Harm's Way Page 2

  ‘No. Why should I know Beth?’

  ‘She’s that great Irish woman I told you about. You remember. The one I met doing work experience with that dress designer in London.’

  I vaguely remembered Sarah’s exultant description of Beth, at the time putting it down to her hyperbolic tendencies, but was soon to realise how accurate it was.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sarah continued, ‘she moved to Paris a year ago to work at some fashion house. Can’t think which … but quite a famous one, I think. She’s practically my mother’s age, but she doesn’t act like it, and if you want her to she’ll happily take you under her wing. Anyway, you’ve probably already got yourself a little clique …’

  I took down Beth’s number: it would be a good place to start.

  Two

  I hesitated to contact this unknown woman but out of a mixture of desperation and curiosity, did so a few days later. Low-voiced but welcoming on the phone, Beth soon dispelled my embarrassment. Still, I was convinced that at best our meeting could yield little more than a few tips on day-to-day life in a Paris that seemed increasingly impregnable.

  She had set a date for that Sunday at the Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen in Clignancourt, which sold every kind of bric-a-brac from vintage clothing to antiques. Once a place where social rejects found refuge, it now featured regularly in French gossip magazines like Voici, with the likes of Juliette Binoche and Sharon Stone (when she was passing through) pictured chatting beatifically to ancient Algerian stallholders.

  At the gates of the métro station at Porte de Clignancourt I spotted Beth immediately. She was petite, with shoulder-length hair the colour of partridge feathers. The translucent whiteness of her skin was as recognisably Irish as the watery blue almonds of her eyes. She did not correspond to my childish idea of what a forty-year-old woman should look like for one simple reason: she was undeniably beautiful.

  As I approached her I caught an impression of snug curves beneath flimsy linen trousers, hips jutting out exuberantly from a slim waist. Her eyes, flashes of colour in the grey of the underground station, flicked over the crowd before alighting on me.

  ‘Hey,’ she drawled with a lazy Irish lilt as I walked towards her with the fixed, determined smile you adopt when meeting someone for the first time. ‘I’ve been looking at that girl over there wondering if she was you.’

  Up close I could see that she was twenty years my senior. Time had sketched fine lines around her eyes, and two grooves, lightly charcoaled exclamation marks, were already forming between her eyebrows. We brushed our lips awkwardly across each other’s cheeks (would we have done that if we had met in London?), and as we neared the market I found myself blurting out: ‘God it’s good to see another person. I’ve been going nearly mad since I got here. Isn’t that pitiful?’

  My speech sounded rushed, as though exhaling breath I had held in far too long.

  ‘Not at all.’ Beth gave a gentle smile revealing small, curved white teeth, a smile which set off perfectly the lazy dance of her eyes. ‘You should have seen me when I first got here. I remember trying to buy some green beans and walking out when the cashier asked me to weigh them because I couldn’t understand what he was on about. That, my friend, is pathetic.’

  The ‘my friend’ was a bonus, encouraging me to open up more. I began recounting some of my own, only slightly embellished tales of humiliation at the hands of Parisians. After a moment I became aware that I was sounding like a child, trying to match her experiences in a desire to make her like me. At first unsure of which tone to adopt with her (should I treat her like a friend or like one of my mother’s dinner guests?) I was quickly reassured by her easy manner. I liked the fact that her attention to me was steady, undivided. As we wandered past a Rastafarian sitting cross-legged on the pavement behind a patchwork of DVDs, she bent down to look closer at one while I chattered on, throwing me a ‘Really?’ over her shoulder just as I began to wonder whether she was still listening. Beth’s movements had a grace and fluidity which drew admiring glances from passers-by, without her seeming to notice.

  ‘God, you’ve done so much already – and you’ve been here less than a month,’ she murmured, shaking her head at an over-zealous stallholder’s advances. ‘I’ve been so caught up in work that I’ve hardly had the chance to get to know Paris.’

