“Exactly. She doesn’t need my advice about how to carry it on.”
“But what are we going to do? She’s alone in a hotel on a street full of prostitutes. When I look out of her window and see them, I get the feeling that is how Claudie will end up. She left home for someone who doesn’t want her. She isn’t fit to live alone, though that is what she ought to be doing.”
“I heard rumors around the house, echoes in the kitchen, that she was planning to take up residence abroad.”
Shirley muttered, “They wanted to go to the Middle East and work with refugees.” As she spoke she knew she was saying something idiotic, which no one had ever believed. She imagined refugees in Lebanon confiding their lives and destinies to Claudie. She came back to reality and said, “What would you do with another child?”
“I? Nothing. I shall have nothing whatever to do with another child.”
“Claudie isn’t fit to . . .” Now it was clear. She sat up straighter and became sure of herself. Yes, this was the way it was: because of the upbringing he had given Claudie, she was not fit to bring up anyone else. “She needs about eighty thousand francs. Please don’t think I suggested it—I hate the whole business. And she owes the hotel too . . .”
“I hope you didn’t suggest it, for your sake. You could be sent to prison.”
This was the second time jail had been mentioned. People kept on asking for her help and then wanting to jail her for giving it.
“Someone has to do something,” she said. “Someone should give her some money.”
“Someone probably will.”
“Do you think I should?”
“I haven’t said I think anything. But I can see you are deeply interested in the matter, so interested that you haven’t yet said what you have come to see me about.”
“She might kill herself,” said Shirley.
“Oh. Yes. How did she say she was going to do that?”
“Don’t laugh, please. I have another friend who is a much tougher proposition than Claudie and even she tried. I could get the money for her. But it seems wrong from your point of view. Dishonorable.”
Now he smiled, as if she had said something endearing. “There is also the father,” he said.
She was about to answer, “You are the father,” but of course he meant Jean-Luc. She had never considered Jean-Luc as a possible father, any more than Karel. Even Renata had not counted on Karel to help. He was expected to disappear until the problems were settled and the danger was past. “I don’t know about him. His family has money, but he doesn’t earn much. He seemed to be counting on this refugee job.”
“I hear phrases at home, complete sentences sometimes, even when I am trying not to listen. I hear you thought it would be a good idea for my daughter to leave her son and her home and live with a jobless young man.”
“I didn’t know she had really left home until Marie-Thérèse told me! I didn’t believe it. I don’t really know this Jean-Luc. I’ve just met him once. I hardly know Claudie. To tell you the truth, I really don’t know much about the situation.”
The telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up, listened, and put it down without speaking. It had given him time to think over and sum up what had been said. “You have talked to her about freedom from her family, haven’t you.”
“She talked to me, mostly. I do think it is wrong for a girl her age to have to ask for pocket money. I think she should work.”
“Yes,” he said, and glanced out the window to the office across the court, where stenographers sat round-shouldered.
“That isn’t work,” said Shirley. “It’s . . .” but she did not know the French for “drudgery.” “I only meant I thought she should be able to support Alain.”
“For the next twenty years? It would be agreeable.”
“You don’t believe any of it, do you?” Shirley said. “You don’t think she had even the beginning of an idea.” The sky could not be seen from this room, but the courtyard went black and she felt the approach of the summer storm. She knew she must stand up, shake hands, say good-bye and apologize for having disturbed him on a busy day. “Claudie tried to be free,” she muttered.
“Free to do what?” he said. “To get money from her father to give to her lovers? To have a dirty life in a dirty hotel? What else did you offer her?”
“I don’t lead a dirty life.”
Now he was not facing Shirley, but, unknown to him, Shirley’s mother. Behind her was still another person, a tall woman who had sat in her kitchen reading to the unemployed while they spread butter over toast. One day she would be frightening to men such as Monsieur Maurel. Tall as her grandmother, unshakeable as her mother, she spoke back at him out of a future. He sensed, though may not have remembered, what he had said; may then have heard something like “How dare you?” and sidestepped without actually retreating.
