Going Ashore (28 page)

We lived on the south side of the Luxembourg Gardens, where streets must have been charming before the motorcars came. Louise was hounded by buses and small, pitiless automobiles. Often, as I watched her from a window of our hotel, I thought of how she must seem to Parisian drivers – the very replica of the governessy figure the French, with their passion for categories and their disregard of real evidence, instantly label “the English Miss.” It was a verdict that would have astonished her, if she had known, for Louise believed that “Australian,” like “Protestant,” was written upon her, plain as could be. She had no idea of the effect she gave, with her slow gestures, her straight yellow hair, her long face, her hand-stitched mannish gloves and shoes. The inclination of her head and the quarter-profile of cheek, ear, and throat could seem, at times, immeasurably tender. Full-face, the head snapped to, and you saw the lines of duty from nose to mouth, and the too pale eyes. The Prussian ancestry on our mother’s side had given us something bleached and cold. Our faces were variations on a theme of fair hair, light brows. The mixture was weak in me. I had inherited the vanity, the stubbornness, without the will; I was too proud to follow and too lame to command. But physically we were nearly alike. The characteristic fold of skin at the outer corner of the eye, slanting down – we both had that. And I could have used a word about us, once, if I dared: “dainty.” A preposterous word; yet, looking at the sepia studio portrait of us, taken twenty-five years ago, when I was eight and Louise
thirteen, you could imagine it. Here is Louise, calm and straight, with her hair brushed on her shoulders, and her pretty hands; there am I, with organdy frock, white shoes, ribbon, and fringe. Two little Anglo-German girls, accomplished at piano, Old Melbourne on the father’s side, Church of England to the bone: Louise and Patricia – Lulu and Puss. We hated each other then.

Once, before Louise left Paris forever, I showed her a description of her that had been written by Sylvie Laval. It was part of a cast of characters around whom Sylvie evidently meant to construct a film. I may say that Sylvie never wrote a scenario, or anything like one; but she belonged to a Paris where one was “writer” or “artist” or “actor” without needing to prove the point. “The Australian,” wrote Sylvie, in a hand that showed an emotional age of nine, “is not elegant. All her skirts are too long, and she should not knit her own sweaters and hats. She likes Berlioz and the Romantics, which means corrupt taste. She lives in a small hotel on the left bank because [erased] She has an income she tries to pass off as moderate, which she probably got from a poor old mother, who died at last. Her character is innocent and romantic, but she is a mythomaniac and certainly cold. This [here Sylvie tried to spell a word unknown to me] makes it hard to guess her age. Her innocence is phenomenal, but she knows more than she says. She resembles the Miss Bronty [crossed out] Bronthee [crossed out] Brounte, the English lady who wore her hair parted in front and lived to a great old age after writing many moral novels and also Wuthering Heights.”

I found the notes for the film in a diary after Sylvie had left the hotel. Going by her old room, I stopped at the open door. I could see M. Rablis, who owned the hotel and who had been Sylvie’s lover, standing inside. He stood, the heart of a temper storm, the core of a tiny hurricane, and he flung her abandoned effects onto a pile of ragged books and empty bottles. I think he meant to keep everything, even the bottles, until Sylvie came back to settle her bill and return the money he said she had stolen from his desk. There were Javel bottles and whiskey bottles and yoghurt bottles and milk bottles and bottles for olive oil and tonic water and medicine and wine. Onto the pile went her torn stockings, her worn-out shoes. I recognized the ribbons and the
broderie anglaise
of a petticoat my sister had once given her as a present. The petticoat suited Sylvie – the tight waist,
and the wide skirt – and it suited her even more after the embroidery became unstitched and flounces began to hang. Think of draggled laces, sagging hems, ribbons undone; that was what Sylvie was like. Hair in the eyes, sluttish little Paris face – she was a curious friend for immaculate Louise. When M. Rablis saw me at the door, he calmed down and said, “Ah, Mademoiselle. Come in and see if any of this belongs to you. She stole from everyone – miserable little thief.” But “little thief” sounded harmless, in French, in the feminine. It was a woman’s phrase, a joyous term, including us all in a capacity for frivolous mischief. I stepped inside the room and picked up the diary, and a Japanese cigarette box, and the petticoat, and one or two other things.

