The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  “Have you never thought of going to live somewhere else?” Edward asked her. “Why don’t you get a job which would take you abroad?”

  Irina looked at him resentfully. So fierce was her mascaraed hostility, Edward sensed she would be capable of emptying her dinner-plate over him.

  “What am I supposed to do with Babushka?” she asked. “Put her in a home? And Great-Aunt Elena? She won’t stay this valiant forever. And the properties, the Cité Etienne Hubert and the rue Surcouf; what am I supposed to do about them?”

  “Oh come,” said Edward. “You can’t let your life be dictated by elderly relatives and flats.”

  Irina glared at him. Then she laughed and sat back. “You’re awfully young, Edouard.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, I’m afraid,” Edward said brusquely. He sliced and forked up his duck in silence.

  “I suppose I envy you,” Irina continued. “For the time being I have to confine my adventures close to home.”

  While they were reading the dessert menu, whose names, Edward thought gloomily, probably took up more space than the dishes themselves, Irina suddenly volunteered, “Don’t be upset if I sometimes snap at you, Edouard. You do realise I’m just raging against the odds?”

  Edward looked up at her. “The odds?”

  Irina fingered the stem of her wine glass. “The odds against us being anything more than a joke which no one laughs at. You do realise I’ve been pining for you ever since we first met?”

  “No,” Edward answered. “I didn’t. If you remember, our first meeting was a bit unfortunate.”

  “Of course I remember,” Irina said. “How could I forget? Just my luck, I thought, to be favoured with such a colossal cold when somebody so absolutely charming walks in.”

  Edward’s eyes escaped to the menu. Was she going to do it all herself? He supposed it was only natural that Irina should make the running. After all, left to his own devices he would never have come near her. She had offered the first invitation, she made the first admission. But was she going to decide everything?

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she told him.

  Edward faced her for long enough to take in her practised yearning look and her right hand stretched far enough across the table for him to take it if he chose. He looked back to the menu. For the first time in what had probably been rather a happy-go-lucky sexual career, he envisaged a prospective sexual encounter as an act of subordination.

  Irina chose the Trois Sorbets nappés à la sauce Geneviève and Edward a cake, which he felt was bound to have at least a certain mass.

  In the longish pause before the sweets arrived, he teased Irina. “You don’t really mean all that, do you? You’re just having me on?”

  She huffed gratifyingly. “Haven’t I made enough of a fool of myself already? What else do I have to do to convince you?”

  “You’re not really interested in me,” Edward persisted. “I’m just a callow trainee journalist, remember. You could have your pick of Paris’s choicest specimens of Gallic manhood, Irina. I’m just your tenant.”

  Irina sat exceedingly straight. “Make fun of me if you like, Edouard,” she said crisply. “But please, don’t insult me; I wouldn’t have anything to do with a Parisian male.” She smiled distinctly nastily. “As for being my tenant, Monsieur Wenwright, let me inform you, you are not my first.”

  While Irina enjoyed the pink sauce poured over her icecream, she pointed out to Edward a woman standing near the cash desk.

  “That’s Geneviève, the patron’s girlfriend. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Edward saw a tall, aristocratically bony, black-haired woman, striking a lean, aloof pose. He looked back at Irina, whose enjoyment of good fare was now coming through her affectation of airier preferences. She was scooping and swallowing great gobbets with delight. Before he could answer anything, Irina said, “Look at her, so thin and smart and narrow; having sauces named after her to make women like me as fat as balloons,”

  Her cheeks were flushed with indignation and, maybe quite unconsciously, she drew herself up again, putting into prominence her black and silver bosom. It was the realisation that if he wanted, he could go to bed with a woman whose breasts were streets ahead of any of her predecessors which caused Edward to relent.

  “But Irina,” he said, “I don’t think she’s especially beautiful at all.”

  The bill, which he rather determinedly paid, was approximately twice what he had anticipated. To make sure Irina noticed how little it mattered to him, he put down a wad of notes instead of his credit card and left a hefty tip. As he followed Irina, now swathed again in her Anna Karenina furs, out of the restaurant, he struck himself as a man whose role-playing was about to go seriously too far.

