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

by Sophie Meredith

  He turned his face away from me as though he could not bear to look into my eyes.

  “As for me…I accepted Father’s story for long enough, even when I realised what his second wife had done to him. No wonder I found it difficult to build a relationship with a woman. I did get in rather deep once. I’d begun to panic a little. I’d decided the ideal love I’d always wanted to believe in was not going to happen. Around me, friends were pairing off—becoming couples, compromising. Lilian was growing more possessive. I let the other girl think I was going to commit myself. Then, at the last minute, I couldn’t go through with it. I dragged out the cowardly convenient excuse—not wanting to risk passing on the family trouble…she was a nurse…she suggested I read up on the subject—and when I let slip about the attempted abortion she said that settled it and there was no obstacle to our getting married. When I still refused, she got nasty—said that my subjugated feelings for my sister along with Lilian’s own witch-like power…had come between us. I didn’t want to hurt her any more so we parted on those terms. But all the time, darling, I was still hoping…that there existed somewhere the right one.”

  He looked directly at me again,

  “But Fate certainly seems to have worked over time putting obstacles in our path….”

  I thought of the dreadful accident that had cut short our first encounter, of my discovery of the damned pair on the night of the storm at Pont Sal…of Michel, and the haunting fear that had hovered over me ever since his birth—that he might have inherited something irremediable.

  I kissed Robert’s worried face a dozen times.

  “You’re thinking of our son,” he said, taking my face in his hands, reading my mind.

  There were tears in his eyes.

  “Even when you believed there was a big chance of a…brain condition…you didn’t think of…of…not having him, did you?”

  I shook my head, confirming his guess. “He’s turned out so marvelously. And…we can have more children. There’s time—as long as we don’t hang about.”

  His face clouded over again. I wondered if he were thinking of the scene at the château. The naked sister—half-sister—the girl he’d been brother to, whatever their blood relationship—lying in his arms a few hours after he’d made love to me.

  “I think I can learn to live with the idea of Lilian,” I assured him. “To forget her, even—is she—all right—now?”

  “It wasn’t what it seemed like,” he said quietly. “But it might have been if you two had not come bursting in. It was the first time she’d come so close to seducing me but….”

  He put his head in his hands.

  “I have to confess that at that time my feelings for her were strong—protective and passionate, too. I know now about her jealousy, her possessiveness. And to—possess me—in every way—was her way of hitting back at you. Yet now—” He laughed bitterly “—I don’t exist for her. Yes, she’s all right. I—paid her off. I wanted to make sure she was independent if her American ever got tired of her. As it happens, he seems to be still infatuated—and she’s gone down very well in the States.”

  I had admired his awesome bravery in facing up to the operation. And now he was courageously bringing out into the open this delicate, potentially-poisonous situation. The image of that lovely amoral female, naked in his arms, was fading. I knew it would not be between us anymore.

  I tried to assure him of this in words, but then found it much easier in deeds. I pulled back his track suit top and gently kissed the livid scar, following it down to the navel, rousing him then giving myself up to his fierce embrace.

  Our nest in the bracken was shady now. We moved to a sunnier spot, climbing hand in hand, careless of our disarranged clothing. We leaned on a broad-trunked chestnut, staring at the truly wonderful view.

  “There’s a couple of other matters,” he said.

  He tightened his hold on me.

  “Are you quite over Jacques?” he asked.

  I was puzzled. He had shown no signs before of jealousy about my past. I had been quite frank with him.

  “Why, yes, of course,” I said. “It was ghastly that he should have had to die so untimely—so horribly—but we were no longer lovers by then, you know. Not for a long time…. It was just that it was such a comfort, knowing he was there if I needed him.”

  “The same as your father?”

  “Why, yes, very much the same. I was terribly tangled up when I lost him.”

  “Would you like to know about him? Your father, I mean?” he asked.

  I stirred the crisp, fallen leaves with my foot.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I—I’ll leave it to you. If you think I should…know.”