  ‘The thing to do is just to start walking and see where it takes you. I’m only just beginning to find my way around but I feel I have to investigate every passage I see, you know? Just in case I miss something.’

  She smiled, amused by my enthusiasm. ‘I’d never thought of it that way – but you’re right.’

  By the time we had walked past the long line of street sellers that led, like scattered human crumbs, to the real market, I felt proud: a schoolgirl who had made her first friend, and I suddenly recalled the special sense of privilege and prestige friendship brings in the eyes of children which, perhaps, we lose as we get older.

  Together we weaved through the rows of stalls, so deep in conversation that we obstructed other buyers, who reminded us of their presence with a dry smack of the tongue to the upper palate. I bought a set of six 1930s-style Perrier glasses Beth had found hidden behind a cracked basin. I still have them today. I know exactly where they are: on the left hand-corner of the shelf beneath the kitchen sink, but I would never use them again.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn to speak French like that?’ she said, grabbing my elbow and leaning in towards me after her darting eyes had registered my bartering exchange with the stallholder. ‘I just can’t get to grips with it – it’s still a relief when people see me struggling and answer in English.’

  I shrugged, pleased. ‘I did it for A level, and we’ve had quite a lot of holidays here, so …’

  Beth blew a silent whistle through pursed lips, and I had the absurd thought that the gesture was too young for her. ‘Of course I might have learned more if I wasn’t sharing a flat with an Irish bloke. Stephen’s my best friend’s little brother,’ she explained. ‘He’s from the same village as me, Skibbereen (you won’t have heard of it), but he did French at university, speaks it perfectly, which means he really doesn’t see the need to practise with me. Of course it might also have helped if my father had forced me to sit down and do my homework at the weekend, instead of helping him out on the farm.’

  Seven years her junior, Stephen had witnessed every adolescent folly Beth and his sister, Ruth, had committed, and was able to remember them all with the disconcerting clarity of youth.

  ‘Stephen works for a big magazine company in London, and so when he was moved to their Paris offices a few months ago, I was hoping he’d be keen to share a flat with me. I just get lonely otherwise, on my own, you know? It takes much longer than people expect to make friends in a new country, don’t you think?’

  Beth had related all this before we’d chosen what we wanted from the handwritten blackboards adorning the walls of a crêperie in the hub of the market.

  I liked the sound of Stephen, and began trying to formulate a question that might tell me how attractive he was. I was still too excited by men to be able to imagine them purely as friends. But the interest I had in the opposite sex had one, vital clause: it must be reciprocated. The second I arrived in any given place I would scour the room for the responsive gleam in a man’s eyes, a reflex of mine that showed little sign of passing.

  ‘He’s single and great-looking, in case you’re wondering,’ Beth said with an indulgent smile, looking above my head at the menu and then back, fixedly, at me. ‘But you’ve probably got someone, haven’t you?’

  I laughed. ‘Actually no.’

  ‘I can’t believe that: why not?’

  ‘I suppose I rarely find people that I like.’

  This wasn’t true. I liked men all too easily: little men who looked up at you admiringly, big men who cradled your head in their hands, clever men, stupid men. I liked them but I was never affected by them.

  ‘You seem to be a pretty self-re
liant person, one way and another.’

  ‘Oh I am,’ I agreed. ‘Very much so.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she rejoined easily. ‘I’m the worst kind of woman. When I like someone I can’t help making it far too obvious. I call them constantly, try to book them weeks in advance, neglect my friends for the duration – which tends to be short – and generally become this terrible, fawning Irish mam. Naturally they end up running a mile.’ She smiled to herself, amused, but seeking no kind of reassurance from me. ‘You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you? You’d think it was something you’d get better at as you got older, but the funny thing, Anna, is that you never do.’

