To begin with, it was all harmlessly entertaining. He wrote some biting satirical cards about his new lifestyle to his friends. He even, although he would have been reluctant to admit it, derived a certain desultory amusement from establishing his neighbourhood routines: where he bought his paper, where he bought his milk, the identical exchanges he had in the next-door bakery every time he bought a baguette. He found himself a launderette, a dry cleaner which did ironing. He invented nicknames. But he knew this game couldn’t last; it was only a matter of time until he exhausted the entertainment value of the here and now. Ultimately, it was far too cramping and frustrating to envisage for long.
Next, he specialised in drunken walks. Late at night, after finishing a bottle of cheap Nicolas wine, he would set off across the empty stretches of the grander seventh arrondissement and watch what alcohol and street lighting could do for the Eiffel Tower and the Esplanade des Invalides and the Ecole Militaire. Brilliant, facile insights would come to him as he walked the deserted avenues, venting his frustrations on the farcical, spotlit monuments. Walking around London at night, he would have been able to look in at the living-room windows of two-storey terrace houses and snigger at rubber plants and enamelled ducks in flight. Here, he walked between immense shuttered apartment blocks. The metal shutters were clamped fast over whatever amusing scenes went on behind them. Only sometimes on the top floors were the shutters left open and Edward could see single yellow squares of light high up above the trees. His exclusion was total and he satirised the monuments because there were hardly any people on the streets to take his unhappiness out on. Occasionally, one of Paris’s small bowed men would emerge from the chandelier-lit entrance hall of an apartment house, taking his wife’s perfumed dog out for a last piddle. But otherwise Edward had the avenues to himself.
He found a late-night café ideally suited to thinking jaded thoughts. It stood at the junction of three broad avenues, its bright façade already attractive from a long way away. Inside, it was always busy with a faintly disreputable, almost exclusively male clientele. There was a boisterous solidarity between them; people out on the town when everyone they knew was at home, guzzling home-cooked tripes and preparing for the marital duvet. Raucous jokes, shouted just too fast for Edward to follow them, flew across the room. He was, in any case, not part of their party; sitting by himself at a pricier terrace table, alternating liqueurs and coffees in a steadily queasier and costlier sequence. He contemplated the habitués condescendingly from his alcoholic elevation. Their hunched shoulders above the bar signalled to him that he was an utterly uninteresting foreigner and he signalled back with a glazed world-weary smile that they were buffoons.
One night, an American girl came in and sat at a table close to him and started talking.
Edward asked her, “How did you know I was English?”
She answered, “Oh, easy; sitting on your own like that, looking pissed off. You had to be a foreigner. And you look pretty English.”
This vision of himself, pitiful and self-pitying, irritated Edward considerably and even though the girl, who was moderately good-looking, freely volunteered her name and telephone number, he didn’t get in touch with her.
He did try briefly pretending that he was happy to be there; acting the part of the young Henry Hirshfeld arriving in Paris, full of sincere enthusiasm. He spent a few weekend afternoons in obscure bookshops, staffed by stooping characters of early middle age whose clothes and hair length – if not luxuriance – were fixed forever in the late Sixties. He went to independent cinemas showing the most unlikely films. He even, once or twice, tried reading a slim volume with uncut pages at a café table. But it was naturally difficult to ride on the pretentious merry-go-round he was simultaneously scoffing. He appeared to himself and felt ridiculous. He persevered for longer than he respectably should have, in the unreasonable hope that he might somehow alight on an intelligent method of living in Paris. All he did was seriously undermine his self-esteem. His whole set-up seemed a pathetic parody of an aspiring foreign correspondent’s life.
