The White Room

by Craig Higginson

  Another woman might have gone up to the couple and introduced herself. She might have acted above this revelation. But Hannah is not that woman. She wishes she had never entertained the thought of Pierre, or written about him, let alone arranged to meet. What was she thinking? That Pierre would still be interested in her after all this time? She understands now that he was only being friendly, perhaps aggressively friendly. Maybe all he wants is to flaunt his glamorous wife.

  As the light thickens, and all the crows come home to roost, Hannah suddenly remembers the play she has written. It runs ahead of them like a long country road, and she sees every turning in it – every bush, every flower, every leaf. She understands only now that she has made a terrible, terrible mistake – not only in writing the play, but in inviting Pierre to come here tonight.

  * * *

  She withdraws deeper into the shadows as the rest of the audience fades into insignificance, and the world of the play, with hideous alacrity, starts to rearrange itself around him.

  ACT ONE

  THE PASSIVE

  Paris

  I

  Pierre

  The first thing Pierre notices about the girl is her dress, which is bright as a daffodil in the cobbled square. Everything around them is the colour of winter, of iron and stone, but she is the beginning of a new season and in that moment she is made only of light.

  * * *

  A week later, on an impulse, he decides to follow her after his English lesson. He has learned by now that she is the new teacher and that she is living in the eighth arrondissement. Her name is Hannah Meade, which sounds to him like England itself. As soon as he hears her name, he sees wooded hills and country lanes and stone pubs arranged picturesquely along canals.

  Pierre has always longed to go to England. The closest he has come is through the language, but this has turned him away at every opportunity. Each opening has only ever revealed itself to be another cul-de-sac. But this new teacher, this Hannah Meade, she will show him the way. Her language, like a silver thread, will lead him out of the labyrinth and into the green, wet light of England.

  This is what he tells himself, but still he hangs back, not yet daring to speak.

  * * *

  Today Hannah has a pale blue scarf thrown over one shoulder of her tweed coat. She steps out through the high wooden doors that lead to the courtyard and the language school and slips back into the human flow, one step behind an old man with a studious-looking dachshund. Pierre follows her into the Métro at La Bastille.

  * * *

  The city still feels foreign to Pierre. Sometimes he imagines he is in a movie, but he finds he hasn’t yet been told which role to play. He likes the way he can become almost anyone in Paris. Yet he also hates to be alone. Only last weekend, he went to the protests at La Bastille about the new war in Iraq – not for political reasons but so that he could bump up against other people, feel their proximity, find amongst all those unknown faces a smile that was intended for him. Soon he found himself looking for the new English teacher, but every face only became another opportunity for disappointment.

  That the English girl is against this latest war Pierre takes for granted. For him, she embodies everything that is best about England. Not the men who came to his continent in their red jackets and white horses, pointing importantly towards the horizons, but those who stayed at home in their knitted jumpers and wrote letters of outraged decency to the press.

  * * *

  The English girl finds a place for herself on the edge of the seat – the rest of which has been taken up by a very large African woman who wears a printed green and orange floral dress. The woman is eating corn on the cob with great patience and relish, sucking at the buttery saltiness and not missing a single pip. She looks relaxed in a way that Pierre, and he hopes the new English teacher, never has been – at least in Paris.

  He is not surprised to see the girl soon hide herself inside a book, her fine aristocratic features softening into the words on the page, moving and faintly glowing – and then distorting abruptly with grief. Pierre has to avert his gaze when the girl, shortly before she gets off at Concorde, looks up and stares around her as if the book is the reality and the train the dream.

  * * *

  Hannah Meade is without question the most beautiful woman Pierre has ever seen. Her pale gold hair is as fine and rough as silk, coiled and pinned tight, like a doll in a museum. He can’t recall when he last felt so ignited, so alive, and yet it is at this very instant that he feels he has ceased to exist. Those parts of him that remain are only there in order to get closer to her.

  Hannah

  When Hannah returns to her apartment, a fresh bunch of daffodils clasped in one hand, it is to find three messages on her phone. Two are from her mother and the other is from a private student, Monsieur Levi, who has been ill and is ‘confided’ to bed. Her mother tells her again that she has been trying to get hold of Hannah all week. It is exactly ten years since Oliver’s death, and her mother would no doubt like to talk about it. Hannah, however, knows she would not.

  II

  Pierre

  The next Saturday after Pierre’s lesson, he switches trains with Hannah at Concorde and they get off at Lamarck. It is not that he is choosing to follow her. It is more that he has not decided not to. They wait together for the lift, surrounded by the smell of stale urine. There is a homeless man at their feet drawing a picture of Sacré-Cœur with chalk. He has made a blue cloud against the blackened concrete to carry the cathedral, but no one even glances at it. Why would they when they are about to encounter the real thing in the world above them?

  * * *

  In the late afternoon light, Pierre finds it has recently rained. Hannah winds the silk scarf tighter around her neck – it is the same colour as her eyes – and ascends the stone steps to rue Caulaincourt. She crosses the road a few people ahead of him – and, walking much faster than the others, she heads up the thin cobbled street towards Montmartre.

