City of Darkness and Light

by Rhys Bowen

  I lay in my narrow bed, feeling like a limp rag and so glad that I was not facing an almost three-hour train journey. I don’t think I could have sat upright for that long. The proprietress came in with a tray of fresh rolls and peppermint tea. I sipped the tea, managed a whole roll, and felt a little stronger. Liam nursed, then fell asleep beside me. I lay back too, feeling the fresh sea air coming in through the shutters.

  I awoke to Liam crawling over me in an attempt to escape from the bed. My head still throbbed but my stomach felt less queasy; in fact, I felt a little hungry. I stood up, held onto the wall because the ground still swayed, then made my way across to the window and pushed open the shutters. Below me was a glorious scene. The sun sparkled on blue water. Red-sailed fishing boats were bobbing in the harbor. Fishermen in bright blue smocks were unloading their catch on the dock. The air resounded to the cries of seagulls. Two young children walked past wearing a local costume and wooden shoes. It was all so picturesque and so foreign.

  “Look Liam,” I said, picking him up. “We’re in France.”

  By lunchtime the tonic had been delivered. It was a dark sludge that tasted disgusting but I dutifully swallowed a tablespoonful. I was served a hearty bowl of soup and sat in a chair by the window, wondering if Sid and Gus would send me a telegram in reply. Actually I was half hoping that they would come to Le Havre themselves to escort me to Paris. It was the sort of thing they would do. But when darkness fell there was no word from them. For dinner I managed a freshly caught sole and buttery potatoes. Liam was also showing interest in food again and was quite annoyed when all he was offered was the breast.

  After a good night’s sleep I began to feel more like myself and suggested that I might travel on to Paris that day. My head was now clear enough that I was also thinking of the extra cost of another night at a pension. Miss Hetherington wouldn’t hear of it. Her sick friends didn’t feel up to the long train journey to Venice yet. She said we would all stay one day more and then travel as far as Paris together. They would then continue on to Venice, and I’d be in the capable hands of my friends. Since my legs felt like jelly after coming down the stairs to breakfast I had to agree that traveling with friends would be preferable to traveling alone and trying to manage Liam and my luggage when I felt as weak as a kitten. So I agreed and thanked them for all they had done.

  “Nonsense. We unprotected women must stick together,” Miss Hetherington said.

  So I spent a second delightful day sitting in the lounge overlooking the seafront. First I wrote to Daniel, telling him that I had arrived safely in France but that I was resting in Le Havre due to a bad case of seasickness. I thought it prudent not to mention that Liam had also been very ill. No need to worry him when he had so much to worry about already. I told him I’d send another letter as soon as I reached Sid and Gus.

  This small task left me quite tired and I lay back in my chair, watching the busy scene in the harbor outside my window. It was all so foreign and fascinating with peasant ladies in white lace caps and the fishermen in their blue smocks, contrasting with the red sails. No wonder the Impressionst painters were so keen to paint here. After lunch Therese, the landlady’s daughter, came to amuse Liam, whose eyes no longer looked sunken. It was a huge relief to hear him laugh loudly when Therese knocked down a tower of blocks. I tried him on a little mashed potato and gravy that night and he ate well. It seemed that our ordeal was finally at an end. By tomorrow night I’d be safely with Sid and Gus.

  In the morning we set off, the wagon piled high with ourselves and our luggage, for the station. I noted the departure time of the train then paid a boy to deliver my telegram to the telegraph office. Sid and Gus would probably be waiting anxiously, I thought. They’d be so relieved to know I was all right and finally on my way. Miss Hetherington found an empty compartment for the six of us plus Liam and the train pulled out of the station. Yesterday’s good weather had given way to a steady rain as we made our way toward the capital city. The French countryside looked bleak and gray, rainswept scenes of fields divided by lines of poplar trees, just coming into leaf. We passed the massive cathedral at Reims, rising above the sloping roofs of the town.

