Her route took her through Leicester Square and on to Piccadilly. It always touched her that before the war, so she’d been told, Piccadilly was where the girls would earn a few pennies selling violets. They were Helen’s favourite flower, but these days, scarce in the city. And this morning, instead of violets, the shops were promoting a musical message, blaring out that Christmas was the most wonderful time and weren’t we all wishing for a white one?
These sentiments drove Helen mad. She passed bag ladies with their meagre possessions piled into carriers, hung on beat-up supermarket trollies. And the men, still unconscious in doorways, wrapped in sleeping bags and, often, guarded by a bored dog.
Easy to say to them, look Sunshine, why don’t you get yourself a job. But how could you go for an interview in a frayed shirt with your face bleeding because you’d had to use a stolen razor? Helen knew about the nicked razors because she’d recently been wrung to tears by George Orwell’s book Down and Out in Paris and London.
White Christmas? Getting snowed on sleeping rough? Oh jolly jingle bells, thought Helen, stopping outside Waterstone’s bookshop to buy a copy of the Big Issue. The magazine was produced and sold by mainly homeless people. The idea of not being able to afford a roof terrified Helen to such an extent that when the vendor said the cover price was £1.50 she gave him a fiver and asked,
‘How’s it going?’
‘Terrible. Nearly midday and you’re the first person who’s stopped all morning. My mate does better outside the Ritz. Gets the commuters off Green Park tube. What I get is snotty women looking smug because they’re going into an effing bookshop. Don’t mean you, love. But you know what I mean?’
Helen said, ‘Commuters? Aren’t they usually rushing to work?’
‘Oh, he doesn’t do an early morning pitch. No point. But he can catch them later when they take an M & S sarnie to the park. If they’re not having a quick snog with that girl from the office, it gives them something to read.’
‘I think it’s a cool magazine.’ Helen said. ‘I like the poems.’
She cut through Waterstone’s into the civilised calm of Jermyn Street. Walking into Franco’s for the first time in her life, she was greeted like a valued customer, her coat was whisked away and she was taken to a table where Jean-Paul was waiting. He stood up. ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting this early. I have to get the train back to Paris.’
Behind the menu, Helen regarded him. Was this a polite way of telling her she was a lousy fuck? Helen bridled at the thought. She took great pride in her bedroom skills. But clearly, action was not required this afternoon. If only she could remember more about last night. They had done it, she was pretty sure of that, but the details were a maddening blur. All she could recall was going into his room, and then waking up, and then him taking her downstairs, past an impassive night porter.
They both ordered risotto. Jean-Paul had a glass of vermentino and Helen stuck to water, glad she’d sunk that head-clearing Bloody Mary when she’d finished cleaning her flat.
Jean-Paul was regarding her sweater with approval. ‘You wear a lot of cashmere.’
‘I do. Legal secretaries get very well paid. And there’s only me to spend my money on.’
‘No boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘What will you do at Christmas?’
‘Well, I can go to my sister’s.’
He laughed. ‘But?’
‘She has a dragon of a mother-in-law, an infuriating young daughter and a dull husband. But, you know, she’s my twin and – we’re not identical, not even particularly alike – but I feel I ought to…’
The Frenchman studied her for a moment, and then said, ‘I have a better idea for you. How well do you know Paris?’
‘Oh, just as a student. Couldn’t afford anything, of course.’
From his jacket pocket Jean-Paul took out a silver key ring, with two keys attached to it. He dropped them on the table in front of her.
‘Why don’t you spend Christmas in Paris? I keep a small apartment on the Left Bank. The tenant’s just moved out. You could make a proper break of it. Come for two weeks, three, if you like.’
Three weeks! Oh bliss. Three weeks would get her out of Carstair Cain during the dreaded DD landings.
What happened was that during the festive season, domestic disputes tended to escalate.
Helen could recite it all by heart, having had to type it up so many times: ‘You said you’d be home in time to do the tree. You said you would!’
‘You said you’d pick up the children from the carol concert. Turning up pissed and goosing the teacher is NOT ON.’
