Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  His inclination was to assume despair, but might there be hope behind the eyes?

  Flemyng straightened the paper on the table and took away his hands.

  Kristof looked up at him.

  THREE

  Sitting on a cracked gravestone, her back against a slab of pink granite, Grace Quincy closed her book and pushed it into a canvas tote bag that was bulging with newspapers. She stretched and found a position where she could catch the sun, and slipped a cigarette out of the packet that was crushed into her shirt pocket.

  There was rain on the way, but at this hour the sun had broken through and was bringing an interlude of warmth and brightness. The breeze had dropped and the air was still. Quincy struck a match on the stone and drew a slow breath. A spiral of smoke rose above her and she was carried off in the moment of calm. The thin blue plume was like an Indian fakir’s rope climbing to the sky, and the overgrown stones and statues around her became a landscape removed from the world, their chaos silenced. She savoured the quiet.

  It was broken by voices from the path that led through the cypress trees on the rise that concealed the next layer of the cemetery spreading out below her. A group of students, at least two of them American, took the turning that led to Quincy’s resting place and chattered their way towards her, their boots making a marching sound on the gravel.

  ‘Hi there.’ She waved, and as they approached they gazed in surprise at the figure before them. Blonde, in pale blue jeans and sandals, with a black shirt and heavy silver bangles jangling on the arm that she held up, she was a picture of dizzy relaxation on a stage set of frozen stones and tangled weeds. They would recognize her as a traveller from somewhere far away, and one with enough confidence to command the rocky mausoleum that stretched for acres around her: a startling mermaid on a tomb.

  ‘Wilde’s in the next row,’ she said, and waved them towards a tall winged statue a few yards away. ‘Left at the angel, then take the second path on the right again. You can’t miss him. Give him a kiss from me.’

  There was laughter in the air for a moment as they thanked her, and one looked back to her before they turned the corner. Quincy waved. But when they disappeared, she rose and walked briskly the other way. She reached the trees and took a rough short cut to the level below, stepping over the broken pediments of a crowded family plot and through the thickets of reeds that had sprung up between the graves. She touched the iron gates that had swung open on a high tomb that gaped like a cave, pushing them back with a loud squeak, and hurried on. Turning into the broad gravel path that encircled the whole cemetery of Père Lachaise, she looked up the slope and back to the trail she’d followed. There was no one behind her. A little further ahead, a workman was filling a wheelbarrow with branches, and she gave him a polite greeting as she passed. In less than five minutes she had climbed another slope, passed behind a row of towering monuments and, cutting towards the cemetery’s edge, found the wall where a plaque commemorated the dead of the Paris Commune. She spent a minute or two at the spot, as a tourist might, then counted her way along the graves stretching southwards.

  An old woman was tending the square plot at her family tomb, its fresh earth and polished urns a contrast to the decay around her, and Quincy stopped, as if in admiration. They didn’t speak, her presence seeming a little act of respect on its own. The woman worried at the soil with her trowel, tossing weeds into the bucket she’d brought with her, and nodded to Quincy as she moved away.

  Fifty yards along the path, having passed eight more plots, a yew tree sheltered the high gravestone where she stopped. Stepping behind it after a few moments, she was invisible to any passer-by and the old woman was out of sight. At head height, she found a loose stone in the boundary wall and it came away with little effort. She dug into her canvas bag and extracted an envelope from the pages of the book she’d been reading. It had no markings. Placing it in the cavity, she made sure that it lay flat, pressing it down with her hand before lifting the stone from the grass at her feet and easing it into the wall.

  She dusted away all the traces and made certain that the stone was flush with the wall and the envelope invisible. Then she picked up her bag and walked steadily to the cemetery gates and the metro station beyond. The sun had gone and she felt the first spots of rain.

  *

  Maria Cooney had been born with the gift of friendship and therefore understood the power of loneliness.

