A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  When first shopping at the butcher’s shop for Florence I’d been shocked by the noticeable lack of pleases and thank yous, used by a French woman when giving orders. No please may I have some ham, but an authoritative you will cut me two slices of ham, and a reminder once again, that the French were more compliant when instilled with the fear of god, than when someone was too ‘nice’. French women were naturally competitive with other women. Seven years at an all-girls’ comprehensive school had taught me to value close female friendships. We did not consider the boys at the school across the road to be any better than we were. There was no the need to make concessions. In our radical single-sex school, close and intimate relationships with other girls were paramount, along with the belief that we were not only equal but perhaps superior. We could have children, run the home and become nuclear physicists … or poets. There was none of the obsequious bowing and scraping I’d seen in the French office lift. Women were invariably our best friends since there were no men to be friends with. Like many other girls in my class, I had shed genuine tears of sorrow when dumped by a girlfriend who had chosen another soulmate over me, experiencing as much pain in these break-ups as with any boyfriend in later years. It was new for me to be in a society where men commanded all the attention, and where women fawned and minced until they had caught their prey and carried it home to bludgeon into shape.

  When French women weren’t cooing in the lift, there was of course the usual back-stabbing that I’d known when growing up. I knew everyone bitched the world over. But there had been a sense back home that an inner circle of friends was sacred. It was not so at the office, where anyone was a fair target and it seemed no one was safe.

  ‘Elle a grossi.’. She has grown fat.

  ‘T’as vu ce qu’elle porte?’ Have you seen what she’s wearing?

  ‘Son mec l’a plaqué.’ Her bloke dumped her!

  ‘Tu m’etonnes!’ Are you surprised?

  ‘Je ne la supporte pas!’ I can’t stand her!

  I hadn’t yet seen evidence of the kind of love and loyalty between the women that my friends at school had shared, but then I was no longer at school. One day I would form close friendships with French women, and I would learn that although it might take longer to get there, when you did, it was for life. There was an inner circle, but to be in it, you had to belong. For the time being, I needed to be patient.

  * * *

  Madame Calmelane, who kept to herself, was a natural giver of orders and was respected, albeit feared, by her employees. In this way, she resembled my old head teacher. I was one of the few members of staff to like and respect her; grateful to this woman who at a comfortable point in her career had taken a risk in hiring me. I admired her strength and intelligence and was comprehensive as to why she should keep her distance from other members of staff. Lisbeth, like many of my other colleagues, was quick to criticise our boss, though hanging on to her every word and mooning all over her at reception whenever she thought there might be a chance of an upgrade in position.

  Lisbeth told me that she preferred the other Head of Human Resources (of course there were two) an exotic woman from the Middle-East named Isra. She was mind-blowingly beautiful. She floated into the office late each day wearing bright red lipstick and clothes which were the fabric of dreams. She had huge doe-like eyes, laden with mascara, clear olive skin and long wavy dark hair. She was a smoker, along with 90 per cent of all the other women in the office, and drifted past reception every five minutes to ask if I had missed any of her calls – or misunderstood them. Madame Calmelane was in the process of eliminating Isra from the company and had taken away all her duties, so that she had no incoming calls of any importance. And yet the switchboard never stopped bleating in her honour. All of the callers were men. One of her callers was a man with a deep voice and an officious manner, who asked if Isra was available about forty times a day. He was exhausting in his demands, and monopolised the switchboard to the extent that I was convinced at first that he must be our biggest client. He hadn’t bought a multi-million-dollar software programme. He was Isra’s lover. One of her many admirers. I signed for the bunches of red roses and bottles of champagne which arrived daily. Seizing the opportunity to take a quick peek into her office, I spied a fairy tale land where it was eternally Valentine’s day. In her mid-thirties, Isra was, to my mind, the picture of French elegance, her ease and savoir faire with men to which I aspired.

  Blandine Calmelane, who was in her early fifties, was also attractive and well dressed. I wondered if it was galling for her to be faced with this nubile competitor, and to witness Isra’s suitors hunting her down during office hours with such ardour, this exotic second in command snapping at her heels for the job of top dog. Madame Calmelane’s marriage had ended in divorce and she was, so the office gossip said, still single. If this bothered her, then she never showed it, continuing to rule her employees with the firm hand of an indulgent headmistress; smart, elegant and gracious. Looking back, I would always be grateful to this woman for having given me a chance to prove myself.

  * * *

  After a few weeks on reception, I was called into a private office and introduced to a man named Richard Grey. He had been drafted in by Madame Calmelane to help ease the rift in the company caused by the merger. In vulgar parlance, he was a ‘trouble shooter’, who had been hired to eliminate one out of two of all Noah’s animals. We couldn’t all stay on the Ark. No company, not even an American software company, could justify the expense of two staff members for every post or tolerate half of the entire company blanking the other and barking conflicting orders to new arrivals like me. Richard was an Oxford graduate who was close to retirement. He had set up a consultancy firm in Paris, and integrated companies for several weeks at a time, a clandestine spy, whispering to Madame Calmelane on a daily basis who she should keep and who she should fire. All members of staff were invited to talk to Richard, including me. I warmed to him immediately.

