Chapter 10

I found Aunt Augusta sitting alone in the centre of the large and shabby salon filled with green velvet chairs and marble mantelpieces. She had not bothered to remove the suitcase, which lay open and empty on the floor. There were traces of tears in her eyes. I turned on the dim lights of the dusty chandelier, and my aunt gave me an uncertain smile.

“Has something happened, Aunt Augusta?” I asked. It occurred to me that she might have been robbed by the man with sideburns and I regretted having left her alone with such a large amount of cash.

“Nothing, Henry,” she said in a voice surprisingly gentle and wavery. “I decided after all on a deposit account in Berne. What banalities they drive us to with their rules and regulations.” At this moment she had all the weary manner I would have expected of an old lady of seventy-five.

“You are upset.”

“Only by memories,” Aunt Augusta said. “For me this hotel has many memories, and very old ones at that. You would have been only a boy…”

Suddenly I felt a real affection for my aunt. Perhaps a hint of weakness is required to waken our affections, and I remembered Miss Keene’s fingers faltering over her tatting as she spoke of unknown South Africa – it had been then that I came nearest to a proposal.

“What kind of memories, Aunt Augusta?”

“Of a love affair, Henry. A very happy one while it lasted.”

“Tell me.”

I was moved, as I had sometimes been at the theatre, at the sight of old age remembering. The faded luxury of the room seemed like a stage set at the Haymarket. It brought to my mind photographs of Doris Keene in Romance, and who was it in Milestones? Having very few memories of my own to linger over, I appreciate sentiment all the more in others.

She dabbed at her eyes. “You’d be bored, Henry. An unfinished bottle of champagne found in an old cupboard with all the sparkle gone…” The jaded phrase was worthy of a Haymarket author.

I drew up a chair and took her small hand in mine: it was creamy to the touch and I was much moved by a small brown grave-mark, which she had failed to cover with powder. “Tell me,” I repeated. We were both silent, thinking of very different things. I felt as though I were on the stage taking part in a revival of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. My aunt had led a very mixed-up life – that was certain – but she had loved deeply in her time, in the Hotel Saint James and Albany, and who knew what excuses in her past there might be for her relations with poor Wordsworth? This sitting-room of the hotel reminded me of that other Albany in London where Captain Tanqueray had lived.

“Dear Aunt Augusta,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “It helps sometimes to speak to another person. I know I belong to a different generation – perhaps a more conventional generation…”

“It’s a rather disgraceful story,” my aunt said and she looked down in her lap with an air of modesty which I had never seen before.

I found myself kneeling uncomfortably beside her, one knee in the empty suitcase, holding her hand. “Trust me,” I said.

“It’s your sense of humour, Henry, that I don’t fully trust. I don’t think we find the same things funny.”

“I was expecting a sad story,” I said rather sharply, climbing out of the suitcase.

“It is a very sad story in its special way,” my aunt said, “but it’s rather funny too.” I had let go her hand and now she turned it this way and that like a glove in a bargain basement. “I must really have a manicure tomorrow,” she said.

I felt some irritation at her quick change of mood. I had been betrayed into a feeling of sentiment which was not natural to me. I said, “I saw Wordsworth just now,” thinking to embarrass her.

“What? Here?” she exclaimed.

“I am sorry to disappoint you, no. Not here in the hotel. In the street.”

“Where is he living?”

“I didn’t ask. Nor did I give him your address. I hadn’t realized that you would be so anxious to see him again.”

“You are a hard man, Henry.”

“Not hard, Aunt Augusta. Prudent.”

“I don’t know from which side of the family you inherited prudence. Your father was lazy but never, never prudent.”

“And my mother?” I asked in the hope of trapping her.

“If she had been prudent you would not be here now.” She went to the window and looked across the Rue de Rivoli into the Tuileries gardens. “So many nursemaids and perambulators,” she said and sighed. Against the hard afternoon light she looked old and vulnerable.

“Would you have liked a child, Aunt Augusta?”

“At most times it would have been inconvenient,” she said. “Curran was not to be trusted as a father, and by the time I knew Mr. Visconti the hour was really getting late – not too late, of course, but a child belongs to the dawn hours, and with Mr. Visconti one was already past the blaze of noon. In any case, I would have made a very unsatisfactory mother. God knows where I would have dragged the poor child after me, and suppose he had turned out completely respectable…”

“Like myself,” I said.

