The Cost of Living (31 page)

It was enough to make Louise sit back in her chair. “What will people say?” has always been, to her, deeply real. In that light the gray wool dress she was wearing and the turquoise bracelets were cold as snow. She was a winter figure in the museum room. She was a thrifty widow; an abstemious traveler counting her comforts in shillings and pence. She was a blunt foreigner, not for an instant to be taken in. Her most profound belief about herself was that she was too honest to fall in love. She believed that men were basically faithless, and that women could not love more than once. She never forgave a friend who divorced. Having forgotten Collie, she thought she had never loved at all.

“Could you let me have some money?”

That was the first time Sylvie talked to Louise. Those were Sylvie's first words, on the winter afternoon, on the dark stairs. The girl was around the bend of a landing, looking down. Louise stopped, propping the bicycle on the wall, and stared up. Sylvie leaned into the stairwell so that the dead light from the skylight was behind her; then she drew back, and there was a touch of winter light upon her, on the warm skin and inquisitive eyes.

I may say that giving money away to strangers was not the habit of my sister, our family, or the people we grew up with. Louise stood, in her tweed skirt, her arm aching with the weight of so many useful objects. The mention of money automatically evoked two columns of figures. In all financial matters, Louise was bound to the rows of numbers in her account books. These account books were wrapped in patent leather, and came from a certain shop in Melbourne; our father's ledgers had never been bought in any other place. The columns were headed “Paid” and “Received,” in the old-fashioned way, but at the top of each page our father, and then Louise, crossed out the printed words and wrote “Necessary” and “Unnecessary.” When Louise was obliged to buy a Christmas or birthday present for anyone, she marked the amount she had spent under “Unnecessary.” I had never attached any significance to her doing this; she was closer to our parents than I, and that was how they had always reckoned. She guarded her books as jealously as a diary. What can be more intimate than a record of money and the way one spends it? Think of what Pepys has revealed. Nearly everything we know about Leonardo is summed up in his accounts.

“Well, I do need money,” said the girl, rather cheerfully. “Monsieur Rablis wants to put me out of my room again. Sometimes he makes me pay and sometimes he doesn't. Oh, imagine being on top of the world on top of a pile of money!” This was not said plaintively but with an intense vitality that was like a third presence on the stairs. Her warmth and her energy communicated so easily that there was almost too much, and some fell away and had its own existence.

That was all Louise could tell me later on. She had been asked to put her hand in her pocket for a stranger, for someone who had no claim on her at all, and she was as deeply shocked as if she had been invited to take part in an orgy—a comparison I do not intend as a joke.

“What if
I
asked you for money?” I suddenly said.

She looked at me with that pale-eyed appraisal and gently said, “Why, Puss, you've got what you want, haven't you? Haven't you got what you wanted out of life?” I had two woolen scarves, one plaid and one blue, which meant I had one to lend. Perhaps Louise meant that.

The absence of sun in Paris brought on a kind of irrationality at times, just as too much sun can drive one mad. If it had been anyone but my sister talking to me, I would have said that Sylvie was nothing but an apparition on the stairs. Who ever has heard of asking strangers for money? And one woman to another, at that. I know that I had never become accustomed to the northern solstice. The whitish sky and the evil Paris roofs and the cold red sun suggested a destiny so final that I wondered why everyone did not rebel or run away. Often after Christmas there was a fall of snow, and one could be amazed by the confident tracks of birds. But in a few weeks it was forgotten, and the tramps, the drunks, the unrepentant poor (locked up by the police so that they would not freeze on the streets) were released once more, and settled down in doorways and on the grilles over the Métro, where fetid air rose from the trains below, to await the coming of spring. I could see that Louise was perplexed by all this. She had been warned of the damp, but nothing had prepared her for those lumps of bodies, or for the empty sky. At four o'clock every day the sun appeared. It hung over the northwest horizon for a few minutes, like a malediction, and then it vanished and the city sank into night.

