The White Russian (7 page)

As the dusk thickened, and the train began passing through thicker clumps of villages, then mean outer-city districts of factories and poky housing with lights beginning to come on as workers came home for the night, I found myself getting so nervous that, in the clammy evening heat, my hands felt hot and damp and, I saw, were covered in newsprint smears.

I put the paper down in my lap, thinking uneasily that I hadn’t had a reply to my letter; well, there hadn’t been time for a reply. I’d sailed the night after I’d bought the ticket, without telling Mother. I’d been trying, all the way over, not to think of the one-line note I’d left on my pillow at home, before heading off to spend the in-between time at Eliza’s. My note had said no more than that I was going to Paris for the summer. Every time I did remember it, I got a sick knot in my stomach. I hadn’t thought about it much on board ship either. It was only once I’d sent Grandmother a follow-up wire from Le Havre, before getting on this train, that the vagueness of my arrangements had really struck me. I couldn’t be sure anyone was expecting me. What if there was no one to meet me at the station? Would I just
take a taxi and go to Grandmother’s address? What if she was away?

I was almost relieved when a very tall young man, weighed down by a big backpack and a guitar suspended across his front by a string, shimmied down the jerking length of the open carriage, only just avoiding all the bags and feet that might have tripped him up, to sit down next to me.

‘Best to be at the front of the train when you’re getting off,’ he said cheerfully by way of explanation, perching on the front of his seat (he couldn’t lean back, with that backpack) and flicking dark-blond curls off his handsome face. And then, looking properly at my face: ‘I remember
you
.’

It was a relief, at that uneasy moment, to be recognized; and, besides, I remembered him too. We’d talked a bit on the boat. He was Dutch, I thought; and I half remembered that his mother had been an actress and his father maybe a theatre manager, but he’d come to America as soon as he’d left school; I thought he’d maybe been hanging around Hollywood for the past few years, like so many of the boys on the boat: doing little jobs, hoping for a break. But I definitely remembered that he’d recently been in Spain, taking pictures. He’d told me he’d been slightly wounded. He’d even rolled up his pants leg to show me the scar across his calf where the shrapnel had been picked out. He’d gone to New York to heal up and tout for work from American papers for his return to Spain. The Yanks paid better, he’d said cheerfully – only he’d said ‘de Yanks’. The Dutch had no cash. Nor did the French.

He grinned at me. ‘You got somewhere to stay in Paris?’ he asked casually.

His smile was so infectious that I grinned back, despite myself, and nodded. ‘I think so,’ I said cautiously, and then pointed at his guitar. ‘Do you play?’

Well, of course he does, if he’s carrying around a guitar, I reproved myself. What kind of stupid question is that?

But he only nodded and grinned wider and lovingly patted the body of his instrument. ‘
Ja
, I started learning last year in Andalucía from the gypsies. The last thing you’d expect in a war,
ja
? But, you know how it is, things just turn out the way they do. And I met some people, and they taught me a bit. And we got along so well, me and my gypsy friends, that they even ended up by giving me a gypsy name: Arai, which means something like “not of our blood, but one of us anyway”.’ He put his fingers gently on the strings: long, thin, elegant fingers, I noticed. The strings vibrated softly under his touch. ‘Did you ever hear flamenco music?’

Perhaps it was just that by then I was so rattled by the prospect of finding myself alone on a strange continent, on my quite likely futile mission, but I half wanted him to start playing, right there in the carriage, while he talked about Spain and gypsies. But when I looked round, the train was already pulling in under a grimy glass awning. I could feel it ominously slowing.

He looked around as if surprised, too, to have reached journey’s end so fast. Then he shrugged in that carefree way he had, leaped up and, picking up my bag, too, as if we’d decided to go travelling together, said, ‘Come on. Let’s beat the crowd.’

I let myself be drawn along in his wake at the front of the crowd leaving the train, half running to keep up,
laughing a little, as much out of surprised pleasure at this chance taste of friendship and freedom as from my nerves. Perhaps, after all, I’d got to a place where everyone
was
as spontaneous and happy as Eliza and Dorothy and their amusing brothers and chatty European fathers? Even if there was no one waiting for me at the station or at Grandmother’s home, how bad could it be? I’d just go and find myself a hotel and some new friends. Maybe this was the start of it all?