  Outside Au Lapin Agile, she stops and unbuttons her coat and lights a cigarette. She sits and smokes on the low stone wall that surrounds the plot of spidery grapevines. A little white train for transporting retired overweight tourists comes towards them down the road, the sound of the Marseillaise pouring out of it. Pierre passes her close enough to smell her cigarette, his gaze fixed to the ground, but Hannah doesn’t seem to notice him.

  He comes to a halt at another homeless man further up the lane, who has a black spaniel bitch and three suckling puppies in a grey blanket at his feet. They make conversation – the man telling him the puppies are for sale for ten euros each – until the girl flicks away her cigarette and passes them on her way up the hill.

  * * *

  The sky is rippled a soft salmon pink when they reach the tourist shops. A weed cutter groans in the distance like a swarm of motorbikes and an electric harp picks up the soundtrack where the train left off, this time with the predictable strains of Edith Piaf.

  Hannah quickens her pace through the dense lanes until she reaches the cathedral and its chalky facade. On the steps, there are some long-haired young people playing drums, smoking hash, kissing, but she trots up the steps without a glance at them and only slows as she enters the echoing cavern of Sacré-Cœur. She finds a pew near the front and stares up at the huge Christ in the dome, his arms spread wide.

  The altar looks like it is made of gold and there is a single nun standing in front of it. The nun lifts her arms and starts to sing, like some insignificant angel, plain and devout, carrying a message far greater than herself. It looks for a while as if Hannah might obey the nun’s bidding and step up into heaven. When the nun lifts her arms again, the whole congregation in the cathedral breaks into song – everyone, that is, except for Hannah Meade, who looks so alone, sitting there all upright in her dark coat.

  III

  Hannah

  Hannah’s favourite café is Le Refuge. It stands above the stone stairs outside Lamarck-Caulaincourt.
She especially likes the small room at the back, with its red fake-leather seats, wood panelling and bookshelves. Sitting there is like being on a train from another era, setting off for some foreign land. There will be a man in a long coat and a fedora soon, and possibly a murder. But when she looks out the window, she sees the sunlit apartments opposite, with their window boxes and sliding doors and air of modernity, and the illusion is lost. Maybe this is why she tends to sit in the corner, facing the books, the glow from the window gilding the edges of everything with light.

  * * *

  Today she is not alone. A young man with dreadlocks is sitting across from her, pretending to read a book. He has large tender hands and a quiet impassioned look and reminds her of some animal – a deer, perhaps, testing the air, yet with a hungry look about him, as if his true nature still lies dormant.

  Hannah is always curious about what other people are reading and she has already observed that his novel is by Somerset Maugham, translated into French. She senses that he is trying to summon up the courage to speak to her, and although she is interested to hear what he might have to say she would prefer to be left alone. He no doubt thinks she is something she is not – a pretty blonde girl, stupid enough to believe his talk, lonely enough to need to talk to him in the first place. He doesn’t yet realise that she is exactly where she intends to be and that his life will be much better off without her.

  * * *

  Hannah has been living in Paris for several weeks, yet she has barely entered the city. She moves between her apartment block in rue Marcadet and the language school, where she has been working for over a month. She realised soon after she first moved to London that it doesn’t really matter which city you are living in. Most of the time you are in your own head, treading your usual thoughts, or otherwise reading a book, cooking, eating or working – then sleeping. Only occasionally has she ever looked up and thought – gosh, I’m living in London, I’m living in Paris. Although she has been to the occasional art gallery and museum, she has yet to visit a single street market or live event – like a music concert or a piece of theatre.

  So far, she has been getting by with her schoolgirl French – ordering a landline from the post office, telling the carpenter how high she wants her bookshelves – but otherwise she tends to avoid all speech. In her classes, she speaks only English, a language most of her students can hardly begin to access – which means they can hardly begin to access her.

  * * *

  I am sorry, the young man says, shortly after Hannah has received her second cup of coffee, but I do not want to disturb.

  Then don’t.

  She wants to tell him this, but instead she smiles blandly.

  She can see he has rehearsed this sentence in his head. What interests her, however, is that he already knows she’s English – or English-speaking, at least. Did he overhear her speaking to the waiter, or is it something she carries with her, this whiff of Englishness, of English – a language so far away from French?

  My name, it is Pierre.

  Have we met? she asks him, testing out the possibility of friendliness. She can hear at once that she doesn’t quite pull it off.

  No, but I know you.

  You do?

  She tosses her hair over her shoulder.

  Somehow, I doubt that.

  I saw you at Language Works. You were wearing a yellow dress.

  There is something hypnotic about this young man, a dreamy insistence that she can’t help being drawn to. She shakes her head and looks towards the familiar light of the window.

  You are a student there?

  I take the Saturday afternoon class.

  The coincidence strikes her as unlikely and she wonders whether he followed her here. She doesn’t like the idea of a Paris of coincidences. What she appreciates about the city is that she knows nothing about it and that it knows nothing about her. And she would like to keep things this way. She doesn’t want people finding their way into her favourite café.

