She had been seeing one of her men off to the war. He had signed them into a hotel in Southampton the night before as Major and Mrs. Smith. "I felt quite the tart," she said, and laughed. The man was afraid he would be killed in battle, and had wept in the night and clung to her. "Honestly," she said in wonderment, "just like a baby." She was sorry now she had not said goodbye to him in London and avoided seeing him go to pieces like that. She had told me all this before we were off the train. She asked if I thought she was awful, and gave me an appraising, a testing, look. We stood in the drizzle outside the station waiting for a taxi. The crown of her hat, sprinkled all over with gemlike drops of rain, was level with the centre of my chest. "I did not think the French were made on your scale," she said. I said I was not French but she paid no heed; I would come to know well her capacity for not hearing things she considered inconvenient. For my part I was already suffering my first London headache. A taxi came. She offered to drop me at my destination but I said I had nowhere to go, which was true. She pursed her lips at that and frowned into the middle distance, thinking. We went and had a late breakfast in a hotel in Knights-bridge, which she paid for. From the dining room window we could look down on the traffic creeping through the rain. Under her overcoat she was dressed in dove-grey silk. She sipped at a cup of lemon tea and ate nothing. "They do fresh eggs here, for me," she said. "Would you like some?" And for the first time she smiled. When I had finished my food – dear me, how I could eat in those days! – she said that she would go home to sleep now, but that I must come and visit her in the afternoon. She produced another big bank note and wrote her address on it with a little silver pencil on a fine black cord. "It is a test of chivalry," she said. "If you spend it you will not know where I live." I walked around the city for hours, feeling nothing very much. There are times like that, every refugee knows them, when one seems to hang suspended, without volition, neither despairing nor hopeful, but waiting, merely, for what will come next. Daylight was already waning when I rang the bell at her tall, narrow little house in Belgravia. She came to the door in a crimson crepe-de-chine dressing-gown and smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder, a perfect parody of the stage vamp. Her very black hair was fixed elaborately with many pearl-headed pins, and she wore a mask of clay-white make-up and crimson lipstick that gave to her delicate features an excitingly oriental cast. All these preparations had been made to welcome someone, but not me, and for the first moment after she had opened the door she looked at me in blank consternation, before remembering who I was. She led me down the hall. "Damn Southampton," she said over her shoulder, "I have caught a cold." I could see, under the make-up, the delicate pink bloom along the edges of her nostrils and in the little groove above her upper lip. Her drawing room was furnished in the chilly, angular modern style of the day: there were low steel-and-glass tables, stick-insect chairs, a chandelier of menacing crystal spikes; the walls were covered with a black woven material that kept shimmering troublingly at the side of my vision. There was the thick heat of a hothouse, but she kept complaining that she was cold. Without asking she gave me gin to drink, and sat in the corner of an uncomfortable-looking, cuboid white sofa, hugging herself and shivering delicately. "I feel terrible about Eddie, now," she said, "the poor pet." Eddie was the pseudonymous Major Smith, he of the cowardly tears. "I should not have told you those things about him. You must think me horribly unfeeling." And she looked at me from under her long and matted lashes, then dropped her gaze and bit her lip delicately in an almost-smiling travesty of contrition and remorse. The doorbell rang, adding a further theatrical touch to the proceedings. She made no move to answer it, gave no sign of having heard it, even. No doubt it was the man she had been expecting instead of me. The bell went again. We sat in silence. Calmly she considered me. My stomach, still struggling with the remains of that unaccustomedly rich breakfast, growled and rumbled. The one at the door gave the bell a last, brief, half-hearted push, and then went away. Lady Laura was running a fingertip along a seam of the sofa covering. A swatch of her hair had come loose from its pins and hung down by her ear like a shiny black seashell. In a small voice she said that perhaps we should go to bed – "even though I have only just got up."
She really was tiny; had it occurred to me I might have felt some disquiet at the ease with which I had attracted in rapid succession these two distinctly boyish little persons. When she took off her gown, under which she was conveniently naked, and lay down before me on the bed, I was nervous of putting my hands on her for fear of breaking something. Where women are concerned I have always been, as you can attest, the bull in the china shop. So many I have caused to shatter in pieces, like Meissen figurines. Even the great, glazed urn that was Magda in the end was smashed under my stamping hoofs. Lady Laura was excited by the prospect of exquisite damage. She lifted her affectingly frail knees and opened her arms and smiled up into my face with slitted eyes. "Come on," she said, in a cat's thick gurgle, "break me in two, and make a wish."
She kept me, more or less, on and off, for nigh on two years. The arrangement between us she set out clearly from the start; it was to be entirely on her terms. There was no question, for instance, of my having exclusive rights to her bed; in fact, I was to have no rights at all, worth speaking of, to anything that was hers. She already had many admirers, and went on accumulating more of them all the time. She moved in a narrow, rackety milieu where aristocratic black sheep met and mingled with the art world crowd. She had a very great deal of money from her dead father, who had been a duke, but although she was a spendthrift, she was not generous. She bought me good clothes, handmade shoes, wearable trinkets of all kinds, but they were less an adornment for me than for her, by proxy. She continued to insist on my being French – "Really, darling, no one comes from your country" – and introduced me everywhere as my Frog. I liked her, really, I did; perhaps I more than liked her. There was something unwholesome about her, something acrid, discoloured, used, that I found deeply appealing; I am remembering the stale smell of her hair, the raspy touch of her shaven legs, the deep hollows under her eyes, with their bruised, plum-brown shadows.Yet no one I have ever known, not even you, dear Cass, was as tender, as delicate, as voluptuously helpless as she was, when she chose to be. She loved, she said, my size, the improbable, impossible bulk of me, her blond, contraband brute with big square jaw and killer's paws and ridiculous, unplaceable accent.