This Saturday afternoon in October a friend of my stepmother’s came to the house. She considered herself to be the Jolly type, going round her friends’ houses giving them loud, healthy advice on dropped wombs and apple jelly.
She settled herself into one of the armchairs with a cup of tea and a cigarette. You could always tell she’d been there by the cigarette butts ringed with lipstick she left crushed in the ashtray. Mary was on the edge of her chair. Anxious to appear jolly and healthy enough.
‘So, what is our Eliza doing these days?’ She looked at me, then Mary. I hated being called Eliza. For a minute I felt like pushing her damned stupid hat down over her eyes.
I said, ‘Oh nothing much.’
‘And plans for the future?’ she asked, beady. You must have plans for the future. Everyone has. Tomorrow for instance. Come along then. Brace up. That’s the sort of look she’d give you.
I said, ‘I’m going to the University.’ Usually that kept them quiet for a bit. ‘Very nice dear,’ they’d say and almost pat you on the head. This one said, ‘But Elizabeth darling, enrolments were closed a week ago.’
Panic. Clear your throat. ‘Ehm … well my father said …’
‘But I’m afraid your father is wrong, dear.’ (Dare you contradict him you silly old bag? But she was winning. Mary was almost falling off her chair in a concentration of concern.)
‘I know, Mary,’ said this awful woman. ‘Why not send her to France for six months? I’ve sent three of my girls there and they’ve all had a very good time. I know just the family who would take her on as an au pair.’ And so they arranged it. They might have been discussing the difficulties of bringing up pedigree dogs—this kennel, or that, now which do you think?
Four weeks later I was heading for Paris in a camel-hair coat, clutching a barn brack (a present for Madame and Monsieur). Coming down the steps off the aeroplane I chucked the brack over the side. A little, dark, French mechanic caught up with me just at the customs gate, the battered cake in his oily hands: ‘C’est a vous Mademoiselle?’—all smiles and delighted with himself. I stuffed it in the bin in the ladies’ lav.
Paris, I thought, was the most awful place in the world. After two weeks I made friends with another Irish girl, also an au pair. We used to meet in the Avenue Royale and fill ourselves up with French bread, sandwiches and water—the coffee was too expensive. Anyway, this girl said, it makes you sterile, barren.
At the beginning I remember just being hungry most of the time. Madame ate very little because of her figure and Monsieur ate lunch at a café near his work and just snacked on salami or cheese in the evening. I used to pray for the children to not finish their food, and then gobble it while Madame wasn’t looking.
At night I’d lie awake and think of roast beef and gravy and potatoes and two veg, and compose letters of my tortures to my father. I never actually wrote them.
The Dumonts, the couple for whom I worked, were a young middle-class couple with two children, a flat in Montparnasse, and a fixed income. M. Dumont was a dentist. He left the flat at 7.00 a.m. and returned at 7.30 p.m. Madame was a housewife. She kept their flat chic and bijou like their friends’ flats, and amused her lovers.
While I took the baby Dumont, Pierre, for what were supposed to be long walks in the park, but were in fact trips to the cafés in the Avenue Royale, and while M. Dumont was being un bon dentiste, Madame Dumont was rolling round her marital bed with one of her lovers. Alternatively they rolled on the living room floor on a blonde rug, which her husband had brought her from somewhere exotic.
I came home early from our walk one day. Baby Pierre had a bloody nose, having careered, pushchair and all, into a lamppost. There were Madame and her current lover on the floor; there was I with Pierre bawling in his pushchair. I stood looking foolishly down at them, and they looked up at me: Madame straight, the lover over his shoulder. Then Madame made a marvellous French ‘pprT sound and they gathered their bodies up like puppets and took them into the bedroom.
I was horrified. Fascinated. Amazed.
Madame became very sweet to me. She stopped shouting at me in great torrents of French. She couldn’t do enough for Leetle Irish. She gave me her clothes that she was bored with, silk scarves and beautifully tailored tweed skirts. She said I must have my hair bobbed so I would look like a French mam’selle. My ears felt naked and cold afterwards. She said, I looked almost chic. ‘Presque.’
