‘So you’re all alone now?’ he questioned. ‘Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.’
‘Whom I’ve now left.’ She was almost boasting again. ‘Because when I was twenty-one . . .’
‘You stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!’
‘I won’t have you being sorry for her,’ Pamela answered hotly. ‘She’s really awful, you know. Like poor Joan’s husband in The Return of Eurydice.’ How easy it was to talk to him!
‘So you even know,’ said Fanning, laughing, ‘what it’s like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous aunt.’
‘No joke, I can tell you. I’m the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn’t mind my going away, whatever she might say.’
‘She did say something, then?’
‘Oh yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like headmistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite—and so fat. Enormous. Don’t you hate enormous people? No, she’s really delighted to get rid of me,’ Pamela concluded, ‘simply delighted.’ Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.
‘What a tremendous hurry she’s in,’ he was thinking, ‘to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, what an intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .’ His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.
‘She always disliked me,’ Pamela had gone on. ‘Mother too. She couldn’t abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.’
‘And your mother—how did she respond?’
‘Well, not hippo-ishly, of course. She couldn’t be that. She treated Aunt Edith—well, how did she treat Aunt Edith?’ Pamela hesitated, frowning. ‘Well, I suppose you’d say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, if she ever was really natural. I don’t know. Is anybody natural?’ She looked up questioningly at Fanning. ‘Am I natural, for example?’
Smiling a little at her choice of an example, ‘I should think almost certainly not,’ Fanning answered, more or less at random.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. ‘But isn’t it awful? I mean, isn’t it simply hopeless?’
Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, ‘At your age,’ he said consolingly, ‘you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is something you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,’ he added, ‘there are some people who are unnatural by nature.’
‘Unnatural by nature,’ Pamela nodded, as she repeated the words, as though she were inwardly marshalling evidence to confirm their truth. ‘Yes, I believe that’s us,’ she concluded. ‘Mother and me. Not hippos, I mean, not poseuses, but just unnatural by nature. You’re quite right. As usual,’ she added, with something that was almost resentment in her voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized.
‘How is it you manage to know so much?’ Pamela asked in the same resentful tone. By what right was he so easily omniscient, when she could only grope and guess in the dark?
Taking to himself a credit that belonged, in this case, to chance, ‘Child’s play, my dear Watson,’ he answered banteringly. ‘But I suppose you’re too young to have heard of Sherlock Holmes. And anyhow,’ he added, with an ironical seriousness, ‘don’t let’s waste any more time talking about me.’
Pamela wasted no more time. ‘I get so depressed with myself,’ she said with a sigh. ‘And after what you’ve told me I shall get still more depressed. Unnatural by nature. And by upbringing too. Because I see now that my mother was like that. I mean, she was unnatural by nature too.’
‘Even with you?’ he asked, thinking that this was becoming interesting. She nodded without speaking. He looked at her closely. ‘Were you very fond of her?’ was the question that now suggested itself.
After a moment of silence, ‘I loved my father more,’ she answered slowly. ‘He was more . . . more reliable. I mean, you never quite knew where you were with my mother. Sometimes she almost forgot about me; or else she didn’t forget me enough and spoiled me. And then sometimes she used to get into the most terrible rages with me. She really frightened me then. And said such terribly hurting things. But you mustn’t think I didn’t love her. I did.’ The words seemed to release a spring; she was suddenly moved. There was a little silence. Making an effort, ‘But that’s what she was like,’ she concluded at last.
‘But I don’t see,’ said Fanning gently, ‘that there was anything specially unnatural in spoiling you and then getting cross with you.’ They were crossing the Piazza del Popolo; the traffic of four thronged streets intricately merged and parted in the open space. ‘You must have been a charming child. And also . . . Look out!’ He laid a hand on her arm. An electric bus passed noiselessly, a whispering monster. ‘Also maddeningly exasperating. So where the unnaturalness came in . . .’
‘But if you’d known her,’ Pamela interrupted, ‘you’d have seen exactly where the unnaturalness . . .’
‘Forward!’ he called and, still holding her arm, he steered her on across the Piazza.
She suffered herself to be conducted blindly. ‘It came out in the way she spoiled me,’ she explained, raising her voice against the clatter of a passing lorry. ‘It’s so difficult to explain, though; because it’s something I felt. I mean, I’ve never really tried to put it into words till now. But it was as if . . . as if she weren’t just herself spoiling me, but the picture of a young mother—do you see what I mean?—spoiling the picture of a little girl. Even as a child I kind of felt it wasn’t quite as it should be. Later on I began to know it too, here.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘Particularly after father’s death, when I was beginning to grow up. There were times when it was almost like listening to recitations—dreadful. One feels so blushly and prickly; you know the feeling.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. Awful!’
‘Awful,’ she repeated. ‘So you can understand what a beast I felt, when it took me that way. So disloyal, I mean. So ungrateful. Because she was being so wonderfully sweet to me. You’ve no idea. But it was just when she was being her sweetest that I got the feeling worst. I shall never forget when she made me call her Clare—that was her Christian name. “Because we’re going to be companions,” she said, and all that sort of thing. Which was simply too sweet and too nice of her. But if you’d heard the way she said it! So dreadfully unnatural. I mean, it was almost as bad as Aunt Edith reading Prospice. And yet I know she meant it, I know she wanted me to be her companion.
But somehow something kind of went wrong on the way between the wanting and the saying. And then the doing seemed to go just as wrong as the saying. She always wanted to do things excitingly, romantically, like in a play. But you can’t make things be exciting and romantic, can you?’ Fanning shook his head. ‘She wanted to kind of force things to be thrilling by thinking and wishing, like Christian Science. But it doesn’t work. We had wonderful times together; but she always tried to make out that they were more wonderful than they really were. Which only made them less wonderful. Going to the Paris Opera on a gala night is wonderful; but it’s never as wonderful as when Rastignac goes, is it?’
‘I should think it wasn’t!’ he agreed. ‘What an insult to Balzac to imagine that it could be!’
‘And the real thing’s less wonderful,’ she went on, ‘when you’re being asked all the time to see it as Balzac, and to be Balzac yourself. When you aren’t anything of the kind. Because, after all, what am I? Just good, ordinary, middle-class English.’
She pronounced the words with a kind of defiance. Fanning imagined that the defiance was for him and, laughing, prepared to pick up the ridiculous little glove. But the glove was not for him; Pamela had thrown it down to a memory, to a ghost, to one of her own sceptical and mocking selves. It had been on the last day of their last stay together in Paris—that exciting, exotic Paris of poor Clare’s imagination, to which their tickets from London never seemed quite to take them.
They had gone to lunch at La Pérouse. ‘Such a marvellous, fantastic restaurant! It makes you feel as though you were back in the Second Empire.’ (Or was it the First Empire? Pamela could not exactly remember.) The rooms were so crowded with Americans, that it was with some difficulty that they secured a table. ‘We’ll have a marvellous lunch,’ Clare had said, as she unfolded her napkin. ‘And some day, when you’re in Paris with your lover, you’ll come here and order just the same things as we’re having today. And perhaps you’ll think of me.
Will you, darling?’ And she had smiled at her
