Free Stamboul Train by Graham Greene Page A

receipt from the desk and blew it away, and in any case the debt had been paid with a kiss or another kindness, and those who thought forgot; but those who felt remembered; they did not owe and they did not lend, they gave hatred or love. I am one of those, thought Miss Warren, her eyes filling with tears and the bread drying in her throat, I am one of those who love and remember always, who keep faith with the past in black dresses or black bands, I don’t forget, and her eyes dwelt for a moment on the Jew’s girl, as a tired motorist might eye with longing the common inn, the scarlet curtains and the watered ale, before continuing his drive towards the best hotel, with its music and its palms. She thought: ‘I’ll speak to her. She has a pretty figure.’ For after all one could not live always with a low voice like music, with a tall figure like a palm. Faithfulness was not the same as remembrance; one could forget and be faithful and one could remember and be faithless.
    She loved Janet Pardue, she would always love Janet Pardoe, she protested inwardly; Janet had been a revelation to her of what love could mean ever since the first evening of their meeting in a cinema in Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse, and yet, and yet . . . They had come together in a mutual disgust of the chief actor; at least Mabel Warren had said aloud in English to relieve her feelings in the strained hush of the dark theatre, ‘I can’t bear these oiled men,’ and had heard a low musical agreement. Yet even then Janet Pardoe had wished to stay till the end, till the last embrace, the final veiled lechery. Mabel Warren urged her to come and have a drink, but Janet Pardoe said that she wanted to see the news and they both stayed. That first evening seemed now to have revealed all of Janet’s character that there was to reveal, the inevitable agreement which made no difference to what she did. Sharp words or disagreement had never ruffled her expressionless mood until the evening before, when she had thought herself rid of Mabel Warren. Miss Warren said viciously, not troubling to lower her voice at all, ‘I don’t like Jews,’ and Janet Pardoe, turning her large luminous eyes back to Mabel Warren’s, agreed: ‘Nor do I, darling.’
    Mabel Warren implored her with sudden desperation, ‘Janet, when I’ve gone, you’ll remember our love for each other? You won’t let a man touch you?’ She would have welcomed dissent, the opportunity to argue, to give reasons, to fix some kind of seal upon that fluid mind, but again all she got was an absent-minded agreement. ‘But of course not, darling. How could I?’ If she had faced a mirror, she would have received more sense of an alien mind from the image there, but not, Miss Warren thought, the satisfaction of something beautiful. It was no good thinking of herself, her coarse hair, red lids, and obstinately masculine and discordant voice; there was no one, even the young Jew, who was not her physical rival. When she was gone, Janet Pardoe would remain for a little while a beautiful vacancy, hardly existing at all, save for the need of sleep, the need of food, the need of admiration. But soon she would be sitting back crumbling toast, saying, ‘But of course I agree. I’ve always felt that.’ The cup shook in Mabel Warren’s hand, and the coffee trickled over the brim and drops fell to her skirt, already stained with grease and beer. What does it matter, she asked herself, what Janet does so long as I don’t know? What does it matter to me if she lets a man take her to bed as long as she comes back? But the last qualification made her wince with mental pain, for would Janet, she wondered, ever return to an ageing plain infatuated woman? She’ll tell him about me, Mabel Warren thought, of the two years she had lived with me, of the times when we have been happy, of the scenes I’ve made, even of the