A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  ‘I must go now,’ she said, ‘my African drumming night is very important to me. It is such a release of all my inner tensions after a busy day. Vous comprenez? My friends will be here in a minute. Can you manage?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Drums! How interesting.’

  Florence smiled and for the first time since our conversation began, looked interested.

  ‘Yes, tonight we are going to La Défense.’

  ‘Isn’t that where Monsieur Blanchard works?’

  ‘How clever of you to remember. Yes, Axel works at the top of a skyscraper. His office is in a big building not far from La Grande Arche. But I will not see him. My friends et moi, we are going down to the metro. We sit on the floor. Well, I can’t sit on the floor so well at the moment so I’m taking a stool – and we play the drums. We have had a lot of success with the commuters at rush hour.’

  Florence twisted around on her good leg and banged the end of the kitchen table rhythmically, moving up and down as if a whole battery of drums lay at her disposition. She had metamorphosed from strict mother to busker. She stopped and laughed. Her face was flushed and her hair tumbled down her shoulders. I stood, rigid with embarrassment. I’d never managed well in these sorts of circumstances. At school discos, I was always too timid to reach for the ceiling, keeping my own arms clamped firmly by my side as I danced my stiff little crab dance.

  ‘Axel is very embarrassed’ she laughed. ‘He is such an important man, you know. And there I am! Me voilà! Banging the drums as his colleagues board the train home. He does not find it so funny. You may find he is a little bad-tempered tonight. His humour is always black on drum night. And it will be even worse since you have not prepared his chicken.’ She sighed; a long-drawn-out sigh of deep fatigue.

  ‘Never mind, he will manage. He will eat bread and cheese.’

  Chapter 8

  Five men with dreadlocks came to collect Florence. She was tiny beside them, frail and sparrow like. Two of them took her by the arms and bore her away, like an Egyptian princess, a third followed behind carrying her walking sticks. The children rushed down to the doorway to say goodnight, and she kissed each tenderly on the cheek, speaking in low, authoritarian French, stroking cheeks or pinning back a stray lock of hair whilst bestowing that virginal mother and child look she did so well – soulful brown eyes shimmering like velvet moles caught in the moonlight. It occurred to me that the children were saying both hello and goodbye at the same time. By the time Florence returned, which was unlikely to be before midnight, the children would be fast asleep.

  Their mother’s departure left the children sullen and mutinous. The pasta sat in a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table. There wasn’t any sauce, and it had been on the table a while, congealing into a solid mass of intertwined worms. A piece of ham curled on the side of each of our plates.

  Delphine delved her spoon in with a squelching sound like wellies in mud. Her face was strained, her expression one I’d taken pains to study in the drama studio at school: traces of horror etched onto its sharp little features. Her spoon hovered an instant and then with a flick of the wrist she slopped the pasta back into the bowl. Her French was a rapid quick fire, and I understood none of it.

  ‘Berk, c’est dégueulasse. Elle veut nous empoisonner avec des vers mouilleés

  I caught the word empoisonner. It was close enough to English to work out. Later I translated the full sentence with my Collin’s Dictionary.

  Yuck, it’s disgusting. She’s trying to poison us with wet worms!

  I was about to protest when Delphine returned to the bowl a second time. I was hopeful she’d decided to give it a go, but she lifted the spoon high above her head and flicked it hard into the air, sending a Scud missile of pasta across the kitchen to land against the door of the fridge. Baptiste and Clémence shrieked in joy, grabbing their spoons with fervour and following suit. Baptiste fired his spoonful against the window, while Clémence stood up on her chair and aimed for the ceiling light.

  By this point the three children were out of control. Pasta worms were strung from the ceiling and walls like Christmas garlands, or sliding their weary way down the oven door.

  There was a lot I wanted to say in French, but I didn’t have the words.

  ‘Arrêtez!’ was all I could come up with. ‘Arrêtez ça tout de suite.’

