The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [59]
Not only was it painful enough to think of Jean giving herself to another man; the pain was intensified by supposing—what was, of course, not possible—that Stripling must appear to her in the same terms that he appeared to me. Yet clearly she had, once, at least, looked at Stripling with quite different eyes, or such a situation could never have arisen. Therefore, seeing Stripling as a man for whom it was evidently possible to feel at the very least a passing tendresse—perhaps even love—this incident, unforgettably horrible as it seemed to me at the time, would more rationally be regarded as a mere error of judgment. In love, however, there is no rationality. Besides, that she had seen him with other eyes than mine made things worse. In such ways one is bound, inescapably, to the actions of others.
We finished dressing in silence. By that time it was fairly late. I felt at once hungry, and without any true desire for food.
‘Where shall we go?’
‘Anywhere you like.’
‘But where would you like to go?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘We could have a sandwich at Foppa’s.’
‘The club?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right.’
In the street she slipped her arm through mine. I looked, and saw that she was crying a little, but I was no nearer understanding her earlier motives. The only thing clear was that some sharp change had taken place in the kaleidoscope of our connected emotions. In the pattern left by this transmutation of coloured crystals an increased intimacy had possibly emerged. Perhaps that was something she had intended.
‘I suppose I should not have told you.’
‘It would have come out sooner or later.’
‘But not just then.’
‘Perhaps not.’
Still, in spite of it all, as we drove through dingy Soho streets, her head resting on my shoulder, I felt glad she still seemed to belong to me. Foppa’s was open. That was a relief, for there was sometimes an intermediate period when the restaurant was closed down and the club had not yet come into active being. We climbed the narrow staircase, over which brooded a peculiarly Italian smell: minestrone: salad oil: stale tobacco: perhaps a faint reminder of the lotion Foppa used on his hair.
Barnby had first introduced me to Foppa’s club a long time before. One of the merits of the place was that no one either of us knew ever went there. It was a single room over Foppa’s Restaurant. In theory the club opened only after the restaurant had shut for the night, but in practice Foppa himself, sometimes feeling understandably bored with his customers, would retire upstairs to read the paper, or practise billiard strokes. On such occasions he was glad of company at an earlier hour than was customary. Alternatively, he would sometimes go off with his friends to another haunt of theirs, leaving a notice on the door, written in indelible pencil, saying that Foppa’s Club was temporarily closed for cleaning.
There was a narrow window at the far end of this small, smoky apartment; a bar in one corner, and a table for the game of Russian billiards in the other. The walls were white and bare, the vermouth bottles above the little bar shining out in bright stripes of colour that seemed to form a kind of spectrum in red, white and green. These patriotic colours linked the aperitifs and liqueurs with the portrait of Victor Emmanuel II which hung over the mantelpiece. Surrounded by a wreath of laurel, the King of Sardinia and United Italy wore a wasp-waisted military frock-coat swagged with coils of yellow aiguillette. The bold treatment of his costume by the artist almost suggested a Bakst design for one of the early Russian ballets.
If Foppa himself had grown his moustache to the same enormous length, and added an imperial to his chin, he would have looked remarkably like