A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  As we examined the apartment and its kitchen we realised how much we required to get started. The kitchen was devoid of a table, or an oven. The built-in cupboards were empty of cups or crockery. We’d need to buy everything from scratch, ‘or eat out’ as Jessica said. Peeling the red plastic from a portion of Babybel cheese I stretched out in contentment. There was a real sense of achievement in being here at number 27, rue Eugène Jumin. It was the start of our Parisian adventure. I didn’t need David: he was welcome to his grass-skirted lover. I was here, under my own guise, in central Paris and within spitting distance of Montmartre and its cobbled streets.

  There would be much Seizing of the Day, novel-writing, and late-night parties with candles flickering on the chimney breast. We would fill the tiny bathroom cabinet with our cosmetics and crowd in to get ready on a Friday night with a glass of wine. I’d finally be doing all the things I should have done at university when I’d been busy getting engaged and pretending to be grown-up before my time. This was to be a chapter in my life devoted to all the many things I’d missed out on as a teenager, when Dad had either been working nights and needing peace and quiet or re-enacting the usual long and heavy dramas played out with my mother. Back home I was the adult and my parents the children: smashed crockery, slashed wrists, shouts and screams; whispered phone calls in the dark. My brother Steven and I had tiptoed through the debris of our parents’ marriage and escaped into our books.

  University had never felt like home. Academically it had been a disappointment after sixth form and the wonderful teachers I had left behind. There had been few, if any, moments to inspire at Aberystwyth, unless you counted the sexy American Literature tutor who smoked joints while he read Walt Whitman and described the sensual baths he took with his wife after making love to her on the beach.

  This would be the first home to call my own as an adult, albeit shared with Jessica, and in a foreign city, no less! A place of promise. We might have had a small brush with the Chinese underworld to get here – but they had our best interests at heart. Our fingers would be safe; our lives were just beginning.

  * * *

  I was in my room later that night, sorting through old letters and papers in preparation for our grand departure when Delphine knocked and let herself in. She should have been in bed hours ago, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her off. She sidled on to the bed beside me and started sorting through my make-up bag.

  ‘Mummy knows about the postcard you sent to Marcel,’ she said in English. ‘He told her. You are in love?’

  I reddened, cursing the day I’d sent that stupid missive.

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ she said after a moment. ‘Mummy not so much, but I thought if you like Marcel that’s a good thing. You won’t leave us at the end of the year.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want any more au pairs – eggs in the shoes and all that. What difference does it make if I leave?’

  Delphine smiled.

  ‘I like you and Jessica,’ she said. ‘You are the only jeune fille au pair crazy enough to send love letters to mummy’s boyfriends.’

  ‘Friend, you mean,’ I said, ‘In English we only say boyfriend when you are in love. Or dating.’

  The girl shrugged. ‘This lipstick’s nice. Can I try it on?’

  * * *

  I couldn’t face saying goodbye in person and I realised it was because of the children. Who would have thought it? Maybe, despite the convictions I had held close at heart since that first viewing of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, I wasn’t only cut out to look after primates after all. I wondered who would next move into my room to care for Florence’s children. It was a strange thing to be such an intimate, underwear-ironing part of the family for so many months and yet not truly belong in any way; to feel both at home and not at home; part of the family and yet a stranger. In some ways, I’d been more present in this house over the past few months than Florence herself. I’d learnt how to iron shirts and how to smother a chicken in olive oil and stuff an onion up its bum. I knew the smell of the house, from the shoes I polished each night, to the scent of the fabric conditioner I poured into the machine. While Florence had been at her atelier, pretending that she was not the bourgeois wife of an upper-class businessman, I’d been here, playing her role. I knew now what it would be like to have children, or almost. I had a much clearer idea of what it was like to run a house and home, and a fair notion of what it meant to be a wealthy French woman in the western suburbs of Paris. I didn’t think I’d ever employ a jeune fille au pair.

