Going Ashore (34 page)

Afraid of missing the moment, the girl leaned on the edge of the table, which was crowded with luncheon dishes; pushed together, behind her, were the remains of the rice-and-tomato, the bones and fat of the mutton chops. The Camembert dried in the kitchen air; the bread was already stale. She did not take her eyes from the spout of the coffeepot. She might have been dreaming of love.

“You still haven’t answered me,” said Jim in the next room. “Will Algeria go Communist? Yes or no.”

“Tunisia didn’t.”

“You had different leaders.”

“The Algerians are religious – the opposite of materialists.”

“They could use a little materialism in Algeria,” said Jim. “I’ve never been there, but you’ve only got to read. I’ve got a book here …”

Those two could talk poverty the whole day and never weary. They thought they knew what it was. Jim had never taken her to a decent restaurant – not even at the beginning, when he was courting her. He looked at the menu posted outside the door and if the prices seemed more than he thought simple working-class couples could pay he turned away. He wanted everyone in the world to have enough to eat, but he did not want them to enjoy what they were eating – that was how it seemed to Veronica. Ahmed lived in a cold room on the sixth floor of an old
building, but he needn’t have. His father was a fashionable doctor in Tunis. Ahmed said there was no difference between one North African and another, between Ahmed talking of sacrifice and the nameless flower seller whose existence was a sacrifice – that is to say, whose life appears to have no meaning; whose faith makes it possible; of whom one thinks he might as well be dead. All Veronica knew was that Ahmed’s father was better off than her father had ever been. “I’m going to be an important personality,” she had said to herself at the age of seventeen or so. Soon after, she ran away and came to Paris; someone got a job for her in a photographer’s studio – a tidying-up sort of job, and not modeling, as she had hoped. In the office next to the studio, a drawer was open. She saw 100 Nouveaux Francs, a clean bill, on which the face of young Napoleon dared her, said, “Take it.” She bought a pair of summer shoes for seventy francs and spent the rest on silly presents for friends. Walking in the shoes, she was new. She would never be the same unimportant Veronica again. The shoes were beige linen, and when she wore them in the rain they had to be thrown away. The friend who had got her the job made up the loss when it was discovered, but the story went round, and no photographer would have her again.

THE COFFEEPOT SPITTING WATER
brought Jim to the kitchen. He got to the stove before Veronica knew what he was doing there. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about shoes.”

“You need shoes?” He looked at her, as if trying to remember why he had loved her and what she had been like. His glasses were thumb-printed and steamed; all his talk was fog. He looked at her beautiful ankles and the scuffed sandals on her feet. He had come from America to Paris because he had a year to spend – just like that. Imagine spending a whole year of life, when every minute mattered! He had to be sure about everything before he was twenty-six; it was the limit he had set. But Veronica was going to be a great personality, and it might happen any day. She wanted to be a great something, and she wanted to begin, but not like Jim – reading and thinking – and not like that girl in taffeta, starting
her
experience with the two Algerians.

“I think I could be nearly anything, you know.” That was what Veronica had said five months ago, when Jim asked what she was doing, sitting in a sour café with ashes and bent straws around her feet. She was prettier than any of the girls at the other tables. She had spoken first; he would never have dared. Her wrists were chapped where her navy-blue coat had rubbed the skin. That was the first thing he saw when he fell in love with her. That was what he had forgotten when he looked at her so vaguely in the kitchen, trying to remember what he had loved.

When he met her, she was homeless. It was a cause-and-effect she had not foreseen. She knew that when you run away from home you are brave – braver than anyone; but then you have nowhere to live. Until Jim found her, fell in love with her, brought her here, she spent hours on the telephone, ringing up any casual person who might give her a bed for the night. She borrowed money for bus tickets, and borrowed a raincoat because she lost hers – left it in a cinema – and she borrowed books and forgot who belonged to the name on the flyleaf. She sold the borrowed books and felt businesslike and proud.

She stole without noticing she was stealing, at first. Walking with Jim, she strolled out of a bookshop with something in her hand. “You’re at the Camus age,” he said, thinking it was a book she had paid for. She saw she was holding “La Chute,” which she had never read, and never would. They moved in the river of people down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and he put his arm round her so she would not be carried away. The Boul’Mich was like a North African bazaar now; it was not the Latin Quarter of Baudelaire. Jim had been here three months and was homesick.

