After the Fireworks by Aldous Huxley Read Free Book Online Page A

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?”
    â€œI should think it wasn’t!” he agreed. “What an insult to Balzac to imagine that it could be!”
    â€œAnd 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,” Claire 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 to-day. And perhaps you’ll think of me. Will you, darling?” And she had smiled at her daughter with that intense, expectant expression that was so often on her face, and the very memory of which made Pamela feel subtly uncomfortable. “How should I ever forget?” she had answered, laying her hand on her mother’s and smiling. But after a second her eyes had wavered away from that fixed look, in which the intensity had remained as desperately on the stretch, the expectancy as wholly unsatisfied, as hungrily insatiable as ever. The waiter, thank goodness, had created a timely diversion; smiling at him confidentially, almost amorously, Clare had ordered like a princess in a novel of high life. The bill, when it came, was enormous. Clare had had to scratch the bottom of her purse for the last stray piece of nickel. “It looks asthough we should have to carry our own bags at Calais and Dover. I didn’t realize I’d run things so fine.” Pamela had looked at the bill. “But, Clare,” she had protested, looking up again at her mother with an expression of genuine horror, “it’s wicked! Two hundred and sixty francs for a lunch! It wasn’t worth it.” The blood had risen darkly into Clare’s face. “How