I turn the corner into the narrow Rue des Lions-Saint-Paul and stop at number 11. My mother’s house; the house where I spent my first eighteen years. I push open the huge studded door and stand in the cobbled courtyard. The silence resonates with the clatter of my heels, as noisy as memory. At the far end of the yard, by the ramped staircase, a small girl desultorily skips rope. She could be me. I skipped here. I imagine the daughter of Madame de Sévigné, yet another Marie, as my mother never failed to tell me, skipped here as well three centuries ago. The daughter, made eternally famous by her mother’s chattering letters, was born here. She knew her father until she was six, Madame la mère having been left a very merry widow at the age of twenty-six. Repetition and variation.
I look up to the top windows and wonder what the apartment is like now. When we lived there, the old ceiling beams in the living dining area were partly uncovered. From one of them an ancient hook dangled and I used to fancy that some poor soul had hung himself from the beam rather than face the guillotine. Three rooms radiated out from this slightly darkened salon - one of them, my mother’s bedroom crammed into the low-ceilinged attic which was reached by a steep, rickety staircase.
The thought of the attic makes me quiver. I remember Olivier. I have no wish to think of him. That is not why I have come here. But he is suddenly there before me, as solid as his square frame. I walk hastily from the courtyard, break into a run. Despite the bustling crowd, he is still with me when I reach the Rue St Antoine. At the corner cafe where I collapse, he sits down beside me.
When my mother died, I was seventeen. I had just entered the Classe Terminale at the Lycée, that arduous final year which would see me through my Bac. Needless to say, I was studying languages. My English was so fluent that my teachers simply assumed I was bored and plied me with extra work. Spanish was slightly trickier. But my difficulties had nothing to do with school where I dutifully excelled. My mother’s death had plunged me into chaos and I don’t mean simply the emotional kind. I had no idea how to go to the bank, let alone how to pay an electricity or phone bill. My mother had only a small sum of savings and her pension would take months to unravel. More importantly, since I was not yet legally an adult and had no guardian, I was destined to become a ward of state, to be thrown on the relentless mercy of a blind bureaucracy.
Olivier saved me from that. He appeared from the midst of the substantial crowd at the funeral - my mother had a lot of close colleagues if no particular intimates that I could designate - and put his arm lightly around my shoulder, before turning me round and forcing me to look him squarely in the eyes through the mist of my stupor. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to everything.’
I was more than ready to put my trust in him.
Olivier Bouccicault was the Head of the History Department at the lycée where my mother taught. I had met him on a number of occasions, but he was hardly a frequent visitor at our apartment. My mother’s life focussed around her work and her committees. At home, apart from the transients we housed and the usual run of my schoolmates, we were largely solitary, a tight little unit of two. On weekends, she took me to films or theatre or museums sometimes with other friends, and very occasionally there was a dinner party. It must have been at these that I encountered Olivier.
I had never paid any particular attention to him. He was just another of those vague presences who belonged to my mother’s world. Now that I think about it, he must have been about forty then, hardly past his prime, a man with a square jaw and slightly thinning sandy hair and a face that made one think more readily of a boxer than a schoolmaster.
In any case, Olivier saw me home from the funeral and proceeded to interrogate me. He wanted to know what I wanted. Did I want to be housed with a family or did I want to stay where I was, at least until the year was out. Was I afraid to be on my own? Did I want someone to come and live with me, a tenant, a housekeeper, perhaps. Did I know how to shop? To do the washing? Who were my friends? Did I feel able to carry on with my studies? Was I having nightmares? He was matter-of-fact, slightly rough and strangely consoling.
I had only been coming back to the apartment until then to change my clothes. I had been staying with a girlfriend and her family and I knew that I couldn’t stay on in those cramped quarters. By the end of that first evening with Olivier, I realized that I did want to carry on living in my mother’s apartment. I knew all the neighbours. They were kind. And I felt safe here. It was after all the only home I had ever known. But was any of it possible?
Olivier arranged it all. He negotiated with authorities and landlords and bankers. He talked to my mother’s weekly help and had her come in twice a week and bring in a basic supply of groceries. He organized a collection at my mother’s lycée so that I had a sum of money to see me through until pensions and estate could be cleared. He dropped in to see me two or three times a week to talk about studies and life and rang me every day.
Then, two months or so after my mother’s death, Olivier arrived with a large gift-wrapped package.
‘Open it,’ he said to me. He slumped down on the worn sofa which creaked with his weight and I could feel him watching me as I carefully undid the package so as not to rip any of the glossy paper.
Inside, there were not one but two dresses, a brown and white chequered concoction of the lightest wool and another in deep bottle green.
‘I thought you’d like something new for Christmas,’ Olivier was smiling. ‘Your wardrobe is hardly, I’ve noticed, extensive.’ He coughed, waved me away. ‘Go and try them on and then show me.’
