I didn’t get a chance to finish. The back of his hand hit me smack on the left cheek and I staggered back, blinking, nearly falling back down the steps to the Métro.
‘Papiers, et que ça saute!’ He hissed. Papers, and jump to it!
I thought of hanging a right hook on his chin and dismissed the idea instantly; even if I survived the subsequent beating, French prisons are hell. So I said nothing and did not resist as he dragged me across the pavement to the ‘panier à salade’ parked in the nearby Rue de la Huchette. The van was already half full; a few clochards (tramps) and the rest students like me. Some bore the marks of earlier encounters, and I thought myself lucky to get off with just a hard slap – so far at least. Conversation was forbidden and shortly after, we were driven to the commissariat of the IVème arrondissement, across the river on the right bank, and ‘interviewed’ there.
I got lucky: my interviewer was an old inspector who I guessed was already retired and had been brought back to help out during this time of unrest. He had nothing to prove and had long since had his fill of violence; more to the point, he had spent some time in London and was something of an Anglophile, so I told him everything – the truth. It wasn’t complicated: how I came to be there, where I was studying, what I was studying. Then I explained that my funds had been held up and that I couldn’t find work because of the student riots. I assured him that it was only temporary and that I would soon receive some money and renew my student visa…basically, anything I thought might help my case.
I thought he seemed sympathetic, but my hopes came crashing down when he said they were taking me to the Gare du Nord and would put me on a train back to Calais and then England. But, when I got into the car, he sort of winked at me. At the station, he took me to the platform and on to the Calais train and then turned, looked hard at me, and walked away.
It took several seconds for it to dawn on me, and then I wasted no time in getting off the train and walking back into the station to lose myself in the crowds. This time I walked to St-Michel and, after checking that the police control was no longer in place, cut off down the side streets to the little café we all frequented.
The walk was depressing: beautiful trees had been felled across the Boul’Mich and dozens of street-sweepers were out clearing the broken glass from the shop windows. Some of the barricades had not yet been dismantled, and here and there small groups of helmeted CRS in their long black rubber coats stood chatting and smoking. In one or two places I caught a whiff of tear gas, and there were blood spatters on the pavements.
The café appeared to be closed. There were no lights on and the windows were completely obscured by condensation. The door opened, though, and I saw Max and Aurélie sitting in the corner. Apart from them, the place was empty, the chairs piled upon the tables, the floor unswept and littered with dog-ends. Behind the counter, Jean-Marie nodded a greeting and a flick of his eyebrows asked the question.
‘I’ve no money, Jean-Marie,’ I said. ‘Que dalle!’ Broke.
He shrugged and set the coffee machine in motion.
Max kept his eyes closed as I sat down. Aurélie looked up briefly and then went back to rolling a cigarette, one of the thin, dark tobacco ones wrapped in liquorice paper that she smoked endlessly. We had had a bit of a ‘thing’ going once, for a short time, a while before. She was quite attractive in a bohemian way, slim, with elfin features and short blonde hair.
But Aurélie wasn’t interested in how she looked. She didn’t need to attract a man – she was married to the Revolution – a sort of sixties version of the women who knitted while the heads from the guillotine rolled into the basket. She mumbled endlessly about student power, people power, the Left, Jacques Sauvageot, Alain Geismar, Daniel (Dany le Rouge) Cohn-Bendit; she knew them all, or so she said. She was really a doctor’s daughter from St-Germain-en-Laye and was in revolt about that, along with everything else. This morning she looked terrible: great dark lines under her eyes, her hair matted and uncombed and her pretty, even teeth stained by nicotine and black coffee. She was wearing a shapeless pink woollen dress pulled in by a wide belt and with a huge, baggy rolled collar.
