After that, there was white space, nothing, until two pages later.
‘The bloody deed is done,’ she wrote. It took me a while to work out what the bloody deed was and then it came to me that she had had an abortion. My father had left her when she was carrying his child.
I read all this slowly, in spasms. It was all too painful and part of me didn’t want to know. What child, for all its curiosity, wants really to know the secret turbulence of its parents lives? But I did read and I learned that my mother had never told my father of this second pregnancy. She wanted him to say that he would stay with her of his own accord. No external pressures, no added weight of choice between her and that other life he so adamantly felt he had to engage in. She was an honourable woman, after all. A good woman. She wouldn’t keep him from his greater commitments unless he wanted to stay of his own free will. She resented him nonetheless, and of course felt the resentment was wrong. And she hadn’t wanted the abortion, but sensed she couldn’t cope with two children on her own.
There were phrases in the midst of all this that I couldn’t penetrate. One of them talked of unborn life being sacrificed for a life already begun. I thought she must mean that my father in his capacity as doctor would save lives in that distant embattled Vietnam. Then I toyed with a much more purple scenario in which my father had left her for another woman who was pining away for him in some rice paddy. I thought I remembered her telling me once that he had spent time in the East before meeting her and that would make sense of it all. But I never really got to the bottom of it all. The diary was hardly explicit about such mundane things as facts.
What was explicit was my mother’s pain and the gradual, dare I say, brave way, she pieced her life together again. Not that her hold on life was weak. She could have gone with him, after all. The diary examines that possibility and comes down firmly against it. The words she uses are not so very different from those she used directly to my face. What is different is the sense that her decision not to accompany him, had initially had something of defiance in it, like a bet with herself that if she stood firm, she would win him over; he would bend to her greater reason and stay in France. For her, for love, for me. He didn’t and she lost: it was too late for her to climb down. The trouble was that she never really got over it.
There were no dates in the diary, just fits and starts of raw emotion. But time must have passed, years, for there was an entry which could only have dated from after my father’s visit to Paris, the one he talked about in his letter. Here she reasserted her reasons for not allowing him to see me. I was hers, only hers now. It was an act of vengeance. A victim’s vengeance. She still loved him, but love has never been altogether devoid of power plays.
The final entry is the one that I think shook me most. It was dated just a few days before her own death. ‘The letter came today, the one I have been expecting for too long, yet hoped would never arrive. Guy is dead. Has apparently been dead for some time, but no one thought to tell me. I didn’t realise I still had hope until now that I recognize it is gone.’
My mother, the last romantic. I remember I was sitting in front of the fire when I read this passage for the nth time. I wondered for a moment whether she had deliberately walked in front of that car on the Bastille and then erased the thought and began to tear out the pages of the diary one by one. One by one I placed them on the flames and watched them burn.
It was when I was about half-way through, that I noticed that one of the sheets was thicker than the rest, that it was in fact two stuck together. I pried them apart thinking I had missed something. I had. Between the two pages was a black and white photograph, slightly damaged by the glue that had spread. It showed a man and a woman, their arms around each other but moving apart, as if the camera had surprised them in an embrace. Their bodies were still facing each other, but they were looking at the photographer. Laughing. I recognized the woman instantly as my mother, though she was young, pretty and I had never seen that look on her face. The man was big, broad-shouldered, with a clear gaze and an open smile. My father. It could only be him, though in my mother’s valiant attempt to excise him from my life, I had never seen a photo of him before. I gazed at the picture for a while and then, when I had finished burning everything else, the letters as well, I threw that too into the fire.
I am not a good person. The story of my life is the story of not being my mother.
-8-
Now that I have confronted the site of my mother’s death, I feel I have the run of the city. I can go anywhere, criss cross, north, south, east, west. The weather has turned beautiful again after days of rain. Plump white clouds travel freely against moist blue sky. I follow them. Follow people too, just to see where they will go.
