Good Morning, Midnight (3 page)

Not to cry in front of this man. Tout, mais pas ca. Say something....No, don't say anything. Just walk out of the room.

'No, wait a minute,' he says. 'You'd better take that note along. You do know who to take it to now, don't you? The cashier.'

'Yes.'

He stares at me. Something else has come into his eyes. He knows how I am feeling - yes, he knows. 'Just a hopeless, helpless little fool, aren't you?' he says. Jovial? Bantering? On the surface, yes. Underneath?

No, I don't think so. 'Well, aren't you?' 'Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.' I burst into tears. I haven't even got a handkerchief.

'Dear me,' Mr Blank says. 'Allons, allons,' Salvatini says. 'Voyons'....'

I rush away from them into a fitting-room. It is hardly ever used. It is only used when the rooms upstairs are full. I shut the door and lock it.

I cry for a long time - for myself, for the old woman with the bald head, for all the sadness of this damned world, for all the fools and all the defeated....

In this fitting-room there is a dress in one of the cupboards which has been worn a lot by the mannequins and is going to be sold off for four hundred francs. The sales woman has promised to keep it for me. I have tried it on; I have seen myself in it. It is a black dress with wide sleeves embroidered in vivid colours - red, green, blue, purple. It is my dress. If I had been wearing it I should never have stammered or been stupid.

Now I have stopped crying. Now I shall never have that dress. Today, this day, this hour, this minute I am utterly defeated. I have had enough.

Now the circle is complete. Now, strangely enough, I am no longer afraid of Mr Blank. He is one thing and I am another. He knew me right away, as soon as he came in at the door. And I knew him....

I go into the other room, this time without knocking. Salvatini has gone. Mr Blank is still writing letters. Is he making dates with all the girls he knows in Paris? I bet that's what he is doing.

He looks at me with distaste. Plat du jour - boiled eyes, served cold....

Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn't it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary....Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple - no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. But I wish you a lot of trouble, Mr Blank, and just to start of with, your damned shop's going bust. Alleluia! Did I say all this? Of course I didn't. I didn't even think it.

I say that I'm ill and want to go. (Get it in first.) And he says he quite agrees that it would be the best thing. 'No regrets,' he says, 'no regrets.'

And there I am, out in the Avenue Marigny, with my month's pay - four hundred francs. And the air so sweet, as it can only be in Paris. It is autumn and the dry leaves are blowing along. Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro....

Thinking of my jobs.... There was that one I had in the shop called Young Britain. X plus ZBW. That meant fcs. 68.60. Then another hieroglyphic - XQ15tn - meant something else, fcs. 112.75. Little boys' sailor suits were there, and young gentlemen's Norfolk suits were there.... Well, I got the sack from that in a week, and very pleased I was too.

Then there was that other job - as a guide. Standing in the middle of the Place de l'Opera, losing my head and not knowing the way to the Rue de la Paix. North, south, east, west - they have no meaning for me....They want to saunter, this plump, placid lady and her slightly less placid daughter. They want to saunter in the beautiful Paris sunlight, to the Rue de la Paix.

I pull myself together and we get to the Rue de la Paix. We go to the French-English dress shops and we go to the French-French dress shops. And then they say they want to have lunch. I take them to a restaurant in the Place de la Madeleine. They are enormously rich, these two, the mother and the daughter. Both are very rich and very sad. Neither can imagine what it is like to be happy or even to be gay, neither the mother nor the daughter.

In the restaurant the waiter suggests pancakes with rum sauce for dessert. They are strict teetotallers, but they lap up the rum sauce. I've never seen anybody's mood change so quickly as the mother's did, after they had had two helpings of it.

'What delicious sauce!' They have a third helping. Their eyes are swimming. The daughter's eyes say 'Certainly, certainly'; the mother's eyes say 'Perhaps, perhaps....'

'It is strange how sad it can be - sunlight in the afternoon, don't you think?'

'Yes,' I say, 'it can be sad.'

But the softened mood doesn't last.