  She was one of the gang, but was just as happy to walk alone when the others had gone. The monthly lunch of American correspondents was often a trial, but today promised more. The tumult at home having stolen their thunder in recent days, May Day was close and they had persuaded themselves that they might yet be on a front line. Maria’s despatches to her wire service had helped.

  She was one of the first to reach Restaurant Lapérouse on the Left Bank near the river, and was able to watch the others arrive, one by one.

  The comradeship of her adopted trade sustained her, and she knew how much she needed it. Her toughness was real and so was the softness that lay underneath. When young Jeffrey Hoffman banged through the doors and raised his short arms in greeting, the first of the others to come, his relief was obvious. ‘Maria, mother of mine.’ He put an arm round her shoulder. ‘And, guess what,’ he said. ‘We have stardust on us.’

  Maria smiled. ‘Tell all.’

  ‘Grace Quincy, no less. In person.’

  Maria laughed. ‘Well, we must be in the thick of things after all, Jeffrey.’

  ‘You bet,’ he said. He was breathless, and rubbing his hands in nervousness. They took the curved stair together and within a few minutes most of the gang had gathered. Two elderly waiters poured drinks and the chatter rose, Maria moving among them and watching for Quincy’s arrival. She would be the last, surely.

  Maria herself was a dark and shining presence, her neck seeming to arch forwards, and her black eyes bright against pale skin that was a contrast to the bronzed faces around her. She was tall and slim, wore her hair long, and moved gracefully. Next to Hoffman, who was as restless as a terrier, she was a picture of calm. The waiters advanced and retreated, and bowed in response to her signals.

  She watched her nine companions, including the soggy core of the American press cadre in Paris, whose regular lunch was going to be enlivened by the arrival of more muscled travellers despatched by their offices in search of unrest and the mood of the moment. The vultures were mustering. Max Anderson was holding court with tales of riots in Warsaw and a week in Budapest where he had failed to find satisfying cuisine on all but one evening, Max being a gourmand by inclination, though in appearance a skinny rake of a man whose most prominent feature was a Mr Punch nose.

  It was he who had chosen the restaurant, because it was a cut above their usual haunt in a corner of Café de Flore. Here there were mirrors, painted doors to private dining rooms that shut with a heavy click and sealed them in, wall murals and a trompe l’œil ceiling, with waiters who played the part. They would tell you stories of the great men who had cavorted behind these doors for long afternoons in the arms of their women, and who cared if they were true?

  It was made for Max, a luminous stage. He had a sidekick from his magazine with him, fidgeting in the next chair as if fearful that if he were to leave Max’s side he might miss a word of wisdom, and attending to his master’s glass like an officer’s batman, waving the waiters away. Alone among them, Max had a dry martini in his hand.

  Quincy arrived. She had been escorted upstairs by the manager himself, his eyes glistening with recognition, and when she entered the room she simply put her arms out and gave a communal greeting that looked like a blessing. The room arranged itself around her, and Maria watched Max with amusement, aware that Quincy’s presence was the cause of his grumpiness, his expected place as leader of the gang having been effortlessly and decisively usurped. And her eyes were drawn back to Quincy herself, a beacon of elegance in a room of men who were uncertain about how to manage her presenc
e. Hoffman had raised his glass in a silent, nervous toast.

  Max Anderson rose and, although he didn’t smile, he announced, ‘We are honoured.’

  In the office of the wire service where Maria worked, Quincy’s words were a source of envy and, sometimes, inspiration. Her journey down the Mekong in the early months of the war had won her a Pulitzer two years before, and she knew the underbelly of half a dozen cities where even Max had found it hard to eat well. She had made and broken presidential candidates in more than one country, run with rebels in the hills and blazed her way to the places no one else reached. Her style commanded space in magazines at home and in Europe, attracting the hungriest of the wandering photographers to her side, and sometimes to her bed. She drew her own route map to follow her star, and roughed it with gusto.

  ‘Hemingway with tits,’ Maria’s boss called her. But a better writer, he’d often add by way of apology.

