Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy

by Rumer Godden

  Such a weight of despair hung over the Maison Centrale of Vesoul, despair and fear; the despair could be dispelled, as Lise had found out, but there was reason for the fear. ‘You’ll see, when we come out,’ the other women had told her, ‘few people, very few, will have anything to do with us, no matter what help we are given and never mind what we have done and how we have paid for it.’

  The resentment was understandable. There were, of course, the irrécupérables, the unrescuable, who seemed to have evil in their skin, as if the devil had sown the seed that made them bad through and through – but many, Lise was certain, were in prison not because of what they had done, but because of what other people, especially men, had done to them, and some of us, like me, thought Lise, were in prison for their illusions. Well, I have no illusions now. Those first years at Vesoul had cured that, three long years – before I woke up, thought Lise.

  Time had passed – but I did not know it; like all the others, for the first three months, Lise had had to be in the Division d’Accueil – what a name for it, ‘Division of Welcome!’ Solitary confinement. ‘Terrible, but necessary,’ Mademoiselle Signoret was to tell her. ‘We have to find out what each newcomer is like – because of the others.’ It was always ‘because of the others’ in prison, in the Rue Duchesne as in the convent, sensible and just, but hard. Hard! At first, determined to stay sane, Lise had made a calendar and crossed off the days – But soon I couldn’t remember if I had crossed one off or not, ‘so I crossed another and perhaps another and soon I thought it was Friday and it was still only Tuesday, or thought it was Tuesday and suddenly it was Friday. If I had gone to Mass as I could have, I should have known the days, but it didn’t occur to me to go to Mass. Why, when I went to those early morning Masses in Paris?’ she asked Soeur Marie Alcide.

  Perhaps the worst of the Division d’Accueil was when each prisoner was let out, morning and evening, to take her solitary exercise in a little gravelled courtyard; Lise, of the long legs, who loved to walk, to stride – going round and round like a leopard in a cage. I felt like a leopard or is it a panther that never can be tamed? They were right then, with their walls and locks and keys – I was dangerous.

  Yet, even there, in the Division d’Accueil, for Lise there had been her star. ‘The real prison is the night,’ the other women had told her when she was allowed to join them. ‘It’s then, after they turn the key in the lock of your cell at eight o’clock and you are alone in that narrow box until half-past six next morning; a box with an iron bed, a chair and table, a locker that has no lock, a basin and sluice in the corner with the bucket you have filled beside it … yes, it is then, in the night …’ But Lise had not found that.

  The cell windows were not barred; they were made of strong frosted unbreakable glass in metal frames, but one pane, too small to get through, of course, had been left clear by some imaginative person – afterwards Lise fathomed it was a suggestion of Mademoiselle Signoret, though Mademoiselle was then only a junior officer at Vesoul – a pane left clear so that Lise could look out, over to the hills, across the shimmer of lights that was the town, near but utterly distant from the inmates of the Maison Centrale.

  The high top of the window opened too, the top panes pulled by a cord, but there was no way of getting up to them, unless one pulled the bed under it and set a chair on top, but the vigilante, passing by every few minutes, would have lifted the ‘judas’, the peephole shutter, and seen – yet standing on the chair, Lise was tall enough to look up and out to the sky, and every evening she saw the star. They called it the evening star, Hesperus, Aunt Millicent had told Lise in the garden at home when she was a little girl. In Paris Lise had not seen it until Patrice banished her to the fourth floor, when she would stand, with Coco in her arms, her cheek against his black head, and watch it over the rooftops and chimney-pots of the Rue Duchesne. It seemed to give her life a continuity and in prison, locked in so early, she had seen how, in summer, it appeared as the sun went down; then the evening star would shine in the last green of the sunset, ‘green like a green pearl’ – she had read that, long ago, in a poem. Every evening it was there, steadfast, and, ‘Somehow, like the Magi, miraculously,’ said Lise, ‘I had the wit to follow it.’

  ‘Shall we come and fetch you?’ Soeur Marie Alcide had asked.

  ‘I should rather make my own way.’

