Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  And then, as a pick-me-up for Flemyng, Goodwater told stories. He spoke of his own recruitment in the pandemonium of early days of the war by a deputy chief who liked to strike matches on his wooden leg to light his pipe. He kept a wind-up gramophone in his room to play a shellac recording of one of the legends of the service describing his escape from a Turkish assassin in Istanbul, and his adventures with the Italians in Abyssinia, to get youngsters in the mood. Goodwater remembered some of the girls who came back from France telling stories of the others who hadn’t, having disappeared in the fray. The German spy who was caught on a train in Scotland because he’d forgotten about the Reichsmarks still in his trouser pocket.

  Of his own travels, he said nothing, showing Flemyng how you could be raconteur and man of mystery at the same time. He also took trouble to plant the idea that Flemyng would spend his life in a study of character.

  ‘Scrapes and ploys. They’ll come, and pass away. But you’ll always watch people – learning their ways, trying to understand them. The game that never ends. Your friends on our side, as well as the others. A comrade-in-arms, or a passing Russian who looks hungry. You’ll learn that the fascination is the same.’

  And they were back to Bridger. Deliberately or not, Flemyng couldn’t know.

  ‘I don’t want to sound like an innocent. Nor scared,’ Flemyng said. ‘But we’re only in our twenties. I can be honest and say that I find it hard to know when I’ll be able to forget this trouble, this break-up if that’s what it is.’

  Goodwater’s genial smile was reassuring. He said that they were talking about a turning point in two young lives. ‘Time is the great healer,’ he said. His gold tooth shone. ‘But not always, I’m afraid. Not always.’

  *

  Bridger’s office in Paris was on the other side of the building from Flemyng’s and much grander in scale. The high windows on the south side opened on to a balcony over the garden where he could entertain when the summer came, and he had requisitioned paintings from London that re-created a belle époque of his own design. There was a revolving globe on a mahogany stand, and floor-to-ceiling books on one long wall. As a trick, Bridger had them arranged as a map, so that his Greek histories were towards the bottom right, with the Arabic texts further along, leading you to Indo-China where he’d won his spurs. Russia was top right, and France, diplomatically, bang in the middle. Bridger enjoyed giving visitors a tour, showing them precisely where the English Channel ran up the wall, with his collection of nineteenth-century novels on its left side and the Americans hard up against the corner. His desk was old and wide with red leather on the top, and though it was a poor relation of the ambassador’s – that had been Wellington’s after Waterloo – the room was a statement of confidence. Not only was he head of chancery and chargé, but happily and unmistakably an ambassador-in-waiting.

  Flemyng made sure that he was one of Bridger’s early callers on his first day, a steel-grey January Monday.

  ‘Will. It had to happen.’

  ‘And where better?’ said Flemyng.

  For half an hour they laughed together, and pretended.

  Bridger had tales from the Far East and his two years in London, just past. They’d been nicely timed, he said, because on the roll of the dice he had managed to jump the queue of men a decade older who were jostling for the top embassies. ‘Coming round the bend on the rails in good fettle,’ he said. ‘The Americans helped, of course, laying on a war on my doorstep. So who knows? I’ve got every chance of a good outcome.’ His new office, for all its splendour, was only a waiting room for better things.

  About Flemyng’s career he said almost nothing. He asked after Sam Malachy and a few of the other boys, passing on some sour gossip from London’s nether world, his name for Flemyng’s head office. By his account it was floundering. ‘Venice, living on lost glory – the city state that lost an empire. Very sad, of course.’ When he poured a drink for them both it was to offer his condolences.

  ‘Sandy keeps me abreast of your world.’ Bolder and he had served together in Hong Kong. ‘Good man, Sandy. Always on the prowl. But straight, of course, so straight. Good to find him here.’

  Flemyng said that Sandy had left his mark everywhere.

  After a few minutes, Flemyng, having offered little apart from a friendly character sketch of Freddy Craven, prepared to leave.

  He gave no sign of his disappointment, which verged on despair.