“I don’t yet despair of you,” my aunt said. “You were reasonably kind about poor Wordsworth. And you were quite right not to give him my address. He wouldn’t fit in with the Saint James and Albany. What a pity that the days of slavery are passed, for then I could have pretended that he served some utilitarian purpose. I might have lodged him in the Saint James across the garden.” She gave a reminiscent smile. “I really think I ought to tell you about Monsieur Dambreuse. I loved him a lot, and if we didn’t have a child together, it was purely owing to the fact that it was a late love. I took no precautions, none at all.”

“Were you thinking about him when I came in?”

“I was. They were six of the happiest months of my life, those which we shared, and they were all spent here in the Albany. I met him first one Monday evening outside Fouquet’s. He asked me to join him in a coffee, and by Thursday we were installed here, a genuine couple on good terms with the porter and the maid. The fact that he was a married man didn’t worry me at all, for I am not in the least a jealous woman, and anyway I had far the larger slice of him, or so I thought. He told me he had a house in the country, where his wife lived with his six children, happy and occupied and requiring very little attention, somewhere near Toulouse. He would leave me on a Saturday morning after petit dejeuner and return in time for bed on Monday evening. Perhaps as a sign of his fidelity, he was always very loving on a Monday night, so much so that the middle of the week would often pass very quietly. That suited my temperament well – I have always preferred an occasional orgy to a nightly routine. I really loved Monsieur Dambreuse – perhaps not with the tenderness I felt for Curran but with more freedom from care than I had ever experienced with Mr. Visconti. The deepest love is not the most carefree. How Monsieur Dambreuse and I used to laugh. Of course I realized later that he had a very good reason for laughter.”

Why should I have been haunted at that moment by the thought of Miss Keene?

“Have you ever been to Koffiefontein?” I asked.

“No,” my aunt said. “Why? Where is it?”

“A very long way away,” I said.

“The really awful thing that I discovered,” my aunt said, “was that Monsieur Dambreuse never went very far away. Not even as far as Toulouse. He was in fact a real Parisian. The truth, when it came out, was that he had a wife and four children (one was already employed in the PTT) no further away than the Rue de Miromesnil – ten minutes’ walk, taking the back way by the Hotel Saint James into the Rue Saint-Honore, and he had another mistress installed in a first-floor suite exactly the same as ours (he was a very just man) in the Saint James. The week-ends he spent with his wife and family in the Rue de Miromesnil and the afternoons of Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, when I thought he was at work, he spent with this girl, who was called Louise Dupont, in the Saint James across the garden. I must say it was an achievement for a man who was well over fifty and had retired from full-time work (he was a director of a metallurgical company) for reasons of ill-health.”

“Was he older than I am?” I remarked before I realized what I was saying.

“Certainly he was. He had told the other woman exactly what he had told me. She knew about the wife in Toulouse, but she had no idea at all that there was another woman more or less in the same hotel. He was a man of great fantasy and he liked women of a certain age. It was a very happy time, and sometimes he reminded me a little of your father – there were periods of lethargy punctuated by bursts of energy. He told me later, when everything was known, that he thought of me always as his lady of the night. I looked so well, he said, by full electric light. The other woman he knew as the afternoon girl – although she was only a year or two younger than me. He was a very lecherous man, quite out of place, I would have thought, in a metallurgical company.”

“How did you discover?”

“He traded too much on his luck. Everything had gone so easily for six months. When I went shopping I always went out by the Rue de Rivoli. When I had shopped enough I would take tea at W.H. Smith’s bookshop. And Louise was, of course, usually occupied in the afternoons. She shopped in the morning when I was engaged, for Monsieur Dambreuse never rose before eleven, and she always left the hotel by the Rue Saint-Honore. Then one day the spirit of devilry took him. It was a week-end and he had led his wife and two younger children to the Louvre to look at the Poussins. Afterwards his family wanted tea and his wife suggested the Ritz. ‘It’s too noisy,’ he told her, ‘it’s like a parrot cage of dowagers. Now I know a quiet little garden where nobody ever comes…’ The trouble that afternoon was that both of us came – I and Louise.

