by Fanny Blake
Mary cleared her throat. ‘So are you?’
In the twilight, her friend was almost a silhouette across the other side of the table. The candles guttered so the light came from the moon and stars.
‘I think so.’
‘I know you don’t like to go overboard, but that doesn’t sound good, even for you.’
Isla laughed. ‘It came out wrong, that’s all. He’s a great guy who looks after me and that takes a bit of getting used to. I’m so used to fending for myself.’
‘Is he going to move in?’
‘He’s staying at the house while I’m away. He offered to keep an eye on it, water the garden – so it seemed sensible. I haven’t thought much beyond that.’
Of course she had. But she hadn’t come to any conclusion about how she would like the affair to progress.
‘Life’s short,’ Mary said with a nod to acknowledge the cliché. ‘You might as well get on with it before it’s too late.’
‘It’s not what I want. I love my life and I’m not ready to change yet. We hardly know each other. But he has been incredibly supportive over Mum’s death. I was a mess when I got back from the funeral. He makes a mean hot toddy and he looked after me.’
‘So he knows about your legacy? The painting?’
Isla shook her head. ‘No. It sounds so melodramatic. Without saying anything, I’ve let him think I’ve inherited a chunk of mum’s estate. He thinks I was devastated by her death, that we didn’t get on and I want to know why, and that the three of us have fallen out. I suppose I’ll have to tell him eventually but right now I don’t want anyone to know except you. I don’t want people, least of all Tony, asking questions and wondering what’s wrong with me or what I must have done to deserve it.’
Mary leaned forward. ‘You didn’t do anything. I’m sure.’
‘But you don’t know that, and neither do I.’
9
Paris, 1954
May held out her Gauloise for a light. What would her parents say if they could see her now? It had taken time to get used to the cigarette’s strong taste that caught at the back of her throat but she and Wendy had persevered. As she had with her French. Already she could make herself understood to most people and could understand the simplest of rapid conversations and was racing through the novels of the fashionable writer, Colette.
Only a few weeks into her stay and she was already quite at home in the city. The cellar boîte or nightclub where they were was small, hot and packed with people; it felt as though sweat were dripping from the low ceiling. She couldn’t hear a word of what was being said over the music and the voices. She was there with Wendy, Max and Sam, two American boys who were studying at the Sorbonne and whom Wendy had met in their local tabac. May’s friendship with Wendy had blossomed since their first meeting in the park and the two young women went everywhere together. Wendy was like May in many ways but braver, more outgoing. Max and Sam were quite different. They were brash, confident and with plenty of money to splash about. May had heard these lucky Americans who came to study at the Sorbonne were known as ‘Amerluks’. There was a shine and flamboyance about them that she had never seen on any boys she’d met at home in Scotland. They had style. She was fascinated by them, drawn to them like a moth to a flame.
Max flicked his lighter and they cupped hands as she inhaled. ‘Merci.’ She blew a cloud of smoke above his head. Quite the Parisienne.
Butterflies stormed her stomach as he gazed into her eyes. ‘My pleasure.’ He was so close, they were almost kissing. Then he pulled back, leaving her uncertain. Did he like her or not? She watched him turn to say something to Sam, then throw back his head and laugh so the light caught the contours of his face. She resisted the urge to reach out to touch them.
She took his proffered hand with a shiver and followed him onto the dance floor. Wendy was already there with Sam. The steps May had practised at home in her bedroom in Scotland didn’t seem right for here so she followed her friend’s example and soon picked up the rhythm, dancing until they could barely stand.
Without Wendy her time in Paris would have been very different. The two of them explored the city together. She had marvelled at the curiously shaped domes of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, climbing to the top of the largest before exploring the streets round the back of the church, dallying to watch the street artists at work, chatting over a coffee or an ice cream. They wandered through the chaotic food market of Les Halles, people-watched from one of the cafés, bought flowers on the Quai des Fleurs, watched the fishermen on the banks and in the little boats on the Seine, stared up at the grotesque gargoyles peering down from the heights of Notre Dame, and had been filled with awe by its cavernous interior. And now, excitingly, they had made friends with Max and Sam, and they were seeing another side to the city. The four of them spent time in the street cafés, bars, and nightclubs, lingered in the grand public parks, visited the art on show in the Louvre and the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and went to the cinema where they had seen L’Air de Paris and, along with all the other women in the cinema, May had fallen in love with Jean Gabin, the star.
How wonderful everything was. During her dreich Dunfermline schooldays, May had never imagined she would be pitched into… this life, this colour, this excitement. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz she had gone through a door that took her from a faded black-and-white film strip into a world of blazing technicolour.
‘You wanna see the Eiffel Tower on Saturday?’ Max was leaning towards her, shouting so she could hear. She melted under his gaze. Blue eyes, square-jawed, slick blond hair. His smile touched her heart.
‘I think so.’ She felt breathless with excitement, although aware she should not seem too keen. She didn’t want to give him the wrong idea about the sort of girl she was.
‘What?’ His hand was holding her arm, pulling her towards him. ‘I cain’t hear ya.’
She nodded, as her insides melted. ‘Yes.’