  As I was called into the room I felt as if I’d been asked to step into the study of an Oxford professor. Richard was an ex-diplomat, an attractive man who held himself well and bore the vestiges of that Classical education and promise that he had drowned in the amber dregs of a whisky glass over the years. The exact office he had held at the Foreign Office was hazy in detail, but it was all ‘hush hush’ stuff out in the Middle-East: ‘Embassy business’; the furtive ‘tap on the nose and wink to the wise’ kind of posting. Richard was dressed in a shabby tweed jacket and trousers, with sensible brogues. His manner was bumbling but his mind laser sharp – perfect for a potential ex-spy/diplomat. Sharp in the mornings, that is. After midday it was hit and miss, with Richard opening a bottle of whisky each morning and sipping from breakfast onwards.

  Richard spoke Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Russian and German fluently. How many of his stories were true is debatable. It didn’t matter. He was one of those great raconteurs for whom truth should never get in the way of a good story.

  ‘There was this time when I had to get girls out of Saudi, you understand. Little fools thought they’d married for love, and found themselves married to men who reverted to radical Islam before the bloody plane was halfway across Europe. Most were pregnant or had young children who we had to smuggle out. We weren’t allowed to go through the official channels, you understand, but something had to be done. I’d have an unmarked car and tell them to be at a certain street corner at a certain time. We’d bundle them in the boot and get them over the border and home. Night-time operations, of course.’

  Richard had grown up in London near Pinewood Studios, and told me how, in 1951, he had met Audrey Hepburn outside the studios on the day of her screen audition for Roman Holiday. He claimed he had fallen in love on sight and taken her out to tea.

  ‘The most beautiful young girl I would ever see.’

  I wanted the story to be true.

  On my first meeting with Richard he looked me up and down and told me that I should make more of an
effort to dress stylishly. Jessica had found a temping job by then and had reclaimed her white blouse, black skirt and shoes. We were still in the thrall of a secret organisation, living on a diet of Chinese dumplings, and waiting to save up enough money to find a new place to live. I’d reverted to wearing my baggy student clothes from Aber. They were more suited for Glastonbury than the upper echelons of La Tour Washington.

  I mentioned in passing that of course I’d like to dress better, but money was still tight until my first wages at the end of the month. Richard noted this on a piece of paper in cramped letters, and I thought no more of it, until two days later, Madame Calmelane arrived at reception before lunch and told me that we were going shopping. My boss marched me to the Les Quatre Temps shopping centre, and to one of those swish shiny shops with slippery floors, where there weren’t any price tags in the windows. The window showed a minimalistic display of tight-fitting suits in bright colours; clothes that required accessories – shoes, scarves, belts and hats à la Audrey Hepburn.

  Madame Calmelane asked me to choose two suits and sat in the changing room while I tried on several options, stepping out of the changing room for her approval. Pretty Woman had just been released and I felt like Julia Roberts in the posh shop. Eventually I settled on a bright cherry-red jacket and skirt, and an electric-blue suit. They were perfect fare for a receptionist: classical and elegant. I wondered how long they would stay clean, as we didn’t have a washing machine, nor did I own any other shoes than a pair of flat ones, which were too clunky for such an outfit. I’d have to fund the extras myself.

  Back at the office I changed in the office toilets. Richard was back that afternoon to see Madame Calmelane and winked as he passed through reception. At around half past four, he escorted Madame Calmelane out of the office, his arm linked in hers. She threw her head back laughing, resting it on his shoulder, skittish as a teenager and as beautiful as I realised she must once have been. Later Richard told me that he had made love to her that day, though soon afterwards she was forced to dismiss him for being drunk at work.

  * * *

  One night when Jessica and I were asleep in our fold-up camp beds we were woken by the sound of banging on the stairs outside. Since we had not seen a living soul in the apartment opposite since the day we moved in, and the only person to come up to our segment of the landing was our benefactor Magwitch, I wondered if he had come to finish us off.

  ‘You hear that?’ Jessica whispered.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Keep quiet!’

  We lay in terror for over an hour, imagining trained assassins dismantling the staircase or building a wall to block us inside.

  ‘Maybe the guy opposite is back?’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Maybe he’s moving out?’

  ‘It’s three in the morning!’

  Sometime before dawn the noises stopped and I fell into an uneasy sleep. We barely had time to speak that morning as we were both late for our respective jobs in the city. Jessica was working as a temp in the upmarket Place Vendome, at a prestigious law firm not too far from the Ritz. She told me how at lunchtimes she would walk to the rue de Rivoli and buy herself a newspaper or a book from WH Smiths, crossing over to the Jardin des Tuileries to sit by one of the ornamental lakes to read it.

  Jessica had that knack of making her experience of Paris sound more authentic than my own. It didn’t help that she worked in the historical heart of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Louvre, whereas I was in the business centre that had sprung up comparatively recently. I could have been in any big city in the world, whereas she could only have been in Paris. I ate in a canteen with a conveyor belt of trays and a smell of disinfectant and old mop heads reminiscent of school, whereas Jessica ate onion soup with a glass of house red in one of the local brasseries around the Musée du Louvre. Like Richard, my flatmate was a fantastic storyteller, and I begged her for a second rendition of some of my favourite tales of her adventures au bureau.

