“Sit there—on the sea-shore,” she said. The gibberish was clearly enunciated.
Her father could not meet my eyes. He had muttered the strange term nominal aphasia when he let me in and had preceded me up the two flights of stairs, shaking his head sadly.
Poor Kathryn—she rallied several times—she was subjected to all kinds of hellish treatments. At Colchester she underwent Radiotherapy. I went there to see her and she lay, skeletally thin, on the hospital bed, her naked scalp grotesquely marked with a violet circle. I was certain she recognised me. She waved airily towards the woman in the bed opposite.
“See her—she’s a pterodactyl!” She smiled broadly at me.
“A—terminal case—” I corrected her quietly.
Kathryn nodded. “A pterodactyl,” she repeated.
I marvelled at this strange condition. It would have been easier to understand if she’d slurred simple words. Instead, sophisticated terminology came out in inappropriate places—as though the lines of communication between brain and voice-box had got hopelessly tangled.
Miraculously, it seemed, she came home again. I was distressed to see her in a wheelchair and to contemplate the awful strain on Mr. Henry of carrying his daughter up and down those two steep flights of stairs. Not so much the physical strain—the elderly man seemed to be more robust than ever from sheer necessity, I should think. But the terrible helplessness of his once so independent, strong-willed and oh-so-beloved daughter must be breaking his heart.
Cruelly, it seemed to me, one of her doctors sent along another of his patients to see Kathryn. This woman had had the same operation a year before and was now “recovered”—driving her car, leading a “normal” life.
I was convinced by now that Kathryn not only realised that her words were coming out all wrong—she also saw the funny side of it. When she referred to one of her former colleagues and her mal-usage of the word “sausage,” it struck me as pertinent. I laughed involuntarily. She joined in my hysterics. Mr. Henry peered out from the glass walls of the kitchen and looked pleased at our jollity.
A month later, she was in Chelmsford Hospital and I passed a tortuous hour with her, trying not to look at the puddle of urine under the chair by the bed where she sat huddled in a blanket. My dear fastidious Kathryn was now reduced to the status of a ‘sit-up” patient who peed her drawers from time to time, but could safely be left to her own pathetic devices while the nurses busied themselves with more demanding patients. On this visit, we did hardly more than smile and nod at each other. She took my hand as I rose to leave.
“Gaby,” she said and the tears I had been holding back filled my eyes as I was confirmed in my certainty that she still knew me.
“Gaby, I’m going,” she said. She looked into my eyes with a penetrating stare. “I’m going,” she repeated firmly.
I hurried down the depressing ward full of purple-painted heads, old and young.
Finally, she was transferred to a little hospital in Maldon, Essex. Her father sold up the house in Cambridge with a dreadful finality and moved back into the tiny country property he had retained just outside the little town. He had relatives there who could offer him some support.
I met him in the car park. A man was hammering away at a chimney on top of the grim main building.
“She’s back there,” he said with an awful disinterested toss of the head to point out the prefabricated extension wards. “It’s quite hopeless, you know,” he said flatly.
I looked away from him, staring up at the noisy workman on the roof.
“There are days when I’d like to be up there in his place,” he said. “So’s I could jump off. Thank you for coming,” he whispered—and hurried away.
Kathryn was up and about. She was on steroids and able to shuffle slowly about the wards and the basketry class. An elderly aunt was just leaving her. She told me bitterly that the model patient they had paraded before Kathryn to inspire her was here, in a side ward, unconscious, dying.
On my final visit this is where I found Kathryn, still conscious but totally unable to speak, her eyes darting about desperately at the sound of voices in the room. She was surrounded by flowers and cards, but my eyes were horribly drawn to the plastic bag hanging over the side of the bed, filled with a liquid like Burgundy wine. The poor darling, struggling to keep just alive, with her brain half eaten away, was still menstruating. She clutched and tugged at the thin sheet covering her emaciated body. Her nightie had been rucked up and I could see that the tubes distressed her terribly—she was trying to dislodge them. I covered her and saw that the once beautifully-manicured nails were grimy. Couldn’t one of the nurses have cleaned her up, I asked myself angrily. One of them came in now, bright-eyed and unendurably cheerful. She addressed Kathryn as if one would a rather stubborn five year old.