“I had never had tea in the garden between the Saint James and Albany before, nor had Louise, but some impulse – I sometimes believe in a Higher Power, even though I am a Catholic – led the two of us that afternoon into the garden. We were the only people there, and you know how sociable French women are. A polite bow and “Bonjour, madame”, an exchange of words between our tables about the balmy weather, and within a few minutes we were seated together, offering each other the sugar and the sandwiches, and only too glad perhaps of a little female conversation after six months in a hotel room with one man.

“We introduced ourselves, and both of us spoke of our so-called husbands. It seemed no more than a curious coincidence when we found that the two of them worked for the same metallurgical firm. One of the things about Monsieur Dambreuse that I particularly like in memory is the fact that he always preferred to tell the truth when it was practicable – indeed he was more trustworthy than most men, who often lie uselessly from vanity. ‘I wonder whether they know each other,’ Louise was saying when into the garden walked Monsieur Dambreuse, followed by his rather stout wife and two overgrown children, the female one squinting a little and suffering from hay fever. Louise cried, ‘Achille,’ and when I think of his expression as he turned and saw the two of us sitting at tea together, I cannot help smiling even today.” My aunt dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. “And crying a little too,” she added, “for it was the end of an idyll. A man cannot forgive being made to look foolish.”

I said with some indignation, “Surely it was for you to forgive?”

“Oh no, dear, I was quite ready to continue as we were. Louise too would have agreed to share him, and I don’t think Madame Dambreuse ever quite realized the situation. His name really was Achille and he introduced us to her as the wives of two fellow directors of the metallurgical firm. But Monsieur Dambreuse never quite recovered his self-esteem. Now when he was rather tranquil in midweek he knew I realized the cause and it embarrassed him. He was not a promiscuous man. He had loved his little secret. He felt naked, poor man, and exposed to ridicule.”

“But surely, Aunt Augusta,” I exclaimed, “you couldn’t bear the man after you had discovered how he had deceived you all those months?”

She got up and strode towards me with her small hands clenched. I thought she was going to hit me. “You young fool,” she said as if I were no more than a schoolboy. “Monsieur Dambreuse was a man, and I only wish you had been given a chance of growing up like him.”

Suddenly she smiled and put her hand comfortingly against my cheek. “I am sorry, Henry, it is not your fault. You were brought up by Angelica. Sometimes I have an awful feeling that I am the only one left anywhere who finds any fun in life. That was why I was crying a little when you came in. I said to Monsieur Dambreuse, ‘Achille, I love the things we do just as much as before. I don’t mind knowing where you go in the afternoons. It doesn’t make any difference.’ But of course it did to him, because he had no secret any more. His fun had been in the secret, and he left us both only so that somewhere he could find a new secret. Not love. Just a secret. The saddest thing he ever said to me was, ‘There’s no other Saint James and Albany in all Paris.’ I said, ‘Couldn’t you take two rooms at the Ritz on different floors?’ He said, ‘The lift man would know. It wouldn’t be really secret.’”

I had listened to her with amazement and some perturbation. I realized for the first time the perils that lay ahead of me. I felt as though I were being dragged at her heels on an absurd knight-errantry, like Sancho Panza at the heels of Don Quixote, but in the cause of what she called fun instead of chivalry.

“Why are you going to Istanbul, Aunt Augusta?” I asked.

“Time will show,” she said.

A far-fetched idea came to me. “You are not looking for Monsieur Dambreuse?”

“No, no, Henry. Achille is probably dead just like Curran – he would be nearly ninety years old by now anyway. And Mr. Visconti – poor foolish Mr. Visconti. He too will be getting on – eighty-five at least, an age when you need a woman’s company. There was a story that he came back to Venice after the war and was drowned in the Grand Canal after a fight with a gondolier about a woman, but I never really believed that. He wasn’t the kind who fought about a woman, he was up to so many tricks, he always survived. What a long life I have had – just like your Uncle Jo.”

She was touched again by melancholy, and for the first time I thought that perhaps dahlias were not a sufficient occupation for a man’s retirement.

“I’m glad to have found you, Aunt Augusta,” I said on an impulse.

She replied in a slang expression quite out of character, “Oh, there’s life in the old girl yet,” with a smile so speculative, so carefree and youthful, that I was no longer surprised by Wordsworth’s jealousy.