The Woman Who Had Imagination Read online

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  For a moment or two he did not speak. But finally he turned and looked at me with a half-solemn, half-vivacious expression, one eye half-closed, and told me in a voice at once dreamy, devilish, innocent, mysterious and triumphant, all and more than I had asked to know.

  ‘She gave me the lily,’ he said.

  The Story Without an End

  I

  The Restaurant Rosset, which had once been painted a prosperous white, was now dingy and cheap; so thickly freckled were its windows with the black dust of London that from the outside nothing within was visible except the ghostly white circles that were the tables and the even more ghostly white blobs which were the shirt-fronts of the waiters. It looked like the kind of place into which unhappy lovers would go to talk over some misfortune and come to a decision about their lives. On the second floor were rooms which other lovers, having a different purpose, might have used also. Pierre Moreau had been learning to be a waiter there all winter.

  He was fifteen: a thin, gawky boy with long black hair, heavy southern lips that he hardly ever opened and dark mute eyes that stood out with sombre dreaminess from his sallow face. He had been growing paler and thinner throughout the winter and he now looked like a plant that had been tied up in darkness and blanched. When there was nothing to do in the restaurant, when no one wanted wine or coffee, which it was his duty to pour out, he stood with his back to the wall and stared at the opposite wall as though he were staring at something beyond it — and beyond it hopelessly.

  It was April, and spring was late. He had come over from France the previous November, alone, with his belongings in a black glacé bag and enough money to bring him to London; he knew no English: but he would learn it from Rosset and his wife, who were distant relations, and from the other waiters; it was part of the bargain his mother had made with Rosset.

  From the first he had been wretched. At the very beginning he had also been frightened. He had arrived on a Sunday and he had been troubled by the bleakness of London, his loneliness, the sensation of being in a strange country, the walk with Madame Rosset through the rainy darkness to the restaurant, and then by Rosset himself.

  His first sight of Rosset sent him sick; the hard lump of fear in his chest was shaken suddenly by an acute convulsion, a spasm that seemed to turn it to water, filling him with a cold nausea. Rosset was a gross figure, a man of appalling physique. Like some old boxer, he had degenerated to fat without losing his air of brutality; his greasy face, a strange yellowish-grey colour, had a loose red slit of a mouth and little black eyes that quivered under depraved loose lids that would close slowly and open again with incredible quickness, leeringly suspicious; his whole body was like that of some ponderous ape, latent with brutality and anger waiting beneath the skin to be stung into life. Continually he worked his brows up and down, as though itching to fly into a rage at something. When he smiled there was something loosely and suavely cynical about it; it was a potential leer. He moved about heavily, rolling from side to side, his hands clasped behind him with a kind of meditative cunning. He spoke with guttural rapidity, with a mean, sneering, brutish, domineering voice, uttering also queer noises of disgust or satisfaction.

  But it was not only this. He took an instant dislike to the boy. ‘Pierre, eh? Ha! Pierre?’ he muttered. ‘Pierre, eh?’

  A spasmodic terror shot through the boy at the sound of the voice, speaking with a dark sneer of significance, as though Rosset had been waiting all his life for that moment. Rosset leered, looked him up and down. They were in the restaurant, in the long alley between the empty white tables. It was five o’clock and since it was Sunday the place was not yet open. Madame Rosset had vanished to take off her wet coat, so that Rosset and the boy were alone.

  ‘Sit down!’ roared Rosset suddenly.

  And the boy, before he had realised it, sat down. It was a miracle wrought by fear. Rosset smiled with wet loose lips and grunted. The boy sat sick and white; he could feel his strength oozing from his finger-tips.

  ‘Stand up!’ roared Rosset.

  And the boy, again by that miracle wrought through fear, stood up, sick and weak. He could not look at Rosset and in desperation he stared at the opposite wall.

  ‘Look at me!’ ordered Rosset.

  Pierre’s eyes fixed themselves on Rosset’s face at once. There had not yet been a word of French from Rosset, yet the boy had obeyed. Rosset was leeringly triumphant. The boy stood staring, mute, mystified, at a loss to understand.