It was true that my wardrobe was poor. I had the two requisite pairs of jeans, an assortment of jerseys and then my mother’s choice, some trim skirts, and white shirts that needed endless washing. My mother had always been both frugal and uncaring about clothes. They were there neatly to cover the body, not display it. The chequered dress I pulled on first I could instantly tell was just the opposite. It had tapering lines, a tightly fitted bodice with tiny buttons at its centre which moulded their way right up to my neck. I hardly dared look in the small glass above my chest of drawers. In any event I could only see my head and shoulders in it. And my everyday boots felt all wrong, but I marched out in them nonetheless to display myself to Olivier.
He looked at me critically for a moment, then came over to pull the Alice-band I always wore in good girlish fashion out of my hair, which had grown longer now that my mother was no longer around to clip it to shoulder length.
‘There.’ He eyed me again from the side, then casually pulled his fingers through my hair forcing it over to one side.
I don’t know whether I would have been aware, then, that it was the first time he had touched me, apart from the requisite handshake, since the funeral, but he cleared his throat in an odd way and the silence which followed that sound was strangely heavy and too long. To cover it, he ran his finger down my cheek and said lightly, ‘Pas mal, not bad. Even quite pretty.’
I met his eyes, but he waved me away again, ‘Now go and try the other one on and you can decide which you’re going to wear tonight, because I’m taking you out to dinner.’
The green frock fitted me even better and I brushed my hair into the shape he seemed to have suggested. When I came out to show him, he was sitting on the sofa and he murmured, ‘Très jolie,’ before patting the space next to him and urging me over.
I sat down beside him and he kissed me lightly but firmly on the lips, then breathed in a peculiar way before springing to his feet and diving into talk.
It’s hard for me now to imagine how innocent I was then. Those may have been the permissive seventies, but I had been brought up as a proper little bourgeoise under my mother’s vigilant eye and I had never been kissed by a man. My close friends were not particularly different. When we saw boys, we shook hands, and at the very few mixed parties I had been to, if anything sexual transpired, it was all in the air. England, with its more liberal atmosphere, might have provided greater freedom, but perhaps f
or that very reason my mother had stopped sending me there when I reached the age of fifteen. I now spoke quite well enough she told me.
So Olivier was the first man to kiss me.
He kissed me again later that night after a dinner during which I had chattered with unusual brightness, spurred perhaps by his eyes. They had a glint to them. That second kiss was different. He folded me in his arms and smoothed the small of my back, my hair, while his lips pressed into me and his tongue flickered into my mouth. I liked it, liked his hands on me perhaps as much as his lips. He left a little hastily after that and didn’t come round again that week, though he did phone me with his customary regularity to check on my well-being.
The next time I saw him, he was very serious. He grilled me about my work, checked through all my notebooks to make sure I was keeping up and then rose with solemn formality. I urged him to stay. I had tried my hand at roasting a chicken in the hope that he might and I wanted him to share it. Everything would be ready in a few minutes. He stayed, after excusing himself to make a phone call first.
With the myopia of youth, I had never thought about Olivier’s life outside his contact with me. It never occurred to me to question him. I think I vaguely knew that he had children, perhaps a wife, but they didn’t seem to live with him. We only ever talked about me or about politics, the state of the world. I was good at that. I could name every single cabinet minister and tell you what he did and did wrong. I was not my mother’s daughter for nothing. But after that phone call, I asked Olivier whether he had another commitment, whether he had to go home. He shook his head brusquely and I laughed and skipped off to set the table with the best tablecloth and napkins.
It was over dinner that he asked me what my plans were for Christmas. I had been dreading the holidays. Christmas Eve was alright. I had been invited over to my friend Annette’s and I would go to midnight mass with her family and stay over until the next day. But after that, long empty days spread themselves before me, so long that I had even begun to make lists of what work to do each day to fill them. Olivier saved me. He asked me whether I might like to go South with him. He had a little house in Provence and he usually went there during the longer school breaks. I was so grateful that I bounded into his lap and flung my arms around him. He held me tightly for a moment, then gently urged me away.
‘Crack of dawn on the twenty-sixth, it is then.’ He took my hand and seemed to be about to say something else, but changed his mind, only adding at the door. ‘Bring some warm clothes. It can get very cold.’
We drove down in his little Peugeot, the car radio blaring out Mozart symphonies all the way, through the flatlands around Orleans, past the hills and dips of Burgundy and into the naked vineyards of the Beaujolais. We stopped in a restaurant in the midst of one for lunch. After that everything was industrial congestion and giant container trucks and I must have dozed off. When we arrived I was so groggy that all I was aware of was the smell of pine and the crackling chill of the air. Olivier quickly lit a fire that was already laid. I stood there watching the flames leap up into the chimney. The hot chocolate he put into my hand revived me a little, but only so that I half took in the room I was in, the presence of two plump striped sofas. I promptly curled into one.
The next thing I knew, light was spilling through a vast picture window, making a garden of the flowery duvet Olivier had wrapped round me. I looked out, saw an oak, a little dip of a valley and in the distance the misty purple of the Luberon hills. For the first time in months, I took a deep unencumbered breath and didn’t wait for the patter of my mother’s slippers on parquet.