Today I find myself in the vicinity of the Cimetière Montparnasse. I walk through the gates into this city of the dead where flowers bloom from grey stone. It is a peaceful city. Its inhabitants rest more easily than their memories in visitor’s minds. My mother is buried here in the 27th section off the Avenue de l’Est, not far from the monument to Baudelaire. While the poet sagely contemplates his own writhing form, my mother lies beneath a slab of black marble which carries on its side the words Famille d’Esté. On the top, her name appears as Françoise Regnier, beneath her mother’s and her father’s and her grandparents. I never knew any of them, though I did know about the little medals imprinted in full colour which her grandfather won in the first World War and the words ‘Mort pour la France - Membre du Réseau Musée de l’Homme, which follow her father’s name. In death families lie together, though life may have torn them asunder. Even Baudelaire, who broke with his parents to pursue his flowers of evil, is now tucked safely under their wing, hidden under the name of his despised stepfather, Aupick. Perhaps one day I will come to rest here too, next to my mother, my prodigal life erased beneath the greater weight of the family stone.
The temptation to stay now is so great, that I race away, my hurry unseemly in this motionless city. To prove to myself I am still alive, I walk into the nearest patisserie and buy one of those round two tier pastries incongruously known as réligieuses. I eat it quickly, letting the rich cream drip down my chin. On the Boulevard Montparnasse, I mingle with the busy crowds. Everyone seems to have a destination. I follow one person after another in the superstitious hope that a sense of destination may be contagious. But they elude me, disappearing down metro steps or behind shop doors.
A street sign announces Rue Falguière. It is a quiet street until children suddenly teem out of a school building. They laugh and shriek, jostle each other with all the frenzy of released captives. A well-groomed slightly stocky woman with short blondish hair above a plain high-browed face steps out of the school building and makes her way quickly through the crowd. The children’s voices fall as she comes between them and then rise, like a wave. I follow the path she cuts, cross back over the boulevard in her determined wake, and trail her into the elegant Rue du Cherche Midi. She stops to look into the window of an antique shop. I stop too, just in time, at its far end. When I raise my head, she is looking at me. Our eyes meet. I have a sudden sense that I know those eyes - still, mellow brown, expressionless. And the woman seems to be about to speak. I turn away abruptly and cross the street.
Those eyes pursue me. Whom do they belong to? The image won’t quite coalesce, much as I prod it.
Closer to the apartment, I stop in front of a newsagents and scan the papers. I haven’t done this in weeks. In New York, I would read two or three papers a day, look through a stack of magazines and watch television. It was part of my job, but I was also addicted. I needed a fix of print and images in my veins to keep the mental motors turning. Now the hunger suddenly fills me again. I buy Libération, Le Monde, the Herald Tribune and for good measure, the Guardian. I take my horde back to my lair.
At the door of the lift I meet the man who I have already noticed is my downstairs neighbour. We exchange our customary polite murmurings, but this time he extends the co
nversation.
‘Vous vous plaisez à Paris?’ he asks me, probably taking me for a visiting American. My Herald Tribune is foremost amongst my papers.
‘Assez bien,’ well enough, I answer. His accent isn’t French. It has a touch of something northern in it, Scandinavian perhaps, or German, but perhaps it is his size, his glacial eyes which make me think that.
‘Well enough, like me,’ he smiles, acknowledging his foreignness.
I know from the particular curve of the smile what is going to come next and it does.
‘Perhaps you’d like to come in for a neighbourly cup of coffee,’ he says. ‘I’m about to make some.’
Despite the expectation, my panic is instantaneous. ‘No, no, no thank you,’ I mumble. ‘Not today,’ I try to hide my panic. Why am I so afraid of being alone with a man? An ordinary man. It used to be so easy not so very long ago. A chat, then another, a couple of drinks, and perhaps after that, if one wanted it, a little pleasure. There is nothing to be afraid of. Yet I am afraid. And perhaps more than that. It’s as if without knowing it, I have made a decision.