  He let his chin fall forward onto my shoulder.

  “Perhaps not, then,” he said. “But if you don’t mind, one day I might put it in a novel. There’s such a fantastic twist to the story and…History Repeats Itself. The theme is irresistible. And the setting! Paris in the twenties. Claud Lemoine let me keep all the photocopies I made….”

  “I’ll wait then,” I said and knew that my task from now on must be to encourage him to write this book, so different from my own feeble jottings. “I’ll read it when it’s published—when you’ve made your fortune on the film rights.”

  Once again, I had spoken without thinking and could have bitten off my tongue.

  He released his hold on me and moved away, round the tree, facing it, pressing the bark with his outstretched hands. I noticed the large vein on his neck standing out like little Michel’s did sometimes when a tantrum was in the offing.

  “Money!” he said bitterly, banging the trunk with his fist. “It never mattered to me before…I owe you such a lot already.”

  “How can you put it like that?” I cried. “Surely what we have together cancels all that out.”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know why I survived that hell of an experience in the operating theatre?” he asked. “It was for what I hoped we could have together. It was for you. Because you seemed to be there, pleading with me to survive.” He laughed again, his bitter laugh.

  “I even welcomed the extra grey in my hair, the wrinkles on my face—because of that foolish “thing” you had about our ages.”

  I realised that I had known for some time, since signing forms at the hospital, that he was in fact thirty-nine—and I was forty-two so we were both practically in our forties and anyway I’d forgotten that particular obsession.

  “So,” he went on. “I owe you my life and as you seem to want me to join it onto yours—that’s okay. But for me, Gaby, your wealth is still a heck of a barrier between us.”

  Crise du Coeur

  by Gabrielle Lemoine

  Sheila emerged from the draughty steps of the Metro at Saint-Placide. The traffic lights had just changed in her favour but she was thankful for the protection of a crowd of pedestrians which swept her across the Rue de Rennes. Stepping off the curb was a risky business anywhere in Paris and here, in Montparnasse, where six main roads converged, the drivers were over-impatient even by French standards. She hurried into FNAC, the cut-price book shop and made her way to the English Novels Section. Michel devoured books with equal ease in both languages but she may as well get something she too could cope with.

  An Irwin Shaw caught her eye. Michel had enjoyed Rich Man, Poor Man on the television just before they left England. She would take this one, Acceptable Losses,—it sounded like a war story—and—she glanced at her watch—no time to linger—she snatched up a paperback entitled Transplant. If Michel had not lost his sense of humour, he would be sure to see the funny side of reading such a title while incarcerated in a famous Paris heart hospital.

  She cut down a sidestreet, hoping her usually reliable sense of direction would lead her through to the Rue de Sèvres. She passed a dozen boutiques catering for the teeming student population of the area. She looked forward to browsing in them with Louise when Michel was fit enough to have her br
ing their daughter to visit him.

  She caught her breath in admiration as a huge double gate swung open revealing a perfect jewel of a house tucked away in a cobbled court. Palms in tubs, white façade, wrought iron balconies. One day, maybe, when Michel was quite well again and she had found a publisher for her novel, perhaps they would be able to afford something like that….

  The streets narrowed, yet cars still hurtled along them, accelerating at the sight of a pedestrian hesitantly crossing. No question then of walking in the roadway, but the pavement had its own hazards. There was the inevitable sludge of canine excreta. Discarded bottles and cans. And there were the beggars. Varying in age from ravaged youth to desolate senility, they sat huddled against the buildings, their pathetic Curriculum Vitae chalked on wall, board or paving stone.

  “J’ai faim,” most of them began and followed up with bitter tales of unemployment, illness, bad luck, dependent families, despair. Sheila remembered reading Hugo’s Notre Dame in the snug little sixth-form tutorial room with a smart, young, well-nourished French mistress and being nevertheless deeply moved by the description of the culs-de-jattes, the legless cripples of the Cours de Miracles. She had been so impressed, she had tried to paint the long, dark lane where Gringoire had dodged amongst the miserable creatures. It had not quite come off as a painting, perhaps because till now she had not quite believed in such abject poverty.

