White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done, Kyle?’ she asked, her head on his chest as the sweet smell of marijuana surrounded them.

  Kyle squinted up at the canopy above him, and the carvings of the Prince of Wales feathers. ‘Making love on a bed Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne slept in while Mick Jagger and a score of other pop groups sing a mere fifty yards away comes pretty near to heading the list,’ he said dryly.

  Serena moved her lips languorously over the smooth, sun-kissed flesh beneath his cheek. ‘But what else have done that is really wild?’

  He frowned, his head so light with alcohol and marijuana that he could scarcely think straight. ‘I once flew my uncle’s Piper Twin Comanche under the Brooklyn Bridge.’

  She giggled and he carefully killed the cherry in his joint and even more carefully placed it on the table at the side of the bed. ‘What about you? Or are your escapades so wild as to be beyond belief?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said modestly. ‘On the last night of term, the school’s head girl crept into my bed. She’s German and built like a Valkyrie.’ She giggled again, moving her hand lower down his abdomen. ‘That was pretty wild.’

  Kyle would have liked to ask for more details, but he was having difficulty coordinating what he wanted to say with what he was able to say.

  ‘I wish we could do something wild, something really wild, together,’ Serena said, bending her head to his penis, her tongue circling it in long, lazy strokes.

  ‘You mean, like both of us going to bed with your German friend?’ Kyle asked, wondering who the fool had been who had said that English girls were frigid.

  Serena paused in her ministrations. ‘No, silly. Something momentous and far-reaching and totally, totally shocking.’

  ‘We could always elope,’ he said, wondering if he was physically capable of making love one more time, and if he was, whether he could capture a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

  ‘Eloping isn’t shocking,’ she murmured, straddling him, holding his penis with one hand and moving herself teasingly and tormentingly back and forth over its engorged tip.

  ‘Believe you me, as far as my parents are concerned, it is,’ he said, wondering how long he could bear the pleasure before having to take action. ‘In fact, I can’t think of anything that would shock them more!’

  She slipped the head of his penis into the mouth of her vagina. ‘You’re quite right,’ she said, her voice high and slurred from wine and marijuana. ‘My parents would be shocked to death. It would cause the most frightful fuss.’ She sank down on him, closing her eyes in ecstasy. ‘So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we elope?’

  Kyle tightened his arms around her, deftly rolling her beneath him. ‘Because I don’t know any blacksmiths,’ he said reasonably, driving deep inside her in an agony of relief.

  She laughed, twining her legs around him, suddenly sure that she loved him and that she would always love him. ‘Silly,’ she said, her diction very slurred now. ‘Marriages at Gretna Green over the blacksmith’s anvil haven’t been legal for years and years.’

  ‘Then why do people elope there?’ He gasped, his eyes tightly closed, an expression of intense concentration, almost of agony, furrowing his features.

  ‘Because …’ Serena struggled for breath. ‘Because… you can be married in Scotland without parental consent as long as you’re over sixteen.’

  ‘I’m over sixteen,’ he said unnecessarily, knowing that his climax was going to be the most shattering he had ever experienced. ‘Let’s forget the ball this evening. Let’s go to Scotland instead.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ she panted, lifting her legs over his shoulders. ‘Oh, Kyle! Oh, God! Oh, Kyle!’

  Chapter Three

  Gabrielle Mercador sat completely immobile, the late afternoon sun streaming through the skylight on to her semi-naked body. One hand was resting on a small table at her right-hand side, and her chin was propped on her other hand while her large, luminous eyes gazed soulfully into the distance.

  ‘That is enough,’ said the heavily built, bearded Frenchman standing a few yards in front of her, wiping his brush on a rag and surveying the painting on the easel before him with satisfaction. ‘We are nearly there, ma petite. Another three or four sessions and it will be complete.’

  Gabrielle happily snapped out of her pose and soulful expression and stretched catlike. ‘Good,’ she said, not bothering to walk across to survey the result of the three-hour sitting. ‘Do you want me back the same time tomorrow, Philippe?’