I leaned across the table and kissed her on each cheek but she didn’t look up, and I noticed that she had been neglecting her personal hygiene as much as her appearance. Still, she droned on about the Revolution, the CRS, Fouchet and the Gaullists – a never-ending monologue that did not require any input from me, or anyone else for that matter. Just as well, because French politics left me cold. I just couldn’t get excited about it all; these people were obsessed with revolutions and they kept restoring the ‘Old Order’ so they could have another revolution to replace it. I mean, five republics should be enough for anyone! It was a national pastime that I just could not get enthusiastic about.
Jean-Marie came over to our table carrying a huge bowl of milky coffee and a croissant to break into it. I’d been living on this stuff for nearly a week.
‘I’ve no money,’ I said again, but he just shrugged and slammed it down in front of me. That was the ambivalence of the Parisians – mean to the last centime of a bill, generous to a fault the next moment.
Max opened his eyes and looked up at me, at the coffee, at Aurélie, and then closed his eyes again and shrank lower into the duffel-coat arrangement that he lived in. His life veered from intense, almost frenetic energy to total lethargy. He could sleep almost anywhere and made a most unlikely carabin, or medical student. He had an astute brain, though, and could often beat me in a discussion. He was usually in funds, but he didn’t offer it around.
So there we sat. No other customers. It was so quiet. The felled trees kept the Boul’Mich and the Boulevard St-Germain barred to traffic, and few people ventured out through the debris of the previous night’s riots.
I closed my eyes and drifted off for a few seconds, to the accompaniment of Aurélie’s monologue and the slight wheezing noise coming from Max’s open mouth.
The slamming of the door and a gust of fresh air woke me in time to see Bruno’s huge frame ambling towards us, lugging a battered suitcase that I realised, with foreboding, was mine. He greeted Aurélie with a kiss, took a look at the still-sleeping Max and, sitting down, stored the suitcase under the table and shook hands with Jean-Marie and myself, all in a series of high speed manoeuvres. Then he grinned at me.
I liked Bruno the best of all my student friends, a huge, bluff, easygoing lad ‘of peasant stock’ as they say. But what he may have lacked in sophistication he made up for with his frank and open disposition. Engineering was his passion, but for some reason he preferred the company of humanities students and had attached himself to us within days of arriving in Paris from his home village near Metz. Bruno was a thoroughly decent guy and had allowed me to sleep on the couch in his room for the last week or so. So why the suitcase?
‘Want the good news or the bad news?’ He continued to grin.
‘It’s all bad, isn’t it?
‘Not at all, Nico, old son. The bad bit is that you’ve got to vacate my room. The landlord’s found out about it and he’s threatening to chuck me out.’
I stared at him as my sluggish brain took in this latest disaster. Finally, I asked, ‘So what’s the good news?’
‘I’ve found you a job, or sort of…’
Max opened his eyes and asked, ‘A job? What, Nico?’
Bruno nodded, pleased with the reaction he was getting. From deep inside his coat, he extracted a crumpled scrap of paper and slapped it down on the table, where it proceeded to soak up the slops of Aurélie’s spilled coffee. Snatching it up again, Bruno smoothed it carefully on a dry corner of the table and then pushed it over to me.
It appeared to be a blurry photocopy of the employment page of Le Figaro. Halfway down one column, an inch of print had been circled with a red pen. Bruno jabbed a thick finger at it excitedly. ‘There, it’s you to a T, Nico! Could solve all your problems, mon pote.’
Aurélie snatched it up and read it out loud. �
�Native English-speaker wanted to tutor 17-year-old at home three days per week. Must speak French. Knowledge of Russian useful. Three months’ renewable contract, board and lodging, generous salary.’
I stared at Bruno. ‘What on earth…?’
‘No, listen, Nico. Think about it for a moment. Board and lodging, right? Generous salary, right? Native English-speaker, must speak French, right?’
‘And Russian, Bruno, what about that?’
‘You speak Russian, Nico. I heard you with that bloke who lives next to me…’
‘That’s Polish, and anyway, it’s only a few phrases I picked up…’
‘Nah, Nico, you speak all the languages – that’s what you do, isn’t it? Listen, it’s only for three months. Somewhere to sleep, something to eat, better pay than washing-up, loads of spare time to study. And, you won’t miss much at the Sorbonne: it’s all closed up now and it will be at least a couple of months before things get back to normal. Plus the fact that you’ll be out of the way of the police checks, and then you can use your saved earnings when you apply for a new student visa.’
