LITMIR.BIZ

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summing-up of the situation at the moment. I’m adoring it, really. I think.’

      ‘I don’t think.’

      ‘Yes, I am,’ said Félicité violently. ‘I adore a situation. I’ve been brought up on situations. Think of George. You know, I honestly believe I’ve got more in common with George than I would have had with my own father. From all accounts, Papa was excessively rangé.’

      ‘You’d do with a bit more orderliness yourself, old girl. In what way is Carlos tricky?’

      ‘Well, he’s just so jealous he’s like a Spanish novel.’

      ‘I’ve never read a Spanish novel unless you count Don Quixote and I’m certain you haven’t. What’s he do?’

      ‘My dear, everything. Rages and despairs and sends frightful letters by special messenger. I got a stinker this morning, à cause de – Well, à cause de something that really is a bit diffy.’

      She halted and inhaled deeply. Carlisle remembered the confidences that Félicité had poured out in her convent days, concerning what she called her ‘raves’. There had been the music master who had fortunately snubbed Félicité and the medical student who hadn’t. There had been the brothers of the other girls and an actor whom she attempted to waylay at a charity matinée. There had been a male medium, engaged by Lord Pastern during his spiritualistic period, and a dietician. Carlisle pulled herself together and listened to the present recital. It appeared that there was a crisis: a ‘crise’ as Félicité called it. She used far more occasional French than her mother and was fond of laying her major calamities at the door of Gallic temperament.

      ‘– And as a matter of fact,’ Félicité was saying, ‘I hadn’t so much as smirked at another soul, and there he was seizing me by the wrists and giving me that shattering sort of look that begins at your boots and travels up to your face and then makes the return trip. And, breathing loudly, don’t you know, through the nose. I don’t deny that the first time was rather fun. But after he got wind of old Edward it really was, and I may say still is, beyond a joke. And now to crown everything, there’s the crise.’

      ‘But what crisis. You haven’t said –’

      For the first time Félicité looked faintly embarrassed.

      ‘He found a letter,’ she said. ‘In my bag. Yesterday.’

      ‘You aren’t going to tell me he goes fossicking in your bag? And what letter, for pity’s sake? Honestly, Fée!’

      ‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Félicité said grandly. ‘We were lunching and he hadn’t got a cigarette. I was doing my face at the time and I told him to help himself to my case. The letter came out of the bag with the case.’

      ‘And he – well, never mind, what letter?’

      ‘I know you’re going to say I’m mad. It was a sort of rough draft of a letter I sent to somebody. It had a bit in it about Carlos. When I saw it in his hand I was pretty violently rocked. I said something like “Hi-hi you can’t read that,” and of course Carlos with that tore everything wide open. He said “So.”’

      ‘“So what?”’

      ‘“So,” all by itself. He does that. He’s Latin-American.’

      ‘I thought that sort of “so” was German.’

      ‘Whatever it is I find it terrifying. I began to fluff and puff and tried to pass it off with a jolly laugh but he said that either he could trust me or he couldn’t and if he could, how come I wouldn’t let him read a letter? I completely lost my head and grabbed it and he began to hiss. We were in a restaurant.’

      ‘Good lord!’

      ‘Well, I know. Obviously he was going to react in a really big way. So in the end the only thing seemed to be to let him have the letter. So I gave it to him on condition he wouldn’t read it till we got back to the car. The drive home was hideous. But hideous.’

      ‘But what was in the letter, if one may ask, and who was it written to? You are confusing, Fée.’

      There followed a long uneasy silence. Félicité lit another cigarette. ‘Come on,’ said Carlisle at last.

      ‘It happened,’ said Félicité haughtily, ‘to be written to a man whom I don’t actually know, asking for advice about Carlos and me. Professional advice.’

      ‘What can you mean! A clergyman? Or a lawyer?’

      ‘I don’t think so. He’d written me rather a marvellous letter and this was thanking him. Carlos, of course, thought it was for Edward. The worst bit, from Carlos’s point of view was where I said: “I suppose he’d be madly jealous if he knew I’d written to you like this.” Carlos really got weaving after he read that. He –’

      Félicité’s lips trembled. She turned away and began to speak rapidly, in a high voice. ‘He roared and stormed and wouldn’t listen to anything. It was devastating. You can’t conceive what it was like. He said I was to announce our engagement at once. He said if I didn’t he’d – he said he’d go off and just simply end it all. He’s given me a week. I’ve got till next Tuesday. That’s all. I’ve got to announce it before next Tuesday.’

      ‘And you don’t want to?’ Carlisle asked gently. She saw Félicité’s shoulders quiver and went to her. ‘Is that it, Fée?’

      The voice quavered and broke. Félicité drove her hands through her hair. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she sobbed. ‘Lisle, I’m in such a muddle. I’m terrified, Lisle. It’s so damned awful, Lisle. I’m terrified.’

      II

      Lady Pastern had preserved throughout the war and its exhausted aftermath, an unbroken formality. Her rare dinner parties had, for this reason, acquired the air of period pieces. The more so since, by a feat of superb domestic strategy she had contrived to retain at Duke’s Gate a staff of trained servants, though a depleted one. As she climbed into a long dress, six years old, Carlisle reflected that if the food shortage persisted, her aunt would soon qualify for the same class as that legendary Russian nobleman who presided with perfect equanimity at an interminable banquet of dry bread and water.

      She had parted with Félicité, who was still shaking and incoherent, on the landing. ‘You’ll see him at dinner,’ Félicité had said. ‘You’ll see what I mean.’ And with a spurt of defiance: ‘And anyway, I don’t care what anyone thinks. If I’m in a mess, it’s a thrilling mess. And if I want to get out of it, it’s not for other people’s reasons. It’s only because – Oh, God, what’s it matter!’

      Félicité had then gone into her own room and slammed the door. It was perfectly obvious, Carlisle reflected, as she finished her face and lit a cigarette, that the wretched girl was terrified and that she herself would, during the weekend, be a sort of buffer-state between Félicité, her mother and her stepfather. ‘And the worst of it is,’ Carlisle thought crossly, ‘I’m fond of them and will probably end by involving myself in a major row with all three at once.’

      She went down to the drawing-room. Finding nobody there, she wandered disconsolately across the landing and, opening a pair of magnificent double-doors, looked into the ballroom.

      Gilt chairs and music stands stood in a semi-circle like an island in the vast bare floor. A grand piano stood in their midst. On its closed lid, with surrealistic inconsequence, was scattered a number of umbrellas and parasols. She looked more closely at them and recognized a black and white, exceedingly Parisian, affair, which ten years ago or more her aunt had flourished at Ascot. It had been an outstanding phenomenon, she remembered, in the Royal Enclosure and had been photographed. Lady Pastern had been presented with it by some Indian plenipotentiary on the occasion of her first marriage and had clung to it ever since. Its handle represented

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