Paris

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “He really would.”

  Frank laughed.

  “Tell them the Pamplona story, Hadley,” he said, with a sideways glance at his mentor.

  “Last year,” said Hadley, “when I’m pregnant with Jack, I am told that I must watch a bullfight in Pamplona because the sensation of it will be good for my unborn child. You know. Toughen him up before he’s even born.” She looked at Hemingway fondly. “I am married to a crazy man.”

  Soon after four o’clock, Marie and Claire left their new friends and returned to their apartment. Frank was going to join Claire at her uncle’s in the evening. On their way back, Marie asked Claire what she thought of the day so far.

  “I love Shakespeare and Company.”

  “And the Hemingways?”

  “They seem very much in love. He means to be a figure in the world.”

  “I agree. A showman,” said Marie.

  “They say his short stories are really fine, though.”

  “And Frank Hadley?” She made it sound casual.

  “Were you interested in his father?”

  Marie laughed.

  “He was Marc’s friend, rather than mine. Your father and I were already courting at that time. I think the son’s a bit of a flirt. Not to be trusted.”

  “He seems serious about his writing. He denies it, but I think he is.”

  “That may be. Avoid him if he has any talent.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all artists are monsters.”

  “Tell me about Monsieur de Cygne. Is he an old flame?”

  “No. His father and your grandfather were friends. He was always away with his regiment. But he was nice, the few times we did see him.”

  “You’re both free now. You could be a vicomtesse.”

  “Better than that, chérie. I can be seen at the opera with him. It’s quite respectable, and chic.”

  “Is that so good for you?”

  “You’re missing the point, my child. It’s good for the store.”

  She enjoyed the evening. It was the very end of the ballet season, after which the Opéra would close until September. The opulence of Garnier’s opera house, the magnificent, gold Corinthian columns, the sumptuous decoration, the gilded balconies and tiers, and the rich, velvety red seats recalled the Belle Époque of her youth so strongly that she gave a light laugh as they sat down.

  Roland gave her a quizzical look.

  “It’s so preposterous,” she said happily.

  “You find it vulgar?”

  “Can an overstuffed cushion be vulgar? It’s a kind of heaven, like a huge gâteau.”

  He chuckled.

  “I can imagine my dear father looking down from the balcony with the same ironic pleasure you feel.”

  “And my father too. They smoked the same cigars, you know.”

  “We share similar memories.”

  “Mine are more bourgeois, Monsieur de Cygne.” She smiled. “Complementary, perhaps.”

  “That’s it exactly,” he said with a nod.

  During the interval, they sat and talked. She asked him about his son.

  “He’s at the same lycée that I went to,” he told her, “and I don’t know if I did the right thing or not. It was always very conservative, and it still is. I wonder if I should have sent him to a place where their ideas are more modern. On the other hand, I feel I can help him better because I understand the school.”

  “Is he happy?”

  “He says he is.”

  “I think you did right. If you felt out of sympathy with the school, uncomfortable with the teachers, then you’d feel off-balance yourself. Children don’t have to agree with their parents, but they like it when their parents are comfortable with themselves, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m so glad you say that.”

  She could see that he said it with some emotion. Yes, she thought, you’re a good man.

  She wanted to go straight home after the performance, but when he asked if she might care to go to the opera when the new season began, she smiled and told him: “After such a delightful evening at the ballet, monsieur, I cannot imagine why I should not want to go to the opera with you.”

  “I go down to my estate in a couple of days,” he said, “but you may be sure, madame, that I shall look forward to taking you to the opera as soon as I return in September.”

  The apartment was quiet when she returned. Claire was still not back. After she had prepared for bed, Marie told her lady’s maid that she and the other servants should go to sleep and that she’d let her daughter in herself.

  She was looking forward to hearing about the Ballets Russes from Claire. Diaghilev and his company had decided to stage Le Train bleu for the Olympics, and it had opened just four weeks ago at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysèes, which lay below the great avenue, near the river. All Paris knew about the huge front cloth that Picasso had painted for it, of two strangely ungainly women running on a beach.

  Claire could be relied upon to give a vivid description of the performance.

  An hour passed. Marie supposed that her brother had either taken the young people out to a restaurant, or was giving them a drink at his apartment. She decided to telephone him.

  When he picked up the receiver, he sounded half asleep.

  “I was looking for Claire,” she said.

  “Oh. They went for a drink with friends. Americans.”

  “Where?”

  “How do I know?”

  “You let Claire go out with a young man, to God knows where, in the middle of the night?”

  “Look, Marie … She’s a young woman now.”

  “She’s a respectable young woman. Do you remember what they are like?” she shouted down the line. “But I was forgetting,” she added bitterly, “you never knew any respectable girls in the first place.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Look after her. Return her to me. Not let her go off with a young man in the middle of the night. You have no sense of responsibility,” she cried in exasperation. “You never had.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do now, anyway.” He sounded guilty, but bored as well, which only infuriated her more.