  Baptiste decided not only to ignore my pleas, but to take things to the next level. His spoon lost on the floor now, he delved his hand into the bowl, scooping out the pasta and squeezing great clumps until the butter ran down his fingers. He slammed his load hard onto the crown of Clémence’s head, who screamed, jumping to her feet and kicking over the stool. All hell had broken loose when the shrill ring of the doorbell cut through the mayhem. We froze, just as if we were playing musical statues, Delphine poised to whack a fist full of pasta into Baptiste’s face. Please god don’t let it be that bossy grandmother again. Or Axel Blanchard who had forgotten his key.

  I unhooked a worm from my cleavage and exited the kitchen. There was a shadow at the glass. I pulled open the heavy old door, stunned to find Jessica my friend from school; my sixth-form classmate who I also knew to be au-pairing somewhere in the city. She must have phoned home and asked dad for my address. There was a large suitcase at her feet.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite a girl in?’ she asked, and pushed forward, dumping her case in the hallway. She sauntered in and looked around with a satisfied air.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘You’ve landed on your feet. Family in?’

  ‘No, the father is still at work, and the mother’s gone … drumming … in the metro.’

  Jessica shrugged as if this was normal. Her eyes narrowed as she spied three dishevelled children lined up by the kitchen door. More like Fagin’s urchins than the Von Trapp children now. She looked at me, then back at the children.

  ‘Mais alors’ she said, in a voice reminiscent of our old headmaster when he walked into a classroom of disarray. ‘Mais qu’est-ce que c’est tout ça?’

  Delphine looked sheepish and grabbed her sister’s hand. Clémence started to cry. Jessica was having none of it. She was Julie Andrews. All those boxing-days spent watching The Sound of Music had stood her in good stead.

  She slipped off her coat to reveal a black pinafore dress, with a white blouse and black stockings. Her shoes were as sensible as a traffic warden’s. Three years ago, she’d worn vintage clothes from Oxfam, specialising in silk flapper dresses as we lounged on the back lawn of her Victorian semi on a grotty council estate, playing at Brideshead Revisited. The ITV version. Her hair was dyed black back then and cut in a bob the shape of a pudding bowl, white foundation caked on her face like a 1920s consumptive; a protest at the Duran Duran mania sweeping across our school.

  Today she was dressed for another part: the English nanny.

  She caught my surprised glance. ‘Oh, this?’ she said, flicking at her full skirts. ‘You’ve got to look the part, n’est ce pas? – or the little brats won’t take you seriously.’

  With her hands on her hips Jessica ordered the children to tidy away their plates and unhook pasta worms from wherever they were hanging. They obeyed in silence while she watched their every move, her crimson lips pursed in displeasure

  Before long the battlefield was clear. The children hadn’t eaten a thing, but two hours earlier they’d stuffed their faces with enough cheese and bread to feed a small French village. They wouldn’t starve. Not by English standards.

  * * *

  Half an hour later the children had been scrubbed within an inch of their lives and were in bed. It was their second bath of the day, but this one had taken place under the stern command of Jessica, who handed Baptiste his own ‘glove’ and told him to stop being such a baby and to wash his own arse. They didn’t really need a second bath, but Jessica said it would calm them.

  Even Delphine obeyed without a squeak. If anything, the elder girl had shown nothing but respect for my friend’s milit
ary organisation, borne not so much from a love of discipline, as a desire to get the little bastards in bed so we can have a drink.

  It was the first time I had experienced this French love of authority, and it would not be the last. The nicer you were, the harder it was. Results could only be achieved with the demonstration of an iron will. It was the zero-tolerance approach to mothering, and it applied not just to childcare, but to every aspect of French life. If you say please and thank you too many times in a French restaurant it is a well-known fact that, at best, the service will be terrible, at worse, they will spit in your food. ‘How the English grovel’ my French husband would tell me some years later, ‘how many times must les anglais thank the waiter. What they do not understand is that he is there to serve, and all these pleases and thank yous show nothing but weakness, and are a reminder to him of his servility. Say it once like you mean it, with guts, and only then will you be shown respect, given the table you want, or have your food served on time.’ The French respected authority and people who instilled the fear of god in them. Later I would learn that the whole educational system was built on this premise. If a child scored nineteen out of twenty in a test, the teacher did not praise the nineteen but beat the stuffing out of it for losing a point.

