Consolation

by James Wilson

  Her voice faltered, as if, having gamely kept up a conversation with me for half an hour, she had finally worn herself out in the struggle to remember pervenche.

  ‘You’ve been very patient with me, Miss Robinson,’ I said, getting up. ‘But I’m afraid I’ve exhausted you.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ She raised a hand, and I thought she was going to try to detain me; but the effort to be polite was too much for her, and she dropped it again.

  ‘I’m only sorry I couldn’t do more,’ she said, ringing for Fanny to show me out.

  I shook my head. ‘You’ve done a great deal. Including’ – forcing myself to smile – ‘giving me a perfect excuse to go to Paris.’

  We had said our goodbyes, and I was half-way to the door, when she called after me:

  ‘I wish I could give you some helmet flower to wear in your buttonhole. That is the flower for chivalry, you know.’ She twisted herself round, and pointed at a plant on the mantelshelf. ‘But at least I can offer you heliotrope, for faithfulness. Please take a sprig before you leave, and my prayers with it.’

  X

  Though I was three-quarters convinced that my enquiries in Paris would lead to nothing, I still found the business of getting there exciting. Since my marriage, my wife’s aversion to boats had kept us pretty much penned up in England; so travelling to the continent – like roaming the countryside with Jessop – was something I associated with youthful adventure. Seeing the weald of Kent sweep by – the orchards already snowy with the first apple-blossom – and joining the luggage-laden exodus at Folkestone, and tramping up the swaying gang-plank, made me feel like a schoolboy given an unexpected holiday. I stood at the rail, relishing the smack of the breeze on my cheeks, and the squawk of the gulls, until the chalk cliffs had dwindled to a brush-stroke on the horizon. And then I inverted the telescope, as it were, and turned to watch the French coast growing from a moth-eaten, dun-coloured ribbon into a living landscape of dunes and beaches and villages. It was odd to reflect that the last time I had seen them the old queen had been on the throne, and I had never even heard of anyone called Violet Ashburn. The thought of the wrong turnings I had taken since, and the deadends and tragedies they had led to, inevitably pricked me with sadness. But as we came alongside the long wooden pier at Boulogne, and I caught sight of the purple-trousered workmen swarming over the quays, and beyond them, blurred by its own smoke, the train waiting to carry us to Paris, I had the thrilling sense that my younger self was not dead, but had merely lain dormant all these years, and was now starting to wake again.

  I shared my compartment with a friendly American, who lent me his Baedeker guide. I spent most of the journey scouring it for some clue to the whereabouts of the Rue Pervenche, but could find no mention of the name, either on the map, or in the text itself. As I returned the book to him, he said:

  ‘Didn’t see what you were looking for?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. But thank you anyway.’

  He laughed. ‘I ought to ask for my money back. They said it had everything.’

  ‘It’s probably just a tiny sans issue.’

  He nodded, in a vague abstracted way that made me think he hadn’t understood me, and turned to look out of the window. We were in the outskirts of the city now. Dusk had fallen, and dark little streets were slipping by like fish glimpsed from a ship.

  ‘There’s been a tremendous amount of construction going on, you know,’ said my companion. ‘Hundreds of neighbourhoods demolished. And a whole lot of new roads made.’

  As if to prove the point, there was a sudden burst of light, and we found ourselves rattling past a broad modern boulevard, brilliant with gas-lamps and lit shop-fronts, that seemed to have been cut with ruthless geometric precision through the tightly packed clusters of older buildings.

  ‘Maybe your place was knocked down to make way for that,’ said the American, nodding towards it.

  ‘Oh, I hope not!’ I said, smiling. But the thought that he was probably right haunted me as we drew into the Gare du Nord, and I fought my way through the crowds in search of a cab. I considered trying to set my mind at rest by asking the driver if he knew of Rue Pervenche, but – worrying that he might misunderstand me, and take me there directly – I finally decided against it. Giving him the address of the Casque d’Or instead, I settled back in my seat and pulled the curtain across the window – feeling curiously like a fugitive or a spy, as if the possibility that the house I was looking for no longer existed had somehow robbed me of legitimacy. Though I knew it was ludicrous, I could not help imagining being stopped by the police, and struggling to explain in my unwieldy French what I was doing there.