  Irina instructed the taxi driver, whom she hailed again without any problem, to take them to the Cité Etienne Hubert. When he heard her give the address, the back of Edward’s neck prickled. Was this wise? No. Would it land him in more trouble than it was worth? Probably. Was it going to happen? Yes. They didn’t speak much on the way. just to express a preference, to show this was not simply happening to him, Edward reached out in the dark and took hold of Irina’s gloved and strangely unresponsive hand. The taxi turned into the Cité Etienne Hubert and came to a stop unnecessarily abruptly in front of Number Nine. Irina withdrew her hand.

  “Well, Edouard,” she said, “it’s been a lovely evening. Thank you so much.”

  A little stiffly, but he reckoned, churning it over later, this could well have been because of the taxi driver, she leant across and bestowed on him a cool, chaste kiss. She told the driver to continue to the rue Surcouf and she stepped out into the dark.

  The names he used to describe Irina were short, uncomplimentary, and repeated in a chant for the rest of the weekend. The flat in the rue Surcouf seemed smartingly redolent of Irina when he was so summarily returned to it. Everything in it, from the new tablecloth to the armchair in which she had so luxuriantly snuggled, conspired to repeat her rejection, and he realised, lying in her bathtub on Sunday morning, helping himself to her milk and her butter from her fridge, that if that was as far as things were going to go between them, living in the flat would be one of the most humiliating experiences he had known.

  He found pretty quickly that the character of Paris was also significantly altered by her trick. As he fumed over it from Monday to Friday of the following week, he became increasingly aware of a previously unrecognised aspect of the capital. It was a women’s city. He supposed that, without explicitly acknowledging this, he had seen it. Women had all along seemed to outnumber men in the street. Now he realised that this was just because they were more dominant, more rapacious than the men. The men were tiddlers dodging cautiously among the shoals of plump, snapping pike. He thought he had never been a misogynist, but now he found himself noticing irritably the overwhelming numerical superiority of hairdressers, dress shops and beauticians over more manly establishments. The smell of perfume which had caught in his throat on his first evening in Paris returned to taunt him. With every passing whiff, he was reminded of Irina, plump, snapping pike extraordinaire, who had been prepared to gobble him up for breakfast, but who at the last minute had disdainfully spat out the pieces. Operating within her female bastion, according to skilled submarine ploys, no wonder she was capable of turning on him like that and dropping him with a silver stiletto tail flick.

  On Wednesday, on an errand, he had to pass the end of the Cité Etienne Hubert. As his taxi drove by, he cast a casual but hostile look along the street. Naturally, the pavements were empty. He did wonder, just in passing, whether he would have any dealings with Irina, beyond the payment of his rent, ever again. At the bottom of the Avenue Duquesne, the taxi was stopped by traffic lights. He could not resist turning round to take another look back at the end of the street. He saw something which prodded him into uncomplicated poignant longing and made at least part of him admit that if Irina were to make a come-back, he would not necessarily reject her out
of hand. From the rooftop corners of the apartment houses on either side of the street, two stone nipples stood up against the cold winter sky.

  He really could not make out what had happened. The major question was, of course, whether the deed was cancelled or only postponed. But the lesser problem of what Irina was playing at, and what exactly she hoped to achieve by it, preoccupied him too. The most likely explanation, he decided, was cold feet, with a dash of sadism. But, he kept wondering, maybe there was something else; some major unidentified obstacle, which he had simply failed to see? With so little to go on, how could he work out a strategy for the unlikely event of Irina’s staging a come-back?

  Which was why her telephone call caught him completely unprepared, stammering and embarrassed, when she finally got round to ringing him last thing on Friday night.

  “So you let a whole week go by without telephoning me?” she asked aggressively. “Is that the sort of man you are?”

  “Hang on a minute,” Edward objected. “I rather got the impression on Saturday …”

  “Yes?” demanded Irina.

  “Well, look, don’t get me wrong, but I got the distinct impression you wanted to call it a day.”