  He nodded, still studying his handiwork. ‘Yes, but it is a pity you cannot come in the morning, ma petite. The light is so much better. There is a softness about afternoon light that is not compatible with what I am trying to achieve.’

  Gabrielle gave a small Gallic shrug of her shoulders as she crossed the studio towards her pile of clothes. ‘C’est impossible,’ she said as she reached for her brassiere. ‘I am still sitting for Léon Durras in the mornings.’

  ‘Bah!’ Philippe uttered expressively, at last looking away from his painting and towards her. ‘Durras has never done decent work, and he’s too old to begin doing so now!’

  The corners of Gabrielle’s generous mouth quirked in amusement. She sat regularly for over a dozen artists and was used to their jealous backbiting and bickering. For a moment she was tempted to remind Philippe of Léon’s recent excellently reviewed exhibition but decided against it. Such provocation would result in a harangue from Philippe that could last half an hour, and she hadn’t the time to spare to listen to it.

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon, then,’ she said, zipping herself into a short, straight black skirt and pulling a thin sizzling pink cotton top down over full, lush breasts.

  ‘Unless that bastard Durras falls down dead, and then I’ll see you in the morning,’ Philippe said sourly.

  Gabrielle grinned. Twenty years before, just after the liberation of Paris, Philippe’s wife had been Léon’s mistress. It was an insult Philippe had never forgotten, or forgiven.

  She slipped her feet into perilously high stiletto-heeled shoes and picked up her straw shopping bag.

  ‘Are you singing at the Black Cat this evening?’ Philippe asked suddenly as she walked across to the spiral staircase that led down from the studio to the ground floor and the street.

  She paused, one hand on the metal handrail. ‘Yes,’ she said coquettishly, ‘are you coming?’

  He forgot the bad temper that her sitting for Léon Durras had aroused. ‘I might,’ he said with a grin.

  She laughed. ‘Then I will see you there,’ she said, blowing him a kiss and going carefully down the awkward stairs into the street. Philippe was easily old enough to be her father, and in all the years she had been modelling for him, he had never made an indecent suggestion to her, but he liked to flirt. It made him feel good. And flirting was such second nature to Gabrielle that she wasn’t even aware when she was doing it.

  She swung out of the darkened vestibule and into the sunlit street, a petite, buoyant figure with a shock of squeaky clean titian curls, laughter-filled green-gilt eyes, and a wide, generous mouth. Her mother was Vietnamese, her father French, and from her mother she had inherited cheekbones that were Asian and high, like those of a Tartar princess, and a short, straight, perfectly shaped nose. From her father she had inherited a firm chin, an earthy sexuality, and the hard-headed common sense that is every Frenchwoman’s birthright. No one knew where her remarkable hair colouring had come from. It was as individualistic, as unique as everything else about her.

  ‘Good afternoon, chérie,’ the aged flower seller on the corner of the rue de Clignancourt and the boulevard Rochechoart called out to her as she swung past, her capacious straw shopping bag over her shoulder, her bottom bouncing tantalizingly beneath her tight, brief skirt.

  ‘Good afternoon, Helena! It is a lovely day, is it not?’

  Helena cackled toothlessly. The little Mercador was always so full of joie de vivre that just seeing
her made the greyest day seem bright.

  ‘Oui!’ she shouted back jauntily as Gabrielle brought the Montmartre traffic to a halt by stepping out into the street, crossing over towards the place d’Angers. ‘It is when you are young, chérie!’

  Gabrielle grinned and raised a hand to show old Helena that she had heard, and then she walked across the place and into the avenue Trudaine, humming beneath her breath. She would sing Fever tonight at the club, and Lover Man and Fly Me to the Moon, and it was about time she gave I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues a public airing. She had been rehearsing it for weeks now and thought that at last she had personalized it and made it her own.

  ‘Good afternoon, Gabrielle!’ the local butcher called out to her as she walked exuberantly past his window.

