A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  This last comment propelled him up the final and steepest part of the hill, so I was gasping for breath by the time I caught up.

  He reached the top and turned like a fury.

  ‘Yes, you mention the Nazis, and I’m telling you, because of what they did, because of what happened, it is important that our race, our people, do not mix. We must protect ourselves. We have lost too much. And I must find a Jewish woman and a Jewish wife to be the mother of my children.’

  ‘And that’s more important than loving me?’ I asked.

  David breathed in deeply and grabbed my shoulders.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, weary now. ‘You will not understand me, and maybe you will even hate me. I should have stopped this before it even started. I am a big shellfish (he meant ‘selfish’) following my passions and desires and not my head. But yes, it is more important than you.’

  * * *

  I’d finished the last of the galub jalums and started on a packet of Jelly Babies. I felt a bit sick. I bit red and green heads off and pulled fat little bodies into long stretched pieces of jelly, until they turned white.

  After that first night of passionate love-making on a single bed, our bodies buffed by scratchy college blankets, there had been an inevitable build-up to David’s departure back to France. David had fallen in love too, or so he said. But his faith had determined to contain our love in the framework of those last few months at university.

  He scored the date of his departure onto a Credit Agricole bank calendar on the back of his door, next to the fire-escape instructions; the only thing to hang there other than his Betty Blue poster.

  At first, the date sat securely in the future, long after the presentation of his thesis on canned foods and at the start of the summer and my own Finals. There was plenty of time to enjoy each other. And still plenty of time to change his mind.

  ‘When I leave, we must never see each other again,’ he’d say, ‘or only as friends. And even then, not for some time, not until our feelings have died.’

  You’ll see, I thought. When that day comes, you won’t be strong enough to end this for real, because I know how happy you are with me.

  But as the months went by, février, mars, avril, mai … I realised that David had, if anything, grown more resolute. As he grew used to me and the novelty of our passion wore off, I suspected that he looked at other women with new interest. Michelle perhaps? Hadn’t there already been some mild flirtation in the air, before Ramid wedged his appendages between them? Rafi had told me as much in warning; David is a man away from his country and the restrictions of his family. He is drawn to women like a hawkmoth to a flame; driven by a part of his body which is housed neither in his brain nor in his faith – a dangerous combination for as foolish a heart as yours.

  I grew bitter. If David had been so keen on his faith all along, why didn’t he behave at university as an Orthodox Jew should? Why wasn’t he cowering from light-switches on a Friday as my phobic mother cowered from bin men on a Monday? How dare he seduce me knowing the sell-by date on our love was stamped as clearly as on a tin of canned food.

  Maybe now he’d ‘had’ me (in the Old Testament sense), he wanted more women from around the world to chalk up on his headboard. Who else would he dangle beneath his Betty Blue poster? Michelle from Malaysia, or Fung from China? And what about that Japanese girl who never spoke to anyone, but who’d worn her national costume at the last ball in his honour? He’d had his photo taken with her. Maybe he wanted to sleep with her too?

  Perhaps this whole MBA course, the one which I spent most of my time editing, was an interlude in which to seduce all the non-Jewish girls he could find, before settling for someone worthy enough to bear his children.

  Whatever the religious reasons David gave, my insecure heart could only surmise that the real reason was me.

  I wasn’t good enough.

  It would be a familiar pattern; seeking love in places where it couldn’t be found; pushing and pushing until the final rejection came to confirm my worst fear – I was undeserving of love. When love was too possessive, or too controlling, as Steve’s had been, I pulled away, preferring to struggle for affection than to have it bestowed in profusion. To feel worthy, I needed to conquer the heart of a man who didn’t want me much to begin with. With the Sword of Damocles above my head, and chronically behind with my revision, it was easy to slip into depression in the weeks before my Finals.

  * * *

  During this dismal period I’d wandered up past the Sperm Bank Hotel to the top of Constitution Hill on more than one occasion, sodden with self-pity and as melodramatic as Catherine Earnshaw when Heathcliff had fled. For the hundredth time, I’d considered hurling myself into the sea to make a point. But death would deny me the only satisfaction that could possibly come from such an action: the satisfaction of watching David’s face on the day he finally realised what his unreasonable actions had led me to do.