“A sad life, I meant,” he said.
Sad! He should have been around last winter, any Saturday, with the telephone ringing, and James not understanding that she was married and that Philippe would never like him, and poor Gertrude telling about the man who was not likely to divorce his wife. He ought to have known Renata!
“No, not sad,” she said, in this room equipped for nothing else but sadness though of course she could not be sure. “I’ve thought you were jealous sometimes. Something to do with Claudie.”
He said, “Claudie is a concern, a charge, like an indigent parent. My intelligent daughter married a fool. As for my not wanting Claudie to work—do you know what Arbeit Macht Frei means? It was written over the gates of concentration camps. How did you meet Claudie?”
“She was sent to me by St. Joseph,” Shirley said. “I had asked St. Joseph to send me someone who could change my life. Don’t you think it is strange that I should have heard the same story twice a few weeks apart? That two girls should have come to me saying they were pregnant, and that this was catastrophic, and that they should ask me what could be done? Why the same story? Why me?”
“If you were interested in criminal justice, and made your profession follow your interest, you would keep hearing about murder,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, and said to herself, Why aren’t people ever clear? Why don’t they say what they mean?
•
“My father sounded quite amiable on the telephone,” Claudie said. “I am grateful to you. August is approaching and the matter of the holidays had to be settled. Maman has taken a villa at Dinard. A month in Dinard should be good for me.”
“Did your father tell you that this time if you come home it is to stay?”
“No. He has all of August to tell me that.”
Claudie sat up in bed in her hotel room with her hair on her shoulders. She looked so like Renata when Renata had been frightened by the shadow of a rat that Shirley said, “Are you certain you want to go home? No one is forcing you. I just feel that your plans weren’t quite ready . . . you should have been better prepared . . .” Her own voice sounded high and anxious; she wondered what her audience consisted of—if she intended someone other than Claudie to hear.
A magnifying mirror hung from a ribbon around Claudie’s neck. Staring down into the glass she outlined the shape of her eyes. Her mouth was pulled to one side with the effort of concentrating, and it was a moment before she could answer: “I don’t feel well, but I am not ill. Not at all. I’ll outlive everyone.” She pulled the mirror away, offered chocolates to Shirley, and had some herself. She had been reading some hitherto unpublished letters of Chekov in a thick little magazine that was unpleasant to touch. She had cut the pages with a comb; the bed was covered with paper crumbs. The magazine had been Marcel Proust’s parting gift. “Jean-Luc really had meant to leave,” said Claudie. “But what could I do without help, without money, without my parents’ consent, and without being married? I can’t tell from here whether it is a fine day,” she went on, squinting at the window. “And don’t tell me it has to be nice because it is Par
is. Some streets are always gray.”
A slim reddish creature—a cockroach?—moved along the base of the wall. Out of Shirley’s capacity for forgetting crawled a live memory: Renata, and the plastic basin with the pattern of cornflowers.
“I hate Paris now,” Shirley said. “All I can see are garages and banks and the whores down there, under your window. The smell of the bistro downstairs nearly made me vomit when I passed it just now. I’ve forgotten why I live here. I don’t remember why I came.”
“If my family could hear you they wouldn’t believe it,” said Claudie, beginning to pin up her hair. “They think you know what you are doing every minute. Do you remember when you first met Papa, and you took the box of pastries away from him as if it belonged to you? Their private name for you after that was ‘the Roman general.’ ”
“Your mother called me that? And Marie-Thérèse?”
“Yes, all of them. It was envy, of course. I wish you were my mother.”
“I was about six when you were born.”
She could see into the windows of an apartment across the street. She seemed to be looking at miles of parquet flooring.
“Now what if my children’s stories were collected into a book?” said Claudie, leaning back. “It would be an immediate bestseller. I could support Alain and have him taught languages. I could travel. I might have an operation on my nose. All the women in my family have ugly ears and noses. Do you know my story about the squirrels who live in a tunnel?”