That day we tramped away from the sleepy cluster of stone houses which was the hamlet and made our way on crisp ground through little copses which bordered vineyards, then up onto jutting hills and down again through woods of fragrant pine. By the time we returned, the sun was setting pink against the hills. In its light the house looked as if it had grown out of the ground. From the dirt road at the back, it was merely an old wall, a converted wash house at the edge of the village. Olivier’s parents I learned, had built onto it to form this long rectangular structure. In the summers, when the picture windows were open, the vine covered terrace and the old oak became part of the living quarters.
We prepared dinner together that night. Olivier concocted some pasta in a fragrant mushroom sauce while I tossed a salad. I remember that I drank what for me must have been a great deal of wine. In any case we were merry and it was in the midst of that merriness that Olivier suddenly announced, ‘Oh, I almost forgot. I’ve brought you a Christmas present.’
‘Me too,’ I laughed and raced to my room which was at the far end of the salon.
He was sitting in front of the fire when I returned and I shyly handed him the carefully wrapped book I had purchased after much browsing in second hand bookdealers. It was an architectural history of Paris and I had chosen it for its lovely line drawings. I waited for him to open it to see if he were pleased. It was the first time I had ever given a present to an adult apart from my mother.
‘It’s perfect,’ Olivier smiled. ‘Very fine.’ He leafed through the pages while I stood over him. ‘Thank you.’ He turned towards me and ruffled my hair. ‘Now, you open yours.’
There were two packages. I opened the heavier one first and found three books, a volume of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Madame de Sévigné’s letters to her daughter, and a biography of Madame de Pompadour.
‘For your history course,’ Olivier prompted.
‘From my favourite history teacher,’ I beamed at him and hastily opened the second package. At first amidst the deep blue tissue paper, I wasn’t sure what the pale silk garments were. Perhaps when I realized, I should have had at least a momentary Puritan revulsion. But I didn’t. I was thrilled. I had been so starved of beautiful useless things that these creamy bodices that one wore secretly next to the skin seemed to me the height of the desirable. I threw my arms around Olivier and with a sudden flush of daring, I asked him whether he would like me to try them on for him. I didn’t wait for a reply. I simply dashed to my room, pulled off my jeans and reappeared in the first of the all-in-one bodices.
The look Olivier gave me was, I think, my first inkling of the meaning of female power. He was silent for a moment, then he gestured me towards him. ‘May I?’ he said in a strange voice.
I stood very still as he ran his fingers along my neck and down over my bosom. It felt nice and I didn’t stop him, didn’t stop him either as he pulled me closer to him and caressed my back, my hips, the top of my bare legs. Then he kissed me, long and hard and groaned oddly. When I met his eyes again, there was a question in them which I didn’t altogether understand and I let him pull me towards the sofa. He started to kiss me all over then and I liked that too, liked the slight roughness of his chin, the gentle pressure of his fingers, the heat of him. In fact, I think I liked everything that first night, except perhaps the momentary pain, the splash of blood on the white sheets of his bed where we eventually found ourselves, and the sticky stain his sperm left on my new bodice.
Olivier taught me a great deal in that week we spent together in the house beneath the purple hills and I must have been a willing pupil. He taught me how to take a man’s penis in my hands and in my mouth. He taught me how to clothe it in a sheath so that the very clothing brought moans to his lips. He taught me how to arch my back beneath him and how to sit astride him and press my knees against his buttocks. He taught me how to stop just before pleasure reached its peak so that when I moved again, it became more intense. He taught me how to take pleasure in myself while he watched with a rapt expression on his face. And perhaps, most importantly, he taught me I was beautiful. He was a good teacher and I have never forgotten any of his lessons.
When we got back to Paris, Olivier came to see me with the same regularity as before our departure. But now he stayed later and sometimes we would spend Saturday afternoons in my mother’s bed in the attic which I had all but taken over. My own was so sm
all. Occasionally, we went to the cinema or the theatre. Every so often too, he would bring me a new silky or frilly undergarment, or sometimes a dress. I would parade it before him and he would sit there silently, his hands in his pockets, touching himself, until I could read from his eyes that he wanted my help and I would go over to him and offer it.
You might think that all this harmed my studies. Not at all. I worked with even greater diligence, certain of the fact that Olivier would arrive at his appointed hours. My friends were hard at work too and when we met for an outing on a Sunday afternoon, we would talk about our studies or exchange our fears about the coming exams. I never felt any need to tell any of them, even the closest, about Olivier. We had never decided this in so many words between us, but somehow I wanted to keep it secret.
In April, for my eighteenth birthday, Olivier brought me eighteen white long-stemmed roses and a lowcut black dress, complete with one of those underwired black corselets and matching stockings. The dress was exquisite. We were going out to La Coupole for dinner, and I asked him whether he would like me to change into it. He nodded, so I quickly went into my room to shed what I was wearing and pull on my new things. I had hesitated before, but now I also carefully put on the dark red lipstick I had bought as my own present. And I brushed my hair afresh to a ruddy sheen.
When I came out, Olivier stared at me as if he had never seen me before.
‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked him.
‘Silly,’ he lifted my hair back from my face and kissed me fiercely. ‘It’s just that I’ve never seen you in black.’
A Good Woman Page 3
