Little White Lies (33 page)

For a week she ate nothing but
ficelles
and drank water from the tap but it was worth it. The tube sat unopened, month after month, the only item of luxury in the tiny flat six floors above a butcher’s and a baker’s, between them home to at least a dozen rats. She knew – at night she could hear them scrabbling around in the rafters.

She walked up Boulevard Barbès and, at Marcadet-Poissoniers, crossed the busy intersection into Boulevard Ornano. The rows of small shops sold everything from fake hair and the sorts of vegetables one would more readily expect to see on the streets of Algiers and Tunis and Lomé and Dakar than Paris, to cartons of dinner plates at knock-down prices. There were always sales on in La Goutte d’Or, the neighbourhood she now called home. It was another Paris. Dim, dank stairwells that opened out onto the view of the white onion-domes of Sacré-Cœur, tiny, bent balconies over which housewives hung brilliantly coloured rugs out to air; people swirled in and out of shops displaying rows of bright, sticky-sweet pastries with signs scrawled in flowery, Arabic script. She walked past the bakery where she often stopped, past the Métro stop at Simplon, down rue Neuve de la Chardonnière . . .
Le Bar Yemen. Coiffeurs Hommes. Bar Taba.
She walked on, blindly.

At the bottom of the road, just before rue de Roi d’Algers, she stopped suddenly. There was a hairdresser on the corner, next door to La Semeuse, a restaurant and bar that appeared to be housed in someone’s sitting room. She peered through the light-blue curtains. Inside were half a dozen women, sitting in mismatched chairs, reading magazines, laughing and talking – there was even one smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser for three years; it too seemed to belong to another life. But there was a fifty-euro note tucked into the lining of her purse – an unexpected gift from Aunt Libertine the last time she’d visited. She caught sight of herself, a large, bulky object, muffled up against the cold with no discernible sign of anything remotely feminine, or, God forbid, attractive. Her hair, which had once been her pride and glory, was perpetually scraped back into an untidy bun. She’d been trimming the ends herself ever since she’d arrived in Paris and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn it loose outside of the anonymity of her own bed.

She pushed open the door without thinking. The chemical garden-sweetness of the salon hit her like a slap. Several of the women looked up but there was only warmth in their faces. ‘
Salut chérie, besoin d’aide?
The woman who was standing in the corner, smoking and supervising, looked up with a smile.

‘I . . . I was just wondering . . . I wanted to . . . how much is a cut and wash?’

‘For you,
ma belle, c’est pas cher
. Come in, come in.’ She beckoned to Annick to come forward. ‘Have a seat,
ma belle
.
Tu veux boire quelque chose
?
Un café
?’

Annick’s eyes prickled. ‘Yes,’ she nodded quickly. ‘
Un café
.’

‘
Ouh la la . . . regarde ça!
’ The woman expertly unpinned Annick’s bun and her hair tumbled over her shoulders. The other women looked over enviously. All were paying for their hair to be straightened, teased, primped and tamed – Annick’s thick, curly locks were the envy of all. ‘You are a
métisse, non
?’ The woman asked her, but again there wasn’t a shred of hostility in her voice. ‘Lucky you. She got the good hair,
non
?’ she asked the others and there was a general, laughing murmur of assent. ‘So,
ma biche
, where are you from?
Tes parents
,
je veux dire. Des Antilles
?’

Annick shook her head. She hesitated. ‘My father is – was – Togolese. My mother was French.’

‘Was?
Ils sont mort
?’ the woman asked, parting the thick brown curls and inspecting the ends. ‘When did you last cut your hair,
ma belle
?’ she went on, without waiting for an answer.

The two questions carried the same weight. ‘A long time ago. My hair? I . . . I can’t remember . . . two, three years ago, maybe?’

‘Three years?’ The woman gave a mock scream. ‘No wonder you walked in here today.
D’accord
. Sophie . . . take the
jeune mademoiselle
to the sink by the window, yes, that one . . . give her scalp a good massage.
Three years . . . mon Dieu
. So you’re an orphan, like Arlène here.
Dommage, non
?
Bon
, Sophie is going to wash your hair and then I’m going to cut it myself,
personellement
. Three years?’ She turned away, shaking her head in disbelief.

‘
Togolaise
?’ One of the women, whose head was buried under the second, steel crania of the dryer, craned her neck to take a look at Annick. ‘You’re very
clair
,’ she said, noting Annick’s pale skin colour. ‘
Très clair
. Whereabouts in Togo are you from?’

