A Week in Paris (9 page)

‘I asked the Monseigneur,’ the priest said, ‘and he found it for me.’ He opened the tome at a marker, smoothed the pages, and held it so she could see. His slender forefinger pointed to an entry near the bottom. ‘The convent – it’s attached to the Church of Sainte Cécile.’

‘Place des Moineaux?’ She could only just read it in the gloom. ‘
Moineaux
are sparrows, aren’t they? Where is it, do you know?’

‘Sparrows, yes,’ he said. ‘Here, the book definitely says
l’Eglise de Sainte Cécile
. Near the Rue St-Jacques, you’ll understand. The Left Bank, by the Sorbonne. You have a map?’ Fay retrieved her tourist plan from her bag and unfolded it and he showed her where the church was.

‘
Merci
,’ she said. ‘Ah, I was near there yesterday!’ It was close to the Seine by Notre Dame. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘
De rien
. This handbook is 1959. The convent is not in the most recent one, only the church, I don’t know why. Is there anything else I can help you with, mademoiselle?’

She hesitated, seeing the sympathy in his eyes. She wondered how old he was. Still young, in his early thirties perhaps, but old enough. ‘There is something. May I ask, were you in Paris during the war? I . . . I wondered what it was like, living here then.’

A look of wariness crossed his face and she cursed herself for being so thoughtless. The organ had suddenly stopped playing and for a moment there was complete stillness.

‘I was a boy of ten when the Nazis marched into Paris.’ The priest was silent for a moment then added, ‘It was not so bad. The worst thing was feeling hungry all the time. There was no milk sometimes for the children.’

It was not so bad
. He didn’t wish to speak about it, Fay saw at once. These events of twenty years ago might appear to have been forgotten in the life going on gaily around her in this beautiful city, but what if she could see below the surface? So many people must have stories to tell of the war, had to live with memories they could never forget, but which they were forced to suppress in order to go on with their lives.

As she thanked the priest and went on her way, it occurred to Fay that her mother might have been like them.

1937

Kitty’s new life fell into a pattern of sorts. There was a two-hour lesson with Monsieur Deschamps on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, then she attended classes at the imposing Conservatoire building on the Right Bank, but for the rest of the working week she was expected to practise. Usually she would take her music to the Conservatoire, where she would be allocated one of the small bare practice rooms, typically with an upright piano and a single window looking out onto a featureless courtyard. Here she would shut the door, adjust the height of the seat, arrange her books on the music-rest and begin.

Monsieur Deschamps had issued strict instructions about practice methods. Kitty must devote half an hour to scales and other technical exercises, before turning her attention to the pieces he’d given her, the Clair de Lune, a Mozart Sonata and a Bach Prelude, which he’d prescribed to train evenness in fingerwork. Her use of the pedals had caused him consternation. ‘You utilize the sustain pedal too much,’ he told her and pointed out how she was doing so to compensate for the weakness in her left hand. But ‘
Écoutez
’ was the piece of advice he most frequently repeated. ‘
Listen
to yourself play. It is the most important thing of all.’ And so for hours at a time she would be alone at her practice, absorbed in the music, playing and replaying the most difficult phrases of the pieces. ‘Thirty times,’ she remembered her previous teacher used to say. ‘After thirty it will become a habit. The fingers won’t forget it.’

M. Deschamps agreed about the playing of passages many times, but disagreed that it was the hands that should know the piece. ‘You should feel
une affinité intime avec la musique
in here,’ he said, rapping his temple sharply, ‘then your fingers will obey.’ Sometimes he would make her deconstruct the harmonies on the page. ‘This chord here, the D sharp is yearning, stretching itself like, how you say, a climber of mountains, to reach this E here, but in the left hand, see, he holds back from the G, so satisfaction is denied. And that is the sound Debussy makes you feel
ici
.’ He pressed his fist to his chest, above where his heart might be. ‘
Vous voyez?
’ And she would nod that yes, she did see. She had never been taught to learn the music from the inside like this, and found that listening closely to the sound of her own playing helped immeasurably. She could hear how much she was improving from day to day.