  Love of discipline was genetic, and it was immediately clear that Delphine, Clémence and Baptiste had far more respect for Jessica than they would ever have for me. They wanted her to smile and to like them because she did not. It was the equivalent of chasing after lovers who couldn’t commit. The children sensed that I was seeking their approval and my weakness was repulsive to them.

  Delphine was the first to ask my friend to tuck her up in bed. She allowed Jessica to smooth down her sheets, and to give her a cold peck on the cheek before switching off her light. Clémence trotted at her heels like a lamb, until finally Jessica, tiring of her new-found shadow, scooped her up and plonked her down onto her tiny bed. Baptiste put himself to bed with a comic book and a promise to Jessica that he would read only five minutes longer.

  I knew he would not disobey.

  * * *

  The children had been quiet for over half an hour. Jessica had found the drinks cabinet in the salon and poured us both a full glass of port, topping the bottle back up with water.

  ‘Drink it fast,’ she said, ‘they might be back soon.’

  We knocked it back and she poured a second glass. I felt nauseous with stress and fatigue but the alcohol blurred the edges and I began to relax. Being on my best behaviour in another woman’s home was exhausting. We rinsed the glasses, put them back exactly where we’d found them and returned to the kitchen table.

  ‘Any food?’ she asked.

  I told her about the chicken, and how worried I was about having to make it the next day. She laughed and rolled up her Julie Andrew sleeves.

  ‘Let’s do it now’ she said. ‘That way I can teach you how and we can have a bit for dinner.’

  She slammed the chicken onto a chopping board while I hunted out some sea salt, an onion and a bottle of olive oil, as instructed.

  ‘First, we peel the onion,’ she said. ‘Second, we stick it up its arse, first checking the butcher has taken out the organs. Here they are. Dump those, will you. See? Easy. Seen my mother do it loads of times.’

  She lifted a flap of dead skin and inserted the onion.

  Then with a dash of sea salt, a sprinkling of herbs and a lug of unctuous golden olive oil, she rubbed the chicken up and down in a non-committal fashion, squeezing the skin with her deft fingers, lifting the carcass up by its legs so that she could do both sides.

  She stuck it in the oven and while we were waiting for it to cook, she filled me in on what had been happening in her life. I told her about David.

  ‘So, he’s said the relationship is over, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And he hasn’t written to you in three weeks?”

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he told you quite categorically not to come to Paris?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She stared at me with a look of exasperation and shook her head.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked, wanting to change the subject. ‘How are you getting on with your family? Night off tonight is it?’’

  She took a moment to reply, then smiled.

  ‘Fired,’ she said, ‘From my third family. I’ll have to go back to the agency at some point. I’ll stay with you till then’

  ‘Stay here? But I don’t know if they’ll mind. Fired what for?’

  ‘Boiled eggs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Boiled eggs. I gave the kids boiled eggs every night for two weeks.’

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘Saves time. I wanted to go into Paris, and they only take three and a half minutes. Four at a push. If you tear off a bit of the egg carton, it makes a perfect cup; saves on the washing up.’

  She pulled her sleeves back down, and carefully buttoned the grubby looking cuffs of her blouse, covering her white and slightly podgy arms. Despite her outwardly slender appearance, Jessica hated sport and had the soft flabby skin of someone who preferred life indoors, curled up on a couch with a book. I remembered how the summer sun would burn her when we were out on cross-country – puffing along at the back, wanting to slip off into the woods for a fag. Her hair was naturally a pale ginger but was hennaed deepest red these days. It suited her better than the severe black of our school years. She had always cut it herself, with varying degrees of success. Today she had a ruler-straight fringe half an inch above her eyebrows, and a square bob cropped into the back of her neck, the quirky shade of red a note of folly in an otherwise perfect impersonation of a Victorian nanny.

