by Rumer Godden
‘Of course, when the gash was new it showed horribly and I was no more use in the Club. Poor Henri! He offered again. I think he felt he had to, but I said “No.” Emile, of course, would have sent me away, but Patrice couldn’t do without me; he didn’t even mind the scar so I became Madame Lise, La Balafrée – and soon was manager. Ostensibly it was Emile but it was really I. Yes, I was equal with characters like Lulu and Madame la Comtesse, who wasn’t a comtesse, of course; we were never pretentious, just a good upper-middle-class brothel. How odd that sounds, but it was true; I think I was the youngest Mère Maquerelle Paris had ever seen, just twenty-three, but I suppose I had an air of authority; that was from Aunt Millicent – she had been a headmistress of a girls’ school; head of Girl Guides. That seems far away from the Rue Duchesne and yet it wasn’t; in a way I was in the same position. Sometimes I wondered if Aunt Millicent had chosen it or if it simply happened, as it happened to me; the broken end of a bottle and I was marked for life, in more ways than one.’
‘I think if it hadn’t been for that scar I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you,’ said Lucette now. ‘It showed someone had once hurt you too, so to me it only makes you more beautiful. You see, to me, you are someone different … somehow pure.’
‘Pure! My dear child! Why do you think I was in prison?’
‘I don’t know – and it makes no difference.’
‘Thank you, Lucette.’ Lise was so oddly touched that for a moment tears stung her eyes, then she shook her head. It was, she told herself, just the emotion of this morning. ‘Drink your coffee,’ she said abruptly.
‘Yes, Madame.’ Lise had never seen a croissant disappear so quickly, and with such noise; then Lucette licked each of her fingers for the last crumb, blew on the remains of the coffee and set the cup down on the table with a bang.
She has forgotten how to use a cup and saucer. That was one of the things Lise herself had been afraid of – in prison we had only mugs. It might betray her. Now Lucette was saying with a smile, the first smile Lise had seen – it altered her whole face almost into beauty – ‘I used to watch you, Madame; of course you never knew, but I did. I used to dream that one day you would speak to me – but I never, never thought I should be sitting with you, invited. Oh, I’m so glad I sent Mademoiselle Marianne’s people away.’
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ said Lise. ‘Lucette, what are you going to do?’
‘What you do,’ said Lucette with child-like faith.
‘Have another croissant,’ said Lise quickly.
‘Please.’
‘And coffee?’
‘Please.’
‘Coffee for two,’ Lise ordered and when it had been brought the croissant disappeared as fast as the other. Then, ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t like to come where I’m going,’ said Lise.
‘I’ll do anything you do,’ said Lucette. ‘I won’t mind anything.’ Lise was silent and, ‘I have been on the streets too,’ offered Lucette.
‘This isn’t the streets.’
‘Then is it … a house? I don’t mind about the fric – the money – or if it’s hard.’
‘It’s not that kind of house.’
‘Then … Madame Lise, where are you going?’
‘Where I shall find just what we have both left,’ said Lise. ‘Walls – or, perhaps, not walls, bounds that I mustn’t cross without leave. Rules I mustn’t break. Times to keep, silence, work, and where I must be obedient, poor.’
‘You mean – another prison?’
‘Not prison, freedom. That’s the paradox. I believe it will be such freedom as I can’t imagine now.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither did I, at first.’ Lise looked down at the table as if she could not make up her mind whether to say any more but Lucette was waiting. At last, ‘Lucette, did you see those Sisters who visited us at Vesoul every three months?’ she asked.
‘The nuns in white?’
‘Yes. Did you go in and talk to them?’
‘No, thank you,’ said Lucette promptly. ‘J’ai mangé assez de ce plat là – I have had enough of that. I didn’t want their talk.’
‘As a matter of fact it was generally you who talked, they listened.’
‘So they could tell you to say your prayers … ask Our Lady to help you … ask to see the aumônier … go to the chapel. I expect they gave you little cards and medals, didn’t they?’
‘Perhaps they did to some. They gave much more to me.’
‘What? Holy! Holy! Holy!?’ mocked Lucette, but Lise did not flinch.
