Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

by Rumer Godden

  ‘You are very kind.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s not often we entertain Ondine, Patagon and I. Come.’ ‘And I was hooked like any silly fish,’ said Lise.

  ‘Your age?’ Vesoul’s Directrice had asked.

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘Religion?’

  ‘None.’

  The Directrice made no comment. A print of Lise’s index finger was taken. On the form she could read ‘Distinguishing marks,’ but there was no need to ask that question: both the officers’ eyes, trained to take in every detail, had already flickered over her face.

  ‘I wonder if she was in the Resistance,’ Father Louis was to say long afterwards to Marc when they had first noticed the scar in the Belle Source garden.

  ‘Would she be as old as that?’ asked Marc.

  ‘Somewhere near, I should think,’ said Father Louis, and ‘That scar must once have been deep. It has paled now,’ but any emotion, anger, distress, made it redden and stand out again. It was throbbing as Lise had stood before the desk and, ‘Yes, Madame, I have a distinguishing mark, I’m La Balafrée,’ and, with all the insolence she could muster – Lise could be vilely insolent – ‘Would you like me to tell you what we canaille call a scar?’ she had asked, and shot out the obscene word. ‘Oh, I was horrible – horrible,’ she told Soeur Marie Alcide.

  They had looked at her without a change of expression; the Directrice simply sounded the bell on her desk and said, ‘Next.’ If only I had known then, Lise thought afterwards, what it is to have pity.

  It had been a long afternoon. The Directrice and Sous-Directrice had already seen more than a dozen prisoners, some defiant, some hostile, some stunned with despair, some rude like Lise, all exhausted; a soul-destroying task but Lise had not a thought for the officers then – they seemed not women but ogres. She only knew she was cold to her bones, bruised with tiredness and frightened by the echoing silence, a silence that was unnerving after Sevenet, the Maison d’Arrêt, where she had been kept waiting in two years of suspense before her trial; Sevenet had been bad enough but talking, some independent life, was allowed. At Vesoul it seemed absolute silence was a rule. Oh well! thought Lise. I never want to talk again.

  After the supper was eaten in that silence, there were more orders before they were taken to their allotted cells.

  ‘Empty your handbag. We shall list the contents and give you a receipt. Your watch please.’

  On this morning of her release Lise had been given the watch back, but after all these years, would it go? There is no service to wind up prisoners’ watches but – what does it matter? – Lise had thought that first day of prison. If it stops, why bother? Life has stopped too.

  ‘Your jewellery,’ and the wardress said automatically, ‘You may keep your wedding ring.’

  ‘I have no wedding ring.’

  Aunt Millicent had, of course, believed she had. Patrice, to Lise’s surprise, had gone over to England with her to pay a duty visit to Aunt Millicent. ‘But why?’ Lise asked him afterwards.

  ‘As a matter of fact there was a possibility of our setting Milo up in London.’

  Lise remembered how out of place Patrice had looked in Greenhurst and had been amused to see how quickly Aunt Millicent had fallen under his charm and his power. He had already succeeded in getting Lise released from the Motor Transport Corps. ‘How?’ asked Lise.

  ‘I have a good many important people in my little hand,’ Patrice had said and laughed.

  Aunt Millicent had even given them her Rockingham tea-set as a wedding present. ‘At least we believed it was Rockingham. I believed things then,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘Where does your charming Patrice live?’ Aunt had asked.

  ‘I’m afraid in rather an expensive part of Paris, near the Opera, the Rue Duchesne.’ Patrice had been astute enough to buy the house when the war was at its worst. Lise did not tell Aunt Millicent that now she, Lise, lived there too – but at first she had thought it was only an apartment.

  It was over a nightclub – at least I thought it was a nightclub. Patrice had a private staircase; the flat was almost aggressively masculine with leather-covered sofas and chairs, colours in reds and brown, but there was an odd smell of scent and always, through the night, the sound of music – and there were the silk dressing-gowns, the exotic blue and yellow of the giant macaw in his cage; only Patrice could ever let Patagon out and seemed to take pleasure in his fierce pecks and beating wings. ‘You must feed him with raw meat but use a pair of tongs,’ warned Patrice. ‘Throw the hood over him when you clean his cage.’

