A Week in Paris (38 page)

‘No,’ the woman said, frowning. ‘There was no piano.’

They walked back into the living room. Bertrand was nowhere to be seen, but after a moment the door of what must be a bedroom opened beside the mahogany dresser and he appeared in the doorway, looking furtive. ‘Was this your room once?’ he said, standing aside. ‘You can see it if you want?’

‘Thank you,’ she said, curious, but before she could move there came the sound of a key in the lock, then the front door opened smartly and a surly-looking man strode in. When he saw Fay he did an exaggerated double-take, and shut the door behind him in the showy, deliberate manner of someone who liked to control.

‘Who is this, Monique?’ he said. He extracted from his jacket pocket a parcel wrapped in butcher’s paper and handed it to his wife. He was a bull of a man with a strong physical presence. He also exuded the sour smell of last night’s wine. In the doorway to the bedroom Fay saw the boy twitch nervously.

‘It’s all right,’ Monique told her husband in a calming voice. ‘She’s not come to make trouble. She lived here once, before we came – is that not interesting?’

The man did not seem to think so. He glared at Fay with narrowed eyes.

Fay stood her ground, meeting his resentful gaze with her steady one, annoyed rather than frightened by this unpleasant man.

‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ she said quietly. ‘But your wife is right, I have not come to make trouble.’ She moved towards the door. ‘Thank you for showing me the flat,’ she said to Monique and Bertrand. And smiling at Bertrand, who smiled nervously back, she let herself out, pulling the door closed behind her. She walked down the stairs, not wanting to wait by the lift in case the boy’s father came out to see if she’d gone. She was not sure what the visit had achieved. It was important to her that she’d seen the place, but it had not settled anything. There had been nothing there that meant anything to her, not really, and she felt sorry for Bertrand, overshadowed by a man like that.

The cherub-faced concierge hardly looked up from his paper as she passed him on her way out into the street. For a moment Fay stood dazzled by the sunlight, then crossed the road and dawdled past the pavement stalls looking at the displays, enjoying being outside in the fresh air.

‘Mademoiselle!’ She glanced up to see the boy, Bertrand, hurry across the street towards her, breathing hard. He reached her and held out something whiteish and creased in his hand. She took it. It was a small envelope, the flap sealed with tape that was brittle with age. She smoothed it out to read the name on the front and looked at him in surprise.

‘Where did you get this?’

‘My mother found it a moment ago,’ he muttered in his hoarse voice. ‘She said to tell you it had been waiting in our flat when she and Papa moved in. She didn’t know what to do with it so she put it in a drawer and forgot about it. It’s taken her a few minutes to remember which drawer.’

‘She kept it all those years?’ Fay whispered in amazement.

He nodded. ‘Was she your mother or something?’ he said, his eye on the envelope.

Fay stared down at it. On it was written
Mme K. Knox
and at the top, in the corner,
Privé
. Private.

‘Is,’ Fay corrected him. ‘She
is
my mother.’ And as she said this she received a tender picture in her mind of her mother waiting for her in the hospital garden, and felt tears prickle behind her eyes.

‘You will give it to her?’ His voice squeaked. His boyish enthusiasm for this mystery moved her and she smiled at him, noticing the dark down on his upper lip.

‘Of course I will. I’m going back to England tomorrow night. Please, would you thank your mother for me?’

‘Yes. Wait, there’s something else.’ He lifted the flap of his jacket pocket and took out a small object, which he held out in the flat of his palm. ‘Is this yours? I think it must be. I found it a long while ago under a floorboard in my room. There was a gap by the skirting board and perhaps it fell down there once.’

‘Yes, it is mine,’ she said, taking it from him in surprise. She held it up, examining it. It was a wooden zebra, much smaller than Zipper, its stripes faded to grey. ‘It must be the one I lost from my Noah’s Ark,’ she told him. The one she had mourned, whom Zipper was to replace, though Zipper would surely have been too big for the ark. ‘I don’t know what happened to the rest of the animals, but it doesn’t matter really. It’s nice to know that this little fellow wasn’t completely lost.’

