Early One Morning (6 page)

She began to propel herself up and down within the illuminated patch of sea, first a crawl, then breaststroke and finally she turned on her back.

Williams positioned himself at the front of the car, rug in one hand, Orpen’s emergency hip flask from the glove compartment in the other.

‘Come in,’ she shouted, her voice drifting away into the surf.

‘I can’t swim, Miss.’

Eve laughed, a full-throated sound that made his skin prickle with embarrassment, rolled on to her front and produced several long, powerful strokes, which torpedoed her way out of the yellow ellipse of the Rolls’ lights. For a few moments he could hear the sound of her limbs breaking the waves and then nothing, just the soft burble of the car engine and the hiss of the ebbing waves.

Williams waited a decent interval before his first tenuous shout. ‘Miss?’

His voice sounded tiny and ineffectual against the sea, as insignificant an event as throwing a pebble into the waters.

‘Miss?’ Louder, harder, trying to keep the panic from his voice. He thought about removing his boots. Should he wade in?

‘Eve?’

There was a rope in the boot of the car. He could use that if she was out there with cramp. But first he should use the headlamps to scan the water’s surface surely.

‘Yvonne.’

That was it, Williams decided, he’d search by the lights of the Rolls and then summon help. He turned to step into the car and felt the slap of her wet skin against him.

‘Nobody calls me Yvonne any longer.’

She pushed against his uniform, trying to catch some of his body warmth. He could feel her shaking, a deep, muscular contraction as her body sought to generate enough heat to push up her plunging core temperature. Williams flung the rug around her and began to rub as vigorously as he could. ‘Whisky?’ she asked with castanet teeth.

‘Not yet. Too dangerous. What the hell did you think you were doing?’

‘Having fun. Hold me.’

He grasped her to him but continued massaging her back.

‘This’ll ruin my reputation,’ she said.

‘And my uniform.’

As warmth and sensation returned she pulled away from him, looking up into his eyes. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘That the car will overheat soon. We must leave.’

‘Ah. The ever-practical Williams. Yes, of course we must go.’ But she made no movement. Williams lifted the wet hair plastered across her face, pushed it to one side and they kissed, a soft, unhurried, gentle touch of the mouths, a preliminary skirmish. He pushed his hips back, just in case she could feel the effect she was having.

‘Are you hungry?’ he whispered.

‘Starved.’

‘I’ll cook you something.’

Sir William Orpen whooped as the tiny ball landed on the number twelve and his losses toppled, at last, over into winnings. For the first time in hours he looked at his watch and realised dawn wasn’t too far away. Berri and the others had retreated to the bar, running on his account, no doubt, but what the hell. It wasn’t the money that mattered here, it was walking away with your head held high. He just wished Eve had a little more stamina for the long run, that was all. He was meant to be the ancient one, after all.

He tipped the croupier and headed for the bar for one last whisky before gathering up his waif and strays. He was sure they would find a driver somewhere, even at this hour.

When he got there the two Americans were face down on the table, asleep, and Berri and the girl deep in discussion with a chap he had never seen before.

Orpen slammed the chips down on the table. ‘Fifteen thousand ahead, Ray. We should settle up and go. One more drink.’ He signalled to the barman for his usual Johnnie Walker and waited for the introductions.

Berri said; ‘Sir William Orpen, Josef Halken. In the same business as me. Degesch. Chemicals. Makes paints and dyes. Hamburg, isn’t it?’

Halken nodded.

‘How’s business?’ asked Orpen more out of politeness than anything else. His animosity towards the German people, stoked by his experiences at the front, had faded in the last decade, but was not extinguished entirely.

‘Good, now. We have had a few bad years, as you know. Shameful. And dangerous. But since this new dye process—’

‘Excellent,’ said Orpen, heading the man off before he gave them a lecture on the finer points of the synthetics industry. ‘Ray, see if you can summon up a car and driver. Eve’s taken the bloody chauffeur.’ Orpen scooped up his chips, ready to head for the cashier. ‘Can’t wait to see her face.’

Williams brushed the hair from Eve’s face yet again, a face flushed from exertion and pleasure and she rolled off him on to the thin strip of bed left to her. ‘God,’ was all she said.

The first rays of warming sunlight were creeping through the shutters of the room, and Williams listened as a motor car chuffed along the lane outside, followed by the clop of a horse-drawn carriage. Versailles was waking.

