by James Wilson
‘Here,’ said M. Loubet, unlocking the doors and spreading them open. ‘Help yourself.’
The shelves were lined with thick, red-covered exercise books. I took one down at random, and saw 1897 written on the front. I pulled out the two before it: 1896 and 1895. They must be in order. I counted back, and found 1886.
I opened it. The first page was headed Célestine Boudin, 12 rue du Renouard. The space below had been divided, with ruled pen-strokes, into differently sized sections, like an ad hoc diary. At the top of each one was a date, and then – underneath – the titles of the pieces played, with comments scribbled next to them in illegibly crabbed writing.
I turned over. Celestine Boudin went on for two more pages. Then came Amélie Corot, Marianne Franck, Delphine de Grandcourt.
Clearly a methodical woman, Mme. Loubet. I turned to the end of the book, and started to flick backwards through it. Caroline Villefranche, Estelle Vitry, Dominique Thiers …
And then, all of a sudden, there it was: Mary Stone, Apt. 4, 18 rue Pervenche.
I read it again, to make sure I had not deluded myself. No, there was no question about it. There was even a crossed-out Marie before the Mary, as if the English spelling had initially taken Mme. Loubet by surprise.
I shut my eyes and muttered a prayer of thanks. Then I closed the book quietly, and turned round. The man was energetically balling newspaper in his big hands, then stuffing it into a box of china ornaments to protect them on their journey.
‘Abracadabra,’ I said.
He did not even look up. ‘What, found what you wanted already?’
‘Yes.’ I hesitated a moment, then added: ‘Would you mind if I took this with me?’
He glanced at the book and shook his head. ‘Just means a slightly smaller fire, that’s all.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. I started to the door, then stopped and said: ‘And – my condolences.’
He nodded, and went on with his work.
*
18, Rue Pervenche was not one of the buildings I had been to that morning, mercifully, so at least I was spared the embarrassment of having to explain myself again to someone who had given me short shrift before. But there was no guarantee that, when I did get there, I could expect a better reception than I had had everywhere else. I knew the address of Mary Stone’s apartment, but I had no idea who lived in it now. The concierge might not believe my story. Or she might believe it, and still feel it was her duty to protect the current tenants from being disturbed by a stranger.
There was a café a few doors down from the dress-shop. I took a table outside, and ordered a large coffee and an omelette. By the time it had arrived, I had what I thought was a workable plan.
I settled my bill, then pulled on my right glove and went in search of a librairie. I soon found one: a dim badger’s den of a place at the corner of the square. The patron was starting to close for lunch, but waited patiently while I selected a small notebook.
‘Would you write something in it for me?’ I asked him, after I had paid.
He looked at me quizzically. I held up my gloved hand.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘An accident?’
I nodded. He took the notebook, and opened it at the first page.
‘What would you like me to write?’
‘Il me faut m’excuser, mais je ne parle pas français.’
He smiled. ‘That’s not true.’
‘You’re very kind. But it’s for someone else,’ I said, hoping it was too dark for him to see my blushes.
He nodded again, and slowly wrote it out. ‘And after that?’
‘Rendezvous à 2 heures. And then the address: Appartement 4, 18, rue Pervenche.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all. Thank you.’
Outside, I removed my glove, then tore the sheet from the notebook and folded it into my pocket. I was too nervous to sit still, so I filled in the rest of the time by walking back and forth, more or less aimlessly, between one little street and the next. Finally, just before two o’clock, I turned into Rue Pervenche again, and made my way to number 18.
It was so like its neighbours – even down to the harlequin floor, and the ponderous wedding-cake moulding of the ceiling – that I could only conclude they must all have been built at the same time to the identical design. The concierge was in her booth, and watched scowling as I clattered towards her across the hall.
‘Bonjour, monsieur.’
I removed my hat, then took out the torn-off page, and – jettisoning my French accent altogether – haltingly read:
‘Il me faut m’excuser, mais je ne parle pas français.’
Her face relaxed into a smile.
‘Anglais?’
I nodded. She laughed, and waggled a finger at the paper. I gave it to her. It was possible, of course, that she knew the tenant of Apartment 4 well enough to be able to recognize his – or her – hand-writing, but I doubted it. It must be obvious, at least, that I hadn’t written it: the script had that distinctive mixture of the careful and the spendthrift – a row of tiny miserly letters suddenly broken by a huge plunging flourish – that French children must learn at school, and no Englishman could ever hope to imitate.
She scanned it, mouthing the words as she read.
‘Ah, numéro quatre! Mme. Gaston!’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Oui. Mme. Gaston.’
‘Deuxième étage,’ she said, holding up two fingers.
‘Merci.’
I started for the stairs – relieved, but troubled, too, by that vague sense of dissatisfaction you feel when you have deceived a child with a too-easy trick. As I was approaching the first landing she called after me:
‘Mais je crois que Mme. Gaston est sortie!’