  She worked under the auspices of an individual she labelled ‘a budding Axel Blanchard’ – a serious looking young man with dark hair and oversized glasses, named Dominique Fromentin. Utterly bourgeois, she moaned in pleasure.

  Just as I had believed in Jessica’s improbable stories of love and seduction, re-enacted back in the school toilets, so she enthralled me now with stories of Paris, and of Dominique Fromentin, her enticing new boss – nothing more than an Axel Blanchard underling – who would grow to love her, slowly but surely, and in absolute defiance of his Avenue Hoch type family. Jessica wasn’t above casting herself in the story as the strict and overly repressed English secretary. She even went as far as to procure an oversized pair of black spectacles for which her sharp-sighted, pale-blue eyes had no need, in order to indulge in a little fantasy that she might whip Vincent’s backside with a rolled-up copy of Le Monde. Or vice versa if she made any more grammatical errors in his copy. There were multiple incidents to relate when she came home: looks and twinkles by the Xerox machine, or brushed fingertips when clumsily keying in the number of a fax. Most of it was made up for my benefit. Jessica loved an audience. I knew deep down she was a staunch feminist who could chew Dominique Fromentin to pieces and spit out the gristle if she chose, but she saw life as a stage-set on which to perform, regaling me with her preposterous tales as we sipped Potage Pekinois from Styrofoam bowls.

  Without the funds for a trip to the theatre or cinema which we both so loved, we made our own entertainment. Evenings were spent at home in the flat, hiding from Magwitch and watching Jessica perform. We had grown used to the usual bag of Chinese dumplings waiting for us on the door handle. We took it for granted now but remembering the thuds and bangs in the middle of the previous night, and our terror, I wondered how much longer this situation could last.

  Jessica got back half an hour later than me, and was just about to launch into a tale of how Dominique had punished her ‘by not letting her go out for her lunch and making her stay behind after the other girls had left’ story, when there was a loud banging at the door.

  ‘Magwitch!’

  ‘I didn’t hear the boots.’

  Our benefactor still wore his dapper high-heels.

  ‘Je sais que vous êtes là.’

  It was a man’s voice, but not one that we knew.

  ‘Ouvrez! Je sais que vous êtes là-dedans!’

  And then in perfect English: ‘Open the bloody door, will you?’

  I felt we had no choice but to obey. On the doorstep was an attractive man, who I was relieved to see was not proffering a bag of Chinese food. He had waves of dark hair which would have been described in a romantic novel as tousled, and was dressed in a smart suede jacket and jeans, the sort that would have given Bryan Ferry a run for his money. In other words, attractive, but not so much pouty as foul-tempered. The man pushed passed us.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Jessica said in her haughty voice, forgetting to attempt French in her fury, ‘you can’t just barge in here. This is our flat.’

  ‘Actually,’ the man replied, in perfect English, ‘I think you’ll find it’s my flat. As is the apartment opposite. Or what’s left of it!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did you two not hear anything suspicious in the night?’

  Jessica and I looked at one another with a guilty expression.

  ‘We sleep at night,’ she said primly, ‘and we keep our door locked.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been cleaned out,’ the man said. ‘Every bit of furniture. Whoever took it knew they would not be disturbed. You cannot tell me you did not hear, n’est-ce pas? They even took the partner’s desk that belonged to my father. This was so heavy it would have needed five men to carry it away!’

  ‘Well, there was a bit of bumping’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry, but we’ve been having some … unwanted visitors. People troubling us. And we didn’t want to open the door in case it was them.’

  ‘Chinese, I suppose!’

  The
man strode across the room and threw open the balcony door. He stood outside and lit a cigarette. The wind ruffled his hair which was just starting to streak grey. He was tanned, and I realised that this must be Henri Martin, the elusive journalist whose name we had seen inscribed on the door opposite.

  ‘What do you mean this is your flat?’ Jessica asked. I knew she was wondering if we owed this man rental money.

  ‘I own both flats,’ he said. ‘I travel all over the world. I’m never here. I’ve been out reporting in the desert, and I’ve come home to find that my apartment has been turned over. Not only that, but this place, which the agency assured me had been let to “a highly paid insurance broker,” a cadre, is in fact let to two …’ he hesitated, seeking the right word, ‘to the two of you, who it appears do not own one stick of furniture. What is this?’

  He pointed to a small pile of debris on the floor in the middle of the room: the remnants of baguette and Babybel cheese wrappers, the empty wine bottle and cartons of takeaway food from Magwitch. A dragon’s lair that had formed over the past week, dried orange peel sprinkled like confetti across the floor.

  ‘We are professional women who work in Paris, with serious jobs,’ Jessica said firmly, toeing a dirty sock under her camp bed. ‘I have a placement with a top law firm on the rue de Rivoli, and my friend works for a top American company; a software company selling millions of dollars of – erm, soft things.’

  ‘Really? And you for instance – how long have you been in employment?’

  ‘A week.’