  “I have such a lot to be thankful for,” she told herself as she dropped a coin in front of an elderly man thrusting out a gangrenous foot. “Michel has survived the operation: the doctors say he will live a normal life, we shall be happy again….”

  Now she was opposite the ugly, old, crumbling walls of the Hôpital de Laënnec. She passed through the deep gloomy archway with its forbidding gardien, grudgingly raising the barrier, more like the entrance to a prison. Then she was in the outer courtyard and bemused by the sight of patients in pyjamas wandering about in the weak, winter sunshine. Modern Surgery relies on antibiotics as a follow up, she reminded herself—the old fears which kept sick people muffled up and bedbound no longer applied. Nor the passé obsession with Hygiene—the rooms here could certainly not be called scrupulously clean—Michel had himself removed some disgusting rubbish from behind a radiator and Sheila had seen the same banana-skin in a corner for three days running. But the medical attention, the skill of the surgeons, the cheerful after care of the nursing teams were world famous. She was reminded of this as she came face to face with the young Arab who had told her in halting English that he had come all the way from Algeria for the operation.

  “Not long now,” she said to him.

  He nodded, smiling, looking forward to it.

  He was about nineteen, she judged. How awful to be so far away from his family at a time like this. How glad she was that she could get in to see Michel every day with just one change on the Metro.

  “Bon courage!” she said to the youth as he held open the swing doors for her. This first long corridor led past the chapel, the library and the kitchens, which produced such unappetising saltless, sugarless concoctions that Michel had persuaded the nurses to knock up his salads in their own little sanctum. Sheila felt guiltily conscious of the cold chicken she was at this very moment smuggling in for him.

  Now she was in the open air again, crossing another court which led to the Heart and Lungs Building. She glanced towards the lifts and saw the Italian nun shepherding in a noisy crowd of visitors. She decided to brave the stairs, steep, shiny and numerous though they were. On the first landing she all but collided with the boisterous little Egyptian boy. He had had his new valve, donated by a pig for its relatively long endurance and extra strength in a hot climate, for ten days now and was gratifyingly chirpy. His father, himself a doctor, was staying in Paris to be near his son. The boy was seven years old. Sheila remembered her own son at that age, vigorous and bright-eyed. How well he had got on from the first with Michel. No step-father trauma for those two.

  “Jimmy is the son I’ve always wanted,” Michel had assured her. And later their happiness had been crowned by the birth of Louise to complete their little family.

  Sheila grinned at Abdul and hoped fervently that he would soon be back in the bosom of his family in Alexandria. She was now in Professeur Neveu’s territory. The little rooms that have replaced Wards in French hospitals all contained just one or two patients, most displaying the tell-tale wound, like a grotesque cleavage, at the neckline of their night clothes. She waved through the open door at the elderly Greek lady, terribly swollen in a travesty of pregnancy, that was surely some non-associated malady. Michel’s figure was quite intact. At fifty, he was as lithe and shapely as he had been in his middle-thirties when they had first met.

  Sheila caught a glimpse of herself in a smoked-glass door.

  “I really must take myself in hand,” she promised herself. “Take up a diet seriously. I could do with losing nine or ten kilos easily.”

  Her resolve was emphasised by the graceful figure of the nurse who rushed by. Pear shaped, but in the opposite sense to the typical Englishwoman. She had a full bosom and narrow, boyish hips which swung sexily even as she hurried to the doorway of one of the Italian patients. The hullabaloo inside did not lessen one jot as she shushed and reprimanded. The nun was in there with what seemed like the whole population of Florence. They had obviously failed to appreciate the many signs hopefully written in Italian as well as French, pleading for SILENCE.