The first of November was a public holiday, All Saints’ Day. It fell on a Monday, giving Edward his first taste of three consecutive days’ holiday alone in Paris. By Sunday evening, he was ready to risk anything as a diversion. He had gone out in the late afternoon for a somewhat pointless walk along the silent avenues. At the main intersections, florists’ stalls were selling the matt maroon and sombre bronze chrysanthemums which Marie-Yvette had told him were the flowers traditionally put on graves. He tried cheering himself by repeating ghoulishly, “La Fête des Morts” but without much effect. As he walked back towards the rue Surcouf through an appropriately low and ghostly mist, it occurred to him that he had been on his own for nearly two months. Short-sighted as it might seem, he had never really thought about loneliness when he planned his exciting life abroad. Now, in the supremely dismal November dusk, it closed in on him. He realised that, since arriving in Paris, he had not spoken to anyone between leaving the paper one day and returning there the next. His evenings and weekends were filled by walks and films and meals and reading, all undertaken in a joyless determination not to give way to depression. He had begun to live according to little, set, single-person’s routines. He had caught himself talking to himself in the shower.
There was something else he had gone without for two months also. He walked unconsciously faster to counteract the ache of deprivation which started up as soon as he thought about it. Would he have to go a whole year, or two if they kept him here for two, without as much as a stray passing fuck? The prospect was too grim to contemplate; he was bound to find somebody co-operative sooner or later. But, reviewing the few women he had met so far, he had disturbing doubts: not counting, naturally, Mrs Hirshfeld, they consisted of the predatory American female in the café, Marie-Yvette and Aurore. Aurore was, according to Marie-Yvette, more or less married. The idea of suggesting any such thing to Marie-Yvette or of her consenting, was so ridiculously unattractive that he at least cheered himself up slightly by laughing at it as he turned the corner of the rue Surcouf. The wistfulness stayed with him, though, all evening. When he went to bed, the bed seemed to him for the first time uncomfortably wide and empty. He lay for a long time still aching for lack of anybody there beside him.
It was humiliating to be so pleased to go back to the paper on Tuesday morning. Maybe Henry guessed his loneliness, maybe it showed; he invited Edward out to lunch to try a new local restaurant.
As they walked there, Henry asked him, apparently casually, how he was making out. Edward thought he sensed a paternal concern and, over-hastily, he answered, “Oh fine, fine.”
To his surprise, Henry laughed. “You are? Well, you must be a man of iron, Edward. Most people find this city pretty tough going at first.”
Edward grinned awkwardly. “Maybe I didn’t have terribly high expectations.”
“Let me tell you something,” Henry said disarmingly. “You may well find this city is better training in survival techniques than some of the wilder places you might have liked to be sent. I don’t know where was your heart’s desire. But in South-East Asia, you know, in some of those African capitals, everyone bands together. You go out hunting in a pack. Someone gets a lead and you all follow it up. There’s not so much scope for the individual. Whereas here, paradoxically, you can make of it what you will.”
The restaurant was Lebanese. The owners, eager to woo their new clientele, lavished them with dozens of small dishes to sample, the lunch became extended and their conversation franker than Edward had anticipated.
Henry asked him if he had any friends in Paris.
Edward shook his head. In a moment’s honesty which he immediately regretted, he admitted, “That side of things does look a bit bleak at the moment.”
Henry looked thoughtfully at the bread basket. “It’s a strange business, I know, setting yourself up somewhere when you know you’re just passing through.”
Before Edward could even w
onder what was an appropriate reply, which neither absolutely agreed with nor absolutely refuted Henry’s assumption, Henry pushed a dish of hummous towards him. “Here, make some inroads into this. You’re young enough not to need to worry about cholesterol.”
He supposed, with hindsight, that he had thought it was a bit too good to be true not to have heard anything out of the Iskarov family for the first three or four weeks he lived in their flat. Certainly, when they did make contact, he was conscious that he had been waiting for it, “braced for it” was the term.
One evening, into the semi-permanent silence of his living-room, the telephone rang. He was so little expecting it that he actually jumped, a reaction which disgusted him because in all his previous existences the telephone had always rung for him with healthy frequency. Expecting that it could only be Henry, or perhaps a call from England, he answered in English, “Hello?”
