The Razor's Edge

Maugham and Larry and the Maturins have plans to go out for dinner. They meet at the Maturins’ for cocktails ahead of time, but Gray has one of his debilitating headaches. Larry offers to help: He hypnotizes Gray, and when he is finished, Gray’s headache is gone. They see a lot of Larry after that. During this period, Maugham asks Isabel if she is still in love with Larry. She answers that she has never loved anybody else. What about Gray, he asks. She confesses she never really loved Gray, but she had to marry somebody. She is very fond of him, and he makes her very happy. Maugham observes that Isabel doesn’t seem to love her children with the same intensity that she feels for Larry.

Isabel tells Maugham a story about the period she and Gray spent in South Carolina after the crash: Gray was distraught over his role in the company’s clients losing everything. In his distress, he went out in a boat in the marsh every day and came back “drunk” with the beauty of nature. Now talking to Maugham, Isabel describes Gray as being close to God when he was out in the marshes. Maugham suggests she was projecting something she expected to see rather than what was actually there. Later in the same conversation, Maugham wonders aloud whether Larry was ever really in love with Isabel. He thinks it just as likely that Larry loved her because he thought it was expected of him.

Maugham has a friend in Paris, Suzanne Rouvier. She is close to 40 now, but at the age of 17, she was seduced by an artist and went to live with him. Over the years, she has gone from one lover to another, always specializing in painters. She models for them and keeps house for them, then moves on to the next. She has a daughter, whom she left with her mother to raise. Her current provider is a manufacturer with a penchant for art who gives her an apartment and an income and visits her every two weeks. Now that she has her own home and an income, Suzanne herself has taken up painting.

Maugham and Suzanne are out together one evening when, to Maugham’s surprise, Suzanne spies Larry and calls out to him. Larry comes over, sits down, and asks Suzanne how her daughter is doing. When Larry leaves them, Suzanne tells Maugham how she came to know him:

Suzanne had been slightly acquainted with Larry through mutual friends, then she went through a bout of typhoid. Afterward, she was very weak and couldn’t get work as a model or find a man to support her. Seeing the state she was in, Larry asked whether she and her young daughter would like to temporarily stay with him at a place in the country. They passed an idyllic few weeks. Suzanne regained her strength and, feeling she should repay him for his kindness, asked if he would like her to come to his room that night. They were lovers for a while, then one day, Larry simply announced that he was leaving. He left her enough money for the rest of the summer and to give herself a good start when she got back to Paris. Then he departed.

Suzanne hasn’t seen him again until tonight.