Madame always looked chic. It was an art, she said, a timeless art of French women. I had never met anyone so totally materialistic; she was sophisticated sin incarnate. I tried to copy her.
Monsieur was very gentle towards her, particularly when they had friends in. They would dress up, Madame like a radiant peacock; they would touch each other’s hands across the table, and click their eyes together. Their friends, who also had lovers, said the Dumonts were a beautiful couple, so in love.
Madame never imparted any other knowledge or experience of l’amour to me. I was too shy to ask. Was it age difference, or just jealousy? That glint in a woman’s eye when men are around—like with my boy.
The boy was blonde. He was the same height as me and had green eyes. It was the combination of blonde and green that made you look at him. He looked back with those quite unblinking green eyes.
We started having coffees together. My evening off we had more coffees together. He said his father was a film director; he made underground films. (Underground? Underground where? How? He laughed at you then till his green eyes went into hard slits like a cat’s.) He said he was a writer: he wrote poems and was also writing a novel. A novel about the philosophy of humanism and the atomic bomb.
He wrote you a poem. Your French wasn’t quite good enough. You took it home to the flat. You and M. Dumont carefully translated it. A vicarious pleasure—such a thing to say to a little girl! Madame gave you a funny look. Monsieur said, ‘You must meet some of our younger friends. We will have a party.’
You thought: Things are definitely looking up; I have a boyfriend and now we’re going to have a party.
The blonde boy and Helen, an Irish girl, came to the party. The blonde boy was called Henri. He wore blue jeans and a black polo-neck sweater. He had a habit of holding his head on one side when he was listening to someone.
He was listening to Madame Dumont. You could see the light and shade on the bones of her back; her smooth, brown, French back. Her little black dress with its deep V showed off her back so nicely—the light and shade on it.
What was she saying? He was laughing. He laughed so seldomly. Talked so little. A real listener. You’d thought it was just to you. Madame was gesticulating. Now he was saying something. Madame was laughing. She touched his cheek lightly with her hand, gently, protectively.
Monsieur was talking to a slim girl with long hair, like a madonna. I felt frantic. Everyone cheating everyone else. Smiling, glinting, touching each other up, preparing ... it’s horrible. A teacher from the Sorbonne, where I went to improve my awful schoolgirl French, was saying something about Victor Hugo and bath plugs and on and on and on.
Madame came over to her husband—must keep an eye on him, a little bit for you, a little bit for me, and then we’re happy, quits, right?
She was leading Henri by the hand. ‘But your friend is so charming, Elizabeth,’ she said to me, looking at him. Too charming. You longed for the roof of the sky to fall in and the whole circus to be over. No more talking, no more laughing, no more knives.
Henri found you outside the door sitting on the stairway. He lit you both up cigarettes, and you sipped brandy from his glass. You were bright. He said, ‘Oh but that Madame of yours is a coquette.’ You were brighter. You could see his eyes, liquid, in the darkness.
Music was coming from the room now. He said, ‘Where is your bedroom?’ You told him. He got up and took your hand. ‘Let’s go.’ You were surprised, but you went. You were terr
ified Madame would come in and find you: ‘Qu’est-ce qui passe …?’ You were on the bed, your mouths sucking each other. He was kissing you all over and his hands were pushing your breasts and one minute he got a bit rough because you seemed to pull away. He was quite quick.
Afterwards you lay very quietly. You looked at his blonde head on your shoulder.
After a bit you said, ‘Does that mean I’m not a virgin any more?’ He jumped up and said, ‘What? What?’—frightened-sounding, and angry. ‘What do you mean? What is this you are saying?’ He reached out for a cigarette and you had one too and you wanted him to lie down again. You told him then about Valerie and how she had shown you how to break the seal on ‘our honeypots’, as she said. It was so you wouldn’t be embarrassed by it later. He laughed then and he looked like a little boy with his fair hair and his clear eyes and together you finished his brandy and he said, ‘Now you must sleep.’
When I woke up he was gone. The bed was crumpled. A sad bed. A used bed. I made it up. That was the last time I saw him. Afterwards he had made love with Madame, and what’s more, she told me.
