A Girl Called Flotsam

by John Tagholm

  For now, the facts at her disposal about Joseph Troumeg reminded her that the man so hard to pin down was once a ubiquitous presence, hard to avoid. “He has transcended the world of food to become an international celebrity,” gushed The Times, adding he was “as well known as Coca-Cola.” If she had read that quotation once, she had read it twenty times, often repeated by Joseph Troumeg, usually referring to himself in the third person as an admiring onlooker of his own success. Beatrice wanted to shake this cosy recycling of facts, but she was finding it hard to find a way through the shiny smooth shellac finish of the story as presented.

  The land line rang to interrupt her frustrations.

  ‘Harry here,’ he announced and she checked her watch to see that it was almost seven.

  ‘Are you still working?’

  ‘Sort of. Thought you’d like to know the radiocarbon dating analysis has come through.’

  ‘Sure.’ She knew, though, this wasn’t the main reason for his calling.

  ‘To within a hundred years one way or the other, she lived around about the turn of the first millennium. So, late Anglo-Saxon like we thought.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  ‘If you like I could tell you more over a drink?’

  Beatrice experienced a faint wave of apprehension at the request, one she received at regular intervals and was usually adept at dealing with and didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘It’s ok,’ he said in the face of silence, ‘it was only on the off-chance.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said after a while, ‘but would you mind if I said no. I’m going to Paris tomorrow and I’ve got to get myself organised.’

  ‘Another time, then?’

  ‘Yes. Sure. I don’t know how long I’ll be away but I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m back. And thanks for the information about Flotsam.’

  Beatrice Palmenter went into the kitchen and began preparing supper, her tall figure stooped over the stove, slowly slicing mushrooms and garlic and feeding pasta into a pan of boiling water. It was only as she sautéed the softened spaghetti, adding the other ingredients and stirring in the butter, that she saw that she had cooked enough for two, an understandable mistake since she had been used to cooking for Joshua. When she sat down she had the urge to phone Harry Wesley and take him up on his offer, but the moment was gone and she ate alone with the white spire of Christ Church bright in the window behind her. Somewhere a bell chimed the time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The bell tolled a warning.

  Where the eight streets meet, as they do today, the draped body is carried on the back of a cart, to be buried with the other victims outside the walls beyond Aldgate. The girl watches its progress from a rise in the ground where the Royal Exchange now stands, and she holds her tunic to her face, as the others walking alongside are doing. This is the fourth body she has seen this week, for the pox is spreading quickly, as it had the time before, taking hundreds in its path before disappearing as it arrives, silently and unseen. She runs back to her mother but the news that the line of death is getting closer has already reached her. Her mother had warned her to stay away, but she had chosen to ignore it for there is another dimension to her these days, a singularity of purpose that she could not ignore. When she arrives home her mother is working on the sailor’s necklace, arranging the stones in a semi-circle first one way then the other, trying to decide which colours worked best together. She stands and watches the variations, her mother’s fingers slowly changing the patterns, each time looking across to seek her reaction. The workbench, spread with pieces of bronze, silver and gold and coloured stones in pottery bowls, is the heart of calmness. Outside the plague is taking its toll on neighbours and the Norsemen are likely to attack again but in here time is being held at bay and they are suspended in a different reality.

  The sailor comes later that afternoon. The way her mother is with him alerts her to a change she cannot fully explain. He inspects the progress of the necklace, praising her mother’s skills and saying that her reputation was deserved. The man not only speaks strangely but brings with him different smells, hard to identify, but which draw her to the faraway places that exist in her imagination. She can see that her mother is happy and she asks if the sailor has a wife. Her mother holds her face in her hands and smiles when she shakes her head.

  The following morning, down at the quays near the bridge, she wanders among the crowd looking for the man. There are half a dozen ships moored in line and the tide is high. Barrels of water are being rolled on to the ship furthest away and she sees that it is being made ready to leave. The ropes fore and aft are loosened and the craft is pushed away with long wooden poles until it catches the current and begins to drift down river. Through the bustle of activity on the dock she sees the sailor, who returns her stare with a slight nod of his head before turning away. She doesn’t move but continues to watch him as he instructs others to load the boat he stands alongside, moving between groups, clearly in charge and occasionally glancing back in her direction. There is a familiarity about him that is almost conspiratorial and she knows then that he will play an important part in her life, but she cannot decide how.

  In the centre of their home the necklace takes shape, the stones mounted in gold and hanging close together on oblong spirals, also of gold, threaded on copper wire. She sees her mother work day and night, aware that the necklace has to be finished before the sailor departs. When finally it is complete the work surface is cleared so that it can be laid out in all its glory on the black velvet bag, the focus of the room. It appears to have a light of its own and when the sailor comes he stands before it without speaking. She sees him look at her mother before stepping forward to pick up the necklace and place it around her neck. The man nods his approval and something passes between him and her mother and the girl slips away and walks down to the river and watches for her father, neither sure of what was in front of her or what she has left behind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Even though she knew Paris, Beatrice felt that she was entering the unknown. It wasn’t a feeling she could give any shape to, a generic sensation without apparent logic.

