With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris]

by Sophie Meredith

  “He was half-French by birth,” I said. “That’s why I have a French passport.”

  “And your mother?” he said gently.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. We never talked about her.”

  I stared across at him, daring him to show signs of disbelief. His eyes were kind, trusting.

  “He was like that,” I went on. “Close, they say in the Midlands.”

  “Like his daughter?” said Jacques.

  I nodded.

  “When….” He hesitated.

  “He died last year,” I said. “He sent me to college—did all he could to discourage my—interest—in writing—in newspaper work. I think he could have been a great journalist. But something horrible happened to do with his work. Anyway, he passionately wanted me to be a teacher. So I became a teacher.”

  I gasped. I had not talked so much outside a classroom since…well, let’s face it…I had never talked like this. It must be the shock of finding what I hadn’t even known I was looking for—a father figure. I looked at Jacques. For the first time, I realised how like my father he was. The features were finer, the skin smoother, the hair more elegantly arranged. And of course my father would never have worn that suit—that shirt. But the eyes—violet blue and slightly prominent! The long straight nose, the hint of a cleft in his chin.

  I diverted my attention to the food. They brought me a silver metal sort of cage affair. Underneath were brown bread, mayonnaise, butter. On top, in a bed of cracked ice—six sprawling, orangey-pink langoustines. I tore them apart, dipped them in mayonnaise. Delicious. Afterwards there was Roquefort cheese. Then crêpes, flambéed with the maximum of ceremony over a spirit lamp at the table.

  “We’ll have coffee at home,” said Jacques and I felt safe for the first time since the funeral.

  His house was near the Louvre. A gate in a tall, forbidding wall opened onto a cobbled courtyard with fringed palms in big white pots. A wrought iron stairway led up to the living room. The balcony was big enough for a white table and chairs under a striped umbrella. Two incredibly slender, beautiful young men rose up from two chaise longues.

  “Claude and Jean-Paul,” said Jacques.

  I soon cottoned onto what they were. Veils seemed to have been lifted from my eyes during the sophisticated lunch. I didn’t care. I was ready to forgive this man Jacques anything. Anyway, it seemed to simplify matters. Surely I wouldn’t need to worry about any ambiguity in our relationship with those two around.

  After coffee, made by Claude and served by Jean-Paul, Jacques showed me my room—a lovely little chintzy affair. He suggested kindly that I might take a bath: he must go back to the shop.

  “Where are your—things?” he asked.

  “In a trunk under a friend’s bed,” I said, and wondered what Beryl would say if she could see me now. Her cooped up in her garret room in Pimlico, my tin trunk inconveniently jutting out from under the scruffy divan.

  I bathed, adding plenty of bubble stuff. I dried myself on a fluffy towel. I crawled between crisp, clean sheets. I slept.

  Jacques woke me, bringing in a tray. It was dark outside the window.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve made our dinner. You’re not too ravenous, I hope.”

  I didn’t like to mention it to him just then—but I was always ravenous. And he’d whipped up a huge, fluffy omelette, which we washed down with some fabulous, chilled white wine. Jacques perched on my bed like a schoolchum and I admired his dark blue silk dressing gown.

  “You should have washed your hair,” he said, after he had finished eating. And added, “Claude and Jean-Paul have gone off into the country.”

  I felt reckless.

  “I’ll do it now,” I said and groped for the towel, not having a stitch on under the sheet hitherto pulled up to my chin. He smiled and tactfully went over to the window. I shot out to the bathroom. I was on the second lathering when I felt his soft beautiful hands on my head.

  “I’ll do that,” he said firmly.

  I’ve never bothered much with my hair. Father watched it turn from silky blonde to lank mouse when I was ten and worrying about the eleven plus exam. Then one day, he deposited me at the hairdresser’s and had me hooked up into a terrible electrical contraption with wires leading from each lock to the black metal ring suspended from the ceiling. He asked for ‘something bubbly”. It came out more like a heap of abandoned sausages. Fortunately, as the perm grew out, the colour deepened to chestnut and when it was long enough I pulled it back into a pony tail. Now it was much too thick and frankly tangled.

