by Ray Connolly
Ignoring the implied insult Kathy turned away and began going through Ille’s wardrobe. She would be no amateur, she was sure, and while Ille dressed completely in white Kathy chose a loose satin gown with peacocks stretched across the full skirt, their tails making a thousand colours in the weave.
‘Let me see you!’ demanded Ille. She studied Kathy carefully. ‘Perfect.’
Together they returned to the living room. Ille regarded the room like a stage manager checking her set: ‘While we’re waiting for the charcoals we can make tea,’ she said at last.
‘Tea?’ Kathy almost laughed at the incongruity of it all, but Ille wasn’t to be upset by ridicule.
‘The tea is almost as important as the opium,’ was all she said, and went into the kitchen where she prepared a set of thimble-sized tea cups and saucers. At that moment the door bell rang.
‘I’ll go,’ called Kathy and hitching up her skirts made her way down the short passageway. Through the peep-hole she could see Madame Diem waiting on the landing. What a strange house she was in, she thought to herself, and swinging wide the door allowed the concierge to enter carrying a smouldering brazier of red charcoals, which after a few polite words to Ille in Chinese she placed on the tray. Then smiling happily at the two girls she shuffled out again.
‘Now,’ said Ille, placing the tea dishes just beyond the cushions, ‘you must lie with your head resting on the headrest. That’s right. Lie full out on the cushion. And I shall lie alongside you. But first the pipe.’ And going back to the table in the window she picked up a wooden and ceramic pipe, a strange bulb-like thing which Kathy had always imagined was there purely for ornamentation. From the neck of the bulb a golden pin, like a hat-pin, dangled on a chain. Carefully Ille placed the pipe on the less hot coals of the brazier.
‘The opium is in the desk. In the silver box,’ said Kathy. Suddenly the whole affair was beginning to make sense, and the strange behaviour of Madame Diem was falling into place. It must have been opium that she had been able to smell inside the box that day.
‘So you guessed?’
‘Only now. I’d no idea what it was. And I didn’t look. I never thought of Madame Diem as a pusher before.’
‘Pusher?’ Ille frowned at the word. ‘She is a courier of great happiness, and always a friend. Never call her a pusher. Keep words like that for all your cocaine friends. Opium is the milk of Paradise. It’s too nice, in fact.’
Kathy lay back with her head on her headrest and watched as Ille opened the silver box and took out what looked like a lump of compressed hashish. Then taking a knife she cut off a sliver, and after passing the pipe to Kathy placed the opium on top of the bulb, over a tiny hole in the pottery. It seemed to Kathy an inordinately awkward way of getting high, but Ille, with her precise and delicate movements, appeared to be fully enjoying herself, quite immersed in the ritual of the affair.
‘Now, my love,’ said Ille demonstrating how Kathy must hold the pipe in two hands, ‘I shall hold a charcoal over the pipe and heat the opium. At first you must blow out, into the bulb, then when I tell you to inhale, suck in all you can. You’ll see the opium begin to bubble like brown sugar. And that’s the signal.’ Kathy nodded agreement, and with her eyes transfixed on the bulb, eighteen inches away from her face, she watched as with a pair of coal tongs Ille brought a red hot ball of charcoal to within an inch of the pipe. Almost immediately the opium began to melt and bubble, and a strong, arid, horsy smell began to fill the room. ‘Blow into the pipe, blow, blow.’ Ille’s eyes were glinting in the light of the glowing brazier. Kathy blew as hard as she could. She didn’t want to look like an amateur. ‘And now suck in … inhale,’ demanded Ille and with great gulps Kathy drew in the strange sickly fumes of the pipe. ‘Keep on, my love,’ said Ille, adjusting the bubbling, popping brown matter around the bulb of the pipe with the pin. Kathy carried on sucking but somehow she felt disappointed. She couldn’t feel anything: not seasick, not high; just nothing. Despite everything Ille had said she had expected an instant stimulant, but nothing seemed to be happening. She had been cheated by the poppy.
