Give Them All My Love

by Gillian Tindall

  ‘I ought to contribute,’ I said inadequately to Hermione. We were on our own, dawdling over breakfast coffee in the flat’s austere but serviceable Parisian kitchen, all exposed gas-pipes, oil-cloth and traditional iron pans. It was the Saturday after Christmas, and Paul had taken Ann to see the Centre Beaubourg, mainly (I realized) to give Hermione and myself a chance for a chat on our own.

  ‘Nonsense, Tom,’ she said firmly. ‘Absolute nonsense. That was the deal – that we should take the mill-house off your hands for the time being and keep it in good order in return. We love going there, you know … Oh dear, does that sound thoughtless?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m just glad someone’s getting pleasure from it.’ It sounded mechanical, but I did mean it.

  ‘I was going to say ‘‘we love going there in spite of everything’’ – but of course it’s really because of everything too. I mean that there were many, many good years before that awful accident, when we used to come on visits and you and Simone and Marigold were happy there. Those years were – are – there. Nothing can take them away or alter them. Somehow I don’t want to abandon them.’ She added quickly, ‘Of course, that’s just how I perceive it, for myself,’ as if afraid I might hear in her words an implied criticism of my own flight.

  I pushed a sugar lump around the oil-cloth that was faintly ringed by a palimpsest of hot pans. ‘The trouble is,’ I said presently, ‘What you say is a truth that works both ways. Horror – evil – are there for ever too as well as happiness. Like the marks on this cloth. Even God, as they say, can’t undo the past. For good or ill. Though some people, I’ve noticed, turn somersaults trying to pretend that He can.’

  ‘Like who?’

  I had difficulty in explaining. For some reason I had been thinking of Humphrey and his panic-stricken retreat into the Deadly Embrace of Carmen, but as soon as I focused the thought more I realized this did not quite fit. Nor, really, did my Aunt Madge, though she was closer … ‘It isn’t really the same, I suppose,’ I said, ‘but a silly old aunt of mine wants to believe that the dead are still alive. Messages from the Beyond and so on. But then a lot of people much less silly than her have that weakness. Isn’t that one of the basic tenets of Christianity, that through belief we overcome death?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Hermione equably. ‘My family are Jewish – were, I should say. They’ve all gone now.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d never thought of Hermione having any particular background lying behind her New York one, but of course it fitted. ‘Isn’t it much the same set of beliefs, though?’

  ‘No. Jews don’t believe in personal survival. Not in an afterlife in which you see Granny and Cousin Ruth again, anyway. It’s this life that counts. There are no promises that anyone will meet up again.’

  ‘I didn’t realize that.’ I wondered if Lewis knew that. But of course, he must.

  ‘Lots of people don’t realize,’ she said. ‘Paul didn’t, till I happened to mention it one day. People reared in even a vaguely Christian ethos tend to assume that it’s the proto-religion and that all other cults must be a version of it – give or take the odd Virgin Birth and such dispensables.’

  ‘I imagine my aunt does.’

  ‘Yes, I should think she would … I’ll tell you one thing I’ve noticed, though: a fervent belief in personal survival is actually a rotten preparation for dying. You might think it would be a strengthener, but it isn’t. Too much at stake, perhaps. And too essentially incongruous. I’ve seen one or two of Paul’s elderly relations die in a blue funk muni des sacraments de la Sainte Eglise etc., etc… I’m willing to have a small bet with you that when your aunt’s time comes she won’t take kindly to the reality of death either.’

  ‘Interesting. She seems in good form at the moment. But I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Yes do, I should like to know.’ Hermione spoke briskly, as if I had offered her some useful statistics that she needed for a scholarly article.

  ‘Did Paul’s family mind him marrying you?’ I said, wondering a little that I’d never thought to ask her this before.

  ‘If they did,’ she said, smiling at me with her cat’s eyes, which still seemed screwed up against the wreathing smoke of the cigarettes she had long since abandoned, ‘they were all, including Paul, too polite to tell me so. And I was too self-centred and pleased with myself in those days to notice.’