‘I . . . I’ve never been to Togo,’ Annick said quickly. ‘I was brought up here.’

‘Ah.’ She seemed satisfied by the response.

‘Just as well,’ someone else piped up. ‘Terrible what’s happening there. Ter-rible.’

The women began to talk amongst themselves again as Annick was led to the basin by the window. She listened, fascinated. They were from all over the African diaspora – Sénégal, Congo, Rwanda . . . Martinique, Guadaloupe, Toronto. There were a dozen women in Céleste’s living room, which, as Annick had correctly surmised, doubled as her salon. They were all friends, or customers who’d been coming to her for so long they’d become friends. It was light-years away from the salon on the King’s Road that she’d gone to ever since her mother had taken her there at the age of eight, but there was a familiarity in the togetherness of the women – of all ages, all complexions – that soothed her instantly. They reminded her of her grandmother’s house in Lomé where the women of the Betancourt family met at family occasions – the births, deaths and funerals that were their rites of passage, a kind of female freemasonry that, even though she was too young to take part in it, she’d been given to understand would one day be hers, too.

She closed her eyes as the girl’s fingers deftly massaged her scalp. It was practically the first time someone had touched her in months, perhaps even years. In the warm, chemical fuzz of the dryers and steamers around the living room, she was suddenly eight or nine years old again. Her mother sat in the salon with her fingernails steeping in oil, her hair hidden under a rubber cap with holes in it, the hairdresser pulling through strands with a crochet hook to tint it. She’d be given money – a few pence, if they were in London, a franc or two if in Paris – to go out and buy sweets for herself. ‘Not too many,
chérie
,’ Anouschka would call out anxiously. ‘Just one or two.’ She would trip back happily, a lollipop or some such in her hand, whispering to herself with the curled contentment of a kitten.

‘
Viens
.’ The girl squeezed the last drops of water out of her hair and beckoned to Annick. She got up with some difficulty – the chairs were small and narrow – and shuffled with the towel draped across her shoulders to the mirror where Celeste was waiting, smiling beatifically.

‘Just a little trim,
non
? With curls like yours, it’d be a crime to cut them off. Just enough for it to grow again,
c’est tout
.’

Annick closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the image of herself staring back at her, her once-beautiful face now fat, swollen out of all recognition. What was it that had sparked the desire to get her hair cut? She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She didn’t like to admit it, but the conversation with Yves, brief as it was, had catapulted her back in time to her old self, to the Annick who deflected men’s attention the way some people swatted flies. She wasn’t that person any longer but the longing for her remained.

REBECCA
London

For once, the weather had decided to cooperate. It was a beautiful early summer’s day – fresh and crisp, a cloudless, blue sky with no threat of rain. At Harburg Hall, everything was in full swing. A marquee had been set up on the lawn behind the house. White, with stiff, peaked folds, its edges had been artfully scalloped with enormous bunches of white and pink roses; there were garlands of pink gerberas and rosy carnations, palm fronds and in the centre of the garden, the
chuppah
, the traditional Jewish canopy where the rabbi would bless the union. From her bedroom window overlooking the gardens, Rebecca watched the teams of waiters streaming back and forth, carrying glasses, champagne crates, wine bottles, more flowers . . . she could see her mother calling out to one of the wedding organisers, a formidably efficient woman called Ruth. The two women huddled together, consulting a list in Embeth’s hands . . . probably working out some last-minute relative who’d ignored their repeated RSVPs and who’d just now phoned from Heathrow, demanding to know why a car hadn’t been laid on.

She turned away from the window and walked over to her dressing table. For the first time in weeks, she was completely alone. She savoured the silence. She sat down, taking care not to crease her dress. It was a pale ecru silk dress, very simple, gathered in tightly at the waist and falling in stiff, billowing folds to the floor. Her mother had chosen it – a modern version, she said, of her own wedding dress. She looked at herself in the mirror. She put out a hand to touch her image dreamily. It was her wedding day. The day of her marriage. When she’d told her mother of Julian’s proposal, Embeth’s eyes had immediately welled up. She’d put out a hand and covered Rebecca’s in a gesture that was both blessing and relief. Julian was hardly part of the inner circle of Harburgs but there was the sense that Rebecca was being passed from one pair of safe hands to another. She’d never thought of her own family as a tribe; now she saw that they were, and that for all their warmth and openness, they guarded themselves against outsiders through the very same codes and values with which they welcomed others in.
A safe pair of hands
. She felt the presence of her family behind her, a solid, breathing, living presence. She caught sight of her face. She’d been frowning, her forehead marked by a single, deep crease, as though she were struggling to grab hold of something. ‘It’s your wedding day,’ she whispered to her own image. ‘Your
wedding
day.’

