Martha in Paris

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Praise for the Writing of Margery Sharp

“A highly gifted woman … a wonderful entertainer.” —
The New Yorker

“One of the most gifted writers of comedy in the civilized world today.” —
Chicago Daily News

“[Sharp's] dialogue is brilliant, uncannily true. Her taste is excellent; she is an excellent storyteller.” —Elizabeth Bowen

Britannia Mews

“As an artistic achievement … first-class, as entertainment … tops.” —
The Boston Globe

The Eye of Love

“A double-plotted … masterpiece.” —John Bayley,
Guardian Books of the Year

Martha, Eric, and George

“Amusing, enjoyable, Miss Sharp is a born storyteller.” —
The Times
(London)

The Gypsy in the Parlour

“Unforgettable … There is humor, mystery, good narrative.” —
Library Journal

The Nutmeg Tree

“A sheer delight.” —New York Herald Tribune

Something Light

“Margery Sharp has done it again! Witty, clever, delightful, entertaining.” —
The Denver Post

Martha in Paris

A Novel

Margery Sharp

To

Geoffrey Castle

Chapter One

“I've come,” announced Mr. Joyce, “to talk about Martha.”

Martha's Aunt Dolores, still slightly fluttered at the unexpected visit, paused in the act of placing a black satin cushion behind his back to glance nervously at Harry her husband. She was always a little nervous of Mr. Joyce, because they owed so much to him: if he hadn't put Harry in as manager at the shop in Richmond, they mightn't even have had a roof over their heads. (The Joyce headquarters establishment, in Bond Street, purveyed sable and mutation mink; Harry Gibson still did quite nicely with lapin and flank musquash.) Moreover—a circumstance peculiarly precious to Harry's somewhat battered ego—the two men were friends; regularly every Sunday morning they played a round of golf together on the Richmond course—Mr. Joyce nipping ahead after his ball small and spry as a cat, Harry Gibson plodding behind large and sedate as a cart-horse—after which Mr. Joyce, sated by a week's fancy cooking at home, regularly came back for roast beef and apple pie. If it had been a Sunday Dolores could have taken him quite calmly; but this was Saturday evening after supper.

Also he wanted to talk about Martha.

Mr. Joyce's interest in Martha was something the Gibsons had never been able to understand, though they were grateful for it. That they didn't understand Martha either troubled them the less because they were not aware of the fact: to Dolores in particular it was incredible that she shouldn't understand her own niece, who had lived with her since the age of six—doubly orphaned, poor mite, and with no other relative to give succour! Resolutely, tenderly, for twelve years, Dolores attributed any lack of communication to feelings (on Martha's part) too deep for words …

But even she could never manage to think of plain fat Martha as the sort of child to twine herself about any unrelated heart; while what Mr. Joyce had seen in Martha's youthful drawings was a deeper mystery still. To Dolores, with the best will in the world, they looked no more than a muddle of criss-cross lines, and to Harry like some sort of blue-print: the fact remained that Mr. Joyce had been so unaccountably struck by them, he was now paying not only her fees at an art-school, but also three pounds a week towards her keep. Since Martha ate like a horse, it made a quite substantial difference to the Gibsons' narrow economy.

“Isn't she working?” asked Harry severely.

“Darling, I'm sure she is!” cried Dolores.

With a snap of his small neat fingers Mr. Joyce flipped the notion aside. Indeed all three knew very well that whatever her other shortcomings, Martha worked. She ate like a horse, also she worked like a horse. (That is, at drawing or painting: not about the house to help her aunt. Given a bed to make, she simply covered it up; given a cup to wash, broke the handle off. Mr. Joyce called it conserving her energies; and after all it was he who paid three pounds a week.)

“Where is she now?” asked Mr. Joyce.

“I'm afraid in the bath,” said Dolores modestly.

“Saturday night,” added Harry—betraying as he too often did his plebeian background.

“Good,” said Mr. Joyce. “I am not sorry to have a word with you both first. What I've been thinking about Martha is, she ought to go to Paris.”

2

He pushed the cushion away and sat back impassive.—As his father or grandfather, outside booth or tent, had sat back impassive, before a deal of consequence. Neither Dolores nor Harry had ever understood, it was beyond them to understand, the sense of creative rapture with which Mr. Joyce had followed year by year Martha's artistic progress. He was himself an artist
manqué
, destined merely to make a fortune in the fur-trade: in Martha finding a vicarious fruition. Equally beyond the Gibsons was it to appreciate the integrity that held him back from loosing her on the world as an infant prodigy. With his many connections—for he was a great patron of art-galleries—it would have been easy enough. Mr. Joyce held back. Counting his remaining years, and allowing himself the decade between seventy and eighty, he set Martha's first show at somewhere about his seventy-fourth birthday. He was the best friend Martha ever had.