I opened my mouth to object, but then closed it again. What Bruno was saying actually made good sense and I didn’t know why I was so reluctant to admit it.
Bruno’s enthusiasm seemed suddenly to desert him and I felt that my ingratitude had hurt him. I couldn’t even offer him a cup of coffee.
Aurélie, rolling yet another cigarette, looked up at me, questions written all over her face. Max, eyes still closed, said, ‘Bruno’s got a point. Sounds ideal to me.’
All of them were right. I realised that. They weren’t just winding me up. It did make sense. I was just reluctant to admit it. I looked at the ad again. A seventeen-year-old; that might not be so bad – I mean, it wasn’t as though it was a naughty young kid. Three months wasn’t so long either, and it would be nice to have somewhere to sleep properly. The food would probably be what the family ate themselves, and few Parisians ate badly. Maybe I could bullshit the Russian language bit.
‘OK, I’ll give it a go. Where is it?’ I said, more out of bravado than confidence. ‘Neuilly! Christ! That’s a good Métro ride away and, anyway, I haven’t got any money.’
Bruno grinned again.
‘Thought of that,’ he said, holding up a ‘Pasteur’ – a five-franc note.
I took the note, and promised to pay him back. I had to; I couldn’t get out of it now. It was touching really; Bruno was the least able to give me money.
The trip up to Neuilly cost me three francs and I spent another one franc thirty on more coffee when I got to the stop. I gave no thought to how I would get back if I didn’t get the job, but I did think it would seem odd to turn up carrying a suitcase, as if I was certain I would be taken on. So I left the case with the café barman and, following his directions, eventually found the address.
CHAPTER 2
The House
‘Surely such are the dwellings of the wicked, and this is the place of him that knoweth not God.’
JOB 18:21
Although the address was correct, I had some difficulty in finding the House. Off the main boulevard, a narrow dog’s-leg led between tall hedges, hiding tall, angular chalets that the French call pavillons, and the further I followed the allée the narrower it became, until it was only just wide enough to take a motor vehicle. In fact the road here was not tarmac, and tufts of grass grew up through the sandy gravel, suggesting that no car had passed this way for a very long time.
The allée swung left and then sharp right, and stopped again at a set of tall portal gates that had once been magnificent, no doubt, but now showed long neglect. The dark green paint was cracked and flaking, revealing mottled orange rust underneath. On a red brick pillar hung a sign, with a white No.4 on a chipped blue enamel background. The gates were chained together and padlocked, and I searched in vain for a way in which I could request entry. To one side, the gate had a smaller gate within it, just wide enough to admit a person on foot. It was bolted but, to my relief, not locked, and it creaked loudly as I pushed it open. A driveway, overgrown until it was little more than a wide track, lay in front of me, flanked by huge rhododendron bushes, the buds just turning pink, and I had to continue for several yards in the bright spring sunshine before rounding a bend and seeing the House for the first time.
Initially, I was disappointed. The gates, the shrub-lined drive…I suppose I was expecting to see a small but impressive château set in an extensive park; silly really, because this was still deep in the suburbs of Paris. Instead, I saw a three-storey stone house with steeply pitched, almost Gothic roofs, hidden by the hedges of neighbouring gardens. Close up, I could see that the building was bigger than it first appeared, being as deep as it was wide. Its most impressive features were the huge stained glass windows that reached up two floors either side of the arched double entry doors. The sun, now high in the sky, bathed the whole façade in sparkling light, and, though there was little warmth in it, seemed to give the whole house a bright and welcoming look. Had it been otherwise, I think I would have turned and walked away, since I was still far from sure that I was doing the right thing and feeling suddenly uneasy about the whole idea.
Would to God I had followed that intuition.