Eve slid off the bed and paced, shaking her limbs, stretching, unabashed as he leant up on one elbow to watch her. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, but now it had changed. It was as if all those times in the studio he had kept his feelings, his thoughts and desires shut behind lock gates, barriers that had tumbled some time during the last few hours. Now he could finally acknowledge a connection, that, as the little voice in his head had wished for all these months, she was finally in his bed.

Eve put another
boulet
into the small stove, having kept the place heated all night after her chilling experience in the sea, even though it meant they sweated as if they were in the tropics during the lovemaking and looked around properly for the first time.

The room was simple, a square semi-basement with high windows, a bed, a dresser and a wind-up gramophone with Sidney Bechet on the turntable. She stopped at the little display of his worldly goods on the dresser. Lined up in a row, a small clockwork race car, two silver hairbrushes, a photograph of Williams on a car bonnet, some hair oil, a man’s grooming kit and a silver trophy of a winged nude. Two neat stacks of thrillers—Agatha Christie, Marjory Allingham, Leslie Charteris—bookended the collection. After a moment’s hesitation Eve picked up the photo.

Williams was perched on the bonnet, one leg on the floor, and around him, holding up a flag as a backdrop, were four badly dressed young men, smiling gap-toothed at the camera. With a shock she realised one of them was cradling a tommy gun.

‘What on earth is this?’

‘I was young,’ Williams said with a yawn.

She looked at the face in the picture and back at Williams. ‘Not that young. What were you playing at?’

‘I was playing at being Irish,’ he said eventually.

The flag was a tricolour. She finally pieced it together. ‘A getaway driver?’ She laughed. ‘How romantic.’

Williams looked across at her standing there, naked, her stomach an erotic protuberance pressing against his furniture. Yes, that was what he had fallen for. The idea of the IRA as a noble cause, a group of Robin Hoods striking the occupiers and speeding away in stolen cars. Then the reality had sunk in. ‘Only from the outside.’

‘Is this your secret, Mr Williams?’ She picked up the trophy. ‘Or this? Number one, La Baule, Brittany?’

‘A sand race. Borrowed car.’

‘So. On the one hand, maybe a man on the run from Irish gangsters. Or the British? Huh? Orpen gives you shelter and a job while you … what’s the term …?’

‘Lie low?’

‘Aha. Yes.’ She pointed to the pile of books. ‘Just like your Agatha Christie. I have the solution. Or maybe …’ She held up the trophy. ‘Maybe you just want to drive. Anything you can get. Be Mr Robert Benoist.’

He snorted. ‘Do you know how much a Bugatti costs?’

‘So …’ She put down the photograph and trophy. ‘Let’s see what else we have.’

Before he could stop her she slid open the drawer and saw the pair of stiff-backed blue passports. She picked them up and opened each in turn, her jaw slack with wonder. ‘Mr Grover. And Mr Williams. Which is it?’

‘Grover-Williams,’ he said, ‘Siamese twins. But we were separated at birth.’

She threw a passport at him and he caught it; The Grover one. His given name. The one who shrugged off a stiflingly boring family and went in search of his wild, free-spirited Irish relations and found more than he bargained for. The Grover who had ended up with another man’s life in his inside pocket, a letter that meant a bullet in the neck and a body thrown outside the police barracks at midnight. So after meeting Slade that morning Grover had gone back to his room and burnt the missive, unopened, and the reckless young man with a lot of growing up to do had skipped the country.

‘I give up,’ laughed Eve. ‘You are even more of a mystery than when I started. Come on, tell me the answer.’

He put his arms behind his head and smiled, considering how much to tell her. Then a door slam reverberated through the whole house, and they both heard the fall of heavy, tired footsteps on stair treads. Coming down.

‘Shit.’ Eve dived under the covers just as the door burst open, and Williams managed to arrange himself so that the shapeless form crammed at the bottom of the bed looked like an extension of his own body. If he was eight feet tall. And multi-limbed. He just hoped his employer was too bleary eyed to notice.

‘Williams. Ah, you’re awake. Good. Did it. Got the money back. And more. Where’s Evie?’

Williams couldn’t answer. Eve was starting to nuzzle him under the covers, and he knew every word would come out two octaves higher than it should. He shrugged.

‘She’ll turn up. I’m off to bed. You can take the day off.’

