“Monsieur,” said Raoul obligingly and withdrew his beloved into the inner room.
Alleyn rejoined his family. “Did you get much of that?” he asked.
“I’ve reached exhaustion point for French,” Troy said. “I can’t even try to listen. And Ricky, as you see, is otherwise engaged.”
Ricky looked up from a brilliant picture of two knights engaged in single combat. “I bet there’ll be a wallop when they crash,” he said. “Whang! I daresay I’d be able to read this pretty soon if we stayed here. I can read a bit, can’t I, Mummy?”
“English, you can.”
“I know. So don’t you daresay I could, French, Daddy?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you. Did you know what we were talking about, just now?”
“I wasn’t listening much.” Ricky lowered his voice to a polite whisper. “If it isn’t a rude question,” he said, “when’s dinner?”
“Soon. Pipe down, now. I want to talk to Mummy.”
“O.K. What are you going to do in Teresa’s bedroom tomorrow night, Daddy?”
“I must say I should like to be associated with that enquiry,” said Troy warmly.
“I am changing there for a party.”
“Who’s having a party?” Ricky demanded.
“A silver goat. I rather think he lights himself up.”
The door opened. Teresa came in with a tray.
iv
The dinner was superb, the filets mignons particularly being inspired. When it was finished the Alleyns invited the M ilanos to join them for fines and M. Milano produced a bottle of distinguished cognac. The atmosphere was gay and comme il faut. Presently the regular clientele of the house began to come in: quiet middle-class people who greeted Madame Milano and took down their own table-napkins from hooks above their special places. A game of draughts was begun at the corner table. Troy, who had enjoyed herself enormously but was in a trance of fatigue, said she thought that they should go. Elaborate leave-takings were begun. Ricky, full of vegetables and rich gravy and sticky with grenadine, yawned happily and bestowed a smile of enchanting sweetness upon Madame Milano.
“Mille remerciements, chère Madame,” he said, stumbling a little over the long word, “de mon beau repas,”and held out his hand. Madame made a complicated, motherly, bustling movement and ejaculated, “Ah, mon Dieu, quel amour d’enfant!” There followed a great shaking of hands and interchange of compliments and the Alleyns took their departure on the crest of the wave.
Raoul drove them back to their hotel where, regrettably, a great fuss was again made over Ricky, who began to show infantile signs of vainglory and struck an attitude before M. Malaquin, the proprietor, shouting: “Kidnappers! Huh! Easy!” and was applauded by the hall porter.
Alleyn said: “That’s more than enough from you, my friend,” picked his son up and bore him into the lift. Troy followed wearily, saying: “Don’t be an ass, Ricky darling.” When they got upstairs Ricky, who had been making tentative sounds of defiance, became quiet. When he was ready for bed he turned white and said he wouldn’t sleep in “that room.” His parents exchanged the look that recognizes a dilemma. Troy muttered: “It is trying him a bit high, isn’t it?” Alleyn locked the outer door of Ricky’s room and took him into the passage to show him that it couldn’t be opened. They returned, leaving the door between the two rooms open. Ricky hung back. He had shadows under his eyes and looked exhausted and miserable. “Why can’t Daddy go in there?” he asked angrily.
Alleyn thought a moment and then said: “I can of course, and you can be with Mummy.”
“Please,” Ricky said. “Please.”
“Well, I must say that’s a bit more civil. Look here, old boy, will you lend me your goat to keep me company? I want to see if it really does light itself up.”
“Yes, of course he will,” said Troy with an attempt at maternal prompting, “which,” she thought, “I should find perfectly maddening if I were Ricky.”
Ricky said: “I want to be in here with Mummy and I want Goat to be here too. Please,” he added.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “You won’t see him light himself up, of course, because Mummy will want her lamp on for some time, won’t you, darling?”
“For ages and ages,” Troy, who desired nothing less, agreed.
Ricky said: “Please take him in there and tell me if he illumines.” He fished his silver goat out of the bosom of his yellow shirt. Alleyn took it into the next room, put it on the bedside table, shut the door and turned out the lights.
He sat on the bed staring into the dark and thinking of the events of the long day and of Troy and Ricky, and presently a familiar experience revisited him. He seemed to see himself for the first time, a stranger, a being divorced from experience, a chrysalis from which his spirit had escaped and which it now looked upon, he thought, with astonishment as a soul might look after death at its late housing. He thought: “I suppose Oberon imagines he’s got all this sort of thing taped. Raoul and Teresa too, after their fashion and belief. But I have never found an answer.” The illusion, if it were an illusion and he was never certain about this, could be dismissed, but he held to it still and in a little while he found he was looking at a fluorescence, a glimmer of something, no more than a bat-light. It grew into a shape. It was Ricky’s little figurine faithfully illuminating itself in the dark. And Ricky’s voice, still rather fretful, brought Alleyn back to himself.
“Daddy!” he was shouting. “Is he doing it? Daddy!”
“Yes,” Alleyn called, rousing himself, “he’s doing it. Come and see. But shut the door after you or you’ll spoil it.”
There was a pause. A blade of light appeared and widened. He saw Ricky come in, a tiny figure in pyjamas. “Shut the door, Ricky,” Alleyn repeated, “and wait a moment. If you come to me, you’ll see.”
The room was dark again.
“If you’d go on talking, however,” Ricky’s voice said, very small and polite, “I’d find you.”
Alieyn went on talking and Ricky found him. He stood between his father’s knees and watched the goat shining. “He honestly is silver,” he said. “It’s all true.” He leaned back against his father, smelling of soap, and laid his relaxed hand on Alleyn’s. Alleyn lifted him on to his knee. “I’m fizzily and ’motionly zausted,” Ricky said in a drawling voice.
“What in the world does that mean?’
“It’s what Mademoiselle says I am when I’m overtired.” He yawned cosily. “I’ll look at Goat a bit more and then I daresay…” His voice trailed into silence.
Alleyn could hear Troy moving about quietly in the next room. He waited until Ricky was breathing deeply and then put him to bed. The door opened and Troy stood there listening. Alleyn joined her. “He’s off,” he said and watched while she went to see for herself. They left the door open.
“I don’t know whether that was sound child-psychiatry or a barefaced cheat,” Alleyn said, “but it’s settled his troubles. I don’t think he’ll be frightened of his bedroom now.”
“Suppose he wakes and gets a panic, poor sweet.”
“He won’t. He’ll see his precious goat and go to sleep again. What about you?”
“I’m practically snoring on my feet.”
“Fizzily and ’motionly zausted?”
“Did he say that?”
“Queer little bloke that he is, he did. Shall I stay with you, too, until you go to sleep?”
“But — what about you?”
“I’m going up to the factory. Dupont’s still there and Raoul’s hiring me his car.”
“Rory, you can’t. You must be dead.”