He looked up from his drawing, to check he’d got the angle right, admiring the gnarled willow tree, which seemed to be stooping over the water to wash its long green hair; the heavy-shouldered chestnuts spitting conkers at their feet. He had always loved this small secluded triangle (which he sometimes shared with no one but the sparrows, when the larger Paris parks were packed to overflowing); liked the fact there was water on both sides, so that you could indeed imagine you were chugging down the river on a pleasure-craft. The traffic noise was muted here, and although the thrustful city pulsed and throbbed all round you, you were more aware of dappled leaves, or the play of sun on water.
Or more aware of lovers, he reflected, his eyes stealing back to the couple on the bench. How could they be such advanced adventurous kissers, when they were little more than kids? They seemed to be devouring one another, tongue consuming tongue, oblivious of anything beyond each other’s mouths. French kissing, he thought wryly; a million miles away from his own restrained and timid English style.
‘Is it a P-boat?’ Pippa asked, pulling at his arm.
‘What? Oh, yes … of course.’ He returned to the task in hand, added a few more ripples to his earthbound River Seine. ‘It’s called the Princess Pippa. Shall I write the name on the side?’
Pippa nodded, crouched on the ground beside him, their heads almost touching. She watched him critically, making sure he spelled the ‘Pippa’ right. ‘I’ve got three Ps in my name,’ she observed, as he gave the final ‘a’ a Gothic flourish.
‘Yes, so you have.’
‘Have you got any in your name?’
‘Well, none in Daniel, I’m afraid, but my middle name begins with P – Paul – and also I live above a bookshop called Peyrefitte. D’ you think that counts?’
‘No,’ said Pippa, unimpressed.
Daniel rubbed his palm across the rough surface of the stick. He was opening up, he realized, actually volunteering information. Earlier on, over tea and almond gâteau, he had given Penny a brief outline of his work: the impact of the new government education programme on illiteracy in Kenya, and the variations in literacy levels according to family size. She had shown a touching interest, though clearly had no grasp at all of the politics or even geography of Africa. (She had thought Nairobi was in Nigeria.)
He glanced at her again. She had kicked off her shoes and was half-lying on the bench, with her head down on the arm-rest and her hips skewed at an angle. He found her body mesmerizing, especially in that position – the way the denim stretched so tautly, outlining her thighs; the bracelet of bare flesh around the top of each brief sock, the tantalizing glimpse of her tongue as she chewed her little finger. He hoped she was truly resting, not slumped there in dejection. She had been fine all afternoon, chattering and sparkling as if fuelled by the champagne, but in the last half-hour she had gradually subsided, seemed to have turned in on herself. It was probably his fault. He’d done absolutely nothing to find Phil; had abandoned any pretence of trying once they’d reached the Pompidou Centre and become engulfed in jugglers, buskers and a throng of American tourists who’d provided quite an entertainment in themselves. Or perhaps he’d bored her by his talk of work. He had discovered long ago that illiteracy was a turn-off for most people. Starvation, famine, terminal disease – those were the headline-grabbers, but who cared a jot that more than a hundred million children had never laid eyes on a reading-book?
‘Give me the stick! I want to write your name.’ Pippa wrested it from his hand, traced a large and bulbous D beneath his drawing of the boat.
Daniel Paul, he mused, as she continued with a lopsided ‘A’ – safe and rather dull. He wished he had a dashing nickname like Daniel Vert Galant. This tiny park was called the Vert Galant, in honour of the sixteenth-century king, Henri IV, whose statue reared behind it. He’d tried to explain the name to Penny, but it was difficult to translate. Vert meant green, in the sense of lusty, vigorous – sap rising, juices flowing – and galant was the old-fashioned word for playboy, ladies’ man. He had always envied that type of man, who could sweep women off their feet, break hearts right and left. Sometimes he’d even imagined himself as Henri, strolling in the palace gardens with his string of voluptuous mistresses, his brood of bastard children, or riding his black stallion up and down the corridors of the Louvre. If he changed places with him now, discarded his boring business suit in favour of regal frills and furbelows, then Penny could be his paramour; Pippa his favourite love-child, even at this moment tugging at his embroidered ruffled sleeve.
