A Week in Paris (14 page)

‘Georges is
very
attentive,’ Sandra said. ‘He’s taking me to Maxim’s tonight and there’s a chance Alain Delon will come. He was in
Purple Noon
– did you see it?’ Fay shook her head. ‘What about you?’ Sandra went on. ‘There was that nice-looking English boy I saw you with on the first night after the concert.’

‘Adam?’ Fay said, as nonchalantly as she could manage. She didn’t know Sandra had seen them together. ‘Oh, he’s only an old friend. I’m sure he doesn’t know Alain Delon.’

‘Never mind that. You’re seeing him again while you’re here?’

‘I’m having dinner with him tonight,’ Fay replied, trying to speak lightly. She didn’t want to talk about Adam to Sandra. Perhaps she feared that the special feeling of exhilaration she had in his company was as delicate as the scent of the violets and might disappear if she laid it open to another’s scrutiny. And Sandra, who always had such a casual way with boyfriends, might make fun of her. No, she would keep the secret of Adam close.

At just before two-thirty Fay waited in the cool of the marble-floored lobby of an elegant Second Empire apartment block for the grim-faced, grey-haired concierge to finish berating someone on the other end of her telephone. This gave her time to be nervous. Mme Ramond must be reasonably well-heeled to live somewhere solid and respectable like this, but otherwise she knew nothing about her. It occurred to her now that the priest she’d met at the convent had merely been trying to be helpful and the whole thing could turn out to be a red herring. Mme Ramond might not even have heard of her mother. What then? The thought of failure was terrible.

Still, she remembered the woman’s reaction on the telephone. Fay’s name
had
meant something to her, or so it had seemed. There came unbidden the vision of her mother’s anxious face and this gave her resolve.

The concierge ended her call with a weary, ‘
D’accord, d’accord
,’ and gave a gesture of exasperation as she replaced the receiver. She frowned as Fay asked where to find Mme Ramond’s apartment.

‘Vous êtes anglaise?
’ The woman looked her up and down critically, but decided that she passed muster and instructed her to take the lift to the second floor.

The name
Ramond
was written in italics on a card in a small brass frame screwed to the door of Apartment #12. Fay pushed the bell and tucked the violets more securely under the lavish red bow on the box of chocolate truffles she’d bought. The gift had somehow felt in order.

After a moment the door opened. The short bony woman with neat greying hair who stood there might have been in her late forties, but it was difficult to tell, because she moved so stiffly, and her face, despite make-up, was pale and etched with lines of pain. Her expression was anxious, the dark brown eyes filled with uncertainty as she stared out at Fay.

‘Fay? Is it really little Fay?’ she breathed.

‘Yes. Madame Ramond?’ Fay didn’t recognize this woman at all.

‘You don’t remember me, do you, I can tell. Well, never mind. I can hardly believe it. Last time I saw you, ah, you were such a sweet child.’ Her mouth trembled but then she straightened her shoulders and said, ‘I’m sorry, it is something of a shock. I forget myself. Come in, please.’ She beckoned Fay inside and showed her where to hang her coat on a carved mahogany hat-stand. She leaned on a stick, and Fay noticed that the joints of her fingers were swollen and misshapen.

‘Oh, you naughty girl,’ she said, laughing, when Fay handed over the truffles, ‘and what pretty violets.’ She looked down at the gifts in wonder as though she wasn’t used to having them, then set them down on a console table.

Half a dozen doors led off the narrow hallway, and Mme Ramond showed Fay through one into a large light drawing room that looked out at the buildings across the street. It was lined with shelves full of books and records, but Fay’s attention was caught by the grand piano that stood in the window, its black surface glossy in the afternoon sunshine. Its lid was raised, and a music book was spread open above the keyboard as if someone had recently been playing. Not her hostess, surely, with her poor crooked fingers . . .

‘No, I’ve never learned,’ the woman said, echoing her thoughts. ‘It’s beautiful though, isn’t it? It’s very old, but it still has a lovely tone. I sometimes tell my husband that he values it more than he does me. As a joke, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Fay murmured, though the woman’s dry humour left her not quite sure. ‘It is lovely.’

‘I should put those flowers in water. They don’t last long, poor things.’