  Tiredness is making you fanciful, I told myself. You’ll see things more clearly in the morning. Settle the matter then. But when I got to the hotel – a fairy-tale confection of marble and velvet and gilt – my resolve began to weaken. My room was so stuffy that walking into it felt like being wrapped in warm flannel. The radiator gurgled dyspeptically, and light and laughter and the sound of traffic spilled in through the window, making it almost an extension of the street. It would be hard enough to sleep there at the best of times. In a state of mental turmoil, it would be next to impossible.

  I decided to try, nonetheless. I had a sandwich and a bottle of mineral water brought up for my supper, then closed the shutters, and went to bed. But it was hopeless. After twenty minutes, I was more wide awake than ever, and so tense that it felt as if my neck had turned to cement.

  I got dressed again, and went down to the lobby. The man at the desk told me the name Rue Pervenche meant nothing to him. But as I turned away, he motioned me to wait, and – taking a creased map from his drawer – opened it on the counter. Painfully slowly, he began to pore over it, moving his stubby finger in tiny half-inch increments, and all the time muttering rue Pervenche, rue Pervenche under his breath. Finally, I could stand it no longer, and asked:

  ‘Well?’

  He grimaced and cleared his throat. And then, rat-tatting the paper triumphantly, he drew himself up and said:

  ‘Voilà!’

  I craned forward to see what he was pointing at: a small crescent-shaped street, close to the place des Vosges.

  ‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘But are you quite sure this is up to date?’

  He shook the map out like a laundress hanging up a sheet, and nodded at the cover: Nouveau Plan de Paris. 1910.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I slid a franc on to the desk, but he held up his hand, in a gesture that said: I don’t expect to be paid. I was just doing my job.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘It’s worth far more to me than that to know what you’ve told me.’

  And leaving the money where it was, I went upstairs again.

  *

  My room had a different aspect when I returned to it. What had been intrusive now seemed romantic. I re-opened the window, and stood looking down at the jostling crowd in the street. Somewhere in the distance a band was playing a quickstep, and every now and again a couple would dance to it for a few seconds, before resuming their stroll. The cool air smelt of drains and garlic and grilling meat and women’s scent. The dark walls of the building opposite were broken here and there by regular slashes of yellow light leaking through the louvres of closed shutters. The effect was almost coquettish, like a well-calculated display of ankle: you could see just so much, and must imagine the rest.

  There was a flutter in my temple, and I began to stroke the skin over it companionably.

  ‘Yes, old fellow,’ I said. ‘And tomorrow we’ll see where she grew up.’

  *

  I went out early the next morning, bought my own map at a tabac, then returned to the hotel with it and studied it over breakfast. There was no direct way to Rue Pervenche, but – even allowing for all the zigs and zags and doubling-backs – I estimated it would take me less than an hour to walk there. Going on foot would not only give me much-needed exercise, I thought: it would also help me to draw my very fractured knowledge of the city
– really no more than a series of fuzzy impressions, if truth be told, gained during two short visits almost half a life-time ago – into a coherent picture.

  I sauntered eastwards, enjoying the spring sunshine, and the exhilarating sense that Paris itself was encouraging my progress, by artfully presenting me with one glorious vista after another, like an unfolding series of lantern slides, that made the prosaic business of putting one foot in front of the other a kind of enchanted journey. There was misery to be seen, of course, and poverty, and ugliness; but the overwhelming sense was of a place that – as far as any human community can – had freed itself of shadow, leaving only light and colour.

