by Tessa Lunney
I had never seen my mother with “luminous eyes.” His descriptions were as over-the-top as the décor.
“I didn’t notice the coat until the next day. She called, asking about it, and promised to pick it up next time she was here.”
“This café opened almost thirty years ago. You must have known her well.”
“Oh, Mademoiselle King…” Albert sighed theatrically. Jean frowned and Albert went back to the cloak room.
“Albert is a little sentimental.”
“My mother made an impression, then.”
“Of course!” He looked at me sceptically. “You must know that she inspired poetry.” He tapped the little book he had tied to the package. It was a slim volume with a dark blue cover, red letters spelling The London Muse: an anthology.
“No one wrote verses to her beauty in Australia.”
“Ah! Well. Perhaps she was too delicate for all that sunshine.”
“Not even ‘perhaps.’ ”
“She was a true beauty, mademoiselle. She came first when she was herself a mademoiselle, surrounded by admirers. She was like one of the women on our walls here… in fact, I think she is one of the women on our walls here. She sat for artists, she spent long hours conversing with poets, and at the end of the night she always helped make sure the bill was paid. She had a smile…” He breathed in with the memory. “She had a smile that made you feel as though you were the only person who mattered in the whole world. Which wasn’t her smile, of course, but the way she looked at you, those eyes with their changing color…”
“Who were these artists?” Could one of them have been her secret lover?
“Always a different group, but they included Matisse, Mucha, Russell, Rodin, Valery… sometimes those scruffians from Montmartre and Montparnasse would turn up too, Apollinaire, Modigliani, Picasso…”
“Even after she was married?”
“Yes, of course. I never saw Monsieur Bouton, but her marriage didn’t seem to make any difference to her appeal. The way she became a little… wiser with each visit. All of us become sadder with age, except with her a little melancholy only made her more beautiful.”
“Sydney doesn’t go in for melancholy. As you say, too much sunshine.”
“She was perfect for Paris. I never saw anyone who could glide so easily between the pauper painters in Montmartre and the high-society patrons who came here merely for breakfast. Only the war stopped her being the toast of the salons.”
“These artists… was there one in particular who was her special companion?”
“Not that I saw, mademoiselle. She knew how to be discreet.”
“How very Parisian.” I looked into his sympathetic face and couldn’t see a trace of insincerity. This made me more confused than ever—the beauty he described was not the mother I knew, nor the woman in the diaries—I needed some space to think. I took the package and got up to leave. “Thank you, you’ve been so—”
“Wait, come with me.” He ushered me through the restaurant to a wall near the kitchens. On the wall were photographs, dozens of them, of famous people who had come to Maxim’s. I immediately recognized Sarah Bernhardt and Marechal Petain, Maurice Chevalier and Raymond Poincaré. Jean stood by a photo in the corner.
“Here she is, with her friends, in… 1894.”
“Two years before I was born.” I peered at the photo. “Is that Rodin?”
Jean leaned forward. “It is, with Matisse, Russell, Monet, the Norwegian Munch… I don’t recognize the others, they weren’t regulars. The men who flank Mademoiselle King, as she was then, are Rodin, as you recognized, and Russell, with Matisse at the front.”
My mother wasn’t merely smiling, she was laughing at the camera. She was literally surrounded by men, everyone smiling and touching each other with linked arms, arms round shoulders, silly poses. I couldn’t stop staring. The woman in her diaries was disappointed, regretful, and generally blue. This woman was so full of joy, she was in the place where she truly belonged. I blinked rapidly to stop the tears, I tilted my head back as though to roll the offending drops back into my eyes, but they were too numerous and they spilled down my cheeks. Jean softly touched my back and guided me into the kitchens, where he handed me a napkin.
“I’m so sorry, mademoiselle…”
“Don’t be.” I sniffed. “I…” But I had to stop or I would simply bawl. Jean promised to try and procure a copy of the photo for me. When I didn’t want to go through the restaurant with tears down my face, he kindly showed me the staff entrance out the back, escorting me through the rubbish-strewn alley with its society of stray cats, to the street, kissing my hand and telling me he’d do anything for the daughter of Madame Cordelia Bouton.
10
“ ’neath the south sea moon”
I don’t really remember how I got home, but I suspected I walked, package banging against my legs, all the way to Montparnasse. All I could think of was how I never knew my mother and I could never get to know her, how cruel that was now that I knew how much we might have had in common. I remember only moments: stopping once or twice to hold back tears, leaning heavily on the stairwell wall to get me upstairs, tripping over my own shoes in the doorway. I collapsed on the bed, but now that I had privacy, I couldn’t cry. I lay like a corpse on the pillow as my eyes stung, my throat scratched, and my head throbbed from unspoken sobs.
