"Don't sound resigned," Laura said. "I hate it when you sound resigned."
Michael controlled himself purposefully and listened to his own voice being polite and pleasant as he spoke. "What do you want me to do?"
"First," Laura said, "turn off that damned radio." Michael started to protest, but thought better of it. The announcer was saying, "The situation here is still confused, but the British seem to have evacuated the greater portion of their Army safely, and it is expected that Weygand's counter-offensive will soon develop…"
"Michael, darling," Laura said warningly.
Michael turned the radio off.
"There," he said, "anything for you."
"Thanks," said Laura. Her eyes were dry and bright and smiling now. "Now, one more thing."
"What's that?"
"Shave."
Michael sighed and ran his hand over the little stubble on his jaw.
"Do I really need it?" he asked.
"You look as though you just came out of a Third Avenue flop-house."
"You've convinced me," Michael said.
"You'll feel better, too," Laura said, picking up the newspapers around Michael's chair.
"Sure," said Michael. Almost automatically, he sidled over towards the radio and put his hand down to the dials.
"Not for an hour," Laura pleaded, holding her hand over the dials. "One hour. It's driving me crazy. The same thing over and over."
"Laura, darling," Michael said, "it's the most important week of our lives."
"Still," she said, with crisp logic, "it doesn't help to drive ourselves out of our minds. That won't help the French, will it? And when you come down, darling, put up the badminton net."
Michael shrugged. "Okay," he said. Laura kissed his cheek lightly and ran her fingers through his hair. He started upstairs.
While he was shaving he heard some of the guests arrive. The voices floated up from the garden, lost from time to time in the sound of the water running in the basin. They were women's voices and they sounded musical and soft at this distance. Laura had invited two of the teachers from a near-by girls' school to which she had gone when she was fourteen. They both were Frenchwomen who had taught her and had been good to her. As Michael half-listened to the rising and falling voices, he couldn't help feeling how much more pleasant Frenchwomen sounded than most of the American women he knew. There was something modest and artful in the tone of the voices and the spacing of the words that fell much more agreeably on the ear than the self-assured clangour of American female speech. That, he thought, grinning, is an observation I will not dare make aloud.
He cut himself and felt annoyed and jangled again as he saw the small, persistent crimson seeping under his jaw.
From the large tree at the end of the garden came the cawing of crows. A colony of them had set up their nests there, and from time to time they clacked away, drowning the other and more gentle noises of the countryside.
He went downstairs and stole quietly into the living-room and turned the radio on, low. In a moment it warmed up, but for once there was only music. A woman's voice was singing, "I got plenty of nuthin' and nuthin's plenty for me," on one station. A military band was playing the overture from Tannhauser on the other station. It was a weak little radio and it was only possible to get two stations on it. Michael turned the radio off and went out into the garden to meet the guests.
Johnson was there, in a yellow tennis shirt with brown bars across it. He had brought along a tall, pretty girl, with a serious, intelligent face, and automatically, as Michael shook her hand, he wondered where Mrs Johnson was this summer afternoon.
"Miss Margaret Freemantle…" Laura was conducting the introductions. Miss Freemantle smiled slowly, and Michael felt himself thinking bitterly: How the hell does Johnson get a girl as pretty as that?
Michael shook hands with the two Frenchwomen. They were sisters, both of them frail, and dressed in black, quite smartly, in a style that you felt must have been very fashionable some years before, although you could not remember exactly when. They were both in their fifties, with upswept lacquered hair and soft, pale complexions and amazing legs, slender and finely shaped. They had delicate, perfect manners, and long years of teaching young girls had given them an air of remote patience with the world. They always seemed to Michael like exquisitely mannered visitors from the nineteenth century, polite, detached, but secretly disapproving of the time and the country in which they found themselves. Today, despite the disciplined evidences of preparation for the afternoon, the clever rouging and eye-shadow, there was a wan, drawn look on their faces, and their attention seemed to wander, even in the middle of a conversation.
Michael looked at them obliquely, suddenly realizing what it must be like to be French today, with the Germans near Paris, and the city hushed listening for the approaching rumble of the guns, and the radio announcers breaking into the jazz programmes and the domestic serials with bulletins from Europe, with the careful American pronunciation of names that were so familiar to them, Rheims, Soissons, the Marne, Compiegne…
If only I was more delicate, Michael thought, if only I had more sense, if I wasn't such a heavy, stupid ox, I would take them aside and talk to them and somehow say the right words that would comfort them. But he knew that if he tried he would be clumsy and would say the wrong thing and embarrass them and make everything worse than it had been. It was something nobody ever thought to teach you. They taught you everything else but tact, humanity, the healing touch.
"… I don't like to say this," Johnson was saying in his fine intelligent, reasonable voice, "but I think the whole thing is a gigantic fake."
"What?" Michael asked stupidly. Johnson was sitting gracefully on the grass, his knees drawn up boyishly, smiling at Miss Freemantle, making an impression on her. Michael could feel himself being annoyed because Johnson seemed to be succeeding in making an impression.
"Conspiracy," Johnson said. "You can't tell me the two greatest armies of the world just collapsed all of a sudden, just like that. It's been arranged."
"Do you mean," Michael asked, "they're handing over Paris to the Germans deliberately?"
"Of course," said Johnson.
"Have you heard anything recent?" the younger Frenchwoman, Miss Boullard, asked softly. "About Paris?"
"No," said Michael, as gently as he could manage. "No news yet."
The two ladies nodded and smiled at him as though he had just presented them with bouquets.
"It'll fall," Johnson said. "Take my word for it."
Why the hell, Michael thought irritably, do we have this man here?
"The deal is on," said Johnson. "This is camouflage for the sake of the people of England and France. The Germans'll move into London in two weeks and a month later they'll all attack the Soviet Union." He said this triumphantly and angrily.
"I think you're wrong," Michael said doggedly. "I don't think it's going to happen. Somehow it's going to work out differently."
"How?" Johnson asked.
"I don't know how." Michael felt he must seem silly in Miss Freemantle's eyes and the thought annoyed him, but he persisted. "Somehow."
"A mystic faith," Johnson said derisively, "that Father will take care of everything. The bogy man won't be allowed into the nursery."
"Please," said Laura, "do we have to talk about it? Don't we want to play badminton? Miss Freemantle, do you play badminton?"
"Yes," said Miss Freemantle. Her voice is low and husky, Michael thought, automatically.
"When are people going to wake up?" Johnson demanded.
"When are they going to face the hard facts? There's a deal on to deliver the world. Ethiopia, China, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland…"
Those names, Michael thought, those grey names. They had been used so often that almost all emotional significance had been drained from them.