‘Françoise Regnier. Françoise d’Esté. She died years ago, when I was seventeen.’
‘I see,’ she muses. ‘No, I don’t think I ever met her. Your father though, if my memory serves me, was a very attractive man.’ Her eyebrows arch, her lips curls, and I suddenly see the flirtatious young woman in her. ‘Yes, after the war, several of my friends I remember had their hearts set on him.’ She laughs, ‘Forgive me, I’m prattling. And you’ll want to join the young people.’
I don’t move. ‘Tell me more,’ I say.
‘Well there isn’t much more. He went off, quite suddenly. Couldn’t stand France after the war, I guess. Not a good time here. In ‘49, was it? I’m not quite sure. So you were born out there?’
‘No, no, in Paris.’
‘He came back then. But by that time I must have been having my children and my father had died. Guy Regnier was really his friend.’ She glances at me curiously, ‘Or was it that your mother came back without him? Sensible of her.’
‘No, he did come back to France, but then left for Vietnam again. When I was about two.’
She lets out a deep breath. ‘I see. Difficult. But here I am troubling you with too many questions. Shall we go back next door?’
‘I think I’ll just slip away now. I…’
She pats my hand. ‘Of course, my dear.’
‘Will you thank Paul and Beatrice for me.’
She nods, gazes at me again as I stand. ‘To think. Guy Regnier’s daughter. Yes I can see him in you. You have his colouring, the bones.’
I am almost through the door when Paul catches up to me. His face is sombre, tired. ‘Was that alright? Are you alright?’
‘I’m not at my most self-possessed, if that’s what you mean.’
That look of longing comes into his eyes. But he doesn’t touch me. I kiss him lightly on the cheek and he steps back as if I repelled him. ‘Happy birthday’. I pretend gaiety, feel only confusion. I turn away.
‘Maria,’ he calls me back. ‘Don’t mention Monsieur Tran and all that to Beatrice.’
‘Why ever not?’ I am suddenly angry. ‘How many things am I not supposed to mention to Beatrice?’
‘Please.’ His knuckles on the door jamb are white. ‘I’ll see you next week.’ He closes the door so quickly that I stand there looking at smooth surface where I should see Paul. I clench my fists, wish I could hammer at it, hammer at him.
I race down the stairs, race as if I were Cinderella running from the ball. But there is no prince running after me and if I were to drop my slipper, he would undoubtedly hand it to his wife on a silver platter and convince her it were hers. I race across the street, look furtively up at the lighted window opposite, and sidle into my door, the gestures stoking my anger, making it as hot and unreasonable as if the situation weren’t also of my own making.
I do not turn the lights on in my apartment. I stand in the dark and gaze into Paul and Beatrice’s bright home. My anger persists and I stoke its coals, prod at its embers. I know where the anger comes from. I have been abandoned. I have been given up for another. Is it the first time? Paul has given me up for Beatrice. Oh not without difficulty. There will still be a little of that. But given me up nonetheless. Tried to return my father to me in his place. A little ghostly sleight of hand, so that I am not left with nothing.
Not nothing. But only the dead. My father, whose features I have to dredge up from the memory of an indistinct photograph. My mother who has grown fuller, more real to me since my return to Paris than perhaps she ever was in my childhood. And Sandro too, yes Sandro, whom I abandoned to his death.
I draw the curtain and nurture my dead.
-29-
When I was small my mother and I used to play her own version of geography. She would twirl the globe which stood in a corner of my room as fast as it would go. Then, when it was spinning so fast that the whole world was just a blue blur, I would close my eyes and place a finger somewhere on its cool surface and stop its spinning. Wherever my finger landed was the subject for that game. We would work out how long it took to travel to that elsewhere, whether by plane or boat or train or bicycle or camel. We would talk about the climate at that particular time of year, the food that grew there or the fish that swam, the languages people spoke. When I was a little older, the encyclopaedia would come out and we found out more about kings and queens and wars, raw materials and religions, mixtures of peoples.
