A Week in Paris (11 page)

‘My grandma on my mother’s side was French,’ he explained as they ate. ‘I came here to stay with her once or twice and sort of fell into the place, like I was born here. You need to walk down a main street in Alabama to appreciate what I’m saying. Here folks are discreet, don’t interfere in one another’s business so much. Not that I’ve anything to hide, you understand.’ He gave one of those friendly smiles she was quickly learning was a part of him.

‘I’ve not found it easy to get to know people here,’ Kitty confessed. ‘They speak so quickly, that’s part of the trouble. I should try harder, I suppose.’

‘Do you know, I saw you at the cathedral,’ he said quietly, between mouthfuls. ‘A couple of weeks back.’

‘Did you?’ she said in surprise. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘You looked a little lonely. I’d have come across and said hello, but you ran off before I had a chance.’

‘Everybody seemed to know one another – it was like a big party for that pretty baby. I’m ashamed to say I funked it.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, we all do that sometimes.’

‘I don’t believe that you would.’

‘I can assure you that you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘Though perhaps I wouldn’t tell that to any patient of mine.’ And she smiled up at him.

A waiter came to refill their glasses with red wine.

‘It’s such a coincidence the way you found me,’ she said, and was genuinely surprised when he turned bashful.

‘All right, I’ll have to admit it. It wasn’t exactly luck.’ And he told her how he’d followed her from the cathedral out of concern, that he’d passed the spot where he’d last seen her several times since that Sunday, for he still attended the odd lecture at the École de Médecine and anyway was working out his notice on an apartment near the Panthéon. It was easy for him to walk near where he’d last seen her.

‘I suppose I should feel flattered that you went to so much trouble,’ she said, but he heard the disapproval in her voice.

‘Now, darn it, I’ve offended you. I should have kept my big mouth shut.’

‘No, I’m not offended,’ she said in a soft voice, her fingers stroking the stem of her glass. She looked up to meet his steady gaze and couldn’t help smiling. His was a face of such honesty and friendliness it was difficult to believe he would ever do anything underhand. Slowly he smiled back at her and his eyes lit up. Soon they were both laughing.

She’d been in love, really in love, once before, painfully and hopelessly, with the headmaster’s son, a golden-haired athletic boy a year or two older, whose eyes had never even rested on the quiet seventeen-year-old girl who came to tea sometimes with her uncle. But nobody had ever warned her that love could spring up as suddenly as this. That two people could see instantly that all they needed was there in the other.

‘Come on,’ he said, breaking the spell. ‘I promised you jazz, and you shall have it.’

A cab dropped them in Montmartre where the steps up to Sacré-Coeur gleamed in the moonlight. Kitty took Gene’s arm and they walked together down a steep side street, then in through the door of a building so nondescript that nobody would have noticed it unless they knew it was there. Instantly they could hear a wonderful swell of music. She followed Gene up a rackety flight of stairs. The music grew louder as they climbed. At the top Gene thrust aside a velvet curtain and drew her into a large square room swirling with smoke. It was noisy and packed with people, and the windows had been thrown open to the night, God help the neighbours. There was a bar in one corner and a makeshift stage draped with crimson in another, where three Negro musicians were playing to a swinging rhythm. The smudged, dancing notes of the piano and the rich, lilting sound of the trumpet snaked inside her in a way that was thrilling and strange, and yet at the same time felt perfectly natural.

Gene guided her to the bar and bought her more champagne. He seemed utterly at home here, and soon they were joined by friends of his – a slight, dapper fellow American whom Gene introduced as ‘the renowned writer Jack Miles’, and a charming, sandy-haired Irish-American by the name of Bill Delaney, who was a journalist on the Paris
Herald Tribune
. The third was a woman, a girlfriend of Bill’s. Claudine was a thin, elegant Frenchwoman in her thirties with a feather in her headdress. She contributed very little to the conversation, simply smoked a cigarette through an ivory holder, but there was a mysterious air about her that fascinated Kitty.

Later, much later, in the cab home, Gene held her hand and she leaned against him, half-drunk on the champagne, the music, and happiness.

‘I enjoyed myself so much, thank you, but I’ll never get up for my class in the morning,’ she murmured.