  She got up to fetch us more coffee from the swan-necked enamel pot. I did not say anything, for I could feel her thinking. As soon as she sat down again she said:

  ‘Now that most of his old people are dead and gone I’m rather sorry that I didn’t ask them more questions about their beliefs. They wouldn’t really have minded, as they’d got me classified as une originale anyway, like some sort of precocious child, and it might have been interesting. I don’t know about you, but I find I get more interested in these things – the theories, I mean, no yearnings or anything like that – as I get older.’

  ‘You don’t hope for anything in particular?’

  ‘Nope. Nor in this life either, come to that. I mean – we’ve had a lot, and what else is there?’ Her eyes met mine again, half mocking and half, I thought, in boundless commiseration. ‘The less I expect of anything or anyone, though, the more fascinated I find I get by other people’s structures. I mean – well, just look at the Christian attitude to the body. The full-strength Catholic version of it, anyway: ‘‘That which is sown in corruption is raised in incorruption, and we shall be changed’’. – See, I do know something of the Christian cult, after all.’

  ‘Quite. I knew you were lying in your usual way when you said you didn’t.’

  She put out her cat’s tongue at me, but continued determinedly:

  ‘What I’m trying to say is that there’s the most extraordinary paradox there. The Christians seem to have no doubt that the body is – is not made to last.’ (I heard her substitute this for the more graphic phrase she must have had in her mind.) ‘Scripture even emphasizes the body’s transience to teach us not to be vain. But at the same time they – and all of us, come to that – go on respecting a dead body as if it remained the – the temple of the soul. Or however we like to phrase it. The lasting symbol of the loved spirit, anyway. Well I do think that’s rather interesting. Don’t you?’

  I did, as a matter of fact, but I probably looked as if I was wrestling with unwieldy thoughts of my own (which I was) for Hermione apparently decided she had said more than enough on this subject. She became brisk, and bustled about and asked me if I wanted to go to the local street market with her to pick out vegetables and fruit for the weekend? Hermione, who had yearned loquaciously for unobtainable hamburgers and liverwurst-on-rye in the Paris of the 1950s, had, with the passage of the years, become a skilled and scrupulous French cook.

  Markets always lift my spirits; there seems something brave and also vulnerable about them: the cold air, the good, perishable things to eat, the wrapped-up stall holders, the racks of flimsy underclothes and cut-price sweaters … But that morning I made an excuse not to accompany her. I wanted a little time in the flat on my own. In the bottom of one of the family tallboys, I had noticed a stack of telephone directories a few years old. Two had fallen out when Hermione had been extracting her winter boots and she had shoved them back again, apparently not reflecting that it might be more convenient to get rid of them. At the time, I had thought this amusing. Then my mind had got to work on the matter, and I felt glad the directories were there. I wanted to look something up, and I had already established that the current directory was no use to me.

  ‘… it was his own car, or so I understood. Paris-registered. I suppose he lived there.’

  1977. September 25th 1977.

  I found, in Paul and Hermione’s cupboard, three directories for 1975.

  French telephone directories are not quite like British ones. Subscribers are listed under their names, but many also under professional categories and occupations; and some, from the over-developed French
sense of privacy, are only listed thus. This complicated double-entry system, which had sometimes irritated me in the past, now turned out to be a blessing. For of the fat books for 1975, two were professional listings; the only one that was the straight list of subscribers was for the latter part of the alphabet.

  Strung out between frustration and qualified hope, I began to turn the pages of the first occupational tome: Abattoirs, acrobates, acuponcture, apiculture (in Paris?), aquafortistes, arboristes, architectes … I had hardly dared hope that there would be a section of people proclaiming themselves Artistes-peintres – surely there would be just too many of them? – but there they turned out to be. Or a selection of them, at any rate. Vaguely speculating on what formally codified French basis such a selection might be made (Income tax status? Long establishment? Proof – submitted in triplicate – of having had exhibitions of work?) I was only beginning to run my eye down the column when the name I sought stood out, as a known name sometimes will. After all, I reflected in weak triumph and surprise, this particular step really was as easy as that. I could have taken it any time in the last six years.

