Good Morning, Midnight (12 page)

We go next door to a place called La Napolitaine and eat ravioli. Warming me. Eat slowly, make it last a long time....

I've never been so happy in my life. I'm alive, eating ravioli and drinking wine. I've escaped. A door has opened and let me out into the sun. What more do I want ? Anything might happen.

'I've got a room,' Enno says. 'Rue Lamartine.'

'I had a chase,' he says. 'Paulette wasn't in. I left a note. I ran into Alfred just outside her apartment.'

Alfred smiles, bows, twists his hands nervously and departs.

'He's nice,' I say.

'Yes, he's a nice boy. He's a Turk.'

'Oh, I thought he was French.'

'No, he's a Turk.'

How much money has he got? No, don't ask. I don't want to know. Tell me later on, tell me tomorrow. Let me be happy just for now....

An old man comes up, selling red roses. Enno buys some. He must have enough money for a bit.

The old boy shuffles of. Then he turns round, comes back and puts two extra roses on the table near my plate. 'Vous permettez, monsieur?' he says to Enno, bowing like a prince.

Paris....I am in Paris....

The room we got in the hotel in the Rue Lamatine looked all right. It was on the fourth floor, the top floor. There was a big bed, covered with a red eiderdown, and outside a little balcony. You could stand and lean your arms on the cool iron and look down at the street.

We took it and paid a month's rent in advance - and that night we woke up scratching, and the wall was covered with bugs, crawling slowly.

I didn't mind the bugs much. I didn't mind anything then....

'Impossible, monsieur. Mais qu'est-ce que vous me dites la? Ce n'est pas possible. Voyons ' Etcetera, etcetera.

She didn't want to give the money back, and after a while it was arranged that she should have the place fumigated and give us another room while it was being done. I was glad we didn't have to leave.

I am lying on a long chair in the middle of the room, which still smells of sulphur. I have opened the door and stuck a piece of paper in it so that it shall stay open. I have shut the shutters to keep the sun out. The room is dim and the ceiling seems to be pressing on my head. I have been going through the advertisements in the Figaro, marking those of people who want English lessons.

Enno sits by the table, smoking his pipe, Monsieur Alfred on the bed. I watch the beads of sweat trickling down his face from his temples to his chin. I have never seen anybody sweat like that - it's extraordinary. Every now and again he blows through closed lips, takes out his handkerchief and wipes his face. Then, in a minute, it is wet and shining again.

I like Alfred. Once he said to me: 'It's very warm today. I'll make you feel cool and happy.' He took my wist and blew on it, very gently, very regularly. I tried to take it away, didn't because he had lent us five hundred francs, then I began to feel cool, peaceful.

And Alfred recites. 'Answer with a cold silence the eternal silence of the divinity,' he says. Sweating like hell. 'Do you mind if I shut the door, madame? There's a terrible draught in this room.'

'Ah, non, mon vieux, non,' Enno says. 'Leave the door open.'

'Just as you like,' says Alfred, fingering his moustache with his long, beautiful hands. He looks shy and pained, 'I thought it wasn't good for madame to sit in a draught like this.'

'I'm not in a draught,' I say. 'I'm all right.'

Alfred goes on stroking his moustache. His eyes look malicious, in the same way that a woman's eyes look suddenly malicious.

He says, looking malicious: 'I think it's a good idea, madame, this giving lessons.' Then, speaking to Enno: 'Not a bad idea, not at all a bad idea. You get two or three good bourgeois to pay up, and afterwards - ca va. Talk, say what you like, but you can't do without the bourgeoisie.'

Enno doesn't answer.

'If I were married,' Alfred says, 'I wouldn't let my wife work for another man. No, no. I should think it a terrible disgrace to let my wife work for any other man but me. I wouldn't do it. Nothing would make me do it.'

'Tu m'emmerdes!' Enno yelss, jumping up, tu'm'emmerdes, je te dis. What are you trying to say, then?'

'Bon, bon, I'm going,' Alfred says, getting up. 'I see you are in a bad temper. I'm going. You needn't shout at me.'

'Oh, don't go,' I say.

'You shut up,' Enno says.

'Madame,' says Alfred from the door, bowing.

I laugh when he bows. I keep on saying: 'Isn't this funny, isn't this funny?' I remember Alfred blowing on my wrists to cool them and I can't stop laughing. I get so tired that I put my head into my hands.

Enno says: 'I'm going out to buy something to eat.'

'Already? It's too early.'

He goes out without answering, slamming the door.

'You don't know how to make love,' he said. That was about a month after we got to Paris. 'You're too passive, you're lazy, you bore me. I've had enough of this. Good-bye.'

He walked out and left me alone - that night and the next day, and the next night and the next day. With twenty francs on the table. And I'm sure now that I'm going to have a baby, though I haven't said a word about it.

I have to go out to get myself something to eat. The patron knows, the patronne knows, everybody knows.

Waking up at night, listening, waiting....

The third day I make up my mind that he isn't coming back. A blue day. This is the first time that I look at the patronne instead of sliding past her with my eyes down. She inquires about monsieur. Monsieur may be away for some time.