As he turned Orpen heard the squeak from under the covers. He took three paces back into the room and pulled the blankets away in a great flowing crescent, revealing the curled-up Eve, eyes tight shut, as if because she couldn’t see Orpen, he would be unable to see her.

F
RANCE,
J
ULY
1928–J
ANUARY
1929

W
ILLIAMS SAT OUTSIDE
the Floreal café on the corner of Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, watching the weekend’s entertainers arrive as he sipped at a chicory-laced coffee and smoked his last Celtique under the watchful glare of the smoker on the giant hoarding opposite, whose six-foot-long cigarette puffed out a thin stream of smoke advertising the very brand he had between his lips. At night the face glowed a blue-ish neon, bright enough to illuminate the four corners of Williams’ tiny—or compact, as the concierge had it—room.

The first of the evening street bands was warming up on the wide pavement, a
baratineur
selling hats was practising his patter, half singing the praises of his cheap Princess Eugenie-style headwear that was currently going out of fashion all over central Paris. Here, though, in the second arrondissement, an area of honest artisans, dentists and furriers and dishonest vice, there might still be a market.

A light breeze occasionally carried the biting ammoniacal smell from the local
vespasienne
, a particularly ornate example of the type, spiral like a snail’s shell, which was prone to blockage and overflowing and was, in the small hours, the venue for brief and sordid sexual acts by the lowest of the street girls.

Near by a gypsy guitarist picked a mournful refrain, some paean to his dead horse no doubt, that did little to lift Williams’ mood. He dug out his last few sou and tossed them over to the guitarist and asked for some hot jazz. The man smiled, revealing teeth like piss-stained stalagtites and upped the tempo to sluggish. Now it sound like a paean to a dead horse who quite liked Django.

Seeing the transaction, one of the burly flame swallowers headed over, but Williams raised a hand to indicate he wanted no private show. A street band finally started up, playing ‘Madame la Marquise’. The guitarist redoubled his efforts against the vulgar brassiness from across the boulevard.

It had been an eventful few weeks since Orpen’s discovery of Eve’s perfidy, as he denounced it. Williams had, of course, packed and left, which put him at something of a disadvantage. Drivers normally moved with cars—a chauffeur went to whoever bought the vehicle. But now he and the Rolls had been split asunder he really did feel like a recently parted Siamese twin, as if a large section of him was missing. He could still feel the wheel, the clutch, the advance-retard, but they were phantom sensations, coming to taunt him.

He had taken a few stand-in jobs, sitting in one of the
restaurants des chauffeurs
around rue des Favourites in the fifteenth, where news of vacancies, or whichever driver on the circuit was taking a holiday or ill, rapidly circulated over the huge plates of
bouef gros sel,
with mounds of leeks and carrots, the traditional driver’s fuel.

He knew the positions would dry up come August, when Paris, and the restaurants, closed and the chauffeured classes moved south or north to the coast. There were other options. He could rejoin his father in the long-distance driving business—if he’d have him after that jaunt in Ireland—or he could get a regular non-driving job. Or he could go and see Constantini or Benoist and tell them that he was the man to move Bugatti and its race cars forward.

The latter fantasy make him smile and he took up a newspaper discarded on the wicker chair next to him and scanned it for a jobs section, but couldn’t find one. He looked at the front cover. Gringoire. Some right wing diatribe was spread across the front, lamenting the paralysis, both intellectual and industrial, that gripped the country at the moment. The
années folies
were over, it claimed: France was about to pick up the tab for its decadence and plunge into turmoil.

Williams threw the rag back on to the seat and picked up the new detective paperback he had bought at the bookstore on rue de l’Odeon, opposite the one run by the strange American woman who published unreadable novels. Georges Simenon might be a Belge, but he knew Paris well—in fact Orpen and the author had dined together at Maisonette Russe and the Château Madrid, the upper end of the social milieu. But in the novel the Belgian had captured the other, grittier end of Paris, not that of slumming, allowance-fed Americans in St Germain, but the cafés along the Canal St Martin, the slaughterhouses at La Villette, the market traders at Les Halles, the marshalling yards beyond the Batignolles and the ateliers of rue St Charles, the seedy nightlife of Pigalle, where the whores flap at tourists like crows, and the
truants
of rue de Lappe—those who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to see the inside of Police Judicaire.