  Bridger suggested they dine the following week, saying his wife Grizelda would be charmed to have him. They had come together in New York, during Bridger’s service at the mission to the UN. ‘A short and useful time, Will. And not just because it got me a wife. You may get the chance some day.’ Flemyng wondered if Grizelda, her German family split by the Atlantic but always trying to be a good-time girl, would be able to rescue the evening.

  Hoping to find some of their old rhythm, he had confronted emptiness instead. In his presence, Bridger had lost the brilliance and the edge that was shaping a spectacular career and assembling admirers in the offices where it mattered, and turned to lofty bluster. Flemyng knew that he was the cause.

  Louder and less sure with every boast, Bridger was a man confronted by his own shadow, walking in fear of it.

  Flemyng was certain that he could expect no comradeship there, because he was the reminder of a failure that rankled still, the wound that never healed.

  ‘Where’s your evidence?’ Craven said, when Flemyng confessed his disappointment, and his fear.

  ‘There is none. None at all. But you forget how I once knew him, and I can read him like a book. He dislikes the thought that we’re here together, because it reminds him of defeat. I think he may even hate me.’

  Craven said he was sceptical, but would watch for the signs. ‘Don’t let it eat away at you. You’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I know,’ Flemyng said. ‘But youthful passions are the most painful. We can’t forget. Nor forgive.’

  SIX

  In the three months since his unhappy reunion with Bridger, Flemyng’s mood had darkened often enough to trouble Craven. The lightness he had carried with him in Vienna, even at painful moments, was rarely seen. He often laughed with the old man, and on embassy high days he carried himself with elan, but there were long afternoons when his door stayed closed, or when he took to walking the city with no hint of a purpose. Craven suspected he had nowhere to go. It was easy for his colleagues to pin the distraction on the departure of Isabel, whose picture he kept in the top drawer of his desk, but Craven had concluded even before the arrival of Kristof in their lives, unexpectedly and quietly at the cool end of April, that Flemyng was thinking not of her, but of himself.

  As the embassy emptied for the weekend on the Friday of his meeting with Kristof, Craven asked Flemyng at the gate to take a walk with him. They stepped away from the two crowded cafés facing each other at the crossroads near the embassy, and Craven led him to a different bar where, despite the young crowd, he seemed at home. There was music playing from a juke box, and Craven was the oldest man in the room. They alone had hats to hang up. Flemyng thought he could smell a joint through the fug of Gauloise. The only women looked like students, draped in black. ‘Not my kind of place, you’re thinking,’ Craven said, and laughed. ‘Perhaps you’re wrong.’

  They drank a beer together, and Flemyng said, ‘Why, Freddy?’

  ‘Because I’m worried about you. Have been for a while.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’ve had a difficult time, that’s all.’

  But Kristof had given Craven his chance. ‘I think we have something to play with, you and I. Your man excites me. You?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I learned my caution from you,’ said Flemyng. He gave the old man a smile. ‘I’m going to take it slowly.’

  So he should, said Craven, but he must remember how the game was played. ‘You’re a fisherman. You know how to pull him in. Don’t give him too much line. I want you to think about that this weekend. I’m going to clos
e myself in with my books and my records. Play some music. And you must relax, too – we may have busy days to come. Any parties?’

  ‘As it happens, yes.’ He held out his hands in acknowledgement. ‘A good crowd tonight.’

  ‘Do have fun,’ Craven said, and they drank up.

  *

  About a mile away, near the dingy maze of the Marais, Maria Cooney was looking through the window of a restaurant. Peeping across the brass rail above the white lace curtain she saw mirrors and murals, light winking from the squat decanters at the side of the bar and warming the red velvet, a few single men enjoying the concentration of their own tables, three couples, and not one diner who didn’t seem to be French. A waiter was polishing a plate with his napkin and stared past her through the window, his face blank. Maria leaned closer, and the window’s contours gave the scene a happy distortion as she moved her head to look past him. She heard no sound from within, the bustle behind the bar a silent ritual through the glass, and the rosy room glowed with contentment.

  An ordered world without threat. She savoured the evening she had planned.

  Pushing open the door, however, she was startled. Grace Quincy was already there, sitting in the most private corner with an open book on the table. Maria had missed her from the window.