Of course she did. The Tower dominated the Paris skyline but so far she had been nowhere near it. When she told Wendy about his invitation on their way home, her friend clapped her hands. ‘A date. I knew he liked you. I knew it!’
May shook her head. ‘No. He’s just being nice.’ But the way her stomach somersaulted again told her something else was happening. This was another side to Parisian life that she had only heard about.
Madame Dubois had proved to be a kind employer who had soon made May feel at home. She rarely saw Monsieur who left the house for work early and often returned late. What Madame did with herself during the day was something of a mystery. She was out a lot – seeing friends, Isla guessed – but had found time to take Isla round the neighbourhood, showing her the local pâtisserie, the pharmacie – where she had been mystified by their bemused reaction when she told them she was hot, only to discover that ‘Je suis chaud’ meant she was feeling sexy (the mortification!) – the tabac for postcards and the nearest funny yellow post box. Everything she saw was so different, such fun. As long as she fulfilled the terms of their agreement and looked after her son, Madame didn’t seem to mind what May got up to out of hours, provided she told her where she was going and when she would be home. As long as she and Emile spoke English every day and spent their allotted time together, they were left to their own devices. When she turned his bed back in an apple pie and he ripped the sheet, he found it hilarious and a friendship began to form, cemented by the card tricks she had learned as a child. They had become regulars at the Jardin du Luxembourg or the ‘Luco’ as she had learned to call it. As spring became summer, the park had got busier and she had got to know other girls like her, employed to look after other women’s children or learn French, but Wendy and she were closest, especially now that Max and Sam were on the scene.
On her evenings off, never once had Monsieur or Madame Dubois raised an eyebrow at the mention of a nightclub or café, whereas her own parents would have had fifty fits. She could only imagine her employers were too caught up in their own
worlds to worry about what went on in hers. Late one afternoon she had heard a man’s laugh coming from the master bedroom long after the two-hour lunchbreak when everywhere in Paris seemed to shut down. She knew Monsieur Dubois was out. And if he wasn’t at home, or in his office, where was he then, she wondered.
When she mentioned it to Wendy, her friend tossed her blond hair and laughed. ‘What? You don’t know?’
‘What?’
‘The French way… cinq à sept.’ This wasn’t the first time Wendy had been astonished by May’s naiveté.
‘What are you talking about?’ May had no idea.
Wendy proceeded to enlighten her. ‘No one turns a hair at a man calling on a woman on their way home from work, never mind if one of them is married. Lucky Madame,’ she said. ‘A husband and a lover in one day. Monsieur Dubois was probably doing the same thing.’
Isla’s eyes were opened. ‘Would you…?’
Wendy roared with laughter. ‘You are funny. Of course not. Although I wouldn’t say no to Sam if he asked.’
Would she say no to Max, May wondered. She was quite taken with him. He was attentive, funny and handsome. Being with him set all sorts of sensations racing through her that she hadn’t experienced before but that she enjoyed, so she tried to find excuses to be with him, and he didn’t seem to mind.
It seemed an age until Saturday came. May met Max outside the Odéon metro station on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. May was wearing the new floral waisted shirt dress she had bought with Wendy’s approval in the fabulous Galleries Lafayette, cinched at the waist with her red belt. Her only shoes were the sensible flats her mother had insisted on her bringing but her finances didn’t run to a new pair of shoes as well. She had tried to tame her short curls into something less bouncy, more elegant, and failed.
‘You look lovely,’ he said, and kissed her cheek.
May’s pulse was set racing by the compliment and by his familiarity.
‘You look nice too.’ She appreciated that he had made an effort: beige slacks, an open-necked short-sleeved white shirt, tan loafers. He pushed his hair back off his face, showing the small red birthmark on his forehead.
‘I’ve never been on the Metro.’ She tried to hide her apprehension. Wendy had scared her with stories of thefts and attacks.
He took both her hands. ‘Come with me… I’m going to lure you into the depths.’ He grinned. ‘It’s very dangerous, but I’ll protect you.’
Was he teasing?
‘We’re so cool,’ he said as they descended the steps. May was nervous, given what she had heard about the dangers lurking in subterranean Paris, but Max negotiated their route with ease, chatting all the way, calming her nerves, and they emerged unscathed at the Champ de Mars. ‘Et voilà.’ He spread his hands like a showman as if he’d magicked the tower from nowhere. He bent over and whispered. ‘Didn’t I say I’d protect you?’
His breath was on her cheek and their heads were almost touching.
They took the Quai Branly and turned up into Avenue Gustave Eiffel until they stood right under the tower itself. Up close, it was like a giant Meccano model rearing into the sky, much taller than she had ever imagined. The iron latticework was painted a reddish brown, presenting an extraordinary feat of engineering. May was lost for words.
Max grabbed her hand. ‘And now, hold on to your hat. We’re going up it.’
‘We are?’ How could they possibly? But she was following him, thrilling with excitement, up the steps to the ticket office. While he bought the tickets for the lift, she bought a postcard for her parents and another for Aggie from the selection that festooned the window of the souvenir shop to the right of the entrance. She would write them when she got back to the quiet of her room.