  “We’ll have most off this off tomorrow,” said Jacques.

  I didn’t quibble.

  He rubbed at it vigorously with a towel then delicately patted my stinging eyes. He stood back and surveyed me, vulnerable in the fast-emptying tub.

  “God, you’re lovely!” he said and I laughed out loud, remembering the grotesque Yves Smythgate-Tyne.

  Jacques was not offended. It seemed he liked me to laugh. He helped me out and pushed me towards the full-length mirror. He stood behind me.

  “See,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  He shrugged off his robe and moved closer. I was scared, but deliciously so like when I was five years old and lying in wait for Santa Claus. He cupped my breasts. I wondered if I were destined to spend my sensuous moments in bathrooms. Then I wasn’t wondering or thinking about anything because he pulled me to the floor and the deed was done, quickly, efficiently.

  “Did it hurt much?” he said in my ear, stroking back wet wisps of hair.

  I considered a moment.

  “No, not much,” I said. “In fact—it was quite nice.”

  It was his turn to laugh.

  “Oh, Gaby, Gaby!” he shouted. “Quite nice!”

  And he set to work on me with a vengeance. I would never again think in terms of nice. Ecstatic, miraculous, soothing, stimulating, joyous—wonderful…sublime.

  Eventually he carried me to my bedroom. I was surprised at his strength: my nine stones were of little account to him. It was a bit disappointing when he tucked me in and whispered goodnight. I had peeped in at his bedroom earlier and would have liked to try out the four-poster. And I passionately needed to snuggle up against him and fall asleep in his arms.

  “I must work on some designs,” he said, and I felt better.

  “I’ll be across the landing in my study,” he said, kissing me on the tip of my nose. I felt better and better. I fell asleep almost at once.

  The next few days were a whirl. There was the hairdresser who cropped my hair into an urchin style that I thought I was going to hate. It seemed to bring out my freckles until she painted dark brown lines round the edges of my eye-lids, sort of modified Cleopatra-style and brushed my lips with a chalky-pink lipstick—Roman pink it was called. Then Jacques enrolled me in a Modelling Course where none of the other girls dared to speak to me and the ravishingly-beautiful Directrice, seventy if she was a day, bullied me unmercifully. There was lunch every day in a different restaurant, wearing a different outfit. There were fittings and rehearsals. There was supper every evening in my bedroom, followed, or sometimes accompanied by, love-making. But Jacques continued his habit of leaving me afterwards. I soon realised that he worked at his drawing-board into the early hours, but I continued to be haunted by the growing obsession of needing to be invited into his bed.

  Then Claude re-appeared. Jean-Paul was not mentioned. But that night, we went out to a bistro round the corner and all three of us drank too much red wine. We walked home slowly, an awkward silence growing menacingly amongst us. At the gate, Jacques hesitated. He looked at me and I put all the appeal I could muster into my face.

  He shook Claude’s hand and said, “We’ll see you tomorrow, then, before the show.”

  Claude avoided looking at me as he offered me a limp hand. He stalked off into the night.

  I scampered upstairs, flinging off my clothes, showered and raced recklessly into Jacques’ room. I burro
wed down into the bedclothes and waited.

  “Chérie,” he said, from the doorway. “We must talk.”

  My lower lip began to tremble. I knew I was behaving like a sulky four year old but I couldn’t help it.

  “In here?” he said, as though at last interpreting my thoughts, my pleas.

  “Please…” I groaned.

  I was determined to make it the best, ever. I did everything he had taught me and he responded gallantly. But the magic was gone. Yet I was fonder of him than ever—and, I think, he of me.

  He was still there in the morning, lying by my side, but the sun lit up a thousand lines I had never before noticed on his face and I saw that his hair was dyed. Maybe that was part of the reason he had never wanted to spend the whole night with me. But it was only part of the reason.

