“This doesn’t seem like a trick,” she said to herself, but the fear that Grandison might in some way be playing some strange and terrible joke at her expense remained at the back of her mind.
“For some reason I thought that Ginette and you were the same person before I arrived,” she said. “You see I overheard Richard spelling out a telegram to you in French before I had ever spoken to him.”
“A telegram?” Grandison asked in astonishment. “Oh, yes, perhaps he did telegraph. I wrote and told him that I was in love with Ginette and that I proposed taking her to live with us.... That was a dreadful thing to have done. You see, Richard was very fond of me; he cares about nobody else,” he said suddenly, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
“I have always, all my life, mismanaged my love affairs. But that is because I have never been in love before. Now I am in love with you and I determined not to mismanage that but to make a clean sweep of everything.”
This remark, and the defiant tone in which it was uttered, struck Anne as comic; she laughed but immediately regretted having done so, for Grandison burst into tears.
She had never seen a man weep before and was alarmed. The tears streamed down his cheeks and hung on the stubble of his beard, for he had not shaved that day, and then fell one after another on to his knees.
Anne jumped up from the mattress, hitting her head on the top of the van. “Oh! Damn!” She clutched Grandison round the shoulders while her eyes filled with tears from the pain. “Don’t cry; I have hit my head such an awful crack, but you see I am not crying,” she said, hugging him and then slipping on to her knees. He looked at her, and the van pulled up with a jerk just as they found each other’s faces in a kiss. They alighted, and Grandison led the way into the meanest building that Anne had ever seen. His room was on the top floor, and as they ascended, an odour of cooking, of accumulated filth, of bugs and of boiled rags took them by the throat. But they climbed on, up and up, and behind them toiled the indignant workman, sweating under the mattress in his arms, and pausing to curse the smells and the filthiness of the house under his breath.
“The view is magnificent,” said Grandison with a sweep of his arm as he threw open the door of a tiny attic.
“Put the things down anywhere, just as you like,” he added to the workman. He was right, the view was magnificent. All Paris lay glittering at their feet in the sunshine, and Anne forgot the malodorous staircase as she leant out of the open window.
“Yes, the view is lovely,” she said, turning to Grandison, but an altercation was going on with the workman, who was repeating again and again: “This place stinks.”