She has coffee and a glass of water and is herself again. Now she wants to be taken to the exhibition of Loie Fuller materials, and she wants to be taken to the place where they sell that German camera which can't be got anywhere else outside Germany, and she wants to be taken to a place where she can buy a hat which will epater everybody she knows and yet be easy to wear, and on top of all this she wants to be taken to a certain exhibition of pictures. But she doesn't remember the man's name and she isn't sure where the exhibition is. However, she knows that she will recognize the name when she hears it.

I try. I question waiters, old ladies in lavabos, girls in shops. They all respond. There is a freemasonry among those who prey upon the rich. I manage everything, except perhaps the hat.

But she saw through me. She only gave me twenty francs for a tip and I never got another job as guide from the American Express. That was my first and last.

I try, but they always see through me. The passages will never lead anywhere, the doors will always be shut. I know....

Then I start thinking about the black dress, longing for it, madly, furiously. If I could get it everything would be different. Supposing I ask So-and-so to ask So-and-so to ask Madame Perron to keep it for me?....I'll get the money. I'll get it....

Walking in the night with the dark houses over you, like monsters. If you have money and friends, houses are just houses with steps and a front door - friendly houses where the door opens and somebody meets you, smiling. If you are quite secure and your roots are well struck in, they know. They stand back respectfully, waiting for the poor devil without any friends and without any money. Then they step forward, the waiting houses, to frown and crush. No hospitable doors, no lit windows, just frowning darkness. Frowning and leering and sneering, the houses, one after another. Tall cubes of darkness, with two lighted eyes at the top to sneer. And they know who to frown at. They know as well as the policeman on the corner, and don't you worry....

Walking in the night. Back to the hotel. Always the same hotel. You press the button. The door opens. You go up the stairs. Always the same stairs, always the same room....

The landing is empty and deserted. At this time of night there are no pails, no brooms, no piles of dirty sheets. The man next door has put his shoes outside - long, pointed, patent leather shoes, very cracked. He does get dressed, then. . I wonder about this man. Perhaps he is a commercial traveller out of a job for the moment. Yes, that's what he might be - a commis voyageur. Perhaps he's a traveller in dressing gowns.

Now, quiet, quiet....This is going to be a nice sane fortnight. 'Quiet, quiet,' I say to the clock when I am winding it up, and it makes a noise between a belch and a giggle.

The bathroom here is on the ground floor. I lie in the bath, listening to the patronne talking to a client. He says he wants a room for a young lady friend of his. Not at once, he is just looking around.

'A room? A nice room?'

I watch cockroaches crawling from underneath the carpet and crawling back again. There is a lowered carpet in this bathroom, two old armchairs and a huge wardrobe with a spotted mirror.

'A nice room?' Of course, une belle chambre, the client wants. The patronne says she has a very beautiful room on the second floor, which will be vacant in about a month's time.

That's the way it is, that's the way it goes, that was the way it went....A room. A nice room. A beautiful room. A beautiful room with bath. A very beautiful room with bath. A bedroom and sitting room with bath. Up to the dizzy heights of the suite. Two bedrooms, sitting room, bath and vestibule. (The small bedroom is in case you don't feel like me, or in case you meet somebody you like better and come in late.) Anything you want brought up on the dinner wagon. (But, alas! the waiter has a louse on his collar. What is that on his collar? Bitte schon, mein Herr, bitte schon....) Swing high....Now, slowly, down. A beautiful room with bath. A room with bath. A nice room. A room....

Now, what are they saying? 'Marthe, montrez le numero douze.' And the price? Four hundred francs a month. I am paying three times as much as that for my room on the fourth floor. It shows that I have ended as a successful woman, anyway, however I may have started. One look at me and the prices go up. And when the Exhibition is pulled down and the tourists have departed, where shall I be? In the other room, of course - the one just of the Gray's Inn Road, as usual trying to drink myself to death....

When I get upstairs the man next door is out on the landing, also yelling for Marthe. His flannel night shit scarcely reaches his knees. When he sees me he grins, comes to the head of the stairs and stands there, blocking the way.

