“What is not true, my darling?”
“That you and Papa don’t love each other.” She kept her face buried. I
felt her heart beating against me, a frail little gusty heart beating
painfully. The room round us was very still, too still, no sound in it,
only the felt sound of our heart beats, and the clock ticking on the
mantelpiece. I must speak, I must lie to her, and as the words left my
lips I knew that they were involving me in endless deceptions, in a
long, long ghastly comedy, in countless humiliations.
“No, darling, it’s not true.”
Her little arms tightened round my neck.
“They said--” she whispered.
“Who said, my pet?”
“Some ladies. I heard them talking. They said, they said you would
never forgive him.” I felt her body trembling, and I too trembled, and
as I realized that I had thought her incapable of intense feeling I
felt deeply ashamed. “What did they mean, Mamma, tell me, what did they
mean?”
“Nothing, nothing.” I must have spoken harshly. “They were mistaken,
they were speaking of some one else.”
She lifted her face then and looked at me, her eyes were wide and
accusing. “Oh, no, Mummy, they said your names, they said Jane and
Philibert, your two names. It was at Aunt Claire’s. Dicky and I were
just behind the door, and I pulled him away so he wouldn’t hear any
more, but he only laughed at me and said, ‘Every one knows your parents
detest each other’--in French, you know, ‘_Tout le monde sait que tes
parents se détestent_,’ and then I kicked him.”
“Jinny!”
“I only kicked him a little. It didn’t hurt. I wanted it to hurt,
dreadfully.”
“My child, my child.”
“I know, Mummy, that it was very wicked. I told Father Anthony all
about it at confession, and he looked so sad, so beautifully sad. I
wept and wept. He told me to pray very hard to the Virgin to save me
from angry passions, and I did, but I enjoyed being angry. I felt big
and strong when I was angry, quite, quite different from ordinary, and
I thought you would understand. Were you never angry when you were a
little girl?”
“Yes, darling, I was.” Her question had startled me. I was profoundly
disturbed by this sudden revelation of her character.
But again her little mobile face had changed.
“You aren’t like that, are you, Mummy? You couldn’t be?”
“Like what, my darling?”
“Unforgiving.” Her eyes were on mine.
“I hope not, Geneviève.” She flushed at my tone, but continued to look
at me gravely and steadily.
“I thought you might have been angry with Papa for leaving us for so
long,” she said with an air of great wisdom. “I was, but I forgave him
at once.” I smiled.
“You see,” she went on, “I couldn’t bear him to be unhappy, for I love
him.”
“I know, darling.”
“And you love him, too?”
“Of course.”
She heaved an immense sigh.
“Then we are all happy.”
“We are all happy,” I echoed.
A minute later she was at the door, wafting me a gay little kiss. I had
not been able to keep her. She was not more than ten years old at that
time, but even then she was already the complete elusive creature of
swift fleeting moods and superlatively lucid mind that she is today.
And still I suspected Philibert of playing the part of adoring father
in order to make me do what he wished. So without alluding to Jinny,
never, in fact, daring to allude to her, I tried to bribe him. He
had hinted occasionally about wanting to resume our old habits of
entertaining, and his hint had shocked me. Such a farce had seemed
altogether unnecessary. Now I gave in to him and the same old
extravagant theatrical life began. To me it was incredibly boring and
at times quite ghastly. There were moments when it was as if over the
old sepulchre of our married life he had built an enormous and hideous
altar to some obscene heathen deity, some depraved Bacchus before whom
he and I giddily danced, with vine leaves in our hair.
“But,” I argued, “this is what he likes, and if I help him do it he
will have got from me all that he wants, he will leave Jinny alone. He
will have less time for her and will forget about her.” Unfortunately
all these social antics took up as much of my time as his. The result
was that neither of us saw the child save in hurried snatches, and in
that horrible house, now so constantly filled with people, with armies
of servants, and streams of guests, I had a vision of her skipping
about like a little white rabbit in a monstrous zoo. Poor Jinny, what
a wretched mess we made of her childhood, Philibert and I, with our
constant vigilant, yet inadequate, lying to each other in her presence,
and our ridiculous absorption in the tawdry pageant of society. And yet
we both loved her and were doing it, even he in his way, for her. He
wanting her to have an incomparably brilliant position in the world,
I wanting to keep him away from her, thinking in my jealous stupidity
that she would belong more to me the more he belonged to the world.
It was when she fell ill that I was at last convinced of his caring for
her. She had pneumonia, you remember, and was very near death for three
days. I can see Philibert now, sitting through the night by her bed,
he on one side, I on the other, I can see his face as he watched her
painful breathing, a face clammy with sweat, contracting suddenly in a
curious grimace when she struggled for breath. He never touched her.
He left that to me and the nurses. But he never once took his eyes off
her swollen little face. I was deeply impressed by the sight of that
fidgety, nervous man sitting so still, hour after hour, and I remember
his sobbing when the child’s breathing grew easier and the doctors said
the crisis was past. Poor Philibert, with his arms thrown across the
foot of Jinny’s bed and his head on them, sobbing like a child, I felt
very sorry for him that night.
But it was too late for Jinny’s illness to make any real difference in
our relationship. We had gone too far, I knew him too well. All that
I could do was add to my knowledge of him the fact that he loved his
child and leave it at that.