The Girl at the Lion D'Or

by Sebastian Faulks

  She pictured her arrival in Paris. It would be crucial to find work, since she had only enough money to last for three or four days. If Delphine still worked in the old café near the Gare Montparnasse then perhaps she would be able to help.

  Anne still had no doubt that somehow she would find either the resilience or the release from feeling and pain that would be necessary for her to endure what was going through her mind. After all, she had had to confront the loss of everything she most valued once before, and in a far more hurtful way than this. There was no reason why this time she should not succeed again. If the pain became intolerable then presumably her body would allow her to lose consciousness.

  She began to cry. There was no one else in the carriage to see the tears that dripped on to the front of her dress or to hear the sobbing that soon accompanied them. After a time she lay down on the floor of the compartment, the better to clasp herself in comfort. Then all thoughts of how she might survive were lost, because she had no time for anything other than trying to breathe. The sounds of her sobbing eventually frightened her, so she hoisted herself back on to the seat. Now perhaps time would start to help, she thought. But time only brought the train juddering exactly on schedule into the Gare Montparnasse: the required number of hours and minutes had passed. Anne took her cases from the rack and went out into the street. She walked to the house in which she had once had a room, and left the heavy cases in the hall.

  Free from their weight at last, she began to walk round the streets, not knowing where she went. After an hour or so she found a small hotel in the Pigalle district run by a man with a yellowish skin and a thin moustache. He showed her a room with greasy curtains and a narrow bed for which he asked what seemed to her an appalling price. Too tired to argue, she paid it and lay down dazed on the bed.

  That night she had no dreams at all, though she was troubled by a series of waking images. The landscape of her youth took on a greater significance than it can really have had; and against it appeared half-remembered buildings, places of authority and fear that seem to link and merge. Dead people lived, and there was a chance of having her life over again, making this time different choices; there was an odd certainty that just out of reach existed a way of explaining all these inconsistencies – the ache of love gone and opportunities missed, the contradictory landscapes and disconnected places.

  The next morning Anne thought for the first time that she knew where this place was to be found.

  First she went to seek Delphine, but the café proprietor said she had vanished some weeks ago leaving no address. Anne nodded and stepped out again into the street, knowing that now she was quite alone.

  For three days she walked round Paris, sleeping two nights in a park after her money had run out. In every bar she saw a telephone and she thought of the instrument standing on the hall table in the Manor. Hartmann had shouted at her to go away; he wouldn’t want to hear from her now.

  He had never told her the address of his flat, but she knew it was in the seventh arrondissement near where the rue de Sèvres met the rue de Babylone. She walked towards it from the river.

  Now she was tired and her body was weak through lack of food. When defeat first creeps into the mind it is not at all unwelcome. There is a strange pleasure in giving up, and although Anne instinctively resisted it she was aware of its sweetness, just as a runner is not really ashamed but pleased when he hangs his head and rests.

  She trailed her hand along the sides of the big grey building, marvelling at their inconsequence. This she scarcely minded; but more difficult for her to bear was the fact that she could see in human beings nothing more than she saw in the physical world. There was no reason and no trust in them. If houses were wild atoms tamed by man, then people themselves were just unbiddable, skin and flesh and hair-gatherings of random matter. And yet there had once seemed a reason and a meaning, when she had played with her father in the fields, and once again when she had stood on the floor of the granary in Merlaut looking into Hartmann’s wise and comforting eyes.

  In the rue de Babylone she gazed up at a large grey block with wrought iron balconies and wondered if that was where he had lived, if it was there within the mirrored walls that the suppers after the opera had been taken with laughing and drinking. She looked away back to the pavement and realised that she no longer cared.

  As she walked slowly down the street, her trailing hand encountered iron railings and she stopped to peer through them. On the other side was a large, well-ordered garden. What held her attention was not its size or splendour or the neatness of the tended paths, but a solitary apple tree. Something low in her memory was stirred by it. She thought of the tree at the foot of the garden at Merlaut. She wanted to touch its bark and lie beneath its branches; there again she might find peace. She climbed the gate in a side street, feverish with fatigue and desperation. She tore her dress and the skin on her hands, but noticed nothing in her desire to be by the tree. The sound of her landing on the gravel path provoked a distant barking which was abruptly silenced. The street behind her was empty.

  She went silently over the grass, pausing only when she stumbled on a pair of shears and a sturdy garden knife the careless gardener must have left out in the twilight. She slipped the knife into the pocket of her dress and lay down on the cool grass beneath the apple tree.

  Courage, she heard that gruff and slightly tipsy voice telling her yet again; it is the only thing that counts. But what if courage does no good? What, she thought, if my life will never emerge by one final act of bravery on to a new and brighter course? What if all our lives are just a circle where at a certain point you cross an unseen trip-wire that sets spinning the same process again? One act of will, of self-restraint might break the circuit, but neither her father nor her mother had shown it.

  Anne felt in her pocket for the knife. Yes, it did take courage. The blade was lifted. Her father’s hand was holding it – just flesh and hair and veins and sinew in their determined course – but driven by evil into a blow repeated. Before she could say ‘forgive’, or ‘me’ or ‘him’, the knife descended; but this time it was her hand that held it, plunging it deep and viciously into the fleshy moss at the root of the tree.