'Bonjour. Cava?'

I walk past him without answering and slam the door of my room. I expect all this is a joke. I expect he tells his friend on the floor below: 'An English tourist has taken the room next to mine. I have a lot of fun with that woman.'

A girl is making-up at an open window immediately opposite. The street is so narrow that we are face to face, so to speak. I can see socks, stockings and underclothes drying on a line in her room. She averts her eyes, her expression hardens. I realize that if I watch her making-up she will retaliate by staring at me when I do the same thing. I half shut my window and move away from it.

A terrible hotel, this - an awful place. I must get out of it. Only I would have landed here, only I would stay here....

I have just finished dressing when there is a knock on the door. It's the commis, in his beautiful dressing gown, immaculately white, with long, wide, hanging sleeves. I wonder how he got hold of it. Some woman must have given it to him. He stands there smiling his silly smile. I stare at him. He looks like a priest, the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion.

At last I manage: 'Well, what is it? What do you want?

'Nothing' he says, 'nothing.'

'Oh, go away.'

He doesn't answer or move. He stands in the doorway, smiling. (Now then, you and I understand each other, don't we? Let's stop pretending.)

I put my hand on his chest, push him backwards and bang the door. It's quite easy. It's like pushing a paper man, a ghost, something that doesn't exist.

And there I am in this dim room with the bed for madame and the bed for monsieur and the narrow street outside (what they call an impasse), thinking of that white dressing gown, like a priest's robes. Frightened as hell. A nightmare feeling....

This morning the hall smells like a very cheap Turkish bath in London - the sort of place that is got up to look respectable and clean outside, the passage very antiseptic and the woman who meets you a cross between a prison wardress and a deaconess, and everybody speaking in whispering voices with lowered eyes: 'Foam or Turkish, madam?' And then you go down into the Turkish bath itself and into a fog of stale sweat - ten, twenty years old.

The patron, the patronne and the two maids are having their meal in a room behind the bureau. They have some friends with them. Loud talking and laughing...."Tu n'oses pas," qu'elle m'a dit. "Ballot!" qu'elle m'a dit. Comment, je n'ose pas ? Vous allez voir que je lui ai dit: "Attends, attends, ma ille. Tu vas voir si je n'ose pas." Alors, vous savez ce que j'ai fait? J'ai'

His voice pursues me out into the street. 'Attends, ma ille, attends...."

I've got to find another hotel. I feel ill and giddy, I'd better take a taxi. Where to? I remember that I have an address in my handbag, a brochure with pictures. Le hall, le restaurant, le lounge, a bedroom with bath, a bedroom without bath, etcetera. Everything of the most respectable - that's the place for me....

There is a porter at the door and at the reception desk a grey haired woman and a sleek young man.

'I want a room for tonight.'

'A room ? A room with bath?'

I am still feeling ill and giddy. I say confidentially, leaning forward: 'I want a light room.'

The young man lifts his eyebrows and stares at me.

I try again. 'I don't want a room looking on the courtyard. I want a light room.'

'A light room?' the lady says pensively. She turns over the pages of her books, looking for a light room.

'We have number 219,' she says. 'A beautiful room with bath. Seventy five francs a night.' (God, I can't afford that.) 'It's a very beautiful room with bath. Two windows. Very light,' she says persuasively.

A girl is called to show me the room. As we are about to start for the lift, the young man says, speaking out of the side of his mouth. 'Of course you know that number 219 is occupied.'

'Oh no. Number 219 had his bill the day before yesterday,' the receptionist says. 'I remember. I gave it to him myself.'

I listen anxiously to this conversation. Suddenly I feel that I must have number 219, with bath - number 219, with rose coloured curtains, carpet and bath. I shall exist on a different plane at once if I can get this room, if only for a couple of nights. It will be an omen. Who says you can't escape from your fate ? I'll escape from mine, into room number 219. Just try me, just give me a chance.