And so I stepped up to the old oak doors and pulled down hard on the metal handle that ran in brackets up the stone wall to the right. If a bell rang, I certainly didn’t hear it, buried as it must have been in the depths of the House.
Above the door was a bronze plate with an inscription in Latin: Taceant colloquia. Effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi Mors gaudet succurrere Vitae. I struggled with it and then gave up. What sort of a ‘tutor’ couldn’t even read the sign above his pupil’s house?
Later, when I did get around to translating it – Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished. Here is the place where Death delights to succour Life – I felt I’d missed another warning sign.
I could not be sure if anyone knew I was there, and again that uneasy feeling swept over me. I forced myself to wait long seconds but heard no movement within. With something approaching relief, I stepped down from the door and began to retrace my steps towards the gate. When I think now how close I came to getting away… I should have followed my instinct even though there was no logic in it.
‘Vous désirez, monsieur?’
A male voice, hoarse and rough, sounded behind me and, turning, I came face to face with the strangest man. Standing in the open door was an old guy somewhere in his fifties, very tall and slim, in a rangy sort of way, his skin deeply lined, with iron-grey crew-cut hair against a brownish, weatherbeaten face. A huge white nicotine-stained moustache hung beneath a hawkish nose, high cheekbones and deep-set, half-closed eyes.
He was dressed in what appeared to be riding breeches over tall, brown riding boots, with a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned down one side. A Cossack! My mind flicked back to the mention of Russian in the job advertisement.
With some reluctance, I turned and walked back towards him.
‘Vous désirez?’ he asked again, and I caught a whiff of tobacco and saddle soap.
‘La situation, monsieur…l’emploi…dans le journal…’
He looked at me narrowly, his deep-set eyes squinting into the sunlight. After what seemed an age, he receded into the House with an abrupt, ‘Entrez! Attendez ici.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, he added,‘S’il vous plaît, monsieur.’
He disappeared, leaving me to gaze in wonderment at the scene. In front of me was a great hall with a double staircase forming a neat horseshoe up to the landing of the next floor. The sunshine streamed through the huge stained glass windows behind me, throwing a kaleidoscope of multicoloured light upon the black and white tessellated floor. To the left and right front, wide red-carpeted steps curved upwards, and either side of them were dark passages leading deep inside the House.
The sight took my breath away and, at the same time, made my uneasiness recede. The colours, the glowing warmth
of the carpets, offset the cold austerity of the black and white marble floor and the heavy dark oak of the stair rails and wall panelling. A feeling of great relief came over me; a feeling of calmness and security quite unlike the taut nervousness with which I had been living for the past few weeks.
I stood rooted to the spot, trying to take it all in and get a grip on my emotions, so preoccupied that I failed to notice the return of my host. His sudden voice startled me.
‘Veuillez me suivre, monsieur. Par ici…’
He led me to the left, through tall oak double doors and into a high book-lined room; he pointed at a leather sofa behind a low table, turned abruptly, and was gone. I approached the seat but did not sit down and just gazed around me at the hundreds of leather-bound books that reached up to a mezzanine floor, halfway up the double-storeyed room. On the low table stood a strange silver vase-like object which I eventually decided was a samovar, since around it hung small, thick drinking glasses. In spite of the spring weather, a coal fire burned in the grate of the marble fireplace and gave the room a cosier feel. I tried to read some of the titles on the book spines but most of them were in Russian script.
Turning back to face the door, I saw that a short, slim girl had entered the room and had been waiting patiently behind me. She held out her hand for me to shake.
‘I’m Anya,’ she said, with a broad and attractive smile. Her small, rather elfin face was framed by dark hair swept up on to the top of her head in a sort of loose bun, and I glimpsed something strange and indefinable about her eyes.
‘I’m the Grand Duchess’s secretary,’ she continued, ‘and I’m to interview those people who reply to our advertisement.’
I continued to look at this ‘Anya’ and suddenly understood what it was that was unusual about her eyes: her irises were different colours – one brown, one green.
The Spaces in Between Page 2
