A Girl Called Flotsam

by John Tagholm

  ‘Do you always get your own way?’

  ‘Mostly, yes.’

  ‘Mostly?’

  ‘Yes, well people aren’t quite as interested in me now as they used to be.’

  ‘Surely my film will change that?’

  ‘No. They’ll just think I’m dead. Joseph Troumeg’s obituary.’

  ‘“I always look forward, never back,”’ she quoted to him and he raised his eyebrows in agreement.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why the revival of interest? I thought you’d given up on the idea.’

  ‘My boss thought that now’s the time for the film.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Graham Roth. I remember him from before. And do you?’

  ‘That depends,’ she said. ‘Would you be interviewed for the programme I want to make?’

  She knew he’d say yes because he could control what information he gave, but she could see in his face that he was weighing the significance of giving in to her.

  ‘And when would this be?’

  ‘Soon, but not too soon.’

  ‘You want to find out more about me first.’

  She nodded.

  Jean-Paul materialised and Troumeg pulled out a chair for him to join them at the table.

  ‘Le filet de bar et mousse de fenouile ecumé à l’anis was a triumph,’ Troumeg said. ‘A sublime meal.’

  Jean-Paul nodded his head in acknowledgement and turned to Beatrice. She saw how his dark hair fell across his forehead, still sweaty from his efforts in the kitchen, his eyes betraying his intentions. He reached out and touched her forearm. ‘And you, did you enjoy the meal, Beatrice?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ she said, moving her arm. She was concerned, not because she couldn’t cope with the situation, for men coming on to her was part of life’s daily pageant, but because of an alarm bell that was ringing somewhere in the back of her head. Jean-Paul had very white teeth and a smile that spoke of pleasure in his own good looks. How easy it would be to flirt back with this Frenchman but she checked herself knowing that he might well be another in the line of men that would simply take up her time and then become forgotten chapters in her life. She looked at Joseph Troumeg as if to say weren’t we in the middle of talking about something important. Jean-Paul got the message and stood. ‘I must see the other tables,’ he said and then to her ‘you know where I am the next time you’re in town.’

  ‘Well, you made quite an impression on him,’ said Troumeg. ‘As you do on many men, I’m sure.’

  ‘Shall we continue discussing the film tomorrow morning?’ she asked, ignoring him.

  ‘Why not, my dear, why not.’

  Later, as they walked back along the canal, she thanked him for the meal and he raised his arm dismissively before peeling off to his apartment without a backward glance. She watched him disappear into the night to end a day which, to all intents and purposes, might have been planned by Joseph Troumeg himself.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She knew it would come to this and when the moment arrives she isn’t afraid, for she has absorbed the signs and already decided that whatever came next was right. They are to leave. She makes it easy when her mother tells her, for she can see that however concerned her mother is at giving this news, she is also happy. There is a certainty about her and although she doesn’t talk about the sailor or her father she knows that her mother is doing what is best for them both. They are to go on the tide in two days time and there is much to be done. She has no time to think of the consequences and she finds it hard to imagine what the future will hold, but she trusts her mother and experience has taught her that her mother tells the truth.

  Now she is running again, northwards beyond where she has been told the king sat at court and from where the City would always be ruled, towards the old garrison at the high stone wall. She hadn’t known how to tell her friend about her father’s death, but she now feels she can’t leave without explaining. She sees her yellow hair in the distance and calls her name. She stops and they run towards each other. They have been friends since they fled from their homes up river, when they had escaped through the woods by what would become Russell Square and then eastwards to the old Roman city. Adversity had thrown them together and it was now to separate them, for she conveys to her friend the news that she is to leave on a ship with her mother. She can see the bewilderment in her friend’s face and sees that it is fear of the unknown, of not being able to give dimension to the world beyond her established boundaries. For several years the two girls had marked out this territory, up river and down, playing along the foreshore and the Roman walls and then across the river, by the great bend, opposite the marshes where her father had once kept the cattle. She tells her friend of his death and the other girl, who has never known her own father, feels twice the sorrow. They vow always to be friends and to spend some part of the next day visiting the places they liked to go best. They arrange to meet by the bridge and go westwards to the old house where they have spent many times together.

  Only when she is running back does she feel the sorrow of having to leave her friend, although when she stops, near the meat market, which is still a meat market, she thinks she might be crying for her father, the one cause of tears being the excuse for the other.

  They are to travel a long distance across the sea, her mother tells her, to a place where the sun shone most of the time and where some people had dark skin. She watches her mother’s face as she tells her this and sees that behind the happiness there is doubt, as the lines across her brow show. She kisses her mother as her father had done on the bridge, disguising her own fears and telling her mother that she has no idea what the sea will look like. She has heard stories about the storms and the waves but cannot really imagine a stretch of water wider than their river. She has never travelled far from the spot where she now holds her mother and the enormity of what they are about to do is like a chill wind behind her neck.

