Tanya looked behind her doubtfully. ‘But it is raining.’
‘Tanya, show a little spirit! Anyway, we can drive around in your car, can’t we? They are talking of blowing up the Pont de l’Alma. I was worrying that your aunts wouldn’t let you out today. Five minutes more and I’d have been off without you. Aren’t they afraid you’ll be swept away?’
‘Perov has been invited to lunch to tell us all the news, but is it really so bad? I thought there were just a few streets flooded near Rue Felicien David. Lila and Vera went yesterday afternoon to see the people going up and down the streets in boats and came back with postcards. And what of Maud? She was going to meet Miss Harris on Thursday and I haven’t seen her since.’
Yvette put out her cigarette and wrapped her arms around her stomach. ‘She has had a victory over Morel, but I think she has gone mad. I cannot be with her today.’
Tanya was still on the step below, her eyes wide. ‘Oh, you have to tell me everything!’
Yvette raised her arms. ‘Oh, I shall, I shall. Only not here. Can we drive out in your little car or not?’
Tanya looked angry, then relented. ‘Very well. Come along.’
Yvette ran past her and down the stairs.
Maud had found her in one of the back rooms of the Bâteau-Lavoir almost two hours after she had stormed out of Valadon’s place. It was one of the better places to smoke a pipe in Montmartre, and Yvette had gone there to enjoy the utter peace and happiness of the drug, the feeling of floating through one’s favourite dreams, recalling them so vividly it was like living them again, but better. No fear, only a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty dancing behind one’s half-shut eyes.
She had brought with her the basket of oysters and three bottles of red wine the strange woman who ran the place always charged for entrance, and had intended on indulging herself entirely. Let Maud go mad. It was no business of hers. A day, two days. The hours would have no meaning. She knew she was supposed to model at Passage des Panoramas the next day, and that if she did not go they might not let her work there again, but at that moment she did not care.
She was welcomed in and made her way into the back room where the floor was covered with rush mats and the walls were hung with silks. Men and women reclined on the floor or on benches round the walls, their clothing loosened and their drowsy faces content or thoughtful. She was shown a space at the back wall on one of the raised hard wooden beds and settled herself. The silks were frayed at the edges. She knew that after a few pipes she would think that beautiful.
A few boys and women made their way slowly and carefully among the smokers, preparing the pipes and offering them to the customers. The men and women in the centre of the room – the wealthiest, judging by their clothes – looked quietly ecstatic. They spoke to each other, telling stories in low voices, but Yvette noticed others in the darker shadows of the room, their faces appearing from time to time in the light of the lamps. They were deeper in their affair with the drug and no longer wished to talk. One ran his fingernails through his hair, scratching at his scalp with an expression of complete bliss. Yvette felt a stab of envy and pity. The women who tended the pipes were thin. They did the skilled work of rolling pills in return for the occasional pipe from the customers. The usual rate was one for every five they prepared.
A boy approached her, the tray in his hand, and lit the lamp then picked up the pipe with a smile, offering to ready it for her. It had been a month since she last smoked. She shook her head and sat up, pressing her back to the wall and drawing up her knees, and the boy moved away to look after someone else. When Maud arrived she had still not taken one from him. The English girl took a place beside her and for a long while stared at the other smokers from the shadows just as Yvette was doing.
‘I am sorry, Yvette.’
‘You should be in bed. You’ll get ill again.’
‘I’ll rest tomorrow.’
Yvette watched for a moment longer. One of the women serving in the centre of the room wasn’t much older than her. Thirty, perhaps. She watched her inhale the smoke through the ivory mouthpiece of the pipe while the opium pill vaporised with the smallest hiss. Yvette wondered how long it would be before she herself surrendered and made pipes for strangers. Perhaps a little longer. ‘Let’s go, Maud.’