  ‘You see!’ said Rosset suddenly. ‘That zow you learn English — that zow. You see!’

  Then, as though remembering that the boy could not understand a word, he began speaking for the first time in French. His thick glistening lips moved with repulsive rapidity; he seemed to suck and taste the words of his own language greedily, his lips protruding and sucking back again like those of a man gorging on a ripe fruit, and his voice took on a thick lusciousness of tone, almost sensual. His features were amazingly flexible and in a way that bewildered the boy he worked his lips and cheeks and brows incessantly, every movement exaggerating the grossness of his face, its lines of cruelty, its perpetual sneer of insidious suspicion.

  He spoke for ten minutes, rapidly, yet coldly, with that sensual ripeness of tone, yet with intense calculation. ‘So he had come to be a waiter, eh? To learn to be a waiter? Did he know how long it took to learn that? How long did he think? How long?’ The boy listened mechanically, his sense numbed by Rosset’s voice, as Rosset told him his duties, how he must take the orders for wine and coffee, pour the wine and coffee, lay the knives and forks, clean the knives and forks, how he would be subordinate to everyone, Rosset, Madame Rosset, the waiters, the chef, even to the girl at the counter, how he must wash up the dishes in the afternoon and again in the morning. By a curious cynically playful tone of voice, Rosset implied that there was little to do. Only to pour the wine and the coffee, only to wash up, that was all: only a little — a little, but so important.

  Rosset talked on without ever pausing for answer. All the time the boy stood stiff, half-stupid, his big mute eyes bulging. At the end of it all he understood only two things: that it took a life-time to learn to be a waiter and that the only way to learn English was Rosset’s way, to speak nothing but English, to be addressed in nothing but English. He was wondering how, since he knew not a single word of English, he was to do this when Rosset suddenly shouted again:

  ‘Sit down!’

  He sat down, as before through fear, and again Rosset leered in triumph. A moment later he sucked in his thick lips and became almost menacingly serious. That was the way! Did he understand that? He was to speak French to no one but Rosset; to the rest, the diners, the waiters, the girl at the counter, he was to speak English. And so he would learn.

  He gave the boy one single look, a queer look of insinuation, his dribbling lips curled and one eyelid sagging, and then was finished.

  ‘Madame!’ he called. ‘Madame!’ Without waiting he rolled off, grunting, between the rows of tables and vanished as Madame Rosset appeared in the restaurant to take the boy to his room.

  Pierre followed Madame upstairs, to a little room under the roof, four stories up. Madame was fat and glum but there was no strength in her bulk and nothing to fear in her silence: she had weak grey eyes that blinked continually as though at a strong light and a little red cupid mouth whose colourlessness she painted over with some dark red colour, like that of cheap red wine; her hair was black and frizzy, half hiding her little tumbling black ear-rings. She was like some round, naive, mindless doll. Perhaps Rosset had forbidden her to talk, for when she spoke she kept glancing back, with little apprehensive uneasy smiles, towards the stairs. She seemed glad when she had told the boy to change into the waiter’s suit that lay on the little iron bed and be down in the restaurant by six. She left him a candle, flickering on the wooden washstand under the roof-window. He would rather have been in darkness. He changed his suit; the trousers struck d
amp against his legs, his hands were cold and he could not manipulate the shirt studs. Only these things kept him from blowing out the candle, from plunging himself into a darkness in which he could feel safe from Rosset, in which he could even hide from Rosset if necessary. He did not realise until he began to go downstairs the full depth of his weakness and terror; his legs would scarcely support his body, weighed down by its flood of sickness and dread, a sickness which he felt might at any moment make him swoon and a dread which was already half-turned to terror. He groped his way heavily and slowly, as though ill, downstairs. At moments only his body seemed to be in existence; the rest of him became annihilated, dead even to terror. At last the smell of cooking reached him, awoke the deadness in him and gave him a little comfort. He went into the restaurant with a queer, forced, half-paralysed step.

