The House in Paris Read Online Free PDF Page B

Miss Fisher said it was.'
    Did she tell you not to ask me things?'
    'How do you mean?' she said, flustered.
    Leopold smiled to himself. 'She told me not to answer, what ever you said. She hopes I won't say anything.'
    'Then ought you to?' said Henrietta, reproving.
    'I don't have to be obedient to Miss Fisher. It's not my fault if you are here while I talk. Look — now your mother's dead so you can't possibly see her, do you still mean to love her, or is that no good now? When you want to love her, what do you do, remember her? But if you couldn't remember her, but heard you could see her, would you enjoy loving her more, or less?'
    'I don't see what you mean,' said Henrietta, distracted — in fact in quite a new kind of pain. She saw only too well that this inquisition had no bearing on Henrietta at all, that Leopold was not even interested in hurting, and was only tweaking her petals off or her wings off with the intention of exploring himself. His dispassionateness was more dire, to Henrietta, than cruelty. With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. Henrietta dreaded what he might say next. Helpless tears began making her eyelids twitch.
    'Why, are you still unhappy about your mother?' he said.
    Henrietta sharply turned her face to the wallpaper.
    'I'm not thinking about her. I simply don't like Paris; I wish I was in the train.'
    'Well, you will be, soon,' said Leopold, much more gently. For a moment, a smile, his first smile, comprehending and vivid, lit up his face. 'You'll be in the train tonight, and I don't know where I shall be!'
    'P'raps in another train,' she replied unfriendlily.
    'You see, you and I are just opposites. I don't remember my mother, but shall see her again.' He watched Henrietta closely, to see, as though on himself, the effect of this.
    The effect was odd. Henrietta turned down her eyes, smoothed her dress on her knees and remarked with the utmost primness: 'You must be very glad: no wonder you are excited. I am excited, going to Mentone.' Then, swinging her feet to the ground, she left the sofa and walked to the radiator, above which she spread her hands. Glancing aloofly to see if her nails were clean, she seemed to become unconscious of Leopold. Then she strolled across to examine a vase of crêpe paper roses on the consol table behind Charles's chair. Peering behind the roses, she found they were tied on with wire to sprigs of box. She glanced across at the clock, smothered a yawn politely and said aloud to herself: 'Only twenty-five past ten.' Her sex provided these gestures, showing how bored she got with someone else's insistence on his own personality. Her dread of Leopold gave way to annoyance. Already she never met anyone without immediately wanting to rivet their thought on herself, and with this end in view looked forward to being grown up.
    Her married sister, Caroline, commanded all she wanted by sailing along effortlessly, like a swan down-stream. No one overlooked Caroline nowadays. Their grandmother Mrs Arbuthnot's distrait expression made her look, as Miss Fisher said, quite above the world, but people did as she liked. From among the many people anxious to know her, she had sorted out two or three friends so distinguished that it was a privilege for Henrietta even to look at them. One of these friends, unbending to Henrietta, had said to her that her grandmother was unique. As no doubt she was, but who is not? And she had minor friends, sub-friends, such as Miss Fisher, whom she remembered when they could be of use. Caroline was as effective as her grandmother; everything was grist that came to Caroline's mill. At one time she had been thwarted and moody, but whatever she touched prospered now she had grown up. Having spent hours