She had only been fifty-one. She could have had another twenty years of loving life, Paris, art, and parties. I could have saved her from her disappointing days. Is that why she wanted to see me, is that why she finally sent that letter last year, asking to visit? It was hard to fit the joyful young woman with the rule-bound sad-sack, the bohemian Beauty with the Matron who sent off her only daughter to get married. Why had she been like that? Why hadn’t she encouraged me, why had she insisted I do the usual thing? Admittedly, she had been lukewarm in her insistence, but she’d been lukewarm about everything, so much so that I hadn’t even known she’d loved me until I read her diaries. A page from her diaries was burnt into my memory, written in 1899, a few years after that photo had been taken: “I can’t do it. I can’t leave my little Katherine forever. Here in Paris, even as the life of the streets makes me tremble, I long to hold her, to kiss her soft golden hair, to see her run in from the garden with her skinned knees and dirty cheeks. So, I shall have to go back. I shall have to return, and return, and return. This is my fate, to be Persephone, allowed to live only once a year, and for the rest to be trapped in my antipodean underworld.” I had read that over and over, said it aloud as I paced the rooms in her terrace. It explained so much about her.
But not about X, the mysterious man mentioned over and over in her diaries. She had loved him, she must have to have mentioned him so often, but this love was only expressed obliquely, through descriptions of his clothing, or the sounds of her surroundings, or the mutable sky. I still had no idea what made her choose my father; her diaries were curiously silent on that point. I could now guess, however, that X was probably an artist.
I smoked the rest of my cigarettes as I wrote out my notes from the interview. It was all I could do to stop myself crying. I would write up the column tomorrow and send it to Bertie. I felt spent, I needed food but wanted no company. I picked up my copy of Ulysses and headed out, not to one of the cafés where I might see a friend and be obliged to chat, but to a little backstreet with an Indochinese noodle house.
The noodle house had no blonde society women in it, no members of the expatriate “Avant-Guard,” only men and women from French Indochina looking for a taste of home. Everyone looked up when I entered, but only for a moment, before they went back to their steaming bowls, and newspapers that looked like they were written in French but held not a single French word.
“What language is that?” I asked the man opposite me. The noodle house held long tables, each table with six seats and a corridor down the middle to the kitchen, like a canteen. The man looked up.
“Sorry, I don’t mean
to interrupt.”
“It’s Vietnamese,” he said. “You’ve never seen it before?”
“No. I’m not French.”
“You’re not from Tonkin? Annam? Then why are you in here?”
“It smelt good.”
“Better than any café. They all reek of overcooked cream.” He looked me over. The waitress came up to get my order but he spoke to her in his language; I hadn’t expected it to sound so musical. The waitress nodded and seemed to come back almost instantly with a huge bowl of noodles, another plate with white shoots and green leaves and red herbs, and a pot of tea with a tiny bowl-like cup.
“I ordered you the best,” he said, “Phở bo, noodle soup with beef. Classic food from Hai Duong. If you like the way this place smells then you will like this soup. Add the shoots in as you wish, and the basil leaves, and chili. Have you seen this before?” He pointed to the red herb.
“Once. In Chinatown, in Sydney.”
“It’s extremely spicy. Eat with caution. Is that your reading material for this meal?” He pointed to Ulysses. “Read with caution.” He laughed at his own joke.
“You’ve read James Joyce?”
“I have no wish for punishment.” He laughed again. “I read Marx first in English, but it’s not a language I have much love for.”
“I’m Kiki.”
“Nguyễn.” He took a pencil from his pocket and wrote it at the top of his newspaper. “Nguyễn. I’m here every night, except when I attend the Party meetings. Say hello next time and I’ll tell you about my country.”
“French Indochina? I’ve always wanted—”
“It’s not French.” He folded up his newspaper and stood up to leave. “It’s Việt Nam.”
The soup was delicious. The chili was much hotter than I expected and I ended up drinking an entire coconut to cool my tongue, much to the amusement of the waitress. Ulysses sat beside me as I ate, as the soup required both hands, one for a spoon and one for my inexpert use of chopsticks. I had time to look around the little noodle house as I ate. There were photos of Việt Nam on the faded blue walls and the front windows were opaque with steam. The tables were bare of linen and the chairs bare of upholstery, clearly so they could be easily cleaned as I watched the waitress quickly slick down a table between diners. Everyone who came in gave me a glance but no one else spoke to me. I had all the privacy that I needed.
Eventually I was left just with my tea and Joyce. But I hadn’t got much further than “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…” when a slip of paper slipped into my lap. I knew that luxe cream paper—I held the tea in my mouth, I couldn’t swallow—and I knew that spidery black handwriting. Fox was overdoing it once again. I closed my eyes and swallowed; I did not want my mission to intrude here tonight. I thought this place could have been a haven but Fox had followed me here too. I looked around the little blue café, its photos on the walls, a Buddha figure surrounded by fruit on the countertop. Was it too much to ask for just for one more night to enjoy Paris and all the delights of noodle soup and avant-garde novels it could offer? The letter was heavy in my hands. Apparently it was.
