She did not see the odd look from a little whippet of a man with a greasy moustache who peered at her from behind the left-luggage counter. The few notes she carried were tucked neatly into her boots. Confused by the fact that he could not label her as a student, or a prostitute, he watched her numb fingers grapple with the centimes and the trunk that she passed over to him with a bright smile. He winked. Whoever she was, the man knew that with an innocent face like that, she would not last long in Paris.
And then Phyllis walked. Following her memory map, she headed back to the Left Bank, and knew that once she crossed Le Petit Pont, the Sorbonne would be only minutes away.
Rue des Écoles. Her breath stopped as she stared up at the ancient tomb of learning; a grey classical stone building guarded by statues that seemed to lean towards her. As her hand stroked the cold wall, she saw the original poor students of 1253 who, like her, would pass humbly through the courtyard and into its hallowed chambers.
Half an hour later and well past one o’clock, no one noticed the slight figure of a girl wander down in the darkness to the rush of the Seine, her pace dazed. The three years ahead of her were skipping through all the possibilities of Free Will. Her mother’s last letter played itself back to her:
My Darling Child,
How marvellous that your father has finally managed to finish your education. You will be charmed by Paris. Remember that whatever it is in the world you decide to do (and who you choose to do it with) you act in the knowledge of your own Free Will. Learn from my mistakes. I gave up my own Free Will long ago.
Mrs Alfred Orr.
Under the Pont St Michel whispered voices, a girl, a boy, a man, trailed into her consciousness. Three pairs of eyes watched as Phyllis felt the damp on the wooden bench and then sniffed a copy of Le Monde, fluffed up from reading that lay in the grass. She opened out the pages and spread them neatly across the bench. They stopped their fumblings to watch as she crept up to a laurel bush and then heard the splatter of liquid on leaves.
‘Do you want to join us in here?’ the girl yelled, her voice echoing round and out.
Like a rabbit Phyllis stopped her breathing dead.
‘Altogether warmer,’ the man growled and then let out a whisky cackle, as the girl and boy joined in.
‘Let me feel your warmth, little girl,’ the man called out before cackling again.
If Phyllis could have smelt the hot breath that slipped itself under the girl’s coat then she might have sensed the danger that crept around her, but sleep was ready to protect her. ‘What you cannot see,’ her mother had tapped on her nose when she was tiny, ‘cannot give you nightmares.’
After wrapping the pages of the newspaper around herself against the river wind, she curled on her left side, facing the water, her hands a bony pillow. As she slid into darkness, the numbness in her legs and in her arms, she imagined drowsily, was nothing compared to the agony Renoir’s beautiful model Danielle must have suffered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nabokov’s First Nymphet
‘I really starved in Paris, but I enjoyed it. That bit of poverty put money into perspective for me. I have never really wanted more than enough to keep me going and firmly expected a bedsitter to be my end.’
Leisure Painter, Spring, 1970
Studying at the Sorbonne was a great privilege for Phyllis, yet the stiff diploma that she received with a curtsey after three years of studying Philosophy and Byzantine Art should have been accompanied by a second one, that acknowledged the freefall experiences she had notched up outside her classes.
Paris was a wonderfully exciting place in the 1920s, and Phyllis gradually took full advantage of it. Paris was the city where Josephine Baker danced in La Revue Nègre wearing nothing but black feathers; it was the city where girls had discovered the suntan, the Vogue plucked eyebrow, the bob, Man Ray, red bow lips and the corset which, with her boyish figure, Phyllis surely didn’t need. Like all students she dabbled; in men and in art.
After twenty-one nights sheltered by the Pont St Michel, Phyllis had painful bruises on her shoulders. So far, no one had tried to rape her; grubby fingers had not grabbed at her English skin, but only because she was lucky. The other ‘outcasts’, as she called them, who hid in the bushes and slept on the benches, were a bizarre mixture of Russian immigrants, crippled war veterans and runaways. Riverlife diseases – tuberculosis, muggings and molestation – went on to claim many of them.