Paris became doubly lonely after that. A big draughty city. Everyone shouting. I spent two precious francs on a guide to the Louvre. I didn’t get further than the hallway. I thought, If I had a dog even, let alone a man, a boyfriend, just something to come round with me, then it wouldn’t be so bad. I walked with Pierre in his pushcart from the flat, to the park, to the café, and back. I thought, at least people can’t laugh at me; I look as if I’m doing something.
Helen and I went a few times to these ‘multinational discotheques’. All the boys seemed to assume that all au pairs were whores; we assumed they were all sex maniacs. They were strained evenings, sitting in the discotheques with the multinationals, burping over Coca-Cola. One came home feeling dissatisfied and exhausted.
I tried to feel guilty. ‘I’ve committed a mortal sin,’ I’d say to myself. ‘If I die I’ll go to hell for ever, and ever.’ I went along to Notre Dame in my soberest clothes. I knelt in the most uncomfortable place I could find. I went to confession. I had to shout out my sin because the priest was old and deaf and my French wasn’t so good. My voice must have ricocheted round the domed walls: ‘J’ai avais faire I’amour avec un mauvais garçon.’ The priest kept saying, ‘Comment?’ in this wheezy, cranky voice. Finally, he said to say three Hail Marys and be more careful in future. I never knew whether he understood or not. Would I go to another priest? Helen said, ‘Stop being such a guilty Catholic.’
I didn’t realize I had stopped being a Catholic until a woman with painted red nails and black hair asked me if I was a ‘proper’ Catholic still. This was at one of the Dumonts’ parties. In France, she said, everyone was a Catholic in name but none of them went to church or believed in sins or any of that. I said, ‘Yes,’ then, ‘No,’ then said, ‘Well no, I suppose I’m not really.’ The lady shrieked with laughter and went off to tell about the Irish girl who couldn’t make up her mind whether she was a Catholic or not.
I got up very early one Sunday and took Pierre and the other child to Mass. The whole church seemed vast and cold, with the priest and a few old people attending—tiny, dusty figures acting out a forgotten ritual. I went home feeling reduced, smaller somehow. Something that had taken up so much time and emotion had gone quite dead.
I wrote a letter to a priest at home. I said, ‘I’ve lost The Faith.’ He wrote back a long and impassioned letter about the pagan French, how sophistication was an evil thing, and that I was to come home soon to Ireland and bathe my soul in the pure waters of Irish Catholicism and bask in the faith of my fathers. There were pages of it.
No thunderbolts came from the sky. I didn’t even dream about it. I felt slightly embarrassed when, a year later, a spotty and earnest lecturer at the University, a visitor from Oxford, asked me to delineate the theological traumas I had been through upon giving up my religion. He kept on about it, thinking my reply of ‘None’ was Irish modesty.
A visit from the priest, and a letter from me, happened upon my parents’ doorstep the same day. The priest said he thought I should be brought home. I said I wanted to come home. The priest said I was having religious difficulties. I said Madame Dumont had a lover. Mary sent me an air ticket by return of post. Madame followed me round whining for the last week. I never had the nerve to slap her face. I just thought: Keep calm, it will soon be over.
—2—
I came back from Paris able to speak French slightly better than when I left; no longer a virgin, no longer a Catholic.
Mary kept saying, ‘Oh dear, it must have been terrible for you.’ She was referring to Madame being a loose woman. I said, ‘Yes, it was terrible.’ My father said, ‘Well now, it’s nice to have you back.’ That was at dinner the first night home. I was a stranger, sitting down eating roast chicken and potatoes and carrots with these two other strangers. They never asked me about Paris or Madame after that. Just a few questions the first night: Did you go sight-seeing much? What did you do in the evenings? Is butter really fifteen shillings a pound in Paris? Then we didn’t talk about it any more.
A few days later the priest called round. Mary left us alone in the dining room. We sat on the stiff dining chairs; he laid his hands and arms awkwardly on the table like legs of lamb.
‘Well now my dear child, tell me about it.’ His head was slightly lowered, almost as if he were in the confessional. I felt an urge to splay it all out before him: me, Henri, Madame, her husband, my loneliness, my confusion, and the hurt, because somebody must explain the stupid brutality of that boy, of life.