‘It is holy, holy, holy. They have given me a chance, opened a way I hadn’t dreamed of, yet I suppose really I had, long ago – that’s why it found an echo in me …’ Lise was thinking still once again of the wood of that lute. ‘It would surprise you, wouldn’t it, Lucette, if I told you that I hope – I pray – that one day I shall be one of them.’
‘You! Une frangine!’ Lucette was aghast.
‘Yes. A nun.’
‘But – you’re too old. They catch you at eighteen.’
‘There are many older than I. Soeur Marie Alcide told me they once had a great-grandmother of eighty … a blameless great-grandmother, so she got there more quickly.’
‘Blameless! But you have been in prison which means …’
‘I committed a crime.’
‘Yes, and long before that you were a putain, weren’t you?’ and ‘It isn’t possible!’ said Lucette.
‘You said yourself it made no difference to you,’ said Lise. ‘Why should you be different from the nuns?’
‘Because they are holy.’ Lucette was inexpressibly shocked. ‘Holy women,’ she used the word differently now.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in holiness.’
‘I don’t, or I do – for other people.’
‘Why not you?’
‘Me?’ Then Lucette was angry. ‘You’re trying to be holy too. You only asked me to have coffee with you because you were sorry for me. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?’
Lise could not deny it and Lucette rose; fishing in her pocket she put four francs on the table.
‘That’s too much,’ said Lise.
‘It will pay for the pity.’ She turned.
‘Lucette, where are you going?’
‘Where I want,’ said Lucette. ‘Goodbye.’
Let her go. God, I have had enough of young girls! Sitting where Lucette had left her, with the empty cups and plates, those pathetic four francs, Lise thought suddenly of Vivi – so different from Lucette. Lise saw Vivi’s piquancy, the firm short little nose, teeth so small and pearly they looked like milk teeth, the pretty mouth with lips that were naturally red. Yet Lise knew they could curl, grow thin and twist almost like a little snake that is ready to strike, and Vivi could strike. Perhaps the whole of Vivi was false: her dimples that were not soft but traps: the glow of the skin looked warm like a ripe apricot and yet was cool, and Vivi’s beautiful eyes might have been made of glass; like glass, they could light with a gleam, a glint that was shrewd. All this Lise knew, had soon known, and yet Vivi could so easily disarm her. Why? Perhaps, Lise thought now, Vivi wasn’t false but simply and naturally herself, as unashamedly shameless as a child. Lise had thought of Lucette as another child, but Lucette could never have been just a child; from the beginning, Lise guessed, she would have been a waif, forlorn and puny. Vivi would never have consented to be a waif; even in the streets, dirty, tattered, hungry, she would have enjoyed herself, kept her cocksure independence, and she must have been beautiful as a little girl, more beautiful still when Lise found her – drunk.
It had been towards five in the Paris morning when it was still not quite light; the debris of the night littered pavements and gutters and dustbins overflowed outside the restaurants, a stale smelly overflow. Cats leapt away as Lise passed, but a rat stayed where it was foraging. A light wind blew through the empty street, Lise felt the coolness on her hot temples and on her cheek where the scar th
robbed. She had been on one of the long impatient morning walks in which she escaped from the Rue Duchesne, from the fumes of drink and cigarettes, the close-drawn curtains, over-furnished rooms; from the long pretence of the night, arranging and cajoling upset girls, upset men: from hours of taking insolence or maudlin affection – which was the more disgusting? Every early morning, if she could, Lise escaped when the house at last shook itself free and the girls could go home, or those who lived in, go to bed – alone. Jock, the barman, and Gaston would clean up the last of the ashtrays and glasses, wiping up vomit perhaps, putting bottles in the dustbins. ‘Everything must be clean, washed and in order.’ Lise had insisted on this, including the weary girls – it was Eugenia’s work to see to that. Patrice, drunk or sober, had gone to bed; if he had a ‘chosen one’ he usually took her to the office, only now and then up to the flat.
‘Didn’t you mind?’ asked Soeur Marie Alcide.