This is the moment to talk about Patrick. I think of him in that season—something to do with chill in the bones, and thermometers, and the sound of the rain. I had often heard his voice through the wall, and had guessed he was an actor. I knew him by sight. But I came home tired every night, disinclined to talk. I saw that everyone in this hotel was as dingy, as stationary, as I was myself, and I knew we were tainted with the same incompetence. Besides giving music lessons, I worked in a small art gallery on the Ile de la Cité. I received a commission of one half of one per cent on the paintings I sold. I was a foreigner without a working permit, and had no legal recourse. Every day, ten people came into that filthy gallery and asked for my job. Louise often said, “But this is a rich country, Puss. Why are there no jobs, and why are people paid nothing?” I can only describe what I know.

Patrick: my sister's lover. Well, perhaps, but not for long. An epidemic of grippe came into the city, as it did every year. Patrick was instantly felled. He went into illness as if it were a haven, establishing himself in bed with a record-player and a pile of books and a tape recorder. I came down with it, too. Every day, Louise knocked on his door, and then on mine. She came down the stairs—her room was one flight above ours—pushing her bicycle, the plaid scarf tied under her chin. She was all wool and tweed and leather again. The turquoise bracelets had been laid in a drawer, the good gray dress put away. She fetched soup, aspirin, oranges, the afternoon papers. She was conscientious, and always had the right change. Louise was a minor heiress now, but I had never been pardoned. I inherited my christening silver and an income of fifteen shillings a month. They might have made it a pound. It was only fair; she had stayed home and carried trays and fetched the afternoon papers—just as she was doing now—while I had run away. Nevertheless, although she was rich and I was poor, she treated me as an equal. I mean by that that she never bought me a cheese sandwich or a thermos flask of soup without first taking the money for it out of the purse on my desk and counting out the correct change. I don't know if she made an equal of Patrick. The beginning had already rushed into the past and frozen there, as if, from the first afternoon, each had been thinking, This is how it will be remembered. After a few days she declined, or rose, to governess, nanny, errand girl, and dear old friend. What hurts me in the memory is the thought of all that golden virtue, that limpid will, gone to waste. He was such an insignificant young man. Long eyelashes, grave smile—I could have snapped him out between thumb and finger like a bug. Poor Louise! She asked so many questions but never the right kind. God help you if you lose your footing in this country. There are no second tries. Was there any difference between a music teacher without a working permit, a tubercular actor trying to get to America, and a man bundled in newspapers sleeping on the street? Louise never saw that. She was as careful in her human judgments as she was in her accounts. Unable to squander, she wondered where to deposit her treasures of pity, affection, and love.

Patrick was reading to himself in English, with the idea that it would be useful in New York. Surely he might have thought of it before? Incompetence was written upon him as plainly as on me, and that was one of the reasons I averted my eyes. Louise was expected to correct his accent, and once he asked me to choose his texts. He read
End-game
and
Waiting for Godot
, which I heard through the wall. Can you imagine listening to Beckett when you are lying in bed with a fever? I struggled up one day, and into a dressing gown, and dumped on his bed an armload of poetry. “If you must have Irish misery,” I said, and I gave him Yeats. English had one good effect; he stopped declaiming. The roughness of it took the varnish off his tongue. “Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal,” I heard through the wall one Thursday afternoon, and the tone was so casual that he might have been asking for a cigarette or the time of a train. “Nor dread nor hope…” I saw the window and heard the rain and realized it was my thirty-third birthday. Patrick had great patience, and listened to his own voice again and again.

Louise nursed us, Patrick and me, as if we were one: one failing appetite, one cracked voice. She was accustomed to bad-tempered invalids, and it must have taken two of us to make one of Mother. She fed us on soup and oranges and soda biscuits. The soda biscuits were hard to find in Paris, but she crossed to the Right Bank on her bicycle and brought them back from the exotic food shops by the Madeleine. They were expensive, and neither of us could taste them, but she thought that soda biscuits were what we ought to have. She planned her days around our meals. Every noon she went out with an empty thermos flask, which she had filled with soup at the snack bar across the street. The oranges came from the market, rue St.-Jacques. Our grippe smelled of oranges, and of leek-and-potato soup.