  She hung up.

  And then she waited. After a while, she opened the window of the salon, which gave out onto a small balcony where she could see up and down the street. Paris was silent. Now and then someone appeared in the lamplight, but it seemed that the city had gone to sleep.

  Were they in a bar or nightclub? The night was warm. Were they walking along the Seine, or out on one of the bridges? Was young Frank’s arm around Claire? Was he kissing her? Or worse, had they gone back to his lodgings? Would he do such a thing? Of course he would. He was a young man.

  She wanted to run into the street and save her daughter. And perhaps she might have gone out, if she had any idea where they might be.

  She pictured Frank Hadley, his tall frame and unruly mane of hair, so exactly like his father. She imagined his eyes in the darkness.

  And then, despite herself, she was assailed by a terrible sensation. It caught her by surprise and took hold over her before she even knew it was happening.

  She wanted Frank Hadley.

  Was it young Frank, or his father? She could hardly say. The other evening at her brother’s it had seemed that the Frank she knew had suddenly walked in from the past. Now it felt as if her old self had reappeared, as if the layers that made up her personality had been peeled back to the girl she’d been a quarter century ago, who had now emerged, hardly changed from what she had been before.

  The shock she had felt when she saw Frank had now turned into something else. A terrible longing.

  Desire. Jealousy. She wanted him for herself.

  Could one be two people at the same time? It seemed she could. As a mother, she wanted to protect her daughter from Frank Hadley. But when she thought of them together, she wasn’t a mother anymore. She was a wom
an whose rival is trying to steal her lover. She felt ready, almost, to physically attack her. But first, she had to know.

  Was Claire her rival? And how far had it gone?

  She was sitting on the sofa in this confused state when she heard a sound at the door. She moved quickly to the hall. The front door opened. It was Claire.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.” She looked pale. “I drank too much.”

  “It’s so late. I was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine.” Claire closed the door.

  “You came home alone?”

  “No. They brought me to the door.”

  “They?”

  “Frank and his friends.”

  Was she telling the truth? Marie wanted to run back to the balcony to see if they were down in the street, but didn’t feel she could.

  “So long as you’re all right,” she said.

  But the next day she warned her daughter that she must be more careful with her reputation and that her uncle shouldn’t have let her wander off with Frank as she had. She was quite relieved when Claire made no objection.

  The month of August was quiet for the Joséphine store. Most Parisians were out of town, though foreign visitors to the city came in. The whole Blanchard family based itself at the house at Fontainebleau, and Claire and her mother took turns going into Paris for a day and a night each week to keep an eye on things.

  Jules Blanchard and his wife had retired into one of the pavilions beside the courtyard now, leaving the main body of the house for the family. Gérard’s widow and her children were there, as well as Marc, Marie and Claire, but there was still room for guests, and so there were usually a dozen people sitting out on the broad balcony looking over the lawn on any August afternoon.

  Claire was always happy to be at Fontainebleau. She loved her grandparents. Her grandmother had become a little confused lately, but old Jules, though somewhat forgetful, still liked to sit out on the veranda and chat, and she would ask him questions about the days of his youth, and he would describe the old people he could remember who had lived through the French Revolution and the age of Napoléon.

  During those long, easy summer days there was only one shadow over her life. A cloud of uncertainty. Did Frank Hadley have any interest in her?

  Perhaps it was because her parents had come from different countries that she was hard to please. As a girl being brought up in London, she liked the English boys she knew, but always felt that there was something lacking. It wasn’t only that they didn’t speak French. She was used to seeing things through her mother’s French eyes as well as her father’s. And indeed, her father had lived in Paris so long that, English though he was, he also saw the world in larger terms than most of his neighbors. True, there were English people—many of them—who had served the British Empire in far corners of the world, and whose imaginations had large horizons. But most of them still saw that larger world in imperial terms, secure in the knowledge that, at the end of the day, British was best. English people who had lived on the continent of Europe were a much rarer breed.

  Similarly, when she returned to France with her mother, she found Frenchmen interesting, and seductive—yet even while she was catching up with the cultural excitement of France, the Frenchmen she met began to seem a little less fascinating. They too, she realized, were part of a crowd—a different crowd, but still a crowd.

  And almost without realizing it, she began to wish that she could find a different sort of man. A free spirit. A man for whom life was an open-ended adventure. He might be English, he might be French, he might come from any nationality. An explorer perhaps, or a writer, or maybe a diplomat … She really didn’t know.

  And where did one find such a man? It had taken her a little while to discover that there was a community in Paris to which people of that sort were drawn.

  The Americans.

  Why was that? She soon came to realize that there were many reasons. Freedom was in their blood. It was their birthright. But almost to a man, these expatriates felt that the mighty engine of America was still too young, too raw to have developed the rich culture they were looking for. Whereas Europe had over two thousand years of culture, from Greek temple to English country house, or Parisian nightclub, all there for the taking. The Americans came, not arrogant, but eager to learn. They meant to have it all.