‘Wake up, Dan!’ she ordered. ‘You’re not to go to sleep.’
He opened his eyes. Yes, he echoed, wake up, Dan – and grow up too, while you’re about it. These were the sort of fantasies he had harboured as a shy and tongue-tied schoolboy (then run a mile if a girl so much as looked at him).
‘Pippa! Do stop hassling the poor man.’ Penny watched him rub his eyes. ‘He’s probably dead beat.’
‘No, I’m fine.’ He picked up a conker, traced the matt white cuticle on its highly-polished brown. He was still humming from the excitement and anxiety of negotiating Paris with two females in his care, and determined that they saw it at its best. Every coil of dog-shit on the pavement, every decrepit tramp snoring on damp cardboard, he’d regarded as a personal affront, and had laboured to distract his charges by pointing out instead the inscription on a statue, or the wide majestic vista up a boulevard, or some incredible confection in a pâtisserie, fashioned like a lovers’ knot or a swan. It had been strain as much as pleasure, especially having to talk so much; make casual conversation more or less non-stop. Yet he was still eager for more: more inscriptions, statues, vistas, pastries, chat. Why limit themselves to the Ps, when they could work through the whole alphabet? –A for Arc de Triomphe, B for Bois de Boulogne, L for Louvre, which he could see if he stood up.
He looked in its direction, dazzled by the water, the sweep of gilded façades on the elegant right bank. He was tempted to haul the sun back like a kite, to prevent it ever setting; longed to keep this radiance all year, keep things green and vigorous, refuse to allow autumn to creep up on him before he’d had his spring. But the trees were already yellowing, he noticed; dead leaves frail and wrinkled on the path, the last roses in the flowerbeds dropping petals like small bloodstains.
‘Well, I’m whacked myself,’ Penny announced, sitting up and stretching. ‘And Pippa must be asleep on her feet. I really ought to take her back to bed.’
‘I don’t want to go to bed, Mum. I want to stay with Dan.’
He felt himself blushing the way he had as a boy; lit a cigarette to cover his confusion.
‘Grandma says it’s silly to smoke,’ Pippa said reprovingly.
‘Yes, it is – extremely silly.’ God, the power of four-year-olds! He had resisted months of nagging from clean-living, clean-air Georges, dire warnings about cancer from his mother; yet here he was stubbing out his Gauloise because a babe in arms had flattered him. Yet he had to admit he liked doing what she wanted, enjoyed her adulation.
‘We could ride back on a bus,’ he suggested. ‘And then you wouldn’t be in bed for ages. The buses take for ever in the rush hour.’
‘No, I want to go on a boat.’
‘I’m afraid none of the boats go in that direction. But we could catch a number twenty-one, and sit at the back and watch all the lights come on.’
An emphatic answering nod, then a sharp tweak at his hand, as if to haul him to the bus stop there and then.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ Penny said sarcastically. She eased her shoes back on, began collecting up the P-things he had bought her: pain d’épice, pâte de fruits, and a large bunch of delphiniums – pieds d’alouette.
Of course he’d wait for her – all night, all week, if need be. That was the whole object of the exercise. He had only suggested the bus because it took longer than the metro, and would spin out his last hour with her. But then back to stern reality. He must dust himself down, in all senses, take the
quickest, most direct route to his mother’s, and serve her up a rather different version of the day. He began sifting through a long list of excuses – rambling explanations for his lateness.
Extraordinary, he thought, with a double prick of conscience, as he dismissed them all as unworthy, not to say dishonest. His mother’s very existence had gone clean out of his head since that moment in the restaurant when Penny fed him a mouthful of her p–p–profiteroles, and her chocolate-coated fingers touched his lips.
‘This is us,’ said Penny, stopping outside a tall and dingy building squeezed between a furniture shop and a fleapit of a cinema. Its neon sign was flickering uncertainly, and some of the letters had failed to light up at all, so that instead of HOTEL MANCHESTER, it proclaimed itself in lurid purple as the H TEL MA CHE TE. Yes, a machete wouldn’t go amiss, Daniel reflected grimly, as he surveyed the narrow street, appalled that Penny had landed up in such a sleazy area, a notorious haunt of prostitutes and drug-pushers.