“Allo? Allo? Mister Wenwright?” came Mademoiselle Iskarov’s flustered voice.
“Ah,” he said awkwardly. “Bonsoir.” Did she always sound, he wondered, as though things were falling in chaos about her ears? Her fluster was infectious.
“Bonsoir,” she replied, he felt just a trifle stiffly and sorely, as though she had interpreted his formality as a rebuff. “I hope I’m not ringing at a bad time?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” And then, completely unnecessarily, he found himself adding, “I’ve been out quite a bit. I hope you haven’t been trying?”
“No, no, I haven’t. In fact, I did mean to ring you before, but I’ve been so busy. I wanted to ask how you were getting on. Is everything all right in the flat?”
‘No,’ Edward retorted to himself. ‘No, it isn’t. I’ve set up a Buddhist temple here, you see, and there have been a few complaints about the chanting.’
“Yes, fine,” he answered shortly.
There was a pause. “Will you be in later on? Are you busy? I’d like to come round if you’re not in the middle of something.”
Edward controlled his indignation. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” Mademoiselle Iskarov said laughingly. “I just want to see that everything’s all right, that’s all; that you have everything you need. I would have come before only I’ve been utterly snowed under. I’ve got a second set of keys for you, in case you need them, and some spare bulbs for those old lamps in the living-room. They’re a funny kind; you’ll never find them anywhere.”
While he sketchily cleaned up the living-room, and the remains of more than one day’s dinner from the kitchen, Edward reproached himself for his immediate acquiescence. It went, of course, without saying that Mademoiselle Iskarov was coming to check up on him; the keys and the light bulbs and the salt which she had rather bizarrely mentioned were a transparent pretext. He would put up with it this once, for the sake of harmonious relations, but he was not going to let her make a habit of it.
He was spared the complicated decision of whether or not to do anything to improve on his appearance by the front-door bell ringing a bare five minutes after he had put the phone down. He had expected half an hour or so’s grace, the time it took to walk the distance, but obviously Mademoiselle Iskarov must have come by car or taxi.
She stood on his doorstep, smaller than he remembered her, and rather stylishly swamped by a bulky red fur coat. Almost in the same instant that he admired the effect of the fur, it occurred to him that it really wasn’t quite cold enough for fur and that if she had come by car it was, in any case, ridiculous.
Her arms were loaded with packages. She gasped at him urgently. “Take them, take them. I’m about to drop the light bulbs,” and as he gingerly extricated the top parcels from her pile, she explained wryly, “I brought a few things I thought you might need.”
He showed her into the living-room and, somehow she was the sort of woman to whom you did that, he helped her a bit self-consciously off with her enormous coat.
“Do sit down,” he said and, he realised afterwards, with something close to curtness, “Or d’you want to look round straight away?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov ignored him. She stood and gazed around the tidied living-room, which now looked as though there were no one living there at all.
“It is funny,” she said, “to see Volodya’s furniture but no Volodya.”
“Sorry?” said Edward.
Mademoiselle Iskarov caressed the back of the armchair Edward had been sitting in. “This was his favourite chair,” she said. She sat down in it and abruptly shut her eyes.
“Would you like some coffee?” Edward offered somewhat helplessly. “And, forgive my asking, but who is Volodya?”
Without opening her eyes, Mademoiselle Iskarov said, “Dyadya Volodya was my favourite uncle. This was his flat. He lived in it after he got divorced from my Aunty Ada, who was my least favourite aunt. In Russian yad means poison. When I was little, I used to call her Aunty Yada.” She opened her eyes to ask him, “Can you understand couples like that? One of them the sweetest, nicest, kindest person you could ever hope to meet and the other – a cow.” Without waiting for an answer, which Edward would, in any case, not have been able to give, she closed her eyes and continued, “He was a replacement father for me when I was growing up; he was better than a father. Certainly better than my father would have been if he had stayed around.” She stretched out both her arms and laid them palms down along the arms of the chair. “Volodya went to America and he was killed in a car crash. I ask you; survive everything else and then that. It was so stupid, so stupid; how could he have let it happen?”