  ‘Sorry.’ She raised an arm and steadied herself. ‘Late.’

  ‘Forget it. I’m early. I wanted to walk through Les Halles. I like it. Nothing changes here.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Maria. ‘I love Benoit and the people here. So long as it lasts, this is Paris.’

  By the time she sat down, and less than a minute had passed, she had recovered her poise. ‘I knew you’d be going to Hoffman’s party so I thought we might catch that dinner first. Thanks for your call to the office. I’d hoped you wouldn’t mind my note to the hotel. I know we just had lunch, but…’

  Quincy was taking her in, her head angled and her expression giving nothing away. She’d pulled her blonde hair back over her high forehead, and wore a light denim shirt that was a perfect match for her honeyed skin. Her smile was easy when it came and she moved her arm across the table in a gesture of reassurance. ‘Course not. The party could be a bitch, so dinner’s great. Let’s enjoy ourselves.’

  Maria gave her a quick sketch of Hoffman, his habitual discomfort and his heroine-worship. But he was young, she said, and we all had to grow up. He could write, that was the thing.

  ‘He scratched himself right through that lunch,’ Quincy said, and they both laughed. ‘We’ll see if he can run to a party.’ They were due at his apartment at nine, and Hoffman had promised everyone a mixed crowd. It was the eve of his thirtieth birthday, so Maria said the least they could do was to stay until midnight.

  Even while they placed their orders, taking all the advice they were offered, and before their soufflés had arrived, Quincy was piecing together Maria’s history. The conversation was fast. ‘New York before you got here, but you were filing from Saigon last year.’

  Maria had a practised story that papered over some of the gaps in her years of work, in which Washington was never mentioned. She spoke of travels that had taken her off the circuit for months, of an assignment in Africa that had taken most of a year, forays to Indo-China when the war was only a baby, and she counterbalanced the vagueness that necessarily clung to these times with a few diamond-hard stories to establish her presence in certain places at particular moments. Within a few minutes they were exchanging experiences like friends on the road, remembering characters they’d encountered at the ends of the earth, and enjoying the closeness of wanderers who find themselves sharing a tempting path to somewhere new.

  ‘Sometimes I feel I need home, but when I’m there – wham! – I’ve got to get away again,’ said Quincy. ‘Even last week, if you can believe it. I like it that I’m usually the only girl on the beat. You, too, I guess.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Suits me,’ Maria said.

  She was thinking of the office in Washington that was her real home. Its four floors were intimate, and the last time she had spent a week there she had met no other woman except the secretary to her boss, as formal as a porcelain figurine, whose task was to guard the basement lair from which he came and went by a private entrance that allowed him to use an alleyway at the rear rather than the door through which everyone else entered on L Street, next to a diner where none of them was allowed to eat. Maria’s secret celebrity was enhanced by her sex, but the stories they told of her were not of seductions, but silky manoeuvres in the field touched by ruthlessness. Always an object of surprise.

  In the boss’s team, which demanded a loyalty that all his soldiers understood, they knew that she was the equal of any of them save one or two veterans who had been there from the start, and had shed blood, but whose powers were on the wane. These were confusing times for the old warriors, who remembered simpler days, and the reason a woman found herself treated in that building with a deference that would have surprised any outsider was that there were a few gamblers in the ranks who spread the word that if you were trying to pick the boss’s successor, or certainly the one after that, you might do worse than place your pot on Maria Delaney Cooney. One of the few woman among them, and a flier.

  Without fuss, and very quickly, she turned her mind and the conversation away from herself and on to Quincy and her adventures. Her own mysteries remained unspoiled and intact.

  They ate easily and happily, Michel Petit himself bringing them the evening’s best offerings from his kitchen, and Maria found that more than an hour and a half sped by like a few passing minutes. Quincy’s concentrated gaze, which intimidated many of the men around her, was a thrill, and, far from producing nervousness, encouraged her to take the conversation away from the open road to personal and risky ground: home and college, even parents, the shared experience of never having married. The wandering Irish. Lovers. Maria spun a mysterious wrap for her own shoulders.

