Thalia Read online

  ‘I didn’t feel graceful,’ I said shortly. ‘I felt as Thalia does now. It’s wretched for her.’

  I remembered the misery of not being able to get my bursting figure into my practice dress—and the even greater embarrassment of keeping it there when it was on. Thalia wasn’t exactly fat. She was lumpy in places, angular in others, and she seemed to have lost co-ordination of her limbs. She came over to me now. Her face was dreadful. Drops of sweat were still on her forehead. ‘I hate it. I’m going,’ she said.

  Judy heard her. She was standing chatting to Cynthia.

  ‘Don’t give up!’ she said laughingly. ‘You should have seen me when I began. Of course I’m too old. All the little French girls laugh at me—but I don’t care at all. I do it for the exercise. It’s wonderful. You just keep on—you’ll be fine.’

  ‘No,’ said Thalia. ‘It’s silly. I think all the positions are ridiculous.’

  ‘Have you ever seen any ballet?’ asked Judy.

  ‘No. I like Indian dancing. They don’t stand on one toe and stick the other leg in the air.’

  ‘You’ve seen a lot of Indian dancing?’ asked Judy.

  ‘Yes. A lot,’ said Thalia.

  ‘Au centre, Mademoiselles! Au centre, s’il vous plaît.’

  Thalia sat resolutely down; Madame had her up in a second. ‘What’s this? You’re tired already? A child like you? Or are you lazy? In the centre, Mademoiselle Thalia! And when I say in the centre I mean it!’

  Thalia shrugged and took her place.

  Madame hadn’t wanted to accept her when I had gone at Cynthia’s instruction to arrange for the classes. ‘If she’s never done any ballet what’s the use of starting now? She’s almost sixteen, you say. She will have to start with the babies—right at the beginning.’

  The vision of Thalia in a class of five-year-olds, a giraffe with the gazelles, was too awful. I pleaded with Madame Anastasia, explaining all I could about Thalia and how difficult she was. ‘It’s her mother who wishes her to attend,’ I said. ‘She thinks it will make her more graceful. Less awkward in her movements.’

  ‘She should have thought of it earlier. Probably it’s too late. Bad habits are difficult to correct.’

  ‘Isn’t it lovely? Doesn’t it make you feel good?’ asked Judy as we wiped our faces with towels. Madame was ruthless and worked us hard.

  She came up to me after the class and said: ‘See that Madame Pemberton doesn’t come again. I don’t allow visitors and the poor child is useless when she is watching. Get rid of her now. I’m going to take Thalia by herself. And you go too. You can’t be nursemaid always. She’s got to learn to stand on her own feet.’

  ‘She can’t speak French,’ I said, feeling awful at the thought of deserting Thalia.

  ‘And neither can I. Don’t you hear my mistakes? I’ve been out of Russia seventeen years and I haven’t learned this language yet. Go on home and leave her with me.’

  ‘She’s not supposed to walk home alone.’

  ‘You can wait in the vestibule.’

  ‘Come back with me and have tea,’ said Judy van Klaveren when I went into the hall.

  ‘I’ve got to wait for Thalia,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll wait too. I’ve got my car outside. I live at St. Lunaire.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask Cynthia.’

  ‘I’ll ask her now.’

  Judy ran off and returned grinning. ‘Not very enthusiastic —but you may both come. Cynthia’s gone on with Claude. He’s going out with her. What a beautiful child he is.’

  Cynthia liked to take Claude about with her. His angelic face and blond curls enchanted everyone—especially the French. She was very proud of his good looks and the two of them together made many heads turn in the streets.

  ‘Why doesn’t he have his hair cut off?’ Thalia would ask. ‘He looks like a girl.’

  The child hated his curls and I often found him trying to plaster them down with water. ‘Soldiers don’t have curls,’ he said angrily. ‘I want it straight like Daddy’s.’

  When Thalia came out I saw that she had been crying. Madame followed her. She was smiling: ‘She did very well —I shall take her alone after each class for a time.’ She patted Thalia on the shoulder. ‘Stand up! Head up. Never down!’ and when Thalia had gone to change she said to me, ‘Poor child. Poor child. But I’ll improve her. She shall learn to walk so that everyone will look at her. The mother dotes on that angel boy. And he’s beautiful, too,’ Madame sighed. ‘Why doesn’t she have him taught ballet? He’s graceful and just the age to start.’