  ‘Hughes, David, artiste-peintre; commissions, encadrements. 18 bis Rue Vieille du Temple, 75004.

  There was a telephone number too, of course. But it was the address I wanted.

  The Fourth Arrondissement of Paris includes most of the old quarter of the Marais, the district in which Simone and I had first lived together. By one of those pointless but poignant operations of chance, the Rue Vieille du Temple had been a very little way from our own hideout off the Place des Vosges. But, thinking about it, I realized that something other than chance was operating. When Simone and I had found our two cheap rooms above a bakery in the 1950s the district had still been poor, its great sixteenth-and seventeenth-century mansions blotched by damp, defaced by sign-writing, divided up into printing shops and garment-trade warehouses. Indeed, since the war and the enforced exodus of many of its inhabitants, the area had been particularly run down; in our street, near the junction with the Rue des Rosiers, a barber’s shop and a one-time kosher restaurant had stood derelict, and boards covered the windows of a small synagogue. But I knew that by the 1960s and ’ 70s the Marais had become first a district where those with foresight quarried new apartments out of spacious, rat-frequented attics, and then a place where it was smart to live, the bakers and grocers giving way to sellers of antiques, new art and newer clothes. If David Hughes had been living in the Marais within the last ten years, I thought, he must have been doing nicely, in spite of the apparently modest, workmanlike claim in the directory to be a craftsman who accepted commissions and also undertook framing.

  I found some excuse to set out for the Marais on my own. Since Ann believed me to be constantly in the grip of nostalgia that week, it was not difficult. In fact she was wrong: cumulative passages through Paris over three decades had all but obliterated for me my own earliest traces. Wherever Simone was for me, she was not here, in this city of traffic and neon lights. But it was true that I had hardly been in the Marais for many years, though I was aware in a general way of its changing face.

  The Place des Vosges particularly impressed me. Remembering it as a patchwork of facades, mostly nineteenth-century reconstructions subsequently decayed, I was unprepared for the newly restored homogeneity of pink brick with stone dressings which now met my tourist’s eyes. The spacious public garden in the centre of the square was unchanged, merely tidied up a little – but I remembered only now (how could I ever have forgotten it?) the sculptured horse and rider near one end. Louis XIII? The horse’s belly was, for prosaic reasons, supported on a stone tree-stump; crossing the square to my destination in the Rue Vieille du Temple, I suddenly recalled, in a blurred way as through many waters, a joke between Simone and me, a lovers’ joke, about that phallic trunk.

  I also recalled – though I do not believe I had ever shared this with Simone – that during that first winter we had together, crossing the square on my hike home from the school on the south side of the city where I still taught, I used to watch the muffled children at play with their hoops and balls and little carts on strings, and fantasize the child that, through our love, would one day become a living creature in the light. That was more than two years before Marigold was born, in England. We never, as it turned out, had a child who played like a real, storybook French child in the Place des Vosges, watched over by a Breton nursemaid in a cap with streamers. But just as, even now, I catch myself day-dreaming consolingly, vainly, about the grandchildren, Marigold’s children, whom I will never see, as if they really existed somewhere in that alternative time-scheme which even God cannot now implement, so, before her birth, I kept her place warm for her with a child of air.

  The baker’s shop above which we had lodged had become a purveyor of expensive objects announced in gilt letters as ‘Gifts’: phrenological china heads, Art Deco tea-cosies, pre-war telephones, toy steam trains, moneyboxes, dolls in Victorian dress, consciously Naïvist pictures of sheep … In keeping with what I recognized from French newspaper features as ‘la mode retro’, the flyblown painted glass panels of the baker’s, showing cows and a few inches of miniature central French landscape, had been preserved and restored.