  Then came David’s surprise gift. A trip to Paris for my twenty-first birthday, and a long weekend of love-making in a shabby hotel near the Gare du Nord far from his parents reach.

  The quartier around the Gare du Nord wasn’t much different from Cwrt Mawr; just as international and with a million mopeds to boot. We made love and wept, made love and wept, our love-making punctuated by long walks around the city, trailing miserably round Le Louvre, down the rue de Rivoli and up the Eiffel Tower.

  On my flight home, I knew two things with absolute certainty: firstly, David wasn’t going to change his mind; secondly, Spencer had taken over 500 pages to get to the point with The Faerie Queene. It would be easier to impress my lover and part the waves of the Red Sea, than it would be to regurgitate this particular ode in time for my exams.

  There were poems. And then there was The Faerie Queene.

  Not the same thing at all.

  * * *

  I scrunched up the empty bag of Jelly Babies as the train screeched to a halt in Shrewsbury. A cup of British Rail tea would have hit the spot, but I was broke. Again. The last of my overdraft facility spent on a mini-break in a seedy hotel in the north of Paris.

  With his departure, David’s letters arrived as frequently as always, bearing news of his Gallic life: long missives in curling handwriting, full of loving endearments, as if we were waiting to be reunited. Tender words scratched with the sharp nib of his pen into blue airmail paper: My love, my little flea, my sweet dove, my girl with eyes of deepest blue. Yet every letter ended with the same proviso: Do not wait for me. Do not love me. Let us lay these passions to rest, so that in time I may become your one true friend.

  So why exactly was I going to Paris?

  The main reason was to improve my language skills – or so I convinced myself.

  I might have left university with a bog-standard 2:2, and learnt the hard way that Spencer was not best skim-read when my heart was broken and my future dependent on wafer thin scraps of airmail paper, but at last, I told myself, something educational could be salvaged from this.

  Love had revived my ‘O’ level French skills like a phoenix from the flames. Surely it would be a pity to let that wondrous linguistic bird flop right now? Speaking French was a useful skill, wasn’t it? Convinced, I enrolled on a French course at l’Institut Catholique in the rue de Rennes.

  This had nothing to do with David at all.

  The challenge was to find a way to live in Paris and fund both my trip and my language lessons. Fate provided me with a curious answer to my conundrum.

  A letter arrived from an old sixth-form friend, Jessica, who informed me in a familiar spidery hand that she was off to live in Paris. She would be working as a jeune fille au pair in the western suburbs, where she would have a room, basic salary, free board and lodgings. Not only this, she was going to study at the Institut Catholique, rue de Rennes.

  It was such a strange coincidence, I convinced myself that the Universe had conspired to nudge me on my way across the Channel.

  The real point of Jessica’s
journey, she later told me, was to track down Samuel Beckett, who it was said hung out on Friday nights at a small bar in Montmartre, where local groups played live music. This secret address, unknown to tourists, was somewhere down a side alley, off the beaten track. As an existentialist at heart, Jessica was determined to sit at the bar with her favourite author, as the old boys played the accordion, and get to the bottom of the great man himself over a glass of fine house brandy.

  Pride forbade me from admitting I was tailing a man who’d dumped me.

  I bought a copy of The Lady magazine that same morning, where the answer to my problems lay between its sweet-smelling glossy pages. The advert stood out from the more formal ones around it, having been composed by the children themselves.

  We are 3 French children, aged 12, 9 and 6, seeking a jeune fille au pair to join our family in a big house close to Paris. Looking for an intelligent girl, who likes to smile. Would prefer if she could cook us tasty meals, play fun games and care for us while maman and papa are out of the house. English mother tongue preferred. Only Delphine speaks English. Please send photo as Clémence can’t yet read. Apply to …

  PS. We don’t like mint sauce on our meat or baked beans.