“What would you like for lunch, dear?” she said. I gasped at the insensitivity of demanding an answer from someone who could not speak. It was ghastly to see Kathryn staring at her, her eyes widening, her hands clenching and unclenching.
The nurse brought semolina in a bowl and handed me a spoon. I tried to feed my friend but it seemed so utterly pointless to humiliate this pathetic remnant of a human being further. I kissed her damp forehead and she clung to me briefly.
A week later Mr. Henry rang. Mabiche brought me his message while I was showering.
“Kathryn died at five o’clock this morning,” she said.
PART THREE
Chapter 20
Alain Leboeuf had become a close friend as well as an employee. Claude and Jean-Paul, who had caused me so much heartache as I vied with them for Jacques’ affection, had long since lost contact. I presumed they had severed relations with Jacques long before his death. Alain was now chief accountant for the whole Group of shops and allied manufacturing units. His alliance with Jacques had been more complicated than most of his men friends. Though they were obviously fond of each other as sexual partners there was, too, a brotherly quality about their closeness. And Alain was the only male lover that Jacques had actually employed in the business. Also, Alain had been married at the time he took up with my dear friend and mentor. I’d assumed that his divorce was a direct result of his new affiliation. There was a child, a boy, now a delightful, well-mannered teenager, who had recently been given leave to spend weekends with his father by his barrister mother. Presumably she had been able to deny access while Alain had his irregular relationship with Jacques. The ex-wife was far from poor: her family owned a chateau in Normandy and a property in the Seventh Arrondissement, a very expensive quarter of Paris. Yet Alain had hinted that the alimony he was obliged to pay left him very short of cash. I was glad when the Board promoted him: he had always been considerate and generous towards me. He invited me to his new apartment in a skyscraper block at la Défense. It was certainly a contrast to the rather squalid quarter on Ile Saint-Denis where he had once entertained Jacques and me to dinner. This time, Michel and I were invited to Sunday lunch.
Alain was not the delicate, effeminate type Jacques had usually favoured. He was tall and bearded and his love of good food and wine had given him a sizable brioche—the word the French use rather than the one the English have borrowed from them—embonpoint. He was as jolly as an idealised Santa Claus and genuinely fond of children, so I was not surprised that he suggested stopping for half an hour at Beaubourg—the Georges Pompidou centre. One of our young designers, trained by and influenced by Jacqes but itching for a chance to “break out” had presented a psychedelic collection in 1977 to celebrate this futuristic development. The brilliant primary colours had been easily echoed, but this young person, who I’m glad to say was female, had also managed to suggest the same idea of inside-outness, mainly by tubular, boldly-stitched seams latticed across semi-transparent fabrics. Today, Michel was thoroughly entertained, after his first joyful surprise at the toy-like aspect of the main building, by the sword swallowers, puppeteers. mime artists and clowns on the broad, sloping. paved swee
p in front of it. While I was quickly upset at the sidling approaches from blind and lame beggars.
We drove along the Seine, crossing and re-crossing it, Alain teaching Michel the names of the bridges. At last, the skyscape changed from crooked rooftops and modest spires to towers and podiums looking more like New York than the French capital. Alain drove down a spiral runway deep into the basement garage. There we stepped straight from the car into a small carpeted lift which shot straight up into the apartment. No bleak stairwell and corridor nor a draughty, wrought-iron ascenseur besmirched with graffiti as there had been at St Denis.
A tiny entree led straight into a huge living room, the longest wall all window. The view right across Paris was breathtaking. On the far horizon the Sacré-Coeur gleamed whitely in the sunshine, more unreal than any cheap tourist model of it. I felt quite dizzy as I looked down. There was a sheer drop of ten stories to the Pont Neuilly. Alain laughed.
