A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  ‘So, you are seeking employment as a secretary, n’est-ce pas? Vous avez apporté votre CV?’

  Contrary to what she asked, I hadn’t brought a CV, believing that the temping agency had already secured a position for me.

  ‘Hm, non. Je n’ai pas ça.’

  My French was clumsy.

  ‘Hmm.’ Madame Calmelane pushed her chair back on its little black wheels.

  ‘Vous parlez bien le Français, je suppose ?’

  ‘I’m getting better.’

  I don’t know why, but I replied in English.

  ‘This is an American company, so your language skills are an advantage,’ she replied, in perfect English. But then with a little smile added, ‘We will, however, require a minimum understanding of French if you are to transcribe letters from our sales team. This wouldn’t be a problem for you I take it? And your computer skills are up to speed?’

  I remembered the woman’s orders at the temping office and smiled confidently.

  ‘Very well. Come with me.’

  Madame Calmelane rose and led me back outside to an empty desk in an open office space. On the gleaming table, there was a small squat computer, which I later learnt was one of the original Macintosh SE models, circa 1987.

  Madame Calmelane reached into an in-tray and placed a page of scrawl beside me.

  ‘Type this for me, please,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If you hurry, our porter will take it down to the mail room, so that it leaves today.’

  She marched off and I stared at the page in dismay. French handwriting was notoriously difficult to read. If you weren’t French it might as well be hieroglyphics. Everyone in France learnt to write in the same way. The Rs looked like Vs and the letters were formed in what appeared to be old-fashioned script to anyone from the UK. It was the sort of handwriting you might see on an old seventeenth-century document in a museum requiring a magnifying glass. I had no idea what the letter said. I decided to buy myself some time and try to work out how to switch the computer on.

  This was the first time I had ever used a computer. At home, I’d had a manual and then an electronic typewriter into which I fed paper. My mother was a trained Pitman’s touch hand typist, working for three years in a brewery before I was born. At the age of seven, keen to start writing a children’s story, I’d been given a typewriter and a book explaining how to type. I’d persisted and grown proficient. Confident now of my skills, and with a typing speed of approximately sixty words a minute, I knew I wasn’t completely useless. However, there were a few hurdles I hadn’t expected. Not only could I not switch the computer on, but someone had moved all the letters into different places.

  A few golden strands of hair fell to the desk. As I ran my hands through my hair a second cluster fell out. A few weeks later a local GP would tell me that this was down to stress, and that with a bit of luck it wouldn’t all fall out, if I would only calm down. As matters stood, I was one pay packet off learning this, and I surveyed the clumps of blonde hair which lay on the desk in horror. I wasn’t yet covered by the French health-care system. To aggravate the hair situation my hands had been itching non-stop for the last few days. I’d scratched them in my sleep and where the skin was inflamed, a row of weeping yellow sores had risen to the surface – more stress-related symptoms. The eczema, which had spread up both arms, wept and bled, then dried and cracked anew. It had worsened in the past few weeks with anxiety about money and how we were to survive. Working in a chic office in Paris with minimal nursery school French was turning into a harrowing experience. But I needed the money. I’d five Francs left in my purse from Dad’s money and no means of paying my half of the rent. I couldn’t fail this simple test. How hard could it be?

  I ran my finger up and down the sides of the Mac and finally found the ‘on’ button at the back. The machine stirred into life with a series of judders and groans, like a waste-disposal unit grinding metal. A black-and-white screen flickered before me indicating a series of small files. Other than the icon resembling Oscar’s bin on Sesame Street in the bottom right corner, I was unable to guess what anything meant. Several members of staff walked past my desk and stared at me, clocking the value of my clothing; the cut of my hair, the worn heels of my borrowed shoes. An unpleasant looking woman did a double-take by my desk muttering, ‘Who’s she?’ to the empty space around me. It was difficult to keep busy at an empty desk when you hadn’t a clue what to do.