I could not show I understood, so I merely smiled and shrugged at her, and continued up to the second floor. If Madame Gaston was out, I thought, I was doomed. My only hope was that the concierge had made a mistake.
Number 4 was at the front of the building, overlooking the street. I rang the bell and waited. There was no response. I rang again. Still nothing. I began to knock, thumping the wood repeatedly with my fist. After a few seconds I heard a click behind me, and a voice saying:
‘Monsieur?’
I turned round. There was another flat, immediately opposite, and a plump woman in a maid’s cap was peering out of the half-open door.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said, ‘but my mistress asks if you would please stop making that noise? She has a headache.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
She smiled and nodded, grateful that I wasn’t going to be unpleasant about it. As she started to close the door again I took a couple of steps towards her and said:
‘You wouldn’t happen to know who lived in number four before Mme. Gaston, would you?’
‘M. Perruquier.’
‘And before him?’
She shook her head.
‘In the eighties there was a little English girl there called Mary Stone. I’m trying to find the people who looked after her.’
Her eyes widened, and darted towards the interior of the flat. There was no doubt about it: she had heard the name before. I rested my hand on the jamb, so that if she tried to shut me out she would squash my thumb.
‘You don’t know how I could discover where they are now, do you?’
‘No.’ But she seemed flustered and uncertain, and cast another hurried look into the hall.
‘Is there anyone else I could ask?’
Her mouth opened, then shut again. From behind her, a woman’s voice called:
‘Who is it, Felicité?’
She half-turned her head, but kept her eyes fixed on me. ‘A gentleman, madame.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He … he …’
‘Did I hear him mention Mary Stone?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I … I don’t know, madame.’
‘It’s a little complicated
,’ I said. ‘But I can –’
‘Ask him to come in!’
The maid raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips – reminding me, suddenly, of our poor house-maid when I was a child, who had made exactly the same expression when my drunk father ordered her to bring another bottle of wine. Then, accepting the inevitable with a sigh, she ushered me inside, and shut the door.
‘Your name, sir?’
‘Corley Roper.’
I followed her down the hall into a drawing-room so murky that at first I could see nothing but the thin slivers of light falling through a venetian blind.
‘M. Roper, madame.’
Something stirred under the window. I half-closed my eyes, and was just able to make out the figure of a woman on a chaise longue struggling to sit up.
‘Roper?’ she said, her voice croaky with pain. ‘You are English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let us speak English, then.’
‘It’s no trouble to speak French, if you prefer.’
‘I don’t,’ she said in English, with scarcely a trace of an accent. ‘But forgive me if I neglect the formalities. I can’t stand. I can’t shake hands.’
‘I could come back later, when you’re feeling better.’
‘No, no, it will make me better to talk to you. A visit from the past is always welcome. Sit down, please.’
I felt my way to a chair.
‘Mary Stone,’ she said. ‘Do you know her?’
‘Yes.’
‘She is alive, then?’
‘Yes. Or she was, anyway, two weeks ago.’
‘Good. Good. I –’ She started to sway, and for the next few seconds was entirely occupied with trying to keep herself upright, thrusting her fists into the upholstered seat and bracing her arms like a pair of callipers. To avoid embarrassing her, I looked away, and began to take stock of where I was. It was a large, high-ceilinged room, which the architect must have conceived as the setting for a scene of Victorian – or Second Empire – domestic harmony, with Papa seated by the hearth, and Mama kneeling at his side, and three children playing happily on the rug in front of them. Reduced – as it appeared to be – to an invalid’s sick-room, it felt sadly empty. The mantelshelf was bare of ornaments; and, aside from the chaise longue and a couple of chairs, there was no furniture except a table and a slender tallboy, so much of the floor was a desert waste. Only the walls seemed populated: I counted fifteen picture frames – though it was too dark to see what they contained; and over the fireplace hung an enormous rococo looking-glass, a muddy puddle of light in the surrounding gloom.
‘Did she send you to look for me?’ said the woman suddenly.
I turned back to her. She was propped against a pyramid of cushions, rubbing her neck with her fingertips.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I am Françoise Revel. I thought perhaps that’s why you’d come? To find me?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. She didn’t send me at all, in fact. She doesn’t even know I’m here.’
‘Ah. She mentioned me, though?’
‘I … The truth is, she told me very little about her time in Paris. It’s taken me all morning just to discover where she lived. I’ve no idea whom she knew, or –’
‘She knew me. I was her friend,’ she said – as if friendship were a legally recognized relationship, like marriage, and you could no more have two friends than you could two spouses. ‘I saw her almost every week. Sometimes I went there. More often, she came here.’
I narrowed my eyes again, trying to guess her age.
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘You think I am too old for that.’
‘No –’
She batted my protest away with an impatient wave.
‘It’s true. I was almost a young woman, and she was only a child. But still we loved each other.’
‘You didn’t live on your own, as she did?’
‘No, of course not! My parents were not monsters. They thought it odd that I wanted to play with the strange little anglaise. But they did not try to stop me.’
‘Did Mary have no other … I mean, was there no one else …?’