  “Catholics, of course,” Miss Pinkerton said when the other women remarked how magnificent it was. “Why can’t Protestants build decent cathedrals?”

  Liam had just fallen asleep on my lap when we came into the outer suburbs of Paris. After having lived in New York for four years, the thing that struck me was that this was a city of low buildings. In New York we were used to new skyscrapers and apartment blocks. Even the tenements were five or six floors high. Here church spires and domes rose above rooftops. And to my disappointment these buildings did not resemble my vision of Paris. They were small and mean and dirty, reminding me of the back streets of Belfast or Liverpool. The only difference was that these houses all had shutters, some brightly painted, some peeling. And there were bright advertising signs painted on house walls. Signs advertising Gauloises cigarettes and Dubonnet and other unfamiliar names. Then I spotted something in the distance above the rooftops, an ironwork tower, impossibly high. I pointed excitedly.

  “Look,” I said. “Over there.”

  “Goodness me,” Miss Pinkerton exclaimed. “I heard it was quite a monstrosity, and it is, isn’t it? I wonder they didn’t take it down after the exhibition.”

  “I suppose it’s progress,” Miss Hetherington said. “We must get used to such things. Skyscrapers and Eiffel Towers. Impressionists and Post-Impressionists who daub on colors willy-nilly and call it painting. That’s what the world is coming to.”

  Personally I thought the Eiffel Tower was spectacular and gazed at it until the train went around a bend and it was lost. The train was slowing, and with a final huff and puff we pulled into Saint-Lazare station. Porters swarmed into the carriage, whisking away bags so rapidly that one never expected to find them again. I stood on the steps of our carriage looking out over the crowd and the smoke, an expectant smile on my face, as I tried to spot Sid and Gus.

  “Do you require a taxicab?” the porter who was balancing the mountain of our luggage on a barrow asked.

  “We require to be taken to the Gare de Lyon to catch our train to Venice,” Miss Hetherington said in efficient French. “This young lady will be met by her friends. You may leave her luggage here and take ours out to the curb.”

  “Do you see your friends yet?” Miss Pinkerton asked.

  I was still looking around, Liam perched on one hip. “No, not yet.”

  “Why don’t you stay here with the bags and we’ll go and locate them for you,” Miss Hetherington said. “What do they look like?”

  I described Sid’s cropped black hair and mannish attire and Gus’s predilection for peasant clothing and shawls. Miss Hetherington looked aghast. “Sapphists are they? Bohemians? My dear, are you sure you should be staying with them? One hears the most extraordinary things about the way these artists live. I’m not sure that your husband would approve, seeing that he works in government.”

  I assured her that Daniel knew all about Sid and Gus, who were my neighbors at home, and that they were my dear friends. Miss Hetherington gave me a strange look before she sent her troops out across the station to find Sid and Gus. They returned ten minutes later to say that there was no sign of them.

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “I wonder if the telegram was never delivered. I thought it was strange when they didn’t reply to me or even come to Le Havre to escort me. I suppose I’d better take a cab to their residence.”

  “They are expecting you?” Miss Pinkerton asked. “These artistic types are known to be flighty.”

  “They know I’m coming. They responded to my cable.”

  “Well, then. We’ll help you into a cab and all will be well.” She motioned to a porter to bring my trunk and carpet bag to a waiting fiacre. Liam and I were loaded in. I shook hands all around and thanked them again for their kindness. Then the driver flicked at the whip and off we went, rattling
over the cobbles.

  “Is it far?” I called out to the cabby over the noise of the hoofs and wheels.

  “No, madame. Not far at all. Ten minutes.”