  The next day she and her friend set off from the bridge and follow the river past the spot where the girl had watched for her father. They walk in silence, the events that are overtaking them too big to comprehend completely. They leave the shore and climb a short distance to a clump of ragged bushes growing just above the high water mark. The trees hide the remains of a stone and brick house whose roof had fallen on to the mosaic floors below. In places these patterns had also collapsed revealing a series of what they thought were stepping stones, small columns of brick that appeared once upon a time to have supported the floor. The bushes have pushed through and destroyed the building and when they first discovered the place they had climbed and sat on the highest of the remaining walls. On one such day, a year earlier, the blonde girl had dropped a small pewter brooch which had held the sweep of her costume. It would remain lost until discovered by a young Italian conservator working on the site nearly a thousand years later as the concrete supports of an office building were driven into the ground around the ancient site.

  From the top of one of the remaining walls, through the bushes, she can see the opposite bank, although she tries to exclude the land from her view across the water. She wants to picture what it is like at sea, with no land in view. It is cold and the wind hurries towards her along the flat surface of the water and she imagines it would be even worse out at sea. The boat, she had seen, was open but for a small covered area at the front and she shivers at the thought of the journey. Her friend puts her hand on her shoulder and she can feel its warmth.

  We are going to start a new life, her mother had told her and she knows that she refers to the sailor for whom she has made the necklace. Her mother is at ease with this man with the pale hair and eyes and natural authority. He has land in Provence, her mother says, a place many miles away in the south where he sells the produce he grows and what he bought at the ancient port, objects from fabulous lands across the Mediterranean sea. She accepts, with the plague all about and the Norseman threatening to attack again, that her mother is doing this for their best interests. She has fa
ith that her judgement is for them all.

  When she returns to the river she carries some her mother’s wisdom with her and even though her friend is not about to leave on this journey, she is able to reassure and diminish her fears. She feels a woman to this girl.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the morning there was a note waiting for her at reception, Jean-Paul inviting her to join him at the café where Joseph took his breakfast and where he would join them. She wondered if the chef had spoken to Joseph and organised this chaperone for himself, making it difficult for her to turn down the offer. She was walking up the quay when her phone rang and she saw that it was another possible suitor calling from London.

  ‘Beattie? Hi, I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’

  ‘Good morning, Harry. No, I was just on my way to breakfast. I’m in Paris.’

  ‘I thought you might like a further update on young Flotsam.’

  There was a businesslike tone to his voice and it was clear that Dr Harold Wesley wasn’t about to make the same mistake as he had the last time he called.

  ‘We’ve just had the DNA back from one of the other bones I picked at the site and by a complete miracle it matched the skull and belongs to the same skeleton. It was a middle finger and I won’t bore you with technical details but it’s all to do with epiphyses,’ he rushed on, contradicting himself, ‘and there is just the weeniest possibility that Flotsam is indeed a girl, although I would need far more evidence to go public on this. Other than to you, that is.’

  It was strange to receive this information by the Bassin de la Villette in central Paris and for a moment Beatrice wished she was back in his laboratory so that she could share his enthusiasm. The idea of the small hand offering a clue across all these years made Flotsam even more real.

  ‘Maybe we should go back to the Thames,’ he continued. ‘I’m keen to increase my area of search. Maybe the erosion on that side of the river released a grave. It happens. We’ve got a lot more Roman stuff coming to light now. The river changes the whole time. When will you be back?’

  When would she be back? Beatrice had no idea. ‘I’m not quite sure,’ she told Harry. ‘I may know later this morning. But you could go back to the site without me, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Of course, of course. But I know how attached you feel to Flotsam…’

  ‘I do,’ she confirmed and told him she would call later when there was more shape to her plans. She rang off just before entering the café where Jean-Paul waited on the terrace, a cigarette in his hand, his long hair freshly washed. She joined him at the table and he called over a waiter. He was clearly pleased to see her and she enjoyed his attentiveness as he fussed around making sure she got what she wanted.

  ‘So you make films,’ he said, leaning forward towards her. One of her earliest lovers was a Frenchman and she recalled him now, a young student she’d met on holiday in Brittany, who had the same instinctive confidence with women as Jean-Paul now exhibited. ‘Tell me what about,’ he said, leaning towards her.

  Beatrice reacted to this familiarity and knew full well that this undoubtedly attractive man wasn’t really interested in her films. ‘Rape, for example, and the innate conservatism of the revolutionary French.’

  He frowned and she softened a little and took pity. ‘A series on a women’s refuge – a place where women can go to escape their abusive men – and another about the fortieth anniversary of the 68 riots in Paris.’

  ‘My father told me about that,’ he said, picking up on the easier subject. ‘He was a student at the Sorbonne, but he didn’t take part.’

  ‘Or he told you he didn’t take part.’

  Again the chef frowned, not quite following her.

  ‘Many of the people I spoke to played down their part in what happened. They didn’t want their sons and daughters to know that once upon a time they threw cobblestones and hurled tear gas canisters back at the police. Revisionist history at its most basic.’

  ‘It’s normal,’ he said, but she could see he was not really interested. ‘Are you here for much longer? I am free later this week, when one of my sous-chefs is standing in for me.’

  ‘You make it sound as if we might be going away somewhere,’ she said.

