The House in Paris Read Free Page A

time for hard writers — and here is one.'
    A. S. B YATT
     
     

 
     
    Part I The Present

1
    I N A TAXI skidding away from the Gare du Nord, one dark greasy February morning before the shutters were down, Henrietta sat beside Miss Fisher. She embraced with one arm a plush toy monkey with limp limbs; a paper-leather dispatch case lay at her feet. Miss Fisher and she still both wore, pinned to their coats, the cerise cockades which had led them to claim one another, just now, on the platform: they had not met before. For the lady in whose charge Henrietta had made the journey from London, Miss Fisher's cockade, however, had not been enough; she had insisted on seeing Mrs Arbuthnot's letter which Miss Fisher said she had in her bag. The lady had been fussy; she took every precaution before handing over a little girl to a stranger at such a sinister hour and place. Miss Fisher had looked hurt. Henrietta, mortified and embarrassed, wanted to tell her that the suspicious lady was not a relation, only a friend's friend. Henrietta's trunk was registered straight through to Mentone, so there had been no further trouble about that.
    There was just enough light to see. Henrietta, though dazed after her night journey, sat up straight in the taxi, looking out of the window. She had not left England before. She said to herself: This is Paris. The same streets, with implacably shut shops and running into each other at odd angles, seemed to unreel past again and again. She thought she saw the same kiosks. Cafés were lit inside, chairs stacked on the tables: they were swabbing the floors. Men stood at a steamy counter drinking coffee. A woman came out with a tray of mimosa and the raw daylight fell on the yellow pollen: but for that there might have been no sky. These indifferent streets and early morning faces oppressed Henrietta, who was expecting to find Paris more gay and kind.
    'A Hundred Thousand Shirts,' she read aloud, suddenly.
    Miss Fisher put Mrs Arbuthnot's letter away with a sigh, snapping the clasp of her handbag, then leaned rigidly back in the taxi beside Henrietta as though all this had been an effort and she still could not relax. She wore black gloves with white-stitched seams that twisted round on her fingers, and black furs that gave out a camphory smell. At the Gare du Nord, as she stood under the lamps, her hat had cast a deep shadow, in which her eyes in dark sockets moved, melancholy and anxious. Her olive-green coat and skirt, absorbing what light there was, had looked black. She looked like a Frenchwoman with all the animation gone. Her manner had been emotional from the first; there was something emotional now about her tense way of sitting. Henrietta, nervous, tried to make evident, by looking steadily out of the window on her side, that she did not expect to be spoken to. She had been brought up to think it rude to interrupt thought.
    But Miss Fisher, making an effort, now touched one of the monkey's stitched felt paws. 'You must be fond of your monkey. You play with him, I expect?'
    'Not nowadays much,' said Henrietta politely. 'I just always seem to take him about.'
    'For company,' said Miss Fisher, turning upon the monkey a brooding, absent look.
    'I like to think he enjoys things.'
    'Ah, then you do play with him!'
    It was not in Henrietta's power to say: 'We really cannot go into all that now.' Re-crossing her feet, she lightly kicked the dispatch case, which contained what she would want for two night journeys and during the day in Paris: washing things, reading matter, one or two things to eat. Turning away again to look at the street, she was glad to see shutters taken down from one shop: a woman in felt slippers was doing this. A paper-kiosk opened to take its stock in; a lady in deep mourning attempted to stop a bus: the frightening cardboard city was waking up at last. Violent skidding traffic foreignly hooted, and Henrietta wished there were more light.
    'Is this a boulevard?'
    'Yes. You know,