With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris]

by Sophie Meredith

  Any gaps between these, the chief players, were filled with the yellow expressionless faces of what seemed to be a hundred Oriental tourists. Richard looked around vainly for a pair of blue eyes, a well-scrubbed rosy face, a head of squeaky-clean American hair….

  The down-and-out ‘chirurgeon,’ once in charge of a private clinic at Versailles, now dressed not in spotless white but in a tramp’s filthy rags, pronounced triumphantly to the enthralled audience that there were no bones broken. The heart was beating fairly strongly. The head appeared miraculously to have escaped a knock. He nodded permission to the cabaret star in reduced circumstances to pour the burning golden liquid down the patient’s throat. Meanwhile, he looked hopefully at the barman who, thankful not to have a corpse on his hands, produced another glass for the fortuitous physician. The tramp tossed it back, retrieved his newspaper-wrapped bundle and shuffled off towards his bench in the Tuileries. The Indian beggarwoman, conscious of the revenue she had already lost, returned to her base by the International telephone booth, squatted and immediately extended her ailing baby at arms’ length while recommencing her grisly supplications. The Japanese tourists were shepherded away by their guide. Most of the other onlookers melted away in search of new diversions.

  Richard sat up. His arm was a bit stiff, one trouser leg was torn, the flesh beneath grazed and dusty. The over-made up woman helped him to his feet, smiling at him from tired but once lovely eyes. He took out his wallet and looked first at her and then at the waiter. Indignantly they gestured their refusal and both returned to the bar.

  On the threshold, the Arab was waiting with a small worried looking man sporting a pencil-thin moustache.

  “Permit me to offer you a lift,” said the white-robed sheik. He spoke in perfect Oxbridge English. “I am sure the taxi driver will not mind dropping you off….”

  The look he flashed at the nervous little driver was threatening enough to guarantee assent.

  “Oui, mais bien sûr!” The words were accompanied by the usual shrugging of the shoulders. “Ze monsieur ees not then vewwy much ’urt…and he understand eet ees not ma faute?”

  “Gee, no, I stumbled right in your path…a touch of giddiness, I suppose,” said Richard. “I’m mighty grateful….”

  “I suggest we go right now.” The Arab, a head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the vicinity had spotted two gendarmes in the distance. “We do not, any of us, want to waste our time, I think.”

  In the taxi, he courteously offered Richard a large white handkerchief to clean himself up. He suggested that once back in his room he would do well to ask Room Service for antiseptic. Then he became silent, staring fixedly out of the window at the Seine. He offered no information about himself and Richard, still shaken, followed his example.

  He felt much better once he was standing under the striped awning of the hötel, responding with a grin to the briefest of royal waves from the haughty, enigmatic Prince of the Desert. Suddenly it felt very good to be alive. And what an adventure! How kind all those wierdies had turned out to be. Foreigners could be all right…if you allowed for their…differences.

  All the same, he decided not to tell Alayne about this evening. She’d only worry and take to making remarks about being careful how he crossed the street. She’d be bound to worm it out of him about the whiskies, the pains. He’d go back to Doc McFlannery and hurry him up about those tests. Maybe he’d postpone the Round Trip…there’d likely be some heavy hospital bills.

  And if Alayne started needling him, trying to find out if he’d had any risqué experiences, trying to ascertain just how much she was missing by not visiting Europe…well, he’d wax clever, knowing her uncanny way of seeming to read his mind. He’d block out one of the scenes that promised to remain so vividly in his memory—he’d refuse to think about the sordid little brasserie. He’d concentrate hard on the earlier familiar ambience of the American Bar.

  “Honey,” he’d say. “Over there…why, it’s just like home.”

  Beryl also insisted that she and I take the children to the Tuileries sometimes instead of leaving it to Mabiche. I suppose she was trying to push me into a sense of my responsibility as mère de famille, to force me to establish a role for myself—to stop me lethargically brooding away my time.

  It didn’t work in the subtle way she was setting about it. I adored Michel and loved watching him and Tasha racing round the Octagonal Pond with their toy yachts, chasing each other under the trees, skipping about on the steps of the Orangerie—but all the time I felt remote from them all.

  “I feel like one of the paintings in the Jeu de Paume museum,” I said vaguely. “Except I see the world in spots of dull colours rather than bright ones, but blurred, like Sisley and Pissaro.”

  “Don’t try to impressionist me with all that piss!” cried Beryl. “You’re just helplessly irresponsible—a disgrace to Women’s Lib. You were born out of your time. You are an ideal candidate for St. George to rescue from the dragon. In fact, that’s how it’s always been—someone’s always turned up in the nick of time to rescue you.”

  She sighed. We were having our last dinner together at home before she went back to London. She snatched away the decanter I had picked up to give myself a refill.

  “I wash my hands of you from now on,” she said. “Though I suppose it’ll happen again—you’ll be saved from yourself just before you go under—as long as you don’t drown first in your self-pity.”