They departed with the smell of the smoke on their clothes and the curious stares of the proprietor at their back. Maud left her at the corner of the street where Yvette shared a room with two other girls who used it as a refuge between men, and Yvette watched her start the descent of Rue Lepic, that straight slim back, the falling snow pale yellow in the lamplight.
Tanya directed her patient chauffeur up and down the quayside in increasing excitement. The snow, which had been falling all night and into this morning, added to the sense of a Paris lost in some sort of strange apocalyptic dream. It clung to the bare trees along the river; the pavements had disappeared under the water. Workers were building raised walkways out of narrow planks so the people could get to and fro without a soaking. Here and there, parts of the road were closed off; the water had eaten away the ground beneath, leaving sudden pits and trenches that reached the sewers.
On the Pont de la Tournelle they clambered out of the car and were for a moment silenced by the sight of the river grown so vast and threatening. Notre Dame seemed to have shrunk, cowering from the waters. The Seine surged forward. The public bathhouses moored along the banks were already floating near the level of the embankment. They tugged at their moorings, fighting the speed and strength of the current. Standing in the open, Tanya could see the wreckage in the water – great planks of timber hurtling past them on the river’s broad back, heading straight for the six great arches of the bridge. The sightseeing boats passed under this bridge every day, but now there was hardly twenty feet of room between the water and the road where they stood. Another barrel crashed against the stone and the whole structure seemed to shake.
Tanya turned her back on Notre Dame and crossed the bridge to join the crowd on the other side. Yvette took her arm and together they elbowed their way to the front of the throng of whispering sightseers to see what the river was hurling into the city. Furniture, shutters and doors that must have been torn from houses further upstream careered towards them and struck against the stonework. A parade of barrels carried away from the Quai des Vins swam with the current like swans, apparently stately in the distance, till as they approached they seemed to speed up and spin, colliding with the arches or sucked through the diminishing space below them.
For the first time, Tanya found the floods something more than a diverting break from the usual patterns of life: she saw them as a threat. One of the barrels cracked below her and she started. The ground under her feet was being knocked away. Yvette tugged on her arm. ‘Look!’ There was a group of men hanging over the edge of the Pont de Sully further upstream, trying to catch the barrels out of the water with long poles as they swept by. As they watched, one man, leaning far out over the water, managed to fix his hook into one. For a moment it seemed as if the barrel was going to drag him with it, but one of his companions managed to reach it too and share the strain. They walked it out of the heavy flow of the water to the sound of distant cheers.
The crowd around Yvette and Tanya was mostly quiet; there was only the occasional murmured remark of fear and awe as the waters clambered over all obstructions, tearing at the walls that confined them. ‘The river will eat Paris,’ a voice behind them said. ‘She already has,’ another replied. ‘The pavements are giving way, the cellars are all flooded. Thousands of homes gone already.’ ‘When will it end?’ ‘Not before it gets worse, that’s certain.’
There was a loud shout of laughter behind them and Tanya turned round. At the back of the crowd, someone still wearing evening clothes was climbing up on top of a car. Once established, he helped drag up a friend to sit beside him. ‘Ten louis on the dresser beating the table to the bridge,’ the man said. He was fat, young, and spoke Fren
ch with a strong English accent. The friend he was helping scrambled to a sitting position and peered into the river.
‘Which table?’ he said, his voice high and nasal. Tanya groaned – it was Perov.
‘Too late! The dresser has it. You owe me ten. Double or quits if that tree gets to us before I can count to twenty-five.’
‘Done! Did we bring anything to drink?’
The Englishman reached down to instruct his chauffeur, realised he had stopped counting and hurried to catch up.
Tanya pushed back into the crowd and was standing directly below them when the tree struck just as the first gentleman reached twenty-three. Perov cheered, then seeming to sense the angry stares from beneath him, looked down.
‘Miss Koltsova!’
‘Mr Perov,’ she said firmly, ‘this wreckage did not come from nowhere. You are making asinine bets over the terrible misfortunes of others.’
