Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I wonder if, when you are not studying, for I see you carry the papers of a student, you might like a little Saturday job, selling gloves at Galeries Lafayette. You know it? You would have a uniform, and the pay is fair for Paris. I am the manageress. Hats and Gloves.’ She tapped her hat and proffered her hand. ‘That’s me. Claudine Couperin.’

  Panthéon. The street of the Gallows. A shudder zipped up her back. The small card inserted next to the bell read: Madame Delaporte, written in a loopy black hand. Phyllis pressed the bell.

  The woman who opened the door had the face of an angel. Or that is what Phyllis imagined, when confronted with her white-powdered, pink-rouged cheeks and crystal eyes, and before she understood the workings of the mind of the woman who would put Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities to shame.

  The sing-song voice that trilled from her rosy mouth explained that she was a widow (the worst landladies usually are) as she led Phyllis up the bare wooden stairs. Anonymous walls. The ginger tom cat whose scent hung in the air, coiled his way down the stairs and through Madame’s legs. Her guess that the widow was in her fifties was confirmed by the glimpse of blue cheese veins showing through her stockings.

  A puff of lavender and the rustle of her crêpe dress as she hummed a little. ‘Oh my dear, such a long way up. Oh, I hope you like it. I do so want a young thing for company. The room is tiny, like you. Do you like books? I have plenty in the dining room. We eat our meals en famille here. I keep three others, you see. Mealtimes are at 8 a.m., twelve noon and 6 p.m.’

  Phyllis passed the bolted doors which hid the other poor captives, locked in their miserable spaces.

  ‘Et voilà!’

  If Phyllis had only taken after her mother, she would have screamed: ‘I’ve kept my furs in better places than this!’ as she turned on her heels and stomped down the stairs.

  English reserve permitted her to let out a tiny gasp of dismay, but the graciousness that was often thrown aside by Bella, always remained intact with Phyllis.

  ‘It will be fine,’ she said faintly. ‘Thank you, Madame. Thank you so much.’

  They both stared in silence at the space where it would have been nice to have a window and the grey bed with grey sheets that her dear mother would have described as fit only for a maid.

  ‘The rent is how much?’

  The rent was courtesy of Claudine Couperin, who would welcome the young student with a kiss on both cheeks on her first Saturday morning at Galeries Lafayette. Tier upon tier of glass and wrought-ironwork stood either side of a coloured glass dome, which covered a grand central staircase and spanned out into what Phyllis would describe as a palace that faced the rich shoppers on Boulevard Haussmann.

  At the department store, Phyllis slipped into yet another disguise, another uniform, this time consisting of a long black skirt with a pleated hem, a white blouse and black tights. Claudine had shown her some little black buttoned shoes in the footwear department.

  ‘Look how soft they feel, eh? The discount is good. I insist you buy them.’

  Phyllis allowed her only pair of shoes, so worn that they had dried out hard like pastry even though she had tried to buff them into a shine, to be unlaced and unceremoniously thrown into the nearest bin. Her interest in material things throughout her life was almost invisible, yet after Phyllis had died, her best friend, Dr Esme Wren, discovered sixty-nine pairs of beautiful size four shoes in her wardrobe, most of them unworn. Too many to ever wear, but enough to know that she would never go without again.

  ‘Not so much the student now?’ Claudine whispered.

  The first few hours behind the counter, Phyllis smiled and waited, shifting back and forth on her new heels, knowing that no customer could match her mother for fussiness and opinion. Years later, she would tell Esme how to put on a glove – you do it like this – and she would imitate the Parisian women who would put their elbow on the glass pane, their forearm pointing upward, their hand twisted in a Royal wave, waiting expectantly for Phyllis to ease a glove over their hands. Who would have thought that these kid leather gloves in every shade – primrose yellow, dove white, night black and apple green – and soft rabbit- and fox-fur mufflers would introduce Phyllis to so many people. And that so many people would return home to unwrap the tissued Lafayette box, and comment on the delightful young English-woman serving behind the counter.