  I wondered if it wasn’t a case of potty calling the kettle bonkers. She seemed awfully worked up—perhaps this Bourgogne, my favourite Pommard, had gone to her head.

  “Just think about it,” she went on relentlessly pressing home the barb. “First, there was your father. Then when you lost him and got yourself into a right old muddle in London—oh, yes you were in a mess—you knew full well you weren’t going to fit into the Educational Scene, yet you were so pussy-footing about breaking into journalism—then, I know my wedding was a rave-up…but only you could have absent-mindedly drifted over to Paris during the proceedings. And then there was Jacques….”

  “You sound like Agatha Christie and her Ten Little Niggers,” I interrupted, but only half-heartedly. I wanted her to continue now, to have it all out, to lay it all on the table for my inspection.

  “When that particular magic wore off, there was Mabiche to fall back on,” she said. “Then you had a near-disaster with Graham and a hideous balls-up with John. Mabiche and I can share the credit of saving you from that one.

  Tony was around to help you escape from the Brittany cock-up. Alain’s cop pal Gérard sorted out another little mess.”

  She droned on while I surreptitiously sipped some of my special Calvados, five hundred francs a bottle and wonderfully numbing to a mind horribly jolted by the name “Robert” that had been left unspoken. I did not weep over him nowadays, but for two years I seemed to have shed tears nightly, my head well under the silk sheets I refused to surrender in exchange for an unromantic duvet—so many of Jacques’ lessons were deeply entrenched. If Mabiche had heard me, she had made no comment. And now my heart continued to ache for what might have been. My worst nightmare was when I dreamed blissfully of the actual holiday in Brittany, but with a happy ending—no Lilian—no stormy night of Revelation—and then half woke to the awful realisation that this was not the true version, and that I must endure a sharply-etched run-through of my memory of that night, before I finally gained full consciousness and rose to face another bleak day.

  “Was it so very bad, what you saw that night?” asked Beryl now.

  I should not have been surprised that she seemed to have been reading my thoughts. I’d had this same experience with three people in my life. Kathryn had many times telephoned me just after I’d been thinking of her. Beryl and I had always seemed to run along parallel trains of thought simultaneously between chunks of apparently-unconnected conversations, thoroughly confusing any third party present. And Robert—he and I had been drifting towards that silent
state of communication, that extra-sensory understanding that had led me to hope for so much—the ultimate, in fact—from our relationship.

  “What would you have done?” I asked, aware that I was slightly slurring my words. “Jumped into bed with the two of them and set up a really avant-garde ménage à trois? And don’t forget Tony—I saw it all through his eyes as much as mine and that really brought home the nastiness, I can tell you….”

  “Hmm,” she said, thoughtfully. “He didn’t say much at the time. But recently, he talked to me about it—and he seems inclined to see it differently now. In his eyes, you acted a bit hastily.”

  I banged down my delicate balloon glass angrily.

  “One minute, you’re saying he rescued me from one of my unfortunate situations—the next, you’re suggesting that I spoiled something for him!” I cried.

  “Calm down, for God’s sake,” she said. “And leave that bottle alone. You’ve had enough trous-normandes to make your stomach look like a Swiss cheese. Tony doesn’t regret being—saved—from the ghastly Lilian. He sees her now as a freak—much more of a freak than that little Joséphine creature. And not because of her mental backwardness so much as for her instinctive forwardness—her animal sense of survival.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Well…yes. Robert Tardy came to the house. I didn’t see him and Charles didn’t tell me at the time. It was years ago—well, three years anyway. He wanted Tony to know that Lilian was married—to a rich Yank who’d been stationed at Huntingdon. I suppose what he really wanted was for the message to get back to you, but Charles was so angry at the time about the state you were in—he practically threw Tardy out, apparently.

  “I’ve been chewing the whole thing over lately and I’m going to risk something that means a hell of a lot to me, Gaby. Our friendship comes high on my list of priorities but…

  “Look, for one thing, you made a great song and dance at the time about Robert’s age. And hurt my feelings a lot, I can tell you. In view of Charles and I…but that’s water under the bridge…Charles said that this Tardy bloke is actually our age, yours and mine—so that was some silly myth you dredged up out of your imagination. I’m no trick-cyclist but I wonder if it was some sort of safety-valve. Were you, perhaps, afraid of committing yourself from the very outset? Looking for reasons to hold back. Before the heaven—sorry—hell sent excuse of what you saw as a scene of Unforgiveable Incest?”

  “I don’t follow any of that,” I lied. “Except the silly suggestion that I imagined the last part. Tony saw it too….”

  “Look—if we take the worst interpretation—if it was what you’ve always taken it for—is it so bad? What’s happened to your broad-mindedness—the unshockable Gaby Parker I once knew so well—the one that rejected religion because it was too full of prejudice. The one that was always more interested in people’s warmth and understanding than their so-called morals.

  And frankly—I wonder if the construction you put on that scene didn’t come wholly out of your twisted mind….”

  “Thanks, friend,” I muttered.