‘Would you like him back? He belongs to you,’ Bertrand said, using the ‘tu’ form, as for a friend. He sounded hesitant though, and she sensed his attachment to the toy. She imagined his secret delight in finding it, maybe when he’d been a quite small child himself.

‘No,’ she said, giving it back. ‘You’ve looked after him better than I did. You keep him.’

And waving away his thanks, she bade him goodbye and watched him walk back inside. She still felt sorry for him, but he was a nice boy and perhaps he’d be all right.

In a café by the river, Fay stirred sugar into her
citron pressé
and examined the envelope more closely. It told her little more than she knew already. It was of thick paper, and there was no show-through when she held it up to the light. The script of the address was distinctively French. She considered briefly the possibility of opening it – the tape would be easy to peel away – but rejected the thought immediately. The very idea was abhorrent. She had learned how her mother had lived through a time when ordinary people were spied on, when letters were opened by censors and black lines struck through private messages. If she opened a confidential letter addressed clearly to her mother, she’d be as bad as the censor. She unclipped her handbag and thrust the letter inside. It had waited many years to be read. It could stand a few days more.

She sipped the bitter-sweet drink and watched tourists browsing the stalls on the quais for books and prints, or crossing the bridge to where the ornate façade of the Louvre gleamed downriver on the other side. Tomorrow evening she would have to leave this beautiful city behind and return to England. It saddened her. She had discovered so much about the past that tied her to Paris, but mysteries still remained. And most of all it would mean leaving Adam. She would see him tonight, after the concert, and as she finished her drink she enjoyed a little day-dream about their meeting. It was best not to think about tomorrow at all.

A church clock struck nearby. Half past eleven already. Two hours to kill before going to Mme Ramond’s. Fay considered what best to do with her time. Visit the convent, perhaps, or spend an hour looking at paintings before a bite of lunch. She wanted to try the convent. Using a phone box inside the café she got through to the curé’s housekeeper with the tinny voice. No, the curé wasn’t in yet, but he was expected back for lunch at one.

She left some coins on the table to pay for her drink and set off across the Pont Royal, which eventually brought her to the Tuileries Gardens with the Louvre to her right. And it came to her, looking across the barren expanse of ground in front of the museum, that she didn’t want to see pictures today. It was too lovely outside in the sunshine. So instead she turned left and walked briskly along the fine, tree-lined paths of the gardens. She could hear ahead, faintly, coming and going on the breeze, the brisk sounds of a brass band. Curious, she followed in their direction, and this took her all the way to Place de la Concorde.

There, at the edge of the huge piazza, steel barriers had been erected to contain the crowds, for quite a number of onlookers had gathered, some using cardboard periscopes to get a view. As she approached, she could glimpse the nearer of the two great fountains that flanked the lofty Egyptian obelisk at the centre of the square. The road itself had been blocked to traffic. Tricolor flags flapped in the wind above a handsome mansion on the far side, lending the scene a bright, ceremonial air.

The music grew louder, and she edged her way to the front to get a clearer view, wondering whether she might see Adam. Along the road towards her rolled two tanks. Behind them a military band was marching. She watched them pass, then came squadrons of soldiers in khaki and red berets, and a cavalry unit, the horses’ hooves ringing on the road. Soon after that, a fleet of cars followed. Their destination was the far side of the square where, in the distance, the parade halted and the squadrons turned at a shouted order to face the obelisk. Dignitaries stepped out from cars. The band started to play ‘La Marseillaise’ as in the distance, a long black saloon car with graceful lines swung slowly into the square from the Champs-Élysées.

‘
Général de Gaulle, le Président
,’ she heard people mutter. There was jostling as the crowd pressed forward. A few of them, she’d been noticing, were Algerians, brown-skinned men like the one she’d seen arrested at the Métro station, but women, too, in traditional dress with gold-threaded headscarves. They were being joined by others, and as their numbers grew Fay sensed tension build in the air. She glanced round nervously, wondering if she ought to leave, but the crowd was too dense now, pressing her against the barrier, and she couldn’t move. There was no sign of anyone who might be Adam.

Across the square the black car slowed to a halt near the lines of soldiers. A young officer stepped forward to open a rear door and Fay craned her neck trying to see the figure who was climbing out, but now the reception party gathering around the car blocked her view.