“What kind of story is that?”
“One I wrote for children. I’m talking to you about my stories. These squirrels are in their burrow underground.”
“You mean rabbits, don’t you? Or foxes?”
“I’ve never seen a fox,” said Claudie crossly. “The two baby squirrels belong to a doomed race. In the story the baby squirrels and their mother are sitting on a bench. The mother has chosen to die with the little ones . . .”
“What kind of death?”
“By order. It has been ordered, and all the little ones are doomed. The mother is sitting there waiting to die with them. It will not change anything. She is really very stupid. It is an obstinate animal decision, and she is sitting there in an obstinate animal way. Outside the door the father squirrel dances up and down and hammers on the door in a rage. His rage adds to the terror.”
“What is he so angry about?”
“It isn’t explained. It just adds to the terror.”
“That’s a charming story for children,” Shirley said. “Perhaps you could have it filmed and shown at bedtime. The condemned babies, the ignorant sacrificial mother, and the father’s anger creating a new fear . . . and, of course, there is the whole new idea about squirrels living underground.”
“You know the club, the Orpailleur? You’ve seen their puppets? Jean-Luc knew a man there who wanted to make a puppet play out of that story. But nothing came of it.”
“I’ve never heard of the Orpailleur as a place for children’s stories.”
“No, perhaps not my stories. With whiskey at two thousand francs a glass, they would want everything clear. Perhaps I could write another ending. You know that my father is very ill, don’t you? Did Marie-Thérèse tell you?”
“Who told you?”
“I read anything I find lying around. As you do, Shirley. We’re alike. I know everything. Papa may be going to die, I think.”
“It is not your father who is ill. It is my mother. The only person I mentioned it to in Paris is Madame Roux. So you’ve been there too, have you? Yes? And she told you I was a great reader, particularly of my husband’s mail?”
“Have you ever made love with a dying man?” said Claudie, very frightened, waiting for Shirley to forget what she had said.
“Question for question,” said Shirley. “Is Papa the father of Alain?”
Claudie stood on her feet now, arms akimbo. She was perfectly groomed and dressed from the top of her head to her waist. From under the bed, pulling the garments with one foot, she retrieved a pair of stockings and a garter belt. “I had a skirt somewhere,” she said, looking for it. She suddenly flashed her most innocent smile. “I wanted so much to live like you, Shirley,” she said. “My dream was to have money and love and never grow old. I wanted to be like you, happy. You are sitting on my skirt, I’m afraid. I shall have to ask you to give it to me. Chekov lost his virginity at thirteen. He had terrible parents too.”
When her father came in she wept in his arms. Shirley buried her face in Chekov’s letters. When she next looked, Claudie sat on the edge of the bed, pulling up her stockings. Shirley turned her back and she fixed her eyes on the windows across the street. It embarrassed her to be here with Papa while Claudie finished putting her clothes on. He stood, cold and impatient, with his arms folded; but when he came to stand behind Shirley, as if to see what she was seeing, the touch of his hand on her arm seemed a movement of pity.
All right, then, she thought. Settle my problems. Run my life. How much would it cost me? She gave up wondering. Claudie would know soon.
•
The two Maurels said good-bye as if this were Shirley’s room. In an odd way she felt that it could be and that the tag ends were for her to tie together. She had been unable to bring order to her own kitchen the morning of Whitsunday, but within other people’s lives she had automatic gestures of neatness.
She opened each of the drawers. Claudie had left behind a photograph of Alain. It was the picture that was to have been shown to the ex-priest and the sculptress. He sat on one ankle, in a classic children’s studio pose, with his weight on an arm and a hand, and a light spot on his forehead, and looked dully into space. Around the edges of the frame, all but obliterating him, were pictures of people Claudie liked as well or better: Claudie herself, and Gérard Philippe as “Le Cid,” and James Dean. The last two were dead. Face down was an old passport picture of Papa, with his tie knotted up under his chin. Change the hair and tie, and he was almost handsome; at any rate, he had once been young. He looked as if he might easily recite Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty,” and he looked much like his elder daughter.