“It’s wonderful to speak English,” he said.

“You should practice your French.” They agreed to talk French. “
Vous êtes bon,”
she said, gravely.

“Mais je ne suis pas beau.”
It was true, and that was the end of the French.

They held hands on the Pont des Arts and looked down at the black water. He wanted to take her home, to an apartment he had rented in Montparnasse. It was a step for him; it was an event. He had to discuss it: love, honesty, the present, the past.

Yes, but be quick, I am dying of hunger and cold, she wanted to say.

She knew more about men than he did about women, and had more patience. She understood his need to talk about a situation without making any part of the situation clear.

“You ought to get a job,” he said, when she had been living with him a month. He thought working would be good for her. He believed she should be working or studying – preparing for life. He thought life began only after it was prepared, but Veronica thought it had to start with a miracle. That was the difference between them, and why the lovely beginning couldn’t last, and why he couldn’t remember what he had loved. One day she said she had found work selling magazine subscriptions. He had never heard of that in France; he started to say so, but she interrupted him: “I used to sell the
Herald Tribune
on the street.”

Soon after that, Jim met Ahmed, and every Sunday Ahmed came to talk. Jim wondered why he had been so hurt and confused by love. He discovered that it was easier to talk than read, and that men were better company than girls. After Jim met Ahmed, and after Veronica began selling magazine subscriptions, Jim and Veronica were happier. It was never as lovely as it had been at the beginning; that never came back. But Veronica had a handbag, strings of beads, a pink sweater, and a velvet ribbon for her hair. Perhaps that was all she wanted – a ribbon or so, the symbols of love that he should have provided. Now she gave them to herself. Sometimes she came home with a treasure; once it was a jar of caviar for him. It was a mistake – the kind of extravagance he abhorred.

“You shouldn’t spend that way,” he said. “Not on me.”

“What does it matter? We’re together, aren’t we? As good as married?” she said sadly.

If they had been married, he would never have let her sell magazine subscriptions. They both knew it. She was not his wife but a girl in Paris. She was a girl, and although he would not have let her know it, almost his first. He was not attractive to women. His ugliness was unpleasant; it was the kind of ugliness that can make women sadistic. Veronica was the first girl pretty enough for Jim to want and desperate enough to have him. He had never met desperation at home, although he supposed it must exist. She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.

“WHAT’S THE GOOD OF SAVING MONEY?
If they come, they’ll shoot me. If they don’t shoot me, I shall wait for their old-age pensions. Apparently they have these gorgeous pensions.” That was Veronica on the Russians. She said this now, putting the hot coffeepot down on a folded newspaper between the two men.

For Ahmed this was why women existed: to come occasionally with fresh coffee, to say pretty, harmless things. Bach sent spirals of music around the room, music that to the Tunisian still sounded like a coffee grinder. His idea of Paris was nearly just this – couples in winter rooms; coffee and coffee-grinder music on Sunday afternoon. Records half out of their colored jackets lay on the floor where Veronica had scattered them. She treated them as if they were toys, and he saw that she loved her toys best dented and scratched. “Come next Sunday,” Jim said to Ahmed every week. Nearly every childless marriage has a bachelor friend. Veronica and Jim lived as though they were married, and Ahmed was the Sunday friend. Ahmed and Jim had met at the Bibliothèque Nationale. They talked every Sunday that winter. Ahmed lay back in the iron-and-canvas garden chair, and Jim was straight as a judge in a hard Empire armchair, the seat of which was covered with plastic cloth. The flat had always been let to foreigners, and traces of other couples and their passage remained – the canvas chair from Switzerland, the American pink bathmat in the ridiculous bathroom, the railway posters of skiing in the Alps.