  After ten minutes of hair loss and skin irritation, I was about to cry when Madame Calmelane returned.

  ‘Alors, ça y est? Bertrand has already take the letter downstairs perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ I confessed, hiding my hands under the desk. ‘I haven’t even started. I’ve never used a computer before.’

  ‘Je vois.’

  She stared at me a moment and then swept to the door with an imperious. ‘Venez.’

  I followed Madame Calmelane out of the open-space area, down a long corridor, past open doors where salesmen lolled back in their chairs, feet on desks or arms behind heads; past a pool of secretaries and back to the main desk. At best, I expected Madame Calmelane to shake my hand and show me to the lift. The girl with dark long hair who was chatting into a handset at reception looked up curiously. Madame Calmelane waited until she had connected her call.

  ‘This is Lisbeth,’ she said, ‘our standardiste.’

  ‘Bonjour,’ she said.

  ‘Lisbeth, do you think you could train this candidate for me? If you train her well, I will offer you the vacant secretarial position which this girl is unqualified to accept.’

  Lisbeth beamed. She was an attractive girl with dark brown eyes that matched her hair. She glowed with pleasure as if her headmistress had just awarded her position of head girl. The Head of Human Resources turned to me. Her regard was serious now.

  ‘You have six weeks to learn,’ she said. ‘This is an important position as you are the first port of call for our clients, and for the type of job it is, very well-paid indeed. You must learn to master the le standard perfectly. You must transcribe messages precisely, so that the sales team can call back their clients immediately. There must be no mistakes with either name, number, or message. We are dealing with contracts worth hundreds of thousands of francs.’

  Madame Calmelane relaxed a little, then added, ‘It is perhaps fortunate for you that you remind me a lot of my daughter, who has just gone to London. I hope that someone there will show her the same kindness in a foreign country. However, much as I wish to be charitable, this is a multi-million-dollar business. Six weeks with no complaints from any members of my staff, or I will have no choice but to dismiss you. I will contact the agency with regards to your contract.’

  I smiled as she turned from reception and left me to fend for myself.

  I’d forgotten to ask exactly what a standardiste was.

  Chapter 18

  I was entrusted to Lisbeth for the rest of the day. Madame Calmelane took me back to her office so that I could fill in the necessary forms. She asked Lisbeth if she would be so kind as to take me to the canteen at lunch time. Divining that overall finances were tight, Madame Calmelane gave me a canteen card charged up with enough francs to buy a week’s food. My mouth watered. Anything but Chinese! French fries, cheese, butter and chips; cutlery that didn’t bend; plates that didn’t sag.

  Lisbeth’s English was better than my French, owing to several trips to the States working in various bars and restaurants, and from her time as a ski-monitor on the ski slopes near her home town of Chambéry, where she confessed she had slept with enough English-speaking tourists to perfect her language skills. She was in her mid-twenties, tall and slender with long chestnut brown hair (which, unlike my own, was firmly implanted at the roots), and a deep throaty laugh with the underlying rasp of a chain smoker. She was attractive in an overly made-up way, her naturally oily face plastered in a coat of thick foundation to countenance the shine. Her jeans were tight and her silk top clingy, turning the
heads of the openly hot-blooded men in the queue as she bobbed above the switchboard. Lisbeth started by helping me acquire some new vocabulary. Le standard was the switchboard and we were standardistes or receptionists. The main switchboard connected 111 offices spread over the 31st floor, plus the hotline on the 24th floor, where clients called with technical problems from all over the world. The company sold mainframe software packages to some of the largest clients in France: Auchan and Carrefour hypermarkets, La Poste, the EDF national electricity company, etc. As an American company, we were affluent compared to local French businesses. On average, company salaries were thirty per cent above the minimum working wage (le SMIC) and I was to receive a whopping 9,000 francs a month. My previous salary as an au pair was mere pin money at 1,800 per month. If I could keep this job, I’d be able to pay my rent and finally have some money with which to enjoy Paris.

