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'D'you sell any pictures?' asked Larry.
'I don't have to,' she answered airily. 'I have private means.'
'Lucky girl.'
'No, not lucky: clever. You must come and see my pictures.'
She wrote down her address on a piece of paper and made him promise to go. Suza
'You're not going?' she cried.
'I am,'he smiled.
He paid and with a waive of the hand left us. I laughed. He had a way that always amused me of being with you one moment and without explanation gone the next. It was so abrupt; it was almost as if he had faded into the air.
'Why did he want to go away so quickly?' said Suza
'Perhaps he's got a girl waiting for him,' I replied mockingly.
'That's an idea like another.' She took her compact out of her bag and powdered her face. 'I pity any woman who falls in love with him. Oh la, la.'
'Why do you say that?'
She looked at me for a minute with a seriousness I had not often seen in her.
'I very nearly fell in love with him myself once. You might as well fall in love with a reflection in the water or a ray of sunshine or a cloud in the sky. I had a narrow escape. Even now when I think of it I tremble at the danger I ran.'
Discretion be blowed. It would have been inhuman not to want to know what this was all about. I congratulated myself that Suza
'How on earth did you ever get to know him?' I asked.
'Oh, it was years ago. Six years, seven years, I forget. Odette was only five. He knew Marcel when I was living with him. He used to come to the studio and sit while I was posing. He'd take us out to di
'We were next door to La Mere Mariette and he took me by the arm and sat me down at a table. I was so hungry I was ready to eat an old boot, but when the omelette came I felt I couldn't eat a thing. He forced me to take a little and he gave me a glass of burgundy. I felt better then and I ate some asparagus. I told him all my troubles. I was too weak to hold a pose. I was just skin and bone and I looked terrible; I couldn't expect to get a man. I asked him if he'd lend me the money to go back to my village. At least I'd have my little girl there. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said of course not, Mamma didn't want me, she could hardly live on her pension with prices the way they were, and the money I'd sent for Odette had all been spent, but if I appeared at the door she would hardly refuse to take me in, she'd see how ill I looked. He looked at me for a long time, and I thought he was going to say he couldn't lend me anything. Then he said:
'"Would you like me to take you down to a little place I know in the country, you and the kid? I want a bit of a holiday."
'I could hardly believe my ears. I'd known him for ages and he'd never made a pass at me.
'"In the condition I'm in?" I said. I couldn't help laughing. "My poor friend," I said, "I'm no use to any man just now."
'He smiled at me. Have you ever noticed what a wonderful smile he's got? It's as sweet as honey.
'"Don't be so silly," he said. "I'm not thinking of that."
'I was crying so hard by then, I could hardly speak. He gave me money to fetch the child and we all went to the country together. Oh, it was charming, the place he took us to.'
Suza
'He was sweet with Odette and she adored him. I had to prevent her from making a nuisance of herself, but he never seemed to mind how much she pestered him. It used to make me laugh, they were like two children together.'
'What did you do with yourselves?' I asked.
'Oh, there was always something to do. We used to take a boat and fish and sometimes we'd get the patron to lend us his Citroen and we'd go into town. Larry liked it. The old houses and the place. It was so quiet that your footsteps on the cobblestones were the only sound you heard. There was a Louis Quartorze hotel de ville and an old church, and at the edge of the town was the chateau with a garden by Le Notre. When you sat at the cafe on the place you had the feeling that you had stepped back three hundred years and the Citroen at the kerb didn't seem to belong to this world at all.'
It was after one of these outings that Larry told her the story of the young airman which I narrated at the begi
'I haven't an idea. They'd had a hospital in the town during the war and in the cemetery there were rows and rows of little crosses. We went to see it. We didn't stay long, it gave me the creeps-all those poor boys lying there. Larry was very silent on the way home. He never ate much, but at di
'What did he read?'
'Oh, all sorts of things. Letters of Madame de Sevigne and bits of Saint-Simon. Imagine-toi, I who'd never read anything before but the newspaper and now and then a novel when I heard them talk about it in the studios and didn't want them to think me a fool! I had no idea reading could be so interesting. Those old writers weren't such fatheads as one would think.'
'Who would think?' I chuckled.
'Then he made me read with him. We read Phedre and Berenice. He took the men's parts and I took the women's. You can't think how amusing it was,' she added naively. 'He used to look at me so strangely when I cried at the pathetic parts. Of course it was only because I hadn't got my strength. And you know, I've still got the books. Even now I can't read some of the letters of Madame de Sevigne that he read to me without hearing his lovely voice and without seeing the river flowing so quietly and the poplars on the opposite bank, and sometimes I can't go on, it gives me such a pain in my heart. I know now that those were the happiest weeks I ever spent in my life. That man, he's an angel of sweetness.'