Her eyes sprang open and, seeing Edward’s fazed expression, she burst into disconcerting laughter. “What am I doing? I mustn’t give you ghosts.”
She bustled out of the chair and over to the heap of packages which lay tipped on the settee. “Here, look, these are the keys and these are the light bulbs. They don’t click in, you understand; you need to twist them. And I’ve brought you a change of tablecloth. You can’t keep on using that green one all the time; it’ll get disgusting. And this is a lampshade for the bathroom. There isn’t one, is there? Something unfortunate happened to the last one. And this, laugh if you like, is a traditional Russian house-warming gift, rather late, I’m afraid: bread and salt.”
She took the last two bundles from the heap and thrust them at Edward. “Here you are. I wish you health and happiness in your new home.”
“Well, thank you,” said Edward. He looked uncertainly at the two brown paper parcels. “Am I – are we supposed to have it now, or what?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov shrugged. “That’s up to you.” Then she seemed to thaw a little and added, “Though why not? You suggested coffee, didn’t you? We can have a mouthful with coffee.”
She followed Edward into the kitchen. “Well, you keep it cleaner than your predecessor, I’ll say that.”
Edward repeated, with perceptible irritation in his voice, “Do have a look round, if you want to.”
To his surprise, Mademoiselle Iskarov seemed to take offence. “I didn’t come on a tour of inspection, if that’s what you think.” But, almost immediately, her offence seemed to vanish and she asked him, “Please put in a bit more coffee than that. I like it very strong.”
It was embarrassing to realise, not having entertained any guests in the flat before, that he had no sugar, since he himself didn’t take any, and when he opened the fridge to get out the milk, he had to reveal that there was nothing inside it but a quantity of wine and a single piece of distinctly aged-smelling cheese.
Largely to distract attention, he asked Mademoiselle Iskarov, “Would you like something a bit stronger with your coffee? I’ve got some whisky and some liqueur.”
She clapped her hands. “Oh, thank goodness. You are a normal person with normal weaknesses; not a dreadfully proper young English gentleman with no known vices.”
Edward felt provoked to childish annoyance. He was at an undeniable disadvantage, squatting in front of his evil-smelling fridge, and it galle
d him excessively to look up and see Mademoiselle Iskarov condescendingly laughing at him.
“I don’t know what on earth gave you that idea,” he retorted crossly.
Mademoiselle Iskarov snorted with laughter.
Edward finished making the coffee in silence.
Mademoiselle Iskarov said contritely, “I’ve offended you, haven’t I?”
“Not in the least,” said Edward, hoping to make it plain through the screen of a foreign language that Mademoiselle Iskarov was of such minimal importance, she would be hard put to offend him.
They went back into the living-room. Following him, bringing her bread and salt, Mademoiselle Iskarov repeated gloomily, “I have offended you, I know I have. I’d forgotten how easily you English people get offended.”
Laughing, Edward said, “Look, you haven’t offended me. But you haven’t answered my question either. Would you like a drink?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov nodded. “We must. Drink and make up.”
“We don’t need to drink and make up,” Edward said. “Would you like a drink?”
Mademoiselle Iskarov replied with a wordless beam.
While he was in the kitchen, getting the bottle and glasses, one of which was sticky and needed to be swilled out under the tap, he heard her get up and move around the living-room. When he returned, she was standing with her back to the window surveying the room with a sad expression.
Edward asked, “Does it make you unhappy to see someone else living here?”
“Oh,” she said, “not you, Mister Wenwright. You seem to appreciate the place. Not like that awful American. I think Volodya would have been happy to know you were living here. No, you know, it’s just for me the place is full of his absence.”
Edward nodded, he hoped eloquently. Unable to think of any other response, he passed Mademoiselle Iskarov her coffee and her whisky. He asked, “How do we deal with this bread?”
The Steppes of Paris Page 6