  The Gare du Nord is a station of tourists and pickpockets. Not long ago she had filmed in Paris and several of her crew had lost wallets here and in the Metro. Beatrice was careful, then, to take her bag off her shoulder and tuck it under her arm for the walk towards Stalingrad, over the lines leading into the Gare de l’Est and her hotel. It began to rain and the reflections of the Quai de la Seine were lost on the peppered surface of the canal. The programme she had made here was called ‘The Revolution is 40’, about the students who had taken part in the riots of 1968, many of them now leading comfortable, middleaged lives in smart apartments, their radical days long behind them. How quickly events become history she thought, making some facts clearer with perspective, but clouding many more.

  She dumped her stuff at the hotel, a non-descript affair with a view on to the Bassin de la Villette but only via a narrow gap in the buildings opposite. Still, she wasn’t here for the sightseeing although she was eager to see where Joseph Troumeg lived. It was no more than two streets away and as far as she could make out, his flat was on the top floor of an ornate block entered through a gated doorway to an inner courtyard. His name wasn’t against the bell for 4b on the outside and nor did he respond when she pressed its brass surface. Some part of her had expected to run into him and she hung around hoping this might happen. Several factors had made Beatrice Palmenter a good producer and the greatest of these was persistence. If Troumeg had owned the flat for some time, which her phone calls to his friends the day before had confirmed, then he would be known in the local food shops. She tried the boulangerie without luck, then the butcher but it wasn’t until the charcuterie that she found a response.

  ‘Monsieur Troumeg? Sure. When he’s here he always buys our special assiettes,’ a florid faced man told her, his hand pointing towards a plate layered with cold meats and dotted with
olives and herbs. ‘He had one yesterday. A good customer.’

  ‘Do you know how long he was staying for?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He comes and goes. I shall tell him a pretty young woman was looking for him, shall I?’

  Beatrice gave him her card and he spoke her Christian name, relatively common in France, in the French way, but stumbled over Palmenter, trying to pronounce the ‘l’. She thanked him, excited to know that she wasn’t far behind her prey, but puzzled that Troumeg hadn’t been to the boulangerie to pick up bread for breakfast. She deduced that he might have had breakfast in one of the local cafés so she chose the nearest, drew a blank but picked up the trail in the third. Pretty women can get answers to questions that many men can’t.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ a young waiter said to her. ‘He was here this morning. Always sits over there watching the canal, or reading his paper.’

  ‘Did he look as though he might be going away today?’

  ‘How would I know? Didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Same as usual, really.’ All this said with a smile on his face as he wiped the tables. She hesitated before giving him her card and she registered the look on his face as she did.

  ‘It’s a business matter,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure it is, mademoiselle.’

  She took a coffee and sat at a table on the covered terrace, watching the entrance to the flats, the sound of the rain pattering the canvas above her. After an hour she gave up but decided to ring the bell one more time. She had just crossed the road when she was astonished to see Joseph Troumeg appear around the corner. He was reading a newspaper and as he came nearer almost collided with her. She was too surprised to warn him but looking up at the last minute he recognised her.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, taking his keys from his pocket. ‘C’mon.’

  She followed him into the courtyard.

  ‘You won’t like the stairs,’ he said, as though their age difference was the other way round. At the top he opened the door to his apartment and gestured for her to enter. The living room was small, but very light with a double aspect, a pair of long windows on one side and, directly ahead, French doors which seemed to lead to some sort of terrace.

  ‘Shame it’s raining, but do go ahead and look at the garden. It’s the reason I came to live here.’

  Beatrice couldn’t believe her eyes. A small lawn stretched out in front of her, with a magnolia tree on one side and what looked like an apple on the other. There were two beds of flowers, bounded by a low box hedge and along one side ran a stone terrace with a balustrade looking across to curved leaded roofs opposite.

  ‘Remarkable, isn’t it? It’s one of the best roof gardens in Paris. Or anywhere for that matter. I don’t see enough of it.’

  ‘But where do the roots go?’

  ‘Sideways. There’s about two and half feet of soil to play with. Not a lot, but enough. I have dinner up here in the summer.’

  When she looked at him he was holding two glasses of champagne.

  ‘Welcome.’

  ‘You act as if you knew I was coming.’

  ‘Some people call me a witch.’

  ‘Or some person called you to say that I’d been asking questions about where you’d gone…’

  Although she’d barely touched her drink, he topped up her glass and led her back into the small living room. ‘I bought this place with old francs,’ he said, ignoring her statement, ‘and although there were lots of noughts on the end, it was surprisingly cheap. The garden was leaking, you see and nobody wanted the liability.’

  ‘So how long have you had it?’

  ‘I bought it with the newspaper serialisation of my first book.’