  One of my biggest faults was my capacity instantly to dislike people, writing them off for making a single statement I didn’t agree with. So I found it hard to rationalise the immediate warmth I felt towards Beth. Yes, there was a complete honesty about her which was very appealing – a lack of undertones in anything she said or did that made any arrière-pensées impossible – but it was more than that. With friendships, as with lovers, there is always one who is keener, more impatient to reach the point of intimacy than the other, and at that moment I felt that I needed to seduce Beth, to convince her of my worth. When I questioned her about her reasons for coming to Paris (how could a forty-year-old woman not have strong enough ties to make such a move impossible?) it surprised me to discover that I was genuinely interested in her answers.

  Cheeks flushed by the heated lamps above our heads, Beth told me – halfway through another anecdote – of her mother’s death from cancer when she was only eighteen and the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s several years later. Being forced to look after her little brothers and ailing father had ripped a hole in her youth, which she was clearly trying to fill here in Paris. I gained the impression that there was more to it than that. But when, with the flourish of a pink-knuckled hand she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Et voilà!’ I knew that despite her apparent openness, that was all I would find out that day. Avid to find out everything about her by now, I hoped that the bruised quality I sensed beneath her cheerfulness would be explained as I got to know her better.

  Looking back I can only compare the way I felt when I left Beth later that day to falling slightly in love. Here was a conduit for my experiences and feelings, and I adored her for it. My life in Paris, hitherto filled only with my burgeoning love of the city, suddenly seemed filled with possibility. Beth and I could discover things together, share experiences, get bored together. I fell asleep less nervous about my first day at the museum than I had been, and looking forward to dinner at Beth’s the following evening.

  I was at once relieved and disappointed when Stephen opened the door to the flat on the top floor of a building in rue des Gravilliers, an insalubrious street off the rue de Turbigo. When I had read, too young, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary I’d been struck by the accuracy of his description of her – of all women perhaps – as ‘voulant retirer de tout quelque profit personnel’. As soon as I saw Stephen I recognised him as one of those men from whom I would be able to draw no profit at all. Tall, dark blond and blandly good-looking, with a strong forehead but a certain weakness around the lower part of his mouth, Stephen was one of those rare men for whom on a sexual level I felt absolutely nothing – not even my usual desire to have him fall in love with me.

  Perhaps he felt the same. As he struggled to shut the door, still sticky with fresh paint, and commented on the powerful fumes (‘Try not to breathe too deeply or you might keel over’) I saw his eyes flit over my body approvingly, but not lingeringly.

  Beth was in the kitchen, stirring something sweet and meaty in a large saucepan. My first impression on seeing them together was that, had they not looked so different, one might have mistaken them for brother and sister. They had adopted many of each other’s mannerisms, especially the way Beth had of nodding slightly when she laughed, as though confirming her own joke. I watched from a high stool as they laid the table and bickered over which herbs to season the salad with, waiting until I had an audience for my description of my first day at work.

  It hadn’t gone badly. I’d pushed through the revolving doors into the grand atrium of the Musée d’Orsay feeling no great trepidation, only a growing curiosity to discover the details of my daily routine. I had dressed carefully, and felt smart in my new suit, wearing just enough make-up to look like I was wearing very little, with my hair tied in a low ponytail. My pride in this attention to detail was overshadowed by the clicking arrival of Céline, the impeccably dressed small-boned woman of uncertain age I could see coming towards me, a purposeful expression on her face. She walked briskly, though with downcast eyes, in the manner of someone with a very specific, emotionless job to do. The tap of each heel sent a reverberation of efficiency through the halls of the museum, enough to make the figures in the Impressionist portraits sit up straight within their frames.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘Yes,’ I had said, as brightly as I could.

  ‘Bienvenue,’ she pronounced, with anything but a welcoming expression on her face.

  And therein, I thought, lies the talent of that certain breed of Frenchwoman: the words the circumstances demand are there, but their meaning is somehow lacking. Holding out my hand I remembered, too late, that the customary British gesture could provoke embarrassment and a faint irritation in France. My hand wavered a split second too long in mid-air before she took it, with the gracelessness of a teenage boy holding a baby.