I said, ‘I just don’t believe any longer, Father.’ The rest I kept to myself. You mustn’t frighten people, mustn’t upset them. All the priest wanted to know is why you no longer wanted to go to church. You must tell him. Simple things. Rituals.
The priest said, ‘Elizabeth—you don’t mind if I call you Elizabeth?—we all of us go through great periods of doubt. Even the Pope himself has to wrestle with the Devil.’ He said, ‘We must be patient. God will return to us. God is testing us.’ I’d heard it all before. I kept quiet. It will be over sooner that way.
What if you said, ‘I loved someone, Father. I wanted to touch him. We touched each other and loved. Everyone needs that, Father. But then he left … he didn’t even say goodbye’? You were beginning to sound like a cliché. The songs, the pop songs that almost made you cry: I’m just a lonely girl, lonely and blue.
But I said nothing to the priest. Just ‘Yes Father’ and ‘No Father’ and ‘Certainly Father’. He said I must come to confession and then receive Holy Communion. I started at that. Communion! And me with a mortal sin. I forgotten I’d given up believing. Even still.
Mary was solicitous. I felt vaguely important—a mortal sinner at eighteen. I went to Mass with her and she watched me through her hands. I cried once during High Mass because the sound of the organ was like someone in pain and I was feeling wobbly because I had my period. I thought, Soon I’ll tell them all that I’ve stopped believing; meantime it’s better to be kind and just tag along.
The priest came round every so often with books on saints’ lives, and then even some modern books about people who looked after drunks and layabouts and wiped up their sick and never shouted at them. The priest said, ‘There are a million ways to serve God.’ I thought of Madame saying, ‘There are a million ways of making love.’ I thought: Millions and millions of ways and how is it I can’t see one?
Mary said, ‘Something will turn up, not to worry,’ and took me round to her friends’ houses for coffee. The coffee seemed awful after Paris. Mary said, ‘Oh mind out now with your high falutin’ ways.’ That was the last I said about coffee.
Mary’s friends asked politely about France and one of them had once been to the Mediterranean and she showed us colour photos of her holiday. The photos had gone liver-coloured with age.
When they’d asked
a few questions about Paris they started talking about their babies, or their insides (did every woman over the age of thirty-five have something wrong with her womb?) and then their husbands. They talked about their husbands’ appetites or how difficult it was to get them to change their socks. They never said things like, ‘He thinks capitalism a terrible thing,’ or, ‘He’s very excited by the space race to the moon.’ The French women used to do that; Madame and her friends would swap their husband’s heads. These women swapped their feet, or their indigestion.
Valerie came back from Italy. She rang up one evening. I sat in my coat, cigarette in hand, and her voice was coming down the line, small and funny. She said, ‘I’ve loads to tell you.’ Then we couldn’t think of anything to say so we said we’d meet for lunch the next day. Valerie suggested lunch—it sounded very sophisticated. Before it’d been just for coffees.
We had lunch in this café where all the au pairs that come to Dublin eat. I pitied them for a bit, remembering what it had been like, but as soon as you no longer feel the pain of it yourself you almost think other people are stupid to complain.
Valerie had had her hair dyed blonde in Italy and then gone skiing and the sun had turned it bright orange. She looked like one of those dolls—their hair green, or any sort of colour. She’d put on weight but it suited her; her hips filled up her skirt and they didn’t look frumpish or flabby, they just looked like big wide hips. She wore a tan sweater with a scooped neck and a string of beads: plastic, she said, but they looked like amber. She tossed her head. Men looked at her. You could see her laughing right into their faces.
She talked about the men she’d been to bed with. The little one with the habit of pulling his nose, who turned out to be married with five children and a wife in Sicily. The wife had come, flaming with anger, to collect him. The tall aesthetic one who talked about love and politics and played ‘The Red Flag’ at six in the morning and the concierge came running out into the courtyard, shouting. There was the passionate one who was once taken to hospital stuck stiff to the woman he was making love to because her husband had come in halfway through and she’d clammed up with the shock of it.
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