‘No I haven’t bought a present for you to give your bloody mother. Last Christmas she gave me a headscarf with horses on it. Me! Horses? I’ve never been on a fucking horse.’
‘Well at least my mother’s not coming for Christmas. And your fucking mother is!’
‘That’s it. I’ve had enough! This time I really have!’
Oh, on and on. But when the last mince pie and the last accusation had been hurled, on the first workday in January, the aggrieved parties steamed into their individual solicitors, demanding immediate attention. On Divorce Day and subsequent days, listening to strident clients in the panelled office next door, Helen was glad she was just a backroom girl. The temp. It was the one time in the year when she admired the Carstair Cain clan. The women solicitors were, whatever the weather, the time of year, their PMT or the client, always totally professional, at work or later for a drink. The men couldn’t be relied upon, but during the DD landings, they came up trumps. The furious clients would be greeted by an engagingly understanding youngish man with an establishment haircut. He had a firm handshake and the sincerity of someone about to take them for a huge amount of money. There would be a hint – oh barely there, just the merest, tiniest glimmer in his eyes that well, oh dear, if you can’t afford our fees…
Of course they wanted to be seen to be able to afford Carstair Cain. Kudos at the squash club, the coffee morning. Helen felt like lining every client up and machine gunning them. They were affluent, they had everything, and they were behaving like spoiled brats throwing their toys out of the pram.
The only consolation for her was that there was such an amount of work, she earned tons of overtime. But now there was the promise of Paris. The keys on the white damask cloth in front of her.
She said hesitatingly. ‘Are you –‘
‘I live on the Right Bank. And of course, for Christmas I shall be in the country, with my family.’ His eyes were kind. ‘Would you mind being on your own?’
Mind? Mind? I can be like someone in a Jean Rhys novel, Helen thought, hanging out in seedy bars and meeting unsuitable men.
She couldn’t wait.
Chapter Two
Two days before Christmas Helene took a taxi from the Gare du Nord to the rue Dumas on the Left Bank. The taxi driver was a woman. Each time Helene saw a commercial woman driver, she had to resist remarking to herself, Can she really handle that lorry? Oh my God, is she seriously going to fly my plane!
Wrong attitude. She remembered her niece Megan on her last holiday project, writing about female astronauts. Helen had mentioned to her that not so very long ago, women were not allowed to read the news on TV because if there was anything tragic involving children, it was assumed the fluffy newsreader would burst into tears.
Megan had flatly refused to believe the discrimination aspect of this, demanding confirmation from her father. ‘That’s right,’ said Olly. ‘And then the women wheedled their way onto the Nine O’Clock News and one of them had an ear-ring fall off.’ And it made the front page of every British newspaper, Helene recalled.
‘Merci beaucoup,’ Helene said, in perfect schoolgirl French as she tipped her granite-faced driver.
‘Don’t mention it,’ the Parisienne replied sourly, in accented English.
The rue Dumas was all promising bustle. There was an abundant vegetable market, a flower stall and a clarinetis
t playing jazz. A girl in a tight skirt and fishnets bent to throw some coins in the blue enamel bowl at his feet, and he managed to carry on playing and, at the same time, slap her bottom. It just showed, in Paris, anything could happen.
Helene’s spirits soared. Outside number seven, she punched in the door code Jean-Paul had given her and wheeled her suitcase down a mosaic-tiled hall to the stairs. Jean-Paul had warned her there was no lift, and no helpful concierge. No interfering old busybody, Helen told herself as she heaved her case and laptop up to the third floor.
When she unlocked the door she found the apartment smelled faintly of turpentine and oil paint. Jean-Paul had said the previous tenant was an artist. But the place was clean, it was warm, and for three weeks it was hers.
Happily, she wandered about. One bedroom, reasonable kitchen, shower room. In the sitting room there was a table and four Empire chairs overlooking the street. Old-rose curtains, looped against the flocked wallpaper the French seemed to be devoted to, and against the back wall an inviting squashy sofa next to a chestnut bureau. On top of the bureau were two envelopes, one with her name on it and the other simply addressed to The Next Tenant. Helene couldn’t help feeling excited. Emails were all very well, but a letter was definitely better. She sank onto the sofa to read her correspondence.
