Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys Page A

in the bar next door to the cinema. I sit at a corner table and sip it respectably, with lowered eyes. Je suis une femme convenable, just come out of the nearest cinema....Now I really am OK, chere madame. If I have a bottle of Bordeaux at dinner I'll be almost as drunk as I'd hoped to be.
    There is a letter from le peintre at the hotel. He says he is very sorry he didn't turn up the other evening - il faut m'excuser. He says Delmar has handed over the six hundred francs, and he thanks me. He says that if I don't like the bonhomme, if I find him too sad, he will change him for one of the landscapes or for anything else I want and that he will try to get to the Gare du Nord to say au revoir to me (I bet he won't), and he is my friend, Serge Rubin.
    Well, I'll have a whisky on that.
    I unroll the picture and the man standing in the gutter, playing his banjo, stares at me. He is gentle, humble, resigned, mocking, a little mad. He stares at me. He is double-headed, double-faced. He is singing 'It has been', singing 'It will be'. Double-headed and with four arms....I stare back at him and think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.
    This damned room - it's saturated with the pas....It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms....
    PART THREE
    ....The room at the Steens'.
    It was crowded with red plush furniture, the wood shining brightly. There were several vases of tulips and two cages with canaries, and there were two clocks, each trying to tick louder than the other. The windows were nearly always shut, but the room wasn't musty. When the door into the shop was open you could smell drugs and eau-de-Cologne. On a table at the back there was a big pot of tea over a spirit-lamp. The little blue light made it look like an altar.
    In that room you couldn't think, you couldn't make plans. Just the way the clocks ticked, and outside the clean, narrow streets, and the others talking Dutch and I listening, not understanding. It was like being a child again, listening and thinking of something else and hear ing the voices - endless, inevitable and restful. Like Sunday afternoon.
    Well, London....It has a fine sound, but what was London to me? It was a little room, smelling stuffy, with my stockings hanging to dry in front of a gas fire. Nothing in that room was ever clean; nothing was ever dirty, either. Things were always half and half. They changed one sheet at a time, so that the bed was never quite clean and never quite dirty.
    Thinking: 'I've got away from all that, anyhow. Not to go back, not to go back....'
    I liked Tonny; she was gentle. But I hated Hans Steen. He had a blustering look. He didn't bluster, he was very polite. But his pale blue eyes had that look, and his hands.
    Narrow streets, with the people walking up one way and down another. So tidily. In the park, the Haagsche Bosch, the trees upside-down in the ice green water.
    We go every day to the Centraal for an aperitif. We eat at a little place where the violinist plays sentimental tunes very well. ('Will you play Le Binyou for madame?....')
    I haven't any money. He hasn't any either. We both thought the other had money. But people are doing crazy things all over the place. The war is over. No more war - never, never, never. Apres la guerre, there'll be a good time everywhere....And not to go back to London. It isn't so fine, what I have to go back to in London.
    But no money? Nix?....And the letter in my hand bag: 'I think you must be mad. If you insist on doing this....'
    A tall vase of sprawling tulips on the table. How they give themselves! 'Perhaps it's because they know they have nothing to give,' Enno says.
    Talking about Paris, where he has lived since he was eighteen. He was a chansonnier, it seems, before he became a journalist. He enlisted during the first