Strangely, my finger never landed on Vietnam.
Now I go to the library on the Boulevard Raspail and I read about Vietnam. I find out about the Van Lang dynasty eight centuries before Christ and the Au Lac which replaced it. I find out about Chinese domination and independence struggles as far back as the tenth century, feudal wars between the Macs and the Les which divide the country into north and south. By the time I reach the nineteenth century and the period of French colonialism, a pattern seems to be in place which gathers inevitable momentum with the crushing speed of industrial technologies. The twentieth century adds the ideological card. I read more carefully now, learn that the French were ousted in 1954 after a long and acrid war, that the Geneva conventions which might have unified the country were disputed by the Americans who backed tyrannical and unpopular southern governments. I learn about the violent repression of Buddhists and the growing American presence. Finally I learn about the brutal and terrifying war. The war which shadowed my childhood, the subject of half-understood headlines and raised adult voices, some of them occupants of the spare room. I learn and I wonder how Monsieur Tran acquired his calm face and sweet smile. I learn and wonder about the man who was my father and I wish that I had found a better destination for my adolescent callousness than the hearth in which I burned his letters.
But all this is only the second or third thing I do. The first thing I do on the Monday after Paul’s birthday party is ring Beatrice to thank her and announce that I have all but moved in to the new apartment. I am literally a stone’s throw away. I invite her to come and visit whenever she has a moment. I also tell her that my old telephone number will be transferred here in a few day’s time and that one way or another I will see her on Wednesday to help out with the language teaching. I also ring Madame Duval to tell her I’ve moved and that I’ll be working from home and library for most of the week, will only be in the office to pick up and drop things off. She tells me not to worry, that the Maître will be so much in court over the next few weeks that she hardly expects to see him and she can’t imagine he’ll have much time for book work.
Paul hasn’t told me this. I don’t know whether he forgot in the midst of everything else or whether it was deliberate. By mid-week I suspect the latter. Paul is drawing a clear and rapid demarcation line between us. My role is to get on with work. I have no need to know of his plans or whereabouts and Madame Duval can easily serve as a link. This is as it should be.
I sit in the dark and look out my window and see if I can catch a glimpse of that other life which isn’t mine. With the fragments of irony that are left to me, I examine my situation. This is the first time in my life that I have chosen the wife over the husband, when, needless to say, I have desired the husband. But this is also the first time the husband has given me up so willingly. That, too, is as it should be. But it hurts. I look in the mirror in the morning and see that it hurts. The mirror laughs, tells me that perhaps, by will or accident, I am at last changing. The metamorphosis I so wanted has begun. The better me. Penance. It doesn’t seem to make me very happy. But then I imagine happiness was never part of that particular equation.
I make plans. I am going to be very busy. If I work flat out I can easily get through the material Paul has already outlined by mid-summer. If he needs more, if he needs trips to Spain or Italy, he can find himself another researcher. Meanwhile I need to sift through law faculty courses, register for October, if it isn’t already too late. I check bank balances and determine that if I am scrupulous, if I do some occasional part-timing, I may just about manage
to become the student I never properly was.
I ring Steve in New York, find myself buoyed by his voice, tell him I have got my own place and can’t wait to see him and Chuck. I will get opera tickets, take them out to dinner. He tells me various people have contacted him for my number - Grant Rutherford, amongst them. Can he give it out now? I say yes without hesitation. He tells me, too, that he has recently been down to East Harlem, that the second building of the Hundreds project has opened. It’s all looking good and the team with a couple of new additions is in fine spirits. He pauses significantly, ‘And they’ve named the new building after Sandro,’ he says.
‘That’s brilliant,’ I say. My voice is husky, but there isn’t a tremor in it. Nor have I broken out in cold sweat. I ask Steve to send the team my warmest congratulations, say I will write to them myself.
