The Steppes of Paris (6 page)

Standing in his future living-room, he abandoned them. For everything about the flat delighted him: it consisted of three partially inter-connecting rooms, with double doors between them, like a jigsaw puzzle or some elementary set of children’s cubes. He walked through them, enjoying the clever satisfactory way the living-room led into the elbow-shaped kitchen, and from the further bedroom you could look back at the living-room windows. The flat was on the ground floor; overshadowed but not gloomy, it took up the right-hand side and half the back of a small, dingy courtyard and the left-hand side was occupied by someone whose name on the letter-box was Dupont. Edward found it all thoroughly cheery and authentic and congenial. He grinned at the lingering curry smells in his kitchen and the burnt-out joss sticks by the front door and felt positively grateful to the American “follower of Hinduism” for having had himself evicted at such a timely juncture. A straight choice between this flat and the marble pudding was no choice at all.

When he rang the front door bell of Mademoiselle Iskarov’s flat to return the keys and to tell her, to his surprise, that he would like to rent the flat, there was at first no answer. He rang the bell again and waited for a long time. Maybe in her scatty way she had gone out and forgotten about him? Or maybe she was bombed out of her mind with the French equivalent of Night Nurse? He began to scribble a message on a sheet of his pocket notepad. On the other side of the door, there was an undeniable rustle. Remembering the possibly crazed old grandmother, he shouted, “It’s me, Edward Wainwright. About the flat.”

Mademoiselle Iskarov’s voice answered him. “You can’t come in.”

‘What now?’ thought Edward. And what on earth was going on inside? Mademoiselle Iskarov was in no fit state to have got herself into any compromising situation. Maybe the aged grandmother had run amok?

He shouted, “I’ve brought the keys back.”

“Put them in the letter-box downstairs,” Mademoiselle Iskarov replied in a muffled voice.

“But I have to talk to you,” Edward protested. “I want to rent the flat. We need to discuss arrangements and things.”

“Good. I’m very pleased you’re going to take it,” came Mademoiselle Iskarov’s voice. “But I’m afraid I can’t let you in. We’ll discuss it all on the phone.”

“Why can’t you let me in?” Edward exploded. “It’ll take three minutes.”

There was a very long pause, such a long pause that he wondered if he hadn’t blown it. Goodbye, rue Surcouf.

“I realise you’re not feeling well,” he added placatingly. “But, really, it won’t take any time. I’d just like to have it all settled before I go back to the office.”

Behind him, he was aware of inquisitive footsteps coming to the door of the flat opposite.

Lowering his voice, he said, “Listen, I don’t want to be a pain. So long as it’s definite I can have the flat.” And lastly, a bit guiltily, he asked, “Nothing’s the matter, is it? You are OK?”

Inside, there was a noise which was either a cough or a laugh. “I can’t let you see me in this condition,” Mademoiselle Iskarov answered. “It is too disgraceful.”

Edward had fairly serious doubts as he walked away down the Avenue Duquesne about whether he ought to get any further involved with this family. Considering he had seen Mademoiselle Iskarov in her full-blown “disgraceful condition” only an hour beforehand, he found her sudden onset of vanity largely comic but also faintly disconcerting.

A month after his arrival in Paris, Edward moved into the rue Surcouf. He didn’t have much to move; he prided himself on travelling light. A taxi ride liberated him from the lace curtains and the dribbling shower and he found himself and his two suitcases inside his own front door, with an angular void to fill.

He did have a low patch immediately after moving, but it was short-lived. The door-slamming certainty of being settled in Paris, which the flat in the rue Surcouf represented, provoked another sad little flurry of comparison with all the other places where he might have been. The Duponts’ macaw, which warbled advertising jingles from their window-sill –
“Orangina
–
à
la
PULPE
d’orange”
and again and again
“Felix
Potin
–
on
y
revient”
–
caricatured the narrow domestic horizons he feared he was now confined to. He had never had any time for domesticity. He hurried through the necessary procedures to take over the flat and the uninteresting but essential household purchases. Much as he liked the flat, he didn’t put up any pictures or do anything to improve the decoration, beyond taking down the last of the American’s unnerving posters. That would have been too frank an admission of long-term residence. He concentrated on ignoring the things which triggered the worst of his wanderlust: the slanting sun stripes
falling through the shutters first thing in the morning, which should have been from a real sun, the Portuguese
concierge’s
wife singing a throaty folk melody as she washed the flagstones of the courtyard. He viewed this as a reverse Pavlovian-dog training and he was quick to learn. Relatively fast, he reverted to resignation, for the primary obstacle which had stood in the way of his embarking on Paris life was gone. Without any more flat hunting, he was free to make of the city whatever he could.

Neither Henry nor Mrs Hirshfeld made any further reference to the role they had played in helping him find his home. They had him to dinner a second time about a week after he moved in and, although he arrived thanking Mrs Hirshfeld profusely for her thoughtfulness, she did not take him up on it.