‘Will you be all right?’ he asked, transferring Pippa into her arms. The child had flaked out on the long trek from the bus stop, so he had done his chivalrous bit again and carried her up the hill.
‘Yeah, fine.’
Was she trying to get rid of him? The neon sign above them cast an eerie mauvish light on her face, making her look ill. Perhaps she was so exhausted herself, she couldn’t wait to collapse into bed. ‘Shall I help you up with the stuff?’ he offered, wishing he could carry her as well.
‘It’s okay, there’s a lift.’
He felt snubbed by her brusque tone. Surely she should be asking about tomorrow, scribbling down his phone number, suggesting that they meet again? She had seemed so keen before, as if she couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, yet here she was more or less giving him his marching orders.
‘Well, goodbye then,’ he said flatly.
‘Goodbye, and thanks for everything. It really was sweet of you.’
Yes, sweet, he brooded bitterly. That was the whole damned trouble. Henri IV would never have been called sweet – nor Henry VIII for that matter. It was the bastards who always got the girls, not the sweetie-pies. He said goodbye again, to detain her a few moments longer, but he could hardly keep repeating it like a record stuck in a groove. In any case, she had turned her back and was halfway through the door.
‘Goodbye,’ he said one final time, though only the door could hear him, and even that was shuddering shut. He forced himself to move, trudged halfheartedly down the street, riled by all the litter, the crude graffiti daubed on vandalized shops. Was Paris really so wonderful? All afternoon he’d been singing its praises, enthusing about its treasures and its culture, but had forgotten how unfriendly it seemed when he had first arrived as a foreigner. He’d known the language all right, but not the social nuances, the nitty-gritty of day-to-day survival. But then he would always be a foreigner in one sense, wherever he fetched up. He had no proper roots. Born in Lusaka, then dispatched to school in Wales – so far from his home and parents that he spent most of the school holidays with odd relatives in England – then a spell in Tanzania (after Cambridge), and now this job in Paris, with trips to Kenya several times a year. Whereas Penny had lived in the same house all her childhood, and never ventured further than Great Yarmouth.
He mooched back to the cinema, its garish posters advertising a film called Sexorama. He was tired of sex – its enticements and its lies, the way it flaunted everywhere yet nowhere. It had always caused him problems, especially in his boyhood when the whole mysterious subject was hedged around with dangers and restrictions: warnings from his mother, diatribes at school; vague threats and hints of retribution if one ever dared indulge. His contemporaries at Greystone Court, brought up just as strictly, had laughed their mentors to scorn once they reached maturity, shrugging off the admonitions as so much stupid claptrap. He alone was retarded, somehow believing that his mother (or the masters in that creepy school) still kept up a Black Book, in which every sexual transgression, however brief or petty, was recorded as a defilement.
Angrily he lit a cigarette, exhaled a spurt of smoke in the face of the nymphet who was smirking from the poster, displaying her half-naked breasts, as if to show him what he’d missed. The furniture shop was equally obsessed – a double bed in the window, with a black lace negligée draped suggestively across it. What the hell was he doing hanging round here anyway? He should be heading for his mother’s – who slept in winceyette pyjamas buttoned to the neck.
‘Dan!’
He wheeled round at the voice, flung his cigarette away.
‘Thank heavens you’re still here! I’m at my wits’ end. The dratted lift’s conked out and I didn’t know how on earth I was going to manage carrying a screaming child up seven flights of stairs.’
The screaming was audible even before they stepped into the foyer – though foyer was hardly an appropriate word for the low-ceilinged scrap of hallway which boasted nothing but a reception desk, a single vinyl chair, and the abandoned broken lift. Pippa was huddled at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by the packages, her face puffy and distorted as she sat howling in frustration.