The first was from Jean-Paul.
‘My dear Helene, welcome to Paris. I am sending in my cleaner so I hope you find she has done a satisfactory job. I have asked her to put a few bits and pieces in the fridge for you, but you’ll find a useful shop just up the road where you can buy everything. As you probably know, in France we don’t “do” Boxing Day so I shall be back at work and will call on you just after five. I hope you will be free to have dinner with me.’
Helene smiled. It would be sex first, then dinner. Very Parisian. Very Jean Rhys. One thing about Jean-Paul, he was always clear cut.
Thinking about what to wear for her rendezvous with Jean-Paul, she opened the window. By craning out, Helene could see, beyond the versatile clarinetist, the shop Jean-Paul had mentioned. She was glad it was just a shop, not the type of supermarket she used in London for convenience. Helen had liked the way, in the English supermarket, she could bypass aisles of products she didn’t need. Pet food, nappies, sweets, buy 8 chops for your BBQ and get four free…
And yet, there was always one item that brought her up short. Last time, dangling enticingly in front of her, was the most adorable romper suit. Raspberry pink fleece. How Helen yearned to buy it, carry it home, cuddle it, wrap it up and give it - to whom? The only child she knew was her niece, aged eight, probably at this moment charging down the road in her favourite army surplus camouflage gear.
Back on the sofa, Helene opened the second envelope and found a 20 euro note, a laundry ticket and the message:
‘I’m sorry to trouble you with this, but I didn’t have time to pick up my shirts. The Laverie is one street down. Would you be very kind and post them on to me? They are paid for. Mille mercis, Rory McEwen.’
Rory McEwen. What an evocative name.
Perhaps because of the smell of turps she had a strong sense of Rory McEwen. It was as if he was still here, this artist she’d never met. She thought herself into his routine. Up late, probably – no, early, to take advantage of the best of the light. He’d paint all day, then go out and share a bottle of wine or two with his friends. There would be girls. He’d probably romanced them on this very sofa. Taken them to what was now her bed.
Helene had always lived in rental accommodation so had never owned, or been burdened with, buying a bed. Her beds had always been slept in by someone else. ‘Previously enjoyed’ was the way she thought of it. Of course, it was the same in a hotel bedroom, but an apartment had a more intimate feel, so Helene found it pleasurable, somehow, imagining the ex-tenant in bed with her. She wondered what Rory McEwen looked like, what his body was like. She wondered what jollies he’d got up to in that double bed. And suddenly, she was glad she’d thought to bring her own sheets.
Before she put the laundry ticket in the bureau drawer, she saw that Rory’s address was East Cliff, Southwold, Suffolk. How extraordinary! It was somewhere Helene knew well, because her sister Hilly lived at the other end of town.
Though actually, thinking about it, it probably wasn’t extraordinary at all. One of her girls’ lunch gang had gone on holiday alone, to Lamu, a remote island off the Kenyan coast. And in the pool she’d met not one, but three people she knew.
‘That’s right,’ said Noreen. ‘It’s like at exercise class, some days most of us turn up in blue. We haven’t agreed it, or phoned one another up first thing, it just happens.’
‘Well they say,’ Helen had said, ‘that if you hired a bus and went round and round Piccadilly Circus you’d look down and in time, recognise everyone you knew in your life.’
Every man they repeated this to had scoffed. But all the women knew it was true. As Noreen had said, with a long-suffering shrug, ‘Women are from Earth. Men are from Earth. So kids, just get on with it.’
Lugging her case onto the bed, Helene began to unpack. A Christmas card from her sister set her thinking about Hilly and their diverse lives. Their father had left home when the twins were fourteen and had made it quite clear that except to give the girls away when they got married, he never wanted to see any of his family again. It took Helene years to accept that he meant it and to this day she didn’t understand why he had turned against them. To Helene’s relief, her mother never remarried.
Hilly married at seventeen, divorced at 24 and then met Oliver when she was on holiday in Southwold. He was an accountant, always in business of course because even a pig farmer is obliged to complete a tax return and probably couldn’t be bothered to do it himself.