‘It’s your turn,’ she said passing the pipe back to Ille.
Carefully Ille placed some more opium on the top of the bulb, heated it over the brazier, and then with Kathy holding the tongs and a piece of charcoal she began to blow into the bulb. Again the bubbling began, and suddenly Ille sucked in, and with a force that surprised Kathy.
‘Isn’t it addictive? Like heroin?’ asked Kathy after Ille had taken a few sucks and was busy prodding the opium around the bulb again. She felt suspicious of the pipe.
Ille gurgled happily: ‘It can be. I know old women in Provence who sit in the sun and have smoked twelve pipes a day for forty years. Yet they are very happy. Some people say there is no such thing as an opium addict, but I am not so certain. It is so nice that too much of it would make you quite happy to drop out of life altogether. To me tonight is an occasional treat I allow myself. I ration myself. I don’t want to be an addict, either. So I’ll take good care of you. Don’t worry, the pipe won’t bite.’
And laying the pipe down again she turned to Kathy and offered her a piece of caramel and some tea, the cup so tiny that Kathy could only hold it with two fingers.
And so for a while they drank tea, and passed the pipe between each other, lounging together on either side of the glowing brazier, two beautiful girls squatting round this glowing fire in the middle of Paris. At one point a bubble of opium burst and spat out on to Ille’s white dress, but Ille appeared not to notice. And although it made a burn mark right through the material Kathy found herself not caring that the dress would now be ruined.
By now Ille was becoming dreamy and peaceful: ‘It is an art you must learn by experience,’ she said. ‘It takes time to learn how to smoke, and how to really appreciate it. I’ll show you. You saw how much of the beauty comes in the elaborate preparation, in the drinking of tea, and eating caramels in between pipes. When you smoke in a party there are always servants to keep the tea warm, and different sweet things to eat. It can be the most social of drugs. And is it not the most beautiful? See how the tray under the brazier is designed. The figures on it tell of court life in Cambodia. A hundred years ago opium smoking was very popular with Europeans. When the French went to Indo-China they inherited it, and the British learned its secrets in India. Can you imagine all these French and English army colonels sitting around a pipe getting high? Now everyone wants stimulants. No one has time for the elaboration that is important if you want to smoke opium.’
Kathy lay back on her headrest and considered the room. A bunch of red roses she had bought for Ille were beginning to droop and die on the top of the desk, and she thought about autumn in California. She seemed to have been away so long now, and yet it was no more than a couple of weeks. Now her life was completely different. She had learned so much from Ille – Ille a woman worldly wise beyond her years. And Kathy wondered what her father might think if he could see her now. Although she had written to him explaining that she now shared an apartment with a girl friend there had been no reply. Nor was any reply expected. Her only contact with him would no doubt be through the Chase Manhattan. He must have been a handsome man once upon a time, she thought, before the worry lines of business had etched scratches in his brow and his hair had begun to recede. She could remember him as a handsome man, in fact, if she thought about it. A man who would take her on outings, just a rich man and his daughter, always treating her like a little princess. He must have dreaded the day she would grow up. Although now she began to remember that she had longed to become a woman for him, that she might replace her mother. And she remembered the time she had worn lipstick and eyeshadow, and he had become angry with her, although she had never known why, and sent her upstairs to wash it off her face. She had probably been no more than nine or ten. And he was still handsome then, although probably he was already forty. And then the break in their love affair had come when she was thirteen and had begu
n bringing home boys, and staying out late, and he had caught her petting with one of the boys from school in her bedroom one afternoon. He had not looked angry, just suddenly lonely, she thought. And without scolding her he had gone back to his mistresses, his older women who could give him the physical satisfaction he needed. And from then on their lives had drifted apart, although she had still wanted him to treat her like his princess.
‘You are dreaming, my love?’ Ille was speaking slowly and softly to her. They had been silent for some considerable time, and the room had become stuffy with the smell of the smoke.
‘No. I was thinking about my father.’
‘Then you are dreaming. What were you thinking?’
