But she was naked and shivering. On her knees. Seven uniformed figures leaned over her, blocking out air, blocking out light, and their accusations hammered at her until she knew her eardrums would split and the guilt hiding inside her head would spill out like grey ash on to the rug for all to see. Already there were telltale flakes of ash on her arms and her thighs. On her lips. She tried to brush them off.
‘You killed him.’
‘No!’
‘You whore.’
‘No!’
‘You butcher.’
‘You slut.’
‘Putain.’
She was shaking her head fiercely from side to side, slamming her thoughts against the walls of her skull.
No. No. No.
The darkness deepened around her. The uniforms were sucking the last scrap of light from the room. She could hear sobs. But when she looked down to hide her guilt from the uniforms, she saw her own naked skin glistening in the gloom with strings of scarlet. And one of her hands was rising and falling. Rising. Falling.
In front of her lay the body of her father, the sockets of his eyes black and empty, and she was stabbing him in the chest with a bayonet. Over and over. She couldn’t make it stop.
Romy dragged herself out of sleep, gasping and trembling. Her heart was trying to kick its way out of her chest and for one sickening moment she had no idea where she was. No idea who lay beside her. Her mind was in turmoil. Moonlight had seeped through the slats of the shutters and lay across the tangled bed sheets like a row of silver ingots spread out for her to steal.
She jerked upright and wrapped her arms around her shins in the darkness, her chin jammed on to her knees to prevent her teeth chattering. She was angry. Angry with herself. With the hated dream. Even angry with the man at her side for not being enough to keep the nightmare at bay.
She slid out of bed and padded on bare feet to where her clothes lay in a black bundle on the floor by the window. She scooped them up and, by the ice-cold light of one of the slats of moonlight, she saw the small leather pouch that Anton wore under his shirt. Her naked skin was slick with sweat but her mouth turned dry at the sight of the pouch. She glanced back at the bed. No movement.
With a quick flip of her hand she opened the pouch, removed her two hundred francs, no more, no less, from the pile of banknotes inside it and tucking her clothes under her arm she hurried from the apartment. On the landing, the air nipped at her skin, with only a dull glow rising from a light bulb on the floor below, and a faint rustle that was hard to place. As though the walls themselves were whispering. She had no idea what time it was. She pulled on her trousers, shirt and shoes, raking a hand through her hair, and only then did she notice the man leaning over the balustrade of the landing on the storey above. He was in the dark but she could make out the pale oval of his face turned in her direction. He had been watching her naked body slide into her clothes.
Softly he called out, ‘I can pay. I have money.’
A banknote fluttered down the well of the stairs like a bird shot from the sky.
‘Go to hell,’ she muttered.
She hurried down the three flights of dimly lit stairs and out into the chill night air. Somewhere, a church clock struck three. She set off at a rapid pace along the cobbled street as if she could outrun the voices in her head.
The police officer sits me down on the velvet chair in Maman’s music room as tenderly as if I am made of fragile porcelain. He perches on the piano stool, hands on his knees, and his voice is kind. Does he have a daughter of his own, I wonder? I do not look at the other stern-faced gendarme with beetles for eyebrows, who stands by the window taking notes.
‘Mademoiselle Romaine Duchamps,’ the officer starts with a soft tone, ‘you have stated that you didn’t see Karim Abed in the garden this morning. Is that correct?’
I nod.
‘You were with your sister and Monsieur Roussel, I believe?’
I nod.
‘Did you see Karim Abed enter the house?’
I find my tongue. It feels too big for my mouth. ‘No.’
He pauses, so I offer more.
‘I did not see Karim enter the house.’
‘Your sister says she did see him go through the side door when she went to the orchard to pick an apple.’
Oh, she is bold, my sister.
‘I saw the wheelbarrow,’ I say. ‘Full of hedge cuttings. But no gardener.’
I sit on my hands to stop their tremors. But immediately I pull them back out. I don’t want to look as though I am hiding something. How would an innocent daughter act, what would she do? Cry.