  Jessica and I waited for Florence to return from her drumming-class and grew tipsy on a bottle of wine filched from the cellar. We both needed a bit of Dutch courage. It was just as well we were leaving, stocks were running low, and we’d resorted to drinking dusty old bottles from the sixties, made by someone called Petrus Pomerol, pushed to the back of the cellar and surely past their sell-by date.

  Earlier that evening, I had crept across the garden lawns to observe the now empty cottage. Jessica’s case was by the door ready to be brought up to the main house and hidden in the garden. The rubbish she had accumulated during her stay had been bagged and binned round the back. She’d left a postcard saying ‘Merci’ on the fireplace. I intended to leave my own note on the kitchen table in case Florence thought I’d been kidnapped.

  Florence returned from drumming around ten. She looked exhausted, holding both rails with her long, delicate arms as she hoisted herself up the stairs. She barely acknowledged us, her eyes fluttering beneath their pale butterfly-thin lids. I knew she would switch on the shower and freshen up before Axel returned home. He was late tonight.

  Most likely, it would be Monsieur Blanchard who would find my note first. I imagined him pounding up the stairs and crashing into the eastern wing with the bad news, wondering how his wife would cope now that their domestic life had been thrown into disarray. I wondered why I was still worrying about the children’s routine, still unable to switch off from my duties. Earlier, when I had tucked the children up in bed, I gave Clémence a special hug. She didn’t want to take out her sparkly butterfly clips and for once I said nothing. Olivier jumped into his bed with a copy of Tin Tin, oblivious as always to what was going on around him. I wished he’d look up, so I could remember him, but he didn’t. Only Delphine seemed to sense that something was wrong, coming down twice to see if we were still in the kitchen, wanting to sit at the table and hang on to our every word. At last, Jessica dispatched her to bed with false promises of a girlie chat another night. This felt wrong. It all felt wrong, but we were in too deep to change our minds.

  I had accumulated a lot of bags and needed help. We listened for the sound of the shower running in Florence’s quarters and once we were sure the coast was clear raced up the stairs to fetch my stuff. We began our descent down three flights of stairs laden like Spanish pack horses. As we reached the bottom flight, in direct line with the front door, we saw a familiar shadow and heard a key turn in the lock. Axel.

  I froze as he came in through the door. Caught in mid-action, I was horrified and ready to confess. Sensing this, Jessica kicked me from behind in warning. He saw us both and smiled in an unusually warm manner, displaying a full set of teeth and his ‘cheeky boy’ smile. It must have been a good day.

  ‘Having a sort out?’ he asked in perfect English.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Jessica. ‘Out with the old!’’

  But Axel had already lost interest and didn’t answer. He bounded up the stairs two at a time, to see his wife. I knew he would take off his tie, loosen his top button, hang his jacket on the clothes rack and reappear ten minutes later to pour himself an evening drink. Florence would come down to join him, freshly showered, wearing an innocent white cotton dress, her African drumming trousers thrown in the wicker basket for me to wash.

  Jessica bundled me out of the garden gate like a bag lady, retrieving her own case from beneath the laurel bush where she’d hidden it. It was only once we were halfway to the train
station that I realised the note I’d written for Florence was still in the pocket of my dress. I told Jessica.

  ‘Too late now,’ she panted. ‘The bird has flown.’

  The train journey to our new apartment involved a change of metro line at the Gare du Nord, a sprawling international station attracting hordes of passengers both day and night. The trains to and from La Gare du Nord were packed. Frequently I was thrown up against an unwashed body, or groped by a wandering hand.

