A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  My colleague Olivia, who had grown friendlier towards me in recent weeks, offered to repaper my studio flat. She was good at DIY and thought it might help cheer the place up. I saw Ron’s sceptical look but thought it was worth a shot. Olivia came over with a steamer to lift coarse sheets of flecked paper from institutional walls. As the steamer started to hiss, the glue on the back of the paper began to melt. She lifted away the first soggy strip which came off in one entire piece. Behind the paper the wall was studded with cockroaches. We continued to work along the wall behind my bed. Living, crawling and breathing in this airless space, were hundreds more mating couples.

  I dreamt of cockroaches. In one nightmare, I turned back the sheets to my camp bed poised with a spray can of poison in my hand. The cockroach was waiting but had grown to the size of a plump poodle. It had huge globules for eyes and hissed in anger as I interrupted its siesta. I sprayed clouds of toxic fumes, but it laughed in my face and refused to die.

  Chapter 24

  Opposite my block of flats there was a run of scruffy shops and a Chinese restaurant. We were close to the Place Jeanne d’Arc, and the main hub of the 13ème arrondissement, but la rue Domrémy was a neglected backwater. I was confident I wouldn’t bump into Magwitch, so I popped down to eat at the restaurant on nights when I could no longer face pasta on the four-ring electric hotplate. The infestations inside the flat and the pigeon-pecked food on the window sill had put me off home-made meals for a time. Like Magwitch’s old place, the restaurant also had an electronic painting of a waterfall, lit from behind, which cascaded down towards me. Reminders of where I’d seen such a tableau before encouraged a paranoid glance at my waiter’s shoes as I verified the height of his heels. Thankfully these were flat.

  I drank sake with Olivia and Ron, who always found polite excuses not to come indoors.

  As the days grew lighter and longer, and in search of the real Paris, I took the number 27 bus home from the Opéra. It offered one of the best rides in Paris, travelling down past Le Palais Royal, Le Musée du Louvre, and over Le Pont du Carrousel to the 6ème arrondissement and down to the entrance of Les Jardins du Luxembourg. I strolled in the park by the Palais du Luxembourg and around the ornamental lake before catching the bus home, back to La Place Jeanne d’Arc. The weeknights were lonely and I missed Jessica and our debriefs on the funny events of our day. There was no longer a devil-may-care attitude to life. Carpe diem had been replaced by a deep-seated worry that this was as good as it got. That this was my new ‘grown-up life’ with its bills and work responsibilities.

  The Paris of my dreams could only be grabbed outside working hours, or far from the flat and its scrabbling, drowning, dying, breeding roaches. I snatched it at odd moments, when the last golden rays of light fell onto a couple who kissed on a park bench, as children laughed and played in their smart old-fashioned clothes, rushing past on tricycles like characters straight out of a Robert Doisneau photograph. But this old vision of Paris had become a cliché, something just out of my reach. Real life was the crowded metro in the morning, when there was no time to take the bus because I’d made myself late de-infesting glossy brown corpses from my shower cubicle before I could wash. Life in Paris was hampered by the regular train strikes organised by the RATP when crowds heaved and fought to squeeze between the metro doors. Real life was the one thousand calls a day I put through on my switchboard. If I said. ‘Good Morning, please hold the line, I’m putting you through!’ one more time I would go mad. I knew that however challenging it was to answer the phone in French, I didn’t want to be a receptionist for the rest of my life. To quote the title of that Marilyn film, Something’s got to give.

  My situation at work was growing complicated. Ron, who meant well, had decided to take up my case, embarking once more on the task of getting me promoted, come hell or high water, which sent Madame Calmelane into a rage.

  ‘Hell doll-face, I don’t get these people,’ he said. ‘Here you are, a degree, fluent in English – in what is, after all, an American company – an intelligent mind … and they don’t offer anything better that switchboard operator. Come on, girl! I want you on my team. I’ve been pussyfooting round this issue for months now.’

