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Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls’ schools exist. The feeling subtilised
itself as Elizabeth grew older, diffused itself through all her thoughts. Everything from a pair of
stockings to a human soul was classifiable as ‘lovely’ or ‘beastly’. And unfortunately–for Mr
Lackersteen’s prosperity did not last–it was the ‘beastly’ that had predominated in her life.
The inevitable crash came late in 1919. Elizabeth was taken away from school, to continue her
education at a succession of cheap, beastly schools, with gaps of a term or two when her father could
not pay the fees. He thed when she was twenty, of influenza. Mrs Lackersteen was left with an income
of, £150 a year, which was to the with her. The two women could not, under Mrs Lackersteen’s
management, live on three pounds a week in England. They moved to Paris, where life was cheaper
and where Mrs Lackersteen intended to dedicate herself wholly to Art.
Paris! Living in Paris! Flory had been a little wide of the mark when he pictured those interminable
conversations with bearded artists under the green plane trees. Elizabeth’s life in Paris had not been
quite like that.
Her mother had taken a studio in the Montparnasse quarter, and relapsed at once into a state of
squalid, muddling idleness. She was so foolish with money that her income would not come near
covering expenses, and for several months Elizabeth did not even have enough to esat. Then she found
a job as visiting teacher of English to the family of a French bank manager. They called her notre
mees Anglaise. The banker lived in the twelfth arrondissement, a long way from Montparnasse, and
Elizabeth had taken a room in a pension near by. It was a narrow, yellow-faced house in a side-street,
looking out onto a poulterer’s shop, generally decorated with reeking carcases of wild boars, which
old gentlemen like decrepit satyrs would visit every morning and snuff long and lovingly. Next door
to the poulterer’s was a flyblown café with the sign ‘Café de I’Amitié. Bock Formidable.’ How
Elizabeth had loathed that pension! The patronne was an old black-clad sneak who spent her life in
tiptoeing up and down stairs in hopes of catching the boarders washing stockings in their handbasins.
The boarders, sharp-tongued bilious widows, pursued the only man in the establishment, a mild, bald
creature who worked in La Samaritaine, like sparrows worrying a bread-crust. At meals all of them
watched each other’s plates to see who was given the biggest helping. The bathroom was a dark den
with leprous walls and a rickety verdigrised geyser which would spit two inches of tepid water into
the bath and then mulishly stop working. The bank manager whose children Elizabeth taught was a
man of fifty, with a fat, worn face and a bald, dark-yellow crown resembling an ostrich’s egg. The
second day after her arrival he came into the room where the children were at their lessons, sat down
beside Elizabeth and immediately pinched her elbow. The third day he pinched her on the calf, the
fourth day behind the knee, the fifth day above the knee. Thereafter, every evening, it was a silent
battle between the two of them, her hand under the table, struggling and struggling to keep that ferretlike
hand away from her.
It was a mean, beastly existence. In fact, it reached levels of ‘beastliness’ which Elizabeth had not
previously known to exist. But the thing that most depressed her, most filled her with the sense of
sinking into some horrible lower world, was her mother’s studio. Mrs Lackersteen was one of those
people who go utterly to pieces when they are deprived of servants. She lived in a restless nightmare
between painting and housekeeping, and never worked at either. At irregular intervals she went to a