  The idea that a son of Cynthia’s should learn ballet dancing made me laugh. I explained to Madame that the family were all in the army, always had been, and that Claude was destined for a military career.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? In Russia the Cossacks danced divinely and there were no better fighters in the world.’

  Judy looked at me and smiled. She understood Cynthia as well as I did.

  ‘We’re going to tea with Mrs. van Klaveren,’ I said to Thalia when she appeared in her coat and beret.

  ‘Judy to you both, Rachel. Come along, Thalia, you must be starving.’

  Thalia brightened. ‘I am,’ she said simply.

  Both Thalia and I had taken an immediate liking to Judy van Klaveren. There was in her that quality of youth which is ageless. Her blunt speech and easy manner appealed to both of us, as did her dislike of anything sham or superficial. Perhaps the fact that both of us had been brought up in the traditions of our families and that hers simply had none, was what we liked most.

  ‘My father was a bricklayer—and made a pile out of his bricks!’ was what she told us. ‘And I just don’t understand all these do’s and don’ts of the colony here.’

  Cynthia did not really approve of her, but Judy was witty and very good company—she was popular with all the men—a rich, attractive young widow with a small daughter, Mimi.

  Her husband had been killed in a car accident three years previously. She had stayed on in the villa they had bought in St. Lunaire and had made it her home. She was about the same age as Julie Caron—perhaps a few years younger. I asked her if she knew Terence Mourne. She said that she played bridge with him often and he was not only an excellent player but a most amusing partner. She liked him.

  ‘I want to have you meet my young brother, Buddy, Rachel,’ she told me. ‘He’s studying to be a painter, as you arc. He’s studying in Paris—but comes here occasionally, usually when he’s broke. Come upstairs and see the view from the windows.’

  The upstairs rooms looked directly down into the clear green water. The rooms had balconies with high railings and from them it was a sheer drop down to the depths below.

  ‘I could leap down here as Tristram did!’ cried Thalia as we stood there with Judy.

  ‘Have you been to Cap Fréhel?’ she asked Thalia. ‘Some people think that the castle of the legend must surely have been out on that promontory. It’s lovely—there’s an hotel with a terrace with a glass floor so that you can watch the fish and sea-creatures while you eat. How’s the portrait of Catherine Tracey getting on?’ she asked me.

  It was not getting on—that was just it. I said so. It was slowly taking shape as I went through the alternate stages of hope and despair, but I was too inexperienced to have attempted such a task. ‘She’s so lovely,’ I said, ‘that I’m afraid to paint her.’

  ‘She looks a delightful person,’ said Judy.

  ‘Don’t you know her?’ I asked.

  ‘I met her once—quite three years ago—just after we came here to live. She doesn’t mix much with the set I seem to have gotten myself into.’

  ‘How did you know I was painting her?’ I asked. I hadn’t spoken to anyone of the painting. Judy hesitated, then said: ‘Cynthia told me about it.’

  ‘She doesn’t like Catherine Tracey—although she’s never spoken to her.’ And now I thought about it I saw that Cynthia invariably made some excuse to prevent me from going for the
sittings.

  ‘What’s wrong with Catherine?’ I asked Judy now.

  ‘She’s a woman who has the courage to defy convention and live as she pleases—it takes a lot to do that in a small colony like this.’

  Judy, who was usually willing to discuss anything with Thalia and me, seemed strangely loath to discuss Catherine Tracey, although it was she who had brought up the subject of the portrait.

  ‘I don’t like her—but I like Clodagh,’ said Thalia. ‘Mother doesn’t like Clodagh because her mother doesn’t get asked to the Consul’s and doesn’t belong to the Club. It’s exactly like India. If you didn’t get asked to Government House parties it was the end of you!’

  ‘And you want to go back to India—to that sort of life?’ I said.

  ‘I want to look after Father. When I’m old enough I shall live as I like too—as Catherine Tracey does.’

  ‘How d’you mean as you like?’

  ‘I shall live as the Indians do.’

  ‘And is that so very different?’ asked Judy.