Although the space between them, divided by the brazier and the pipe which they passed between each other at frequent intervals, was no more than three feet, Kathy felt a strange sense of isolation. Talking to Ille was like talking to herself, allowing her mind to unravel thoughts which it had never before explored, travel euphoric roads where half-memories and half-images appeared to become whole and meaningful.
‘I was in a long white dress in a limousine with my father and he was a middle-aged man. It was my wedding day. And he was going to give me away. And then I was in the church in my white dress, again with my father. But now he was as a young man, with thick black hair and a white suit. And I was getting married to him. And he was putting a ring like a daisy chain on my finger … or maybe we were having a hippy wedding … now I see him with long hair … and I’m holding flowers … buttercups I think … but they’re blue … and he’s smiling and laughing again….’
Kathy’s words had become slower and slower and finally they ceased altogether. She was breathing heavily, and moving slowly across to her Ille put the pipe down in the tray and lay alongside her cushion, gently touching her body, not sexually, since the few pipes they had smoked had killed all desire, but in a spiritually tactile way that aroused neither but kindled further half-dreams in the minds of both.
Partly disturbed by her friend’s nearness Kathy began murmuring again: ‘To marry my father, so that I might be my mother …’ She spoke in riddles. ‘That would be the best thing in the world.’
Ille lay back resting on her cushion, her eyes closed, and her mouth sagging open: ‘To me … the nicest thing in the world would be to have a baby …’ she said.
And as the night passed dreams came and went to both of them. Though lost in their private worlds they hardly spoke again. And before a moment seemed to have gone it was dawn, and climbing into bed they slept the rest of the next day away.
Chapter 5
The invitation from Claude Arbus came at the end of September. It was a complete surprise. While half of Paris had run away to the sea during the second half of July and all of August Kathy and Ille had remained behind to enjoy the strangely deserted streets, peopled only, it seemed to Kathy, by fellow Americans. And together they had spent long languorous days strolling in the Jardins de Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne, where they watched with amusement the techniques of harassment employed by the police ridding the grassy glades of the ladies of the woods. They had considered taking a villa in Provence for August, but the somnolent air of the deserted city proved a greater attraction than the busy and competitive bareness of the beach, and they forsook the sun that they might further know each other. During those weeks of sunshine they were rarely out of each other’s sight for more than a few hours. In August Ille’s antique shop took its customary month’s holiday, and together they took to going off for days, packing picnics, hiring a car, and driving out to Versailles, Fontainebleau, Chartres, Rouen and Reims. In her own way Kathy wanted to do some sight-seeing, and Ille wanted to be her guide. Surprisingly, to Kathy, Ille was unable to drive, but it wasn’t a matter that seemingly vexed her. She had, she explained, never found it necessary to learn to drive since there had always been more than enough people to drive her anywhere she had wanted to go.
It was an idyllic, romantic and gentle time: a summer when Kathy for once forgot about the importance of deepening her tan with every passing day, and when Ille found herself increasingly dependent upon her friend for her moments of happiness. After Kathy’s first experience with opium Ille refused to repeat the ‘lesson’, as she primly described the evening, in case Kathy were to discover that she liked it too much. For her part Kathy strongly suspected Ille’s fear lay in knowing that it was she who already liked it too much for her own health. Opium was a treat for birthdays and holidays only, insisted Ille, and not for daily self-abuse. So they took their highs from grass and wine and city sunshine, and the general intemperance that came from a withdrawal of discipline and habit.