  As they sat round the long oval table, the old waiters pulling back the chairs one by one, she allowed the high atmosphere that had accompanied her arrival to subside and the room to settle. The others, lifted by a feeling that events were on the move, were still gossiping hard, in whispers. Maria looked at Quincy across the table. Her natural blonde hair was cut long to her shoulders, and she had put on a white jacket over the black shirt and her light-blue denims. Her bangles reflected the light and she wore a simple necklace, with no earrings.

  Quincy was placed beside a nervous reporter from New York whose two years in Europe hadn’t lessened his fear of threatening deadlines, nor of cables and calls from head office that might follow him across the city on his daily round, maybe catching him at play when he should have been at his desk. Beyond him, young Hoffman was rotund and uncomfortable, scratching himself, and hadn’t exchanged words with Quincy since she’d climbed the stairs to lunch, although he’d admired her since he’d begun to travel in Europe for his paper and had half-consciously followed in her tracks to the Middle East, although five hundred miles behind. On Quincy’s other side was the place assigned to the guest of honour at lunch, a late and weak substitute for the gang’s regular embassy contact, who was therefore awaited with little enthusiasm.

  ‘Who’s this boy?’ said Max, hooting at the table.

  ‘Butterfield’s his name,’ said his junior, picking up his cue.

  ‘I hear he knows nothing,’ Max said without acknowledging his friend. ‘Roll out the barrel of crap.’

  Instinctively leading the way, Grace Quincy rose to greet Butterfield, who had come through the door a moment too late to hear Max’s words of welcome. She introduced herself, and the tall young man took his place, putting his spectacles on the table without folding them up. His tie was tight and crooked, and his shirt damp with the sweat of his walk. When he had apologized for his timing and his lack of seniority, the table quickly turned to drink.

  Maria leaned across to catch Quincy’s eye.

  ‘Grace, this is a pleasure.’

  ‘Sure. Our paths haven’t crossed. But they were bound to, weren’t they?’

  ‘Always. That’s the way.’

  They spoke of Paris. West of the city, students were in revolt on the Nanterre campus, and Maria had been talking to them for nearly a month, her stories alerting the world beyond France to the crackle of flames in the universities. Their movement was spreading. The Left Bank was buzzing, political sects starting to colonize their different cafés and settling their territories, a crowd always ready to gather round. Pamphleteers were on the streets. Easter weekend, just gone, had brought on a pause but they knew that May would be different. It was promising enough for Quincy to return. The April chaos at home had taken her to New York for ten days, to write of violence in politics, riots and a president humbled. But Europe called her back. ‘I’ll try to get into Prague again,’ she said to Maria. ‘That’s the place. For now, here we are.’

  ‘I tell you, we should be in Warsaw,’ Max was saying at the end of the table. ‘Read me Saturday.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Maria to Quincy, smiling. Her marble skin and the black sheen in her hair made her a contrast with the other woman, who had softer colours, but her voice had the same gentleness. ‘Let’s get together, more quietly than this.’

  She spoke as if she and Quincy were old friends.

  Butterfield was struggling in his first efforts to address the table as the two waiters circled to clear away the soup plates.

  ‘I guess you’re aware that it’s… ah… real sensitive around this town. Movement of 22 March – weird name, but still trouble. Ugly stuff at Nanterre again last week, and still bub-bling up. We hear the… ah… government is concerned. Pretty concerned.’

  ‘The embassy must be reading the Trib again,’ Max said. He sent a bottle of white burgundy sliding across the table, embarrassing the waiters who sprang back to the table and started to pour again.

  ‘Well,’ said Butterfield, ‘we don’t want to get too dramatic. But trouble comes easily. We know what’s happening at home. All the sadness and politics going…’ and then, because he felt himself approaching treacherous ground, he said ‘zany’, dried up and returned to his duck.

  ‘Zany!’ said Max. ‘What kind of word is that? Death and destruction in America. And there’s no city in Europe where they’re not marching against us.’

  His young man said that Max himself had been threatened in a bar in London.

