by Rose Tremain
‘What the hell . . .?’ I said.
Joe said: ‘Sorry about this. Does the hotel have a doctor? Could you go and phone?’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said vaguely. ‘She’s just having her baby.’
‘Having her what?’ I said stupidly.
‘She’ll be fine,’ said Joe. ‘But I guess we ought to get somebody. If you could . . .’
I wrapped a blanket round me and went up to the hotel foyer, which was silent and dark. A tray of malted milk cups had been left on the reception desk. I put on a couple of lights and reached for the phone, then put it down again because I didn’t know what to dial. Was I meant to call the emergency services or wake the manager, or what? When my wife was about to have Daniel, we just went calmly to the hospital in a minicab . . .
I saw a packet of fags lodged on the hotel switchboard and I took one of these and lit it and tried to decide what I was supposed to do. Memories of the birth of Daniel kept coming to me and distracting me from the here and now. I thought about the moment when the surgical mask had been tied round my face and the way my wife gripped my hand when her contractions came and how her hair got damp and stuck to her head. And then I remembered the doctor and nurses suddenly scurrying about and doing things, like there was an unexpected emergency and I said: ‘What’s happening? Is everything OK?’ and they said, ‘Yes. Everything’s fine. Everything’s under control.’ And then Daniel came out. He was covered in blood and a sort of whitish gunge. He was wrapped in a bit of green material and laid on my wife’s breast and as I bent over them, I could hear a sound coming out from behind my surgical mask and I thought, fuck, I’m crying.
I lit a second cigarette. I still hadn’t telephoned anybody. When that second fag reached its end, I thought I would go and wake up the manager and let him decide what to do. I was stubbing out the ciggie when I saw one of the Dance-and-Dreamers coming down the stairs. He was an oldish guy with a bald head and a tiny little crown of fluffy hair going round it. He was wearing a dinner jacket and in his hands he was carrying one of the prizes he’d won at the bingo game. It was a useless glittery box, made out of mosaic pieces.
He nodded to me. He looked rosy-cheeked and happy. He said: ‘Did you see those stars?’
And I said: ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did, sir.’ And then he went on down along the corridor, heading for the basement.
I was thinking, what on earth is that old geezer doing wandering about in his dinner jacket at four in the morning, when I heard someone calling my name. It was Rinaldo. He’d appeared from out of the kitchen area, wearing his chef’s whites and his chef’s hat. ‘Mordy,’ he said, ‘fantastico! Don’t you think?’ Under Rinaldo’s arms were two bottles of Vermouth.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What?’ But he was gone, also heading for the basement. And I thought, God Almighty, what’s going on in this bloody place? This is the weirdest night I’ve ever lived.
I picked up the telephone receiver again and was looking down the hotel listings for the manager’s number, when I heard more footsteps on the stairs. It was the manager himself. And he was carrying the huge arrangement of sunflowers that normally stood on a table on the first floor. It was so enormous he could barely hold it or see round it, so that some of the sunflowers looked as if they were growing out of his head.
I washed the smirk off my face. I said, ‘I was just about to wake you . . .’
‘Yes, Mordy,’ he said. ‘I should think you were!’
He bumped into me as he passed and a couple of golden petals fell on to my shoulder. I put down the phone and walked behind him, talking as I went, but the manager didn’t seem to be listening to me, so I just obediently followed where he led, which was back down the stairs to the basement and then into the snooker room. As we went in there, I thought, that guy Joe is going to kill me.
It was absolutely quiet in the snooker room. The girl was sitting up inside the two pushed-together sofas and in her arms was a baby, wrapped in a pillowcase. Joe, the husband, or boyfriend or whatever he was, stood behind her, with one arm round her shoulders, and both of them were smiling, like the birth had been really easy and nobody had panicked because there was no doctor and no pethidine and in fact no nothing. There were only the shabby sofa-bed with its barley-husk pillows and a single overhead light.