  “Did you?” Irina asked mockingly. “Well, spare me the expressions of the cricket pitch please, Mister Wenwright, and do tell me whatever gave you that impression.”

  “Is the phone the best place for this conversation?” asked Edward.

  “Well, I don’t see where else we’re going to have it,” Irina answered in an aggrieved voice. “I certainly don’t see why I should agree to meet you again before you’ve explained yourself.”

  “Believe it or not,” Edward said hotly, “I feel rather the same myself.”

  He listened to Irina’s stony silence. Into it, he eventually added, “If you remember, you did rather drop me from a great height outside your front door last Saturday night.”

  “Ah,” Irina answered icily. “Is that it? How disgusting.”

  The silence which followed threatened to break all records. At last, in the depths of it, Edward thought he heard a chuckle.

  “What are you doing tomorrow night?” asked Irina.

  This time, he deliberately didn’t take her hand in the taxi on the way back. He wasn’t going to give her the least pretext to recoil. Instead she reached over and took hold of his, squeezing it conspiratorially as their taxi driver, one of the garrulous school, held forth on the rampant evils of socialism currently clutching France in its tentacles. He was displeased with the size of Edward’s tip, which Edward made deliberately small as a reproof. When the taxi driver had reversed vindictively fast and noisily the length of the Cité Etienne Hubert, expressing his displeasure with a mighty revving, Edward started to explain his action to Irina, but she appeared to have something else on her mind.

  “Let’s take a walk before we go in,” she suggested to Edward. “To digest our dinner.”

  At Edward’s instigation, they had not gone back to the Pré Geneviève, but to a less pretentious Armenian restaurant where they had, indeed, both eaten heavily.

  It seemed to Edward the moment to take Irina’s hand, as they paced in silence under the trees of the dark Avenue Duquesne. But he still hesitated for Irina had an abstracted look on her face, and he worried that any move on his part which could be construed as pressure might tip the balance of her doubts against him.

  Finally, when they had reached the top of the avenue, cast affectionate glances at the Taverne Tourville, and turned round again, Irina said, “I have a matter to discuss with you, Edouard.”

  He thought dismally, ‘Here goes.’

  “You must not let my family know to what extent you are seeing me,” Irina said. “Babushka and Great-Aunt Elena and Varvara Stepanovna, if you ever meet her; they mustn’t find out that we are – friends. Do you accept that?”

  Edward grinned. “Yes, of course I do. I mean, it’s pretty unlikely they’d ever grill me on the subject, isn’t it? I’ll go along with it, though, if that’s what makes you happy. But why?”

  Irina made one of her “Tchuh!” noises. “Isn’t it obvious? We’re not what you’d call ideally suited, are we? You must remember, they’ve still got the outlook of another time and another place. They have these ridiculous old unrealistic dreams for me; they want me to be happy.”

  They walked along a façade or two in silence.

  Perhaps embarrassed by her explicit relegation of their romance to the rank of doomed endeavour, Irina went on, “And also the fact they know you’re going away in a year or two; they’d be shocked.”

  Edward said, “OK, point taken.” He felt an unmistakable relaxation at Irma’s having mentioned his departure just at this juncture.

  They turned into the Cité Etienne Hubert. The stump of a street for once seemed long, and as they walked down to Number Nine, Edward was aware all the way of the big wall at the end of the street, looming over them, closing off the distance.

  At the double front doors, in the brief pause between Irina pushing the brass bell and the right-hand door springing open in response, she glanced at Edward. He saw she had, miserably, as many misgivings as he did.

  The lift came down clanking, and they stepped inside. While they waited for it, looking upward through the lozenged wire mesh for the small wooden box to come into view, neither of them said a word. They transferred their taut apprehension to the arrival of the lift, staring as if it mattered at the two quivering ropes which ran the length of the lift shaft. Irina pressed the button for the fifth floor and, with a jolt followed by a shivering moan, they set off.