He had not expected to be left quite so much to his own devices. Of course, he didn’t want to be overseen either. But Henry’s completely
laissez-faire
managerial style left him pretty much on his own. Henry was kept busy with his weekly
Letter
from
Paris
and it was obvious that any really big stories which broke Henry would cover. In the first few weeks, Henry took Edward along with him to meet the best press officers, the most useful sources. But once the introductions were over, Edward didn’t really have that much to do. He felt it would show a lack of initiative to speak about this to Henry. All he had to do, Henry would surely think, was go out there and find the stories. But Edward wasn’t yet well enough acquainted with Paris to know where to find her weak spots. He went to press conferences and dealt with urgent calls for information from the paper’s other bureaux. He tried not to cross swords with eccentric old Monsieur Marchais, about whom Henry had warned him. When Monsieur Marchais came in for his querulous couple of hours compiling what he called his
“Rubrique
Culturelle”,
Edward would more often than not invent an errand and wander out. It seemed to him more than once that he was wasting his time here on the work front too. He hadn’t expected the cinema drama of shrilling phones, chattering telexes, sweat-glistening men rushing in with shouted news of world-shattering events. But he hadn’t, frankly, expected such slow motion either.
He observed Henry, contentedly going about his worthwhile business of telling it how it was, setting the record straight, and after a while it struck Edward that, for all his apparent nonchalance, Henry was observing him too. The neglect, the casual address was deliberate; Henry was waiting to see what Edward could generate for himself. Edward had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor, one Howard Knapman now at the Wellington bureau, who seemed to have spent his idle hours here elaborating a multi-coloured index card system of Paris contacts. He wanted to show Henry that he understood and was worthy of the blind eye that was being turned to him. But, first of all, in order to land the scoop which would cause Henry to congratulate him, he had to get his bearings. And Henry seemed prepared for him to spend as long as it took to get them.

He had more leisure time than he had anticipated. In London, he would have filled it, no problem, drinking with his friends and he would have been temporarily happy doing that. But here he didn’t have any friends. Moreover, he had not yet seen a way of ever acquiring any. If one thing was clear to him about Paris, it was the city’s mollusc-like nature; its hard and shiny lips clamped shut on its salty inner workings, it excluded disdainfully all foreign bodies. The house in the rue Surcouf illustrated this principle in microcosm. Edward liked the house, he continued to like it. He came home to it along the rue Saint Dominique sometimes repeating “Surcouf, Surcouf” to himself like the yapping of a little dog. But inside the house he was totally ignored. After nearly a fortnight, he had still not spoken to any of the other residents, apart from the
concierge,
whose French was so rudimentary it was hard to consider what they had a conversation. He had seen Monsieur and Madame Dupont going in and out, a wizened pair with sour, mistrustful, elderly faces. Once he had seen Monsieur Dupont on a sunny Sunday morning cruelly taunting the macaw by offering it scraps of food held just beyond the reach of its beak. The residents of the other flats he had barely seen. There was a middle-aged spinster lady living above him, who came down smartly to complain the day he celebrated the arrival of his first delayed month’s salary by buying a stereo cassette player and renting a TV. She made
almost no noise at all, although once or twice Edward heard her little pop-eyed dog giving shrill, strangulated barks overhead. Otherwise, the house was unusually quiet. It was enough of an event to hear voices in the courtyard for Edward to slip sheepishly over to a window and snoop outside. Sometimes it was just the macaw giving a particularly life-like eulogy to
“Rasoirs
Bic”.
Sometimes it was Monsieur or Madame Dupont exchanging parsimonious civilities with the
concierge.
Once, it was an itinerant knife-grinder braying out an offer to sharpen anyone’s knives. Edward spent a good many evenings just sitting in the atmospherically lit living-room, savouring the freedom of his flat and speculating with nothing like urgency how he was going to fill future evenings.

To begin with, it was all harmlessly entertaining. He wrote some biting satirical cards about his new lifestyle to his friends. He even, although he would have been reluctant to admit it, derived a certain desultory amusement from establishing his neighbourhood routines: where he bought his paper, where he bought his milk, the identical exchanges he had in the next-door bakery every time he bought a
baguette.
He found himself a launderette, a dry cleaner which did ironing. He invented nicknames. But he knew this game couldn’t last; it was only a matter of time until he exhausted the entertainment value of the here and now. Ultimately, it was far too cramping and frustrating to envisage for long.

Next, he specialised in drunken walks. Late at night, after finishing a bottle of cheap Nicolas wine, he would set off across the empty stretches of the grander seventh
arrondissement
and watch what alcohol and street lighting could do for the Eiffel Tower and the Esplanade des Invalides and the Ecole Militaire. Brilliant, facile insights would come to him as he walked the deserted avenues, venting his frustrations on the farcical, spotlit monuments. Walking around London at night, he would have been able to look in at the living-room windows of two-storey terrace houses and snigger at rubber plants and enamelled ducks in flight. Here, he walked between immense shuttered apartment blocks. The metal shutters were clamped fast over whatever amusing scenes went on behind them. Only sometimes on the top floors were the shutters left open and Edward could see single yellow squares of light high up
above the trees. His exclusion was total and he satirised the monuments because there were hardly any people on the streets to take his unhappiness out on. Occasionally, one of Paris’s small bowed men would emerge from the chandelier-lit entrance hall of an apartment house, taking his wife’s perfumed dog out for a last piddle. But otherwise Edward had the avenues to himself.

