When he went into the narrow corridor to telephone, there was no response from Natalya’s number. A sense of dejection hovered over him. He stifled it in movement.
Half an hour later, he emerged from the metro into the Place St Michel and walked through busy nighttime streets bursting with youth towards the Quai de la Tournelle. When in need, what did one do but turn to Simone? Grand and wonderful Simone. He had to see her in any case, apologise in advance for not being able to accept her invitation. She wouldn’t like that. But she would understand. Simone always understood.
Ariane had once reminded him of Simone. They shared a vivid beauty, an aura of enigma. But Simone wasn’t replicable.
He allowed himself a moment’s pleasurable reminiscence to keep his fears at bay.
When he had first met Simone, years before he met Tessa, he had still been a student - green and quivering behind the ears, as unworldly as they could come.
It was late in the summer of ‘78. He had just completed his first degree and his supervisor had taken him aside and suggested that a complete break, a genuine holiday, would do him no harm before he immersed himself in research. Even scientists, he had added with a wryness which had only later become apparent to Stephen, needed to know something about the world outside the laboratory. If he wanted to travel, a grant might be found, and there were always contacts, former students or researchers who had returned to their native countries, places to stay, people to visit.
It was Stephen’s first introduction to the international community which was science.
He had cycled round the north of France and Brittany with a friend, slept in youth hostels or a tent and gradually in August made his way to Paris. The city overwhelmed him with its beauty. He was not, by experience or nature, a city person. The schoolboy trips that had taken him, once to Hamburg, and once with his parents to Rome to visit classical sites, had left him untouched. London, he was a little afraid of. But Paris, in the quiet of August, wooed him with its formal splendour. The geometry of squares and boulevards and hidden courtyards fascinated him. He explored the city’s structure with all the fervour he normally gave to cellular forms of organization and he ended up by staying far longer than he had planned.
When François, the biochemist and absent host of the spare two-room flat behind the Pantheon, returned from summer beaches, he invited Stephen to camp out on the sofa for a few more days so that he could introduce him to an insider’s Paris. One of the points on that insider’s map was Simone, the mother of François’ girlfriend.
Stephen had never met anyone like Simone before, never would again in fact. Nor had he ever been in an hôtel particulier with its own courtyard and fountain, its own stone nymphs above the threshold, its own unfolding series of rooms with pictures on the wall which looked as if they might have come from one of the museums he had visited. He felt like some clumsy feudal peasant who had been thrust from cowshed into the Queen’s presence with no adequate preparation.
The queen, contrary to expectation, wore no gilt or royal robes. She sat on a capacious white sofa in a room washed by early evening light and she too was all in white, but for the gleaming darkness of hair, the flash of eyes and the curl of a ruby smile with which she welcomed them.
Stephen, who was usually tongue-tied with women, didn’t know how it happened, yet by the end of the evening round that dinner table where he sat at her right, it was clear he had told her more of his life history than he realised he knew or cared about. He had also told her he was planning to visit Prague and she had asked him whether he might consider taking something along for a friend of hers.
Of course he had said yes. If she had asked him then and there to walk across hot coals or dive a hundred feet, he would have done it. The wonder of it would have been that he would probably somehow have emerged alive. She gave him a kind of courage, an importance, an interest - in himself as well - which he had never before tasted.
Later, but that was a good deal later, he also realised she had the invaluable talent of making him think he had arrived at ideas or perceptions himself, when in fact she had helped him to them.
He saw her three times before he left that summer and after each visit, his fascination grew. He dreamt of her, dreamt of the mobility of her face and the intensity of her eyes, dreamt of witty, rambling conversations about the state of the world and the state of the self, dreamt of a room where the curtains blew light and airy and candles gutted in an ornate candelabrum.
He also dreamt her as the city, a series of brightly illuminated, parallel boulevards and intricate, densely inhabited side streets which abutted on splendour or mystery at every turn.