Occasionally, kindly strangers would cover the shivering girl with their unwanted copy of the day’s newspaper, which Phyllis remembered as ‘the warmest thing you can imagine’. The dates printed at the top of the copies of Le Monde were additionally useful: they helped her count down the days to the start of term at the Sorbonne.
Within her first week, Phyllis had pinpointed the cleanest museum lavatories from the Champs-Elysées to Montparnasse and had worked out when to stand outside the kitchens to Brasserie Lipp for their discarded trays of sauerkraut and sausages.
In the years to follow Phyllis would inherit two watches from her Mama and be presented with one by her employees, but she never bothered to wear one – she always guessed the right time. In Paris, just by sniffing the dampness, she could tell what time of day it was:
Hot water. Chocolat Chaud. Bread. Morning.
Tomatoes. Chicken. Gallettes. Lunch.
Fish. Garlic. Lamb. Tarte Tatin. Dinner.
‘You will never know,’ Phyllis once said, ‘how beautiful an old baguette dipped in a water fountain tastes until you have starved for ten days.’
The shame of being found sleeping rough woke Phyllis as early as five o’clock in the morning, when she would fold her newspaper over another dormant soul before defrosting her blood with a sharp walk to the Gare du Nord.
Somehow, Phyllis managed to manoeuvre the morose young man who had relieved the winking nightshift man into releasing her trunk so that she might retrieve her water colours and sketchpad, and then put it back. When she had first asked if he would allow this without her paying twice, the young man had lolled his tongue around his mouth.
‘What can you offer me if I let you off?’
‘Let me draw your likeness.’
Despite his ugly flat forehead and red bulbous chin that Phyllis presumed had once been the breeding ground for many spots, the proposal seemed to flatter him.
‘Please be my guest,’ he smirked.
Her pen worked swiftly around his features and softened his disjointed face.
‘I like it. That’s me, all right! I can see the resemblance. Thank you.’
Her talent discovered, his interest in what might lurk under that dark coat of hers subsided as awe took over.
‘If I bring a photograph of my mother in tomorrow, can you do a portrait of her, too?’
‘Of course.’
And that little scene was all part of Phyllis’s great plan, the one she had carefully constructed so she might avoid Tony until her classes at the Sorbonne had begun. If a few sketches and paintings could bring in some pocket money, she might be able to save enough to rent a room. Then she could turn to Tony and say: ‘Thank you so much for your kind offer to sleep on your floor, but you see I already have a place of my own.’
Theirs was often a tense relationship; an unspoken rivalry pulled and pushed Phyllis towards and then away from the brother she had fought so hard to protect as a young child.
At the age of six, Phyllis had fallen ill with scarlet fever during a family holiday in Hungary. Sandor dismissed the doctor’s orders that his daughter be kept in isolation and inevitably the fever passed to Tony, a sickly child who was affected so badly that doctors told Sandor and Bella not to expect him to live.
The affection Phyllis openly showed her brother was never diluted. After all, they were united in a loyal sibling bond; no one else could have ever understood the unsettling and complex nature of growing up with their quarrelsome, emotionally indiscreet parents. Phyllis was not to know that on hearing that his step
daughter had, as Alfred would say, ‘gotten to Paris on her lonesome,’ he had offered to pay for her tuition at the Slade.
According to Bella, Tony had then lost his temper, reminding her strongly of Sandor as she watched him rave and bang his fist on the table. ‘Why pay for Phyllis? It’s not fair! I don’t want her beating me at that too.’
Yet in Paris, Tony appeared before Phyllis as the perfect Romantic hero; handsome with brooding, Bohemian looks. It was as much as she could do to ride along on his coat-tails. If she ever felt resentment, then Phyllis guarded it well, as she witnessed her precocious brother being swallowed up in the rarefied world of art.