  ‘I think I had a hood over my head too,’ said Lise.

  Aunt Millicent had stopped her allowance. ‘You won’t need anything now,’ Aunt Millicent had said. ‘Monsieur Ambard is obviously rich,’ and, ‘The Fanshawe girl who married that rather outré Frenchman …’ Lise could hear the talk in Greenhurst.

  ‘An exceedingly charming and well-to-do Frenchman.’ Aunt Millicent, Lise thought, would have defended her but, ‘What am I to do?’ Lise asked in Paris. ‘I must earn my living.’

  ‘On the contrary, you must live and that is what you are going to do – with me.’

  ‘But didn’t you guess what kind of man he was?’ asked Jacques.

  ‘I was as green as a lettuce leaf.’ True, Lise had been driving for two years, but usually with other girls. ‘I had never met anyone who was anyone until I was seconded to drive General Simpson. I was a good driver, but he was fatherly and, in those days, even at twenty, one could be young.’

  ‘There was one thing that did strike me,’ she told Maître Jouvin, ‘though I didn’t try and understand it then. Patrice looked so well fed – too well fed in a Paris that had been half-starved in those years of the Occupation; some people had gone through the winter living on turnips and a few potatoes, while he had the sleek satisfied look that comes from at least two good meals a day; when I saw that dinner I couldn’t believe my eyes – a whole fillet of beef; I didn’t even know what it was. In my ignorance I had supposed conditions in France were different from England, not that they were worse for most people. If I had stopped to work it out, it would have told me many things – how, for instance, Patrice and Emile got the money to move from the little house on the left bank to the Rue Duchesne – but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t, it was all such a whirlwind.’

  Until she met Patrice, Lise had not been to a fashionable restaurant or to any but a provincial theatre, never to opera, never to a nightclub. ‘I didn’t know men chose women’s clothes, dressed you like a model or a doll. Patrice gave me rings, jewellery, furs. I had Coco, a little French bulldog I adored – Patagon was wildly jealous. It was fun and I had never had any fun.’

  ‘And you were lovers?’

  ‘Of course,’ but to Soeur Marie Alcide she said, ‘Until Patrice, I had never been kissed on the mouth – or …’ She broke off but it was Lise, not the Sister who blushed. ‘I didn’t know you made love over and over again, not just once in the night but day-time, any time. I thought that was for whores. It didn’t occur to me I was a whore …’

  ‘Put on that gold lamé dress, chérie,’ said Patrice. ‘I think you must go downstairs tonight.’

  ‘Downstairs?’

  ‘You don’t think I live here as a tenant?’

  ‘You mean that … that club …’

  ‘Belongs to me, at least to me and Milo – and it isn’t exactly a club, chérie. You said you wanted to earn your living. Well, you are going to be a little more generous than that. You are going to earn mine …’

  ‘And it dawned on me,’ said Lise.

  ‘You mean … be like those girls?’ She was white with shock.

  ‘They are not “those girls”. They are the same as you. Many of them started up here, chérie – just like you.’

  Patrice knew how to hurt physically too, without leaving a mark; when Lise refused he had twisted her arms, holding them behind her back, and slapped her face until her ears rang. ‘But it wasn�
��t that which made me give in,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘I … I had thought he loved me – of course I didn’t know then what love was – for instance that pride has nothing to do with love and in that first hurt moment I didn’t care what I did – or thought I didn’t.’

  ‘I had never seen the rooms on the first floor,’ said Lise. ‘I had not even known they were there, a whole line of rooms, opulent and scented, with old Eugenia hobbling up and down.’ ‘Number four, Momone.’ ‘Number seven.’ Eugenia was the mother of Gaston, who kept the entrance and did everything else as well from morning to night. Eugenia spied through keyholes and cackled; she carried tales from spite and always had her hand held out. It was her duty to keep the rooms tidy, smooth each bed with her stick or put on a fresh cover as soon as it was vacant and, ‘Don’t let anyone be too long,’ Patrice would instruct, ‘As I was to instruct,’ said Lise. ‘They’re not here for the night, you know – unless they pay.’

