W. MAUGHAM - The Razor's Edge

Suzanne had delicacy. She left it to my intelligence to infer her meaning. I inferred it all right.

A week or so after I had so unexpectedly run into Larry, Suzanne and I one night, having dined together and gone to a movie, were sitting in the Select on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, having a glass of beer, when he strolled in. She gave a gasp and to my surprise called out to him. He came up to the table, kissed her, and shook hands with me. I could see that she could hardly believe her eyes.

'May I sit down?' he said. 'I haven't had any dinner and I'm going to have something to eat.'

'Oh, but it's good to see you, mon petit,' she said, her eyes sparkling. 'Where have you sprung from? And why have you given no sign of life all these years? My God, how thin you are! For all I knew you might have been dead.'

'Well, I wasn't,' he answered, his eyes twinkling. 'How is Odette?'

That was the name of Suzanne's daughter.

'Oh, she's growing a big girl. And pretty. She still remembers you.'

'You never told me you knew Larry,' I said to her.

'Why should I? I never knew you knew him. We're old friends.'

Larry ordered himself eggs and bacon. Suzanne told him all about her daughter and then about herself. He listened in his smiling, charming way while she chattered. She told him that she had settled down and was painting. She turned to me.

'I'm improving, don't you think? I don't pretend I'm a genius, but I have as much talent as many of the painters I've known.'

'D'you sell any pictures?' asked Larry.

'I don't have to,' she answered airily. 'I have private means.'

'Lucky girl.'

'No, not lucky: clever. You must come and see my pictures.'

She wrote down her address on a piece of paper and made him promise to go. Suzanne, excited, went on talking nineteen to the dozen. Then Larry asked for his bill.

'You're not going?' she cried.

'I am,'he smiled.

He paid and with a waive of the hand left us. I laughed. He had a way that always amused me of being with you one moment and without explanation gone the next. It was so abrupt; it was almost as if he had faded into the air.

'Why did he want to go away so quickly?' said Suzanne, with vexation.

'Perhaps he's got a girl waiting for him,' I replied mockingly.

'That's an idea like another.' She took her compact out of her bag and powdered her face. 'I pity any woman who falls in love with him. Oh la, la.'

'Why do you say that?'

She looked at me for a minute with a seriousness I had not often seen in her.

'I very nearly fell in love with him myself once. You might as well fall in love with a reflection in the water or a ray of sunshine or a cloud in the sky. I had a narrow escape. Even now when I think of it I tremble at the danger I ran.'

Discretion be blowed. It would have been inhuman not to want to know what this was all about. I congratulated myself that Suzanne was a woman who had no notion of reticence.

'How on earth did you ever get to know him?' I asked.

'Oh, it was years ago. Six years, seven years, I forget. Odette was only five. He knew Marcel when I was living with him. He used to come to the studio and sit while I was posing. He'd take us out to dinner sometimes. You never knew when he'd come. Sometimes not for weeks and then two or three days running. Marcel used to like to have him there; he said he painted better when he was there. Then I had my typhoid. I went through a bad time when I came out of the hospital.' She shrugged her shoulders. 'But I've already told you all that. Well, one day I'd been round the studios trying to get work and no one wanted me, and I'd had nothing but a glass of milk and a croissant all day and I didn't know how I was going to pay for my room, and I met him accidentally on the Boulevard Clichy. He stopped and asked me how I was and I told him about my typhoid, and then he said to me: "You look as if you could do with a square meal." And there was something in his voice and in the look of his eyes that broke me; I began to cry.

'We were next door to La Mere Mariette and he took me by the arm and sat me down at a table. I was so hungry I was ready to eat an old boot, but when the omelette came I felt I couldn't eat a thing. He forced me to take a little and he gave me a glass of burgundy. I felt better then and I ate some asparagus. I told him all my troubles. I was too weak to hold a pose. I was just skin and bone and I looked terrible; I couldn't expect to get a man. I asked him if he'd lend me the money to go back to my village. At least I'd have my little girl there. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said of course not, Mamma didn't want me, she could hardly live on her pension with prices the way they were, and the money I'd sent for Odette had all been spent, but if I appeared at the door she would hardly refuse to take me in, she'd see how ill I looked. He looked at me for a long time, and I thought he was going to say he couldn't lend me anything. Then he said:

'"Would you like me to take you down to a little place I know in the country, you and the kid? I want a bit of a holiday."

'I could hardly believe my ears. I'd known him for ages and he'd never made a pass at me.

'"In the condition I'm in?" I said. I couldn't help laughing. "My poor friend," I said, "I'm no use to any man just now."

'He smiled at me. Have you ever noticed what a wonderful smile he's got? It's as sweet as honey.

'"Don't be so silly," he said. "I'm not thinking of that."

'I was crying so hard by then, I could hardly speak. He gave me money to fetch the child and we all went to the country together. Oh, it was charming, the place he took us to.'

Suzanne described it to me. It was three miles from a little town the name of which I have forgotten, and they took a car out to the inn. It was a ramshackle building on a river with a lawn that ran down to the water. There were plane trees on the lawn and they had their meals in their shade. In summer artists came there to paint, but it was early for that yet and they had the inn to themselves. The fare was famous, and on Sundays people used to drive from here and there to lunch with abandon, but on week-days their peace was seldom disturbed. With the rest and the food and wine, Suzanne grew stronger, and she was happy to have her child with her.

'He was sweet with Odette and she adored him. I had to prevent her from making a nuisance of herself, but he never seemed to mind how much she pestered him. It used to make me laugh, they were like two children together.'

'What did you do with yourselves?' I asked.

'Oh, there was always something to do. We used to take a boat and fish and sometimes we'd get the patron to lend us his Citroen and we'd go into town. Larry liked it. The old houses and the place. It was so quiet that your footsteps on the cobblestones were the only sound you heard. There was a Louis Quartorze hotel de ville and an old church, and at the edge of the town was the chateau with a garden by Le Notre. When you sat at the cafe on the place you had the feeling that you had stepped back three hundred years and the Citroen at the kerb didn't seem to belong to this world at all.'

It was after one of these outings that Larry told her the story of the young airman which I narrated at the beginning of this book. 'I wonder why he told you,' I said.

'I haven't an idea. They'd had a hospital in the town during the war and in the cemetery there were rows and rows of little crosses. We went to see it. We didn't stay long, it gave me the creeps-all those poor boys lying there. Larry was very silent on the way home. He never ate much, but at dinner he hardly touched a thing. I remember so well, it was a beautiful, starry night and we sat on the riverbank, it was pretty with the poplars silhouetted against the darkness, and he smoked his pipe. And suddenly, a propos de bottes, he told me about his friend and how he died to save him.' Suzanne took a swig of beer. 'He's a strange creature. I shall never understand him. He used to like to read to me. Sometimes in the daytime, while I sewed things for the little one, and in the evening after I'd put her to bed.'