  For this moment, at least, of her release, she could choose and, at that thought, it was as if the humdrum town street opened like a dazzling path in front of Lise, seeming as wide as the whole world. Then she laughed at herself; she had already made her choice, or been chosen, for a very different path, a narrow and difficult one. First, though, there was one thing she had promised herself she would do, only an infinitesimal thing, self-indulgent perhaps but how precious only someone who had been in a Vesoul could know. She could also choose whether she would walk to the station – I should have to ask the way. Well, why not? I am free to speak, actually speak to a stranger, or I could find a bus-stop and go by bus, take my own ticket – or ask in that shop if I could telephone for a taxi, but I have almost forgotten how to use a telephone. Perhaps they would do it for me if I tipped them. I can give a tip, thought Lise, almost with a swagger, and she, Lise, had promised herself one little hour of freedom, just one, before she gave that freedom back again. I shall go to a café and order a cup of coffee, real coffee – not prison coffee – I can buy it – not be given it – and drink it, sitting at a table by myself, alone: a cup of coffee and a croissant – she could almost smell the delicious aroma – real coffee, fresh warm bread. I’ll walk, Lise decided, my case isn’t heavy; by the time I reach the town it will be seven o’clock, more cafés will be open. She had turned to go down the street when she saw Lucette.

  A girl was sitting on the old mounting-block beside the prison gates – Vesoul was at least a century old – a disconsolate figure in an ill-fitting and too thin bright green suit, a cheap fibre suitcase at her feet. The whole small body was hunched as Lise had usually seen it, and she recognised the hair, a tangle that would have been fair if it had not been browned with grease – Lise remembered this girl had always been in trouble for not washing. It was a childish face, round with a quivering red mouth and brown eyes wide apart and wide with hurt yet, at the same time, with a curiously innocent wonder.

  Of course, thought Lise, I was not the only one to be released today, but why was this girl out so early? Lise knew that she herself was a special case; for most the usual regulations had to be applied.

  She could barely remember the girl’s name – Lulu? Lucie? No, it was Lucette, but Lise scarcely knew her. In a prison the size of Vesoul, when one was in another division, worked in a different workroom, paths did not often cross, but in her last two years Lise had heard a little of Lucette’s troubles: slatternliness, careless work, or work left undone. ‘She seems so helpless,’ Marianne had often said.

  Lucette had served three years; now in that too-thin jacket and long skirt, she looked a cold, miserable little creature; she must, Lise thought, be at least twenty-one, but some frost seemed to have touched her growing – a cruel frost, thought Lise. Lucette seemed never to have grown and looked too frail and naïve to be abandoned. Abandoned? That was nonsense! The Directrice and the Assistante Sociale, Marianne Rueff, would never have let her go without some prospect of help or shelter and, It’s none of my business, thought Lise.

  She decided to leave her and then was suddenly impelled to go back to the gate.

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Hullo.’ It sounded breathless.

  ‘It feels … funny, doesn’t it – being out?’ Lise tried to be companionable.

  ‘Funny?’ The brown eyes were startled.

  ‘And how did you manage it so early in the morning?’

  ‘It wasn’t early in the morning; it was yesterday afternoon but I knew, all of us knew, there would be some trick about letting you out. You were in all the newspapers, they said, so I guessed, and yesterday I found a roo
m. I thought if I came early, very early, I might be here when you came out – and I am,’ said Lucette.

  ‘But hadn’t Mademoiselle Rueff arranged for you? Surely somebody came to fetch you.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They had a room for me, and a job.’ It was a moment of boasting, then the curious breathlessness came back. ‘I sent them away.’

  ‘Away? But – why?’

  ‘Because …’ The brown eyes were raised to Lise. ‘Madame – where are you going?’

  It was as if she, Lise, had been suddenly warned. Of what, she wondered afterwards? The implications? How selfish, but all the same she drew back. ‘I have to catch my train.’ It was brusque, businesslike. Then why should Lise feel it was brutal? Still, ‘I must hurry,’ she said. ‘Well – good luck.’

  ‘Good luck.’ It was spoken into the road as if the road might take the words away, but Lise had turned her back and was walking towards the town.