  ‘Follow me and I’ll show you where you can hang your coat. Then we’ll have a little chat about what you’ll be doing.’

  In some indefinable way Céline made it clear that I was to follow behind, not beside her – perhaps as a gentle payback for the moment of discomfort I’d caused her when I held out my hand. She took me to the staff room: a smallish locker-lined space with high frosted slit windows beneath the ceiling through which one could decipher the mottled greys of Paris. More civil than friendly, she explained my duties and hours, never pushing the boundaries of conversation so far as to enquire about my living arrangements or what had brought me to Paris. It took me a few more encounters to register that Céline smiled only when she wanted to, never out of decency like everyone else. Introducing myself to two of my co-workers – a dark-skinned girl in a voluminous smock and a tall, shaven-headed man who were neatly stashing their possessions in lockers – I noted a similar abruptness of manner which fell slightly short of rudeness. It was a Parisian trait I was going to have to get used to, a world away from the instantly indiscreet confidences exchanged in any office by the supposedly stiff and inhibited British.

  All this rang bells of recognition over dinner. The Frenchwoman’s most outstanding talent, Stephen assured me as he picked a piece of mâche off the tablecloth, lay in her genius for silently undermining any surrounding females. Since these were national characteristics that could never be changed, the only way to handle them was to develop a tough exterior that guaranteed instant respect. Gratuitous kindness in Paris was not a quality; it was a weakness. I nodded agreement, remembering a cautionary tale the mother of a Parisian-born friend had told me. In the playground the Englishwoman had been in the habit of telling her little boy, ‘Now don’t push forward. Be nice, and let the other children have a go on the slide before you,’ until she overheard French mothers berating their neat and polite-looking offspring for letting others push ahead of them. As I was quickly to discover, it all made perfect sense.

  The gallery each guardian invigilated was always the same: gallery number fourteen was my lot. The most famous painting in my room was Manet’s Le Balcon, flanked on the left by his arresting portrait of Berthe Morisot. Insofar as I had anything to do at all it was to make sure no bored child or ignorant tourist touched any of the paintings, spoke too loudly, or attempted to walk round an exhibition in the wrong direction – a misdemeanour of which Céline particularly disapproved. There was only one way of viewing an exhibition and that was in the order established by authority.
For me the worst thing about my new job was that it was forbidden to read. And of course I was to become an unperson – something I was unused to and initially found it hard to live with. Very soon, however, I realised that being invisible had its advantages: I was able to overhear intimate conversations and study the people engaged in them. That first afternoon I had watched with a mixture of amusement and mild indignation as couples dressed in subtly gradated shades of black ignored me with the same studied dedication they devoted to the Impressionist works lining the walls.

  Beth grinned into her wine as I finished my account of the day and paused to take a mouthful of my now luke-warm poule au pot. They seemed genuinely entertained but I was keen not to appear self-obsessed. Had I been talking too much?

  ‘Your boss doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs,’ said Stephen sympathetically. ‘Still, it must be fun people-watching all day.’

  I had the impression Stephen wasn’t too keen on the French, but Beth told me later that it was French men he had taken against. For all his mocking, the women he went for in a big way.

  He and I soon became what I could only, at my most generous, qualify as ‘companions’. Like many supple-minded young men I have since come across from the world of magazine publishing, Stephen’s interest in the surface of things was almost feminine – and something which, at that time, I could relate to. The slight campness of his manner seemed to be at odds with his love of women. Later I realised that these two carefully cultivated sides to his character worked harmoniously towards the same goal. We huddled together with the lazy ease of expats, but I doubt whether even if things had turned out differently I would still be in touch with him today. My friendship with Beth was something deeper. During those first few weeks it was a rare day when we didn’t see each other, either for a quick coffee or for dinner at her flat before a night out. Her advice was always sane, tempered and completely selfless; my admiration for her grew with every hour we spent together. Still, I was beginning to learn that beneath the surface there was a disquiet which gave her an edge she might otherwise have been lacking.