What she hadn’t expected in Paris was to feel quite so alone. Practising, by its very nature, is a solitary affair, she had never minded that, but even when she was with other people – at the harmony class on Saturday mornings, for instance, where she struggled as it was taught in French – hardly anyone spoke to her. Being naturally reserved and not fluent in the language, she did not dare start up any conversation. There were very few women at the Conservatoire, that was part of the problem, and the ones she glimpsed seemed horribly sophisticated; she felt plainly dressed next to them. They stuck with each other, too, chattering nineteen to the dozen in a way that made her feel excluded.

It was Monday morning of the second week, while approaching the building, that she encountered someone she recognized – the young man with cropped dark hair she’d met on her first visit to M. Deschamps’ apartment. He was slouched against a wall lighting a cigarette and looking nervy and intense. His surname, she remembered, was Ramond. He recognized her too, for he watched her approach and muttered,
‘Bonjour
,’ but though she returned the greeting he seemed indisposed to continue the conversation, instead looking away, so she passed on into the building feeling a little hurt and putting his charmlessness down to arrogance. The next day, when M. Deschamps’ little maid showed her into the apartment she listened to the tempestuous sounds of Beethoven coming from the drawing room, but again, when the young man emerged, he passed her with barely a nod.

The very same afternoon, however, after the slow-moving old man on reception at the Conservatoire had given her the key to her practice room, he reached into a pigeonhole and passed her an envelope with her name on it. The note inside on cheap writing paper was signed
Serge Ramond
and asked her to meet him at a café nearby at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Kitty sighed, still feeling put out by Ramond’s offhand manner and fearing that he’d be hard work as a companion. On the other hand, beggars couldn’t be choosers and she didn’t know anyone else at the Conservatoire, so she turned the paper over and wrote a painstaking couple of lines in French thanking him and agreeing to the rendezvous.

The café was on a corner near the front entrance of the Conservatoire and turned out to be popular with the music students. It was a cheerful place hung with baskets of late geraniums outside, noisy with chattering groups within. Kitty spotted Ramond sitting by himself at a round table near the bar, smoking furiously and staring into space with his usual intense expression. When he finally saw her, he leaped up, rocking the table in his eagerness.

‘
Kitty – comment allez-vous?
’ He shook her hand then pulled out a chair for her to sit down, and she saw at once that he was doing his best to be friendly.

‘I haven’t been here before,’ she told him, looking round at the polished brass bar, the rows of bottles on the dresser behind, the dark varnished wood floor, seeing their reflections in the ornate mirrors on the walls.

‘It’s all right – not expensive, that’s the best thing.’ He was studying her but still he didn’t smile.

The waiter brought them coffee and glasses of water and they conversed in a halting mixture of French and English. He’d been in Paris a year, Serge said. His family lived further south, in Orléans, and she sensed it had been something of a struggle financially for them to send him to be taught by M. Deschamps and to attend classes at the Conservatoire. He was currently boarding with a Jewish family in Le Marais, in a flat above their wholesale jewellery business. He spoke rapidly, so she sometimes had to ask him to repeat himself, but the gleam in his quick dark eyes and the passion in his voice betrayed both his love for the piano and an over-anxiety to succeed. Sensing that his previous standoffish behaviour had been due to shyness, she began to feel sorry for him, and even to like him a little. When after half an hour she rose to go, explaining that she had some shopping to do, she was touched when he refused to take the coins she pushed across the table.

‘I can’t allow it,’ she said. ‘We are both students living on a budget.’

‘Next time we pay for ourselves, but today, no, I invited you,’ he insisted. ‘I hope there will be a next time? We have the same teacher – it makes sense to be friends, not rivals, no?’ She didn’t recognize
rivales
from his pronunciation at first, but when finally she understood, she was indignant.

‘Of course we’re not rivals! I don’t think like that.’ It was then, finally, that he permitted himself to relax and give the slightest of smiles.