  Ron went to see Madame Calmelane and told her he wanted me as his PA. Madame Calmelane refused. She had recruited me, and she was keeping me, whether she still wanted me or not. It was a matter of principle. I had not been hired to speak English; I’d been hired to answer the phone in French. I was hers. Lisbeth was now in the secretarial pool and a new girl named Luna had been recruited to replace her but could not be left alone. The answer was no, whether Ron was Head of Human Resources worldwide, or not. If he wanted me, it was war. And if there was war, he’d have to fire Madame Calmelane. Even Ron flailed at this idea.

  Our new receptionist, Luna, had a cloud of blonde hair, huge eyes, full lips, a stunning figure and a mind devoid of interest in anything except fashion. If she had been a character in a novel she would have been a cliché. She filed her nails, as was expected of a receptionist, and painted them, ignoring the shrill cry of the switchboard as they dried. She was a heavy smoker and called me from the 24th floor at regular intervals to tell me ‘Je vais fumer ma clope.’ ‘Clope’ was one of those slang words the French loved: clope for cigarette, boulot for work, godasses for shoes, bagnole for car – replacement words which formed a second language of argot, or familiar everyday speech, which I had to learn alongside correct French if I was to understand what was being said. Spoken French was so different from what I’d learnt at school.

  Ron was adamant that, with the arrival of Luna, he could promote me into the American branch of his office. A compromise was reached in which I was allowed to assist the Atlanta-based team that was moving to France, while continuing to work for Madame Calmelane. Ron asked me to write a guide in English for expats moving to Paris from the US and I was allowed official writing time every day on my Apple Mac. It was a godsend finally knowing how to use a computer. I continued to type up my stories in my free time, fantasising that maybe one day I could write something good enough to be published, allowing me to unplug my switchboard for good!

  Now that I had fallen from grace with Madame Calmelane my days felt numbered. Those cosy trips to the fancy boutiques at the shopping mall were long gone, and my two special work suits were starting to look a little grey and bobbled around the cuffs. There was talk of Ron moving to Brussels within a year, and I realised that if he ‘grabbed skirt’ and headed out of town without me, my position in the company might no longer be tenable. But if I couldn’t go home, what else could I do?

  I started to pick up the FUSAC, a freebie magazine in English, advertising jobs and courses, to see what else was available in the city. I also wondered what other parts of France had to offer, amusing myself by looking at adverts in the PAP magazine for stone manor houses at ridiculously low prices in remote regions of France. Further South than Château de Trémouillet, that was for sure. I knew the perils of falling into the belly button of France, and not descending any lower than the Loire valley, which the French always claimed was the demarcation point on the map for sunny weather.

  I wanted to escape. I didn’t know where or how, but I poured over the adverts until the ink was smudgy; dreaming of farms that were half-dilapidated but full of promise, large plots of land, and even vineyards! Some of them advertised for less than the price of a smart new family car. If I couldn’t go home, perhaps I could go somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper, where I didn’t have to share a 27m² room with an infestation of cockroaches; a place with a garden for Basil. A home of my own.

  The magazine was addictive, and I realised that in the South West of France, in particular, it was possible to buy a sizeable estate with several hectares of land for a pittance. Many evenings, long after hometime when I’d unplugged my switchboard, I sat perched up high on the 31st floor of La Tour Washington, as the turbaned cleaners wheeled their trolleys into the office, and my colleagues called goodnight as
they headed home, my head filled with visions of maisons de maître, orchards and hectares of land. Sometimes, by the time I’d got to the end of my journal, it was so late that the lights across Paris had flickered on. I’d been busy in sunlit Provence, decorating old walls with lime plaster and pruning back wisteria. My dream was a stone house, nestling in the southern sunshine, surrounded by woods and trees, with a river at the bottom of the garden. I wouldn’t know a soul and I’d be totally alone, at the start of a new adventure – just me and Basil. Strangely, despite the loneliness I felt in Paris, I did not imagine anyone else in my isolated farmhouse. Where was William in this fantasy? Why was he not there with me in Gascony or Provence?