Even when we got to the ticket barrier, and there was, after all, a fat, red-faced man in a peaked cap holding up a cardboard sign which I saw, with a thrill of recognition, said, ‘Mme la Comtesse Sabline’, I was (just a bit) sorry to say goodbye to the first new young friend I’d made.

Arai the Flamenco Dutchman surrendered my bag to the chauffeur willingly enough. Then he nodded farewell at me, looking a little sad too.

‘Look me up,’ he said with another flashing smile, ‘if you want. I’ll be putting up at La Ruche for a bit. A blanket on the floor, I expect – no creature comforts – but it’s always fun.’ Before I’d even got out the words, ‘But what is La Ruche?’ he was already off at high speed, whistling. But he turned one more time and called back through the crowd that had by now caught up with us, and the pigeons flapping in the ironwork, ‘Oh, ask anyone! Everyone knows La Ruche!’ and waved before he vanished.

And then I was alone with the chauffeur.

He was called Gaston. I knew that because, with my bag in one hand, walking towards the automobile he’d parked outside the station, he used his free hand to thump at his
own chest and said, speaking loudly and enunciating very carefully, as if I wouldn’t understand a word and was deaf into the bargain: ‘Gaston.’

‘Evelyn,’ I replied, with my best social smile and brightest tone, ‘Evie.
Enchantée!
’ He just grunted. I could see he’d got it in his head I wouldn’t understand French, because he ignored all my subsequent polite attempts to chat: about the weather, about the crowds, about the pigeons … After a few minutes of scratchy struggling, I stopped trying to converse with him and just concentrated on getting inside the motor car.

Because, really, who cared about a surly driver? I was here! And, as I settled myself in the back seat, my mind was already leaping ahead – out of sheer relief, probably, at knowing I did, after all, have a journey’s end after that unsettling last hour of worrying in the train. And, now I was here, I’d befriend Grandmother. Of course I would. And maybe there’d be an afterwards, too, once I’d filled that gap in my family’s past and answered the questions in my head, once I’d found a family member who wouldn’t automatically disapprove of all the things my friends wanted to do with their lives. And, if she’d liked that Russian singer (funnily enough, I’d actually seen her again, on the ship, though only from far away; she’d been sitting on a deck chair behind the railing separating me from the second-class deck of the boat, looking windswept and glum and dumpy under a shawl, staring out to sea; I’d even waved, but she hadn’t seen
me
) … well, maybe I’d discover that Grandmother would enjoy the idea of wandering musicians as much as I’d liked that brief brush with the handsome young Dutchman. And (since she obviously liked romance
and adventure and travel too – two husbands! And all those artists’ colonies all over the world!) she might even think it a good idea for me to go off to Spain, to see what it was all about. And even if she
was
against that idea, for better reasons than any I’d have heard from Aunt Mildred or Mother, well, no harm done. Because maybe I could just stay on in Paris for longer, and learn to paint or write my own novel …

‘…
mademoiselle
,’ Gaston was saying, turning round and taking one hand alarmingly off the wheel. I realized he’d been trying to get my attention for several moments.

I nodded and put an intently listening look on my face. I could see he’d need encouraging out of his
idée fixe
that all young Americans in Paris were complete, uncomprehending idiots. I leaned forward.

But it didn’t matter what look I put on my face, or how I arranged my body. He just looked a mixture of agonized and patient and impatient all at once, and went on in the kind of pidgin French he must think easier for me to understand: ‘
Madame
–
malade. Madame
–
malade, comprenez?
’

After a moment’s panicky thought, I said weakly, ‘
Oh là là
,’ as if I really were the half-wit he took me for, then instantly cursed myself for feebleness. He only shook his head and sighed eloquently (proof!); then – and this, at least, was a relief – he turned his eyes back to the road and accelerated off, making the automobile growl. By the time I got my wits together enough to add, ‘
Qu’est-ce qu’elle a, la pauvre?
’ (‘Poor thing, what’s the matter?’) he was concentrating on his driving, and the car was probably making too much noise for him to have heard. At any rate, he didn’t reply.