The short, astonished silence was broken first by Harry.

“Gay Paree?” said Harry dubiously. “Why Gay Paree?”

Mr. Joyce grinned. He was truly fond of Harry—as the cat is fond of the cart-horse, as the small is attracted to the large, as the nervous to the placid.

“Dashed if I quite know myself,” he admitted, “what they've got there. But they've got something.” He cast about for an acceptable simile. “It's like the Argentines coming here to buy bulls.”

“The roast beef of old England,” agreed Harry, brightening.

“Well, it's the same with Paris and painters. Paris gives 'em something. Look at Sickert, look at Whistler, look at Sisley. Look at Picasso. Let alone their promotion technique,” added Mr. Joyce; “get taken up in Paris and it's half the battle. But you've got to be trained there. Which is why Martha,” finished Mr. Joyce, “should have at least two years.”

He had spoken with unusual, even unnecessary, impressiveness: the Gibsons had no intention of arguing. When Mr. Joyce talked about painters and Paris, and Whistler and Sickert and Sisley and Picasso, they knew themselves thoroughly out of their depth in waters where only Martha could thrash beside him.—Harry by now would have seen Martha off on the next boat-train, such was his confidence in her patron's wisdom and intentions; and only Dolores' maternal, or auntly, instincts found voice.

“She's only eighteen, Mr. Joyce! Do you really think that at
eighteen
—”

“Just the right age,” said Mr. Joyce briskly.

“And she doesn't speak French!”

“She will,” promised Mr. Joyce. “I have just the billet for her—widow of a professor, daughter who's a school-marm, not a word of English between them. Martha'll learn French all right.”

Still Dolores hesitated. Actually it wasn't Martha's lack of the parlez-voo (as Harry would have put it) that chiefly troubled her; nor did she fail to appreciate the widow-and-daughter aspect. Before marriage once forced to take in lodgers herself, as an experienced landlady Dolores at once recognized, in that particular set-up, a guarantee of respectability. But Martha, in Paris, would be attending an art-school as well; and of the few French phrases Dolores knew,
la vie de bohême
happened to be one …

“What I really mean—” persisted Dolores; and hesitated again. For what she really meant, to put it crudely—and though no nice woman
would
, it was something any nice woman naturally thought of—was that in Gay Paree Martha might get raped. Not sordidly and horridly, of course, not in such dreadful circumstances as one read of in the Sunday papers, but after some gay party when they'd all been drinking ted wine. “What I
mean
,” said Dolores delicately, “is that she might
come to harm
…”

She blushed as she spoke. Mr. Joyce regarded her thoughtfully.

“I shouldn't think it likely myself,” said Mr. Joyce. “She must weigh close on ten stone.”

At which moment, Martha appeared.

3

Mr. Joyce's guess at her weight was roughly correct. As a child Martha had been first fat, then stocky; in maturity would undoubtedly be stout; at eighteen, however, one could see where her waist was. She always looked her best immediately after a hot bath: her hard round cheeks shone like red apples, her poker-straight light hair, while still damp, lay in neat sleek bangs. Instead of smelling as she customarily did of turpentine she smelt wholesomely of coal-tar soap. Tightly corded into a boy's dark-blue dressing-gown, Martha in fact appeared as nearly attractive as she ever could—and Dolores, who'd once dreamed of sending her off to dances in frilly net, simultaneously repressed a frustrated sigh, gratefully dismissed the notion of gay parties, and felt pleased that Martha appeared so cleanly to her patron's eye.

“I thought it was you,” said Martha.

“It didn't make you hurry much,” retorted Mr. Joyce.

“Well, the water was still hot,” explained Martha.

Mr. Joyce rose from his chair in order to stamp his foot. Martha squatted on the floor. She knew, without ever giving him a conscious thought, much more about Mr. Joyce than did either her Uncle Harry or her Aunt Dolores. His stamping didn't alarm her. She instinctively recognized that he was merely translating a mental concept into a physical act—just as she did herself whenever she picked up a brush or chalk: as it were stamping his way into their joint future. Thus Martha squatted receptive but by no means over-awed. She even, after a moment's reflection, hauled herself up again to reach for the biscuit-box—