Chapter 11

The Orient Express left the Gare de Lyon just after midnight. The two of us had spent an exhausting day – first at Versailles, which my aunt curiously enough was seeing for the first time (she found the palace a little vulgar). “I didn’t get very far afield,” she told me, “in the days of Monsieur Dambreuse, and in earlier times when I lived in Paris I was much too occupied.”

I had become very curious about my aunt’s history, and I was interested to arrange her various periods in some kind of chronological sequence. “Would that earlier time have been before or after you went on the stage?” I asked her. We were standing on the terrace looking down towards the lake, and I had been thinking how much more pretty and homely Hampton Court was than Versailles. But then Henry VIII was a more homely man than Louis XIV; an Englishman could identify more easily with a man of his married respectability than with the luxurious lover of Madame de Montespan. I remembered the old music-hall song, “’Enery the Eighth I am.”

I married the widder next door,

 

She ’ad ’ad seven

’Eneries before.

’Enery the Eighth I am.

 

Nobody could have written a music-hall song about the Sun King.

“On the stage, did you say?” my aunt asked rather absent-mindedly.

“Yes. In Italy.”

She seemed to be trying hard to recollect, and I was aware as never before of her great age. “Oh,” she said, “yes, yes, now I remember. You mean the touring company. That came after my Paris days. It was in Paris that I was spotted by Mr. Visconti.”

“Was Mr. Visconti a theatrical manager?”

“No, but he was a great amateur of what you insist on calling the stage. We met one afternoon in the Rue de Provence and he said I had a fine talent, and he persuaded me to leave the company I was with. And so we travelled together to Milan, where my career really started. It was fortunate for me; if I had stayed in France I would never have been able to help your Uncle Jo, and Jo, having quarrelled with your father, left me most of his money. Poor dear man, I can see him still, crawling, crawling, down the corridor towards the lavatory. Let us go back to Paris and visit the Musée Grévin. I need to be cheered up.” And cheered up she certainly was by the waxworks. I remembered how at Brighton she had told me that her idea of fame was to be represented at Tussaud’s, dressed in one of her own costumes, and I really believe she would have opted for the Chamber of Horrors rather than have had no image made of her at all. A bizarre thought, for my aunt was not of a criminal temperament, even though some of her activities were not strictly legal. I think that the childish saying, “Finding’s keeping”, was one of her ten commandments.

I would myself have preferred to visit the Louvre and see the Venus of Melos and the Winged Victory, but my aunt would have none of it. “All those naked women with bits missing,” she said. “It’s morbid. I once knew a girl who was chopped up that way between the Gare du Nord and Calais Maritime. She had met a man in the place where I worked who travelled in ladies’ underwear – or so he said, and he certainly had an attaché case with him full of rather fanciful brassières which he persuaded her to try on. There was one shaped like two clutching black hands that greatly amused her. He invited her to go to England with him, and she broke her contract with our patronne and decamped. It was quite a cause célèbre. He was called the Monster of the Chemins de Fer by the newspapers, and he was guillotined, after making his confession and receiving the sacrament, in an odour of sanctity. It was said by his counsel that he had a misplaced devotion to virginity owing to his education by the Jesuits, and he therefore tried to remove all girls who led loose lives like poor Anne-Marie Collot. The brassieres were a kind of test. You were condemned if you chose the wrong one, like those poor men in The Merchant of Venice. He was certainly not an ordinary criminal, and a young woman who was praying for him in a chapel in the Rue du Bac had a vision of the Virgin, who said to her, ‘The crooked ways shall be made straight,’ which she took as proclaiming his salvation. There was a popular Dominican preacher, on the other hand, who believed it to be a critical reference to his Jesuit education. Anyway quite a cult started for what they called ‘the good murderer.’ Go and see your Venus if you want, but let me go to the waxworks. Our manager had to identify the body and he said it was just a torso, and that gave me a turn against all old statues.”