‘You must, or I’ll blame myself,’ Gene said, squeezing her hand. ‘I can’t have you cutting your lessons. Your uncle would never forgive me.’

‘He wouldn’t approve of jazz. “Music of the gutter”, I once heard him call it.’

‘Oh, don’t spoil it, I was liking what I heard about your Uncle Pepper.’

‘He’d like you, I’m sure,’ Kitty said, laughing. ‘It’s in matters such as music and painting that he has strong old-fashioned views.’

‘I hope to meet him one day then,’ Gene said as the cab drew up outside her alleyway. ‘
Attendez un petit moment s’il vous plaît
,’ he instructed the driver.

She was glad to have his arm to cling to in the silent darkness of the alley. Where it opened out into the square, all bathed in moonlight, he stopped and turned to her. ‘It’s been the most wonderful evening,’ he murmured. ‘May I see you again?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, while glancing anxiously at the shuttered mansion, ‘but you’d better go now in case we’re seen. I don’t want to get thrown out of my lodgings.’

At the gate of the convent he waited while she stole in through the front door using the key Sister Thérèse had given her. Upstairs, safe in bed, she fell asleep at once, but her dreams were full of the sinuous, caressing music of the evening and Gene’s soft lazy voice.

They saw each other as often as they could after that, and on his days off Gene made it his business to show Kitty Paris. It wasn’t always the main tourist sights, but the out-of-the-way places, the secret nooks he took her to – a shabby theatre showing Grand Guignol melodrama, the Jardin des Plantes by the School of Botany, Chopin’s tomb in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Best of all, Kitty loved a little piano shop in St Germain, where she roamed about marvelling at the beautiful old instruments whilst Gene chatted easily to the proprietor, learning the stories about the pianos and the people who’d owned them. In the evening he might accompany her to a concert, or they’d dine together and visit one of the
boîtes
to listen to some woman in black with a smoky 4 a.m. voice, singing heartbreaking love songs that left Kitty with the melancholy sense of how time effaced everything. Not this, she thought, not this, as she sensed the warmth of Gene sitting close, the fair hairs on the backs of his strong hands gleaming in the candlelight, and he would catch her eye and smile his open smile.

Then came a rainy November Friday afternoon when they’d arranged to meet in the foyer of the Louvre and she waited and waited with a mixture of annoyance and concern because he didn’t come. Eventually she went into the maze of galleries by herself, but tired quickly of the frivolity of eighteenth-century girls in swings. She tried the sombre sensibilities of Dutch landscapes, finding them more in keeping with her mood, but really, she didn’t enjoy them either. It would have been fun with Gene. All the time she worried whether she’d come at the wrong time or if something had happened to him.

She heard nothing from him until the next day, when she arrived downstairs, her face pale and puffy after a night of anxious wakefulness, to find a letter by her place at the breakfast table addressed in his loopy scrawl. She opened it eagerly. It was full of apologies. There had been an emergency admission, the child of a family he faintly knew, suffering from meningitis; he’d felt it important to stay with her – the mother had begged – and he’d no way of contacting Kitty. He hoped she would forgive him.

She did, of course she did. Her first feelings were relief, and she quashed the mean little selfish voice inside that said,
but you abandoned me
, and told herself instead how good he was, that he’d put a sick child first.

There were other times. He had to cry off a day trip to the Palace of Fontainebleau in December because of staff shortages at the hospital. Kitty managed to hide her disappointment, but grudgingly, because the outing had been long-planned and she’d excused herself from a class to go. Though she recognized the importance of his work she secretly felt sometimes that it always seemed to be him who volunteered for an extra shift and a resentment grew, though she hated herself for it.

Matters came to a head during the week before Christmas. She’d arranged to meet Gene one Thursday evening at a favourite auberge in St-Germain, where they liked to go for the traditional cooking and often met two of Gene’s American friends, Jack and his girlfriend Milly. Gene hadn’t arrived when she walked in, but the patron, a pleasant man with a fleshy, creased-up face, like a friendly bulldog, knew her and took her to a table, bringing her a complimentary glass of wine whilst she waited. Everyone liked Gene and this kind of reception was not unusual.

