Going Ashore (33 page)

A Warning: If you break the chain, you must be prepared to face the consequences, which are often very sad. Mme. Clémentine B. of Clermont-Ferrand broke the chain in March, 1975. Soon after, she received the unfortunate punishment of having her only husband receive a subpoena from the Minister for Weights and Measures.

We are sorry to learn that you don’t know what to do with the case of sample suet-pudding mix, and we are now sending you five hundred copies of a guidebook to central Aberdeen. Perhaps you can place them with appropriate Paris bookshops? Please feel free to keep one of the books for yourself. Thank you for your coöperation.

Trudi is our youngest. We’re putting her on a charter flight that lands in Norway. (See attached schedule.) She’s pretty resourceful for a sixteen-year-old, so you don’t really have to meet her, though it would be a good way of getting acquainted. I think you’ll find her refreshingly candid and outspoken. She’s willing to help around the house, once she has seen the purpose of the task. What she really wants is to spend the summer working on the creative side of someplace like Yves Saint Laurent or Christian Dior. She wouldn’t mind starting as a salesperson, just to get the feel of things. You won’t have anything like the trouble with Trudi that you had with Cressida, Ralph, and Bunny. Kids are off drugs now, except – but we’d just as soon let Trudi tell you.

ON A WET FEBRUARY AFTERNOON
in the eighth winter of the Algerian war, two young Algerians sat at the window table of a café behind Montparnasse station. Between them, facing the quiet street, was a European girl. The men were dressed alike in the dark suits and maroon ties they wore once a week, on Sunday. Their leather jackets lay on the fourth chair. The girl was also dressed for an important day. Her taffeta dress and crocheted collar were new; the coat with its matching taffeta lining looked home-sewn. She had thrown back the coat so that the lining could be seen, but held the skirt around her knees. She was an innocent from an inland place – Switzerland, Austria perhaps. The slight thickness of her throat above the crocheted collar might have been the start of a goiter. She turned a gentle, stupid face to each of the men in turn, trying to find a common language. Presently one of the men stood up and the girl, without his help, pulled on her coat. These two left the café together. The abandoned North African sat passively with three empty coffee cups and a heaped ashtray before him. He had either been told to wait or had nothing better to do. The street lamps went on. The rain turned to snow.

Watching the three people in the café across the street had kept Veronica Baines occupied much of the afternoon. Like the Algerian sitting alone, she had nothing more interesting to do. She left the window to start a phonograph record over again. She looked for matches, and lit a Gitane cigarette. It was late in the day, but she wore a dressing gown that was much too large and that did not belong to her, and last summer’s sandals. Three plastic curlers along her brow held the locks that, released, would become a bouffant fringe. Her hair, which was light brown, straight, and recently washed, hung to her shoulders. She was nineteen, and a Londoner, and had lived in Paris about a year. She stood pushing back the curtain with one shoulder, a hand flat on the pane. She seldom read
the boring part of newspapers, but she knew there was, or there had been, a curfew for North Africans. She left the window for a moment, and when she came back she was not surprised to find the second Algerian gone.

She wanted to say something about the scene to the two men in the room behind her. Surely it meant something – the Algerian boys and the ignorant girl? She held still. One of the men in the room was Tunisian and very touchy. He watched for signs of prejudice. When he thought he saw them, he was pleased and cold. He could be rude when he wanted to be; he had been educated in Paris and was schooled in the cold attack.

Jim Bertrand, whose flat this was, and Ahmed had not stopped talking about politics since lunch. Their talk was a wall. It shut out young girls and girlish questions. For instance, Veronica could have asked if there was a curfew, and if it applied to Ahmed as well as the nameless and faceless North Africans you saw selling flowers or digging up the streets; but Ahmed might consider it a racial question. She never knew just where he drew his own personal line.

“I am not interested in theories,” she had taught herself to say, for fear of being invaded by something other than a dream. But she was not certain what she meant, and not sure that it was true.

Jim turned on a light. The brief afternoon became, abruptly, a winter night. The window was a black mirror. She saw how the room must appear to anyone watching from across the street. But no one peeped at them. Up and down the street, persiennes were latched, curtains tightly drawn. The shops were a line of iron shutters broken only by the Arab café, from which spilled a brownish and hideous light. The curb was lined with cars; Paris was like a garage. Shivering at the cold, and the dead cold of the lined-up automobiles, she turned to the room. She imagined a garden filled with gardenias and a striped umbrella. Veronica was a London girl. At first her dreams had been of Paris, but now they were about a south she had not yet seen.

She moved across the room, scuffling her old sandals, dressed in Jim’s dressing gown. She dropped her cigarette on the marble hearth, stepped on it, and kicked it under the gas heater in the fireplace. Then she knelt and lifted the arm of the record-player on the floor, starting again the
Bach concerto she had been playing most of the day. Now she read the name of it for the first time: Concerto Italien en Fa Majeur
BWV
971. She had played it until it was nothing more than a mosquito to the ear, and now that she was nearly through with it, about to discard it for something newer, she wanted to know what it had been called. Still kneeling, leaning on her fingertips, she reread the front page of a Sunday paper. Is Princess Paola sorry she has married a Belgian and has to live so far north? Deeply interested, Veronica examined the Princess’s face, trying to read contentment or regret. Princess Paola, Farah of Iran, Grace of Monaco, and Princess Margaret were the objects of Veronica’s solemn attention. Their beauty, their position, their attentive husbands should have been enough. According to
France Dimanche
, anonymous letters might still come in with the morning post. Their confidences went astray. None of them could say “Pass the salt” without wondering how far it would go.

When Jim and Ahmed talked on Sunday afternoon, Veronica was a shadow. If Princess Paola herself had lifted the coffeepot from the table between them, they would have taken no more notice than they now did of her. She picked up the empty pot and carried it to the kitchen. She saw herself in the looking glass over the sink: curlers, bathrobe – what a sight! Behind her was the music, the gas heater roaring away, and the drone of the men’s talk.

Everything Jim had to say was eager and sounded as if it must be truthful. “Yes, I know,” he would begin, “but look.” He was too eager; he stammered. His Tunisian friend took over the idea, stated it, and demolished it. Ahmed was Paris-trained; he could be explicit about anything. He made sense.

“Sense out of hot air,” said Veronica in the kitchen. “Perfect sense out of perfect hot air.”

She took the coffeepot apart and knocked the wet grounds into the rest of the rubbish in the sink. She ran cold water over the pot and rinsed and filled it again; then she sat down on the low stepladder that was the only seat in the kitchen and ground new coffee, holding the grinder between her knees. At lunch the men had dragged chairs into the kitchen and stopped talking politics. But the instant the meal was finished they wanted her away; she sensed it. If only she could be dismissed, turned out to prowl
like a kitten, even in the rain! But she lived here, with Jim; he had brought her here in November, four months ago, and she had no other home.

“I’m too young to remember,” she heard Ahmed say, “and you weren’t in Europe.”

The coffeepot was Italian and composed of four aluminum parts that looked as if they never would fit one inside the other. Jim had written instructions for her, and tacked the instructions above the stove, but she was as frightened by the four strange shapes as she had been at the start. Somehow she got them together and set the pot on the gas flame. She put it on upside down, which was the right way. When the water began to boil, you turned the pot right way up, and the boiling water dripped through the coffee. You knew when the water was boiling because a thread of steam emerged from the upside-down spout. That was the most important moment.