Whilst the woman was gone, Fay glanced round the room. On the shelves were several framed photographs of a dark-eyed, dark-haired man with a pale face and an intense expression. One was a close-up of him playing the piano, but the others were dramatic studio portraits, such as might feature in a concert programme. She was studying one of these when Mme Ramond returned with the posy in a small crystal vase, setting it on the mantelpiece and indicating that Fay should sit down with her on a stiff striped sofa with scrolled arms – the sort of thing made for an ambassador, Fay thought.

‘My husband is away in Vienna until Monday,’ the woman said. ‘Since we moved back here from America two years ago he often tours, though I am no longer well enough to go with him. This time it is a Mozart festival. Serge is passionate about Mozart. But enough of him. You must tell me news of your mother.’

‘You know my mother?’ Fay’s relief was immense, but she was horrified to see hurt spring into the other woman’s eyes

‘She has not spoken of me to you, then?’

‘I’m afraid not, no. I only found you because of the priest at the convent. Please, madame, I’m sorry, but there is so much I need to ask.’

‘How much do you already know?’ Mme Ramond said in a quiet voice.

‘Know about what?’ Fay cried. ‘I’m so confused!’

‘Ah.’ For a while Mme Ramond was lost in thought, her expression immeasurably sad. Finally she stirred and said, ‘Fay, I have had no correspondence with your mother for years. I do not even know where she lives.’ She stopped and gave Fay a searching look. ‘What has she told you of your early life? About your father, for instance?’

‘She doesn’t talk about him. It upsets her.’

‘She grieves still, after all these years,’ Mme Ramond murmured. ‘She loved him so very much.’

‘I don’t remember him at all,’ Fay burst out. ‘I don’t remember our house in London or feeding the ducks in the park or any of the ordinary things she says we did. Madame Ramond, my mother is unwell and I need your help.’ She described her mother’s deep sadness, and how she had directed Fay to the little rucksack hidden in the trunk.

‘And that’s all I know,’ she finished.

‘That’s all you know,’ the other woman echoed. She massaged the joints of her hands and flexed them gently. ‘I had no children of my own,’ she said, almost conversationally. ‘My health has not been good. But sometimes I wish . . . no, what is the use.’ She did not sound bitter, Fay thought, just sad, but she didn’t know what to say to this woman who, though a stranger to her, seemed, she sensed, to know so much about her.

‘How did you meet my mother?’ she ventured. ‘Was it here in Paris?’

‘It was, yes. I met her soon after she arrived here before the war – 1937 it must have been. She came to study the piano, of course.’

‘Of course? She told me she trained in London.’ It was hard to hear a different story from a stranger. But was it the truth? She couldn’t be sure of Mme Ramond. She considered telling her about her experiences in Paris. To anyone normal they’d merely sound silly, or worse, mad.
Was
she going mad? She didn’t think so. Adam hadn’t seemed to think so either, or at least had given her no indication that he did.

‘And me – was I here, too?’

And Mme Ramond smiled. ‘Of course. You were born here,
chérie
.’

‘Oh,’ Fay said, not exactly astonished, but feeling a certain shift, as though something had fallen into place. ‘Then, please, madame, will you tell me everything?’

Mme Ramond pondered this and sighed. ‘I don’t think I should. It’s not my story to tell, it’s your mother’s.’

‘But she wouldn’t tell me. Or couldn’t. Why, madame?
Why?
’ Fay implored in desperation.

Mme Ramond frowned and Fay watched her anxiously, worried that she’d offended her in some way. Finally, the woman pushed herself up slowly from her seat and reached for her stick. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something that might help explain.’

Fay followed her down the hall into the next room, a handsome dining room painted dark red, and with more of the carved mahogany furniture. Against the far wall stood an ugly cabinet on bowed legs like a bulldog’s, and it was to this that Mme Ramond took her. The top half was a cupboard with glass doors and crowded with china ornaments. The lower part consisted of three wide drawers.

‘Please,’ Mme Ramond said. ‘Pull out the bottom one for me, will you? I don’t have the strength.’

The drawer was stiff and Fay needed to work it open with both hands. Inside lay neat piles of photographs and a large album with a leather cover. At the woman’s instruction she brought this out, and laid it on the thick cloth that protected the heavy dining table.