  We left the noise and bustle of the station and immediately we were in a street more like the Paris I had dreamed of as a child. The street was lined with plane trees and on either side were light-yellow stone buildings, four and five stories high, decorated with wrought-iron balconies. Some of them had shops at street level, with bright awnings hanging over them, and there was a café on the corner with tables outside on the sidewalk. Nobody was sitting at the tables as it was still drizzling, but a man and woman walked arm in arm under his big umbrella—the woman holding the leash of a small poodle dog. On the corner was a flower seller standing beside her barrow of spring flowers. We turned into a treelined square with a lovely ornate gray stone church on one side. Two priests in flat black hats were standing on the steps and a bell was tolling. But right after the church we entered a smaller street and clearly a less salubrious area. There were bars and gaudy signs for cabarets mixed in with greengrocers and bookstores. There was even an occasional girl lounging against a wall trailing a feather boa. I’d seen enough of them in New York to recognize what she was, making it clear that this area might be more active when the sun went down.

  I also saw that we were coming into the Paris of artists. We passed three of them, walking together, one of them carrying a canvas while his friends were in animated conversation, gesturing with their hands. We emerged into an open area with a fountain in the middle. A street sign announced it to be the Place Pigalle and I vaguely remembered having heard of it. Then I saw a windmill, illuminated with electric lights and knew why. This was the famed Moulin Rouge cabaret where the cancan was born and the girls wore next to nothing. The boulevard that led from Pigalle was wide and treelined but almost immediately we turned into a narrow side street that ascended a hill. There were shops and cafés close to Place Pigalle but as the street went up the hill it became more residential. The cab halted.

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  “Oui, madame. Rue des Martyrs.” He climbed down, took Liam from me, and assisted me. “I will bring the baggage,” he said, handing Liam back to me as the child started to cry.

  I managed to open the heavy wrought-iron and glass front door with my free hand and entered into a dark foyer. There was a faint smell of drains, and someone had been cooking with garlic. On one side of the foyer a flight of stone stairs curved up. The only adornment was a large, sad-looking potted plant on a marble table and a speckled mirror on the wall. As I stood looking around, wondering which apartment might be Sid and Gus’s, I noticed that there was an open doorway beside the front door, leading to a dark cubbyhole. As I approached it a large woman emerged. She was dressed in a high-collared black dress. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her sallow face and she wore a black cap with trailing black ribbons perched on her head.

  “Bonjour, madame,” I said, smiling at her.

  “What do you want?” she asked, staring at me as if I was a worm that had just crawled onto her clean floor. “There are no rooms available if you are looking for one.”

  I recoiled at the unfriendly reception. “I’m here to visit my friends, Mademoiselle Walcott and Mademoiselle Goldfarb, who reside here,” I said, my brain wrestling with long-forgotten French. “I am Madame Sullivan, just arrived from America. Perhaps you can tell me the number of their apartment.”

  She folded her arms across a large bosom. “They are not here,” she said coldly.

  Twelve

  “Pardon?” I asked, not sure that I’d understood her correctly.

  She repeated it, spitting out the words slowly as if for an idiot.

  Of course, I thought, realizing my stupidity. They had gone to the station to meet me as planned and somehow been delayed. I should have waited longer.

  “I expect they went out to meet me at the station and somehow we missed each other,” I said in my halting French. “Do they keep their door locked, do you know? Or do you have a key so that I can go up and wait until they come back?”

  “I told you, madame. They are not here,” she repeated. “They have gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?” I demanded. I could hear my voice, shrill and echoing in the tall narrow hall.

  “How do I know? I have not seen them for one, maybe two days. At least I know they did not return home last night because they were not here when I locked the front door at eleven. This is a respectable household. The door is always locked at night.”

  “And they didn’t tell you where they were going?”

  “I am the concierge, not their confidante,” she said. “I do not ask questions. They pay their rent and what they do with their time is their own. The rent is paid until the end of the month. It matters not to me whether they are here or not.” And she gave a very Gallic shrug.

  “But they are awaiting me,” I said. “I sent a cable from America. They replied that they were glad I was coming. They told me to send a telegram to inform them which train I was taking from Le Havre and they would come to meet me.” I fought to find the words to make this clear to her in French. “Did a telegram not arrive for them this morning?”

  “The telegraph boy did come. I told him they were not here. He went again.”