  Porte de la Villette, our new home area, wasn’t the safest part of town in the late eighties, although the apartment was beautiful and even this area beyond our means. Twenty-five years on the area has been spruced up. At the time when we moved in, it was still in that part of town where girls tried to avoid travelling home alone. Stories about aggression towards women were rife amongst au pairs girls in the city. The streets were full of sans-abri; those literally without shelter, lost souls who slept on the ventilation grids of the metro for warmth, blasted by gusts of warm air from the bowels of the underground, frozen topside during the long, cold Paris winters. A network of arteries ran beneath the city, and sometimes as my train halted between stations, I glimpsed a community of sans-abri bedded down in the offshoots to the main tunnel where the trains no longer travelled: groups of men clustered together, drinking methylated spirits, kipping on old sacking, a stone’s throw away from the rats who foraged by the side of the tracks. It was a world away from the western suburbs, the Blanchard’s house or the unaffordable boutiques above our heads in the 16th arrondissement, or on the Champs Elysées.

  The northern line of Paris was a particularly intrepid line, but Jessica and I reminded ourselves that it was only a short flight, as the Paris pigeon flew, to the soft, bosom-like domes of the Sacre Coeur, visible from almost anywhere in the city, and to our favourite restaurant and a bowl of warm and comforting French onion soup. To my romantic mind, nothing could spoil the beauty or the magic of Montmartre and I comforted myself with the knowledge that our new home lay in its shadow just a heartbeat away. We were not far from the tourist attractions such as the Moulin Rouge and the Place du Tertre. But in Paris, no-one was ever far away either from the sex shops and the rows of seedy boutiques where leather curtains flapped like ravens’ wings as we passed, and squat men huddled at trestle tables, fingering tickets that promised peep shows with three or more girls for the price of one. Paris had many faces and I was beginning to know them all.

  Chapter 16

  Our first few nights at 27 rue Eugène Jumin were idyllic. The weather was still warm for September and with both windows flung wide open, we could hear the music floating in from the jazz festival at the Porte de Pantin. Apart from our camp beds and new quilt covers there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the flat. We sat cross-legged on the floor, careful not to get crumbs on the sheets, uncharacteristically house-proud now that we had a home of our own. We bought most of our food from a small corner shop run by a Moroccan man called Mahdi (which was pronounced the same as Tuesday in French), who treated us like locals.

  We were careful with our money. Our only financial resources were those left in Jessica’s purse. Because of our prudence, we washed our plastic knives and forks and lined them up on the draining board as if they were silver. Our menus followed much the same pattern. We couldn’t make anything hot without an oven and discovered the difficulties of chopping ingredients for a salad without a proper knife. The plastic knives bent and snapped under the slightest pressure. It was a curious experience biting into an onion as if it were an apple. We resorted to eating finger foods: crusty bread which could be broken off by hand; Babybel cheese, which was a favourite as it could be peeled like a banana; packets of squishy Boursin that could be spread with knife, fork, or finger; and screw-top wine. I’m not entirely convinced that the cheap, plastic-bottled wine Jessica swore by wasn’t designed to unblock drains. It left our breath reeking like the old man who slept on the bench in the metro with his dog. I could see that Jessica’s teeth had begun to absorb the colour and had the same permanently plum veneer as her lips and tongue.

  But our money was running out. Not only this, but our clothes needed washing. Jessica had worn the same floral dress for the past few days and I’d got through most of my clean clothes. There was a distinct difference between the fresh smelling laundry which I ironed back in The Submarine and the clothes which now lay in a plastic bag by the side of my bed. There was a launderette at the end of the street, but I’d have to borrow money from Jessica, and she didn’t seem as concerned about clean clothes as I was, saying I shouldn’t fuss.

  In desperation, I pleaded for some coins from Jessica to phone my dad from a telephone kiosk at the station. I knew his work number and I wanted to ask him if he could send some emergency funds. I had to make this sound like a temporary blip. He promised to send me the equivalent of £50 in francs. He was pleased we’d got a flat, though I didn’t mention the Chinese connection. ‘Get yourself a job,’ he said. I didn’t mention returning to England as a possibility as both of us knew this wasn’t an option. I knew my dad was waiting for my brother Steven to start university in a year’s time before leaving home himself. He had been unhappily married for twenty-seven years and I’d been party to his secret for years: When you and your brother are both at Uni and gone, I’m off. I’ve done my bit. I couldn’t blame him. My mother’s drinking, her obsessions, her violent outbursts and her fear of ‘germs’ had grown worse over the years. She wouldn’t admit there was a problem to treat. My father was too afraid to talk to the doctor; afraid not only of his wife but also that she could appear so normal ‘on tap’, that he might not be believed. Most blokes wouldn’t have lasted a year. That’s what her brother had said. My uncle, like most other members of our family, had learned to keep his distance.