And then I saw that the Dance-and-Dreamer was on his knees on the dusty floor, offering up his bingo box to the couple and their baby. He didn’t seem to be minding about the dirt on his dinner jacket nor about the creak in his old knees. He looked flushed with happiness.
Rinaldo was kneeling, too. He’d put the bottles of Vermouth on the sofa and I saw him reach out to the baby in the pillowcase and lay his hands on it tenderly, just like he’d lay his hands on his pizza dough before he began to shape it. And there was something about all this that made me feel shivery and strange. I wrapped my blanket round me and went to my sofa and sat down.
Soon after that, more people started arriving in the snooker room. I lost count of them, but I think that just about every one of the Dance-and-Dreamers came tottering in – some dressed in their dancing finery, some just in their night clothes, two couples with their dogs which normally whimpered and yapped but which were quiet as could be – all bringing stuff for the couple and their child, and laying these things all around them so that the sofa-bed disappeared under a mound of peculiar presents: washbags, clothes brushes, bed jackets, bars of hotel soap, shoe-cleaning kit, paperback novels, half-finished knitting, satin coat-hangers and tins of Complan.
After a long time, I opened my mouth to say: ‘Will someone please tell me what is going on?’ But these words didn’t come out. Nothing came out. I wasn’t capable of speech. Because what I felt inside was a horrible feeling of loneliness and misery. I was the only person in that massively crowded room who had no gift. I was apart from everyone, wrapped in my blanket, all alone in my corner, while everybody else was in a happy sort of hugging-and-kissing mood, and the bottles of Vermouth were being opened and passed around. I thought, there’s a party going on – a surprise party – and I’m missing it, just like I seemed to have missed out on all the important things in life.
Then I remembered my oyster shell. I’d sworn I’d never part with it. It had been intended for my son Daniel and no one else. But now I got it out and polished it up. I wormed my way through the big throng of people. I laid the shell down on the girl’s pillow, and I saw everyone nod approvingly and the girl swivelled her head and looked up at me. And her face softened into a fantastic smile. The happiness and relief I experienced when that smile came were huge. And I felt Joe’s hand laid gently on my shoulder. ‘Grab a tot of Vermouth, Mordy,’ he said and held out the shining bottle.
The Over-Ride
When Stefan Moutier was a child, he was forbidden by his mother to sit on the stairs.
Madame Moutier was the concierge of an expensive building in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris and she would remind her son: ‘The stairs are not ours. They are the residents’ territory and you shouldn’t be there.’
But Stefan had noticed other things on the stairs which looked as if they shouldn’t have been there: cats sleeping; bags of garbage left out. And so he disobeyed his mother. He decided to become as silent as a cat, as shapeless as a bag of garbage. That way, the residents would walk right by him and not notice him.
The most famous residents of the building were Guido and Claudette Albi. Madame Moutier boasted about them to the concierges of other buildings in the area: ‘The Albis, you know, the world-famous musicians.’
But these other concierges often said: ‘Yes, Madame Moutier. But beware. Artists are trouble. In the end, trouble will come.’
But trouble did not come for a long time. What came, all through Stefan Moutier’s childhood and adolescence, was music. And this was why he sat crouched on the stairs. He was listening to the tides of Mozart and Haydn, of Brahms and Bruch, of Beethoven and Schubert, of
Debussy and Ravel that came flooding out of the Albis’ apartment. And when he grew up, married his childhood sweetheart, Monique, and left the building, he missed the Albis’ music. In the night, while Monique slept beside him, he would often remember it and think, the staircase to the fifth floor was a fabulous place to be.
It wasn’t that he was musically talented himself. He had no aspirations to be good at anything like that, and what he wanted from life, apart from Monique, he wasn’t really able to say.
He went to work for GDF, the national gas company. He trained as a gas fitter and began to earn the kind of salary people told him was ‘decent’. He considered himself fortunate.
He liked the fact that he wore overalls to work. This meant that he could save his own clothes for Sundays, when he and Monique would go and have lunch with Madame Moutier. He was a dark, good-looking young man and he enjoyed looking smart.