She found an empty bottle of Coty’s Emeraude, faded and sweet, the neck of the bottle mossy with dust, and an advertisement torn out of a newspaper: a film director was looking for a girl of fifteen to play Madame de Sévigné’s daughter. The film would be played in modern dress. Madame de Sévigné, a rich widow living in a suite at the Ritz . . . The girl, her daughter, was to be pure, beautiful, talented, inexperienced and perverse.
Shirley left the door open behind her. When she came out to the street she had a foretaste of autumn. She imagined August and autumn, then winter, through the window of the empty room. The whores on the corner spread newspapers over their heads as the first drops of rain began to fall. The smell of frying from the dark bistro, which had been nauseating only a few hours before, now had its winter aspect and suggested shelter and warmth. She would leave Paris the day after tomorrow. When she came back in two months’ time, the rain would have washed everything away.
14
IT RAINED through autumn and winter and through part of the next spring, and then one April Friday was suddenly, blindingly hot. Shirley looked in cafés she had known and saw nothing hut strangers. Gérald Ziff stopped, turned; she turned too. He waved at her. They looked at each other and smiled without speaking. The girl beside him was younger than Marie-Thérèse. She was tall and very thin with curly hair and freckles. She was a girl who would keep turning her ankles and slipping out of her shoes. Shirley wondered if he was spending August in Paris this year too.
He must have trusted Shirley, for he dared tell the family he had seen her. The next afternoon, as she knelt in the boxroom separating rubbish from the rubbish she was obliged to keep, and looking quickly through whatever Philippe had forgotten or left behind (his personal property was none of her business now), the telephone rang in the living room. When it persisted she answered it, ready to take a message for the n
ew tenant of the apartment, Sutton McGrath. The listing in the book was still “Higgins S-M, Decoration” and might be for some time to come, but the telephone was now McGrath’s. Even the lock on the door had been changed. Madame Roux was guardian of the keys.
“Yes, I suppose I do sound surprised,” she said to Madame Maurel. “I don’t expect anyone to call me here. I don’t live here now. Yes, eight months, nearly nine. No, not in Greece. I was in Greece for a few weeks. I have just come from there now. Yes, I can come to you, but not for a meal. I haven’t time. Tomorrow, Saturday, in the afternoon.”
She had to turn the key in every day to Madame Roux. Madame Roux would part the bead curtain wearing, as always, a smile for a customer. When she saw it was Shirley she did not efface the smile but let her eyes go dead. She held out her hand.
“Finished?”
“No, I’m afraid I shall have to come back tomorrow, and perhaps once after that.”
“He is very patient,” said Madame Roux. “He would have been within his rights to have had everything belonging to you put out in the courtyard.”
“Was he within his rights to move into an apartment for which I was still paying rent? Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
A hand parted the bead curtain; a blond head looked out. The guitar-playing McGrath said, “You can take your time, you know. I’m sorry about the mixup, but I do have a lease. I put your stuff in that little room; I thought it would make it easier for you.”
“Yes, thank you. It does. You were wise to insist on a lease. I never thought of anything like that.”
“I didn’t insist on anything,” he said. “Madame Roux had it ready for me. Didn’t you?” He seemed uncertain.
“Did I not!” she said, opening the door and letting the bell ring. “And, oh, Mrs. Higgins, your mail. Some personal mail. I have kept it for you, as you have no mailbox now.”
Shirley was careful to rip the unopened letters across before throwing them away; otherwise the garbage men were likely to fish them out of the cans and post them again, thinking they had been dropped there by mistake. Out of today’s handful she kept only one. Every inch of the envelope was covered with forwarding addresses. It had been mailed in Canada in July and had been traveling to the wrong places ever since.
A Fairly Good Time Page 29