  A whole new adventure without David! Though who was to say if I found myself in his quartier I might not look him up?

  David had taken pains to keep me away from his family home during our trip to Paris. Luckily, at the start of our relationship, he had written his address in my diary. Something I’m certain he would not have done by the end. He lived on la rue des Rosiers, which conjured images of rose bushes blooming around a forbidden doorway, a froth of fairy-pink buds at the windows, like Sleeping Beauty’s palace. I would go there and chop them down, regardless of the thorns, and make him see that love would win the day.

  I would, I would, I would.

  The train lulled me into a gentle sleep. I curled my legs around the bag that contained all my worldly possessions and tried to shut out Rafi’s now distant voice: ‘No good will come of this. No good will come of this’.

  And louder still, that of my father’s: ‘You flaming idiot. You dozy bloody mare.’

  Chapter 5

  Paris, La Banlieue

  I awoke in panic, in an unfamiliar room, and sat bolt upright. The walls were covered with hessian and punctured with multicoloured pins like an infant-school classroom. The shutters were closed, but sunlight crept through the slats. It must have been around nine. I wondered if I should be up and doing something useful, though of course the only thing I wanted to do was to find David.

  The night before I had been met at Beauvais airport, north of Paris, by a tall and angular man, holding a piece of cardboard inscribed with the words ‘Axel Blanchard’. He had written his own name on the card, not mine.

  The man spoke good English and greeted me with a formal handshake. To reassure me, he presented me with a handwritten note from Madame Blanchard, his wife, in which she explained in perfect English that she had sprained her ankle playing tennis the day before and was laid up in bed. Her husband had come to take me home.

  The journey home, in the smart family car, passed pleasantly enough, with polite conversation and only the occasional panic that this grey-suited man might be a dapper serial killer who had somehow done away with Madame Blanchard.

  We skirted round Paris on the Périphérique at over 100 kilometres an hour. The roadside fell away into a blur of concrete and exhaust fumes. Monsieur Blanchard dodged the traffic with quick flicks of his slender wrist on the power steering. Although it was Sunday, he was dressed in office-style clothes: the cuffs of his shirt were white and starched beneath the steel-grey jacket, the hands of his Rolex inched rhythmically forwards.

  Soon I would be the one starching the cuffs of this neat man. Madame Blanchard had made it clear on the phone that ironing was to be one of my principle duties.

  If I’d stayed with Steve, I would have been washing mud out of rugby shirts in Neath. As it was, I would be pressing neat French shirts into place and looking after the clothes of this cool-mannered, grey-suited man, who wasn’t to know that I had never ironed a work shirt in my life. Would I have to deal with his underwear? What sort of underpants did a man as frosty as Axel Blanchard wear?

  I turned my face to the car window to hide a smile and caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, illuminated with a thousand golden lights – snatched away before I could relish it, as the car plunged into the depths of a long, acrid-smelling tunnel.

  Twenty minutes later and we were back into fresh air, pulling up in a quiet, tree-lined avenue. Monsieur Blanchard parked outside the large, wrought-iron gates of a stone house that looked early nineteenth century in style.

  Later I would learn that this maison bourgeoise was typical of the type of house that dotted the leafy western suburbs of Paris, and sold for the equivalent of a life-sized reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. Gold plated. It was of course a privilege of the lucky few to own such a property, and to have a garden so close to Paris. Most families were squashed into apartment blocks, reliant on local parks for their greenery. But I knew none of this as I stepped from the car and looked up curiously at my new home.

  Once inside Monsieur Blanchard indicated that my room was on the top floor on the right but did not accompany me up the stairs. He bade me a curt goodnight and disappeared through a set of double doors.

  I climbed the polished wooden staircase, found my room and climbed straight into bed, falling into a deep sleep from which I did not stir until early light.

  * * *

  I swung out of bed and tiptoed across the squeaking parquet to open the shutters. The iron bars were stiff, and I pushed and pulled with difficulty until the metal bar gave, and I could peer out over a row of red rooftops.