He went quite red. Tanya was speaking French, and loudly too. There were murmurs of agreement in the crowd. ‘The city is under threat and this is all you can do?’ she continued, her sense of outrage in no way diminished by her own sightseeing. ‘Factories have been destroyed, homes inundated and still it rains. Can you not find useful employment even now?’
He slid back down from his perch on the roof. ‘Miss Koltsova, you are too harsh.’
Behind them came another crash against the stonework. The impact seemed to run through Tanya like an electric shock. She said more softly and in Russian, ‘I will not marry you, Mikhail Pavlovich. I do not need any more time to decide. Thank you for your offer and your patience. I shall explain to my aunts why we cannot have the pleasure of your company at lunch today and write to my father myself.’
His mouth hung open. ‘Because you see me making bets on the wreckage of some peasant dwelling?’ he managed to say at last, his cheeks still red.
‘No.’ She reached out and patted his arm. ‘It is because we are not friends – and no amount of money or family interest can make up for that.’ He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times.
His friend also slid down from the roof, nearly tripped then cleared his throat. ‘Natives . . . restless. Better view from further upstream.’
Perov took control of himself. ‘As you wish it, Tatiana Sergeyevna. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to choose another moment to tell me of your decision.’
Tanya nodded. ‘Probably, but I see no reason to keep you in suspense a moment longer than necessary.’
His friend pulled on his sleeve. ‘Stop jabbering in that barbaric tongue and come on, will you, Micky?’
Perov said no more, but now rather pale, he made a smart bow and climbed back into the car. The crowd cheered their departure.
Yvette struggled to Tanya’s side in time to stare after it. ‘Was that . . . ? Did you just . . . ?’
Tanya took a deep breath. ‘Yes, it was, and yes, I did. And I am very glad.’ Her eyes dropped to the sable muff that had been warming her hands. ‘At least I think I am glad. Still, now I will marry Paul so that is good.’ She looked up at Yvette, her eyes huge and black and her skin rather pink. ‘You don’t think Paul will mind marrying me, do you?’
Yvette laughed.
Before Tanya returned to her aunts to break the news, she had the story of the weekend from Yvette. She leaned back in the car and blinked rapidly. ‘Poor Maud! Do you think she is mad?’
Yvette shook her head. ‘No – at least not yet. It is this way she has of talking about herself as if she were already dead, yet she is still there somehow. She came looking for me last night, after all.’
Tanya smiled sadly out of the window. ‘It gives her licence. Like Akaky in The Overcoat, I think. When she is a ghost she can take revenge. She can’t as a living breathing English girl. Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I never thought of you as a great reader, Tanya.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘All Russians have to read Gogol. It’s a rule we have.’ Still watching the streets through the window, Tanya rested her delicate pointed chin on her thumb and forefinger. ‘I have to tell my aunts about Perov now. Oh, I hope I’ve done the right thing.’ She turned round as she said it, all appeal.
‘Of course you have. I saw the man for ten seconds and would rather marry Valadon’s dog. Much rather.’ Tanya smiled again. ‘Do you have time to drop me in Place Pigalle?’
The letter was waiting for her on Maud’s bed. Yvette sat down and opened the envelope. It was cold in the room; the stove was unlit and the snow and rain fell in turn outside. She clambered under the blankets and pulled them up around her as she read.
Yvette,
I know I have not repaid you very well for saving my life. I thought that making the Countess believe I was innocent would make me easy, then that taking something from Morel would do the same. It made me glad to see the fear on his face tonight, but it was a dark, hungry sort of gladness. After we left that place I came home thinking I should rest as I promised you, that just as you could resist that drug, perhaps I could resist haunting Morel any further and leave Paris, but I find I cannot. He will try and convince himself it was all accident. Even if Charlotte’s conspiracy of shop girls prevent him from selling any of the other diamonds he has stolen in Paris, I’m sure he and Sylvie will have money enough to get to America by some means – and what if the Countess misses him there? I would disappear from his conscience and he would be happy forever. The idea of that stops me from sleeping.