Ten minutes ticked by. Kitty pulled a novel out of her bag written by a Frenchwoman who Milly said was the latest thing, and tried to read, but her French, though much improved, wasn’t up to it and she couldn’t concentrate anyway. Twenty minutes, still no Gene, and by now, some of the other diners were glancing at her curiously. After three-quarters of an hour she’d had enough. She put her book away and caught the eye of the patron.

‘I think I’ve come to the wrong place,’ she told him. ‘If Dr Knox does come looking for me, perhaps you’d explain.’

Outside, sleet was coming down fast and hardly anyone was about. She pulled her collar up tight against a biting wind and set off to walk back to the convent through the back streets. She’d never felt so miserable. When she was with Gene she felt happy and loved. He was completely present for her. When they were apart she thought of him all the time, as though, if her life were a piece of music, he was the bass note underpinning it.

But what if it wasn’t the case for Gene? Kitty knew how important his work was to him. Did he forget her when she wasn’t there? And what if he did? Would it mean he didn’t care deeply enough for her? Should she go on seeing him, or was there no future? These thoughts chased round and around in her mind as she trudged on, her shoulders hunched against the weather.

When she came to the piano shop, she stopped to look in the window. The grille was down, but through the latticework in the light of the streetlamp she could see the miniature model of a grand piano, perfect down to the tiny painted man in evening dress, tails flying, bent over the keyboard, and the music spread before him, pages fluttering in some imagined breeze. She was struck by the thought that she’d never be able to visit this place again without thinking of Gene. He had coloured her whole life in Paris. Without him it would be monotone.

She turned to go and only then registered the sound of a man’s hurried footsteps somewhere behind. In response she hastened her pace, but found herself slipping in the slush. The footsteps gained on her. Then, ‘Kitty,’ came a voice and joy flooded through her.

‘Gene,’ she whispered, swinging round, and found herself clasped in his bear-like hug. Her face was buried in his shoulder and the wet wool of his coat tickled her nose.

‘I am so sorry,’ he puffed, when he set her upright. ‘They said I’d missed you by only a minute, but I didn’t know which way you’d gone.’

‘Something must have told you it was this way,’ she said quietly.

‘You were looking in the window of our shop,’ he said, light dawning. He drew her into the shelter of a doorway. They stood, hardly touching, both sensing a distance between them.

His face was in shadow and she glanced up at him, unsure. The initial joy at seeing him was fading now and misery taking hold once more. The fact remained that she felt he’d abandoned her again. What excuse would he come up with this time?

‘You were late,’ she said tightly. ‘Gene, you don’t know what it feels like. The other customers stared at me, it was so public and humiliating. And it made me feel as though you don’t care.’

‘I am truly sorry,’ he said very humbly.

‘You were sorry last time. And the time before that.’

‘Kitty, look, someone hadn’t turned up for their shift. I couldn’t just leave, surely you understand? I am sorry, but it’s what happens in my job. It’s my life, Kitty.’ She was hurt by the stubborn tone in his voice.

‘If it’s more important than me, than us,’ she started to say, and then caught the expression on his face. It was neither the look of abject apology she hoped for nor the stern coldness she feared. Instead it was an expression of immense calm and compassion, as though she were a struggling child failing to understand why its behaviour was unreasonable. Like a child’s, too, her gloved hands were coiled into fists, beating the air.

‘Hey, hey, Kitty,’ he said, grasping them, unfolding the fingers, holding them firm in his. ‘What I am doing with my life is not something I have chosen. It is as though doctoring has chosen me, it’s my calling. To say it is more important than you, though, is to compare two things that are incomparable. It is my duty to tend the sick and I must do it.’

She turned her face to hide the tears that threatened.

‘Kitty, darling Kitty, are you listening?’ She nodded miserably. His voice was gentle. ‘Kitty, how important is your music to you?’

‘I cannot imagine my life without it,’ she said after a moment. ‘It’s such a part of me, I—’

‘And the time you devote to it, all those hours of practice?’

‘That’s different!’ she cried, seeing what he was getting at. ‘I wouldn’t devote the time to the exclusion of people I love.’

‘You wouldn’t?’ he said, sounding surprised, then his tone lightened as he said, ‘Some would though. Your friend Ramond, for instance.’