In the evening we had a quiet dinner at Maxim’s, in the smaller room where Aunt Augusta thought to escape the tourists. There was one, however, whom we could not escape; she wore a suit and a tie, and she had a voice like a man’s. She not only dominated her companion, a little mousy blond woman of uncertain age, she dominated the whole room. Like so many English abroad she seemed to ignore the presence of foreigners around her and spoke in a loud voice as though she were alone with her companion. Her voice had a peculiar ventriloquial quality, and when I first became aware of it I thought it came from the mouth of an old gentleman with a rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole who sat at the table opposite ours, and who had obviously been taught to chew every morsel of his meat thirty-two times. “Four-legged animals, my dear, always remind me of tables. So much more solid and sensible than two legs. One could sleep standing up.” Everyone who could understand English turned to look at him. His mouth closed with a startled snap when he saw himself the centre of attention. “One could even serve dinner on a man with a broad enough back,” the voice said, and the mousy woman giggled and said, “Oh, Edith,” and so identified the speaker. I am sure the woman had no idea of what she was doing – she was an unconscious ventriloquist, and surrounded as she believed by ignorant foreigners and perhaps excited a little by unaccustomed wine, she really let herself go.

It was a deep, cultured, professorial voice. I could imagine it lecturing on English literature at one of the older universities, and for the first time my attention strayed from Aunt Augusta. “Darwin – the other Darwin – wrote a poem on the Loves of the Plants. I can well imagine a poem on the Loves of the Tables. Cramping it might be, but how deliciously so, when you think of a nest of tables, each fitting so blissfully, my dear, into one another.”

“Why is everyone staring at you?” Aunt Augusta asked. It was an embarrassing moment, all the more so as the woman had suddenly stopped speaking and had plunged into her carré da’gneau. The trouble is that I have an unconscious habit of moving my lips when I am thinking, so that to all except my immediate neighbours I seemed to be the author of her ambiguous remark.

“I have no idea, Aunt Augusta,” I said.

“You must have been doing something very odd, Henry.”

“I was only thinking.”

How I wish I could conquer the habit. It must have been established first when I was a cashier and silently counted bundles of notes. The habit betrayed me very badly once with a woman called Mrs. Blennerhasset, who was stone deaf and a lip-reader. She was a very beautiful woman who was married to the mayor of Southwood. She came to my private office once about some question of investments, and while I turned over her file my thoughts couldn’t help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness. One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing. She finished her business very quickly and left. Later, to my surprise, she dropped in to see me again. She made some small alteration to the decision we had reached about her War Loan and then said, “Did you really mean what you told me?” I thought she was referring to my advice about National Savings Certificates.

“Of course,” I said. “That is my honest opinion.”

“Thank you,” she said. “You mustn’t think I am at all offended. No woman could be when you put it so poetically, but, Mr. Pulling, I must tell you that I truly love my husband.” The awful thing, of course, was that she couldn’t in her deafness distinguish between the lip movements made by spoken words and the movements which expressed my unspoken thoughts. She was always kind to me after that day, but she never came to my private office again.

That night at the Gare de Lyon I saw my aunt into her couchette and ordered her petit déjeuner from the conductor for eight a.m. Then I waited on the platform for the train from London to come in from the Gare du Nord. It was five minutes late, but the Orient Express had to wait for it.

As the train moved slowly in, drowning the platform with steam, I saw Wordsworth come striding through the smoke. He recognized me at the same moment and cried, “Hi, fellah.” He must have learnt the Americanism during the war when the convoys for the Middle East gathered in Freetown Harbour. I went reluctantly towards him. “What are you doing here?” I asked. I have always disliked the unexpected, whether an event or an encounter, but I was growing accustomed to it in my aunt’s company.

“Mr. Pullen, Mr. Pullen,” Wordsworth said, “you an honest man, Mr. Pullen.” He reached my side and grasped my hand. “Ar allays was your friend, Mr. Pullen.” He spoke as if he had known me for years and I had been a long time in his debt. “You no humbug me, Mr. Pullen?” He gazed wildly up and down the train. “Where’s that gel?”

“My aunt,” I said, “if that’s whom you mean, is fast asleep by now in her couchette.”

“Then please go double quick tell her Wordsworth here.”

“I have no intention of waking her up. She’s an old lady and has a long journey ahead of her. If it’s money you want, you can take this.” I held out to him a fifty-franc note.

“I no wan CTC,” Wordsworth said, waving one hand hard for emphasis, while at the same time he took the note with the other. “I wan my bebi gel.”

Such an expression used in connection with Aunt Augusta offended me and I turned away to climb the steep steps into the coach, but he put his hand on my arm and held me back on the platform. He was a very strong man. “You jig-jig with my bebi gel,” he accused me.

“You’re preposterous, Wordsworth. She is my aunt. My mother’s sister.”

“No humbug?”