When I put down the phone, I note that I have indeed changed. I am not afraid. I have stopped running and hiding. I think of Sandro and I do not instantly see a fractured body that I have helped to push out a window. Instead I think how pleased Sandro would be to have a building named for him. I think how proud of him his son will be when he grows up.
It is when I switch on my computer and see Paul’s prose on the screen that I realize how much it is he who has helped me to arrive at this point. Could it only have been a little over week ago that I was sitting in Steve’s apartment cut off from everything but misery and ghosts? And Paul saw me through it, wooed me out of it, made me think and feel differently, gave me hope, opened me out, gave me love. Made me love. Him. And not just then, but over the months. A process of coming back to life. If not to the life I briefly hoped for.
But glancing through this chapter again, I am caught in a time warp. It was written while I was still away in London and Paul’s asides are delicate little probes, attempts to understand me, or persuasive arguments about the power and necessity and sometimes madness of love. Like coded notes to his coy mistress. In the interim, the mistress has all but ceased being coy only to find that the Maître has decided that love is no longer in the offing. I know this is only a partial story, but while I read, it feels like the true story. And the feeling makes me cruel, makes me want to rile. I make little bracketed barbed comments in Paul’s text, date them, quote the last line of Law like Love, ‘like love we seldom keep’; suggest that law is really far more like marriage. Like marriage it comes complete with contracts and code books, engages respect and policing, grants occasional licences for peripheral passions, incurs penalties when broken.
On Wednesday afternoon I go into the office to drop off books and files and pick up new ones. Perhaps if Paul had been there or perhaps if he had even phoned me in the intervening days, I would have erased my caustic comments, but all there is from him is a message through Madame Duval reiterating what she has already told me. So I leave the diskette with Madame Duval.
From the office, I go to the school in the 13th where Beatrice teaches the refugee children. It is a working-class area and the school is a rundown sixties civic building, dusty in its functionalism. Beatrice is already there, writing phrases in a big round hand on a chalky board. She embraces me warmly. Then she primes me, takes me through some of the areas she’s already covered with the children, stressing that what they need is everyday speech - buses, trains, shops, playground, doctor, pharmacy - and whatever points of grammar arise from that. She shows me the neighbouring classroom where I will be stationed for the hour.
By the time we return to the first room, the children have begun to gather. I look at them and realise that I have not prepared myself sufficiently. I have not prepared myself for the impact of these lost haunted eyes, these weary faces. Nor have I considered missing limbs, frail scarred bodies, expressions which are at once pleading and absent or angry. I look to Beatrice for help, but she is already greeting the children, introducing them to me. I force a smile to my lips, shake hands with two mothers who have tagged along for the lesson, one thin and gauntly arrogant, the other small, with a timid expression. Beatrice’s outburst at the dinner party comes back to me.
There are about a dozen children in all and Beatrice designates six of them to come with me. One of the mothers seem to belong to my six and we traipse along to the neighbouring classroom. I begin by telling them about myself, my name, my age, where I come from and then coax them each in turn to do the same, the mother as well. They are all from Bosnia, four of them from Sarajevo. I swallow inadequacy and put on what I imagine is a teacher’s face, tell them we are in a playground, dramatize, give them phrases to repeat, write them on the board, choose a boy who must be about ten and who speaks slightly more fluently than the others to engage in an acted-out dialogue with me. He has a patch over one eye and from the way he bumps into desks and chairs, I sense that he doesn’t see well with the other either. I tell him I’m a naughty girl and he’s a good boy and I’m going to break in on his game. We begin. It goes something like this.
‘Salut.’
‘Salut.’
‘What are you playing?
‘Ball’
‘Can I play too?’
‘Sure. Catch.’
‘Ouch. That was too hard.’
‘No it wasn’t.’
‘Yes, it was. I’m going to tell teacher.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am. Try and stop me.’