I cannot cry.
‘I know this is deeply upsetting for you, mademoiselle, but I have to urge you to think hard. Did you see anything at all unusual this morning?’
‘Yes.’
He leans forward, alert as a gundog. ‘And what was that?’
‘I walked past the window of Papa’s study. I was taking deadheaded rose blooms to the compost heap.’
It is as if I have lit a fire under the investigating officer. He jumps to his feet. Stands right in front of me.
‘What did you see?’
I stare straight into his intent eyes. I do not blink. ‘I saw Karim’s face at the window. Inside Papa’s study.’
There. The lie is told. My cheeks burn but I do not look away. If Florence can do it, so can I. I do not want a cold blade to sever my neck. I let my distress show on my face and he presses a pristine white handkerchief into my hands. With relief I bury my face in it and pretend to cry.
Moonlight streamed into Romy’s attic room, daubing silver on the walls, so bright that she felt no need to light a candle. She filled an enamel bowl with cold water downstairs and carted it back up the five flights to her room, where she stripped, washed and pulled on a clean skirt and blouse. They were her smartest. She didn’t want to embarrass Florence again, nor did she want to come to Chloé stinking of whisky, cigarettes and sex. Especially not sex.
She knelt once more beside her mattress and again unlaced the strap holding the split together. Her hand fought its way through the horsehair lumps until it closed on the canvas bag and dragged it out. But this time instead of placing the two hundred francs she’d retrieved from Anton back in, she removed another three hundred. Five hundred altogether. The moonlight’s touch turned them into lace between her fingers, with winged Mercury gazing up at her.
She took an envelope from a box under her bed, a plain manila one, and tucked the money inside. In pencil she wrote on the front a single name: Aya.
It was the first day of the month.
The dawn had nudged the darkness of the night hours westward in the direction of Versailles. In its place a pinkish veil spread over Paris and transformed the graceful dome of the Sacré-Coeur basilica into a sumptuous vast glace à la fraise. The dirty and dilapidated streets of the Goutte d’Or district of the 18th arrondissement were turned into the rose-tinted haven that its north-African inhabitants yearned for. A brief whisper of the wind from the deserts of their homeland.
Romy liked it here. The smell of spices and unfamiliar oils and herbs hung in the air. Strange garbs and languages from other corners of the world filled the narrow streets. Even at this hour of the morning the colourful Barbès market was buzzing with life, as dark-skinned fingers prodded the silvery scales of fish for freshness and scooped handfuls of fiery-hot chillis into hand-woven bags. The area rang with shouts and arguments in unknown guttural tongues and reverberated with the rumble of the Métro overhead.
This was the world from which Romy had wrenched Karim Abed. A soft-spoken gardener, a family man. A man who had placed ripe strawberries in front of her each summer and chopped wood for her bedroom fire each winter. She stood now in the musky shadow of an alleyway and observed the door of the house in rue d’Oran where Karim used to live. She ignored the odd looks she received, a white female face that didn’t belong in the Arab quarter, and kept her eyes fixed on the door. It was red. Wit
h long threads of peeling paint, like strips of skin flayed off a slave’s back.
She did not have to wait long. The door opened and a woman slid silently into the flow of humanity in the cobbled street. She looked about forty, small and self-contained in her black robe and black headscarf. Her tiny feet scurried along at speed, eager to get wherever she was going, but she kept her eyes downcast, unwilling to engage with the busy world around her. Romy knew exactly where she was heading. To one of the big hotels near the Opéra. She worked long hours for a pittance as a kitchen skivvy. Her name was Aya. Aya Abed. Romy said the name aloud, not once, but twice, as if doing so would empty it out of her head.
She returned her attention to the door, but it was another half-hour before it opened again. This time a boy emerged, caught in that gangly state between childhood and manhood. Romy knew his age – thirteen. She knew his name – Samir. Samir Abed. She knew where he went to school. So it came as a surprise to see him wearing dirty overalls and turning in the opposite direction away from the school.