  It was too early for the kind of café where the cups would have been porcelain, the tables set, but the workmen’s cafés and the Café de la Gare of every town opened, Lise knew, early in the morning and workmen gathered at the counters to snatch a cup of coffee, perhaps laced with rum or cognac, or to take a nip of pernod and eat a roll. Lise had often stood with them on her way back from her dawn prowls in Paris; with luck there might be croissants, crisp and fresh, perhaps a table to sit at.

  In the first café she came to there was a dog, a poodle, sitting by the counter; every now and again it would beg, its eyes beseeching. It was the first pet dog Lise had seen since … She did not go in but quickly shut the door and found she was trembling.

  Leaving Coco had been one of the worst partings – no, perhaps the worst. A small French bulldog worse than human beings? But there were no humans, except Marcelline. Coco’s black toad face had been crinkled with anxiety when she had had to leave him so precipitately – seldom had they left one another. There had been no time to take him up in her arms, that firm small black brindled body, well stuffed, but not fat – though that was a battle because the girls were forever giving him tidbits. His coat had been perpetually scented with their caresses. Coco bore the scent with good humour but Patrice did not. ‘If only they knew how they stink …’

  ‘“Stink” – with that expensive scent? And the customers like it.’

  ‘Don’t call them customers – they’re clients; besides, they haven’t had as much of this as I have. Thank God, you don’t use this “perfume” as they call it.’

  It was true; she had never wanted her hair or her skin impregnated, no matter how good the scent was, how expensive.

  ‘You’re a puritan,’ the girls had teased.

  ‘I don’t compete, that’s all.’

  One of the girls, the Russian Magda, had bought Coco a collar at a fabulous price from the Rue Saint Honoré, scarlet kid studded with rhinestones; but, ‘For all the affection, I couldn’t trust him to a girl – their fortunes are too insecure for a dog,’ Lise had said, so she had given him to Marcelline. ‘But Madame, my little room – after this.’

  ‘He will be happiest with you, Marcelline, and so shall I be – you’re faithful.’

  How faithful, perhaps, only Lise knew. From the beginning, instinctively she had loved Marcelline just as instinctively she shrank from Eugenia with her lame leg and red lips and the stale powder in her wrinkles.

  Marcelline was always upright, deep bosomed and with rosy but formidable forearms; her sleeves were usually rolled up to leave her capable hands free and she had kept her country freshness. Marcelline wore a high-necked striped blouse and, sometimes, what Eugenia would not have consented to be seen in, a little crochet shawl on her shoulders and, over her skirt, a clean checked apron. The only extravagant thing about Marcelline was her hair which she kept coiffed in such puffs and combs as her mother might have worn in Edwardian days.

  All through those months when Lise had been waiting for trial at the Maison d’Arrêt at Sevenet, Marcelline had come each week to visit her and, long before then, in the times when Patrice had been in one of his rages, ‘Raw steak is good for a black eye, Madame,’ and Marcelline had laid on the bloody mess with a gentle hand. ‘One of Monsieur Patrice’s best fillets!’ she had said with satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, Marcelline, take Coco please,’ and Lise had drawn her rings off her fingers – they didn’t confiscate our jewellery at Sevenet. ‘Take these and sell them; here is a letter to prove I gave them to you. I can’t give you money. What I have must go to Maître Jouvin for his fees.’

  ‘I don’t want money.’

  ‘Keeping Coco is expensive.’

  ‘He’ll have what I have,’ Marcelline had said it gruffly. ‘That’s what he had with you.’

  ‘That’s all he’ll want.’

  Marcelline had taken Coco down to the village near Varennes where her family lived. ‘I won’t stay on at the Rue Duchesne without you, Madame. I haven’t the heart.’ She had asked the Curé to write and tell Lise when Coco died – ‘I never knew till then that Marcelline couldn’t read or write.’ The Cure had written again when Marcelline went herself. ‘She was my best friend in that old world,’ said Lise. ‘Perhaps my only friend,’ but it was only for Coco that Lise had ever let herself weep.

  She went quickly on to the next café.

  ‘The coffee was good! And the croissant. I had forgotten …’ With a sigh of content Lise sipped and dipped the fragrant little crescent in the cup.