“I think you’ll find the view from the balcony more—comfortable,” he suggested.
We went through a dining room, furnished very attractively in dark cane-work and onto a large square terrace with shrubs in tubs and creepers. I saw what he meant as I leaned on the parapet. the building, on this side, was ‘stepped’—rather like I’d always imagined the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—so one looked down, not into the distant street, but onto the balcony below which jutted out far enough to give a sense of security but not enough to inhibit privacy.
Alain showed me his kitchen, resplendent in black glass. His son, Jean-Christophe, was hovering in here shyly, busying himself decapitating a huge fish—in my honour, I presumed—these Frenchmen, like all their countrymen, would have had no qualms about serving it head-whole for themselves. He was kitted out in an enormous white apron and a chef’s hat. Alain liked to do things in style.
In the living room, where I was now able to appreciate the long white sofas, the thick cream wool carpet, the well-stocked pine bar, Alain settled Michel in a corner with an electric car racing game. I didn’t realise until we were leaving that this was not a discarded toy of Jean-Christophe’s but an extremely expensive gift bought expressly for the occasion.
Over aperitifs, I was shown three paintings, as yet unframed—new acquisitions which I later realised must have cost a great deal of money.
We had a wonderful lunch. The two males had not done much actual cooking but everything was fresh, having been purchased that morning from their favourite street market. The charcuterie, the fish mayonnaise, the platter of cheeses, the tarte aux framboises—were each served up with the appropriate wine. Jean-Christophe was touchingly-attentive to my little boy, plying him with orange juice and grenadine as scrupulously as his father occupied himself with keeping my glass filled. He had the wistfulness of any only child brought up in a household of adults and I made a mental note to send Michel over to Beryl or have Natasha over more often.
On the way back, as on the way out, Alain stopped the car in a little side street.
“Have you seen the Place de Vosges?” he asked.
“Yes, Jacques and I once dined there at midnight on a June evening—it had been so hot all day, no-one could eat. But—I don’t mind looking again….”
Memories of Jacques were not so painful now, and I was reminded of him as I looked up at a wrought-iron structure sticking out of the wall between two adjoining buildings at second story level. He had told me such structures had been put there to impede the to-ing and fro-ing of servants from one household to another on amorous business. He was full of knowledge about such details in his beloved city.
We stood at the corner of the beautifully-proportioned square, admiring the tracery on the pillared cloister-like covered walkway which separates the entrées of the building from the central green lawn. The whole effect was of a tapestry picture.
Alain sighed.
“Most of the apartments are occupied by film stars,” he said. “But I can dream….”
So—despite his recent move up the ladder—he was still ambitious.
* * * *
I described it all to Mabiche as we waited patiently for Michel to pack up his new racing game at bedtime.
“Ah!” she said. “He’s pushing the boat out, your Monsieur Leboeuf, is he not? He can hardly have had time to receive the first instalment of his augmentation as yet.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have to pay anything to his wife now,” I said. “Though, I do know he still contributes to Jean-Christophe’s school fees—the most expensive school in Paris—he has got—expensive tastes….”
“Hm!” said Mabiche. “As long as his ambitions and tastes don’t run to you.”
She was the only person who did not fall under Alain’s charm, and if she had told me the main reason for this, it might have coloured my own admiration and liking for the man. There had never been a hint of snobbishness in his character in my presence but much later, Mabiche told me that he had referred to herself constantly as “the ignorant peasant.”
His family owned vineyards in the southwest and he brought casks and bottles of rich red wine which Mabiche always pushed well to the back of the racks in our cave. He told me one day after a board meeting that he had sold off part of his share of one of the vignobles.
“I’ve bought a small property in Picardy instead,” he said. “Much more accessible for weekends with Jean-Christophe. In fact, it’s in his name. It’s near Le Touquet—there’s swimming and fishing.”