  Despite our high working wage, Lisbeth and I were at the bottom of the company food chain. Below us were only two other staff members: Yazid Seridi, a Pakistani man whose English was better than his French, and his side-kick Bertrand Gauthier who smelt like a skunk, because of (what Lisbeth described as) ‘a chronic and incurable and most sad problem with his glands (however often he washes, he will never remove the odour)’. Yazid and Bertrand worked in the mail room and dealt with the packaging of software systems sent out from the office. They lived below ground in the cavernous dungeons au sous sol. This was the lowest part of the building, an underworld five floors beneath the ground floor, reserved for the cockroaches and the mail men. Everyone below ground was male. There were no women in packing. Occasionally Bertrand travelled up in the lift to the 31st floor filling our nostrils with his acrid odour. Lisbeth mimed with a pinched nose how it was every employee’s worst nightmare to be caught in the lift with the unfortunate man, especially if he alighted on the 24th floor leaving his odour behind him so that anyone catching a ride up to the 25–30th floors might wrongly attribute the provenance of the smell to the remaining person in the lift. She kept a special can of air freshener behind reception to fumigate the area post-mail delivery. We chatted at reception in broken English and French during those blissful moments when the monstrous standard drew breath between its ugly screeching howls. Bertrand and Yazid struggled through reception carrying a large box. There were at least fifty paces between us, but Bertrand’s bitter smell hit my nostrils.

  ‘Poor Yazid,’ I said to Lisbeth.

  ‘Poor wife,’ said Lisbeth, ‘though they appear happy.’

  At twelve o’clock on the dot, Lisbeth unplugged the switchboard and we headed down for lunch.

  The Tour Washington had three canteens, each on a different level below the entrance hall and descending in order of importance. Minus one housed a grand-sounding restaurant called Le Musée. Lisbeth told me that she had never eaten there because there was a non-spoken agreement that it was reserved for cadres. I was not familiar with the term, but during my time at Brown & Mclane Software, it was one that would come to haunt me.

  We were, it transpired, non-cadres. Cadre was a title given to management and determined by pay scale and position within the company. Cadres were relinquished from the rules and regulations which controlled our lives and were trusted to manage their own time. They had higher salaries, better pensions, longer lunch breaks, and massive egos, considering themselves to be superior to any other living creature on earth. Cadres had graduated from the top business schools or universities in Paris, whereas non-cadres usually left school with little more than a Brevet or Baccalaureate beneath their belts. If that. Whatever the reality of our qualifications, our positions within the company predetermined the level of respect accorded to us from other members of staff, and by society at large. A cadre, it transpired, was not reprimanded for shagging his colleague on the boot of his car in the underground carpark to the same extent a non-cadre might be, if caught on CCTV. An incident between a randy head of department and his assistant filmed on the bonnet of a Peugeot 605 demonstrated such differences with clarity during my second week.

  At the office, non-cadres (secretaries, receptionists, packers, cleaners, brown-collar workers, etc.) were obliged to use the formal ‘vous’ when addressing their superiors on the pay scale, whereas cadres could happily use the familiar ‘tu’, both to each other and when addressing non-cadres. I learnt later on, that the informal ‘tu’ could show friendship and familiarity, but when used unilaterally by a cadre it could also underline both inferiority and lower social status. Time taught me that, even when authorised, it was not always a good idea to jump in too soon with the friendly ‘tu’, as it was difficult to revert to ‘vous’ afterwards. An unmistakeable snootiness could be conveyed with a well-placed ‘vous’ enabling a much-appreciated chasm to exist between two parties. In-laws for example.

  Later, I would learn that the use of ‘vous’ in situations of intimacy, when ‘tu’ would be the norm, could also heighten the eroticism of a moment, if so desired.

  In many ways ‘vous’ was far more flexible.

  At the office, mistakes in tense were punishable by decapitation, since the tutoiement of a cadre showed the utmost lack of respect. I was going to have to revise all my verb endings, as clients on the phone had to be addressed in formal French and I’d spent the last few months with the Blanchards using the familiar ‘tu’ form.