Phyllis’s own romantic prospects were nil, yet this time, her family were not to blame. Years before other young women walked en masse into university lecture halls, never mind tour Europe unchaperoned, Phyllis behaved and was treated very much like a boy. She never dreamed of acquiring a villa in Monte Carlo, with glass ceilings, silk carpets, Pekinese dogs, brooches by Boucheron, furs from Reville, chiffon chemises, a tennis court – all the trappings of modern wealth that might be hers if only she could meet the right man. Sandor and Bella never bolstered their only daughter’s marriage prospects, probably because they were too tangled up in their own desperate problems. So Phyllis found herself in the unusual position of following her whims, unfettered by any parental pressures to seek out the joys of marriage and children.
It may have been the 1920s but Paris society was squeezing into its literary and artistic élite only a select few females like Colette and the grande dame of Rue Cambon, Coco Chanel. Like clever cats they arched their backs and drew attention to their clever selves. The bons mots, the cigarette-holders, the sharp red tongues, the cocktails disappearing as they matched their male counterparts glass for glass.
Swept along on the Left Bank tide, Phyllis attracted some attention with her brilliant eyes, her effortless humour and sharp observations. They let her join in their drunken discussions, the louche, the snide, the slovenly exhibitionists who fell asleep among their wine stains and cheated their models out of payment, the revolutionaries too mean to purchase a cup of coffee, the opium-fuelled writers, whose words stopped flowing once they felt the floor beneath them. Her one mistake, the one thing that kept her from becoming an insider, was that she failed to swoon and pay homage at the feet of the artistic gods. Sycophancy made Phyllis Gross sick. The truth never failed to scurry from her lips.
As an artist, the reception she received from peers and critics never rose in temperature above lukewarm – maybe because she was a woman. Hundreds, if not thousands, of her own bright paintings and sketches were sold in her lifetime, yet art critics defined her talents as modest. To be described as moderate in anything, to be middling or mediocre would have secretly crushed her – it just was not her style.
By now Tony had returned to his room in the Rue des Cannettes and was evidently preoccupied:
I had become friendly with a little scullerymaid who when she came to my room was so tired, the poor thing, that she just rolled over on my bed and went fast asleep. She lived in a fantasy world of her own. She had a boyfriend who had once slit her cheek with his knife (she had a scar) and promised her another scar and a wound for anybody who interfered in her life.
As usual with the Gross family, Tony had skimmed the telegram from his sister announcing her arrival in Paris and promptly forgot about it. It was only after Dick Pearsall had made some remark while picking through oysters at his birthday lunch at Brasserie Bofinger, and said ‘When is your sister visiting next?’ that Tony had a jolt of conscience. The stained-glass windows Dick said had reminded him of Phyllis and the fainting incident in Notre Dame. The next morning Tony sent a telegram off to his mother.
How much simpler family life might be today if telegrams, the one-liners that cut out the waffle, the elongated discussions and arguments, were still used. For Bella and Sandor and Tony and Phyllis, telegrams elegantly sustained what were already strained relationships. Letters, after all, required effort and time and love. Telegrams simply called for money, brevity and wit.
WHERE IS PHYLLIS?
IN PARIS SILLY WITH YOU.
NOWHERE TO BE SEEN.
LUCKY BOY.
Her presence undetected, Phyllis geared herself up for a smart new term at the Sorbonne. Even though she had spent a month sleeping rough, it would be another few weeks before she was able to afford to rent a room, and she was anxious about her dishevelled appearance. At ten o’clock on 1 October, as Phyllis filed in with the other students for her first lecture, she ducked past the enrolment queue and made straight for the ladies’ lavatories.
As an experienced cleaner of toilets, she inspected what she could see was not half a bad job. Above the sink, a huge mirror reflected a wind-burnt nose, bright white eyes, with grooves of charred black below, and brown chapped lips. Pauper cheeks stretched over the hollows of her skull. Try as she might, her fingers could not fork through her knotted plait, which she did her best to tie away from her face.
The brown tiles radiated warmth through to her toes. The water that ran from the taps smelt rank but at least it was hot. She pummelled the hard soap to work up a lather for her face. Splash after splash, the first water that had touched her face since she had arrived from England suddenly made her feel filthy dirty – as if she might never get clean again.