  Confined for the first time, the two of them, in a small oblong space, they were enclosed in a sudden inescapable intimacy. As the lift rose, swaying and shuddering, through the red-carpeted tiers of the staircase which encircled it in a long embrace, they exchanged their first frank look of mischievous complicity. But Irina looked away almost at once and fixed her eyes seriously on the struts of the door. Not to be outdone, Edward concentrated on the safety instructions. Ascenseurs Roux-Combaluzier gravely informed passengers that unaccompanied children were forbidden to use this machine. Accompanied, they were to be kept well away from the passing walls of the lift shaft. The lift, till then an absurd spoof of a vehicle, took on an uncertain, treacherous quality. Behind them the thin, hairy ropes hissed. At each passing floor, the lift cabin acknowledged the possibility of stopping with a little lurch.

  Edward read on automatically until he came to a sentence which filled him with profound pleasure, and a childish wish to grab Irina by the arm, to point and share the joke. The sentence read: “Pour provoquer le départ, appuyer sur le bouton de l’étage désiré.” He had always had a soft spot for Parisian lifts; ungainly spiders laboriously spinning their webs. Now he relished the new erotic connotations they would shortly acquire. Having pushed the requisite button to provoke their departure, he and Irina were rising, side by side, to the floor they desired. With a final audible exertion, the lift covered the last few feet, slowing disturbingly and drawing level with the fifth-floor landing only inch by inch. As they waited those ultimate inches, Irina’s hand ready to yank back the sliding inner door, she caught sight of Edward’s broad grin, due solely to the phrase “the desired floor”, and as the lift bumped home, she responded with a quick nervous smile.

  She looked at her watch as she opened the front door and murmured, “Ah good, Babushka will be long in bed. But don’t make too much noise, just in case.”

  She didn’t hang their overcoats in the hall cupboard but took them and went to put them in another room. She gestured to Edward silently to go and wait for her in the sitting-room and a moment later she came in, reperfumed he was sure, and shut the sitting-room door behind her.

  “The one thing to be thankful for,” she said, “is that Babushka goes to bed really early, at nine or ten o’clock. It leaves me room to manoeuvre.” And she laughed.

  Edward was about to tell her what had happened at her dinner; how he
had been on his way back from the lavatory at twelve o’clock or one and had encountered Babushka, horror-struck, in the doorway of her room. But it seemed pointless to unsettle Irina by such a suggestion. If the aged grandmother found out what they were up to, what did he care?

  “What sort of thing would you like now?” Irina asked him, in a way which seemed somehow so explicit, Edward was almost embarrassed. “Coffee? Whisky? Vodka?”

  She displayed herself in front of him and on an impulse, really, he had not intended to take the initiative, Edward stood up, walked towards her smiling, and enfolded her in a hug. There was more of her than he had expected; every woman he had hugged before had been distinctly smaller and thinner than he was. That had even been part of the enjoyment; wrapping up and squeezing someone he could contain. Irina was of undiscovered dimensions. She was a short woman, but as she leant forward appreciatively into his hug, he felt fleshy parts of her meet him the whole way down. She not only had splendid breasts, she had a tummy and soft round thighs. He might have expected her substance to repel him – when all was said and done, she verged on the fat – but quite the opposite happened. As he eagerly took her tighter, Irina burrowed her head into his chest as if she were embarrassed. Edward ran his hand down her back, to reassure her and encourage her, and he felt the robust bottom which completed her figure. They stood for a few moments, embracing in the middle of the dark-red rug and then they seemed simultaneously to decide it was time to proceed to the kiss.

  He was about to prise Irina’s head up towards him when, of her own accord, she lifted it. She had her eyes shut but there was no mistaking her willingness. As he put his lips tentatively towards hers, they immediately opened and his tongue could make its way into a warm rotating welcome. Her hands, which had been fairly neutrally around his shoulders, moved into action; one frisked around the back of his neck, making little delightfully ticklish forays into his hair, and the other slipped down to the small of his back where it exerted a most enjoyable pressure. For one moment, he thought there was a third hand cradling his right ear but then he realised it must be the frolicsome hand from his neck which had moved up. Reluctantly, they had in the end to draw apart and breathe, reluctantly also because it meant opening their eyes and looking each other in the face. Irina’s eyes only came open slowly and gazed at Edward, as if in amazement or dismay.