Summer arrives and I am packed off to Kent for madcap games in English with Robinson. The golden fields, the expanse of the horizon, bleach out Paris. When I come back to school, everyone seems a little hazy to me, a little unreal. Even Beatrice. But she greets me with a beatific smile and assumes she is coming home with me. It is on the way home that I realise she has seen my mother far more over the summer than I have.
It is only some months later that this rankling develops into something I recognize as anger. For my mother’s birthday, Beatrice brings her a large and expensive bottle of Chanel No. 5. My mother is overwhelmed. She hugs Beatrice to her and mumbles, ‘How good of you. You really shouldn’t have.’
‘I wanted to,’ Beatrice says.
As my mother showers us all with her new scent, I think of the two tea-cloths I have chosen for her in obedience to her rule of usefulness and feel like hiding the package. I know that the hug and peck she gives me are as nothing compared to Beatrice’s.
The next day I ask Beatrice how she could afford to give my mother such an expensive present.
‘I did lots of errands over the summer,’ she turns her patient smile on me and then waves the matter away. ‘By the way, your mother asked if I’d like to stay over this weekend. Won’t that be fun!’
I nod but I am not happy.
Over the next months, Beatrice seems almost to be living with us. When the spare room isn’t otherwise engaged, she is always there. She comes to us for Christmas. She makes herself useful, sets the table, takes the rubbish down without being asked, is thrilled to stand at the metro station with a box in her hand and collect money for my mother’s charities. And my mother has been helping her with her work as much as I used to, so that now we are neck and neck for first place in class.
One day we are sitting together at the large table doing our homework when I spill a bottle of ink over Beatrice’s notebook. I snatch the bottle upright and watch the circle of blue widen and spread and sink down through the pages.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, feeling blissfully happy.
Beatrice looks up at me with her mellow eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She finds a page towards the end of the book which is untainted and dutifully starts her work again.
An imp of the perverse takes me over. I break plates and pretend that Beatrice has done it. I hide her notebooks so that she will be late delivering homework and find them for her miraculously the next day somewhere around the house. I take my mother’s best pen and imply that Beatrice has perhaps stolen it. I begin to invite more and other friends home after school, avoid Beatrice when the bell rings, so that she is forced to ask whether she can tag along with us. I never stop her, but she becomes more and more like someone we treat as a mangy dog. The trouble is, she is happy with her scraps. Even when we whisper horrible things about her behind her back, so that she can hear; even when one day our game entails putting her in the large green rubbish bin in the square by the school and covering her over. Beatrice never complains. And my mother continues to sing her praises.
Beatrice, I say to myself, is my mother’s better daughter.
No sooner do I acknowledge this, than Beatrice is suddenly living with us. How it happens I don’t quite know, but it has to do with the fact that she has broken her leg. She is away from school for a few days and when she reappears, she is on crutches. A grubby white plaster cast sticks out from beneath her desk.
‘I fell down the stairs,’ she tells me without meeting my eyes and I imagine that someone has pushed her, perhaps her brother or sister.
‘Did it hurt?’ I ask.
She nods.
‘So you won’t be able to play for a while,’ I say. ‘You won’t be able to come home with me after school.’ It is a statement, not a question.
Beatrice looks away. ‘No.’ Her voice is funny. I can barely hear it.
That evening I tell my mother, ‘Beatrice has broken her leg. She won’t be able to come here any more.’
‘Oh?’ A deep crease appears in my mother’s brow. She looks worried, even a little frightened. With a distracted air, she asks me to tell her how it happened.
‘She fell down the stairs,’ I reply and add, ‘Her sister or brother probably pushed her. They were fed up with her being such a goody-goody.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ my mother frowns.
On Saturday, when I come home at lunchtime after school, Beatrice is installed in our spare room. I had noticed her absence that morning, but thought little of it. My mother tells me nothing about how she convinced Beatrice’s parents to let her go, nor what they are like. She simply says, ‘Beatrice is going to stay with us until her leg is healed. Won’t that be nice? And so much better for her to be closer to school.’