‘She’s overtired,’ said Penny. ‘She gets like this if I keep her up too long. The only answer is to shove her into bed. Gosh! I just can’t tell you how pleased I am to find you. I hope you’re feeling strong, though! I’m afraid we’re right up at the top.’
Daniel stooped to pick the child up – easier said than done. She was evidently determined to resist him, holding her body rigid and pushing with her hands against his chest, all the while yelling at full volume. He felt a churning mixture of guilt, exasperation and resentment. It was petty of him maybe, unworthy of a rational adult, yet he was secretly aggrieved that she should repay him in this way, when he had indulged her every whim for the last six or seven hours.
Penny was on edge as well: pitching into Pippa, pouring out apologies to him, scattering parcels on the stairs in her haste to find the key, though she would hardly need it yet – they were still nowhere near the top. He stopped on the third-floor landing to rest his aching legs. The stairs were steep and narrow, meant only for emergencies, and carpeted with nothing but fag-ends. A door slammed in the passage to his right. He turned to see a bare-chested man emerging from the bathroom, clad in dirty corduroys, with a towel slung round his neck. Penny’s fellow-guests did little to reassure him. Two floors below, a couple of well-oiled lads had lurched past him to their room, tattoos of naked women on their arms.
He dared not stop for long. Pippa’s shrieks were still resounding through the stairwell, and any moment some outraged resident would start protesting at the noise. She was also flailing with her feet and fists, battling to get down, snail-trails from her runny nose smeared against his suit.
‘Pippa, stop it!’ Penny snapped. ‘You really are a little beast.’
He winced at her sharp tone, as if the rebuke were directed at him. All three of them were angry now, he realized with a twinge of fear, as he tramped on up the stairs. The gleaming magical afternoon had shattered like a fragile toy.
‘Almost there – thank God!’ Penny pounded on ahead to open the door.
He caught her up, stared appalled at the tiny shabby room, which was completely filled by its meager-sized twin beds. There was no space for anything else: no chest of drawers or wardrobe, not even a small chair. And as for refinements such as bedside lamps or a mirror on the wall, this hotel had clearly vetoed them as an unwarranted expense. Penny’s battered suitcase lay open on the floor, disgorging clothes and clutter (including some scanty undergarments he felt embarrassed to have seen). The room was dim and shadowy, lit by an unshaded bulb dangling over one bed.
The apology of a window looked out on a flat concrete roof which, like the stairs, had been used as a spare ashtray.
‘Can you put her on the bed?’ said Penny, moving a sweater and a furry frog to make more room for Pippa. ‘She usually has a bath, but there’s no way I’m going to give her
one tonight. She seems to have quietened down at last, and I can’t face another bout of screaming.’
He laid the child on the flimsy cotton coverlet, astonished at the change in her. She had switched from hysteria to torpor in a matter of two minutes.
‘Where’s my book?’ she asked, groping out a sleepy hand.
‘Down there by the case. Be an angel, Dan, and throw it over, will you? I can skip her bath, but not her precious story. However tired she is, we still have to plough through Peter Rabbit – right on to the camomile tea!’
Daniel passed her the book, then stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed. It was time for him to leave. This was a private ritual between mother and child, and he’d only be in the way; already felt uneasy about seeing the child undressed. Penny had removed her top and was now pulling off the leggings and the white pants underneath. ‘Goodbye, Pippa,’ he called, averting his eyes from her body.
She didn’t answer, just swivelled her head on the pillow and looked at him in silence, a long and searching look, then turned back to her mother. ‘Is he going to find my Daddy now?’
Penny blundered out of the room, pushing past him almost rudely. He realized she was crying, but trying to hide the fact. She ran on down the passage, dived into the bathroom and banged the door.
‘Where’s Mummy gone?’ Pippa sat up, instantly alarmed.
‘Just to the … er … toilet.’ He didn’t know what word they used. ‘You know – to have a pee-pee.’
The child appeared suspicious, while he himself was fretting about what he ought to do. Surely he should go and comfort Penny, yet how could he leave Pippa on her own? Besides, wouldn’t she get cold lying naked on the bed like that? ‘Have you got some pyjamas?’ he asked her.
Breaking and Entering Page 7