What was the boy up to?
She felt a twist of disquiet and quickly fell into step some way behind him. Samir was taller than his father had been so his dark head was easy to spot in the crowd, but he had inherited his sloping shoulders from his father and the intent way of holding himself, as though aware that each step was an important part of his journey through life. At the foul-smelling tallow factory he hurried through the tall gates, but just as he was disappearing from view, he glanced over his shoulder. Straight past the other workers crammed around the gates. Straight at her.
Karim’s eyes. Dark and accusing.
She turned and fled.
The lock clicked. The red door opened. Romy extracted the hook-pick and slipped it unobtrusively back into her bag. She had won the set of picks in a poker game years earlier from a professional burglar and quickly learned to use them effectively. She knew the stubborn temperament of this lock, its tendency to dig its heels in if she applied too much pressure. Gently, gently. She tickled it open in less than ten seconds and stepped inside the building.
It smelled of too many bodies and not enough running water. A labyrinth of dim corridors ran back through the tenement, twisting and turning around a dingy courtyard where sunlight rarely found a foothold. Romy walked fast, sure of where to go. No one challenged her. In places like this, it was better not to ask questions.
Answers could be dangerous.
Romy stood in the centre of the small airless room, eyes darting around, seeking changes. There was one. One big one. The schoolbooks were usually stacked neatly on the table with a sharpened pencil laid out beside them, but now were pushed into a corner on the floor with a small pile of folded shirts on top of them. As if they had no more value than a stool.
Surely not.
Not that. A rejection of the only pathway out of this stinking rathole. She recalled Samir in the overalls. The gates to the tallow factory. The leaden footsteps of the men streaming through them. And it made her want to reach out and haul him out of there before the damage was done.
Why Samir?
Why now? For six years she had been coming here with her hook-pick and her envelope on the first day of every month, and for six years she had kept him in school instead of working the markets or weaving threads in the carpet sheds the way many of the children from Algeria were forced to in the backstreets of Paris.
What has happened, Samir?
She studied the room more carefully. Never had she touched anything. Not opened any drawers or rummaged through any cupboards. Never that. Once, only once, she had brought a pot of paint and the next month the walls were a pristine white and a dish of fresh dates had been sitting on the table when she arrived. Were they for her? She ate one. It was the only time a thin wire of contact had connected them. She could still taste that date, sweet and scented. A dark, savage part of her mind had suspected it would be poisoned, but still she swallowed it, and it wasn’t poisoned.
The room was tidy, always clean and tidy. But bare. A pile of large threadbare cushions on the floor, a small table, two hard chairs. Screened from the room behind a faded curtain that must once have been a vivid magenta stood a narrow bed and in one corner lay a thin rolled-up mattress, with a few clothes precisely folded. All as usual. Yet something was missing. It took her a moment. It was the vase. The brass one. With hand-chased elephants on it and handles designed as cobras. It was gone. It was only when she stepped behind the curtain that she saw the medicine bottle by the bed and realised where the money was going. Aya Abed was sick.
It was too much.
She quickly placed the envelope on the table and hurried to the door, eager to be gone. That was her mistake, her haste. She forgot. She forgot to keep her eyes averted from the photograph that hung in a bamboo frame next to the door. It was Karim’s long gentle face and his dark eyes were staring straight at her, just as he had done when he stood in the dock in court. She heard again the jangle of his handcuffs when he raised them in the air, showing them to her, and caught again the soft sobbing of his wife, the rustle of the papers that held the damning accusations. She could smell fear in the courtroom and knew it was her own.
She tore her eyes from the photograph and left the room, but as she entered the corridor a figure loomed out of the dim shadows. Her heart leaped into her throat and for one terrifying moment she thought it was Karim. But no. It was a woman.
‘What the hell you doing in there? You got no right.’
The woman was large, with an abundance of very dark rolls of flesh and large flashy beads that rattled as she waved an arm in the direction of Aya Abed’s room.
‘Who are you?’ Romy countered.