  Not that the food at Vesoul had been bad. Long ago, at Cadillac, in that grim Maison de Force, as prisons were called then, when a group of kind ladies, roused by the young father, Père Lataste, had volunteered to give the prisoners a treat for Christmas and asked what they would like, the unanimous request had been for a slice of fresh white bread. ‘We were well looked after,’ Lise was glad to admit that. ‘I believe the Directrice tasted a sample of the dinner every day, but it was distributed to our trays on battered enamel plates; an enamel mug’ … so this! thought Lise, the thick white smoothness of the warm cup under her fingers; there was a spoon, a bowl of sugar, as much as she wanted, a napkin, though only of paper. She lifted the cup but, for a moment, instead of drinking, shut her eyes to savour the smell, then opened them – and abruptly put the cup down. Pressed against the window was a face; though the glass was steamy, the waif look was unmistakable; the great brown eyes, the tangled curls – Lucette. ‘Oh no!’ breathed Lise. ‘Please no.’

  She sat rigidly at her table, turned to wood again. She must have followed me. Can’t I have this one hour? Lise wanted to cry. It was all I asked. I was enjoying – for the first time for ten years – real joy. She was defiant, but no matter how hard she tried to make herself hard, the wood still had, for her, that living chord which was quickened and said or, rather, commanded: ‘Call her in. Give her a cup of coffee.’

  ‘If she wants one she can perfectly well come in,’ Lise told Lise, ‘and order it for herself. She must have money. No one leaves prison penniless. This … this creature doesn’t have to hang about as if she were lost.’ Lise dipped her croissant into the coffee and bit into it, but somehow its savour had gone. The face was still pressed against the window.

  Why doesn’t she come in?

  She doesn’t dare.

  Why, she’s the same as I am?

  She doesn’t think so.

  ‘Merde!’ Lise swore aloud and got to her feet.

  ‘Lucette.’

  ‘Madame?’ It was evidently more than Lucette had hoped for; the face was illumined.

  ‘Better come in and have some coffee. It’s chilly standing here.’

  Lucette still seemed to need to be ordered. ‘Sit down. Better take off your jacket, you’ll feel the wind when you go out. Coffee? A croissant?’

  Lucette did not say ‘Am I intruding?’ She had intruded and was as pleased as a puppy or a child. ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  ‘Why do you say Madame? You know my name?’
>
  ‘Yes, Lise – like a lily.’ The eyes were adoring. ‘I always think of you as a lily,’ the shy words came out, ‘tall and straight and beautiful.’

  ‘Beautiful! With this scar?’

  ‘What scar?’ asked Lucette, then, ‘Oh that!’ and dismissed it. Vivi had had no such delicacy when, twelve years ago, she had seen it at once, but of course it had been more marked then.

  ‘They call you La Balafrée, don’t they?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Someone did it to you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Somebody,’ but Vivi’s eyes were bright and curious as a monkey’s, though a monkey has mournful shallow eyes and can only do what it is taught, or imitate, while Vivi’s were knowing. They were beautiful eyes, grey and long-lashed. Grey eyes are supposed to be soft but Vivi’s were hard – I should have been warned, thought Lise – but the first time I saw them they were dazed, young, milky with what I thought was sleep – until I smelt her. ‘It was Monsieur Patrice, wasn’t it?’ asked Vivi.

  ‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘It happened in a quarrel. I had made a friend, a real friend, of a client. Henri was a good man, clean in his way, though he was one of our regulars. He wanted to get me away from the Rue Duchesne. I think he would have married me – I might have been living as a quiet respectable wife in some provincial town. Patrice knew, he always knew everything, and he was jealous as only he could be. He said – unspeakable things,’ Lise shuddered. ‘Men despised Patrice, naturally, and Henri was not going to allow those … those words to be said to me, and in public. There was a bottle of wine on the table; Henri knocked the bottom off and attacked Patrice. I happened to get in the way.’

  ‘To protect Monsieur Patrice?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes.’ Lise lifted her chin. ‘If you love the wrong people it’s still love, isn’t it, no matter what kind of love, and I’m glad I knew it – it makes it easier to understand. Once you have had that appetite, ma Soeur …’