  Lisbeth, Bertrand, Yazid and most of the other staff members at the office who deigned to talk to me, were non-cadres. I was about to join their ranks, so I needed to know the rules.

  I learnt that the office building segregated its diners at luncheon in accordance to their social standing. With Le Musée occupying a rather grand space on level Minus One, there was a second canteen which was used by non-cadres on Minus Two. This restaurant catered for white-collar non-management staff: secretaries, lower-level accountants and technicians. Further below, on level Minus Three, in the entrails of the tower, there was another canteen which served only sandwiches and coffee. This was reserved for the lowest paid of all non-cadres: the packers, cleaners and security services, or the brown-collar workers. There were no seats, the workers huddling round a bar area long enough for a quick snack.

  This tiered level of society surprised me. I’d thought that the French Revolution had taken care of all that. I’d imagined that it would be an ‘all for one and one for all’ type of mentality in France, considering the number of heads that had rolled into baskets. Not so. I was realising, first through the likes of the Blanchards and their easy aristocracy, and now through a software company in the heart of the business centre, that class was clearly defined and adhered to. There was a palpable sense at the office (albeit it American owned) of needing to learn one’s place in the organisational chart and sticking to it. Contrary to the mentality I’d grown up with in my comprehensive school, social mobility was not encouraged.

  A non-cadre when lying in the gutter (or eating at the canteen three floors below ground) shouldn’t aim for the stars. It would only lead to unhappiness. When I joked with Lisbeth that one day we too might eat at Le Musée on Minus One, she looked at me in horror. Her greatest ambition was to achieve secretarial status, but she had no ambitions to eat caviar on toast from fine china side plates, bemoaning the fact that some of the sales team would struggle to accept her as a personal assistant, having first known her as a receptionist, never mind dining in her presence.

  I asked Lisbeth what would happen if we decided to pay more and eat at Le Musée.

  ‘This would be very bad form,’ Lisbeth said. ‘We might see our boss and she wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Is the food nicer?’

  ‘They have starters, main course, and dessert: pretty cakes with berries on the top, fresh not frozen; foie gras at Christmas. And a Roman statue at the entrance.’

  I determined I would eat there one day. Even if I had to take my book and read in a corner by myself.

  The food on Minus Two was school canteen fare: chips and lasagne. Hot stodge without a
trace of those fine slices of salmon carpaccio that Lisbeth had talked of at Le Musée. Not a place where we were likely to find lemon quarters or bowls of hand-whisked mayonnaise. At least we weren’t huddled round a cheese toastie at Minus Three with Bertrand and Yazid. At least it wasn’t Chinese food.

  As I trailed behind Lisbeth, up and down La Tour Washington and around the office, I observed how the cadres held the swing doors open for other cadres. Yet whenever a cadre met us on his travels, he pushed rudely past, allowing the door to swing wildly in our faces. (The majority of cadres, with the exception of Madame Calmelane, were male).

  ‘Bit rude,’ I said, checking my front tooth.

  ‘C’est normal,’ said Lisbeth. ‘We are nothing to them. Rien du tout.’

  On our first lunch together, Lisbeth ate a hearty lunch, swallowing a couple of yellow pills with her coffee.

  ‘To keep thin,’ she said. ‘I used to have a fat ass. I was obèse, but now I’m on medication. They are trying to stop these pills now. They say they are bad for the heart – but I’d rather be dead when I’m old than fat like before.’

  I noticed that she had that same American twang as Bonne-Maman when she said ‘ass’.

  After lunch, Lisbeth said she was going to have a cigarette, or ‘une clope’ in familiar French argo (slang). This also helped to keep her weight down, and was a trick adopted by many of the French women I met. We went back up to the office. There were no rules preventing smoking in the building either in designated zones, or at their desks in the case of higher level management; and this regardless of the pregnant non-cadres who breathed the air around them.