At that moment, as if at a signal, the crowd started pushing forward. Next to her, an Algerian man was pulling a board from under his coat. Others were doing likewise. Two men lifted the railing aside and people surged into the square, raising their placards and calling out slogans. The womenfolk followed, making strange whooping cries. All around the square it was happening. There were dozens, a hundred – no, hundreds – of Algerians, pouring into the road, moving as one body across the square towards the President. Two women stopped near Fay to unfurl a banner. On it were printed the words
L’Algérie pour les Algériens
.

A whistle shrieked, then dozens of gendarmes appeared from the other side of the square and bore down on the demonstrators. Fay watched in horror as they thrust their way amongst the Algerians, threshing about with truncheons or with the butts of pistols, or simply wrestling them to the ground. The air was filled with screams, angry shouts and grunts of pain. A falling placard spun into the crowd, hitting Fay on the arm, then someone barged into her from behind; she stumbled and would have fallen, had not another bystander caught her arm and steadied her. He was middle-aged and French, in a working man’s jacket and a beret. He rescued her handbag and helped her towards some steps in the gardens, saying, ‘Are you all right, mademoiselle?
Les terroristes
, that’s what these people are. They’re not in Algiers now. They should go home.’ She thanked him and politely refused his offer to find her a taxi. Eventually he went away still muttering about, ‘
ces terroristes
.’

She was all right, she discovered, shrugging off her jacket and examining her arm. The placard hadn’t drawn blood, it had merely grazed her. There would be a bruise. Otherwise she was just shaken. She pulled on the jacket again and stood up, wondering which way to go. There were still gendarmes everywhere, but the altercation seemed mostly to be over. Dark blue vans were drawing up, and she watched with concern as some of the demonstrators were rough-handled into them and driven away. Then, in the distance, with a stab of joy, she caught a glimpse of a blond head.
Adam!
she thought, but then he was hidden again by the dispersing crowd, and though she strained to see, he was gone.

She had begun to cross the gardens towards the Métro when she passed an embroidered slipper lying in the dust. On a nearby step two young Algerian women sat with their arms round each other. One was crying and the other was comforting her. All the while, the triumphant strains of the military band could be heard in the distance. The crying woman was missing a shoe and Fay went back and picked up the slipper and took it to her, a small gesture of how she felt. The other received it, giving a brisk nod of thanks, then her face changed to alarm as she saw a gendarme approaching, and she hustled her companion to her feet. They hurried away in the direction of the river. Fay, too, moved on, but more slowly and in the opposite direction.

Back at the Madeleine, she sat alone in the café across from the hotel, picking at a sandwich and unable to get the disturbing events that she’d witnessed out of her head. She tried to tell herself, as she had with Adam only the other day, that the Algerians were trouble-makers. They couldn’t expect to spoil a solemn state ceremony without repercussions. After all, a small handful of Arab activists were violent, had killed innocent people, even Adam had admitted that. The demonstrators just now had been unarmed though, and the brutal response of the police, especially towards the women, had shocked her to the core. The irony struck her that twenty years ago, it was Parisians themselves who had suffered like this at the hands of the Nazis. How was it they appeared to have forgotten this recent past? Suffering did not seem to make people kinder.

She was still wrestling with these weighty matters as she made her way to Place des Vosges for her appointment with Mme Ramond. She was almost there when she realized she’d been so caught up in her thoughts she’d forgotten to try the curé’s number again.

July 1942

The hidden room at the back of the convent had once been a storeroom lined with shelves of bottles and jars. It had been the curé’s idea to build a false wall to disguise the door, and an ingenious one. The room being long and narrow, with only one of a row of several skylights for a window, it would be difficult for the casual observer to notice its existence. Only if they looked down on the building from a bedroom window and counted, or compared the inside width of the scullery with that of the outside of the building, would they ever begin to suspect. The disadvantages were that the room was dark and cold in winter, and visitors had to pass through the Reverend Mother’s sitting room to get to it, but neither of these difficulties was insurmountable. The scullery was rarely used and there were long periods when the hidden room was empty.