  To his relief Rosset was not back. A waiter was just drawing back the bolts of the street-door to open the place for the evening. Pierre stood still, watching. The waiter switched on the lights, fingered the dark leaves of the aspidistra in the window, peered into the dark street. The lights of other restaurants shone out across the street. The waiter stood still, his napkin on his arm, his thin sallow face negative, blank, thoughtless, his weak round-shouldered body broken and servile.

  Turning, he saw the boy. He came from the window, hobbling badly. ‘Bon soir, Pierre’. His voice was hollow, and spiritless. The boy nodded, formed some words on his lips, heard them in his mind and felt that they had been spoken. In reality he knew he was afraid to speak. He expected Rosset at any moment: the waiter also had fear in his eyes, an unconscious fear, an emotion bred of years of just such waiting.

  But Rosset did not arrive; and they held a brief whispered conversation, the man giving the boy hoarse scraps of advice, little tips to remember. He was not to be afraid, he was not to be afraid, he kept whispering. It was all right.

  The only other waiter appeared and stared also with that fixed blankness into the dark street. How long had they been there, these waiters? The boy kept wondering. Had they also come, as boys, to learn? Would he too go on serving for years and years and become like them? Would he also, in time, stare out into the dark street with that fixed emptiness of expression, his body crushed and servile, waiting for something? Was that what Rosset meant when he said that it took years to become a waiter? He caught himself staring, too, with a curious static gaze, as he wondered.

  A moment later he was standing alone; the waiter beside him was hurriedly flicking at the tables with his napkin, the waiter at the window was nervously busy over a cruet. He turned in sudden alarm at their sudden fearful activity. Rosset had entered.

  He had come in silently, and in the same silent way he moved to the window. He did not look at the boy, who stood stiff and contracted with fear. After a moment, rubbing his hands together, he turned from the window and came back. Fear seized the boy like a paralysis; he held himself rigid as though against a blow, contracted, sick. And again Rosset did nothing, neither looked nor spoke.

  Diners began to drift in by twos and threes, Rosset greeting them with obese affability, rubbing his hands or hiding them behind his back. The place became animated: there was a clatter of conversation and crockery together, the shouting of waiters and the answering echo from the kitchen below. Rosset walked up and down. And the boy, all the time, might not have existed.

  From taking the wine-list to each table the boy returned always to the same place: an opening between two empty tables, at the edge of the gangway. There he stood, his fingers gripping the wine-list, enduring over and over again the same piercing fear of Rosset each time he passed him. He felt always weak, cold, dazed; he hardly saw anything except Rosset. It would have been a relief to do something, to pour out some wine: but no one had yet asked for wine. He was to discover later that it was an event when anyone did.

  Finally he almost conquered his fear of Rosset. He could do it by staring at the opposite wall, by staring so intensely as to see beyond it and there lose himself. He would stare in this desperate way for minutes on end, while Rosset passed and repassed, saying and doing nothing to him.

  He was aroused from one of these stares by a sudden blow on his chest, a blow which made him stagger back against the wall, and by Rosset’s voice in a fierce whisper:

  ‘Always against the wall — always against the wall.’ The words came first in English and then in French. ‘Always against the wall. You see? Always against the wall.’

  The boy pressed himself back against the wall. His head, cracked against the wall, ached and throbbed. He shut his eyes, groped in a cold swooning darkness and came to life again. Rosset had gone.

  He stared at the opposite wall. A long time seemed to pass. Finding that someone wished for coffee he roused himself, took it, poured it into the cups, came back to the wall again. ‘Always against the wall,’ he kept thinking. A little later, realising that someone was staring at him in return, he let his eyes flicker back to a conscious gaze. This brought back a consciousness of mind also. He looked down the restaurant towards the door.

  There, on a table, stood the cash-desk, at which Madame Rosset had sat all evening. Now Madame Rosset had gone and her place had been taken by a girl of perhaps twenty-eight or nine, a dark, sallow-skinned girl with a mass of luxuriant black hair, and warm liquid eyes. He did not understand her sudden presence. Perhaps the Rossets had gone for their evening meal. His mind seemed stupid, drugged. He tried to force into his eyes some expression of understanding, of response. It was futile. Something in him had been crushed, annihilated, by that blow of Rosset’s sending him back against the wall.