Nathalie Ramond turned the album towards her and opened it at the first page. Fay found herself looking at a faded photograph of a family group, a mother and father with three boys of varying ages and a girl of about two in her father’s arms. All were dressed in their best clothes and stared solemnly at the camera with the same dark-eyed gaze, except for the girl, who was reaching down, trying to steal the cap from the littlest boy’s head. There was something about their faces, the eldest boy in particular, that reminded her of the photographs in the drawing room.

‘My husband’s family,’ Mme Ramond confirmed.

‘Is that your husband?’ Fay pointed.

‘Yes. He was fifteen when this picture was taken.’ She turned the pages of the album and Fay was surprised to see that the rest of them were filled, not with other photographs but with letters, official forms and newspaper cuttings. She glimpsed headlines in French and English, and grim, grainy photographs of the sort she’d seen in an old magazine she’d found once in a wardrobe when she’d lodged in London. Pictures of ragged, emaciated people with empty eyes, of ugly buildings behind wire fences. Hitler’s concentration camps.

‘When the war ended, Serge tried to trace them,’ Mme Ramond was saying. ‘He wrote to all the organizations he could think of, but so many people were doing the same thing and everything was in chaos. Eventually he learned the truth. They were all dead. His parents, his sister, his two brothers. He alone survived.’ She closed the album very deliberately. ‘And there are some here who still blame him for his survival. They say he was a collaborator. It’s nonsense, and so hurtful.’

The fierce resentment in her voice shocked Fay, who could think of nothing to say except a soft, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You must wonder why I am showing this to you. It’s because you should understand that the story you ask for isn’t so easily told. There was so much suffering in those years. Our generation does not like to speak about it. And for some there is much guilt. We would rather bury it, forget about it.’

‘Guilt . . .?’ Fay faltered, realizing for the first time that she was becoming caught up in something she might not be strong enough to bear.

Seeing her stricken face, Mme Ramond said more gently, ‘Do not alarm yourself unduly. The guilt – that is something the parents have to carry, not the children.’

‘But I was there,’ Fay whispered. ‘And those other children you spoke of just now. It was not their fault, but they suffered.’

‘Yes, they did. But you lived and now you’re here. The world is different today and you are ready to take the best from it.’

Still much troubled by this conversation, Fay helped Mme Ramond replace the album and close the drawer, then accompanied her back to the drawing room. But instead of sitting down again, the older woman walked over to the window and looked down the street. For a while she did not speak.

Fay sat down on the sofa and wondered what to do in the face of this silence. Her thoughts raced. Somehow her own and her mother’s stories were caught up in this tangle of tragedy and pain – but how? What had happened? Although she badly needed to know, she also feared it. Perhaps the truth would, after all, be unbearable.

She looked around the room, so gracious with its comfortable antique furniture, the beautiful gilt-framed oval mirror above the fireplace of polished brown stone. There were invitation cards propped on the mantelpiece by the vase of violets, yet something told her that Mme Ramond was lonely. She missed her husband.

‘
C’est lamentable
,’ the woman muttered, staring at something in the street below. Fay went to stand at her shoulder and see. Walking along the pavement away from them was a family who appeared exotic to her in a Paris street, the men and children dark-skinned, the two women swathed in traditional Arab dress. She noticed a Frenchman on a bicycle passing them in the opposite direction, contempt plain in his expression.

‘Algerians,’ Mme Renaud said, turning away from the window. ‘The cycle of oppression continues.’

‘What do you mean?’ Fay asked.

‘I mean that although France herself was freed, she will not give her colonies freedom. These poor people come here to escape, but they are treated as terrorists.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Fay thought of the newspaper-seller she’d seen the day before and her conversation with Adam. She opened her mouth to recount the incident, but Mme Ramond was speaking again and studying her, her face a mixture of sadness and amusement.

‘Dear Fay,’ she said, ‘such a funny little girl you were. And here you are, all grown up. What was it you say you are doing here? Playing in a concert?’

‘Three concerts. There was one on Tuesday, our next is a schools programme tomorrow morning, and the last is on Saturday. Then we go home on Sunday.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘a musician like your mother.’ They sat down again, Fay on the sofa, Mme Ramond on a high-backed chair near the fireplace.