He found a late-night café ideally suited to thinking jaded thoughts. It stood at the junction of three broad avenues, its bright façade already attractive from a long way away. Inside, it was always busy with a faintly disreputable, almost exclusively male clientele. There was a boisterous solidarity between them; people out on the town when everyone they knew was at home, guzzling home-cooked
tripes
and preparing for the marital duvet. Raucous jokes, shouted just too fast for Edward to follow them, flew across the room. He was, in any case, not part of their party; sitting by himself at a pricier terrace table, alternating liqueurs and coffees in a steadily queasier and costlier sequence. He contemplated the
habitués
condescendingly from his alcoholic elevation. Their hunched shoulders above the bar signalled to him that he was an utterly uninteresting foreigner and he signalled back with a glazed world-weary smile that they were buffoons.

One night, an American girl came in and sat at a table close to him and started talking.

Edward asked her, “How did you know I was English?”

She answered, “Oh, easy; sitting on your own like that, looking pissed off. You had to be a foreigner. And you look pretty English.”

This vision of himself, pitiful and self-pitying, irritated Edward considerably and even though the girl, who was moderately good-looking, freely volunteered her name and telephone number, he didn’t get in touch with her.

He did try briefly pretending that he was happy to be there; acting the part of the young Henry Hirshfeld arriving in Paris, full of sincere enthusiasm. He spent a few weekend afternoons in obscure bookshops, staffed by stooping characters of early middle age whose clothes and hair length – if not luxuriance – were fixed forever in the late Sixties. He went to independent cinemas showing the most unlikely films. He even, once or
twice, tried reading a slim volume with uncut pages at a café table. But it was naturally difficult to ride on the pretentious merry-go-round he was simultaneously scoffing. He appeared to himself and felt ridiculous. He persevered for longer than he respectably should have, in the unreasonable hope that he might somehow alight on an intelligent method of living in Paris. All he did was seriously undermine his self-esteem. His whole set-up seemed a pathetic parody of an aspiring foreign correspondent’s life.

The first of November was a public holiday, All Saints’ Day. It fell on a Monday, giving Edward his first taste of three consecutive days’ holiday alone in Paris. By Sunday evening, he was ready to risk anything as a diversion. He had gone out in the late afternoon for a somewhat pointless walk along the silent avenues. At the main intersections, florists’ stalls were selling the matt maroon and sombre bronze chrysanthemums which Marie-Yvette had told him were the flowers traditionally put on graves. He tried cheering himself by repeating ghoulishly,
“La
Fête
des
Morts”
but without much effect. As he walked back towards the rue Surcouf through an appropriately low and ghostly mist, it occurred to him that he had been on his own for nearly two months. Short-sighted as it might seem, he had never really thought about loneliness when he planned his exciting life abroad. Now, in the supremely dismal November dusk, it closed in on him. He realised that, since arriving in Paris, he had not spoken to anyone between leaving the paper one day and returning there the next. His evenings and weekends were filled by walks and films and meals and reading, all undertaken in a joyless determination not to give way to depression. He had begun to live according to little, set, single-person’s routines. He had caught himself talking to himself in the shower.

There was something else he had gone without for two months also. He walked unconsciously faster to counteract the ache of deprivation which started up as soon as he thought about it. Would he have to go a whole year, or two if they kept him here for two, without as much as a stray passing fuck? The prospect was too grim to contemplate; he was bound to find somebody co-operative sooner or later. But, reviewing the few women he had met so far, he had disturbing
doubts: not counting, naturally, Mrs Hirshfeld, they consisted of the predatory American female in the café, Marie-Yvette and Aurore. Aurore was, according to Marie-Yvette, more or less married. The idea of suggesting any such thing to Marie-Yvette or of her consenting, was so ridiculously unattractive that he at least cheered himself up slightly by laughing at it as he turned the corner of the rue Surcouf. The wistfulness stayed with him, though, all evening. When he went to bed, the bed seemed to him for the first time uncomfortably wide and empty. He lay for a long time still aching for lack of anybody there beside him.

It was humiliating to be so pleased to go back to the paper on Tuesday morning. Maybe Henry guessed his loneliness, maybe it showed; he invited Edward out to lunch to try a new local restaurant.

As they walked there, Henry asked him, apparently casually, how he was making out. Edward thought he sensed a paternal concern and, over-hastily, he answered, “Oh fine, fine.”

To his surprise, Henry laughed. “You are? Well, you must be a man of iron, Edward. Most people find this city pretty tough going at first.”

Edward grinned awkwardly. “Maybe I didn’t have terribly high expectations.”

“Let me tell you something,” Henry said disarmingly. “You may well find this city is better training in survival techniques than some of the wilder places you might have liked to be sent. I don’t know where was your heart’s desire. But in South-East Asia, you know, in some of those African capitals, everyone bands together. You go out hunting in a pack. Someone gets a lead and you all follow it up. There’s not so much scope for the individual. Whereas here, paradoxically, you can make of it what you will.”