  * * *

  It was May, and William and I had been invited to a party. Fabrice was in tow. The evening was balmy, and Fabrice’s shirt was unbuttoned, his medallion twinkling in the sunlight through a nest of hair. We were invited by a friend of a friend to an unknown house in Paris. Our journey led us to a smart house in the western suburbs of Paris, a flight of white stone steps leading to a grand doorway. Standing at the open door were two gorgeous French girls in their mid-twenties. These were the type of girls that always made me anxious I might not be enough for William. After all, he couldn’t be that keen on me. He didn’t want to live with me and was flat-hunting with Fabrice. How much clearer a message could he send than this? Fabrice was, after all, the man repudiated to have once wiped his own arse with his girlfriend’s towel because he couldn’t find any toilet paper. Was he really a better bet than me?

  The girls fluttered at the door in pale-green and pink dresses, their long dark hair blowing in the evening breeze. All the French girls I knew had long dark hair and slender figures. I was slim, for I barely weighed seven stone due to lack of food in the week, but I’d had my naturally blonde hair cropped short like a boy. Jessica had always promised that short hair would suit me and show off that long, Modigliani-style neck she claimed I’d inherited – but faced with these two giggling long-haired girls tossing their manes, I wondered if in comparison I didn’t look butch.

  William and Fabrice embraced the girls as if they’d known each other all their lives. French girls were rarely friendly to an unknown woman in a skimpy dress, and they eyed me up and down, briefly proffering cold make-up clad cheeks before turning back to the men. It was the old lift scene back at work. There were men on the radar, so naturally the two alpha males were shunted into the limelight, and the girls grew flighty around them.

  One girl had draped herself around William’s neck.

  ‘Comment ça va? Depuis le temps?’ she quivered.

  It was an odd thing to ask, considering they’d never met. Why would she ask how he’d been keeping? William hadn’t mentioned her before.

  ‘You know each other?’ I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

  ‘Mais oui,’ she tittered, before William could reply, ‘on s’est rencontré mercredi.’

  They had met the previous Wednesday. Wednesday was a weeknight and thus a night when William should have been home playing the role of dutiful son and eating his plate of sloppy veal out in the suburbs with Maman and Papa. Clearly not what a twenty-seven-year-old man worth his salt did during the week when there was a perfectly good party in the offing. Perhaps his parents had never demanded he stayed home. It was possible that Philip and William had been gadding about town for months now, meeting girls like this and sleeping with them for all I knew. How naive and idiotic could I have been?

  To think that last Wednesday night, while I’d sat home alone, William had been here! In this house! With this long-haired flirtatious siren! No wonder she was hanging round his neck like a bauble on a Christmas tree. For all I knew they may already have slept together. With Fabrice watching. Participating! Who was this man I was dating? I was beyond anger. I pushed past and fought my way into the house in search of a drink.

  The party resembled any of a thousand others held in and around Paris that night. All the French women smoked, their hands conveniently occupied with this easy accessory. The men rolled joints or picked at the buffet table. Once again, I was the exception – the English girl who couldn’t say much and understood even less. The usual English tracks were playing: Fine Young Cannibals ‘She drives me crazy’, REM’s ‘Losing my Religion’, and by the time I’d stopped crying, Simply Red’s ‘If you don’t know me by now’.

  There was a table laden high with bottles of drink and food. The French managed a sense of etiquette even at a student party. Unlike in the UK, it was normal practice not to get blathered and then throw up over the balcony, but to hold one’s liquor and to eat a decent meal too. There was potato salad, rice salad, tomato salad, trays of charcuterie, and home-made quiche, made by the girl currently whispering into William’s ear, whose parents owned the house. We were the only guests not to have brought a chocolate cake fait maison or a savoury dish. It was as if each of these girls was trying to lay out her stake and prove what a fabulous housewife she would make one day. They fussed with napkins and cleared away empty dishes, rifling the cupboards for the right dessert dish. I’d never seen a French student throw up, although they all drank, and smoked weed. It was because of all this endless preparation of food. And because they were careful never to binge drink on an empty stomach. It was also a given that they all drove home on the Périphérique afterwards at 100 kilometres an hour. No-one seemed to worry about drink-driving.