‘No one capable of understanding her as I did. I am an artist, you see. And that gives one a certain sensibility. A certain natural affinity with the world of a sensitive child like Mary. Perhaps the true artist never entirely grows up.’
She paused, gathering up the reins of the conversation and preparing to take it firmly in the direction of her own life. Hurriedly I said:
‘But what about the people looking after her?’
‘Oh, they were all quite unsuitable. The governess was a frightful woman. A grim-faced purveyor of facts, without a spark of imagination. And Mme. Bournisien, the housekeeper, was no better. She might have been caring for a parrot, for all the interest she showed in Mary. There was a vile old nurse, to begin with – what was her name –?’
‘Adèle?’
‘Adèle Lamarthe, yes, that was it. She at least was loyal, I suppose. But more like a sly old dog than a human being. You know, grey whiskers, and the foulest breath you’ve ever smelt. And no conversation beyond the state of the weather, and the price of things in the market. And she left, of course, when the governess came.’
‘What happened to her? Do you know?’
‘No. But she must certainly be dead by now. She was at least sixty-five, even then.’
‘And Mme. Bournisien?’
‘Oh, yes, I know what happened to her. She came back, no more than a year ago – expressly to tell me, I think, how well she has done. I’m with a family in Cabourg now, madame. Very respectable people. Good Catholics. A large house near the sea, with six children and a staff of eight. Certainly a more responsible position than looking after one little bastard, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Is that really what she said?’
She nodded again. ‘And the other children in the building shunned Mary for being, you know, different from them, and not quite respectable. So that just left me. She used to like coming here for all kinds of reasons. One was that it gave her an opportunity to practise her English.’
‘You do speak it extraordinarily well, I –’
‘Ah, well, I was brought up more or less bilingual. My mother was from Kent, you see, so –’
‘She considered herself English, then, did she? Mary, I mean?’
She hesitated a second, then nodded again. ‘She knew she had an English name. And that one day, when she was old enough, she would be going to school in England. That’s why she wanted to speak the language perfectly: she was frightened, if she didn’t, the other girls would laugh at her accent. But she really had no idea what she was. People would put all kinds of silly notions in her head.’
‘That she was the daughter of a Balkan grand duchess?’
‘Yes, that kind of thing. They weren’t serious ideas, needless to say: just romantic fairy-tales, really. But sometimes she’d take one of them quite literally, and for a week or two wouldn’t talk of anything else …’
There was a sudden commotion in the street: shouts, and the blare of a horn. She immediately grimaced and clamped her hands over ears. After a few seconds she gingerly removed them, and – when she was sure it was quiet again – folded them in her lap.
‘It’s killing me,’ she said.
‘What? The noise?’
She gave a quick flick of the head. ‘Anyway,’ she said, with the air of someone forcing herself back into a pleasanter train of thought, ‘I used to have an old dolls’ house, you know, and Mary would always make me fit it up to match the latest story. Turning it into a Bohemian castle wasn’t easy, I can tell you. Though not as hard as Versailles.’ She tried to laugh, but the effort made her wince. ‘That …’ she said, catching her breath again, ‘that’s what I had to do when my father suggested she was the daughter of the comte de Chambord, and would go to live at court when the monarchy was restored. It was a joke, of course. But Mary insisted I should make one of the dolls Marie A
ntoinette, even though she’d been dead for almost a hundred years. And paint a backdrop showing the park and the petit hameau. I was always painting things for her. She adored my pictures.’
‘I’m sure she did.’ I was anxious to ask about Mary’s servants, but didn’t want to seem to be changing the subject too precipitately. I left what I thought was a decent pause, and was about to go on when she said:
‘Would you like to see some of them?’
‘Hm?’
‘The pictures? Most of them were done after she left, of course. But I can show you her particular favourite.’
‘Well, yes, that would be very interesting.’
‘Open the blind, then, would you?’
I got up, and started towards the window.
‘Not completely,’ she called after me. ‘Just the slats.’
I pulled on the string until the strips were horizontal. Muted daylight filled the room.
‘Thank you,’ she said, staring at me over her shoulder, as if she were as curious to see me clearly as I was to see her. She was a striking-looking woman, dark-haired, with a pale, square-jawed face. She wore a high-collared silk dress the colour of oyster-shell, setting off the startling flint grey of her eyes. As she studied me she ran one finger absently around the neck.
‘Not too bright for you?’ I said.
‘No. I think I’m feeling a little better, thank you.’
I started back towards my seat – not pausing to examine any of the pictures closely, but conscious of a general impression of clouds and river-banks and little girls in smocks. As I passed the chaise longue she put out a hand and touched my wrist.
‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘That was the one.’
It was hanging next to the fireplace, half hidden by shadow from the chimney breast. I saw speckles of blue on a dark background, but it wasn’t until I went and stood directly in front of it that I was able to make out what they were: wild flowers carpeting a beech wood.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘The Bluebell Wood. My first oil. I did it on a visit to my grandparents in England.’