Wild Lavender (16 page)

The studio numbers were painted in lopsided numerals on each of the buildings circling the courtyard. Apartments seven to fourteen were at the rear. I crossed the yard and entered the building through an archway. The foyer was dimly lit and smelt even more pungently of dog piles and mildew, along with the added stink of sour wine. I inspected the stairwell and braced myself to drag my trunk up the narrow stairs, hoping that no one would be coming the other way. Someone was singing and I felt heartened by the richness of the voice. But then I cringed as I made out the lyrics:

I love to sit by my window day after day

Here in Paris, so lovely and gay

Watching the girls running along the street

I want to give them a special treat

Come here, my pretties

And show Grandad your titties…

The door to apartment number nine was half-rotted with strips missing from the wood around its base. I patted my coat pocket for the key Monsieur Etienne had given me, and turned it in the lock. The door was stiff and I had to push my weight against it before it gave way and I tumbled into the room. The first thing I saw was pigeon droppings oozing down the window.

The room was both better and worse than I had expected. Better, because compared to my gloomy room in Le Panier, it was filled with light from two tall windows; worse, because of the chill that seeped through the walls. I had been hoping for somewhere cosy to rest but the room was colder than the air outside. At least the stench of the courtyard didn’t reach up to it; rather, the air was tinged with the scent of stale water and camphor.

I dragged my trunk to the iron bed frame, grit crunching under my feet. The bed was the only piece of furniture besides a washstand. Monsieur Etienne had told me that there was a toilet on each level but the building didn’t have a bathroom. If I wanted to wash, I would have to walk three blocks to the public baths and pay a few francs for a twenty-minute soak. But I already knew that Parisian women were famous for emerging from their apartments fresh and perfectly groomed after washing themselves with nothing more than a flannel and a bucket of water. The ‘tart’s bath’ they called it. I would be fine with that, I thought, except how would I heat the water? There was a long pipe that stretched from the ceiling to the floor between the two windows. I touched it; it was lukewarm. I resigned myself to the fact that it was the only heating for the room and prayed that the heat would be turned up higher in the evenings.

I lay on the bed even though there was no mattress on it. The springs creaked with my weight. I turned on my side, and tucked my legs underneath me. I had only been in Paris a few hours but I was exhausted. I picked at a spot of dust and released it into the air. The dust spun for a moment before floating to the floor. Loneliness crept over
me. I thought of my mother, Aunt Yvette and Bernard. They were miles away from me now. I closed my eyes, still feeling the motion of the train rocking me. I had only intended to lie down for a few minutes but I drifted off to sleep.

I awoke with a shooting pain in my right arm where it pressed against the springs. The temperature in the room had dropped several degrees. I rubbed my eyes, swung my legs to the floor and groaned. The sun was setting over the rooftops and chimneys. I had planned to clean the room and buy a mattress but it was too late now. My stomach growled. The best thing to do, I decided, was to get something to eat.

The traffic bustling down the street reignited my excitement at being in Paris. I wandered down the Boulevard Raspail, breathing in the aroma of the roasted chestnuts that the street vendors sold in newspaper cones. I stopped for a moment near the entrance to the Vavin
métro
station, sure that I could feel the rumble of a train passing underground, before walking on to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, where the cafés were crowded and the patrons spilled out onto the terraces, downing plum liqueurs and warming themselves around the braziers. The intersection rang with their conversations and the tinkle of wine glasses. When I passed the Café Dôme I caught a whiff of steaming mussels and melted butter. From the fine clothes of the patrons, I assumed that even a
café crème
would be out of my reach there.

I ambled on, my hands thrust into my pockets and my head full of visions of pumpkin soup, accompanied by a half-carafe of red wine to step up my circulation. My mouth was watering with the anticipated grainy sweetness of the pumpkin when I found myself in front of a café with an inexpensive menu in the window. Inside, it was packed shoulder to shoulder with students, their orders for drinks and fried potatoes echoing around the room. The air was hot, but whether that was from the heating or the bodies crowded together, I could not tell. There was a pile of
woollen coats and berets on the pegs near the door. I unbuttoned my coat but decided not to take it off until the chill had thawed out of me.