The mystery had remained despite the closeness of their bond. He would have liked to introduce Simone to Tessa, Stephen reflected, but the timing of that, too, had been wrong. And then, after Ariane, it didn’t seem right to bring Tessa to a woman who knew far more about him than she did.
Stephen tapped out the door code and made his way into the courtyard where the fountain still stood, as unaging as Simone herself. He had begun to suspect that Simone lied upwards about her age, if only to produce a greater effect. Only the last time he had seen her, had she begun to show her years. There was a certain fluttering in her movements, a shortness of breath. But he wouldn’t lecture her about her cigarettes again. They were as much a part of her as her unerring instincts.
He pressed the inner doorbell and was met by Yvette, the housekeeper, in her perennially neat black dress.
‘Ah, Monsieur Stephan. Madame vient juste de terminer son diner. Elle est un peu fatiguée. Mais…’
‘C’est qui, Yvette?’ Simone’s husky voice emerged from a side room.
‘It’s me, Simone. I hope I’m not too late. I needed to see you.
‘Stephen. A welcome surprise. I was wondering this very afternoon when I would hear from you. I was too busy to drop in on your conference.’
Simone stood before him offering her cheek. She was regal, as always. Dark elegantly cut hair, eyes which flashed brighter than her rings. A soft deep blue dress moulding slenderness in impeccably restrained lines and broken only by the knotted flair of a teasing silk scarf.
‘Come in. I was just having some coffee in front of the fire. My latest grandchild paid me a visit today and now I’m only good for staring into the flames. But you’re troubled by something.’ Simone surveyed him with practised eyes and noted that Stephen was at last losing the boyish air which had been his for so long. She was pleased about that. It was time he made his true stature felt.
‘I’m worried about Ariane.’
‘Oh?’ Simone hesitated for a fraction of a second in her pouring of coffee. That wasn’t what she had been expecting. ‘A cognac, Stephen?’
He nodded absently. ‘I was meant to see her this evening at her house. And she’s vanished.’
‘Vanished?’
‘Yes. Moved. Moved suddenly, according to her landlady.’
Simone bent to stoke the fire. ‘And you think this is more than her dislike of saying good-bye?’ she asked softly.
Stephen stiffened. ‘When I saw her on Tuesday, she told me she was scared, living under a threat. She didn’t like to bother you with it.’ Quickly he outlined Ariane’s brother’s plight.
Simone listened carefully, her face unmoving. When he had finished she took a cigarette from a gold box and lit it slowly. ‘As far as I know, Stephen, Ariane’s younger brother went to America some month’s back.’
‘Went to America?’ he repeated inanely. He started to pace the room, stopped in front of an abstract oil to gaze at golds and russets blending into each other.
‘Yes.’ Simone came up behind him. She placed a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Ariane talked about going to join him when I last saw her. She said she was tired of Paris… Come and drink your cognac, Stephen.’
He sat down opposite her and emptied his glass in a single gulp. ‘In other words, you think I’ve been fed a line. Given the brush off?’ Stephen taste
d humiliation.
Simone shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she paused. ‘I thought the two of you…’ She waved elegant fingers in the air, smiled. ‘I thought you were simply friends now. Had been simply that for some time.’
‘I thought so, too, until this week.’ Stephen struggled to erase the note of self-pity which had crept into his voice.’ Someone mentioned to me that she might be pregnant? Do you think…?’
She gave him one of her inscrutable looks. ‘That, of course, is possible. I have no certain knowledge. But we must talk of more significant things, now.’ She threw up her hands. ‘We cannot let a pretty girl interfere too much with the progress of science.’
Her laugh tinkled in his ear compelling a sense of proportion. With effort he shifted his thoughts onto another track and told her in broad terms of what were indeed more important things. She listened with her usual total attention. Her face, beautiful with the trace of its years, mirrored his narrative.
‘But that’s wonderful, Stephen. Congratulations are due.’ She hugged him, refilled his glass, then studied him in silence for a moment. ‘And your wife, Stephen, this wife you keep so wonderfully to yourself, whom you promised to introduce to me some time ago, have you been remembering her in the midst of all this? For some years now, I have been hoping for a little godchild from you. It’s perhaps what I am best at now. Soon it will be too late.’