  Chapter 4

  The show was a success but I wasn’t. I got terrible stage-fright and was jostled a lot by the other mannequins. The jealous cows got their own back and I heard them laugh when I all but tripped in the bridal finale. Jacques was wonderful about it. He assured me it did not matter in the least. He had always had other plans for me. Still in my white lace and veil, my heart lifted for a moment. Could he mean….

  He elaborated on his plans to train me in all aspects of the business, make me responsible for his English-speaking clients—eventually send me to London to open a branch in Bond Street.

  That night we went to Maxims. I didn’t enjoy it. For one thing, Claude and Jean-Paul were there. For another, there was a waitress who had obviously attracted Jacques’ attention. He watched her the whole evening and kept commenting on the lovely swing of her hips. I thought she was two stones overweight and said so. I heard Jacques ask her to come to the shop in the morning. I announced that I had a splitting headache. Jacques insisted that Jean-Paul take me home.

  He was surprisingly kind to me. He made me some hot chocolate and found me an aspirin. He asked me five times if there was anything else he could do for me. I knew he was desperate to get back to the party. I declared that I wanted nothing but to sleep. Gratefully, he left and I crawled miserably upstairs and sobbed myself to sleep.

  Next day, Jacques took me to see a small apartment at La Défense. We stood by the window looking down at the Seine. He took my hand.

  “What do you think, my beloved Gaby?” he asked.

  Suddenly I felt more cheerful. I owed him so much. The least I could do was to make him feel better.

  “I love it,” I said, smiling up at him. I stretched up and kissed him in as daughterly a way as I could manage. “Thank you, Jacques.”

  I was surprised at how agreeable I found my work in the shop and the office. And at how good I was at it. Jacques gave me more and more free rein. I was choosing my own clothes now—always from his collection of course. And I had modified the hairstyle a bit—it was longer in the nape, still short and spiky round the face.

  One day in early spring I went down to the Quay de la Tournelle to see Mabiche. I thoroughly enjoyed the sensation I made and, as I had hoped, after the first shock, I was welcomed aboard as warmly as before. I shared their lunch—in the cabin this time as the weather was bright but chilly. The children stroked my fur coat. I groped about in my mind for something I could do for them. The eldest daughter was fifteen.

  “Would you like to work for me?” I blurted out as she sat staring in fascination at my earrings. “As—as—my assistant,” I stammered.

  Father had a thing about servants. It was one of his few dogmas. No human being should have to fetch and carry for another, he would say. We had cleaning ladies, a house-keeper once…but those were jobs, according to his definition. Honest work for honest wages. Jacques, too, kept no living-in help. Perhaps for other reasons—privacy, a small sense of shame—but then such feelings may have been behind Father’s declared reasons, too.

  My second-hand scruples were not shared by the bargee and his wife. They were delighted.

  “Why, yes!” cried Mabiche. “She knows already how to clean and to cook. She will learn whatever else you need her to know very quickly.”

  “And for very little wages!” declared Gaspard. “She will be pleased to get away from here, I know.”

  The girl denied it, kissing them both, but her eyes kept darting back to my jewellery.

  “Come for her at the end of April,” said her father. “By then, we will have arranged matters with the school.”

  I smiled at this tiny declaration of independence—I knew well enough that the education of bargee children was haphazard. But I was glad of the interval. Gaspard’s talk of wages had put an idea into my head.

  Thoughtlessly, I burst into Jacques’ office. There was a scuffle from behind his mirrored screen, an embarrassed cough and he appeared, adjusting his clothing self-consciously. He shrugged when he saw it was me.

  “It’s all right,” he said, over his shoulder.

  Françoise, ex-waitress, this season’s star model, appeared, her lipstick smudged. I felt painfully jealous and at the same time considerably guilty. I would never presume so on our old ties again.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” I said.

  Françoise waddled out, shooting me a look of triumph as she passed. Jacques sat down at his desk. I remained standing.

  “Jacques,” I began. “Am I still—of any value to you?”

  He weighed up all the implications of my question. Then he got up and came round to my side of the desk. He put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Gaby,” he said. “I couldn’t do without you. You’re not thinking of leaving me, are you?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “And I am really honestly grateful—for everything. But…”

  “Go on,” he prompted.