  It was hard, in such an atmosphere, to feel anything but uplifted; and I was soon optimistically sketching out a strategy in my head. From the plan, it was obvious that Rue Pervenche was a short street, which meant that – even if the houses were small and cramped – there were unlikely to be more than fifty or so on each side. I could try half of them in the morning, and the rest in the afternoon. If there was anyone there who had known Mary Stone, I should – with reasonable luck – have found her (it seemed almost certain it would be a woman) by night-fall.

  It was only when I turned into the Rue Pervenche itself that I realized how woefully my ignorance had betrayed me. Apart from a huddle of old tenements at one end, there were no houses at all. In the middle, where the street bent like a crooked elbow, stood a boarded-up shop, with posters pasted over the shutters. Otherwise, I could see nothing but apartment buildings. I counted: they were all six storeys high. That must, at a stroke, increase at least threefold the number of doors I should have to knock on – and that was assuming I should be allowed in in the first place, which seemed far from certain.

  But wait, I thought. Surely Mary Wilson said she lived in a house? I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes, trying to imagine myself on the windswept road between Heanor and Langley Mill again. Fragments of conversation started to come back to me: Nurse … Governess … Sur le pont d’Avignon. And then I had it: An entire household …

  Household. Not house. Ménage, not maison. And for most Parisians, except perhaps the very poorest and the very richest, ménage would suggest an apartment.

  I was already in front of the first building. I pushed open the massive glazed entrance-door, and found myself in a cool, dimly lit hall floored with black-and-white tiles. To the left was a heavy marble staircase, and next to it the ornately barred cage of a lift. Opposite them was a small booth with a half-open stable-door, beyond which I could see a mahogany cabinet divided into pigeon-holes, and an empty chair.

  I started quietly towards the stairs. As I reached the bottom step, a woman’s face suddenly appeared in the booth, like a puppet at a seaside Punch-and-Judy show.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

  ‘Bonjour, madame.’

  She shaded her eyes and squinted at me. When she was sure she didn’t recognize me, she said:

  ‘Excusez-moi, mais où est-ce que vous allez, Monsieur?’

  I explained as best I could. She nodded sympathetically; but when I had finished she shook her head and said she was sorry, but I could not go up. It was nothing personal, she was sure I was an honest gentleman, but the rules were quite clear: no unauthorized strangers. Otherwise the place would be full of hawkers and other undesirables.

  I tried two more buildings, with no better success. Then I stood outside, wondering what to do next. I could simply walk up and down the Rue Pervenche, of course, accosting the residents as they came out; but it would be impossible to be systematic about it, and the chances of discovering anything remotely useful before I started to find myself being shunned as a nuisance were negligible.

  A policeman appeared at the far end of the street, and began walking towards me. Not wanting to arouse his suspicion by seeming to be loitering, I set off again, strolling past him with a nonchalant bonjour. As I turned into the boulevard at the bottom, I heard the mournful swoop of a violin, and the next second almost collided with a small crowd of people gathered outside a café on the corner. Peering over the head of the woman in front of me, I saw a dark-skinned girl of nine or ten dancing barefoot to a gypsy fiddler.

  It was an oddly engrossing spectacle, touching and squalid at the same time. Want had made her prematurely old: she moved well enough, but it was the motion of a mechanical toy, rather than a spontaneous expression of innocent high spirits. As she hopped and twirled, her face fixed in a joyless smile, she hoisted her dirty dress above her knees, revealing her naked legs. They were as spindly as a scarecrow’s, and covered with a fine powdering of dust, which turned them from chestnut brown to a sickly corpse-grey – so giving the startling impression, when you first saw her, that while the top part of her was still a living child, the bottom half was already dead. It seemed such an image of a life withering before it had truly begun that I was suddenly stabbed by the memory of poor Elspeth. I quickly threw a couple of coins into the upturned hat lying at the musician’s feet, and then hurried away, before anyone could see my tears.