  They usually paid. The Rue Duchesne was expensive. ‘Fifty dollars for one go!’ a young American expostulated and, ‘There are cheaper houses round the corner,’ Lise, when she became Madam Manager – Mère Maquerelle – used to say smoothly. ‘Besides, you have chosen Zoë, one of our best girls, so what did you expect?’

  ‘It was amazing how quickly I learnt,’ said Lise, ‘and soon how well I trained them, considering I was something of a fake myself – a whore who wouldn’t be a whore.’ Then she added, ‘The Rockingham tea-set was a fake too, as I found out when I tried to sell it. They would only take it in the flea-market, where I belonged too.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘Quite,’ said Lise firmly. ‘Ma Soeur, you don’t know it all.’

  On that first night she had been handed over to a Colonel of the Foreign Legion – ‘Worse than an Arab and quite drunk,’ said Patrice. ‘You may as well go in at the deep end. Now remember …’

  Remember! Lise never forgot. The Colonel had had no mercy and finally, leaving him asleep, Lise had escaped, gasping. She had dodged past Eugenia down the back stairs, found a coat in the passage – it had probably been Gaston’s – ran through the kitchen like a mad thing, astonishing the cook Marcelline who, loyal even then, never told a word, and, in the street, ran again. She was sore, dishevelled, blinded by tears and it was raining hard. She had seen a church – it would be empty at this time of night. It had been not only empty but locked and then Lise had seen a light in the presbytery. She crept up and saw, through the window, a priest, white-haired, old, but still up, working, writing at a desk. Timidly she had knocked.

  ‘But, my child, I can’t let you stay here all night,’ Père Silas had said.

  ‘Father, please.’ ‘If he had, would it all have been different,’ she asked Soeur Marie Alcide? ‘He hesitated, but it must have been my looks,’ the dress, gold shot with green, brilliant and revealing, the scent Patrice had sprayed her with, her make-up raddled, her hair fallen out of its knot and, ‘I can’t,’ said Père Silas. ‘I have young priests here … and my housekeeper. I’ll find you a taxi while you tidy yourself. Here is an address. I’ll telephone the Sisters and they’ll take you in for tonight. Then come and see me in the morning.’

  ‘I have no money, Father.’

  ‘They won’t want money. Here’s enough for the taxi,’ and the good old man had given Lise a ten-franc note. ‘That’s too much.’ ‘Keep it, keep it.’ Then he had put on his cloak, taken his umbrella and gone out into the streets; he came back with a taxi and put her into it. ‘Go to the Sisters for tonight and come back tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock without fail.’

  ‘Without fail, Father,’ but the address Lise had given the driver was not that of the hostel but the Rue Duchesne. It was only when she was there again that Lise realised she had no bed of her own. I should have slept on the kitchen table.’ Instead she had climbed Patrice’s staircase back to the flat. ‘And for some unfathomable reason I told Patrice about Père Silas.’

  ‘I’m going back to see him in the morning.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes, at ten. This is the end, Patrice.’

  ‘At ten?’ Patrice had made no other comment but, ‘At ten o’clock I was locked in his office,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide and, ‘You’re going to learn from another kind of priest,’ said Patrice.

  When it was over he had knocked her on to the floor – she, proud, poised Lise, cowering and bruised. ‘You’ll not be fit to be seen for a good few days,’ said Patrice. ‘But if you like, go and show yourself now to your holy man.’

  ‘You could have,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘I was too – ashamed.’

  ‘He would have understood.’

  ‘Would he? No, he couldn’t.’

  The Sister studied Lise’s bowed head. ‘Was it because … you liked it?’ asked Soeur Marie Alcide.

  The head came up and Lise looked Soeur Marie Alcide in the face. ‘It was ecstasy,’ said Lise.

  Patrice had said, ‘Now come up to the flat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Upstairs he had wrapped her in one of his own dressing-gowns, the same she had worn the night of the fountain, then given her brandy, and had taken her face between his hands. ‘Poor bruised face. Terrible black eye!’ and, ‘Do you think I like doing things like this?’ he had asked almost virtuously. ‘Like sharing you? But we have to eat, buy clothes, live. Don’t you understand?’ said Patrice and, for once, he had spoken seriously. ‘Don’t you realise I’m good for nothing, only bad for one thing.’

  ‘And you have no limits.’