I grunt in the way my mother hates, but she lets it pass.
Everytime we have chicken for dinner and my mother hands us the wishbone, I imitate Beatrice’s gestures and wish with all my heart that Beatrice will soon be better and disappear. Forever, I feel, though I don’t put that into the words of the wish. But Beatrice wishes better than I do and I am always left holding the short end of the bone. Until one evening, just before the summer holidays, when the top of the upside down V remains in my hand. I stare at it in amazement, feel a miracle has taken place.
Sure enough, Beatrice’s cast comes off two days later and after the summer break, she has disappeared. She is no longer in our class, no longer in the school. I hardly dare tell my mother, but she speaks to me about it herself.
‘Beatrice and her family have moved to the country. She’ll write to us when they have a permanent address.’
I feign sadness. Then in order to explain the smile which tugs at my lips, I add, ‘She’ll like the country. She always said she’d like to go to the country.’
‘Yes,’ my mother looks at me dubiously.
Beatrice writes, not frequently, but there are separate letters for my mother and myself. I answer the first two or three and then stop. I am not interested. My mother, I know, carries on, for occasionally she gives me news of Beatrice.
Then one Saturday, I must be about sixteen, I come home mid-afternoon and find a young woman sitting with my mother. It is not until I see her eyes, that I realise this must be Beatrice. She doesn’t look well. Her skin is blotchy, her face puffy. Her skirt is thick and shapeless. She seems years older than the rest of my friends. But the eyes are the same, mellow, benign, somehow more saintly than ever.
Conversation is difficult. We have nothing in common anymore. She has really come to see my mother, ostensibly to ask for a job reference. But she asks me questions about school, about friends. She flatters me. And I feel guilt spreading through me as if I were somehow responsible for the way Beatrice has turned out. It is my fault. I escape as soon as I can. I have friends to see, an appointment at the cinema. All of this is true, but I am still escaping.
My mother tells me no more about Beatrice. I don’t know whether she sees her anymore or not. I certainly never hear from her again.
-10-
The idea that the woman I trailed from the school on the Rue Falguière down to the Rue du Cherche Midi is Beatrice obsesses me. I have gone back to the school twice and waited as the children spilled through the gates. But she didn’t appear.
This morning, as I gaze down from the window into the courtyard garden, the sight of the sprouting crocuses and fat daffodil shoots makes me long for the country. I pull on my boots and jacket and head for the Luxembourg Gardens. Hardly the country, but at least there will be those flowers I am so good at naming.
On the way I pause at a Travel Agent’s and look at posters. A cheetah lopes through long grass. A lion yawns regally, balancing himself on a tree-trunk. Masai-Mara, the pictures announce. Sunsets in Siam, reads the script above a group of men raking rice as white as snow in a peaceful paddy field. Golden beaches. Martinique, Ile de la Réunion, Gaudeloupe. Places I never heard of in America but which my school books had carefully taught me were departments of France.
>
My first job in New York was in a travel agency. From the hundreds of letters I sent out after I had left the Delahaye’s, the third response was from something called French Affair. I was summoned to an interview. Since it was my third, I prepared myself a little better and reminded myself over and over that I had to impress my prospective bosses with my eagerness and talents, minimal as they were, before the crucial question came up.
The office was on the sixth floor of a block on Madison and 50th. It consisted of one largeish room where French exhibition posters had pride of place: The Carnavalet, The Louvre, Matisse at the Musée d’Art Moderne. There were also two desks, shelves neatly ranked with brochures and a few chairs; plus a nether room. A woman who was visibly in the final stages of pregnancy showed me in to this back room where Mr. Carruthers was waiting for me.
He was a gangling man with a shining pate and a wry turn to his lips, and he had a dapper air about him. His bow tie was a bright canary yellow, his shirt forest green and when he stood up to shake my hand, his trousers sported a perfect crease. He addressed and put his first questions to me in French and when I started to babble away at top speed, he lifted his knobbly hands to his ears and shouted, ‘Whoaaa.’