  She remembered the quote, having read it several times and completed it: ‘A place where I can go and retreat, like a trap-door spider.’

  ‘You know me so well.’ And then, with a change of gear, ‘let me take you out tonight to a little place around the corner. Perhaps the best food in Paris at the moment.’

  This was Joseph Troumeg, master of ceremonies, maitre’d, restaurateur supreme, setting the agenda, smoothing the path, making his guest feel important and giving the impression that all this was meant to happen.

  ‘Oh, and well done about the Bafta, by the way. I saw your series and it was exceedingly good. How did you get those women to talk like that?’

  Because in some ways I almost felt like one of them, she almost replied, which was a surprise since she had never articulated the thought before. ‘It took me some time,’ she said instead. ‘Being a woman helped and, of course, I had an all women crew.’ She had spent a month getting to know the women in the refuge before ever introducing a camera.

  ‘Battered women seem to ask for it, don’t they.’ Joseph Troumeg wasn’t posing a question but making a statement and from another man it might have produced a different response.

  ‘That’s the point. At some stage in their lives they’ve had the self-respect knocked out of them, so they don’t think they’re worth anything. As you say, they expect abuse.’

  ‘And you think they are worth something?’

  ‘Indeed they are.’

  ‘Why were you interested in the first place?’

  This conversation seemed to be the wrong way round but Beatrice found his directness difficult to escape. She was used to asking the questions, of using question and answer to her own ends.

  ‘I met a woman who was being abused…’

  ‘And it rang a bell with you?’

  She didn’t know why he’d jumped in and asked such a challenging question and she was thrown off guard.

  ‘Not that I was aware of. But I was supportive.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he continued. ‘I’m sorry I asked.’

  Nevertheless, Beatrice was left strangely wounded by the question for she had always believed she had conveyed the very opposite picture, a young woman in charge of herself and her destiny.

  ‘What I meant, I suppose,’ he said, unabashed, ‘is that personal experience always lends a certain weight to any project and I just wondered if these women felt that you were a fellow traveller, as it were.’

  ‘They were certainly happy to have a sympathetic ear and one that they learned to trust.’ Beatrice knew that she sounded rather prim and defensive and hoped that Troumeg wouldn’t pick up on this, but she fancied he had. He changed the subject again and what he asked next she first interpreted as making up for his previous question.

  ‘What are you. Five-ten, five-eleven?’

  ‘Between the two,’ she said, over her glass.

  ‘I seem to remember that you had a boyfriend when we first met. Adrian, wasn’t it, the chef? It didn’t work out?’

  ‘You’ve got a good memory,’ she said, without committing herself any further.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re short of suitors,’ he said, emptying the remains of the bottle into her glass. ‘Good looking woman have such power. I’ve had the opportunity over the years to watch them at work.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound all that complimentary.’

  ‘Oh, I meant no offence. But men can be such saps, don’t you think? Give them a pretty face and they’re done for.’

  ‘I’ve had a couple of boyfriends since Adrian,’ she said, omitting the fact that, as far as she was concerned, both fell into the category just defined by Troumeg.

  ‘You must tell me more later,’ he said, ‘over dinner.’

  She returned to her hotel, kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed aware that she had been both charmed and criticised by Troumeg but not quite certain in what proportion. She began to think about the evening and the approach she would take to get him to take part in the film, but she fell asleep before she could decide on a strategy.

  She had not brought the clothes for a smart restaurant but she needn’t have worried, for l’Assiette had none of the usual formal starchiness of a Michelin starred restaurant, the tables crowded together in a comfortable room with scuffed white floorboards. Tro
umeg, who had arrived before her, rose to his feet as she entered and he beckoned her to the table in the window which looked on to the canal basin. He gave her the chair with the view and even before they sat down a figure in whites appeared at their table.

  ‘Ah, Jean-Paul, may I introduce one of the best film makers in England, Beatrice Palmenter.’

  ‘Enchanté.’

  ‘This is Jean-Paul’s place and when you taste the food you’ll want to come back.’

  Beatrice looked up at the chef who gave a little bow towards her. ‘If I might recommend “Le Menu Gourmand”,’ he said and smiled.

  ‘You don’t ignore his suggestions, Beatrice. They’re really orders dressed up to sound polite.’

  And so it was that she ate one of the best meals she’d ever tasted and discovered that Joseph Troumeg didn’t soften his approach to her at all.

  ‘You’re not here to talk about the series I want to make, are you?’ he said as the mousse de chèvre au miel et huile d’olive was served.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Do you always get what you want?’

  She thought about it, taking the soft cheese and rolling its sweetness around her mouth. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I was talking about your work.’

  ‘So was I,’ she said, but she knew that he could see that this wasn’t the complete truth.

  ‘You know I don’t want to make a film of my life, not the way you want it, anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Boring. It’s all in the past.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘There’s no “and”. I want a series about me now, not some historical document for which I might just as well be dead.’