Stephen started to pace again, randomly picked up a book that lay on a corner table, flicked through its pages: The New Economies of Eastern Europe. He turned abruptly back to Simone.
‘I shan’t be able to come to your gathering, Simone. I’m sorry.’
‘Bonsoir, grandmaman!’ A young woman who was all long limbs and pert bosom strode into the room and placed airy kisses on Simone’s cheeks. With a coltish toss of honey gold locks, she glanced up flirtatiously at Stephen and stretched out a hand. ‘Bonsoir.’
Stephen stared at a wide, pouting mouth, limpid eyes, didn’t allow himself to stare at tight crop top and tighter jeans.
Simone laughed. ‘I can see you don’t remember Antoinette, Stephen. Paule’s daughter. She’s become quite a beauty, hasn’t she?’ She turned to her granddaughter. ‘You’re refreshingly early tonight. Jean-Michel is away, I take it.’
Antoinette sank into the sofa, tossed off her shoes and curled her legs under her. With a little moue, she complained to Stephen. ‘Grandmaman doesn’t approve of my boyfriend. That’s because she refuses to read her Aristotle. I showed her the passage.’ She shot her grandmother a look of pure provocation. ‘The best, the most fruitful unions are made between women of eighteen and men of thirty-seven. While both sexes are in their prime. That can’t be wrong, can it?’
Stephen looked uncomfortably away. It was hard to believe this young woman was Paule’s daughter. God, he was getting old.
Simone noted his unease and smiled at them both benignly. ‘Aristotle also says if you’re too young or too old, you only make girl babies. Which I think, Stephen will back me up, is hardly the wisdom of science.’ Humour lit up her face. ‘Antoinette has taken to quoting the greats at me to support her view of the world. It keeps me on my toes, which aren’t as nimble as they used to be.’
‘Yvette didn’t by any chance leave me any dinner?’ Antoinette dropped the argument as abruptly as she had started it. ‘The late shift at the hostel makes me ravenous. All those Italians and Americans munching their sandwiches as they come in.’
‘Off you go.’ Simone shooed her away. ‘Into the kitchen and leave us to talk.’
They watched her go.
‘Antoinette is the bane and joy of my life these days. Paule sent her to me because she wants to study acting. And Paris has more possibilities than Geneva. But until her course starts, despite her job, she seems to spend all her time with this wholly unsuitable boyfriend of hers.’ She shook her head with a sudden air of exhaustion ‘But you were telling me that you couldn’t come to my gathering Stephen. I’m sad about that.’
‘Yes, I am too. I have to be in Prague for a few days. And then I’ll have to get back to Cambridge and immerse myself in interminable form-filling. I’ve already left it for too long.’
Simone slowly reached her coffee cup towards the table. She looked suddenly frail, her arms too thin.
‘Very sad. It was to be an occasion for me. An important one. I had hoped all of you, everyone, would come. The whole network.’
He sat down beside her and took her hand. ‘I’ll try. Perhaps just for the night.’
‘You see, I’ll tell you now, it’s a kind of farewell. I am giving over this house, funds, everything,’ she gestured around her majestically, ‘to create a centre for Eastern European studies. And then I shall move to the sea and live very very quietly. And privately. No more committees or boards or lectures or articles or pretences at an expertise I do not feel.’
‘Simone!’
‘Ah yes. My time is done. Has been for some years now. I have delayed, too long really. And one must mark the end of an era.’ She waved away his protests. ‘So tell me what will you do in Prague?’
Beyond the bright smile, he suddenly detected the abyss of her melancholy. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ he found himself saying. ‘A change. It will do you good. Revisit old haunts. And we can have some time together. You can see Jan. He often asks about you.’