‘It seldom lasted more than a night,’ said Lise. ‘There was a room next to Zoë’s where I could take refuge.’ Those of the girls who slept in, had rooms which they shared on the third floor; some went back to their families, taking a taxi or the early metro, others to the apartment of their ‘old man’ whom they kept or helped to keep. By five o’clock usually the house was still. Jock had closed and cleaned the bar; Gaston locked the door before going home with Eugenia; Emile, the last, had put the takings in his safe and gone, himself, to bed – he had to make do with second choice – and Lise was free, to breathe the morning air, fresh as it could be even in the city. She would walk and walk – too far for Coco whom she left snoring in his basket; she walked until it was time, in some church – any church – for the first Mass, when she would slip in at the back and sit in the shadows so that nobody knew she was there.
The trucks had long ago arrived at Les Halles for the market and now there were others; water-trucks to hose the gutters, waste-trucks to clear rubbish and litter, dark blue police vans to pick up human rubbish … and it was then that Lise saw Vivi.
It was in a little Place where, outside the shuttered cafés, no one had bothered to stack the iron chairs, and the zinc-topped tables had already gathered the dew; at one a girl was sitting on a small iron chair, sitting bent over, head and elbows on the table, fast asleep. It was the elbows Lise saw first, young fresh flesh, soft and vulnerable for all their thinness. She saw the hair, bronze chestnut, tumbled over a neck that was white and, again, so young. ‘Perhaps it was that little vulnerable neck that first made me love her,’ said Lise. A girl, little more than a child, asleep over a table.
We were the children of the Maison Dieu, Renée, Pom-Pom, Rico and I – Pom-Pom had to count as a child. A Maison Dieu is where they put the people nobody wants: old people and poor loonies who are out of their minds – and us, not many of us – children only go there for ‘grave reasons’ – I heard the Doctor say that. Renée was hunched from where her step-father broke her back – step-fathers, fathers, they are all the same. Though I was only nine when I came and Renée was fourteen I was taller than she was. Mamaine, who looked after us, said one day someone would take Renée as a servant for nothing, ‘And do a good deed,’ said Mamaine. No one would take me, I was too pretty. I am nearly as pretty as Claudine. Claudine is my sister but nobody knows that. I don’t want them to know.
Sometimes I shrieked in the night and Mamaine came; poor, sleepy Mamaine, and she held me while I sobbed and sobbed. Next day I saw the Doctor or Madame Lachaume the Superintendent but it was no use.
I should have liked to tell it all to the Doctor – I still don’t know why I couldn’t. I should have liked to live with the Doctor and be his little girl – a proper little girl, not like me, like the little girls outside.
All the same, it was nice at the Maison Dieu. I had a bed all in white and a dress, and pinafores with flowers on them and a hairbrush of my own – I hadn’t known my hair could look like silk. I had a toothbrush too – I haven’t had one since – Mamaine used to say my teeth looked like pearls! and I was washed and clean. We had breakfast and goûter in the afternoon, milk and brioche before we went to bed and we had dinner at twelve o’clock. Yes, every day we had a real dinner, soup, meat and vegetables, and on Sundays ice-cream. Maison Dieu means the house of God. I used to think God was very kind to have us to live with him. No one else would.
I pretended Pom-Pom was my little dog. Pom-Pom seemed a little boy in blue overalls, striped socks on his little legs and felt slippers, a little boy, but not his head. There was a secret: Pom-Pom had to be shaved. I was not supposed to know but I knew; the barber from the men’s wing did it and I knew why: Pom-Pom was thirty-four years old.
Rico would have been a little boy but, as Mamaine said, he was not all there. I think he was not there at all. He would sit at the table and draw but not on the paper – in the air; it was as if he saw far beyond the Maison Dieu to the sea and sky and clouds; I think it must have been sunset, Rico had such a light on his face: it was a shame he would not talk or look at us: it wasn’t like living with a boy but with a sunbeam.
Rico did not know who I was but Pom-Pom followed me about and when I talked to him or chirruped like Mamaine’s canary or sang one of my songs, slowly, slowly, because things took a long time to get into Pom-Pom, his big ugly face used to break into a smile.
I have two smiles. I wish I had only one but I know I have two. I used to put my arms round Mamaine’s fat waist and rub my face against her apron and she stroked my hair. ‘Pauvre momone, poor child. She is hungry for love.’