Ahmed liked talking to Jim, but he was uneasy with liberals. He liked the way Jim carefully said “
Ak
med,” having learned that was how it was pronounced; and he was almost touched by his questions. What did “Ben” mean? Was it the same as the Scottish “Mac”? However, Jim’s liberalism brought Ahmed close to his mortal enemies; there were Jews, for instance, who wrote the kindest books possible about North Africa and the Algerian affair. Here was a novel by one of them. On the back of the jacket was the photograph of the author, a pipe-smoking earnest young intellectual – lighting his pipe, looking into the camera over the flame. “Well, yes, but still a Jew,” said Ahmed frankly, and he saw the change in Jim – the face pink with embarrassment, the kind mouth opened to protest, to defend.

“I don’t feel that way, I’m sorry.” Jim brought out the useful answer. In his dismay he turned the book over and hid the author’s face. He was
sparing Ahmed now at the expense of the unknown writer; but the writer was only a photograph, and he looked an imbecile with that pipe.

Ahmed’s attitudes were not acquired, like Jim’s. They were as much part of him as his ears. He expected intellectual posturing from men but detested clever women. He judged women by merciless, frivolous, secret rules. First, a girl must never be plain.

Veronica was not an intellectual, nor was she plain. She moved like a young snake; like a swan. She put a new pot of coffee down upon the table. She started the same record again, the same coffee-grinder sound. She stretched her arms, sighing, in a bored, frantic gesture. He saw the rents in the dressing gown when she lifted her arms. He could have given her more than Jim; she was not even close to the things she wanted.

Jim knew Ahmed was looking at Veronica. He wondered if he would mind if Ahmed fell in love with her. She was not Jim’s; she was free. He had told her so again and again, but it made her cry, and he stopped saying it. He had imagined her free and proud, but when he said “You’re free” she just cried. Would the fact that Ahmed was his friend, and a North African, mean a betrayal? It was a useless exercise, as pointless as pacing a room, but it was the kind of problem he exercised his brain with. He thought back and forth for a minute: How would I feel? Hurt? Shocked?

In less than the minute it was played out. Ahmed looked at Veronica and thought she was not worth a quarrel with his friend.
“Pas pour une femme,”
Sartre had said. Jim was too active in his private debate to notice Ahmed’s interest withdrawn. Ahmed’s look and its meaning were felt only by the girl. She turned to the window, with her back to the room. Suffering miserably, humiliated, she pressed her hands on the glass. The men had forgotten her. They laughed, as if Ahmed’s near betrayal had made them closer friends. Jim poured his friend’s coffee and pushed the sugar toward him. She saw the movement in the black glass.

She knew that Jim’s being an American and Ahmed a North African made their friendship unusual, but that was apart. She didn’t care about politics and color. They had nothing to do with her life. No, the difficulty for Veronica was always the same: when a man was alone he wanted her, but when there were two men she was in the way. The admiration of men, when she was the center of attention, could not make up for their
indifference when they had something to say to each other. She resented the indifference more than any amount of notice taken of another woman. She could have made pudding of a rival girl.

“The little things are so awful,” said Jim. “Look, I was on the ninety-five bus. The bus stopped because they were changing drivers. There were two Algerians, and without even turning around to see why the bus stopped where it shouldn’t, they pulled out their identity papers to show the police. It’s automatic. Something unusual – the police.”

“It is nearly finished,” said Ahmed.

“Do you think so? That part?”

In one of the Sunday papers there was a new way of doing horoscopes. It was complicated and you needed a mathematician’s brain, but anything was better than standing before the window with nothing to see. She found a pencil and sat down on the floor. I was born in ’43 and Jim in ’36. We’re both the same month. That makes ten points in common. No, the ten points count against you.

“Ahmed, when were you born?”

“I am a Lion, a Leo, of the year 1939,” Ahmed said.

“It’ll take a minute to work out.”

Presently she straightened up with the paper in her hand and said, “I can’t work it out. Ahmed, you’re going to travel. Princess Margaret’s a Leo and she’s going to travel. It must be the same thing.”

That made them laugh, and they looked at her. When they looked, she felt brave again. She stood over them, as if she were one of them. “I can’t tell if I’m going to have twins or have rheumatism,” she said. “I’m given both. Actually, I think
I’ll
travel. I’ve got to think of my future, as Jim says. I don’t think Paris is the right place. Summer might be the time to move on. Somewhere like the Riviera.”