I must be his shadow.
Maud
‘Oh, Maud,’ Yvette said and curled the thin blankets more closely around her, letting the note hang from her fingers. Outside the window she could see the snow falling from the clotted skies. Like feathers, that was what they always said of snow in books, wasn’t it? That it was like feathers.
When she was a child she used to dance and sing for the gentry as they drank their coffee outside the cafés on the Champs. One of her maman’s other little charges would go among the crowd with his cap out collecting coppers and anything that they might have taken their eye off, wallets and trinkets from inside the ladies’ handbags, watches and rings.
Once, one of the women had called her over to pet her and stroke her hair and tell her what a pretty child she was. Yvette had submitted happily enough. There was a pigeon feather caught on her blouse. She thought it was dirty and made to brush it away but the woman stopped her and told her it was good luck, a sign that her guardian angel was looking after her. She thought maybe the woman was going to take her home but then the kind lady had released her and turned back to her coffee and her friends. Yvette’s companion gave her the signal his work was done and she ran away, disappointed again, but the idea of the guardian angel stayed in her mind. She had thought of it the first time an artist on Montmartre had asked her to model and then paid her, the time she turned down a man as a lover who later turned out to be violent and cruel to his girl. She had thought of it too the second or third time she had smoked opium, the first time the drug had let her fully appreciate its beauty, and thought that in that moment she was finally settling back into her angel’s embrace and feeling his wings close over her. That was then. She had not believed in him for a long time. Then in the last year or two, since she could not find him she had tried to become a guardian angel to others, or not an angel, but something hopeful in the world. Imperfect and muddy from the streets, but still . . .
She rested her head on her knee. The whole point of a guardian angel was that they were with you whether you deserved it or not, that they stayed with you, that even if they could not save you, they were there. She threw off the blankets and went in search of Maud.
CHAPTER 17
Scolding, threats, long lectures on her lack of character, her ingratitude, her gross stupidity – all of this Tanya had been expecting, but when her Aunt Vera said nothing at all to the news, only burst into tears and ran out of the room, the girl was shocked. Aunt Lila stayed where she was, her hands folded in her lap and
she too said nothing for several minutes. Tanya’s bravery began to shiver and retreat.
‘Aunty Lila, please say something. I have thought very carefully. I cannot marry someone I do not respect, and Mr Allardyce is a good man.’
Eventually Lila looked up, her features sharp and angry. ‘I’m glad you think so, Tanya.’ She stood up and smoothed the heavy silk of her dress. ‘Do you realise why Vera ran away like that?’
‘She wishes me to marry Perov,’ Tanya answered a little sulkily. ‘I know that.’
Lila shook her head. ‘You are a deeply selfish child, Tanya. You always have been, fainting and sighing into getting your way. I never thought you were as delicate as you pretended, but it has suited you, hasn’t it, to make your father think you are a weakling in need of constant care? Now you announce to us that you are a modern woman able to make her own way, that you care and think nothing of us and throw all that care back in our faces.’
‘Aunt, I do not mean—’
‘Do be quiet and listen. You have humiliated Vera. Your father needed someone to look after you and she volunteered. She asked for your father’s trust and now he will think that she has failed. You know that neither of us would have a penny if he didn’t give it to us. It is easier for me, I have played the shrinking violet for fifty years so no one will blame me, but Vera has actually tried to do something in this world. She tried to help her husband in business but he threw it away at the gambling tables, she has had to beg and flatter to get her son a decent position in the Ministry and hears hardly a word from him. She tried to guide and protect you in a foreign city and you have done nothing but sneer at her and defy her since the moment we arrived. She only wanted to love you, Tanya. She is a busy old woman but she only wanted your love and your father’s respect. You never offered her the first and have robbed her of the second. It is very badly done, my girl. Very badly indeed.’
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