Yes, it felt safe and warm in our attic, yet even then I wanted to get out. We couldn’t be let out, except for our playtime in the courtyard, partly because we were us and partly because of the Stefans. The Stefans were in the men lunatics’ wing with barred windows and iron doors with keys.
I called them Stefans because of Stefan, the Russian. Stefan was young and big and good looking; his hair was gold like Rico’s but not in curls; Stefan’s was cut short and stubby; his blue eyes followed me each time he saw me. Most of the Stefans were never let out, not even in the courtyard – because of the war there were too few guards – but Stefan was a ‘trusty’ and sometimes he was out in the hall. If he was still there when Mamaine took us out, she hustled us past him, but I knew Stefan looked at me.
Every day when it was fine, Mamaine took us down the staircase at one o’clock and through the locked door with its chain, down more stairs into the hall and outside and then we played, at least Pom and I. The old people of the Maison Dieu watched us and talked about us; whenever I think about us, I see those old mouths talking, some without any teeth. I knew what they said about me. It was supposed to be another secret but I knew. The doctor had a photograph of me; it was in the newspapers though I wasn’t supposed to know that, either. ‘Found sleeping on manure heap’ – Madame Lachaume read it out to Mamaine. It wasn’t a manure heap, it was turnips and I had a sack on top. I stole up behind Madame Lachaume and Mamaine to look at the photograph and I didn’t like it; I wasn’t pretty at all. My bruises looked like smudges, my hair not silky; it was caked – I still remember its smell. My dress was an old one of Claudine’s like a big sack; it showed my skin through the rents where Papa tore it. He chased me. At first it was only Claudine, then one day it was me too and it hurt. That’s why I slept on the turnips – I was afraid to come into the house, but sometimes I wanted to.
It was because of Papa that I shrieked; I didn’t want to make a noise but I shrieked higher and higher and it made me so excited I couldn’t stop. I knew my cheeks were red and my eyes so bright they shone, and the whole of me felt light and quick and I had an ache like being hungry, half an ache and half a tingle, and I could have told everybody out flat, ‘Sometimes I want a Papa to chase me.’
There! I was soon small and sweet again. I played with Pom-Pom, sang to Rico, rubbed my head against Mamaine’s apron. Madame Lachaume put my hair back. ‘Poor child. Poor little girl.’
The Doctor asked me questions gently,
especially after I was given the doll, but I didn’t tell him about the baby. It wasn’t mine, it was Claudine’s. She screamed and screamed out in the shed where Papa had put her; she rolled on the floor and doubled up. We were so surprised when the baby came out. I wanted to keep the baby and love it, but Claudine said we mustn’t or the police would take it and her, and Papa. In the end it was Papa and me, but I am still sorry about the baby.
Madame Lachaume told me I couldn’t be the Doctor’s little girl, but it seemed there was someone else – Monsieur Grebel. Monsieur Grebel was one of the Governors; he was much richer than the Doctor; he had a beard and a watch-chain, and he was even kinder; he often came up to the attics to see us and he was all of our friend. He patted Pom-Pom on the head and dangled his watch for Rico to catch. He even gave Renée some knitting wool, bright red, and he brought sweets for us all. It was he who gave me the baby doll and was shocked when I had hysterics. I was sorry I couldn’t like it because I loved Monsieur Grebel. He would no more have chased me than Pom would. I used to think Monsieur Grebel was like God.
We were in the courtyard when we heard the people’s voices in Madame Lachaume’s office. We were not supposed to hear them but when they argued their voices grew loud – Mamaine said I had long ears which wasn’t true; they are small and pretty as shells and close to my head but I stood up on the bench to hear better though Pom-Pom tugged at my pinafore; the people were Madame Lachaume, Monsieur l’Abbé who came for the chapel, the Doctor, one or two ladies and Monsieur Grebel.
‘She cannot be with other children.’
‘Evidemment, but she shouldn’t be here.’
‘She should be admitted to a Home.’
‘There would be other children there.’
‘We have to take some risks,’ that was the Doctor and another voice, sneery, like Renée’s, said, ‘May I ask you, Doctor, if you would allow this child to be with your own daughters?’