  I crossed to a small park on the other side of the road, and sat on a bench near the entrance. Try as I might to think clearly, and work out what I should do next, I could not put the dancing girl from my head. I found myself wondering if the young Mary Stone had witnessed something similar when she lived here, and – looking into the child’s face – seen a mirror of her own blighted existence. Not blighted by material need, of course, like the gypsy’s; nor by ill-health, like Elspeth’s – but by something all the more disfiguring, perhaps, for being invisible.

  I shut my eyes, listening to the faint strain of the violin, and imagining all three of them – Mary, and Elspeth, and the gypsy girl – moving to it in a sad ring o’ roses. After a few moments, the whirligig music metamorphosed, almost without a break, into something calmer and more stately. I knew at once that I had heard the tune before, and that it had some significance, but I could not immediately put a name to it. Then some of the children in the crowd started to sing along with it:

  Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.

  I got up, and retraced my steps to the Rue Pervenche. The first concierge I had spoken to had been the friendliest, so – assuming she was the one most likely to help me now – I decided to start with her. She was still in her little booth, and smiled when she saw me walk through the door.

  ‘What, have you remembered who you came to see?’ she said.

  I laughed. ‘A music teacher.’

  ‘A music teacher!’

  ‘The little English girl I mentioned had a music teacher. There can’t be many round here. Most of the children, I take it, go to the same one?’

  She jutted her lower lip and frowned. Then she nodded. ‘Mme. Loubet.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sixty-five. Seventy.’

  ‘Has she been here long?’

  ‘As long as I can remember.’

  My pulse fluttered. ‘Where does she live? Do you know?’

  ‘The Place Colombe. Above the dress-shop.’

  ‘How far is that?’

  She made a finger-post with her hand. ‘About two hundred metres. In that direction.’

  It wasn’t difficult to find. There was only one dress-shop in the Place Colombe, and on the entrance next to it was a list of names. Second from the top was Mme. L. Loubet.

  I opened the door, and found myself in a narrow hall, lit only by a grey funnel of light from the upper storeys. It was bare of furniture except for a chair with an untidy ball of knitting on the seat, as if whoever normally sat there had been suddenly called away, leaving her work behind her.

  I went quickly upstairs, making as little noise as I could on the stone steps. There were two flats to each floor. Mme. Loubet’s was on the second, marked by an engraved brass plate with Professeur de musique under the name.

  I rang the bell, and almost immediately heard rapidly approaching footsteps inside. I expected a maid, or possibly eve
n Mme. Loubet herself; but in the event the door was opened by a plump, harassed-looking man of about forty. He was respectably dressed, but had taken off his jacket and tie, and his shirt was stained with sweat. His arm was crossed over his chest as if to bar my way, and he was fidgeting nervously with the latch, clearly impatient to be rid of me, and return to whatever he had been doing.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I speak to Mme. Loubet, please?’

  ‘The elder Mme. Loubet? Or the younger?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was more than one. The elder, I imagine.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘She’s dead. I am her son. I’m here to remove her things.’

  It would have been hard enough to know how to answer in English. In French, it was impossible. I made a pitiful attempt, mumbling je suis désolé and c’est une tragédie, then ran out of words altogether, and was reduced to merely shaking my head.

  ‘Did she owe you money?’ he said.

  ‘No, no, I just wanted to ask her some questions.’

  He seemed to relent slightly. ‘What sort of questions?’

  ‘I was hoping she might be able to give me the address of one of her former students.’

  He hesitated a moment, then stood back, pulling the door wide. ‘Well, you can look, if you like, I suppose. Lucky for you you came today. All her books are still here. Tomorrow they’ll be on the fire.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He turned, and led me into a cluttered salon overlooking the street. The shutters were half-closed, leaving only a narrow rectangle of daylight, too feeble to fill the entire room. In the middle of the floor stood a round table crowded with boxes and old newspapers and piles of bills – the top one, I noticed, stamped dernier avertissement, which presumably explained his assumption that I was a creditor. In the furthest corner, draped in a dust-sheet, was an elephantine grand piano. Next to it, and taking up the rest of the end wall, was a pretty mahogany bureau, with a glass-fronted cabinet above it.