A waiter who looked Spanish showed me to a table in the corner near the newspapers and periodicals stand. Pumpkin soup wasn’t on the menu and he suggested that I have onion soup instead, and try
pâté
with my bread. I accepted his advice and looked around me. The lower floor of the café consisted of a zinc counter, stools and some tables. The mezzanine level had convent tables and benches. I craned my neck to see how far the second level stretched, and was surprised to find a group of students huddled together with books and notepapers propped in front of them. I wondered how they could concentrate with the noise from the crowd below. Perhaps they lived in rooms as cold as mine and found it easier to study in a noisy café than to shiver in the quiet.

My meal arrived. Even though I was hungry I ate slowly, letting the soup’s warmth spread to my fingers and toes. I stayed in the café for as long as I could make my food last, dreading the thought of walking out into the freezing air again. There were more people jostling in the door, and some patrons took up residence on the stairs. But even when I’d scraped my plate clean, the waiter didn’t move me on. It was only when a trio of boys sat down at the table next to me and starting making eyes in my direction that I decided it was time to leave. I may have been young, but I was too serious to think about romance. I had other ideas in my head.

My first audition was for the chorus at the Folies Bergère. I spent the morning running over a song from ‘Scheherazade’ and reading
Le Figaro.
The audition was for the next season’s show, ‘
Coeurs en Folie
: Hearts in Folly’, which was going to feature the high-kicking John Tiller Girls and costumes by the Russian designer, Erté.
Le Figaro
said that the amount of fabric to be used in the revue was enough to stretch from Paris to Lyon and that the theatre’s proprietor, Paul Derval, was so superstitious that the titles of all the shows had to have thirteen letters. I put the paper down and counted the letters in my name. Fourteen. I wondered, with mounting anxiety, if the same rule applied to their chorus girls.

I allowed myself time to negotiate the
métro
. It took me a few minutes to pluck up the courage to venture down the stairs into the darkness of the station. Finally, I joined on to the back of a group of students and followed them. I bought my ticket from the booth and found myself being jostled with the crowd down a tunnel. On the platform, I studied the map and became confused by the mess of coloured lines twisting around each other and ending in far-off suburbs. An old lady explained that I would need to change at Châtelet in order to get to Cadet.

I stared at the abyss of the tunnel until two headlights like fire in the nostrils of an ancient dragon lurched out of the darkness and a train clattered towards the platform. I was bustled into the carriage and took a seat as close as I could to the door, terrified that I would miss my stop and end up lost in the maze of tunnels. The doors rattled shut, a bell pinged and the train took off. Under other circumstances, I would probably have enjoyed my first ride on the modern
métro
but I was too worried about my audition. At each stop, more people joined the train and I found myself straining to read the station names through the mass of heads and arms.
Saint Germain des Près. Saint Michel. Châtelet!

I followed the crowd off the train and somehow managed to find the platform for trains heading north. The next train was just as crowded as the first and this time I didn’t get a seat. I tugged my coat collar; with all the bodies pressed together the carriage was steaming. But there was hardly room to move, and I couldn’t have taken off my coat if I had tried. The
métro
may have been modern, but I saw it as an unnatural way to travel: lurching blindly
through a tunnel, my sense of direction taken from me. The train came to a stop and I saw the sign for Cadet
.
I made my way to the door, thankful there was someone in front of me to open it. If I had been by myself, I would still have been standing there when the train pulled out, not realising that although the doors closed automatically the latch had to be raised in order to get out.

I emerged from the station into the afternoon light with as much relief as an animal escaping from a trap. The ramshackle combination of cafés, butchers, grocers, trinket shops, restaurants and bars was less planned than Montparnasse. I opened my bag and reviewed the directions to the Folies Bergère. Still disorientated from the
métro
ride, I set off up a street in the opposite direction to where I should have been heading.