  Nevertheless the girl continued to look at him. With her big, fluid dark eyes she coaxed him back gradually to a belief in his own existence. He felt inexpressibly soothed. Finally she shrugged her shoulders, smiled and made a droll face in the direction where Rosset must have gone. In spite of himself he smiled. She repeated it all, with a momentary flash of mimicry, mocking Rosset’s twitching brows, his fierce eyes and loose drooping lips. As, in spite of himself, he smiled again, she looked round, saw an imaginary Rosset approaching, bent her head hastily over the accounts and then looked up again, grinning with eyes that were bright and mischievous.

  As the evening went on she would repeat all this. It saved him from complete despair, took him away from himself. Her dumb-show was delicious. Normally he would have abandoned himself to absurd laughter. But he still felt sick; he was still apprehensive about Rosset’s sudden return; and he gave her back quick little smiles which simply flickered across his face and fled.

  The clatter of the restaurant died down. On Sundays it shut down at eleven, and long before then he was utterly weary by that prolonged standing against the wall. His head ached, the sickness in his heart persisted, and only the smiling mimicry of the girl saved him, again and again, from desolation.

  Once, just before eleven, Rosset returned, on drunken legs, took a lugubrious look round the empty restaurant and then disappeared.

  Soon afterwards a waiter bolted the door. The girl came from behind the cash-desk, straight to the boy. She spoke to him quickly in the flexible, sweet tones of his own language.

  ‘Go up to bed, quickly,’ she told him. ‘Quickly. We’ll clear up. Go along and sleep. We’ll talk to-morrow.’

  She put her arm softly about his shoulders, gave him a brief squeeze, and took him to the door. ‘There you go — sleep well.’ He caught the comfortable odour of her dress and the thick warm fragrance of her body.

  As he dragged himself upstairs he burst into tears, silently, and he lay on his bed choking with deep sobs of agony, holding his hands desperately to his mouth, afraid that Rosset would hear and come up and knock the life out of him.

  II

  It was Sunday again, Easter Sunday. He stood there, against the wall, pressed back, as he had done every day of the winter. It was midday: in April the sun, at noon, could just clear the high roof of the buildings opposite Rosset’s; it was fitful windy Apri
l weather, with stumbling white clouds which hid the sun, and snow-cold air. There was no sign of spring: not even a daffodil on the tables of the empty restaurant. The two waiters stood at the window, gazing into the street, waiting for something to turn up, and the girl, Yvette, sat at the cash-desk, scratching her head with a pencil, licking her lips, and exchanging occasional glances with the boy, her eyes sparkling and mischievous. Sometimes she hugged herself against the cold and at last she got up and walked about the restaurant, stamping her feet. She walked to the far end of the empty room and turned, and it occurred to her then to retrace her steps like Rosset and she came back with his heavy rolling gait, twitching her brows up and down, her hands clasped behind her back, her full red lips loosely drooping. ‘Ah! bon jour, m’sieu’, bon jour! You like to sit ’ere? No? Over there? Nize table, ver’ nize. The Preence of Wales sit sometimes there — sometimes. Oh yes. Sometimes. You sit ’ere? As you wish, m’sieu.’

  She had come down to the door and was bowing and rubbing her hands to that imaginary customer, while the waiters rolled against themselves and laughed and the boy smiled with delight by the wall, and now suddenly she flung up her hands and turned back by a series of quick rhythmical turns up the room, like a dancer, her black skirts flowing out wider and wider like an opening sunshade, showing her plump legs and the mauve garters on her black stockings just above her knees. Laughing with delight, she kept snapping her fingers, and performing little seductive wriggles of her body for sheer joy.

  ‘Ach! Rosset! Who cares anything about Rosset now? Who cares anything? Pouf!’

  It was a great day, for Rosset and his wife had gone away for Easter Sunday, on a visit to some relations, so that Pierre, the girl and the waiters would be free after three o’clock until the place opened again at six in the evening.