  Had Sandor known of her success at money-making, he might have withdrawn her termly payments to the Sorbonne. ‘Look how easy her life has become now,’ he would have grumbled. ‘She plays with more money than I could have dreamed of as a young man.’

  Unintentionally, Phyllis excelled at one of her father’s greatest skills – seeking out small business opportunities with strangers. Financial profit could not be further from her mind though; her longing for friendship was the motive. One day, she had served a gentleman who wanted to find a black fur muffler for his wife’s birthday; he turned out to be the playwright Joseph Kessel, author of Invitation au Voyage. Taken by the way the young girl swam through and around the hooped French language, he invited her to translate some of his notes at his house.

  ‘Could you bear to teach me also?’ he asked diffidently. ‘To speak your language?’

  Phyllis agreed, and every Friday afternoon after that she went for one hour to his neat house on Rue Christine to tutor him in English and to help out. There, piled on his desk, she spotted a pile of John Bull, the British newspaper in Paris.

  ‘I try to read the articles,’ Kessel explained, seeing her interest.

  ‘What a good idea. Shall we start off by translating them then?’ As Phyllis drew her finger under the dotted word in every sentence, her mouth silently shaped each word, before Joseph took a breath and ran across the line.

  ‘Paris in the autumn is a marvellous place for shopping.’

  ‘Very well done. And the next one?’

  ‘The restaurants are full of dishes you may never have heard of before: omelette, frogs’ legs and snails. It may sound rather off-putting but do try it with some of the bread or baguette that the French are so keen on.’

  ‘Bon!’ Phyllis said, as she thought to herself how easily she might have written such an article.

  Exactly one week later, while sitting at the dining-room table in the pension, reeling off an article entitled An Englishwoman’s View of Paris for John Bull, she first set eyes on Vladimir Nabokov.

  After shaking hands with Joseph Kessel, following his first English lesson, she had walked straight to the offices of John Bull. It was dark and past five o’clock, but Phyllis was not the sort of woman to wait for Monday morning.

  ‘I wonder if I might speak to the editor?’ she said. ‘My name is Phyllis Gross. I am a writer.’

  The French secretary, who had been enjoying the purr of her own typing, scowled through her little round glasses and stubbed out her cigarette as if she was killing a fly.

  ‘The Editor is on edition – we go to press tonight,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Perhaps I might wait?’

  ‘No, you cannot. Can I help you?’

  As usual she could only be bothered to half tune into the breathless stream of words from the skinny Englishwoman, who had decided not to take up her offer of a chair. Her coffee-coloured dress and coat looked brand new, but the secretary could not help staring at her hard brown hands, that were gesturing enthusiastically. A gardener perhaps?

  ‘. . . and so now I’m here in Paris, painting, sketching, teaching English, that sort of thing, and I thought perhaps I might write a freelance piece or two?’

  ‘Why not? If you deliver it here, I’ll be sure to show it to the Editor.’

  The secretary watched as Phyllis smiled, nodded, thanked her and briskly left the office. Before now, a sorry trail of young hopefuls had sat on the black leather chaise longue opposite her desk, pouring out their decadent aspirations. Most of them she would never see again. They would promise, as they shook h
er hand for longer than was polite, to come back, their first feature written. Why Cubism is the New Art. The Book-Lover’s Tour of Paris. The Real Life of a Parisian Chef. The Confessions of a Parisian Lady. She imagined them stepping outside into the sunlight and promptly falling down a black hole. Making a bet with herself, that this girl with the loud voice would be different, she lit another cigarette.

  So now here was Phyllis, her Friday morning Philosophy lecture over and with an hour to go before Madame would serve lunch. A sorry excuse for lunch it would be too; a thin gravy, which she called consommé by floating a few carrot heads on the top, cauliflower or courgette baked with cheese. Meat, on the rare occasions it did appear was always smothered in the same mushroom sauce. Why the delicious pie smells drifted up from her kitchen, Phyllis had only discovered on venturing downstairs to return a water glass she had taken to her room by accident, earlier in the week. There, slumped in a chair, was Madame Delaporte, her fat ginger cat prettily mewling for titbits, as she ravaged what looked like a steaming meat pie, accompanied by a heap of potatoes next to vegetables in every shade of green.

  ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ Madame screeched and then raised her glass of red wine to Phyllis and laughed. ‘Do you see my lunch?’ She laughed through an open mouthful knowing that Phyllis, however disgusted by the meagre offerings she was given, could not afford to move anywhere else.

  Phyllis apologised and left. If she had been of a religious persuasion, she would have prayed very hard that night for the soul of Madame Delaporte.

  Vladimir Nabokov, the author, was one of the other unfortunates residing with Madame. After leaving his native St Petersburg, he grew tired of Cambridge after graduation and was here in Paris to try his luck at writing. As he walked into what he believed would be the empty dining room, his eyes fell on the back of a girl, the one who had moved into the attic. Seated at the table set for lunch, her dark head tilted to one side, was balanced by two plaits that dangled over the back of her slim red cardigan. Perhaps she was completing some schoolwork. Her feet, he noted, that peeped below the long black skirt, were hooked around the legs of her chair, not able to reach the floor. Her hands seemed as small as her black buttoned shoes, but would her face be as pretty?

  ‘May I?’

  Who knows whether Vladimir Nabokov was disappointed or excited as Phyllis turned to face the owner of this richly accented voice. She smiled, stood up and extended her hand to his. ‘Heartthrob handsome’ is how she described him later. Cruel cheekbones as undernourished as her own. Timid eyes. A passionate mouth. Freshly laundered white shirt, and raggedy cuffs.

  He bowed and pulled up a chair. They talked until Madame sulkily served lunch. They rummaged through writers, the latest books, the trouble with the French.

  ‘It is just the two of you today,’ Madame sighed, as she dumped two bowls of bouillabaisse in front of them.

  They talked until Phyllis began to make her excuses, for she was already late for her English lesson with Joseph Kessel.

  ‘How old are you?’ Vladimir stopped her, rubbing his fingers across his eye.

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘You look so much younger.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘That is no bad thing.’ Then, as he leant forward across the table to whisper, he let his forefinger drop to touch her own: ‘Would you let me take you to the cinema tonight?’

  He did not wait for Phyllis’s reply. ‘Meet me here at six o’clock. Do not tell Madame.’

  Phyllis did not write in her memoirs what the film was, or record any more details about Vladimir. We do know that he could not chase away, much as he might try in later life, his close association with the narrator of his novel Lolita, Humbert Humbert, whose preference was for what he described as maidens between the age limits of nine and fourteen: ‘who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets”.’

  Maybe Vladimir saw in Phyllis’s little girl’s body, starved of food and affection, a willingness to please, an openness so different from the intricate ploys of the fleshy French girls. She was, undoubtedly for Vladimir, a nymphet, years before Lolita was ever conceived.

  What about Phyllis? After her trip to the cinema with Vladimir, she cut off her plaits. Relieved of its weight, her hair sprang into a wavy bob. Her private life was a secret to the end of her days, but she was neither the daughter of typical English prudes nor did she refrain from teasing allusions to her love-life in interviews:

  I think I was fairly free with myself if I fell for somebody. I lived on my own – I loved my independence. But I’ve never led a celibate life. As an adult I was always susceptible and that was part of Bohemian life. Not now, thank God, all passion spent. I would fall for looks, first, then perhaps get bored.

  Her face was not the fragile, dolly sort of face that men saw flicker on the screens from Hollywood, but Phyllis emitted a quirky energy which they loved to feed on. A little thing, they foolishly believed, was so much easier to seduce. On the contrary, Phyllis had an almost masculine ability to shake off their affections, to break away from their clinginess and step over (without treading on) them, which surprised and intrigued them. A harsh woman, you might presume – if any of her romantic tactics had been calculated. But Phyllis never went in for her mother’s manipulative strategies.

  A week after delivery, the first of many articles describing Phyllis’s favourite Left Bank haunts was accepted and printed by the editorial staff of John Bull. The writer had a grasshopper mind, the editors concluded after tightening up her prose, but what brilliant colour.