“No humbug,” I said, though I hated the expression. “Even if she were not my aunt, can’t you understand that she is a very old lady?”

“No one too old for jig-jig,” Wordsworth said. “You tell her she come back here to Paris. Wordsworth wait long long time for her. You speak her sweet. You tell her she still my bebi gel. Wordsworth no slip good when she gone.”

The conductor asked me to get onto the train, for we were about to leave, and Wordsworth unwillingly released me. I stood on the top of the steps as the train began to move out from the Gare de Lyon in short jerks, and Wordsworth followed it down the platform, wading through the steam. He was crying, and I was reminded of a suicide walking out fully dressed into the surf. Suddenly, staring at a window beyond me, he began to sing:

 

“Slip gud-o, bebi gel:

An luk me wan minit

Befo yu slip.”

 

The train gathered momentum and with a final jerk and strain it had left him behind.

I squeezed down the corridor to my aunt’s couchette which was number 72. The bed was made up, but there was a strange girl in a mini-skirt sitting on it, while my aunt leant out of the window waving and blowing kisses. The girl and I looked at each other with embarrassment. We could hardly speak and interrupt this ceremony of separation. She was very young, perhaps eighteen, and she was elaborately made up with a chalk-white face, dark-shadowed eyes and long auburn hair falling over her shoulders. With the strokes of a pencil she had continued her eyelashes below and above the lids, so that the real eyelashes, standing out, had a false effect like a stereoscopic photograph. Her shirt had two buttons missing at the top as though they had popped off with the tension of her puppy fat and her eyes bulged like a Pekinese dog’s, but they were pretty nonetheless. They had in them what used to be called by my generation a sexy look, but this might have been caused by short sight or constipation. Her smile, when she realized that I was not a stranger intruding into my aunt’s compartment, was oddly timid for someone who looked so flagrant. It was as though someone else had dolled her up to attract. She was like a kid tethered to a tree to draw a tiger out of the jungle.

My aunt pulled in her head; her face was smeared with smuts and tears. “Dear man,” she said. “I had to take a last look. At my age one never knows.”

I said with disapproval, “I thought that chapter was closed,” and added for the sake of the girl, “Aunt Augusta.”

“One can never be quite sure,” my aunt said. “This is Seventy-one,” she added, indicating the girl.

“Seventy-one?”

“The next-door couchette. What’s your name, dear?”

“Tooley,” the girl replied. It might have been a pet name or a family name – one couldn’t be sure.

“Tooley is going to Istanbul too. Aren’t you, dear?”

“En passant,” she said with an American accent.

“She’s going to Katmandu,” my aunt explained.

“I thought that was in Nepal.”

“I guess that’s where it is,” the girl said. “Something like that.”

“She and I got talking,” my aunt told me, “because – what’s your name again, dear?”

“Tooley,” the girl said.

“Tooley has brought a sack of provisions with her.

Do you realize, Henry, that the Orient Express has no restaurant car? How times have changed. No restaurant car till after the Turkish frontier. We face two days of starvation.”

“I’ve got a lot of milk chocolate,” the girl said, “and a little sliced ham.”

“And thirst,” Aunt Augusta said.

“I’ve got a dozen bottles of Coke, but it’s getting pretty warm now.”

“When I think of the party I once had on this very train,” Aunt Augusta said, “with Mr. Visconti and General Abdul. Caviar and champagne. We practically lived in the dining-car. One meal ran into another and night into day.”

“You are very welcome to share my Coke,” Tooley said. “And the milk chocolate. The ham too, of course, but there’s not much of that.”

“At least the conductor has promised us coffee and croissants,” I said, “in the morning.”

“I shall sleep as late as I can,” my aunt said, “and we shall be able to get a bite at Milan station. With Mario,” she added.

“Who’s Mario?” I asked.

“We stop at Lausanne and Mürren and Saint Moritz,” said the well-informed girl.

“Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,” Aunt Augusta said, “like some people are only bearable under a sheet. Now I shall go to bed. You two young people are old enough to be left alone.”

Tooley looked at me askance as though after all I might be the tiger type. “Oh, I’ll sleep too,” she said, “I love sleep.” She looked at a huge wrist-watch on a strap an inch wide with only four numerals, coloured scarlet. “It’s not one yet,” she said doubtfully. “I’d better take a pill.”

“You’ll sleep,” my aunt said in a tone not to be denied.