She rose abruptly, searched for a second cigarette. Then changed her mind and laughed. ‘Perhaps. Why not? I can take your mind off Ariane. I’ll sleep on it. But now you must leave me. I have a few things to do before that sleep.’
As he walked east along the river, Stephen could not quite take his mind off Ariane. He replayed their last evening together, that night with its reborn passion. He felt a sudden, stupid stirring of it in his newly kindled body, felt the brush of her limbs, the secret movement of her tongue.
Had there been any indication that it was all a deliberately staged good-bye? The thought depressed him. He remembered how in that first of her years in Paris Ariane had fallen in love with a Paul Simon song which she played over and over for him, almost like a tease. Fifty ways to leave a lover. Was that what she had done? Got out the back, Jack. But why entice him, only to leave him?
Rain had started to fall, thick, cold slushy drops. They beat down on his hat. He secured it more firmly as a gust of wind blew across the river. But he didn’t want a cab now. He turned onto the narrow bridge which led past the memorial to the deportations of the Second World War. Dark now. Everything dark and hushed in the shadow of the Cathedral.
No. He wasn’t altogether convinced by what Simone had intimated. Ariane had told him that she hadn’t confided in her. He couldn’t shake off the sense of danger Ariane had conveyed.
Suddenly, from the other side of the bridge, he heard a shout, the sound of feet scuttling on wet pavement, a wail.
A figure was running break-neck in the direction of Notre Dame. Another, bulkier form, set off in pursuit, then stopped in visible hopelessness and shouted, ‘Stop, please.’
As Stephen crossed over, the shout became a whimper.
‘Can I help?’ he asked, having just registered the bulky, hooded form spoke English.
‘He grabbed my purse, my bag, my camera. Everything.’ A woman’s face turned towards him. A girl, really. She was sobbing. ‘My first day. My very first day.’
‘Bad luck,’ Stephen murmured. He peered in the direction he had seen the man running, looked down along the bank of the river. There was no one to be seen, except a shape huddled on a bench. ‘I think you had better go and report it to the police.’
‘The police?’ the girl wailed.
‘Yes. There’s a Commissariat not too far from here. Come on, I’ll show you.’
She sobbed once, then trotted along beside him, wiping her tears on her sleeve.
After a moment, she said. ‘You’re English?’
Stephen nodded.
‘That’s good. I’m American. Though today they’ve made me feel I might a
s well be from Mars. I hate it here already. The jostle and the stench and the bitter coffee and all those supercilious French guys ogling you. And the muggers…’ She stifled a sob, said plaintively, ‘I was just trying out some nighttime photography.
In front of the imposing stone of the Commissariat, she looked up at him. ‘I…I don’t have much French. Could you come in with me?’
‘Of course.’
One policeman guided them to another who sat behind a battered typewriter in a shabby room too large for its sparse occupants. Stephen explained, waited as the man wound a form into the machine, and proceeded to translate. He found out that her name was Cary Wilkinson, that she was twenty-two and came from Lexington, Mass; that her camera was a Pentax and her bag contained her passport, airplane tickets, a credit card, traveller’s cheques and all her money, as well as a hairbrush, a diary, a pen and other bits and pieces. That she had that very morning left her suitcase at a youth hostel behind the République, though she couldn’t remember the exact address. It was in her bag. She sobbed again at that, then took off the bulk of her hooded coat. Beneath it she was surprisingly pretty, all curling copper hair and blue eyes and a smattering of freckles.
The policeman advised her to come back in the morning with an address and a telephone number. Stephen, once they were outside again, suggested she ring home to have some funds transferred and set off for the American Embassy straight after breakfast.
She stared up at him with a bleak face, stained by silent tears, murmured a ‘Thank-you,’ then gazed round at a loss.
‘Look, my flat’s not far from here,’ Stephen heard himself saying. ‘Why don’t you phone home from there. I know that can prove difficult at a Hostel. Then I’ll give you some money. For a taxi and whatever.’
She beamed a smile at him. ‘That would be great. What’s your name by the way?’
‘Stephen. Stephen Caldwell.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 10