  Depeche Mode were playing now, the volume to ‘Personal Jesus’ cranked up. Fabrice was dancing in the centre of the floor, opening the buttons of his shirt as he limboed around a shrieking girl. I couldn’t tell what anyone was saying, the music was so loud, and anyway, no-one bothered to talk to me. I was William’s girlfriend, so the other men couldn’t flirt according to etiquette, and the girls were not interested in a moody English woman in the corner with a sulky face and shorn locks.

  I glared at William as the girl with the long dark hair brought him a plastic plate of quiche and salad and fussed around him as if she’d personally puffed the air into the pastry for him. I might as well not have been in the room.

  ‘You didn’t say you came here on Wednesday,’ I said, as soon as we were alone.

  ‘Quoi? Je n’entends pas. The music is too loud. Speak up.’

  ‘YOU DIDN’T SAY YOU CAME TO A PARTY HERE ON WEDNESDAY.’

  He shrugged and carried on eating.

  ‘Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I invited? I could have come. I was on my own.’

  ‘There wasn’t time. Fabrice called. Last-minute thing.’

  It was then I knew for certain we had reached the end of our journey. It was over between us. It had been a strange first year, coming to Paris in search of one love, and then thinking I had found another, only to realise with certainty that whatever the future in Paris held for me, I was to face it alone.

  Epilogue

  The next morning is our last. I will next see William over twenty-one years later at a party in Gascony. He will travel from Lyon where he is living and not knowing what to say to one another, we will stand on my doorstep and kiss as if the years have not crept between us. By this time William will be a shadow of his former self, and that evening, I will learn why. We will speak of the years in between, sipping wine, in a stone house overlooking the Pyrenees; in a room filled with the friends I have made over those long and intervening years.

  Until this time we will live out our twenties and our thirties apart and marry different partners. I will become a mother myself, and William will discover that, despite our often-careless and un-protected love-making, the reason I have never fallen pregnant, is because he is unable to have children at all.

  By that time it will no longer be possible for him to meet my father or my brother.

  But we guess at none of these future heartaches or joys, as we wake that last Sunday morning, snatching our milk from the beaks of pigeons; boiling water in the only pan I own, and checking the cups for roaches.

&
nbsp; I am still upset about William’s Wednesday escapade to a party without me.

  More than this, there is the ring of disappointment that he has not once told me he loves me. With these words I might have been able to forgive him, choosing to believe that the party was a one-off; or accepted his wish to live with his friend, knowing that one day there might be some hope for our relationship.

  But on that last morning together he talks of his week and says all the many things it is possible to say to a lover over coffee, when you are determined not to mention the word love.

  After breakfast, he takes me into his arms and kisses me. Twenty-one years later I will learn that this is the moment when he will first suspect his true feelings, but I am far from guessing the truth. In my mind I’ve flown away; drawn a line through him and crossed him out.

  We make love on the camp bed, and then, because of its bone-snapping habit of folding in two at inappropriate moments, we pull down the quilt and slip to the floor, falling onto a carpet of sunflower seeds.

  When the knock at the door sounds, we are in a still and contemplative hiatus.

  There are never visitors to my house on a Sunday morning. It is our precious time together.

  None of my friends would call so unexpectedly.

  William jumps up and drags on his clothes.

  It’s Fabrice.

  ‘He wants to know if I can come out to play squash.’

  I smile. I’m not even angry.

  William hunts for his wallet and keys, we agree to meet later that evening.

  We are invited to eat curry at the house of an American called Joyce. Olivia will be there, and for once, William has agreed to join us. Although it is a Sunday night.

  ‘A ce soir.’

  ‘See you at eight. 27, rue Guénigaud. Don’t be late.’

  He will not come, and I will end our relationship in anger; a whisper in my heart telling me that there are new lives waiting for me somewhere over the slate-grey rooftops of Paris.