‘Did you know Eiffel built a secret apartment for himself at the very top?’ Max was back, clutching two tickets.
‘Are we going right up there?’ Her palms were sweaty.
‘We’ll see.’ He took her hand again and led the way to the lift, not giving her the chance to change her mind.
Nothing in May’s life yet could match the experience of being in that lift cabin. She stared out of its partially louvred windows as they rose steadily, first one floor, then the second, higher and higher above the city. When the lift shuddered to a halt, they got out and peered over the railing at the microscopic people scurrying below them. May gazed over the panorama of the city laid out at their feet, quite overwhelmed. Masses of grey rooftops were divided by the network of streets, interrupted in one direction by the glass roof of the Gare St Lazare and the green copper roof of the Madeleine. Windows glinted in the sun and, on the ground, the traffic moved about like ants racing from one burrow to another.
‘There’s Notre Dame,’ said Max pointing in its direction.
‘Where, where?’ She followed the direction of his pointing finger. ‘The heart of Paris,’ she said happily. They took over one of the telescopes from a couple who were leaving and went on identifying highlights of the city to each other – the Palais de Chaillot, Sacré Coeur, L’Opera, the bateaux mouches on the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe, Les Invalides – until they had named everything they recognised.
They stood close together, May barely breathing from excitement. Max put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her even closer. She relaxed into his embrace. Her day was complete… her week was complete… her life was complete. She had never known anyone like him. Forget the boys from Scotland. They had none of Max’s swagger and energy. They didn’t know about places like this.
‘Souvenirs!’ A man appeared up the steps with a trayful of miniature Eiffel Towers.
‘M’sieur.’ Max went over and bought one. ‘For you,’ he said, presenting it to May with a flourish. ‘For a wonderful morning.’
May took it and tucked it in her bag as if it was most precious thing she had ever been given.
After that day, they spent as much time together as they could. May would count down the hours until she next saw him, her mind only half on her French lessons, watching out for him when she was in the Luco with Emile. Whenever she wasn’t working or at her French classes she would meet him, sometimes alone and sometimes with Wendy and Sam. They wandered through Paris, exploring. Thanks to the German Occupation, the city itself had not been decimated by war and was coming back to life with determination. They dawdled by the bouquinistes, the second-hand booksellers on the left bank, rummaging through the books and prints. Max’s favourite bookshop was Le Mistral on the Rue de la Bûcherie where they would spend hours, poring over the books while Max spotted notable visiting writers. This was the hub of Bohemian Paris, and she was part of it.
‘One day, my books will be on these shelves,’ he’d say with longing. May would squeeze his hand in support.
They exclaimed over the puppies and kittens in the animal market where small caged birds of every colour sat on perches waiting to be taken home and hung in apartment windows. They sat in street cafés taking hours over a single cup of coffee, talking, talking and even kissing. They learned everything about each other and bit by bit May found herself falling in love.
She listened to Max’s stories of his happy childhood in Wisconsin, how he came to Paris with his brother Walt who had gone home months earlier, homesick and unable to pick up the lingo. But Max stayed where he was, obsessed with his dream of becoming a writer, of hanging out at Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp and Les Deux Magots with the notable writers of the day, of being internationally recognised for his talent. Sometimes he would read out an excerpt from his writing which she would admire extravagantly without quite understanding what he was trying to say. There were plenty of philosophical meanderings embedded in prose full of metaphor and words May had not come across before.
One evening they were in a café, eating oeufs en cocotte, when Max took her hand across the table. May waited for him to speak.
‘I thought we might go to Brittany for a few days, get out of the city.’ He raised his eyebrows, questioning
.
Just the two of them! Her immediate reaction was excitement, but then a note of caution kicked in as her mother’s warnings about boys echoed in her head. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’d have to ask Madame.’ There was nowhere she’d like to go more and Madame was bound to let her have a couple of days off.
‘Not just us,’ he added. ‘I was going to ask Sam and Wendy to come along. You girls can look after each other.’
She laughed. ‘I think we can look after ourselves.’ The idea of some time out of the city, alone with the others was thrilling.
So a few weekends later, Max drove her with Wendy and Sam to Brittany in the green Renault 4CV he borrowed from a friend. Where they went, on the south coast, was a paradise apparently untouched by the war with small white-sanded rocky coves sheltered by pine trees, the turquoise water crystal clear lapping on sandy beaches.
They took two rooms, one for Wendy and May and one for the boys, in a local family-run hotel that was modest in its decoration but warm in its welcome. Immediately May knew they would have a good time. And they did. Their days were spent exploring the region, lying on the sun-kissed beaches or strolling along coastal paths with only the occasional heron or cormorant for company. May felt thoroughly relaxed, loving this time with Max. Every day seemed to bring them closer. She never wanted their time there to end.
On their last night, they had a simple supper of truite au bleu and potatoes accompanied by deep red burgundy wine.
‘You girls have made all the difference to this summer,’ said Max.
‘We try,’ said Wendy, looking pleased.
May said nothing but enjoyed the warmth his words gave her. Max touched her arm, making her shiver with delight. ‘You have.’