THAT WINTER’S DAY
when Sylvie talked to Louise for the first time, Louise was guiding her bicycle down the stairs. It would be presumptuous for me to say what she was thinking, but I can guess: she was more than likely converting the price of oranges, face powder, and Marie-biscuits from French francs to Australian shillings and pence. She was, and she is, exceptionally prudent. Questions of upbringing must be plain to the eye and ear – if not, better left unexplained. Let me say only that it was a long training in modesty that made her accept this wretched hotel, where, with frugal pleasure, she drank tea and ate Marie-biscuits, heating the water on an electric stove she had been farsighted enough to bring from home. Her room had dusty claret hangings. Silverfish slid from under the carpet to the cracked linoleum around the washstand. She could have lived in comfort, but I doubt if it occurred to her to try. With every mouthful of biscuit and every swallow of tea, she celebrated our mother’s death and her own release. Louise had nursed Mother eleven years. She nursed her eleven years, buried her, and came to Paris with a bicycle and an income.

Now, Sylvie, who knew nothing about duty and less about remorse, would have traded her soul, without a second’s bargaining, for Louise’s room; for Sylvie lived in an ancient linen cupboard. The shelves had been taken out and a bed, a washstand, a small table, a straight chair pushed inside. In order to get to the window, one had to pull the table away and climb over the chair. This room, or cupboard, gave straight onto the stairs
between two floors. The door was flush with the staircase wall; only a ravaged keyhole suggested that the panel might be any kind of door. As she usually forgot to shut it behind her, anyone who wanted could see her furrowed bed and the basin, in which underclothes floated among islands of scum. She would plunge down the stairs, leaving a blurred impression of mangled hair and shining eyes. Her eyes were a true black, with the pupil scarcely distinct from the iris. Later I knew that she came from the southwest of France; I think that some of her people were Basques. The same origins gave her a stocky peasant’s build and thick, practical hands. Her hand, grasping the stair rail, and the firm tread of her feet specified a quality of strength that had nothing in common with the forced liveliness of Parisian girls, whose energy seemed to me as thin and strung up as their voices. Her scarf, her gloves flew from her like birds. Her shoes could never keep up with her feet. One of my memories of Sylvie – long before I knew anything about her, before I knew even her name – is of her halting, cursing loudly with a shamed smile, scrambling up or down a few steps, and shoving a foot back into a lost ballerina shoe. She wore those thin slippers out on the streets, under the winter rain. And she wore a checked skirt, a blue sweater, and a scuffed plastic jacket that might have belonged to a boy. Passing her, as she hung over the banister calling to someone below, you saw the tensed muscle of an arm or leg, the young neck, the impertinent head. Someone ought to have drawn her – but somebody has: Sylvie was the coarse and grubby Degas dancer, the girl with the shoulder thrown back and the insolent chin. For two pins, or fewer, that girl staring out of flat canvas would stick out her tongue or spit in your face. Sylvie had the voice you imagine belonging to the picture, a voice that was common, low-pitched, but terribly penetrating. When she talked on the telephone, you could hear her from any point in the hotel. She owned the telephone, and she read
Cinémonde
, a magazine about film stars, by the hour, in the lavatory or (about once every six weeks) while soaking in the tub. There was one telephone and one tub for the entire hotel, and one lavatory for every floor. Sylvie was always where you wanted to be; she had always got there first. Having got there, she remained, turning pages, her voice cheerfully lifted in the newest and most melancholy of popular songs.

“
HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT NOISY GIRL
?” Louise said once, describing her to me and to the young actor who had the room next to mine.

We were all three in Louise’s room, which now had the look of a travel bureau and a suburban kitchen combined; she had covered the walls with travel posters and bought a transparent plastic tablecloth. Pottery dishes in yellow and blue stood upon the shelves. Louise poured tea and gave us little cakes. I remember that the young man and I, both well into the age of reason, sat up very straight and passed spoons and paper napkins back and forth with constant astonished cries of “Thank you” and “Please.” It was something about Louise; she was so kind, so hospitable, she made one want to run away.

“I never notice young girls,” said the young man, which seemed to me a fatuous compliment, but Louise turned pink. She appeared to be waiting for something more from him, and so he went on, “I know the girl you mean.” It was not quite a lie. I had seen Sylvie and this boy together many times. I had heard them in his room, and I had passed them on the stairs. Well, it was none of my affair.