  Here was Michel’s room. She wondered whether to peer through the porthole in the door before going inside. She had done that yesterday and almost fainted with the shock of seeing his bed empty. Then Gérard, his roommate had beckoned her to come inside and had directed a stream of what he imagined to be slow and simple French at her. She had managed to isolate enough words to gather that Michel had gone for some sort of test. Then, a further shock to her tortured nerves, her beloved husband had come in, almost at a run, boasting how he had scorned the wheelchair and walked back unescorted from the X-Ray department.

  “Take my pulse, dear,” he had demanded, too excited to give her more than a passing peck of a kiss as greeting. She had shared in his triumph when it was discovered that even a flight of stairs had taken the count up to a mere 80. He had averaged over 100 before the operation. He showed her the latest X-ray prints. The plastic valve and the five metal rings tying the ribs together. She listened from across the room to hear the tick-tick and said once again that he was just like the crocodile in Peter Pan. Then he had thrown off his dressing gown, the violet-blue of which exactly matched his beautiful eyes in his handsome, tanned face. Once on the bed he bared his chest and pulled his pyjama trousers away from the soreness.

  Sheila had tried not to avert her eyes from the great slash—throat to navel—cobbled together like a hastily-sewn Christmas turkey, the tortured flesh bulging out between the stitches. The great blue bruise on his neck where he had been clamped down on the operating table. The two electrodes emerging from his abdomen in case of a sudden need for resuscitation. The yellowing contusions on the arms from the drips. The long slash up his left leg where part of a vein had been removed to provide a by-pass for his faulty Aorta. And even taking all that into consideration, she admitted the tremendous improvement on the way he had looked the previous Friday. Then, she had crept in, unsuspecting, to find him lying in a semi-fœtal posture, his whole body and face a silent, agonised protest against the indignities of the operation. His mouth had been horribly twisted in memory of the thick breathing apparatus and he could only speak in a hoarse whisper.

  “I told you not to come for three days,” he had moaned. She had explained lovingly that the nurse had encouraged her to break this rule, happy to inform her on the telephone that Monsieur Grandsire was making remarkable progress, back in his room after only sixteen hours in Ré -animation. And only four days later, he had walked at a steady pace from another wing of the hospital.

  Quietly now, she pushed open the door. Politely she lo
oked towards Gérard first. But his wife was bending over him, fussing with his pillows. They had not heard Sheila come in.

  And neither had Michel.

  His back was to her and he was talking animatedly to a beautiful, middle-aged woman, perfectly coiffured, elegantly-dressed—who sat by the bed holding his hand. She looked vaguely familiar. Then Sheila heard Michel call her Louise.

  Sheila stepped back into the corridor and made her way to the Waiting Room, her eyes blurred with tears. Trembling, she sank into a chair and tried to pull herself together.

  Someone from his past—from his first twenty years spent in Paris and Normandy, his birthplace. Someone who shared their daughter’s name, chosen with no explanation by Michel.

  The group of noisy, gesticulating Italians came in, ejected from the sickroom finally by the little nurse.

  “Scusi!” said the one in pyjamas, still waiting for his operation. “Hev you pleasa da change for da telephona?” Sheila found some loose franc coins in her bag. He would be calling la mamma again. He had already cleaned Gérard and Michel out of small change, so that Michel had been unable to call home from the kiosk in “A” block. The others sat down to wait and Sheila took out the books she had bought for her husband. They were something to hide behind. With her mind in this turmoil, she could not hope to concentrate on really reading.

  Flicking through Shaw’s Acceptable Losses, she came upon a full-page description of a heart operation. Her attention was held for a moment as she read of the incision, the sawing of the bone, the wrenching open of the ribcage, the organs unceremoniously moved aside. She closed the book with a snap, but her nausea was not from these words but from fear of what her husband’s unknown visitor meant in her own life. Daniel Farson’s Transplant was a lightly-macabre tale of an outraged corpse seeking to reclaim his heart, implanted in a stranger’s body. She would save both books till Michel was safely back home.