  I’d never had a relationship with my mother. We had never touched or kissed or hugged. She clung to my brother; her self-proclaimed favourite child. It wasn’t a position I envied and I wondered how my brother would ever escape. From the safety of Paris, I felt sick at the thought of who would care for my mother if Dad carried out his plans. I couldn’t blame him. No-one could, not if they’d experienced the home life we’d lived. I needed to find a job. The only person who could look after me, was me.

  * * *

  We didn’t have a landline and had no way of contacting friends before the invention of mobile phones. Evenings were spent in at the flat, without a TV or radio for company, cut off from the outside world, apart from the non-stop jazz music which played in the park opposite. We hadn’t met any other neighbours in the block of flats. There was only one other door on our floor other than our own, and this was permanently shut. There was a man’s name by the bell, Henri Martin, underneath which he had scrawled the word journaliste on a small white card.

  For entertainment, we relied on conversation and books. Jessica was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as well as her sacred anthology of Beckett. I was finishing The Woman in White, which had me gripped. As always, books were a blessing and an escape.

  I was hungry. All day I’d been haunted by visions of the roast chicken I made for the children at the Blanchard house. Jessica seemed to fare on a diet of black coffee and pure alcohol. I’d grown used to four meals a day over the past few months, including the array of pastries and cheeses for afternoon goûter. My stomach had expanded along with Clémence’s pot belly and was struggling to shrink back down to the sized required by our current state of penury.

  I was on the final chapter of my book, when a strange tap-tapping noise sounded on the stairs. Jessica jumped from her bed and switched out the light. The siren of a passing ambulance drowned out the noise for a moment, but then there was a loud rap at the door. She shot to my side of the room.

  ‘It’s him,’ her stained red lips mouthed.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, but she clamped her hand over my mouth and hissed into my ear: ‘Shut the fuck up, will you!’

  Our visitor banged more loudly on
the door this time, and tried the handle for good measure.

  ‘It’s Chinese Magwitch with the high-heeled boots,’ she hissed again.

  This explained the tapping on the stairs.

  ‘Our benefactor? How can you be sure? Lots of men wear boots.’

  ‘He’s been here once today already, when you were out phoning your dad.’

  ‘What? Shouldn’t we let him in? He must know we’re here!’

  ‘NO!’ She looked frightened.

  ‘Why not? And why the hell didn’t you tell me he’d been here?’

  ‘He said not to, and I wondered if the flat might be bugged.’ She did that annoying thing with the folded-in finger again.

  ‘Stop being stupid for a minute. What did he want?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, you know. Me. Sex of course!’

  ‘But his wife’s pregnant! Surely not?’ I paused in fear. ‘What about me?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t want you.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that!’

  ‘He doesn’t like blondes.’

  ‘Small mercies!’

  She looked scared now. ‘It’s all very well, blondie, but I’m the only brunette in here.’

  We jumped as the sound of a key was inserted in the lock. Luckily our own key was on our side of the door firmly blocking the hole. The good thing was that Magwitch couldn’t get in. The bad thing was he knew we were on the other side. We heard a voice calling out in French. Jessica pulled the quilt cover over us and we sat for a time. Just when I thought the siege would never end, the footsteps tip-tapped down the stairs, gradually disappearing all together. We crawled out from beneath our makeshift tent and Jessica went to the door to open it. She said she wouldn’t be able to sleep unless she was sure Magwitch had gone for good.