  She gasped at what she had done. It was not what she had intended. She began to mutter rapid and distracted prayers, then stopped on hearing her voice in the quietness of the garden. She stood up and rubbed the grass and twigs from her skirt. She was terrified by what she had done, or failed to do. To be alive was now truly to be alone.

  She heard a dog barking from nearer the house, and this time it was not silenced. There was the sound of footsteps and a man’s cry. Anne, startled from her reverie, flew across the grass towards the tall iron gates to tear and claw her way up them. A male voice shouted at her to stop and the sound of running footsteps came closer. In her panic and lightheadedness she recognised no obstacle to freedom: as the security guard arrived at the gate to resume the position he should never have left, she was already dropping on to the other side. He reached through the bars of the gate and grabbed her arm, but she pulled herself away. As she ran down the street she heard him fumbling with the keys. The pavement rang with the sound of her slapping feet and she felt a strength fill her limbs as if she could have run across the whole of Paris, all the way south to the Cantal, over the mountains and down into Spain.

  After a time she rested in a backstreet in the Latin quarter. There were enough unusual-looking people for the sight of one breathless and dishevelled girl to pass without comment. Two or three men even glanced at her admiringly as she panted in the doorway of a furniture shop. There was music coming from a café a few doors down, and she went to peer in through the window. A fat, friendly-looking man with a beard cleared a space on the steaming pane with his hand and gestured her in. She shook her head and smiled, but he came out and took her arm firmly. He bought her some soup and an omelette and gave her two glasses of wine from the bottle on his table. He asked if she had run away f
rom home. She shook her head, her mouth too full to allow her to speak. He watched her as she ate and when he found he could prise no information from her began to tell her instead about a scheme he had for a new kind of motor car.

  Anne nodded and smiled at his story. When she had finished eating, the man, who introduced himself as Georges, gave her some money so she could take a taxi to the house near the Gare Montparnasse where she had left her suitcases. She told him she had friends there; he looked at her sceptically, but pressed more coins into her hand. He made her promise to meet him in the same café the following evening. Anne thanked him and shook his hand.

  When the taxi had dropped her off she found she still had a little money left. She showed it to the landlady of the house who took her upstairs to a box-room which, she said, was all the money would buy. Anne unpacked some clothes and stole along to the bathroom. When she had scrubbed the stains from around the rim she found to her amazement that the water was hot. Carefully bolting the door, she undressed and sank into the water. Clouds of grime floated from her legs with puffs of dried blood where she had scraped them on the railings.

  Back in the bedroom she found that she was crying, tears that were not squeezed or choked from her but which ran in a hot profusion. In bed she hugged the bolster to herself and for the first time since she had been in Paris slept long and without dreaming.

  The next day she looked in the newspapers and the shop windows for work. Twice she offered herself as a shop assistant only to find the position had already been taken. Vacancies were few, and the wages on offer even smaller than those she had been paid at the Lion d’Or.

  Anne, however, didn’t feel discouraged. She walked all morning, and although she had little idea of where she was going, she felt a lightness and vigour in her movements. Her wanderings eventually brought her to the Avenue Foch which she remembered was spoken of in hushed tones by Parisians. The people who lived there were so rich they didn’t have to work; they drove to the seaside at weekends and had parties every evening. Feeling she might be arrested even for being there, Anne hurried across into the Avenue de la Grande Armée, a broad thoroughfare which began with a pompous flourish at the Arc de Triomphe but whose massive grey houses acquired an air of the suburban as the road trailed down towards Neuilly.

  When she had walked a little way she saw a street called the rue des Acacias. At first she was angry that even in Paris there seemed to be no escape from the sadness of Janvilliers; but then she smiled as she walked slowly down it, past the tranquil open food shops with their displays of vegetables and shellfish, the stationers and huddled cafés. In the window of one she saw a sign advertising vacancies for bar staff. It was not what she wanted to do, but there could certainly be no question about her suitability or experience. Before she committed herself, she decided to walk once more up and down the narrow sloping street.

  Through one of the ground-floor windows she saw a telephone, and the thought of the instrument that waited silently on the table in the hall at the Manor. She imagined Christine answering it. Then she imagined Hartmann doing so. It wasn’t difficult to resist the temptation.

  The unexpected sensation of being alive lent her a precarious self-confidence. She turned over her hand to feel the rain that was drifting in from the wide spaces of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. It didn’t trouble her; and in the breeze that filtered down the street, blowing the rain beneath the awnings, causing the shoppers to hurry for the doorways, there was a lightness that could be taken for a blessing. She turned her face to it, the pale cheeks with their handful of freckles, the long-lashed eyes, and felt on her skin the touch of the world in its renewed strangeness.

  She found herself once more at the door of the café that was advertising vacancies. Two small lines of determination ran diagonally from the corners of her mouth as she pushed at the door. A couple who were sitting at the window looked up without interest.

  A wireless was playing loudly. Behind the bar a bald man wearing glasses sat with a proprietorial air, reading a newspaper.

  Anne went and stood in front of him, playing with the handle of her bag.

  The man continued reading. She coughed and shifted from foot to foot. At last he put down his paper and peeled the glasses from his nose.

  He looked her up and down, appraising her from the dusty shoes to the expression of guarded hope in her eyes. ‘Can I help?’ he said.