  Quincy seemed to be open. ‘Listen. Things happen on the road, like you know. Good times – a night, a week, sometimes a season with someone who seems special. Then you take off again. I’ve learned that I’m a gypsy, travelling on.’

  Maria’s state of intoxication, which had little to do with the one glass of wine inside her, was obvious to the man at the next table, a lone diner who had worked his way through a yeoman’s hearty meal and a bottle of burgundy, and who was now subsiding with a giant ballon of calvados swirling in his hand. He’d pulled a vast napkin from his neck, and it blanketed his knees as he focused his eyes on Maria. He couldn’t look away, because there was obvious drama. Quincy was in charge, smoothly directing the evening and drawing power from the attention of her companion and the ambience of the crowd in the room, and Maria was speeding up in her wake. Benoit had filled up and the noise was rising gradually, but neither woman noticed. They were hooked together.

  When they left, just before ten, Maria led the way with confidence to their destination near République, squirming through narrow cut-throughs that she knew well. Hoffman’s paper had provided him with an apartment in a corner building where he often seemed lost in the high-ceilinged rooms with their peeling walls and Maria knew that the tiny kitchen was hardly ever used. But the birthday party was an opportunity to fill the long salon with acquaintances who might reconsider him as a result.

  ‘You never know, there may be some women there,’ said Quincy. Maria laughed.

  She had bought a small present for Hoffman, for whom she had affection. When he needed to explain a bout of misery or ask help in a passage of arms with his editors, it was in Maria that he found a listener.

  She realized, as they were shown in by a barman hired for the night, that this was meant to be the end of Hoffman’s embarrassment. The night he’d grow up. Quincy, who’d only seen him scratching himself through lunch, understood, too. She glanced at Maria and they exchanged a silent vow. They were both there to help.

  ‘Jeffrey,’ said Hoffman to Quincy, holding out his hand. ‘We hard
ly spoke at lunch. Sorry.’

  The other hand was in his black curls and he swayed from side to side. But to Maria the flower-patterned shirt told a story, like his new shoes. Hoffman was trying harder than ever before.

  ‘No apology, Jeffrey,’ Quincy said. ‘Please. We’ll make this birthday sing.’

  There was already a crowd, with Max Anderson in the corner, occupying a chair that he seemed unlikely to abandon until the end of the party. His junior was managing his drinks, and corralling guests who were to be introduced.

  ‘I knew Max when nobody had heard of him,’ Quincy said. ‘Nobody.’

  Maria laughed and put a hand on her arm, touching her for the first time, and it was an electric moment that made her pause before she spoke. ‘But d’you know what? I kind of admire how he’s done it. Loads of bullshit, but plenty panache, too. You can’t take that away. Those paragraphs still sing.’

  Then, suddenly, Maria lost her composure for the second time that evening.

  It was brief, and she didn’t stumble, but her flow stopped. Quincy felt the hand on her arm tightening before Maria pulled it back, and noticed the puzzlement on her face before the moment passed and Maria laughed again.

  ‘Well, here’s a surprise,’ she said.

  Walking forward, she pulled Quincy with her and stood behind a man who was bending forward to talk to Max. They could hear him talking about Prague. Sensing the women’s presence, Max’s companion straightened and turned towards them. He smiled warmly.

  ‘My dear Maria.’

  She turned to Quincy and then gestured towards him.

  ‘Let me introduce a friend of mine, Grace. You’ll like each other. This is Will Flemyng.’

  He shook hands, and felt Quincy’s grip for the first time. They began to talk and, recollecting the conversation later, Flemyng recalled the speed with which their journey began. Quincy’s questions were sharp, and would have seemed abrupt without the softness of her appearance that belied the steel underneath. Or, he thought, if they had come from a man. He kept his own history back, and turned her energy back on herself: what had she seen in Prague? Where was she bound? Could it be true that she had little interest in politics at home, despite the fire and blood? She was confident at every turn. Afterwards, he realized how rare it was to have such a conversation with someone who had not changed position once, nor offered an apology for any view. A fast driver who promised danger.