I stopped in mid sentence and he started to laugh. ‘I was just checking that you had a command of the language,’ he grinned. From then on he spoke to me in English. He explained that the agency worked with private individuals as well as other agencies to set up select trips for people who wanted to explore France, not just the usual tourist trajectories, but journeys that would cater to particular tastes and interests.
I dug out some history and asked him, ‘You mean things like Louis XIV’s France, or Napoleon’s, or eighteenth century architectural highlights?’
‘Yes, all that,’ he looked at me oddly. ‘Not bad ideas those.’
We chatted for quite a long time about this and that, and about why I had come to the States. He told me that my job would consist of liaising with clients to draw up itineraries, then with the French side, hotels, train schedules, car hire firms. He told me that some clients would require discretion, that others would be difficult. And then he asked me the hard questions.
No I had no experience, I told him, but I would work hard and my school results were good. I could type pretty well, I lied, and then hurriedly added that I would practice all day every day until the job started and every night after that. No, I had no references, but he could write to my teachers. My desperation was growing by the second and when he asked me the crucial question about working papers, I think I must visibly have stifled a sob.
‘That’s just what I thought,’ he murmured. He gave me a long hard look and then grinned his grin again. ‘Well, we can try. I know someone who knows someone who may be able to help. In the meantime, you can come in and learn the trade for pocket money.’
If he hadn’t been sitting at the other side of the desk, I would have flung my arms around him.
And so I became a travel agent. It was Mr. Carruthers who used to call me Rita when he wanted to tease me. I stayed with him for over a year, before the next thing came along and he agreed, not altogether happily, to let me go.
The beds of the Luxembourg Gardens are afire with the molten reds, rich purples and fuchsia pinks of pansies and primulas. I walk past the Italianate palace my royal namesake constructed for herself when the Louvre began to bore her and head towards the central fountain. Children are sailing their little boats across the carps’ heads, prodding boats and fish at once with their wooden sticks. ‘L’amiral des voiliers’, Admiral of the sailing boats, we used to call the old woman who rented the ships to us by the hour. We each had our favourite number. Mine was ninety-five and it won many a race to the centre of the fountain.
From the presence of the children, I realise today must be Wednesday - a full free day for some, half free for others. My mother, I remember, used to rant about this free day, set up to appease the clerics: if state schools were secular, there would nonetheless be time set aside when, if so wished, children could pursue a religious education. ‘Half-measures,’ she grumbled, ‘calculated to drive working mothers mad.’
Past the wooded area where a few lone enthusiasts act out a ballet of Tai Chi, past the children’s playground, I sit down on a bench. In the midst of the moist lawn before me stands Bartholdi’s original for the Statue of Liberty. Was it here that my dreams of going to America were nurtured? Or was it simply the latest spate of Hollywood films?
The quiet of the spot is suddenly broken by piping young voices. A flock of small schoolchildren appear. Two women are with them ordering them into double files, hushing their clamour. One of the women begins to speak. I stare at her from the distance of my bench. It is her. I am certain of it. Beatrice. She may look far better than she did at sixteen, but the quiet gestures are the same. And the stillness is there like an invisible wall around her.
The statue of liberty explained, the group turns down the lane at my left. The woman I am sure is Beatrice doesn’t look in my direction. I cannot but get up and follow. It is as if the piper has begun to play and her flute controls my limbs. I trail the group to the southern tip of the gardens and watch them congregate at a bus stop in front of the Closerie des Lilas. I hesitate. Have I gone mad? Why am I so certain this woman is Beatrice? Is it simply because she turned up unexpectedly in the Luxembourg today? But I hurry on. I may not have the courage to get onto the same bus, I may not have the courage to pronounce her name, but I know her destination. I catch up with the children on the Rue Falguière and watch the gates of the school swallow them. It won’t be long now. It is almost noon. I am so tense with anticipation that perspiration wets my arms. I take off my jacket and wait.
On the dot of twelve the doors open and I cluster behind the waiting mums until I see Beatrice emerge. She walks quickly her slightly heavy hips moving with a precise efficient swing. Her suit is good, her legs a little thick but shapely in clear stockings and pump shoes. For a moment, seeing her like this, I am uncertain about her again, but I hasten after her nonetheless.
