Celia, aged sixteen years and eleven days (“Give me back my eleven days,” she cried out in a brief moment of melancholy), was escorted to France by Mr. Burphy, die Chief Clerk in Totlands, her father’s solicitors, and of course her own too. They even consumed an evening meal of a sort in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, the most gorgeous in Europe. But all the arrangements had really been made by Celia’s distant cousin, Rolf, who lived with two other men of the same generation in a beautiful house up the hill at Meudon, and who knew all the ins and outs. Cousin Rolf fixed Celia up at Étien’s and he even found her a nearby apartment: very high up, but with two rooms, though small ones, and with what amounted to a private staircase down to the sanitary facilities on the floor immediately below. Celia had no occasion ever to encounter in person her remote, though helpful Cousin Rolf. It was unexpected that a girl of Celia’s age and background should be deposited on her own in Paris, and among artists; but she had requested it, she had always spoken quantities of French, and she could not see that there was anyone to make a fuss, as all her aunts were in Ireland, about 150 miles from Dublin, and in no position to go anywhere else, even had they wished to. Fortunately, Celia could depend upon an adequate allowance. This was mainly because her father did not understand the value of money, and, throughout his long life, had made a point of refusing all advice about it, or about anything else.
The first things that Celia bought (apart from a few dresses, pairs of shoes and stockings, lovely lingerie, and even one or two hats, either very small or very large) were additional chattels for her miniature rooms, which, upon entry, she was surprised to find almost unfurnished, as if she had been living still in the days of Mimi, Musetta, Colline, and all those well-known people. In particular, there was not one single mirror or looking glass, not one; not even a cracked fragment in the downstairs cabinet, with, perhaps, MILTON at one corner, or, possibly, JEYES, such as one found in bathing machines.
So Celia went out and purchased four or five looking glasses immediately. All but one would be merely for use each day and were backed with nitrate, though certainly not mass-produced or in any way commonplace; but the last of her acquisitions might have stood in any bedroom at home.
Celia had spotted it in one of the low, dark, hopelessly untidy shops, and its capture had been an impulse of the instant, as is everything that is in any way real. Elements of nostalgia, even of plain homesickness, no doubt entered in.
The shop had proved to be run not by the usual very old man, but by an even older woman, though spryer and more grasping than Nurse at home. The aged tricoteuse had driven a terribly hard bargain, but Celia had to possess the glass; first, for the obvious reason that she could not live without it; second, because it bore extremely faded traces of mysterious male and female figures round the upper part of the frame; third, because the face that had just looked back at her from its shallows and depths had not been her own.
The short distance along which the glass had to be borne presented an even worse problem than the haggling, and the need for lugging it up so many narrow, winding, and decrepit stairs a worse one still.
But the most complex of ordeals sometimes finds its own resolution, and now Celia sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all. She had to seat herself for these transactions, because the looking glass was so short in the frame. She had heard that our ancestors were more stunted than we are, though even this (she knew) had been contested by a woman who owned an immense collection of very old clothes, all of which she had measured anew, giving years to the work. Possibly the beautiful looking glass had been designed for the Gonzaga dwarfs, men and women even as the faded figures gamboling round the top of the frame? Celia wondered if she would ever visit their tiny suites at Mantua; of which her father had shown her small yellow photographs taken years before with early flashlights. In the meantime, she would have to find a chaise longue that was stumpier in the shanks. Her own limbs were as long as they were lovely.
So life continued, for Celia could not quite say how long, as her father wrote letters of any kind only on formal occasions, and Totlands really had no business to transact with her beyond paying out her allowance, with their usual precise punctuality. She had been well aware that Mr. Burphy had been more frightened of her than anything else. How long ago it began to seem! Time flies when we watch it, but has no need to fly when we ignore it.
One morning, Celia felt quite certain of something that of late she had more and more suspected: she was not merely looking older, but looking much older; older, more grained, more perceptibly skinny. The first bright light of spring must have wrought the trick.
At least, Celia presumed it was the spring; which she had always distrusted, even artistically. She knew that spring is the season of maximum self-slaughter; and who could wonder? It was the season when doubt was no longer possible. Momentarily, she clutched at the neckline of her dress, and managed to inflict an actual rent. Even the fabric of her garments seemed to have weakened slightly; and this had been an expensive garment, once.
Celia did not care to look very often in any of the glasses after that, but crept past and around them, her eyes on the jade or turquoise carpet.
All the same, life has in some sense to go forward, as long as it bears with us at all; and Celia, despite her tendency to melancholy, was perfectly courageous. Moreover, she was finding more and more of herself in her art, and had been assured that soon she might quite easily win a medal of some kind. Of course, that had been said to her privately, in order not to upset the others.
She bought many new dresses to replace the one she had torn. She even bought six fancy dresses, or costumes that were all but that; with a view to meeting life from time to time in different and selected disguises. She bought a silk tie and two pairs of silk socks for a man she knew; all in excitingly aggressive colors and patterns. Sometimes she dwelt upon what it would be like to nurture eight or nine children, the fruit of her womb; upon their complex teething and schooling; upon some brusque, shadowy figure to pay for it all and act as head of the household.
How long could it have been before Celia, despite her precautions, caught her own eye in the glass and realized that she must be middle-aged and beyond all chance of concealment? And, needless to say, it had happened at that same dreadful morning hour, when the brightness of the sun is equaled only by the blackness of the heart.
Other faces had continued glinting back at her from time to time, but now she recognized that a stranger had intruded for ever.
She opened a letter that morning from David Skelt, the senior partner in Totlands. He had never before been under any necessity to write to her personally, but had been able to leave the task to his staff, or at least to a partner who was greatly junior.
Mr. Skelt informed her that her father had become so frail that Nurse would have to be supplemented by at least one other nurse; and that her own allowance would have henceforth to be halved at the least, in consequence. He referred to these new nurses as “trained nurses.” Presumably, that might make a big difference in some way.
Prices in Paris were said to be rising and the people to be changing in character; but Celia knew that she still had her art, as well as her beautiful looking glass. She realized that her art must mean more to her with every day that sped past. Whether strangers cared for her art or not, the other pupils could be counted upon for loyalty without flaw. Moreover, most of the pupils were nowadays little more than children, so that all could not sensibly be described as lost. There could always be a completely new generation. The future was an open question yet.