‘Another time then.’ He has taken me at my word.
I nod as he leaves the lift.
And why not ‘another time’? I cannot go on like this forever, using my lips only to utter inanities to shopkeepers. For almost a month now, since the chance meeting with Sarah Martin, I have had a conversation with no one except my ghosts.
The door of the apartment closes behind me and as always, when I come in, my eyes look towards the picture above the mantelpiece, as if for reassurance. The woman is still walking, her feet firm on the pale ochre earth. I sit down in front of her and spread my French newspapers out on the coffee table. The headlines make no sense. I am out of touch and their shorthand is mystifying. CEE, FIS, OLP, CNPF, TVA. The letters mean nothing to me. So short a time and it is as if I have fallen out of the world.
I turn to the Herald Tribune for comfort and to reassert my kinship with my fellow beings. To know what acronyms and initials stand for is to have power, as well as a sense of community. UN US GB IRA PLO are hieroglyphs I can decipher. Peace talks are in the headlines, between Israel and the PLO, Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, IRA and Loyalists; but headlines about carnage between the same parties also blare. The state of the world makes my own difficulties piddling. Perhaps that was why my mother was a news junkie. What matter one small well-fed, if not altogether happy, lifetime in this quagmire of horrors.
Satiated with affliction, my eyes wander to the classified columns. Escort Agencies abound. Belgravia Orchids, Chic of London, Ferrari International, Suzy of Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, Educated and Elegant. Perhaps I should offer my services. Get paid for what I do best.
I skim through language schools and apartments and am suddenly rivetted by a little boxed announcement. ‘Women who Kill’ it says in bold and then beneath, Attorney seeks researcher for study of women murderers. Fluent English and French, at least, essential as well as ability to use computer, type, interview, and travel at quick notice.’
I must have stared at the ad for some time for when I look up, it is dark outside and without realising it, I have already switched on the hearthside lamp. Restlessness seizes hold of me. I start to pace the length and breadth of the apartment. Even the sight of those gliding feet doesn’t calm me. I stare into the mirror. It shows me a face no different from the one I saw before I left New York. The cheekbones are still there, the wave of a nose, the full lips, the grey eyes. Perhaps there are a few more lines round them. I crinkle them to check. But no, faces show nothing. My face shows nothing. I grub round in my capacious make-up bag and come up with a stick of mascara, some lipstick. I put it on for the first time in weeks. Savagely I brush my hair.
The street is deserted. I turn the corner and go into the local café. A few men are hunched over the bar. Some younger ones bend over a flipper machine showing a jean-clad woman with a large bosom and a cowboy hat. Lights come on in different parts of her anatomy as the racing ball clacks and zings its way down the machine. The noisy youths push and prod and slap the side and the glass surface. I sit at a corner table and order a glass of sauterne. It is too sweet, but I drink it anyway.
‘May I?’ the man from the apartment below mine is suddenly in front of me.
Before I have a chance to answer, he sits down and stretches out his hand, ‘Bjorn Johannsen,’ he introduces himself.
I hesitate and then place my hand in his. ‘Maria d’Esté.’ It is the first time I have said my name since I checked in at the hotel.
‘Another glass?’
I shake my head, only to change my mind. After all, I have come out because I felt restive. A little conversation may help.
‘A coffee, please. Un petit crème.’
He waves the waiter over and then examines me. ‘You said that like a native.’
‘I am.’
‘Not American, then?
‘No, mostly French.’ I tell him the truth, though the temptation to lie is great.
‘I see. I thought the apartment belonged to Americans.’
‘It does. I’m only using it for a while.’
He gives me an open smile then, as if everything has been cleared up and proceeds to tell me about himself. I learn that he is from Stockholm, that he works in Paris for IKEA, that he doesn’t particularly like the French. He says the last with a little self-effacing grin, adding that at least the nights are shorter here.