  By now the cabby had brought my bags into the hall and stood there behind me, waiting to be paid.

  “This is mad,” I said, not knowing the word for ridiculous. “It doesn’t make sense. They are not the type of people who would depart and not tell me.”

  But a small voice nagged at the back of my brain that they were that type of people. They did lots of crazy things on impulse. The one thing they wouldn’t do would be to let down a friend.

  She shrugged again. “What can I say? If they are not here, you cannot visit them, can you? I suggest that madame return her bags to the vehicle and go to a hotel until her friends come back. If they decide to come back, that is.”

  I was tired, I was weak. The floor was beginning to sway again as if I was back on the ship, and now I was angry too. “Absolutely not,” I said. I opened my purse and rummaged in it. “Look.” I waved a piece of paper at her. “Here is their cable. Do you see? I will translate if you don’t read English. It says, ‘So excited you are coming to stay. Send telegram with arrival time and will meet train at Saint-Lazare.’ You see. They are expecting me. Obviously something has delayed them but they will return shortly. Now please escort me to their room and I will await their return.”

  My confidence in speaking a foreign tongue grew with my indignation until at the end I was gesturing with my free hand like a true Frenchwoman. She sighed. “Very well. I will take you to their rooms, if you insist. You’ll have to wait for the trunk. My husband will bring it up when he returns. Me, I do not intend to carry it up five flights of stairs.” She started for the staircase. “Follow me,” she said.

  I hoisted Liam higher on my hip, and followed her up the stairs, then a second flight, then a third. Our footsteps echoed in the high stairwell. We passed closed doors on each landing, there was no sign of life except for the woman in black and myself. As we started the fourth flight my weakness overcame me and I began to feel dizzy again.

  “I must stop and rest,” I said, leaning against the bannister. “I have been unwell. That was why I couldn’t travel on from Le Havre before this. I should have been here two days ago.”

  She spun around, glaring at me. “I hope you don’t bring a sickness into this house. What was wrong with you?”

  “Mal de mer,” I said. “The ship came through a bad storm.”

  “Oh, mal de mer.” She shrugged again as if I was making a fuss over nothing. “You are not at sea now, are you?” And on she went again, up the next flight, leaving me to stagger after her with Liam in my arms.

  I managed to keep going because I had to and I was terrified of fainting with Liam in my arms. At the top of the stairwell there was a skylight
and rain drummed on it loudly. The concierge stopped outside one of the doors, now breathing heavily herself, and stood, hand on bosom, catching her breath, before she produced a bunch of keys from her belt. She examined them, selected a key, then turned it in the keyhole. “Voilà, madame,” she said, and motioned for me to go in. “As you can see. There is nobody here. I leave you to decide what action you wish to take.”

  “I will stay and await my friends,” I said. “And I will need a key if I choose to go out. Do you perhaps have an extra one?”

  “In my office, downstairs,” she said. “I will want a deposit of five francs.”

  “Madame is kind,” I said, with sarcasm. “I am Madame Sullivan. May I know your name?”

  “Hetreau,” she said. “Madame Hetreau.”

  I nodded, not able to bring myself to say I was pleased to make her acquaintance.

  “I’ll leave you then,” she said, and slammed the door shut behind her.

  I stood alone in a large, light room; sparsely furnished and with a cold, damp feel to it. The smell of oil paints, linseed oil, and foreign cigarettes lingered in the air. The high ceiling was molded and an improbably grand chandelier hung in the center of it. On one side long windows opened onto a narrow, wrought-iron balcony. Rain was streaking those long windows.

  “Hello?” I called hopefully. No reply.

  A look around me revealed a faded velvet sofa and two high-backed armchairs on one side, a dining table on the other, and in the window an easel set up with a canvas on it, a sheet beneath to catch the spatters. A palette of paints rested on a table beside it and brushes stood in a glass jar of some kind of cleaning fluid—was it turpentine? I tried to remember.