I admired the pink and green houses covered with bare ivy vines. The area would have had the atmosphere of a village if not for the seedy characters stinking of booze and cigarettes lurking in doorways. When I reached the traffic on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, I realised that I was lost. A policeman gave me directions to get back to the Rue Richer. I passed some street performers on my way, including an India-rubber man twisting himself into knots on a mat for the amusement of the patrons of a nearby café. Although he managed to cross both his legs behind his neck, I heard the crack in his joints and shivered. It was too cold for feats of flexibility.

I reached the Rue Richer and took a deep breath outside the glass doors of the Folies Bergère, dazzled by the plush carpet, wood panelling and sparkling chandeliers. A doorman with gold braid on his shoulders informed me that performers were to use the stage door on Rue Saulnier for the audition.

I turned the corner and my heart skipped a beat. There were about fifty women milling around the stage door. The management was only looking for three chorus girls to replace those who weren’t continuing on from the previous show. Why were they auditioning so many? Some of the
women had struck up conversations, but most were either sitting on the steps or standing around on their own, going over the words of their songs, smoking or staring into space. I leaned against a lamppost and reconsidered my audition tactics. I knew that getting a part in the chorus for one of the most prestigious music halls wasn’t going to be easy, but I hadn’t expected it would be
so
competitive. I had ended up on stage at Le Chat Espiègle by accident, and even then I had known the impresario and most of the cast beforehand. In Paris it looked as if I was going to have to work hard and get used to going into things cold. While I was recovering from my shock, a blonde girl with golden eyes glanced in my direction and yawned. I studied the women around me. Most were blondes and nearly all had their hair fashionably bobbed. There were only a few very tall girls and there was certainly no one as dark as me.

After a while, a woman with severe eyes appeared in the doorway. ‘
Bonjour
, ladies,’ she said, clapping her hands. ‘Nudes on the left. Chorus on the right.’

Along with the other girls I jumped to attention. We shuffled ourselves into two lines. I was relieved to see the girl with the golden eyes line up for a nude part, but there were still eighteen other girls trying out for the chorus. ‘I heard it’s Raoul who’s going to be taking us through the steps,’ a girl with a Russian accent said to her French companion. ‘He’s tough but good.’ Her comment left me feeling even more isolated and inexperienced. Was I the only one who didn’t know what went on at a proper audition?

After we had handed in our music, the woman took us to a room to change into our rehearsal costumes. As outer clothes were flung off and tights, chemises and tunics were tugged on the air became rank with the smell of nervous sweat. My fingers trembled when I tied on my dancing shoes, but I reminded myself that auditions were part of becoming a real performer.

‘Hurry, this way,’ the woman called out when she saw that we were ready. She shooed us into a rehearsal room
with a scuffed wooden floor and mirrors on the walls. A black man in tights and a singlet stood at the front, his arms crossed over his chest. The woman took a seat at the piano. When we were all in the room, the man shut the door. ‘I’m Raoul,’ he said in a squeaky voice that was at odds with his muscular frame. ‘I want you to organise yourselves into pairs for the dance segment. You will be auditioning in sets of two. It makes things faster.’

We did as he instructed. I joined a leggy girl whose sleek bob concealed half her face, knowing that standing next to a diminutive girl would only exaggerate my height further.

Raoul strode into the middle of the group. ‘Now, I’m only going to show you this routine twice,’ he said, holding up two fingers. ‘This is part of your audition too, because if you can’t learn steps quickly then you have no place at the Folies Bergère. Understood?’

Any face that had been smiling up to that point became as crestfallen as the rest of the group. My heart thumped in my chest so loudly that I didn’t think I would be able to hear anything Raoul said. He demonstrated a quick cross step, which was probably the only useful thing I’d learnt from Madame Baroux, with Egyptian arms and a few kicks at the end. I was surprised that I picked up the routine faster than anyone else, including my partner who shuffled her feet, her steps blending into one shaky movement. I would have been happy to show her how to do it correctly, but we weren’t allowed to talk to each other. Fortunately for her, we were given another ten minutes to practise on our own, by which time most of the girls had grasped the routine.