I think what I imagined was a touch of flu, or just a headache. My euphoria at having reached Paris was so intense that it never crossed my mind that there might be anything really wrong. Why would it? I’d never seen any illness but Mother’s turns.

Perhaps I should stop for flowers? I thought vaguely, while also letting my eyes drink in the great squares as they rose up before us, and the bridges, the boulevards, the trees, the statues, but as I didn’t have the faintest idea of how you’d buy flowers here and wasn’t about to tangle further with Gaston to try and find out, and it was pretty much night-time anyway, I didn’t take the idea that seriously. Anyway, I already had a gift. I’d brought Grandmother the new novel everyone was talking about back home about two landless men looking for work in California – a grand little novel, despite its melodrama, the
New York Times
had called it, and it had struck me, midway through, that those two characters, George and Lennie, wandering the dry heat of the West with their bundles on sticks, were a bit like me and my own quixotic, uncertain journey here. It would be enough for her to read that in bed as she recovered, I decided. So I let my mind form vague pictures of myself taking her cups of smoky China tea in a vast Empire bed, and the gratitude of her smile as she looked up from the book. And I stared around me.

When we finally stopped, it was in front of a large, handsome building in blond stone with elaborate chasing, lit by several equally elaborately leaved-and-flowered wrought-iron lamp-posts. From what I could see, the entire street was built to the same level of grandeur. I got out, feeling impressed by the stateliness of it, though also
slightly puzzled, as this didn’t seem exactly the picturesque
vie de Bohème
I’d expected of someone who’d earned so much family disapproval by devoting her life to art.

As I stood on the sidewalk, breathing in the hot night air and gazing round while Gaston thumped his slow way around the automobile and, grunting, pulled my bag out of the trunk, I saw half a dozen men come out of the front door. They were solemn-looking, straight-backed, elderly men, all wearing what struck me as thrillingly foreign, Ruritanian-style military uniform – the kind that’s all gold frogging and epaulettes and medals. I strained to hear what they were saying, because I figured every word of real French I could soak up would only help get my French sounding more authentic, but I soon realized they must be speaking some other language. I couldn’t make out a word.

The one who was clearly the boss – I could see that because everyone else was deferring to him as they bowed goodbye – was a dignified type with a pot belly and big old-fashioned side-whiskers. He had twin widow’s peaks in the light-grey hair on either side of his forehead, just as I did, I noticed (though his hair didn’t have grips holding it off his face, as mine did, so the two kinks at the sides were pushing up in defiance of a very fierce recent damp combing-down). For a moment I wondered idly if his hair annoyed him as much as mine often did me.

He waved at the taxi parked just in front of Grandmother’s car. Then he headed across the wide sidewalk towards its passenger door. But, before he reached the car, a tall dark young man with startling blue eyes leaped out of the driver’s seat and hurried to intercept him. For a moment I saw their eyes meet, and the quiet smile that passed
between them as the young man opened the door for him and put a solicitous hand under his elbow to help him in. I was only a few feet away, and I couldn’t help admiring that dashing foreign warmth, and thinking: Why, you’d never get a New York taxi driver behaving like that. I thought I was admiring it unobtrusively – at least until, as the young driver shut the door behind his client and straightened up, still half smiling, my eyes accidentally met his. Feeling the blood rush to my face, I realized I must have been gawping straight at them.

The young taxi driver didn’t react in any of the ways I might have expected. He didn’t drop his eyes, or grin flirtatiously, or ask pugnaciously what I thought I was staring at, lady. Instead he completely stopped moving – froze immobile – and stared right back at me out of pale, pale eyes. For a strange moment, I actually thought he was scared.

‘
Mademoiselle,
’ Gaston said from behind me. He had my small bag in his hand.

At that, the taxi man glanced over at Gaston; then he scowled at me, for all the world as if he were furious at having been, briefly, terrified. He had extremely handsome, noble-looking features for a taxi driver – a straight nose, good cheekbones, black waves of hair – but his scowl was so fierce and aggressive that it turned his two eyebrows into one lowering black line across his face, and made me wonder if he wasn’t going to leap forward and intercept me.