Suddenly the boy makes a rat-tat-tat-tat noise through his teeth and aims a pretend machine gun at me. The gaunt woman, his mother, shouts out something I don’t understand from the back. One of the smaller girls starts to cry. I realise my teaching methods leave a lot to be desired. I pat the little girl’s head, thank my dialogue partner and tell him that was wonderful, except for the machine gun. I start again on the less dangerous business of repetition.
At the end of the lesson mother and son come over to me. She is obviously lecturing him and at the end of her lecture, he says ‘Sorry Miss’ to me. In English.
‘You speak English?’ I reply in kind.
‘A little,’ he nods.
‘You too,’ the mother bursts in. ‘I am sorry for Jasha. He has lost his manners.’
I grin at them both. ‘Mine weren’t too good either.’
The woman suddenly smiles, shakes my hand. ‘Thank you. Until next week.’
I walk with them towards Beatrice’s classroom, ask the woman if she too is taking French classes. She tells me the Alliance Française is too expensive and she is teaching herself out of a book. She laughs with a hint of bitterness. ‘And they have put us in a house which is like all of Bosnia. So there is no one to practise with. But here we manage to live together, Muslims, Serbs, Croats. No problem.’ She throws her hands up in the air. ‘There is a story, no!’
‘There is a story,’ I repeat.
She looks at me curiously, ‘You are a teacher?’
I shake my head, ‘Just helping out. And you?’
‘I was a, how do you say, dentist assistant. Now I am a nothing.’ She laughs harshly. ‘No, not right. I am sometimes a cleaner. Do you need a cleaner? I am a good cleaner.’
‘Perhaps,’ I murmur uncomfortably, then face her. ‘Look, would you like me to help you with your French. We could do an hour after the children’s class. Or you could come to me. With Jasha.’
I cannot read the expression on her face. After a moment she says, ‘You are not afraid we will dirty you with our miseries?’
I shake my head, feel like telling her that I’m already rather dirty as it is. ‘Here,’ I jot down my name and phone number for her. ‘Just ring me and we can arrange it.’
She takes the paper and studies it. ‘You know I am a Bosnian Serb,’ she says with a stiff defiance, then holds the paper out as if she expects me to take it back.
‘And what is your name? I didn’t catch it.’
She is still staring at me. ‘Vesna Dimic.’ She suddenly smiles, looks young, pretty. ‘I will phone you.’ She ruffles her son’s hair. ‘And Jasha, he is not so bad. Just a li
ttle confused.’ She gestures towards her eyes, grimaces. ‘It would be better if he hadn’t seen before. Not now, when he needs to. Say au revoir and merci, Jasha.’
‘Distressing, isn’t it?’ Beatrice says to me as we make our way home.
I nod.
‘Are you going to come back?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She puts her arm through mine. ‘I’m glad.’
‘But now you must come up and visit my new place.’
‘For a cup of coffee. I need it. By the way has Patrick phoned you?’
‘Twice.’ I grimace.
‘I knew he would,’ she says triumphantly. ‘And you’re going to go out with him?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘He’s a very good journalist you know.’
It’s as if she’s trying to sell him to me and I wonder for a moment whether Beatrice has put two and two together about Paul and London and me.
‘And you’ll tell me all about it, won’t you? If you … if you go to bed with him?’ She blurts it all out in a rush and flushes. I have the odd sense that the words are new to her lips, as if she were a child experimenting with swearing.
We have turned into our street and I let her question pass, stop instead in front of the house to punch out the door code.
‘But you really are just opposite, Maria. That’s wonderful. And it’s beautiful,’ she says as I lead her into the flat. ‘Just perfect.’ She smooths the sofa with her hand, touches the wood of the table, sniffs flowers, opens the door to the bedroom. ‘Exactly what I would want if I lived alone.’ She sighs a little as she sinks into a chair.
‘Lucky accident isn’t it.’
‘You’re always lucky. You bring me luck too.’ She gives me her beatific smile and I hide my face, busy myself with making coffee. ‘One day I’ll tell you all about it,’ she says dreamily.
A Good Woman Page 30