  “Could we—put our affairs on a—new footing?” I asked.

  He tapped his chin with his fore-finger. He paced about the gleaming, glass-tiled floor for a few moments.

  “Why yes,” he said at last. “What had you in mind? A—salary? Responsibility for your own—life?”

  “Yes!” I said eagerly, and regretted it at once as a shadow crossed his handsome face. “If—that’s all right with you,” I added.

  “Hmmm. Yes—you are much more practical now than when I first met you. I should think you could handle your own—housekeeping.”

  He opened a drawer and took out a ledger.

  “Please, though, Gaby—could you allow me to continue to pay your rent—on another place if you’d care to move—but let it be in my name.”

  I suppose I should have had all sorts of suspicions then, but I was absolutely confident that I could trust this man. I nodded. I told him about the enormous Mabiche and her family.

  “You should keep such a name for the daughter also,” he said. “If her mother does not mind.”

  I looked forward to discussing it with my friends on the river.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 5

  The London Branch was opened in 1959. Just in time for the Swinging Sixties. Mabiche and I found a four-roomed flat just off Baker Street. It was in an old building but had been modernised so that Mabiche found cooking and cleaning dreamily easy. But she was a great help to me in a hundred other ways. She liked to keep in the background but could be relied on to do whatever I needed. She was one hundred percent devoted to me—I knew that if I were to say, “Just run out, Mabiche and lie under a bus,”—she would do it without question. Dashing back across London to buy some trimmings, I’d hesitated over at a market stall, running out to buy yellow roses when I felt a sudden urge to fill the flat with flowers, getting up in the middle of the night to keep me supplied with coffee when I got going on a new idea for a window display—these things were child’s play to her.

  Just around the corner from us, in Baker Street itself, was the Smythgate-Tyne Dance Studio. This was run by Yves’ aristocratic old hag of a mother who gave scandalously-expensive lessons in the Waltz and the Quickstep—ludicrous in the days when free-style Rock and Roll had reached th
e masses and was no longer a studenty thing. Yet lucrative enough for her to need the place only three afternoons a week.

  In the evenings, Yves ran a jive-club there. I avoided the place even when I heard that Doug’s group played regularly. Apart from not wanting to meet the odious Yves, I was deeply into folk music. And rather heavily involved with an Australian called Graham. I met him through Beryl. She had severed relations with Bryn who had left her to endure the forerunner of today’s fashionable Anorexia—then it was called Starvation. It came from Bryn’s being totally unable to accept Authority. His guitar playing was not quite good enough to ensure a steady income—and he had never heeded Yves’ constant counselling that even the most talented groups needed to rehearse seriously.

  A qualified draughtsman, his certificates picked up somewhere in his mysterious past in darkest Wales, he took job after job in Engineering firms—but the first time an Office Manager told him off for being late he would walk out in high dudgeon, loftily omitting to even claim his wages. Finally, Beryl had walked out on him with her skeletal figure and a pair of adorable twin boy babies as reminders of her brief marriage.

  By the time I was back on the scene, she had caught several glimpses of Bryn on the television, a shadowy figure in the backing groups of various well-lit pop stars. She was living with one of her aunts at Bromley and working at the International Telephone Exchange by day. In the evenings, she was helping to launch a Folk Club in Soho, and she invited me to the Opening Night.

  Red Sullivan, whom I’d known in my old Bohemian days, sang the Derby Ram in my honour and introduced me to Graham who was one of the hundreds of young Aussies hell-bent on bumming their way round Europe before settling Down Under. He had a night-time job in a bakery and shared a big, bare, shabby flat in Clapham Junction with Red. They led a hilarious, haphazard life. The flat was always overflowing with Down and Outs. The bathtub was in the kitchen and I even saw that converted into a bed for a needy case. Graham was attempting to fatten Beryl up. He seemed to base all his cooking on rice—including his homemade Saki. His relationship with my friend was purely platonic, but the moment he looked up into my eyes (he was two inches shorter than me), I knew our terms of reference were on a different plane.