Often, during those Sunday lunches, he would ask his mother if the Albis were home and felt comfortable when she said they were. Frequently, however, the Albis were in New York or Chicago or Salzburg or Adelaide. Stefan would remember all the times he’d stowed their tan-and-green luggage into the boot of the chauffeured car and the way Guido Albi would put a scrunched-up piece of blue paper into his palm – a fifty-franc note. But in all the years he’d sat on the stairs, the Albis had never seen him there. They didn’t know he’d ever heard them play a single note.
Trouble came to Stefan Moutier before it came to the Albis.
He and Monique were driving down the avenue de Clichy late one Saturday night, when a garbage collection truck pulled out in front of them. Monique was thrown through the window of Stefan’s new Peugeot into the maw of the truck.
Stefan got out of the car and stood in the road. He thought he was elsewhere and dreaming. He thought he was going to wake up in his bed with Monique beside him, so he just stayed still, waiting for this to happen. But it didn’t happen. And from that moment, when Monique’s life was thrown away, Stefan was stuck in a nightmare from which there appeared to be no exit.
The gas company were enlightened employers. They had to be because gas, after all, was a lethal product and a man who has seen his wife die in a garbage truck will need time to recover before he can be trusted with it again.
They gave Stefan Moutier a month’s paid leave of absence. His colleagues held a whip-round for a large funeral tribute in the shape of an M and then they said to him: ‘Stefan, nobody is capable of getting over something like this on his own. You have to have help.’
They started taking him to bars in the evenings and making sure he was well and truly drunk by the time they saw him home. He drank a variety of things: beer, pastis, vodka, cognac, whisky, rum. He admitted to Madame Moutier: ‘I don’t like the taste of any of them, except the beer, but I like what they do to me: they let me escape from the nightmare for a few hours.’
‘All right,’ said Madame Moutier, ‘but take care. Your father was a drinker and couldn’t stop once he’d started. Don’t get so dependent on it that you won’t be able to quit.’
When the month was gone, Stefan put on his overalls and returned to work.
The area manager took him aside on his first morning back. ‘We hope you will be able to continue in this job, Stefan,’ he said. ‘But I must inform you we will be monitoring you. It’s nothing personal. Just the safety measures we always apply in circumstances like this.’
Stefan wanted to say: ‘There are no other “circumstances like these”! This is worse than anything ever experienced by anyone working for this company!’ But he stayed silent. He didn’t want to be kicked out of his job.
But then he found he couldn’t do the job any more. His hands shook. His vision, which had always been sharp, became unreliable. One minute he would be working on a boiler component and the next he’d be staring at nothing – at a terrifying void in front of his eyes.
He tried to conceal these things. A shot of alcohol at midday seemed to steady him. But now fear had crept into his nightmare, a fear so profound there were days when Stefan had to call in sick because he just couldn’t cope with the idea of work.
It was on one of these days, while he lay alone in his bed, that he switched on the radio and heard some music that he recognised. He couldn’t name it. He thought it might have been by Schubert. All he knew was that it was one of the pieces he used to listen to on the stairs outside the Albis’ apartment.
And it also brought him instantly to a decision: he couldn’t work as a gas fitter any more. He was too afraid of what he might do, the mistakes he might make. He would give in his notice to the gas company. He would leave the apartment he had shared with Monique and which now seemed chilly and full of shadows, and return to his mother. And when the distortions of vision came, when the nightmare was at its darkest, he would pray that the Albis weren’t away in New York or Adelaide, but were there on the fifth floor, playing their music behind the closed apartment doors, and then he would sit on the stairs and listen.
Madame Moutier said: ‘It’s all very well, Stefan, but what are you going to do with yourself all day?’
Stefan reminded his mother that there were a hundred small tasks he could usefully do in the building – from carrying down luggage, to changing light bulbs, to cleaning windows.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘but I can’t spare you much money. You’ll have to rely on tips. And don’t spend them on drink, or you’ll have nothing.’