I settle back into the hard chair. I can read the signs. There will be few demands made of me for the next half hour. I am in for a life-story, professional at first, and gradually, confessional.
Men always confess to me. I don’t know why. Someone once told me it was because of the way I tilt my head, so that I look as if I’m fascinated by every word uttered. And apparently I ‘mmm’ in a particular way, a sound which serves every purpose from question to comment and also acts as a provocation to more speech. Someone else told me, but that was when things were getting a little ropey between us, that it was because I was just a mirror and reflected whatever any pompous little arse wanted to see of himself.
It’s not that I don’t speak. It’s just that I take a little while to warm to it. When needed, I can hold my own with the best of them. But it’s not needed now. Bjorn Johannsen is off and away. He has finished giving me his impressions of Paris, he has told me about his work, and now that he’s onto his second glass of beer, he’s beginning to tell me about how his girlfriend didn’t take to Paris.
I glance at my watch and in a great flurry start to rise. ‘I must go,’ I say. ‘There’s some work I have to finish tonight.’
‘Oh,’ his blue eyes narrow into a seductive look. ‘I’d hoped you’d join me for dinner.’
‘Can’t,’ I mumble, smile. ‘Another time.’
‘Are you a writer?’ he asks.
I shake my head and before he can ask any more, add, ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
Without looking back, I make my way to the door and resolutely head homewards. No sooner am I in the apartment, than the show of resolution becomes real.
At the corner of the desk in the mezzanine, there is a small old fashioned portable. I take a piece of paper and off the top of my head begin to type.
‘Dear Sir/Madame,
Your classified ad in the Herald Tribune intrigues me. I could tell you a great deal about myself, but prefer in the interests of your time and mine, to tell you just a little. I have all the qualifications you note. I also have a reading and speaking knowledge of Spanish, though my ability to write in it is limited.
I then switch to French and note that I have held a responsible job for some years but would now welcome a change. References, if needed, can be had, though I prefer not to trouble anyone, until I have a clearer notion of the project at hand.
As I write, the idea of death curls round me like a serpent, clutches at my throat. Before I lose my nerve I address the letter and rush downstairs to post it. While I press the lid of
the yellow box, I shut my eyes, screw up my face, and make a wordless wish. The gesture is involuntary. This is how I have always done it. This is now I used to do it in my early days in New York.
When I first arrived in Manhattan the city both excited and frightened me and the more it frightened me the more excited I grew. I was avid for life, hungry for sights and smells and sounds. Sleaze or glamour, it didn’t matter which, as long as impressions and experience crowded upon each other at breakneck speed. It was the careless avidity of youth, impatient only with constraint.
The run down yellow cab which bumped me from the bus terminal to the hotel I had randomly chosen for its cheapness seemed to have served as a getaway car for some sleazy shoot out amidst the yawning canyons of the city. Its corpulent, shirt-sleeved driver chewed gum, intermittently took slugs from a coke can and when he abruptly turned towards me, it was to bellow out words I could barely understand. Amongst them was the word, ‘English’. I nodded at this, and when he lifted my bags from the boot of the car, he looked me up and down slowly and smiled with approval, ‘London, ya?’
I agreed, since it seemed to make him happy. It seemed to make everyone I met in New York happy. So half the time I simply let people think I was English. My being mistaken for an English person was the one thing about my life in America that would probably have made my mother proud.
The hotel was a nondescript building tucked in beside Lincoln Centre. It smelled vaguely of urine mingled with disinfectant and had nothing to recommend it except that it was in New York and far from home. Outside police and ambulance sirens blared, obliterating the sounds of the television where earnest men and women with bright teeth held up packages, bottles, tubes.
I think it was the sight of the tenth cockroach crawling out from behind the murky sink that made me decide that I would after all, as Olivier had insisted, ring his friend. I hung on for seven days - days replete with forays down Broadway and into the Village and up the Empire State Building and into museums - and then phoned.
A Good Woman Page 5