  Is there something you need from me? she asks – in a tone that makes her sound more disinclined to help.

  It’s my lessons. I was wondering if you could teach —

  Not very well, I’m afraid.

  I mean – to teach me.

  I know what you think you mean, she tells him, she hopes not too unkindly. But you see I’m not taking on any more students at the moment.

  You aren’t?

  No – none at all.

  She is trying to make it sound as if she is busy, night and day, and in no need of money. Neither of these is true, but she has enough to get by, which is all she wants at the moment.

  Pierre is looking thrown. Perhaps he thought his rehearsed sentences would be enough to open her doors. But the poor boy has gravely misjudged her.

  I have been saving up.

  For English lessons? I thought you were already in the Saturday class.

  I mean, I have been saving up for lessons with you.

  With me?

  For extra lessons. With someone like you.

  Why don’t you speak to Mr Joffe? He’s forever looking for extra work.

  There’s another teacher at the language school with too much pale flesh and a slight squint who keeps pawing at her. She likes the notion of foisting this eager student onto him.

  All I ask is for once a week, Pierre persists.

  I’m sure Mr Joffe is flexible. You can get his number from the office.

  She smiles to conclude the exchange.

  * * *

  If Hannah had it her way, she wouldn’t teach at all. She likes the planning of lessons and the rehearsal of the different grammar points, but she’s not so interested in getting embroiled with the students themselves. Sometimes, when they have to make conversation – on such topics as ‘What unusual food have you eaten before?’ in order to practise the perfect tenses – she finds it difficult to breathe. She has to hold onto the edge of the desk as the ground tilts away from her, wanting to slide her and the room away, as if the earth is the table and everything else, the whole of Paris, is an elaborate accumulation of toys.

  * * *

  The young man, however, is still standing in front of her.

  Please, he says, I want to learn English from you.

  As much to get him away as anything else, she agrees to meet him next week on Wednesday, here at Le Refuge, at ten o’clock. She tells him she will test his proficiency and see if she might be able to help.

  Thank you, he says. That will be perfect.

  ‘Would’, she tells him, not ‘will’. We are still being hypothetical.

  IV

  Pierre

  Pierre’s bedroom back home is in the attic. From the window, he can see the lime trees below, huge and restless, and the River Saône. There are red squirrels in the lime trees and there are walnut and cherry trees in the front garden. An uneven brick wall marks the boundary of the property, and in the summer months the river beyond it lies wide and still. In winter, the water sometimes overflows its banks, and it can seem that the house is sitting on the edge of a large lake, floating.

  His father acquired the house when it was a shell and hadn’t been lived in for twenty years. The people they bought it from suggested they knock it down and start again, but Pierre’s mother liked the look of the house and wanted it – at least outwardly – to remain unchanged. The house has three levels and is made from thin faded terracotta bricks. There are wooden shutters that Pierre’s father paints bright blue every other year. Whenever anyone moves inside the house, it creaks like an old ship.

  Pierre’s father patched up the house almost single-handedly, redoing all the water pipes, the electric cables and the roof. This is probably why nothing has ever worked properly. When you turn on the kitchen sink, all the upstairs pipes shudder. The downstairs bath smells of rotten pond water. Yet Pierre loves the house – and his bedroom especially. This is in spite of the spiders in every corner and the single mottled bulb that swings whenever he walks
past it. The only problem is that his parents’ bedroom is directly below – the light fingering the floorboards, their love-making and bickering reaching him too easily and too often.

  During the week, the house was usually left to Pierre and his mother. His father worked as a lecturer in African Studies at a college in Dijon, and during term times he only came home for the weekends. As soon as he went away, the house became more frightening. His mother wandered about from room to room late at night, looking for something she had lost, while Pierre lay in bed and listened to her, following each movement and trying to decipher her mood. His mother’s moods were like the April weather – sunny and windy and rainy all in one day. The only safe place was Pierre’s bedroom, which his mother avoided because she disliked spiders.

  * * *

  Perhaps this is why Pierre settled on his attic room in Paris. The building overlooks spring-softened plane trees and a café where oysters and champagne are served. There is only space in his room for a narrow bed and a wooden desk where he keeps his sketchbooks and paints. Pinned along the sloped ceiling are neat watercolours of birds, of all the birds of Pouilly: kingfishers, bee-eaters, nightingales, ducks – and the hoopoe, which arrives occasionally in midsummer, all the way from Africa.

  At the bottom of the ladder to his room is a hallway and a bathroom that he shares with two girls who work at the GAP on rue Rivoli. His room has only one window above the bed, through which he can see the sky of Paris. At night, it is rarely possible to make out any stars. Since he was a boy, he has found it difficult to sleep at night. Because of his mother, he has always had to remain watchful and alert. In the dimness of his Paris room, he can only make out the silhouettes of the birds he likes to paint, but they are often enough to send him off to sleep. There is something so uplifting in the angle of a kingfisher’s beak, and that neat bullet shape that at any moment can launch itself back upriver – a thin line of electric blue crackling in its wake.