Family and Friends by Anita Brookner Page B

household elect, to which he has been steadily moving and for which Sofka has been preparing him, is absolutely consolidated when Frederick returns. Frederick, who is under the impression that he has delivered Betty to the Lausanne train, is ready to receive congratulations, and indeed Sofka has prepared a congratulatory meal for him. It is in the course of this meal, and under the closest questioning from Alfred, that Frederick reveals that he last saw Betty at the Hôtel Bedford et West End the night before she was due to leave for Lausanne and he to see her to the train. It was with a promise of good conduct from Betty that Frederick sailed off into the blue Parisian evening for a late stroll and a last brandy. It is, after all, much easier for him to catch the morning train to London, and Betty is not a child. She is quite capable of catching a train at her age. ‘She is quite capable of catching a train at her age,’ he says affably to his mother, not focusing on her dawning look of uneasiness. ‘How do you know she caught it?’ demands Alfred stonily. ‘Why wouldn’t she catch it?’ asks Frederick, his eyebrows lifted. ‘It’s not as if she knows anyone in Paris.’ For a moment they sit, digesting this sentence. Try as they may, they cannot dispute it. Betty knows noone in Paris. She has not been there since she was a very small child, with her mother and her nurse and her father, just before he died. She must have remembered it, in some mysterious way, as an agreeable alternative to home, as a place where life is a holiday.
    With a stifled exclamation, Sofka gets up from the table, dropping her napkin, and is on the telephone, placing a call to Mme Renaudin in Clarins. There is no conversation during her absence, but Alfred fixes Frederick with his increasingly stony glance. At that moment he feels that he can discount and discard his brother; it is almost a moment of triumph. Mimi is pale and frightened; she is also guilty, for she thinks she knows something of what Betty has in mind. If Mimi knew for certain what she thinks she knows she would faint with the grief of that knowledge; therefore she puts it away from her. But she cannot recover her colour, even when she reflects that her mother must be more anxious, and it is only due to her abiding innocence that she does not in that moment renounce her obligations altogether.
    In the brief interval of Sofka’s absence, telephoning to Mme Renaudin, Frederick’s status has undergone a slight but permanent alteration. Frederick’s agreeable lightheadedness is perceived in that moment as unreliability, and when Sofka returns, pale and with a fixed expression, she ignores the hand he thrusts out towards her and waits for him to get to his feet and pull out her chair. ‘She has not arrived,’ Sofka finally says, after what seems a very long period of silence. Mimi puts her hands to her face. ‘Alfred,’ says Sofka, turning to him and disregarding the other two. ‘You had better ring the hotel. If she is still there, I’m afraid you will have to go and get her back.’
    It transpires that Betty has left the Hôtel Bedford et West End, that she in fact left when she was meant to, soas not to arouse undue suspicion. But she has not gone to Lausanne. She has moved to another, smaller hotel, the Hôtel des Acacias, the address of which she has deposited with the hall porter. How she got hold of this none of them can work out. It happens to be where Frank Cariani’s family stay when they are in Paris, and it must have been Frank who mentioned this in the course of a long-ago conversation. But Mimi, who was also present when that conversation – a mere exchange of pleasantries – took place, at the very beginning of the girls’ association with members of the Cariani family, is suddenly as cold as death. She imagines that it was Frank and Frank alone who planned this coup and for the first time in her life she recognizes the sad need to defend herself. ‘If