  ‘It was all fine to begin with,’ she said, ‘I mean the baby, he’s only two … well, he didn’t complain. He liked having toasted soldiers ever night. But the girl, Juliette, she’s five, started to complain that she was suffering from des gazes –– you know, farting. Sulphur farts. Her mother had the nerve to go through a week of bins to find out what I’d been feeding them. She found twenty-one egg boxes.’

  ‘So, they chucked you out? The parents?’

  ‘There was only the mother. The husband had run off with his marketing assistant. A tall blonde named Letitia. He didn’t leave them with much money. The mother was never there: out all day at the office and she expected me to do the shopping on a pittance. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to buy much. Not meat or fish for sure!’

  The aroma of chicken filled the kitchen. Jessica sourced a jar of peas and some instant mash at the back of the kitchen cupboard. Its sell-by date was two years past, but we were too hungry too care. Anyway, I was on safe territory with instant mash. We served up, slicing the chicken carefully so that it wouldn’t look as if we’d taken too much; a fine slither from under the wings, a strip or two from the bottom of the legs.

  I’d just popped the first delicious forkful into my mouth when the front door slammed and I heard footsteps in the hallway. I jumped to attention nearly choking. Jessica remained seated, head tilted back with a snotty look, as if entertaining in her own kitchen.

  In walked Monsieur Blanchard, wrestling with his tie. He stared at the two of us, and from his puzzled glance I could see he couldn’t remember which of us he had employed. He’d barely glanced at me in the car.

  ‘Florence est là?’ he asked, hedging his bets and addressing the space between us.

  ‘Non. Elle n’est pas là. She’s still out.’ I was careful not to mention the word ‘drums.’ I didn’t want to set him off.

  Jessica stood up, smiling sweetly, and extended her hand.

  ‘Je suis Jessica, enchantée.’

  She pointed to the empty chair beside her and pulled it out, saying something in French which must have been the equivalent of ‘Hard day at the office, darling?’ Monsieur Blanchard sat down heavily, his face etched with fatigue. Jessica fetched him a plate. If anything, he looked grateful to be taken care
of. She took the blue silk tie from his hand and folded it carefully, wrapping it softly around her own. I set a plate for him and he started to eat at once, staring at his food with the vacant look of a man who had given his all in the last twelve hours. He asked Jessica if she might be so kind as to pass him the red wine. I noticed he didn’t ask me. He poured a glass from the half bottle left over from Hugo and Marcel’s lunchtime feast. Seeing that Jessica had taken the initiative to bring over three glasses he poured the last of it out for us. The wine’s heady aroma filled the air with a whiff of wealth.

  I was too tired, and too tipsy after the port, to attempt to speak French. Revived by this stage, and appearing to remember who I was, Monsieur Blanchard shot me a direct look.

  ‘Have you been into Paris yet?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, and then, emboldened by the wine, and touched that he had thought to ask, I added: ‘You see, I don’t have any money yet.’

  ‘Ah,’ he replied thoughtfully, swirling the wine in his glass. ‘Je vois. I see.’

  I hoped he might stick his hands into his back pocket, but he stared thoughtfully into his glass, and I could tell he was no longer thinking about me or my lack of wages. Jessica said something I didn’t quite catch, and he grinned, his lips parting to reveal what I’d often heard my mother call ‘a good set of teeth’. I didn’t know what Jessica had said, but for a second he looked less of a man in a grey suit, less of a managing director of very important matters, and more like the young boy he must once have been.

  The kitchen was in disarray once more. Life had become a constant round of kitchen cleaning. How many meals was it possible to fit into one day? I left the table and started to tidy up. Jessica did not offer to help, but remained at the table, her head resting on her hands, leaning forwards to catch Monsieur Blanchard’s every word. The conversation grew animated. From what I could understand, above the sound of running water, a transaction was taking place between them.

  ‘Deal!’ said Monsieur Blanchard, the English catching my attention. He swigged the last of the wine and banged his glass on the table.