She stood up, flattening the folds of her dress with the palms of her hands. Her dark hair was swept up off her face in a loose chignon, with a few curly tendrils escaping to frame and soften the look. Her mother had given her the most exquisite headband of tiny silk roses to wear. She picked it up just as the door opened and her cousin Rachel walked in, followed closely by Tash. They both stopped; Tash gave out one of her customary low wolf-whistles. ‘Don’t make me cry, please,’ Rebecca begged, half-laughing, half-crying. ‘I’ve just had my make-up done.’

‘I’ve been crying all bloody morning,’ Tash announced, throwing herself on the sofa beside the window. ‘Let someone else take over. I don’t
care
if you’re the bride.’

‘Don’t, it’s bad luck,’ Cousin Rachel said primly. She sat down on the edge of the bed, carefully arranging her skirt around her. ‘To cry on your wedding day,’ she added, in case they’d missed the point.

‘Fuck it. It’s
your
party,’ Tash grinned.

‘And you shouldn’t swear, either.’

‘All the time, you mean? Or just on one’s wedding day?’

Rebecca threw Tash a pleading glance.
Not today, darling
. ‘Are all the guests here?’ she asked quickly.

Rachel nodded. ‘There’s one more carload from the airport – Uncle Morris, I think, and Aunt Ellie. Oh, and Adam’s just arrived. He brought his fiancée. Have you seen her?’

Rebecca shook her head, aware that a faint blush had crept into her cheeks. Adam. Her teenage crush. It all seemed so long ago. ‘Ready?’ she asked lightly, turning for one last look at herself.

‘Uh, give us a moment, Rachel,’ Tash asked. ‘Alone.’

‘Why?’

‘We won’t be a minute,’ Rebecca jumped in quickly. ‘Be a darling and just let Mama know I’ll be down in two ticks.’

‘Okay. But only a minute,’ Rachel said reluctantly. ‘Everyone’s waiting.’

‘Jesus, she gets on my nerves,’ Tash said, loudly enough for Rachel to hear as the door closed slowly behind her.

‘Shh, I know, I know . . . but she’s my
cousin
.’

‘And I’m your best friend.’

‘I . . . I wish . . . well, you know what I wish,’ Rebecca said, bringing up a hand to her eyes again. ‘I wish Annick could be here. Oh, shit, I promised I wouldn’t cry.’

‘And you’re not going to.’ Tash put her arms round her. ‘It’s your wedding day, Rebecca. I can’t
believe
you’re fucking getting married.’

‘Don’t swear,’ Rebecca said shakily.

‘I know. It’s not nice.’

‘Is your mum here?’

Tash nodded, pulling a face. ‘Unfortunately. Had to persuade her
not
to wear white. You know what’s she like . . . she’d have upstaged everyone. Right, are you ready?’

Rebecca took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.’

‘Come on, then. It’s time to get you married.’

She circled Julian carefully for the seventh and last time. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother dabbing at her eyes and her father’s broad smile. The rabbi carefully laid the cloth-covered glasses on the ground and Julian raised his right foot. There was a moment’s hush, everyone held their breath, then he stamped, breaking them loudly, and the garden behind them erupted in cheers. Embeth was crying openly now; even her father was fumbling for a handkerchief. She felt Julian’s arm on her waist and turned her face up towards his. His eyes were the deepest shade of blue she’d ever seen. She felt his lips against hers and the pressure of his hand at her back.

‘
Mazel tov!
’ someone shouted behind them. There were answering cheers; people clapped. Blushing and smiling, Rebecca was turned around to face the crowd. The waiters in their smart black and white jackets were standing by, trays of champagne in hand, canapés ready . . . the celebrations were about to begin. There would be speeches and a few tears, lots of laughter and smiles and congratulations all round. Some of Julian’s colleagues had come over from Paris and they stood around in small groups. One or two of them had come with their wives or partners. These women, in their late thirties and early forties and contemporaries of Julian’s, regarded her warily, their expressions revealing what their words couldn’t.
So young
.
And a Harburg, too
. The Lovells were hardly third-rate relations, but there was no denying Julian had made himself a good match – a
very
good match. Julian was a safe choice for a young girl like her. Lovely man. A safe pair of hands. Rebecca could read their faces as if they’d spoken aloud.