  ‘I am a writer and an artist and a teacher and a translator,’ Phyllis repeated to herself early one morning as she kicked past the autumn leaves swirling at the church steps of St Germain des Prés, before turning into Tony’s street. Her new feelings of self-confidence had slowly begun to tempt her into buying her own fresh croissants for breakfast, then curling up in the cosy bookshop, Shakespeare & Co, at number 12, Rue de l’Odéon, where the owner Sylvia would let her leaf through books for hours in the corner. Sylvia, a large, handsome woman, or so she might have been behind her perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke, fussed over poor, withdrawn writers whom she slavishly introduced to one another, above the jingle of her amber bangles.

  ‘Ezra Pound – this is Phyllis Gross.’

  ‘Phyllis, mon petit – let me introduce you to Tom Eliot.’

  Polite conversation would begin and circle and circle, but as Phyllis clocked the office boys whistling home, she would wonder why, as she spoke to these men, the word ‘I’ kept hammering into her ears:

  ‘I am, of course, over here trying to get a French agent,’ they usually began, ‘which I believe I may be able to pull off as some of the English ones have told me I am the genre au courant. I don’t think I know your work, do I?’

  Their eyes would glaze over at the sound of their own brilliance or dart left, right, up and down the bookshop aisles in search of someone more useful.

  The ego that nestled firmly and warmly inside Phyllis did not budge. Her fascination with writers would extend to gossip and then she was off, doing her own thing. A queer bunch indeed.

  To her surprise, Tony received Phyllis with a little more affection than she had expected. Why, she was almost grown-up, almost a woman, he thought as he kissed her smiling cheeks.

  ‘Guess where I slept for five weeks?’

  Tony stared at her. He had never thought to ask. ‘Come with me to breakfast at Les Deux Magots,’ he offered. ‘Bring your sketchpad. I want to see what my little sister can do.’

  The round of lectures and café rituals woven into the company of the élite of literary society would immerse Phyllis during three of the happiest years of her life. Correspondence from her parents had dwindled into insignificance. Life, she believed, was rich. Life was beautiful. Sitting between the honeyed twang of Ernest Hemingway and her b
rother at Café de Flore, through the breaking sun at breakfast and over a long lunch until les apéritifs signalled the arrival of Dick Pearsall, or Vladimir, she basked in their conversations, without feeling the need to contribute.

  Existentialism. Man and God. Man without God. Art and God. Good God. As each man spoke, in deep ponderous tones, Phyllis would sketch their faces on napkins, and place them next to their wine glasses. Tony’s baby sister. What a cute child. And each of the men would chip in to buy her a drink.

  ‘Try him,’ Tony turned his sister’s face in the direction of the profile of Samuel Beckett. To observe was one of her greatest passions, to capture a face, a stance, a building, a boat in a minimal number of lines.

  A coffee cup spiralled and shattered outside on the pavement. Like little hens, the waiters flustered around the man, who kept perfectly still as they whipped away the spilt liquid from his table in napkins and flourished a fresh cup in front of him.

  ‘Tony, who is that blind man? He looks so miserable.’

  ‘That, my dear, is an old acquaintance of mine – James Joyce. I cannot go near him until I’ve finished reading Ulysses, which is taking me an age to get through.’

  Carefree though she may have been, the pinch of her darn and mend existence had not changed a great deal. ‘Why would I want to burden myself with such a thing as my own flat?’ Phyllis would say when asked why she remained chained to the dreary confines of her boarding-house, which incidentally was still good enough for Vladimir, too.

  Indeed, her contentment with boarding-houses and bedsitters only ended in 1972, when at the age of sixty-six, Phyllis bought her first home, a flat overlooking the beach at Shoreham-on-Sea in Sussex.

  Then one autumn day in 1924, Tony confessed to Phyllis that he was finding the light in Paris drained his energy. The next day, when she went to collect a new set of paints he had ordered for her, the Portuguese cleaner scrubbing the stairs shouted out to her: ‘That one he left this morning. Big luggage. Many luggage.’