  ‘Fortunately none,’ and he smiled, the smile that always left Lise helpless. She tried to fight him. ‘I hate you.’

  ‘No, you love me – and I love you, Lise’ – ‘Which no one else had ever really done,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘Why should he love me? Me, among all those dozens and dozens of girls far more beautiful, amusing, desirable. Why me? Of course, he knew he could trust this poor fool.’

  ‘Yes, loyalty rates high in that world,’ Soeur Marie Alcide agreed. ‘But I think it was for something more uncommon than that. You always gave, Lise, gave through thick and thin.’

  ‘Yes, you are right, chérie,’ Patrice had said seriously. ‘You are different from the others, from everyone,’ and, ‘After that,’ said Lise, ‘though I went downstairs every night I didn’t go up to the “rooms”. It was as if I had a label on me – “Monsieur Patrice”; the men kept their distance – except one …’ – and she said, ‘Yes, I had five years of Patrice. Only two without Vivi but …’ She broke off; she could not tell Soeur Marie Alcide, not even her, what else Patrice had said that day.

  ‘Lise, say after me what I shall say to you.’ He had been even more serious.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Just, “Chéri” and, “à jamais” – “forever”. Say it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s like a children’s pact.’

  ‘Children have a way of speaking the truth. Say it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please chérie.’ No one ever said ‘chérie’ as Patrice could, but Lise had still tried to hold out. ‘Patrice, not now.’

  ‘Now.’

  And, through her ravages and tears, Lise had whispered it: ‘Chéri, à jamais.’

  ‘Go behind the screen, Fanshawe, undress … put your clothes on the chair … now take a shower.’

  ‘Madame, I had a bath this morning.’

  ‘Take a shower. Use the soap.’

  Then came what Lise, for all her long sentence, never could get used to – the search, when the prisoner stood naked while her body, her hair, her clothes, her cell were thoroughly gone over. It had to happen, she realised afterwards, and at unexpected times. ‘If there isn’t a search, properly done and often done, there will be trouble,’ Mademoiselle Signoret, Directrice of Le Fouest, twin prison to Vesoul, was to tell her, but now Lise smarted
under the indignity.

  ‘Take your uniform,’ her ‘trousseau’, underclothes of stiff thick woven cotton and, ‘in those days,’ Lise was to tell Marc, ‘we had a long dingy dark dress, a shoulder cape – unmistakably “prison”, and a black head-handkerchief that most of us refused to wear, stuff slippers for indoors, sabots for outside – mine were too wide for my feet and made blisters.’

  On the morning of her release Lise’s own clothes had been given back to her packed in the expensive dressing-case that had been one of Patrice’s early gifts, morocco leather with ivory fittings – ‘Ivory suits you better than silver,’ – but dressing in those once familiar clothes had been to Lise like dressing a ghost.

  ‘On the last day of the trial Lise Ambard, La Balafrée, wore a dark red Chanel suit …’ Marcelline had brought the suit to Sevenet. She had wanted Lise to wear the black and white check, ‘So striking, Madame,’ but Lise was glad now she had refrained; it would have been far too conspicuous for coming out of prison. As it was, she was sure she looked strangely old-fashioned and she had put on weight under the Vesoul régime, so that she had had to pin the skirt band. Her hands too felt stiff in gloves, it was so long since she had worn any. She had left her hat behind. ‘Hardly anyone wears them nowadays,’ Marianne had told her. ‘Use your scarf – it’s a beauty.’ It had been another present from Patrice, long long after the dressing-case, but, ‘After all, you keep my house for me.’

  ‘Both houses,’ she had flung at him.

  Now the scarf looked as over-opulent as the suit looked out of date. Never mind, they’ll find me some clothes, thought Lise. It doesn’t matter what, because I shan’t have to wear lay ones much longer, or hope I shan’t, please God. ‘Please God,’ murmured Lise again and stepped into the road.

  Behind her, the big building rose above the street, shut off from it by the walls and the gatehouse. The walls in places were double, as Lise knew, and set with those merciless arc-lights. Who would have believed that she, Lise, could come to view those very walls with something like affection, certainly gratitude. What a paradox! she thought. They are supposed to be unyielding, yet have yielded me so much – though I could not have believed it when I went inside them.