She pauses at the window of the same antique shop. I am about to speak. A little speech has crystallised in my mind: ‘It’s strange, I know, but you remind me so much of an old school friend…
Our eyes meet in the reflection of the shop window. And suddenly she turns towards me and says, her voice faltering, ‘Maria Regnier?’
‘Beatrice?’ I respond hoarsely.
We stare at each other for a moment and then she touches my hand, squeezes it. ‘How extraordinary. How utterly extraordinary. After all these years… I saw you here the other day, didn’t I? I thought it was you, but then you walked away.’
Her voice has the same soft, slow inflection and the radiant smile she gives me makes me feel she has forgiven me or forgotten. I prefer to think it is the former.
‘You look so wonderful,’ she murmurs.
‘And you.’ It is true. But what fills me with wonder is how her quiet plainness is still irradiated by something I cannot quite grasp. We gaze at each other for another moment and then I say, ‘Shall we have a coffee? Catch up…’
She glances at her watch, nods, ‘But I won’t have very long today. I’m sorry. But now that we’ve found each other… I’ve thought about you on and off over the years.’
We sit in a cafe in the Carrefour de Croix-Rouge and gaze at each other. Conversation isn’t easy. It is she who takes the lead. ‘So tell me what you’ve been up to? What do you do?’
I laugh brittly, ‘For the moment, I do nothing. I’ve been living in New York. I only came back recently.’
‘I always thought you would be a teacher, like your mother.’ She hesitates on the last word, gives it a breathing space of its own.
I shake my head, ‘It’s you, instead.’
She smiles that slow smile, ‘Yes,’ she acknowledges. ‘But not half so good.’
‘She would have been proud of you.’
‘I would have liked that.�
� She stirs her coffee deliberately, then raises her eyes to mine. ‘I wrote to her once after that last time I saw you both. But the letter came back.’ Her face clouds over. For a moment, as she stares out the window, it grows ugly, contorted, as if she can’t forgive me for chasing her away from my mother. Or perhaps I imagine it, for as soon as she looks at me again, there is the same soft light. ‘It was only when I came to Paris, some years later, that I learned she had died. I’m so sorry. She was so kind. So good.’
The way she says it brings an unaccustomed lump to my throat. For the first time, I, too, seem to feel sorry for my mother. But I say with an inappropriate laugh, ‘She was still relatively young.’
‘Yes.’
She is lost in some thought of her own, then she glances at her watch again.
‘You were her better daughter,’ I say, to keep her there, but also because I need to say it.
‘What a strange idea.’ She reaches for her bag. ‘I must go. But we’ll meet soon. You’ll tell me all about yourself.’ She takes a pen from her bag and writes her phone number for me on a napkin. ‘Please ring.’
‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘If you like. It’s not far.’
We turn left into the Rue de Grenelle. At the next corner, she pauses, gestures along a narrow street. ‘We’re just up there.’ I am so much taller than her that she stands on her toes to kiss the air on either side of my face. ‘You are alright, aren’t you?’ she looks at me with momentary concern.
‘Yes.’ The syllable doesn’t sound quite emphatic enough, so I repeat it, ‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’m sorry I can’t invite you up, but Marie-Françoise’s English lesson begins in just five minutes, and then there’s one of my SOS-Racisme meetings.’
‘Marie-Françoise?’
‘My youngest,’ she waves, hurries along the street.
I watch her stop at a building on the right, tap out a code, push open a heavy wooden door. I wait a moment and then I walk slowly past the building. Beatrice has children, I think. Beatrice is married. Beatrice is a teacher. Beatrice lives in an apartment in one of the city’s most desirable areas. Beatrice belongs to committees. Beatrice has come from nowhere and made a life for herself. She has named her daughter Marie-Françoise. Is it a coincidence that the name contains both myself and my mother? Surely not. Beatrice bears no rancour. She is good. She has not changed. There is a peace about her.
A Good Woman Page 7