Louise had known Patrick seventeen days, and he had been ailing for twelve, when she talked to Sylvie again. The door to Sylvie's room was open. She sat up in her bed, with her back to a filthy pillow, eating
pain-au-chocolat
. There were crumbs on the blanket and around her chin. She saw Louise going by with a string bag and a thermos, and she called, “Madame!” Louise paused, and Sylvie said, “If you are coming straight back, would you mind bringing me a cheese sandwich? There's money for it in the chrysanthemum box.” This was a Japanese cigarette box in which she kept her savings. “I am studying for the stage,” she went on, without giving Louise a chance to reply. This was to explain a large mirror that had been propped against the foot of the bed so that she could look at herself. “It's important for me to know just what I'm like,” she said seriously. “In the theatre, everything is enlarged a hundred times. If you bend your little finger”—she showed how—“from the top gallery it must seem like a great arc.”

“Aren't you talking about films?” said Louise.

Sylvie screwed her eyes shut, thought, and said, “Well, if it isn't films it's Brecht. Anyway, it's something I've heard.” She laughed, with her hands to her face, but she was watching between her fingers. Then she folded her hands and began telling poor Louise how to sit, stand, and walk on the stage—rattling off what she had learned in some second-rate theatrical course. Patrick had told us that every unemployed actor in Paris believed he could teach.

They still had not told each other their names; and if Louise walked into that cupboard room, and bothered to hear Sylvie out, and troubled to reply, it must have been only because she had decided one could move quite easily into another life in France. She worked hard at understanding, but she was often mistaken. I know she believed the French had no conventions.

“I stay in bed because my room is so cold,” said Sylvie, rapidly now, as if Louise might change her mind and turn away. “This room is an icebox—there isn't even a radiator—so I stay in bed and study and I leave the door open so as to get some of the heat from the stairs.” A tattered book of horoscopes lay facedown on the blanket. Tacked to the wall was a picture someone had taken of Sylvie asleep on a sofa, during or after a party, judging from the scene. The slit of window in the room gave on a court, but it was a bright court, with a brave tree whose roots had cracked the paving.

“My name is Sylvie Laval,” she said, and, wiping her palm on the bedsheet, prepared to shake hands.

“Louise Tate.” Louise set the thermos down on Sylvie's table, between a full ashtray and a cardboard container of coagulated milk. She saw the Japanese box with the chrysanthemum painted on the lid, and picked it up.

“What a new element you are going to be for me,” said Sylvie, settling back and watching with some amazement. “I shall observe you and become like you. Yes, that's the money box, and you must take whatever you need for the sandwich.”

“Why do you want to observe me?” said Louise, turning and laughing at her.

“You look like an angel,” Sylvie said. “I'm sure angels look like you.”

“I was once told I looked like an English poet in first youth,” said Louise, trying to pretend that Sylvie's intention had been ironical.

Sylvie tilted her little chin as if to say she knew what that was all about. “Your friends are poets,” she said. “They must be like you, too—wise and calm. I wish I knew your friends.”

“They are very plain people,” said Louise, still smiling. “They wouldn't be much fun for a bright little thing like you.”

“Foreigners?”

“Some. French, too.” Louise was proud of her introductions.

Sylvie looked with her bold black eyes and said, “French. I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“You and the type upstairs. The great actor—the comedian.” She bit her fingers, hesitating. Her features were coarse and sly. “You're so comic, the two of you, creeping about with your secret. But love is love, and everyone knows.”

I have wondered since about that bit of mischief. I suppose Patrick had given Sylvie a role to play, because it was the only way he could control her. She had found out, or he had told, and he had warned her not to hurt Louise. Louise was someone who must be spared. She must never guess that he and Sylvie had been lovers. They thought Louise could never stand up to the truth; they thought no one could bear to be told the truth about anything after a certain age.