She thought about what he’d said after she stopped at a tiny shop near the convent to buy needles and thread, ‘to mend stockings,’ as she explained to the dumpling-shaped woman in widow’s black who served her. It had never occurred to her that she should feel in competition with other students. She played for the delight of the music, because it pleased others to listen, because she wanted to do well for Uncle Pepper. She had hoped too that it would somehow provide her with a living and an interesting life – but fame? Success as a concert pianist? That was for the few, surely. And perhaps she didn’t have the drive that Serge had. No, they were not rivals. She had learned that much about herself through their conversation.

Because board was included in the cost of her lodging, Kitty had so far eaten dinner at the convent every evening, immediately after one of the several church services the nuns attended each day. If Father Paul wasn’t there, the Reverend Mother said Grace, and they ate for the most part in silence along the trestle tables in the dining room.

It was not an uncomfortable silence, Kitty decided, and although the food was plain it was flavoursome: meat stews with herbs, soft fresh bread, followed by fruit and various mild sorts of cheeses, but there was no wine, only water to drink. There were fourteen nuns in all, counting Mère Marie-François and the only novice amongst them, Sister Thérèse. In addition to Kitty there were three other paying guests – an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter who had apparently come to Paris from Toulouse to visit some relative in hospital, and an Englishwoman in her late forties named Miss Dunne.

Adele Dunne was from Norfolk, Kitty discovered in the course of a conversation at dinner one evening, and following the deaths of both her parents, had come to Paris to work with a children’s charity in the city. She was a tall, squarish woman with a penchant for tweed, but the expression on her plain face was lively, and she liked to sit and draw in a sketchbook she often carried. It was Miss Dunne who pointed out to Kitty the trickle of Jewish and other refugees passing through the city from Germany. It all meant a greater pressure on the resources of the charity, she told her.

One evening, a few days after Kitty had arrived, she found Miss Dunne’s open sketchbook left for a moment, with her spectacle case, on a table in the hall and was moved to see, rendered very skilfully, a drawing of a dark-eyed woman in a headscarf with an anguished expression in her eyes. Kitty would have liked to turn the pages to see what else Miss Dunne had captured, but didn’t dare and instead passed on her way.

She was going for the first time on her own to the church to play the piano there. She’d felt self-conscious about doing so before, given that the building was a public place, and someone might come in, but Mère Marie-François had repeated the invitation and she thought it rude not to try. In the event, she became so caught up in her playing that she stopped worrying. It really was a most beautiful piano with a lovely touch, and the acoustics of the building were perfect. She played for an hour until Father Paul came in to ask whether he should light the candles for her.

If Kitty had been like many other young women, with a family and many friends her own age, she might have found her life in those first two weeks unbearably lonely, but she was used to spending time by herself, and though she longed to find friends and to feel at home, it didn’t drag her down. There was someone in the convent to whom she felt drawn and that was Sister Thérèse. It was strange, because their lives were worlds apart, yet fate had thrown them together and the fact that they were the same age, but had made such different choices in life, had evoked a curiosity in each about the other.

Once, Kitty forgot to wind her travel clock and got up too early in a panic that she was late. Downstairs, she found the novice had just returned from buying baguettes for breakfast and she helped her lay the tables. At first they worked in silent companionship, then Kitty caught Thérèse giving her shy glances and she asked the girl if she had always lived in Paris.

‘
Oui
,’ Sister Thérèse said promptly, ‘but on the other side of the city, in Saint-Denis.’ She had been educated at a school run by nuns, she told Kitty, and for her it had been a natural step to become one. She hadn’t realized it would mean coming all the way here to the centre of Paris, but it had been God’s will, and the priest’s at Saint-Denis, so . . . Here she made a gesture of acceptance. Despite the expression of intelligence in her eyes there was something delightfully unsophisticated about her, Kitty found, and she wondered at the calm sense of purpose in someone so young.

‘
Et tu?
’ Thérèse addressed her informally, as though they were already friends. ‘Your mother and father allowed you to come to Paris on your own? They must worry that you are safe.’