Despite Ille’s familiarity with the chores of living alone, or perhaps because of it, she had never taken much interest in the arts and efforts of cuisine, and since Kathy knew even less about cooking than Ille they would find themselves taking dinner out every evening – managing only to prepare the briefest of snacks for themselves. Their upbringings had left each of them quite unprepared for domesticity, but equally that upbringing had provided the funds necessary to pay others to do the tasks they both found tiresome. And consequently Madame Diem would arrive promptly at eleven each weekday morning with her buckets and mops and polishes, vacuuming and sweeping and speaking only when addressed. Kathy still found her a sombre and disturbing presence, but she did her job, and so far as Kathy knew she never again brought any little gifts for Ille. Ille for her part trusted the woman entirely, and from time to time would betray anecdotes about Madame Diem’s past loyalties to Ille’s family. Ille had grown up to treat Madame Diem with some respect, ‘despite Papa’s racist streak,’ she said, and Madame Diem had been a totally trusted member of their family. Kathy wondered what the family might think of her if they knew that she peddled dope to their daughter when she wasn’t doing the dishes, but she didn’t mention it. The woman was of no concern to her. Instead she kept out of her way as much as possible, which wasn’t difficult during this gloriously heady foreign summer.
The character that became Paris during August amazed Kathy: a city with only half its population, and seemingly hardly any of them French, appeared to her, she liked to think, like a woman, dressed, but unadorned. It was a place of closed restaurants and stores, empty cinemas, offices, buses and Metro cars; and the only places where crowds would congregate would be tourist centres, where rucksacks would be littered like an army encampment, and the lobbies of rich hotels. It was a Paris of strangers: of foreigners, of Americans mainly, and, like Ille, she found herself regarding their intrusion into the city with a hard-to-justify jealousy.
Throughout the summer they had found perfect contentment in each other, neither seeking, nor being sought by, other company, and all thoughts of men as potential boy friends or lovers had left both of them. Claude Arbus had never been given a second thought since that evening when he had taken them both to dinner. But then came the invitation. It was a Monday morning. Ille’s day off from her shop. ‘Claude and Hélène Arbus invite Miss Kathy Crawford and guest to a party at the Galerie Arbus, Place Saint Thomas d’Aquin on Friday September 30th to celebrate the publication of the Illustrated History of Christianity in North America.’ Kathy read the invitation card out to Ille with increasing giddiness. They had been lying in bed together taking it in turn to tell lies about their childhood, each story sadder than the one before it, willing themselves to break down and cry under their own imaginings. So far today neither had been successful, but it was a game which when sufficiently emotional both could play to the point of tears. Then Kathy had heard the postman at the door, and tiring of her game had gone to fetch the mail. While she had been staying with Ille her own mail had been virtually non-existent. Her father had never written, nor phoned, and only twice had she received letters from home, both times from a girl friend she’d known back in her days at Sarah Lawrence, who had firstly written with glee telling her that she was getting married and asking Kathy to be a b
ridesmaid. Kathy had politely refused, explaining that she wouldn’t be going home for some time and that maybe she’d be able to make the role next time round. She’d meant it as a joke, but somehow it had misfired and the next letter had been full of reproach, explaining that Kathy’s levity about marriage had indeed caused the girl to have second thoughts and that she was returning the Dresden China tea set which Kathy had so kindly sent as a wedding present since the marriage was now not to take place after all. One more sister saved from the perils of the patriarchal system, Kathy had mused to herself, and stuck the Dresden China in a cupboard for the next time one of her former friends should decide upon any action so silly.
Reading the card, and tossing a couple of bills in Ille’s direction, Kathy climbed back into bed: ‘D’you remember Arbus?’
‘The cuckolded cuckold, you mean?’
‘Yes. The cuckoo,’ answered Kathy.
‘Will we go?’ Ille was watching Kathy carefully trying to measure the depth of her expression.
‘D’you want to?’
‘No….’
‘… Okay, Monsieur Arbus. Miss Crawford will send her regrets….’ Kathy began to screw up the card with a theatrical finality.
‘Do you?’ asked Ille.
‘What?’
‘Want to go?’
‘Not really.’ Kathy was being deliberately off hand.
‘Liar. You’re intrigued. Admit it.’
‘Well, maybe a little.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, you know. All that bullshit he was giving me on the flight about his business and his wife, Hélène, or whatever her name is … and …’
‘And what?’ Ille watched Kathy through partly closed eyes: two slits of penetrating deep blue: two laser beams of interrogation.