  Gabrielle gave him a wide, dazzling smile and threw him a kiss.

  ‘Good afternoon, Gabrielle!’ the old woman selling papers at the corner of the avenue Trudaine and the rue Rodier, said to her. ‘How is your mother? Your father?’

  ‘They are both well, thank you, Madame Castries,’ Gabrielle replied sunnily, taking a newspaper and tucking it into her bag.

  ‘That is good,’ Madame Castries said with a pleased nod of her head. The little Mercador wasn’t like some eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds. She looked after her parents. It was a pity that there were not more girls like her.

  Gabrielle went into the bakery and bought two loaves of bread, chatting to the baker about his wife’s health and the progress his children were making at school. In the maze of streets that lay to the south of Sacré-Coeur, there wasn’t a man, woman, or child who didn’t know her and didn’t greet her with pleasure.

  She had lived in Montmartre since she was eight years old. Since the French had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu and her father had circumspectly decided that it was time he and his family left Saigon for good. Her mother had never settled comfortably in Paris, which was so vastly different from Vietnam. The climate was cold and damp instead of hot and humid. Her father, too, though France was his homeland, had never been able to come to terms with the difference in life-style between Saigon and Montmartre. Only Gabrielle, after the first few bewildered days, had adjusted, as happy in the narrow, cobbled streets of Montmartre as she had been in the wide tree-lined boulevards she had left behind her.

  She crossed the road to number fourteen. A passing gendarme winked at her and told her he would be at the club that evening. A young man on a motor scooter called out to her that he had seen Léon Durras’ latest canvas and that, thanks to her, Durras had created a masterpiece. Gabrielle paused at the door that led up to her parents’ top floor flat, laughing and shouting back that she was glad he thought so.

  Beside her, on the wall, was a bird cage with two canaries in it. As the motor scooter zipped away, Gabrielle put her hand into the bottom of her straw bag and withdrew some birdseed.

  ‘There, mes petits,’ she said, tossing it into the cage. ‘Enjoy your supper.’

  The canaries belonged to old Madame Garine, who lived in the ground floor flat. When Gabrielle had first arrived in Paris, only the canaries in their little cage had been familiar to her. In Saigon every house had its cage of brightly fluttering birds, and in those first strange, lonely days, Madame Garine’s canaries had been a great comfort.

  She stepped into the lobby and hurried up the dark stone steps, a rueful smile on her lips. Her father had promised her mother and her, when they left their large sun-filled house in Saigon, that they would live just as comfortably in Paris. They had not. In Saigon there had been servants and easy luxury. In Montmartre there was only a small flat and penny-pinching economy. Her mother, lonely without her Vietnamese family and friends, had begun to stay more and more indoors so that now, ten years later, she very rarely ventured out. It was Gabrielle who shopped, Gabrielle who brought the gossip of the streets to the dining table, Gabrielle who insured that there was still laughter and gaiety in the Mercador household.

  Her father, Étienne, had left his home in a small provincial French town for Saigon in 1932. He had had only a moderate education and could see no great future for himself in France. The colonies promised richer pickings. A family friend, already in Saigon, saw to it that there was work waiting for him when he arrived, and for eight years he was happily and profitably employed as a civil servant in a French government department. In 1938, enjoying the rank and life-style of a senior department head, he married Duong Quynh Vanh, a Roman Catholic Annamite of good family. When war broke out in Europe a year later, it made little difference to Étienne and Vanh Mercador. Étienne continued to enjoy the respect and prestige of his government position, and Vanh continued to enjoy the lazy leisurely life-style of a French colonial wife. And then, in 1940, the Japanese swept south.

  The French administration in Vietnam was crushed, the French interned as the Japanese surged onwards, driving the British from Malaya, the Dutch from Indonesia, and the United States from the Philippines.