  I scanned the horizon for a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. There was no sign of it. The Blanchard household was in the wealthy western suburbs of Paris and, as Mr Blanchard had explained during our car journey, was situated closer to Versailles than to Paris.

  The only buildings I could see on the distant horizon were a cluster of tall skyscrapers, rising from what looked like mist or pollution, and beyond those, a white archway. I knew from my reading, that this was La Défense, where Monsieur Blanchard had his offices. The Grande Arche was aligned symmetrically with the Arc de Triomphe, thus creating a direct and symbolic passageway from the new business centre to the heart of the ancient city. I also knew that somewhere, through these imposing gateways, David was moving on with his life, oblivious to the fact that I was here.

  * * *

  I had yet to meet Madame Blanchard. The night before, her voice had rung through the darkened corridors of the household, as I crept up the stairs with my bags: ‘Karen, bienvenue. A demain.’

  I knew, from the clipped explanations barked by Monsieur Blanchard before bedtime, that he would have taken the three children to school by now, but that from tomorrow morning onwards this would be my job. As things stood, I was surely alone in the house with Mrs Blanchard who was laid up in bed, in pain. Perhaps I should make her some tea or breakfast, but I didn’t yet know my way around this shadowy house, nor what was expected of me.

  What would Jane Eyre do?

  I dressed, and explored my floor to find the children’s bathroom and three rooms with neatly made beds next to my own. We were in a separate wing of the house from the grown-ups. The bathroom was painted in playschool red, with easy-to-wash, hospital-white floor tiles. There were three toothbrushes in the holders, large, medium and small, like the Three Bears. I unpacked my washbag and placed my tooth brush in the cup, showered quickly, combed my hair and put on some make-up. Not too much. I couldn’t imagine any woman with a twisted ankle wanting her jeune fille au pair slinking down to breakfast looking like a glamour-puss. I wondered how elegant a French lady like Madame Blanchard was? The only French women I knew were the ones in perfume adverts and I was sure that my new employer must be exquisite. Her husband was not unattractive by any mean
s, but so formal in his suit and tie that it was difficult to imagine him in any context other than a board meeting.

  I tied my hair back in a serious knot, a respectable Miss Jane Eyre type who had come to lend a helping hand, and tiptoed down the grand, turning staircase. The wood was neatly polished and smelt of bee’s wax, the walls of the middle floor covered in tasteful modern oils.

  The gilded doorway through which Monsieur Blanchard had vanished the night before was firmly shut. I pressed my ear to the wood but there wasn’t a sound, so I crept downstairs where I discovered a kitchen, a dining room, a music room and a rather grand salon which led onto a veranda. There was a large garden visible through the French windows (what word did the French use for ‘French windows’?).

  I decided it was best to wait in the kitchen; a suitably servile place to be.

  A woman with a colourful green turban on her head walked in carrying a duster. She jumped and then smiled, saying something which I didn’t understand. Seeing my look of confusion, she repeated her name – Fuschia, and gesticulated with her duster to show me what she was doing.

  There was a baguette on the table with some butter and jam, as well as a tray, with an empty coffee cup, littered with crumbs. Fuschia pointed to the tray, miming an eating and drinking motion.

  I sat down and buttered myself a piece of bread. Fuschia was busy scrubbing the coffee pot. I glanced around but couldn’t see a kettle on the work surface. I timed Fuschia’s next exit and quickly opened the cupboards, scanning the shelves for a box of tea. Not a box of PG Tips in sight. There was, however, a green box labelled ‘Chinese gunpowder’. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed the leaves, which the manufacturer hadn’t bothered to bag. There was still the problem of the missing kettle. Fuschia returned and appeared to understand my problem. She gabbled something and took out a big pan, filled it with water and put it on the hob. This seemed a complicated way to make a cup of tea, but over the next few months I would learn that tea wasn’t such a ritual in France as it was in England, and most people resorted to boiling water in a pan on the hob or, even worse, pouring lukewarm water from the microwave onto a teabag, creating a frothy film on top of the tea.