11
“shimmy with me”
It was dark when I returned to my studio flat and I read by candlelight. I flicked the letter over but there was no second page. The letter was, like the mission, only a poem.
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary nightingale day
’Tis since thou are fled away.
How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.
As a lizard with the shade
Of a lustrous leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismay’d;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.
Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Thy happy lot will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress’d,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow, and forlorn forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.
I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good;
One minute past, and
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.
I love Love—though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! Oh come,
Make once more my heart thy home.
“Many a weary nightingale day”—nightingale was surely not in the original poem. This poem was in code. It was Shelley, called only after the first line, “Rarely, rarely, comest thou.” “Nightingale” wasn’t the only substitution. There was also “thy happy lot,” “forlorn,” “one minute past,” and possibly “lustrous.” These were all words or phrases from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which I knew inside out. “Nightingale” was the first clue and this was the key; the other words would refer to something within or about “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Stuck in the folds of my passport was the copy of “Ode to a Nightingale” that Fox had given me when I first started nursing for him. My copy was now brown with travel and frayed at the edges, spotted with tea and coffee and what looked like blood. But the title was clear: “Ode to a Nightingale (early May).” “Early May” was not usually published as part of the title; in fact, I had only seen it on this copy. I had an inkling that “nightingale” had something to do with “May.” I looked at the other words but there was no obvious link between them. Unless it was their position in “Ode to a Nightingale”—“nightingale” was line 1, “lustrous” was line 39 (it was so helpful that each stanza was ten lines), “thy happy lot” was 5, “forlorn” was 71, and “one minute past” was 4. No, if “one minute past” was 4, then “nightingale” couldn’t be 1 as the word didn’t appear in the poem except in the title. Was “nightingale” actually zero? 0395714—that collection of numbers was nonsensical, unless only some of the numbers mattered. 5714 could be the end of a telephone number—now I felt I was getting somewhere—which left 0 and 39, nightingale and lustrous. 039: another telephone number? A date, a time? That made no sense. What about the words, what could they have to do with each other? Maybe “nightingale” of the title did relate to “may,” as a synonym, a substitution within a substitution? May-lustrous? May-beauty? May-fair?
I couldn’t help myself, I yelled “Aha!” into the chill night. Mayfair 5714—this must be the number to call Fox. Was it his club? In Mayfair, it was more likely to be his London home.
A cold wind crept under the window frame and wrapped around my neck. He had given me his home number in the poem—home is where the heart is—his heart was in the poem. Shelley and his abstract Spirit of Delight disappeared and I could hear Fox’s silvery voice flow like mercury, poisonous and powerful, through the lines to speak to me directly. It was so intimate that I felt sick.
I opened the window wide, the night air damp and wild, moving under my hair and in my sleeves and making it hard to light my cigarette. The view at night was a carnival of light and noi
se, it was a photographic negative of the subtle elegance of the day. The Eiffel Tower lit up like a beacon, calling all the street life out of their crannies and into the rain-heavy air. I inhaled deeply and considered what the entirety of the poem meant. It was unlike Fox to be so personal, but if he wasn’t calling me with this song, then why was it here? That final stanza was too much, he couldn’t possibly mean it, I doubt he would ever think of something so over-the-top. I had never made his heart my home and never would; he must know it. No, this “spirit of delight” had to refer to something other than me—our work together, Englishness, King and Country, something. That it seemed to speak to me was just a game, a play for power, it had to be.
The bells in the church rang; it was nine o’clock. If I had to call Fox at his home in Mayfair, and not at his work in Westminster, then now was as good a time as any.
12
“der zwerg”
Telephones were still a novelty in Montparnasse. As I collected my things I tried to think where there might be one I could use—the Hȏtel des Ecoles, just up the street? It seemed too cheap to need a telephone. There was one at the Rotonde, I had used it last year, but it was in the manager’s office and not at all public. Private residences might have one, of course, but whose? I really needed to find a telephone where I could call Fox throughout this mission, somewhere straightforward where I’d never have to beg or persuade. There was sure to be one at the station.
Gare Montparnasse was only a few minutes’ walk away. It was one of those grandiose train stations built last century, before trains were associated with rows of uniforms, lines of bandaged wounded, and forever-goodbyes. A couple of decades ago there had been a spectacular accident: A train had plunged right off the tracks and through the front window, spilling onto the street like a child’s toy. The façade of the building still held the scars of this accident, with the stone chipped and the replacement bricks a different color. The station was busy with trains running to and from the French countryside, farmers and weavers, merchants and winemakers, the rural poor desperate for money and well-fed Parisians desperate for space. This autumn night there were people coming and going for the weekend, people drinking at the station bar, ragged boys begging for errands and ragged girls selling matches. I bought a box of matches from a pale girl.