‘I’m Leilah. More to the point, who the fuck are you? A thief, that’s what you are, you—’
‘No. I’m not. I’m a friend of Samir’s.’
The woman’s large muscular hands, the scrubbed hands of a washerwoman, seized Romy’s shoulders and almost lifted her off the floor as they slammed her against the wall, so hard that the back of her head hitting the already cracked plaster made a sound like a gunshot. For a moment her mind went blank.
‘You ain’t no friend of Samir’s,’ the woman yelled, her face a hand’s width from Romy’s, her nostrils wide black tunnels. ‘I’m going to beat the shit out of you until I get the truth out of . . .’
But Romy knew how to fight. You don’t hang around bars late at night without learning a thing or two about combat. The point of her shoe raked forward into a well-padded shin and her elbow twisted and shot up at an unguarded chin. She heard the crack of a tooth and the round eyes rolled in Leilah’s head like marbles ricocheting off a windowpane. Her hands grew slack.
Romy ran. Today had not started well.
CHAPTER NINE
FLORENCE
Sunlight flashes off the aircraft’s wing, painting it a shimmering buttercup yellow as it flies smoothly above the row of trees. But the wind has picked up, the warm dusty breath from the Sahara, and a gust of it snatches at the tail fin, spinning the fragile plane, sending it into a steep nosedive.
I hold my breath. My hands clench. From behind my sunglasses I watch it tumble to earth and a part of me is glad.
But I hear the cry of alarm. Witness the moment the aircraft hits the ground. See its wings torn off on impact as easily as an insect’s, as it flips tail over nose. I long to run to it, but make myself remain seated on the rug. Face immobile. I am good at that. My teeth clamp down on my tongue to stop me shouting out.
I let her deal with it. It is what she wants.
‘Maman, look! Tante Romy mended it.’
Chloé’s voice is so full of admiration, her words so exuberant in their love for her aunt. I smile with delight and hide the shiver that runs through me.
‘Isn’t she clever?’ I say. ‘What would we do without her?’
My tongue is dipped in bile.
My daughter holds up the model aircraft for me to view its perfection, now that
my sister has slotted its wings back on after its accident. Even I have to admit that it is an impressive toy. It flies above tree-height after no more than a metre takeoff run and wings its way straight along the Grande Allée of the Tuileries Gardens, easing itself up over the long rows of trimmed chestnut trees as though hell-bent on reaching the Louvre. The museum’s steep grey roof seems to watch us from afar, as if storing up more knowledge to cram into its bowels.
I like the Tuileries Garden. I like its geometric layout, its neatness. A formal garden that was based on perfect symmetry by its designer, Le Nôtre, who understood, all the way back in the seventeenth century, the need to teach people about structure. Discipline. Self-control. Calmness. I know that if I had met M. André Le Nôtre, I would have liked the man, we would have spoken the same language. All the way from the Place de la Concorde to the Louvre Museum he created a symphony of allées, terraces, horseshoe ramps, all graced with carefully positioned statues, lawns and flowers. And a pond sixty metres across. Not just an ordinary pond but an octagonal one. The geometric beauty of it soothes my soul. I like to walk around it, counting my paces.
Romaine sits down on the rug beside me, but her eyes are still on my daughter whose beaming smile is like a splash of sunlight in the shade.
‘Did you have a good time, Chloé?’ I ask.
She nods vigorously, setting her long curls dancing. It strikes me that if my sister had not cut her own hair short, how similar the colour and texture of their hair would be. Not like mine, which has no sense of natural decorum. I have to wrestle it into submission each day.
‘Tante Romy says it has a flying speed of two hundred metres per minute,’ Chloé announces. She stands in front of us on the grass, holding the plane up in the air, admiring the RAF roundels on its silver fuselage and wings. She is wearing a white broderie anglaise dress. She looks like an angel.
‘I am impressed,’ I smile.
‘It arrives in its box in flying trim, Tante Romy says. I like winding the rubber band.’
‘You do it well, chérie.’
The Betrayal Page 6