One of the other directors told me that Alain had also bought a rubber power boat. It surprised me that he should have mentioned it: he was not a man to gossip. He went on hastily to praise Alain’s work.
“He’s revolutionised our costs in so many ways. The savings he’s made from an in-depth study and revision of out packaging charges alone have made his appointment worthwhile,” I was enthusiastically informed.
On my next visit to La Defense I met Alain’s childhood friend, now District Commissioner of Police for Gonesse. The two men were happy to find themselves so close to each other after a long gap in their friendship—our Commercial Office (Siège Social) was now situated on the Industrial Complex of the Charles de Gaulle Airport. I wondered if the two had had, or were still having, a homosexual relationship but Gérard did not seem at all the type (though I knew by now that there was more than one type). He was tall, heavily-built, blue of chin, deep of voice—but then Alain, too, had always struck me as being very masculine. What was clear was that they were content in each other’s company. Alain even went out sometimes on “cases” with Gérard, when he’d been called back suddenly to duty while out with his friend. Alain described a car chase very vividly, making it sound like the Keystone Cops. Another incident seemed to have upset him dreadfully—the nasty rape of a young girl by a group of Arab youths. He was almost in tears as he told me of the pathetic state the poor young creature was in.
Inevitably, I was invited to the seaside cottage. It was the weekend before the yearly audit. Alain said he needed to relax before the Firm of Accountants moved in and made his life a misery for a few days. I remembered that the year before one of the young men from the Cabinet we employed to carry out this obligatory legal check had pursued Alain insufferably while at the same time exasperating the older man by his professional incompetence. In the end, I recalled Alain telling me, he had managed to resist the young man’s sexual approaches without hurting his feelings too much and had written up most of the required report himself.
Michel had a cold and I tried to cancel the visit at the last moment.
“Come on your own,” he urged. “The boy will be well-looked after. You need a break—a change of scene.”
It was true. It was six months since Kathryn had died and a delayed reaction was setting in: I’d felt very depressed and even Paris in the spring had not managed to lift my spirits. Alain drove me up the A1. We went in his new Porsche, after a session in the office which I’d found much less tiresome now that it was relieved by a merry lunch with Alain. We
drove very fast and I soon decided that sleep was preferable to tightly gritted teeth. The next thing I knew was that we had stopped and my companion was gently shaking my shoulders. He reinforced his message by a light brushing of my lips with his and I was pleased to discover that his beard was silky and delicately-perfumed. It was the first time I had been kissed by a bearded man, but I said nothing and he sprang out and hurried round to open my door for me.
While he was fumbling with the house-keys, Jean-Christophe arrived on his proud new possession—an immaculate new motor-scooter. Alain had told me how the rather strict, old-fashioned grandmother in whose house the boy and his mother now resided, always delivered him to the Gare du Nord by taxi, immaculately dressed in suit and tie—and that, once on the train, he hastily changed with great glee into jeans and sweatshirt. He kept his scooter at the Picardy station, Alain quickly befriended the stationmaster, for the archaic traditions of France often demanded that the boy’s weekend did not begin till Saturday afternoon, and his father would then travel up and prepare the cottage the night before.
It appeared a tiny place from the outside—it was practically on the dunes at Berck—but later examination proved it to be a long low structure with three bedrooms. Inside was chilly and the massive old oak furnishings—the sideboard was two metres high and four metres long, the armoires reminded me of the flagship Victory—and the marble floors added to the rather bleak atmosphere. Within minutes, however, my two hosts had started up the central heating and got a huge log fire blazing on the hearth. Before they’d had time to show me round, a young woman arrived with a basket of provisions—some of them hot and appetising, judging by the aromatic steam escaping from under the checked cotton cover.
“Nathalie’s family has “adopted” us,” explained Alain. “Her mother supervises our cleaning woman and sees that we’re always welcomed in this fashion.”
With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris] Page 13