He had nothing. Nothing was exactly what he had. No wife. No job. No steady state of belonging in the world. He was alive, that was all. He could get plastered and remember what it was to laugh at a stupid joke, to feel affection towards his old friends and towards a particular café or bar. But beyond this he was as good as dead. Days and weeks and then months passed, and they seemed to go on ahead of him, or at a different pace, or somewhere else, leaving him behind.
Only once in a while did he get the feeling that he was waiting for something more to happen.
It was during this time that Guido Albi fell in love with a young Chinese cellist called Jenni Chen.
From behind the door of the Albis’ apartment now came the sound of Claudette Albi’s hysterical crying and the breaking of crockery and glass.
‘You see, Madame Moutier,’ said the neighbourhood concierges, ‘disruption and trouble. Exactly as we predicted.’
And it was true: the whole building could hear the weeping of Claudette and the furious shouting of Guido. Not only the building. These noises could be heard right across the courtyard and by the optometrist on the opposite side of the street.
The fourth-floor residents came down to the concierge’s rooms and declared: ‘We can’t sleep, Madame Moutier. Our lives are being totally disrupted. Just because they’re famous doesn’t give them licence to disturb the whole of the 8th arrondissement.’
‘I agree,’ said Madame Moutier, ‘but what can I do?’
‘You must talk to them,’ said the residents of the fourth floor. ‘You must ask them really and truly, to be quiet.’
But then, suddenly, quietness fell.
Stefan helped to stow all Guido Albi’s green-and-tan luggage into the chauffeured car and he was driven away. Before he left, he gave Madame Moutier a handsome tip and apologised for the disturbance he’d caused. He said he was very sad about everything, but the apartment belonged to Claudette now and he wouldn’t be coming back.
Madame Moutier looked at the stash of notes she’d been given and counted them, and gave 200 francs to Stefan. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘And we’ll have some peace now.’
But Stefan understood that, although no sound came from the fifth-floor flat, ‘peace’ wasn’t a word that anyone should be using. He knew what was really happening to Claudette Albi up there alone. She had been Guido Albi’s wife for seventeen years. Jenni Chen was twenty-four and Claudette was forty-five. She was entering a nightmare from which there was no exit.
A year passed.
Stefan�
��s drinking became so heavy, Madame Moutier threatened to throw him out if he didn’t get a grip on himself. She knew he stole money from her purse when he went on his sprees. She also knew that whenever the residents saw him reeling home drunk, they were shocked and disgusted, and that he was putting her own future as concierge of the building in danger.
And she knew something else. Stefan sometimes reverted to doing what he had been forbidden to do as a boy: he sat on the stairs outside the Albis’ apartment.
But he didn’t care. He wasn’t listening to Schubert or Brahms. He was just waiting for the day when Claudette would start playing the piano again. He rested his back against the iron banisters. Memories of his childhood came and went. The stairwell grew dark. Sometimes, he fell into a deep sleep.
The winter was unusually cold. Stefan told his mother that he stayed in the bars and cafés to keep warm, but she knew better. She understood now that her livelihood was definitely in jeopardy. Everything she’d worked for – on her own for all these years – was just being pissed away down the toilet.
Then, one icy morning, Claudette Albi appeared at Madame Moutier’s door.
She’d wrapped herself in a black mohair shawl and her hair was wild.
She asked Madame Moutier if Stefan could come up to her flat. She said she was freezing to death up there because her boiler kept cutting out.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Madame Moutier, ‘Stefan doesn’t work for the gas company any more, Madame Albi. Not since the accident.’
‘I know,’ said Claudette. ‘That’s why I need him. I’ve run out of patience with the gas company. They’ve been round twice and this morning the boiler’s cold again. I want him to sort it out.’
Stefan was still in bed, sleeping off his hangover. He shaved and dressed as quickly as he could and went up the stairs to the fifth floor. He had never been inside the Albis’ apartment, never further than their little hallway to deliver flowers or crates of champagne or to collect luggage. He took with him his fitter’s tool kit, unused for more than a year.