  ‘If you like. I was thinking a club, or dinner somewhere else, perhaps?’

  And so the process begins again, she thought and the new sense of uneasiness remained with her so she hesitated over her response, even though she knew exactly what it would be.

  ‘Do you mind if I say no?’ she said. ‘I’m not sure of my plans and I won’t be until I talk further with Joseph.’ And then, as an afterthought, ‘what do you make of him?’

  ‘I’ve not known him for long, but he has a big reputation here in France. They see him as one of their own, which of course he is even though he made his fame abroad. He tells me that he was born here, in this arrondissement. Some years ago he had a restaurant in Paris, down on the Left Bank, and one in Provence, in Marseille, I think. He often goes to the south. Maybe that’s where he’s gone. Anyway, if you’re free, just let me know,’ he said as he stood. ‘Now, I must go to the market. See you around.’ And taking his leather jacket from the back of his chair, he was gone, unused, she thought, to being rebuffed.

  Twenty minutes later, Troumeg still hadn’t turned up so she called his apartment. There was no reply, not necessarily an indication, she knew, of whether he was there or not. When she went to pay, the waiter shook his head and said that it had been taken care of. She went round to Troumeg’s apartment and rang the outer bell, again with no luck and for the first time that morning considered that he might have once again upped sticks and departed. She called in at l’Assiette to get Jean-Paul’s mobile number.

  ‘So soon.’

  The response was what she expected and she ignored it. ‘Did Joseph say that he would definitely be at breakfast this morning?’

  There were a few beats before the chef replied. ‘Well, I didn’t actually speak to him but he always goes there for breakfast.’

  Typical, Beatrice thought. She should have guessed. She was about to ring off with the briefest of goodbyes, when she stopped herself. ‘Do you have any idea where he might have gone?’

  ‘He’s that sort of man,’ the chef said. ‘He never used to say goodbye. One day he would be here and the next day he’d be gone.’

  Despite her initial disappointment at being back to square one, Beatrice was somewhat reassured with this behaviour for it conformed with her appraisal of Joseph Troumeg as not being quite as he seemed, an elusive man with an opaque past. She considered her options over a further cup of coffee on the terrace, but there seemed to be a collision of paths open to her and she was uncertain which to chose. She could stay in Paris, hoping that Troumeg might turn up, return to London on the assumption this is where he might have fled, or simply stop and take a rest, as Amanda had suggested. Instead, her mind slipped back to Flotsam, the young girl who had perhaps lived and played along the Thames a thousand years ago. She saw the shape of her skull, the arch of the eye sockets she had observed in the palm of her hand and tried to put flesh on the bones, to imagine her life. How quickly history escapes us, she thought again, the pieces of Flotsam’s life open to interpretation and fantasy, just like the way Joseph Troumeg presented his own childhood.

  Somehow this process of thought prompted a decision and finding a note she had made for herself on her phone, set off for the mairie of the 19th arrondissement where she hoped she might be able to bluff her way through the civil service procedures and find out more about the parents of Joseph Troumeg. Although Joseph had told Jean-Paul he had been born here, she remained sceptical, but it might just be that Troumeg had taken a flat in this part of Paris because he knew it well and felt sentimentally attached. For now, at least, it seemed to Beatrice the most logical of the paths to take.

  The town hall was all that she might have expected of French bureaucracy, an elaborate building, majestic, with high windows and a pilla
red entrance above which two great stone figures stood guard, the perfect outward representation of the labyrinthine processes she expected to find inside. She wasn’t disappointed, although during the walk across the arrondissement she had worked out an approach to help her through the expected red tape.

  ‘I am trying to trace the parents of my godfather,’ she told an efficient looking woman with spectacles that did justice to the ornate exterior of the building. She was one of a number of assistants providing help in a large room marked Registres d’État Civil.

  ‘His name is Troumeg. He was born in 1935, so his parents would have been born in the first decade of the century, more than a hundred years ago.’ Beatrice hoped this fact would allow her to do a search without producing a birth certificate and she was directed to a computer screen where, having waded through the necessary preambles, a screen message told her that she could study records up to April 1911, but not beyond.

  There were no Troumegs born in the 19th arrondissement between 1900 and 1911. In fact, the name Troumeg didn’t exist at all in the records that were available to her. She wasn’t entirely surprised, since Joseph Troumeg’s father could have been born anywhere in France, let alone this particular arrondissement in Paris. She tried Leval, Odile, but again drew a blank. Beatrice was keen to find out if there was a marriage certificate for the couple sometime around 1935. She looked back at the counter and assessed her chances. The woman who had helped initially was busy talking to someone else but either side of her were two colleagues, an older man in a blue cord suit and pale yellow knitted tie and a younger man with a crew neck sweater over a collar and tie. She chose chord over sweater.

  ‘I’ve come to Paris,’ she said leaning forward, to find out about my godfather’s parents. He’s too old to make the journey and is losing his memory. I want to try and find out when they were married and if, indeed, they lived in the 19th. I’m sorry if my French is poor. Please excuse me.’