  ‘I mean those who stay Indian. Not those who copy us,’ said Thalia decidedly.

  VII

  IT was in October when the days were sharply beautiful, with that heartrending quality of each one being the last perfect one, that I first became aware of the runner. I had taken to going down to the rocks on the deserted plage with my sketch-book every morning unless it were raining.

  Cynthia seemed to be becoming obsessed with the preservation of her beauty. Handbooks on the subject and samples of all kinds of aids to it were constantly arriving from London and Paris. She would lie with them spread out on the bed, her silver hand-mirror by her side, and would gaze carefully into it as she came to each point in the treatment.

  I was fascinated by this absorption—because she had no vanity as I knew it. She merely accepted her beauty as something everyone would acknowledge and which it was her duty to cherish and preserve.

  Thalia told me that one of the reasons why her mother hadn’t returned to India this year was that she had been afraid of the drying quality of the heat in the plains.

  ‘She might get a wrinkle,’ Thalia had said. ‘All the women get lined and withered—like trees!’

  Sometimes Cynthia would ask me to pat in some cream or to smack her cheeks sharply after it were removed. She said I had good sensitive fingers for this.

  I usually went to the large Plage de l’Ecluse because there was more sun there than on the smaller St. Enogat one. I sketched there on a sheltered rock, longing all the time to be back at the Slade. I became aware that every morning a young man was running systematically across the sands. And then, as each day the tide came higher, he came closer to me, for he always ran along the hard edge by the incoming surf. I began to notice the beautiful rhythmic movement of his limbs against the water.

  Fleeting poses always attract me more than static ones, and I began sketching the runner. He was tall, slender and blond. He could have been a Greek, and it wasn’t until the tide had brought him quite close to the rock on which I sat that I recognized him as Armand Tréfours. Until he turned that morning and waved gaily to me he had been merely a subject for my pencil.

  In his brief running shorts, with his bare torso and hair blown by the wind, it was no small wonder that I hadn’t immediately known him as the young man I’d met at Catherine’s and who had driven us home that day. He’d looked very different then—as he had that evening at the Casino with his father.

  He came deliberately over to the rock on which I was sitting and greeted me. ‘Mademoiselle Rachel, don’t you know me?’

  I said that I had only just recognized him. He was very brown, his muscles hard and clearly defined on his lean body.

  ‘You’re drawing me?’ he asked delightedly, taking the sketch-book from me without preamble.

  I told him that I was trying to keep up my drawing.

  ‘Catherine told me you are painting her portrait,’ he said, sitting down on the rock beside me, ‘but she won’t allow me to see it.’

  I was annoyed that Catherine had talked about the painting but grateful that at least she hadn’t been showing it to people. It would probably prove to be a failure and I was sensitive about my efforts.

  ‘She seems delighted with the start you have made,’ he said.

  I took the book from him and snapped it shut.

  ‘They’re good,’ he said simply. ‘You must meet my uncle, Xavier Tréfours. He’s often at Pont Aven and then he visits us. Just now he’s in Paris, of course.’

  ‘Your father doesn’t care for his work?’

  ‘No. But I do. He’s ahead of his time—and isn’t appreciated properly. He will be.’

  ‘Like Gauguin and Van Gogh?’

  ‘Like many painters,’ he agreed. ‘You like Gauguin?’

  ‘I think he is the greatest of all painters.’

  ‘Not Cézanne?’

  ‘Not Cézanne.’

  He stood up, he was shivering a little. ‘I must go and get some clothes on. Don’t go, will you? I’ll only be five minutes.’ I liked his voice not only because all voices sounded better to me in the French language than in my own, but because for a blond man it had all the depth and timbre I had hitherto associated with dark ones.

  His eyes were very green as he smiled down at me. I studied his ears, throat and the upward sweep of the wheat-coloured hair. I stared at him and he stared at me, and something intangible passed between us.

  ‘You won’t go—will you? Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  He ran off with the easy gait of the trained athlete and vaulting up on to the Promenade disappeared into one of the cabines built into the rock.