  Étienne gritted his teeth, proclaimed himself a supporter of the French government in Vichy, and escaped internment by the skin of his teeth. Vanh’s brother, Dinh, moved north, seeing in the Japanese invasion of his country hope for a future Vietnam free of all invaders. The Japanese would be defeated eventually by the Allies. When they were, Dinh was determined that his country would no longer be governed by the likes of his brother-in-law Vietnam would become independent and free.

  In the North, a middle-aged freedom fighter, Ho Chi Minh, was consolidating nationalist groups under one banner, fighting a guerrilla war against both the Japanese and the French. Dinh said good-bye to his family in the south and went north, on foot, to join him.

  When the war ended and the Japanese left, Étienne had looked forward to a period of increased prosperity. But his brother-in-law’s belief that native Vietnamese could force the French out was naive. The French had governed the country for a hundred years and, now that the war with the Japanese was over, they intended to govern it for another hundred.

  Vanh had kept her thoughts to herself. She loved her husband, and she loved the French way of life. She had been educated in French convents, and she enjoyed the ease and luxury of her husband’s French salary. Yet, like her brother, she wanted to see her country independent. As life after the war began slowly to return to normal, she comforted herself with the belief that the French would allow the Vietnamese a greater say in the governing of the country, and in the fact that she was, at last, pregnant.

  In 1945 and ’46, the French reasserted their authority over Vietnam, but only with difficulty. In the North, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed a provisional Vietnamese government in Hanoi, and in the south, Britain came to France’s aid, subduing bitter protests and bloody street fighting, and imposing French rule yet again.

  As a child in Saigon, Gabrielle was happily unaware of the tensions surrounding her. The family home was in the avenue Foch, a wide, tree-lined, flower-filled boulevard. She had a Vietnamese nanny to look after her, a monkey for a pet, and a garden crammed with tuberoses and orchids and gardenias to play in.

  Fighting continued from 1946 until 1954 when the French met with the forces of General Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s right hand man, at a small village on the Lao border, called Dien Bien Phu. All the previous bloody engagements had been running guerrilla battles, in which the Viet Minh had the advantage. At Dien Bien Phu, the French, with superior air power and superior weapons, and fighting the kind of battle that they were accustomed to, were confident that they could thrash the Viet Minh once and for all.

  Shortly after French troops were airlifted in to the floor of the steep valley, General Giap moved thirty-three infantry battalions, six artillery regiments, and a regiment of engineers toward Dien Bien Phu. In a tremendous feat of muscle power, soldiers, coolies and cadres dragged artillery to the tops of the surrounding mountains. From then on, the incredulous French were under constant blistering attack. A Howitzer was positioned within range of the French air strip, cutting off flights in and out o
f the valley and making it almost impossible for them to receive supplies or to evacuate their wounded. Almost from the beginning the French were in a state of siege.

  Seven horrific weeks later, in a sea of blood and mud and vomit, the Viet Minh’s red flag went up over the French command bunker. The French had been defeated; colonial rule in Vietnam was at an end, and an international conference was set up in Geneva to plan the country’s future.

  Whatever that future was, as a minor French civil servant, Étienne knew that his good fortune had run out. He packed his bags and returned to the land of his birth with his wife and child. And the three had long since settled in Paris.

  Gabrielle climbed the last few steps and opened the door of the apartment. From the kitchen there came the appetizing aroma of shredded pork and rice vermicelli, for her mother still cooked the traditional Vietnamese dishes.

  ‘Hello, Maman. Is Papa home?’ she asked, putting her straw bag on the kitchen table and removing the two loaves of bread and the newspaper.

  ‘No, he is playing boules,’ her mother said, kissing her cheek.

  When they had first returned from Saigon, her father had been devastated to discover that his government would not employ him. He had found work as a manager of a local garment factory and then the factory had closed. For the past two years he had not worked at all.

  Gabrielle looked down at the table. There was a letter from her aunt. Her mother, diminutive and fragile in Vietnamese traditional dress, sat down at the kitchen table, a doubtful frown creasing her brow.