Hilly had told her twin that frankly, what had swung it with Oliver was that he lived in a house that was as charming as its name – Honeysuckle House.
‘That’s barmy!’ Helen’s friend Noel had exploded, when she told him. ‘No one gets hitched because they like the bloody house!’
‘Oh really? Why did Elizabeth Bennet change her mind about Mr Darcy?’
‘Because Mr Darcy was played by Colin Firth.’
Noel fancied Colin Firth rotten and pettishly refused to forgive the actor for not being gay.
‘Because, Noel, she saw his house, Pemberley. It happens. It happened to Hilly.’
Unfortunately for Hilly, her love-affair with Honeysuckle House was tarnished by the presence there of Olly’s mother.
Helene took her laptop to the table. As she expected, there was an email from Hilly:
‘Hi Sis, well the annex is finally finished and we’ve got the dragon, her wheelchair and her motheaten dog installed. She has invited the Canon and the President of the Women’s Fellowship for Xmas drinks. I wheeled her round to the offie and the very nice man said he would deliver all the drink. Oh no, butts in bagfeatures, My Son will come and collect it. I mean, as if Olly hasn’t got enough to do, without getting a hernia heaving boxes of booze. Actually, isn’t there a shower called Myson? Do you remember that couple at school, Val and John and you said Val-n-Jon sounded like something you put down the loo.
‘Thanks for our prezzies and Megan’s Xmas money. I wish I could report that she’s spending it on something pink and pretty but no, she’s been to some second hand shop and unearthed a wartime gas mask.
‘I hate to think of you alone for Christmas. Lots of love, Hilly.’
Helene’s reply omitted any mention of Jean-Paul and majored on sheer indulgence, a cooked chicken to heat up, paperbacks, wine, chocolate. And finally:
‘Do you know an artist called Rory McEwen in Southwold? He used to live in this flat.’
Noel rang that night to counsel her on How to Survive Christmas Alone.
‘For heaven’s sake, Noel. It’s only one day. What’s the big deal?’
The way he ignored this told Helene he had a new boyfriend he was showing off to. He crooned on, in an infuriatin
g lullaby voice:
‘On Christmas Day, don’t go out. All you’ll see is people playing happy families. It’s a mirage, of course, but you’ll imagine it’s for real. So stay in, but stay structured. No drifting about and no eating standing up. Above all, don’t turn on the telly. Doesn’t matter which part of the world a programme takes you to, it will all come down to you being gurned at with frightening festive cheer. And what you have to remember is that when they’re in their appalling paper hats tucking into turkey and all the disgusting trimmings – oh my God, watery Brussels sprouts – and Christmas pud and greasy brandy butter, all this would have been filmed in sweltering heat in July.’
Helene didn’t need to ask how Noel would be spending his Christmas. One year, she had gone with him to the hospital where he worked as a porter. On the large ward, she had been shocked and surprised by turns. Shocked and saddened at how many people had no-one visiting them on Christmas Day. And, reeling from this, she was astonished to the point of hysteria when a man visiting a woman in the end bed got under the covers with her and was, quite blatantly, at it.
Noel barely gave them a glance. ‘People get randy in bed, Helen. Just because, every five minutes a nurse sticks a thermometer in your mouth, it doesn’t mean you don’t feel horny.’
Early that evening, Helen accompanied him to help at a soup kitchen near Waterloo. On the way back, crossing Hungerford Bridge, a man ahead of them was playing a plaintive tenor sax, ‘Getting Sentimental Over You.’
Under a clear night sky frozen with stars, Helen’s thoughts were still with the people, mostly men, she’d seen that night. Her job had been to ladle vegetable soup – gruel, moaned Noel – into bowls while Noel handed out mugs of what he despised as builder’s tea along with lumps of bread. In George Orwell’s day, Helen recalled, the bread had been smeared with a smidgen of marg and was known as bread and scrape.
The men, at long trestle-tables, had devoured every last mouthful, wiping the bowls with the bread. Helen and Hilly had been forbidden by their mother to do this, on the grounds that it was common. Then along to the school canteen had come a posh girl. She’d been chauffeur driven to morning class, would you believe!
The Price of Love Page 2