The thought that really tickled her as she peeled off her coat, unlaced her sodden shoes, tore off her navy-blue cardigan, her blue blouse, her petticoat, her black woollen tights that covered a multitude of bruises, her knickers and her vest, was that she might actually smell terrible. All the matrons and nannies who had briskly flannelled her down over the years in a furious effort to purify her skin (and her behaviour), would have shuddered at her present repulsive state.
Her rib bones, she noted, that had previously made do with a slither of skin to cover them, were bursting through to harden her body. She scrubbed at the mottled flesh. Tweaking her thighs Phyllis deduced that one week remained before her legs would be too weak to walk. The passionkillers, as her grandmother called Phyllis’s sturdy maroon convent knickers, which had kept her skinny behind from getting chilled, were wrung out under the hot tap. Like all institution radiators, the one Phyllis draped her knickers over were furnace hot and guaranteed to leave scorch-marks. No one would pinch those.
‘Do not forget your knickers. Do not forget your knickers,’ Phyllis chanted to herself half an hour later as she trailed after the other students who buzzed into the echoing vaults of the lecture room, carrying pencils and notepads. Long woollen scarves dangled down their blazered backs, and as she counted fifty heads she smiled at the shiny hair and the expectant laughter.
How new.
How innocent they all looked.
But as she pulled out a pencil and a few sheets of paper scrounged from the left-luggage boy, she realised that everyone knew someone.
In those precious hours that ran into weeks, when bearded lecturers such as André Diehl took their students on flights of Byzantine fancy – to soar over Constantinople, examine the treasures of Sophia and marvel at Iznik tiles – Phyllis let herself be released from her tired body and experience a heady thrill more than offsetting cold, dirt, hunger, soaked-through rags and cardboard shoes.
Philosophy swept through her mind, scooping up her imagination and leading it into broader stretches of open land that she never knew existed.
The Good, the Beautiful, the True: which is the most valuable? Discuss.
Try replacing even one word of Hamlet. There is no alternative.
As if there was a fire and someone had shouted, ‘Appelez les pompiers,’ the students scurried off in every direction after lectures; each one seeking refuge in a café. Still twisting the words just heard into shapes in her head, Phyllis would make her way across the Pont au Change and up Rue de Rivoli to the Bibliothèque Nationale. While the other students gobbled lunch, she devoured the heavy, mite-ridden books, that almost fell upon h
er as she levered them down from the dusty shelves. The works of Tolstoy, Marx, Proust, Molière, Gide and Homer, in French, in German and in English, kept her body motionless and her mind running. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she realised how precious her time was at the Sorbonne, and gave full rein to her reading addiction.
During one lecture on the use of religious iconography, the skin on her arms prickled under a shaft of light that cut in through the window, leaving a celestial glow on the wooden floors. In her mind she floated outside to the courtyard and sat on the steps underneath the Eglise de la Sorbonne clock, quick fine lines appearing on her paper, and a likeness of the building springing up on the page.
As soon as the lecture ended, Phyllis ran out to fulfil her fantasy. Squinting into the very soul of the building, she barely noticed the woman who tapped her first on the shoulder and then offered to buy the drawing.
‘Is that for sale?’
Phyllis jumped. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I want to buy it for my husband. He spends his life here, so why not remind him of it some more?’
The air puffed white as the woman laughed and her freckles disappeared as she wrinkled her nose. A Dutch face. Distracted by her red hair, expensively bobbed and tucked under a green velvet hat, the flap of her ten-franc note startled Phyllis.
‘I am so sorry, Madame, but I don’t have any change on me. I know that is what all artists say to buyers, but it is true.’
‘Why would you want to undersell yourself? Your eye is pretty accurate. I shall wait here beside you until you are finished.’
The woman hugged her knees as she chattered. In the remaining minutes of pen-strokes, before Phyllis handed over the sketch, she had enquired as to her background. ‘Ah. You are English. May I ask you something?’
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