  The cobbler’s next door had become part of a photocopy and instant print shop. The defunct barber’s at the corner of the Rue des Rosiers had gone, but new kosher establishments had appeared: evidently Jews from North Africa had infused fresh life into the district’s old identity. I was glad to see that.

  At number 18 bis I rang the bell marked ‘Concierge’. With the double vision, past and present, that the Marais had induced, I really did not know what I expected. A traditional French female dragon in bombazine, impregnated with perspiration and garlic? Surely not. But I was faintly disconcerted all the same when there appeared at the adjacent small window a young black girl, clutching a toy black baby to her breast.

  Monsieur Euze? I gave the name the kind of sound, like a distant French river, that a French speaker would give it.

  The girl was uncertain, pleasantly dithery, sexually responsive to me. She had not been here that long, voyezvous, Monsieur. She would ask her aunt.

  The aunt, an even blacker lady but of a different vintage, now joined her in the window, which was beginning to resemble a Punch and Judy stage. I was reassured by the aunt. There was about her the old-fashioned air of a colonial French subject firmly aspiring to be du metropole. Yes, one remembered Monsieur Euze quite well. An artist he had been. But he had gone away. Three or more years ago now. In ’79 or ’ 80, perhaps.

  I heard myself embark, for reasons that were not entirely clear even to me, on a rambling explanation: I believed I had known Monsieur Euze when we were both young, but I was not quite certain that this would be the same Monsieur Euze: Euze was a common name in our country, voyezvous …

  My vague trial balloon (for so the French call such overtures) seemed to strike my listeners as plausible. At any rate they did not tell me that their Monsieur Euze had been far too young to be a companion of my youth. Instead, the older lady nodded sagaciously and confirmed that their Monsieur Euze had been a compatriot of mine but ‘dark haired, for an Englishman. With a little beard, you know – ah, but perhaps not in your day, Monsieur?’

  It was indeed many years since we had met, I assured her. It would be so good to talk over old times. Perhaps, if the ladies had a forwarding address – ?

  They regretted. There had been a forwarding address, no doubt of it, the older informed the younger, who was now inclined to coy, disclaiming smiles. But letters sent on to it had eventually been returned undelivered.

  A faint embarrassment now hovered in the air. A reticence that suggested, to my over-attentive senses, that more might be suspected of Monsieur Euze than I was going to be told. At length the older lady ventured that she had intended to take the ownerless letters round to the local police station. After all, the police would know where he was. The police had everyone on record
, not a doubt. Domiciles, after all, had to be registered … But somehow she had never taken the letters. It hadn’t quite seemed her place to do so … Voyez-vous monsieur.

  ‘Perhaps I will call at the police station,’ I said, ‘and see if they can help me.’

  The ladies beamed. This was obviously the most satisfactory solution to their obscure, half-admitted problem. They had been waiting for several years for someone like me to appear, and here I was. Voila tout.

  As I left, the young girl with the baby called after me:

  ‘Come back and tell us if you find out where he is –’ And then, reproved by her aunt, relapsed into childish giggles.

  I hastened on my way to meet Ann outside the Musée Carnavalet which was not far away. I did not go to the police station in the Marais after all, that day. I was already a little late for Ann. Was that why I did not go?

  Not really. For on none of the remaining days in Paris did I go. My long-term campaign of action (for so, in retrospect, I now see it) was not consistently sustained, being punctuated by prolonged lapses during which I stayed quiet, gathering my forces for the next oblique assault. It was also punctuated by fits of cowardice.

  Better stop here. Better not know any more.

  ‘You said at the time that you didn’t want to know anything about the man.’ Lewis’s voice, superficially reasonable but with a hint of panic in it.

  I know I did. But I’ve changed my mind. Only, I need to wait. Two lines of approach, I have. But do they really join as they appear to? Is the pattern of which I am now convinced, in both hope and dread, actually there or is some mocking, stupid coincidence at work?