  I took the small mirror from my handbag and looked at my face in it. Compared with the almost classic beauty of his it appeared nondescript. Dark hair with chestnut in it, dark green eyes not clear emerald like his, dark brows, an oval pale face curiously transparent in quality. The only feature which satisfied me was the mouth. Full lipped and very curved, it formed a shape which was pleasing to me as an artist, and when it smiled the teeth were small, evenly formed and spaced. I put away the mirror as he came running back. His movements in the flannel trousers and yellow sweater were just as perfect as when he had been unencumbered by them. I didn’t understand the strange, intense happiness I felt when he sat down again by me and said in that disturbing voice: ‘Rachel—I may call you that, may I? You know my name, it’s Armand —I saw you dancing at the Casino some time ago, d’you like dancing?’

  I said that I adored it.

  ‘So do I—let’s go and dance, shall we? What about the tea dance on Sunday?’

  I said that I would like that—if Cynthia was agreeable.

  ‘I hope she’ll be agreeable,’ he said, taking my hand and spreading it palmwise in his. ‘You see, I believe that you and I are going to be very great friends.’

  Claude came rushing up and, flinging himself on me, cried: ‘Show me the drawings, show me the drawings of the running man.’

  ‘Here is the running man in the flesh,’ said Armand laughing, but Claude, not understanding what he said and suddenly affronted in the way that children can be for reasons which we cannot plumb, cried: ‘Who is he? Who is he?’ I told him he was looking at the running man himself.

  ‘No. No, it’s not! You’re teasing me!’ He edged himself firmly between Armand and me and sat with one arm round me, glowering from under his brows at what he obviously considered was an intruder. When Mademoiselle Caron and Thalia came up and as I introduced the Frenchwoman to Armand she smiled curiously. ‘We already know each other,’ she said.

  I thought Armand was not too pleased to see her. ‘Everyone knows everyone else in this little place—and also everything one does . . .’ he said.

  ‘She’s got a big son, he’s a sailor. She’s Madame, not mademoiselle really. Did you know that?’ asked Claude.

  ‘Say it in French,’ said his governess.

  ‘Shan’t,’ said
Claude.

  Thalia had adopted the same attitude as had Claude. Her tightly drawn mouth and averted eyes showed plainly her displeasure at finding me with a companion. Armand looked whimsically at me. ‘I know when I’m not wanted,’ he said, ruffling Claude’s hair. ‘Will you be here to-morrow?’

  ‘If it doesn’t rain.’

  ‘It won’t rain—and I shall be running as usual,’ he said confidently. ‘Au revoir then.’

  He bowed ceremoniously to the sulky Thalia and to Mademoiselle Caron, leaped lightly over the rocks and ran up the beach to the Promenade.

  ‘I don’t like him. He’s French. I don’t like any French people. They can’t talk properly.’

  ‘Speak in French!’ I said sharply. ‘It’s still only a quarter to eleven. Your lesson with Mademoiselle hasn’t finished.’

  Mademoiselle backed me up by saying that she’d let them out early as it was such a lovely morning. ‘The lesson is still on,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care what time it is. I won’t speak French,’ said Thalia.

  ‘You can’t,’ teased Claude. ‘That’s why you won’t.’

  ‘Your little brother makes much better progress than you,’ reproved Julie Caron.

  ‘I don’t want to make any progress,’ snapped Thalia.

  ‘Monsieur Tréfours is champion runner for the whole of Brittany, do you know him well?’ asked Mademoiselle Caron, turning her darting little eyes on me as we walked along the Promenade towards the Casino.

  ‘I met him at Mrs. Tracey’s,’ I said.

  She looked a little startled. ‘You know her? You go there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She said no more and bade us good-bye.

  ‘I don’t like Armand Tréfours,’ said Thalia. ‘He’s too good-looking. He knows Mademoiselle Caron quite well.’

  ‘You heard what he said. Of course he knows her.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ said Thalia.

  I went to the tea dance with Armand the following Sunday. He danced as he ran—superbly, but I was so nervous that I couldn’t follow properly. After several stumbles I could have wept with chagrin—but Armand only laughed. ‘Come into the little ante-room and we’ll try in private,’ he suggested, and he took me slowly and patiently over each step. When we returned to the ballroom it was better, but not as good as it had been with Terence. It infuriated me that I could dance better with a man I didn’t like than with one whom I did like.