  And so it was that Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach from America, and Ford Madox Ford the Englishman, and the Spaniard Picasso, and Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, and French writers like Cocteau, and young Ernest Hemingway could all find each other in the bookshops and bars and theaters of Paris on any day of the week—and did.

  So when her uncle Marc asked her casually one day what she thought of the Americans in Paris, she answered: “I wouldn’t want to marry Hemingway, but I like his adventurous spirit.”

  “Perhaps you could find yourself a younger version and share your adventures. Though you may have to work to get him the way you want him.”

  “That sounds like a challenge.”

  “Don’t you want a challenge?”

  Perhaps she did.

  So what did she have to do to get Frank Hadley Jr. to notice her?

  He was friendly. He was easy to talk to. That evening after the Ballets Russes, they’d gone back across the river with her uncle Marc, and then walked down the long boulevard Raspail into Montparnasse where they’d met his friends, and she’d felt so easy in his company. He’d seemed to enjoy her company too. He’d laughed at her jokes. When they walked her home, there had been a party of six of them, walking along empty streets, and they’d all linked arms. Frank had been next to her, so that she’d felt his tall, warm body against hers, and they’d all kissed each other on both cheeks, in the usual French manner, before she went into the building where she lived. But she hadn’t been able to tell whether he was interested in her or not.

  She’d seen him once again, at the very end of July. She’d agreed to meet him and the Hemingways early one evening at the big Dôme Café bar, where all the artists and writers gathered. “Lenin used to come here too, when he was living in Paris,” she informed him. “Uncle Marc told me.” It had been very pleasant. Hadley Hemingway had informed them proudly that Ernest had written maybe a dozen stories already that year, and then Hemingway had turned to his wife and asked if she’d seen any of Frank’s writing. Frank frowned, and she said, No, she hadn’t.

  “You should show her your stuff,” said Hemingway to Frank. “She’d be a good judge.” But Frank just looked awkward and said it wasn’t good enough yet, and probably never would be.

  “You need to stay in Paris for a good while,” said Hadley. “We think it suits you.”

  “That’s right,” said Hemingway.

  “Don’t go disappearing on us, like Gil,” said Hadley.

  “Who’s Gil?” asked Claire.

  “Oh, he was a nice young American that we all thought had promise,” said Hadley. “And then suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. Disappeared without a word.”

  “I won’t do that,” said Frank.

  After that, he’d walked her back, and he’d talked about his home in America, and asked her all kinds of questions about Joséphine and the plans for the store. He seemed quite interested in what her mother did there as well. In fact, he seemed rather fascinated by her mother. Then he told her that he was going to spend part of August in Brittany. So she hadn’t expected to see him again until September.

  It was the third week of August when Marc, after an absence of a few days in Paris, returned not alone, but with Frank. “I’d just looked in at the Dôme to meet a man, and there he was. I told him to come down to Fontainebleau with me.”

  Since the house was almost full, Marie told Claire that she’d better let Frank have her room.

  “There’s the little boudoir beside my room,” she told her daughter. “We can put a bed in there for you.”

  Frank seemed a little embarrassed that he might
be inconveniencing everybody, especially Claire; but Marie assured him that it was a family house and everyone was used to making room for friends.

  And indeed, Marc soon made Frank into a family project.

  “This is a wonderful opportunity for you,” he declared. “Here you are in the middle of a French family, and we shall teach you how to be French.” He smiled. “An even better Frenchman than your father was.”

  Every morning, Claire was to spend an hour teaching him to speak French. Then he’d spend another hour with Marie. She might take him to the kitchen and show him how all kinds of dishes were made. Or she might take him to the market to shop. She simply involved him in whatever activity she was employed upon at the time, and gave him a running commentary. As for Marc, he would take Frank and anyone else who wanted to come to the old château, or across to the village of Barbizon, or show him books in the small library and talk of French history and culture. In ten days of this regime, Frank learned an astonishing amount.

  One lunchtime, Frank confessed that he had still not fully understood how Paris was organized geographically. And here everyone had something to tell him.

  “First,” Marc explained, “you must understand how Paris has grown from a modest Roman town to a medieval city.” And he told him how the city had expanded, like a growing egg, as he put it, enclosed by a series of walls taking in further suburbs each time.

  “So we have, for instance, the ancient Île de la Cité, and the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève where the university is, which was once a Roman forum. Across the river you have the Temple area, once a suburb where the Templars lived, and near it the Marais, so called because it was once a marsh. Most of the other quarters keep the names either of former villages or churches. And each has its own character—though many smaller quarters practically disappeared when Baron Haussmann knocked them down in the last century.”

  “But what about the arrondissements?” Frank asked. “That’s where I get confused. They have numbers, but there seem to be two sets. And they also seem to have their own reputations, don’t they?”