  For a few minutes their minds turned to home, some of them expressing a wish to be called back, where they might understand more. A gloom settled on the company, and Maria took it as a signal to rescue Butterfield by allowing him to eat uninterrupted.

  ‘Grace. Prague?’ she said, and they took the conversation to the east, speaking of bubbling food riots, party schisms, jumpy Russians. Another Warsaw Pact summit in the wind. After Quincy had offered a thought, Max found his stride and, stroking his long nose as if it were the tiller of his boat, he took them up the Danube from Budapest to Vienna with his own rehearsed commentary, and then one of Maria’s wire service friends offered a titbit from the diplomatic foreplay for the Vietnam peace talks. They might be coming to Paris, which would let them set up camp for months. Years, said Max.

  Butterfield had to say that it was a matter beyond his reach, dealt with elsewhere in the embassy.

  So, after the silence that followed his confession, lunch ended quickly. Max said he would lead a party towards a bar he knew in the rue Gay-Lussac on the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens where they could play, and they began to disperse. Maria heard him say, ‘You’ll have other business, Grace, I imagine.’

  She put a gentle hand on Butterfield’s shoulder. ‘Benjamin,’ she said quietly, the first time anyone had used his name during lunch, ‘a word?’

  As the others turned towards the stairs, for a few moments the two stood in a corner of the room, near the open window looking out to the river, the smell of the pavement crowd and the noise of the city carried up to them, and they felt the rain coming on. For the first time since he had arrived, he was smiling, with his back to the others. Maria spoke quietly. She leaned to one side, her eyes taking in her companions round his shoulder as Butterfield came close.

  Alone among the crowd, Quincy was watching them.

  ‘Thank you,’ Butterfield said under his breath before turning to leave her. ‘I’ll do what I can. À plus tard.’

  Quincy reached the top of the stairs before Maria.

  ‘Grace, let’s have a quiet dinner,’ she said from behind. ‘Without everyone…’ She gestured downstairs, where Max was herding them, the mother hen gathering the brood, with his sidekick holding a rolled umbrella high in the air like a tourist guide, then letting it spring outwards, against the rain. ‘Would you come?’ Quincy nodded. They watched the party fanning out behind Max to cross the street.

  ‘Soon,’ said Quincy, still looking down from the window. ‘Next few days? Before May Day anyway. I’m at the Meurice. Just call.’

  Although Maria’s offic
e was close to Quincy’s hotel, they parted at the door, and Maria took another route across the city. She cut eastwards first, taking an alleyway off the tiny Place de Furstenberg, where the Paulownia trees were in full flower at the height of their spring boastfulness, and then finding a back route towards the river so that she avoided the busier streets. It took her by a dog-leg passage into the confinement of rue de Nevers. The pavements were narrow and uneven, so that she walked in the street that was hardly wide enough for a car. The drizzle was steady and she quickened her pace. Halfway along, she took a key from her pocket and with a slow and heavy turn of her hand opened the lock of a dark blue door. An old woman in black sat on a stool outside the little courtyard of the next-door apartment building, ignoring the rain, and nodded. Pushing the door back, Maria entered a high lobby with a curving stone stairway to her left. She stood still for a moment, heard nothing, and climbed to the first floor, the clatter of her feet sounding high above her and echoing back down.

  The apartment was tiny, two rooms with narrow windows that allowed only a little light to filter in from the street. She had a desk and a phone, two bookcases and an overstuffed sofa. In the other room, through an archway, there was a single bed and, in the corner, a china pitcher and painted basin that had been there when she first saw the place, taken there by a young embassy man long since moved on. Two piles of books peeped above the bottom of the bed. On the walls, she’d stuck a few of the posters that were beginning to appear on the trees along the Left Bank – student slogans, a raised fist, a blackened photograph of a bombed city, Mao. But the rich red rug was from home in Boston, and above the desk she’d hung a garish crucifix that her mother had sent her to keep her safe on her travels. Maria locked the door, heated some coffee on the gas ring and began a round of phone calls.