  “Remember at college,” she went on, ignoring the fact that there were tears streaming down my face now. “The first weekend at that ghastly hostel in Hadley Woods? We were all desperately homesick but loth to admit it—then there was a terrible electric storm and the three of us—Judy as well, you remember—leaped into the same bed and hugged each other. And the next morning we felt we had to keep on making all those stupid cracks about crypto-lesbians—to purge our consciences about something that wouldn’t have made us feel even a little bit guilty if we’d been a few years younger—and none of us really had a clue what Lesbians were in those days….”

  She helped me to bed and I heard her prowling about several times during the night. She probably thought she’d gone too far and was checking up to make sure I hadn’t taken an overdose. And I reflected sadly that gone were the days when she and I could lie and hug each other—the dignity of age had come between us as had an over-sophistication of outlook and an inevitable growing apart even between the closest of friends.

  Yet, as I saw her and her little girl off at the airport, they both hugged me spontaneously.

  “Sorry about the pep talk,” said Beryl. “Go home and write a story about—unnatural relations—and get it out of your system.”

  The two of them, one an exact miniature copy of the other, went through Passport Control.

  “Don’t forget!” she called from the other side of the barrier. “Michel might want a father….”

  She hadn’t quite dared to say it until she was out of reach, so to speak.

  On the way back in the taxi, I only looked up once from my notebook where I was sketching out “Maison de Campagne.” I had a glimpse of the white dome of Sacré-Coeur and wished—oh, how I wished—I might have climbed up to it with Robert.

  PART FIVE

  Chapter 22

  Mabiche had a drawn look, and if I hadn’t trusted her implicitly, I’d have immediately suspected her of trying to hide something from me. But that was not her way. If she disapproved she either said so, outright, or went around tight-lipped and glaring. Recently, she seemed to scuttle away whenever we met around the house, and the way she lowered her eyes from mine began to distress me. Often, too, she would brusquely whisk Michel out of the house almost in the middle of my Au Revoir. One day I thought I heard him say something about his Papa, but the door had slammed before I was able to collect my fuzzy thoughts. I was not drinking heavily now on a regular basis, but there were days when I could find no ease in tapping away at my typewriter, no comfort from looking at my pictures, no escape in books. Then I would return to the bottle. And now I had this vague fear that perhaps Mabiche was beginning to indoctrinate Michel in some underhand way about his single-parent state.

  Then came the morning when clear-headed for once, I knew I had heard my child ask Mabiche if they would be meeting “le gentil homme” again. I felt mischievously gay and light-hearted. So—there was the explanation—Mabiche was having amorous liaisons. I should be piqued, I supposed, that she had not confided in me, angry that she was involving my innocent child. Not that I feared for his moral corruption from participating in the lovers’ rendez-vous but that he should have been drawn into the deception, perhaps even sworn to secrecy, against his own mother. But my spontaneous reaction was curiosity rather than indignation and it pleased me to find that I was thus proven to be not completely devoid of interest in the world outside myself as Beryl was convinced I was.

  I pulled on my big, black fur coat. it was imitation fur in deference to my own qualms about animal suffering so there was another quid of baccy for Beryl to put in her pipe and smoke thereof—or chew over, to be more accurate, etymologically speaking, despite the terrible mix of metaphors. I had decided to follow my faithful friend—not as an employer checking up on a hireling, not as a mother reassuring herself of her son’s safety: simply as an excruciatingly inquisitive individual who could not wait to see how the new man in her friend’s life measured up to the adored Fred.

  To my surprise, the sturdy but womanly figure clutching the hand of the little boy skipping along at her side did not make for the Tuileries. Instead, they crossed the Pont des Arts and I was obliged to mingle with a crowd of Japanese tourists when they stopped for a few minutes for Michel to wave at the sightseers on a bâteau mouche, crammed to capacity even on this chilly autumn day. They then struck out southeast in the general direction of the Sorbonne. Every now and then I was forced to study intently the window of a bookshop or occasionally a jeweller’s, wondering how on earth the latter tradesmen made a living in the student quarter, while my two quarries were diverted by the interesting sights. Such as dogs delving in dustbins, beggars holding up scrofulous babies or severed limbs. Or an old mad-eyed tramp totally committed to a feverish game of his own devising, involving kicking one empty cigar tin towards another, cursing horribly a
t his failure to achieve whatever obsessive goal he had set himself. I was glad to see that Mabiche never relaxed her firm hold on Michel’s hand. Some of the narrow, twisting streets in this area seemed sinister indeed. At both ends of one alley in particular, I saw gendarmes posted, watchful, anxious, as though some dreadful scene or outrage was expected to be perpetrated at any moment.

  At last we emerged on an open place—triangular, rather than square, with a café at each apex. I was shocked to see Mabiche lift Michel onto a chair at one of the pavement tables. Knowing her parsimonious nature I could not believe that she had been unable to persuade her young charge to wait till they got back home for his refreshment. This added to my conviction that she must have a “date.”