Until Louise’s arrival, I had avoided meeting anyone in the hotel. Friendship in bohemia meant money borrowed, recriminations, complaints, tears, theft, and deceit. I kept to myself, and I dressed like Louise, which was as much a disguise as my bohemian way of dressing in Melbourne had been. This is to explain why I had never introduced Louise to anyone in the hotel. As for the rest of Paris, I didn’t need to bother; Louise arrived with a suitcase of introductions and a list of names as long as the list for a wedding. She was not shy, she wanted to “get to know the people,” and she called at least once on every single person she had an introduction to. That was how it happened that she and the actor met outside the hotel, in a different quarter of Paris. They had seen each other across the room, and each of them thought “I wonder who that is?” before discovering they lived in the same place. This sort of thing is supposed never to happen in cities, and it does happen.

She met him on the twenty-first of December in the drawing room of a house near the Parc Monceau. She had been invited there by the widow of a man in the consular service who had been to Australia and had stayed with an uncle of ours. It was one of the names on Louise’s list. Before she
had been many weeks in Paris, she knew far more than I did about the hard chairs, cheerless lights, and gray-pink antique furniture of French rooms. The hobby of the late consul had been collecting costumes. The drawing room was lined with glass cases in which stood headless dummies wearing the beads and embroidery of Turkey, Macedonia, and Greece. It was a room intended not for people but for things – this was a feeling Louise said she often had about rooms in France. Thirty or forty guests drifted about, daunted by the museum display. They were given whiskey to drink and sticky cakes. Louise wore the gray wool dress that was her “best” and the turquoise bracelets our Melbourne grandfather brought back from a voyage to China. They were the only ornaments I have ever seen her wearing. She talked to a poet who carried in his pocket an essay about him that had been printed years before – yellow, brittle bits of paper, like beech leaves. She consoled a wild-haired woman who complained that her daughter had begun to carry on. “How old is your daughter?” said Louise. The woman replied, “Thirty-five. And you know how men are now. They have no respect for girlhood any more.” “It is very difficult,” Louise agreed. She was getting to know the people, and was pleased with her afternoon. The consul’s widow looked toward the doors and muttered that Cocteau was coming, but he never came. All at once Louise heard her say, in answer to a low-toned question, “She’s Australian,” and then she heard, “She’s like a coin, isn’t she? Gold and cold. She’s interested in music, and lives over on the Left Bank, just as you do – except that you don’t give your address, little monkey, not even to your mother’s friends. I had such a lot of trouble getting a message to you. Perhaps she’s your sort, although she’s much too old for you. She doesn’t know how to talk to men.” The consul’s widow hadn’t troubled to lower her voice – the well-bred Parisian voice that slices stone.

Louise accepted the summing up, which was inadequate, like any other. Possibly she did not know how to talk to men – at least the men she had met here. Because she thought people always said what they meant and no more than they intended, her replies were disconcerting; she never understood that the real, the unmentioned, topic was implicit between men and women. I had often watched her and seen the pattern – obtuseness followed by visible surprise – which made her seem more than ever an
English Miss. She said to the young man who had asked the question about her, and who now was led across to be presented, “Yes, that’s quite right. I don’t talk to men much, although I do listen. I haven’t any brothers and I went to Anglican convents.”

That was abrupt and Australian and spinsterish, if you like, but she had been married. She had been married at eighteen to Collie Tate. After a few months his regiment was sent to Malaya, and before she’d had very many letters from him he was taken prisoner and died. He must have been twenty. Louise seemed to have forgotten Collie, obliterating, in her faithlessness, not only his death but the fact that he had ever lived. She wore the two rings he had given her. They had rubbed her fingers until calluses formed. She was at ease with the rings and with the protective thickening around them, but she had forgotten him.

The young actor gravely pointed out that the name he was introduced to her by – Patrick something – was a stage name, and after Louise had sat down on a gilt chair he sat down at her feet. She had never seen anyone sitting on the floor in France, and that made her look at him. She probably looked at his hands; most women think a man’s character is shown in his hands. He was dressed like many of the students in the streets around our hotel, but her practical eye measured the cost and cut of the clothes, and she saw he was false-poor, pretending. There was something rootless and unclaimed in the way he dressed, the way he sprawled, and in his eagerness to explain himself; but for all that, he was French.