Blue sky over the streets, the houses, the bars, the cafes, the vegetable shops and the Faubourg Montmatre....

I buy milk, a loaf of bread, four oranges, and go back to the hotel.

Squeezing the rind of an orange and smelling the oil. A lot of oil - they must be pretty fresh....I think:

'What's going to happen?' After all, I don't much care what happens. And just as I am thinking this Enno walks in with a bottle of wine under his arm.

'Hello,' he says.

'I've got some money,' he says. 'My God, isn't it hot ? Peel me an orange.' 'I'm very thirsty,' he says. 'Peel me an orange.'

Now is the time to say 'Peel it yourself', now is the time to say 'Go to hell', now is the time to say 'I won't be treated like this'. But much too strong - the room, the street, the thing in myself, oh, much too strong....

I peel the orange, put it on a plate and give it to him.

He says: 'I've got some money.'

He brings out a mille note, a second mille note. I don't ask where he has got them. Why ask? Money circulates; it circulates - and how! Why, you wouldn't believe it sometimes.

He pours me out a glass of wine. 'It's fresh. I've kept it away from the sun.'

'But your hands are so cold,' he says. 'My girl....'

He draws the curtains to keep the sun out.

When he kissed my eyelids to wake me it was dark.

But it wasn't all that that mattered. It wasn't that he knew so exactly when to be cruel, so exactly how to be kind. The day I was sure I loved him was quite different.

He had gone out to buy something to eat. I was behind the curtain and I saw him in the street below, standing by a lamp post, looking up at our window, looking for me. He seemed very thin and small and I saw the expression on his face quite plainly. Anxious, he was....

The bottle of wine was under one arm, and his coat was sticking out, because the loaf of bread was hidden under it. The patronne didn't like us to eat in our room. Just once in a while she didn't mind, but when people eat in their room every night, it means they really have no money at all.

When I saw him looking up like that I knew that I loved him, and that it was for always. It was as if my heart turned over, and I knew that it was for always. It's a strange feeling - when you know quite certainly in yourself that something is for always. It's like what death must be. All the insouciance, all the gaiety is a bluff. Because I wanted to escape from London I fastened myself on him, and I am dragging him down. All the gaiety is going and now he is thin and anxious....

I didn't wave to him. I stayed by the curtain and watched him, and after a while he crossed the street and went into the hotel.

'I can't sleep,' he said. 'Let me lie with my head on your silver breast.'

The curtains are thin, and when they are drawn the light comes through softly. There are lowers on the windowsill and I can see their shadows on the curtains. The child downstairs is screaming.

There is a wind, and the lowers on the window sill, and their shadows on the curtains, are waving. Like swans dipping their beaks in water. Like the incalculable raising its head, uselessly and wildly, for one moment before it sinks down, beaten, into the darkness. Like skulls on long, thin necks. Plunging wildly when the wind blows, to the end of the curtain, which is their nothingness. Distorting themselves as they plunge.

The musty smell, the bugs, the loneliness, this room, which is pat of the street outside - this is all I want from life.

Things are going well. We have settled down. Enno has sold two articles. He has been to see the old boy at the Lapin Agile, and now sings there every night. And there is a real job in prospect. A publicity campaign, to popularize tea in France - Timmins' Tea. He is very excited about this, and he has designed a poster, which he says will appeal to the French: 'Tea is the most economical drink in the world. It costs less than one sou a cup.' I give English lessons. Ten francs an hour. I have three pupils - a girl who works in a scent shop, a man who advertised in the Figaro, and a young Russian whom Enno met at the Lapin Agile. He speaks English just as well as I do.

I have bought a Berlitz book and follow it blindly. Farcical, these lessons, except the Russian's. He is determined to get value for his ten francs, and he does.

'Would you tell me, please, if I have the "th" correctly ?' The, this, that, these, those - all correct.

He brings along a collected edition of Oscar Wilde's works and says he wants to read them through. 'Will you stop me, please, if I mispronounce a word?.... I think Oscar Wilde is the greatest of English writers. Do you agree?'

Well....'

'Ah, you do not agree.'

'But I do like him. I think he is very - sympathique.'

He makes a little speech about English hypocrisy. Preaching to the converted.

The streets, blazing hot, and eating peaches. The long, lovely, blue days that lasted for ever, that still are....

At the corner of the street, the chemist's shop with the advertisement of the Abbe Something's Elixir - it cures this, it cures that, it cures the sickness of pregnant women. Would it cure mine? I wonder.

My face is pretty, my stomach is huge. Last time we ate at the Algerian restaurant I had to rush away and be sick....People are very kind to me. They get up and give me their seats in buses. Passe, femme sacree....Not exactly like that, but still - it seemed to me that they were kind. All the same, I'm not so mad now about going out, and I spend long hours by myself.

There is a bookshop next door, which advertises second hand English novels. The assistant is a Hindu. I want a long, calm book about people with large incomes - a book like a lat green meadow and the sheep feeding in it. But he insists upon selling me lurid stories of the white slave traffic. 'This is a very good book, very beautiful, most true.'

But gradually I get some books that I do like. I read most of the time and I am happy.

In and out of the room - Lise, Paulette, Jean, Alfred the Turk. I watch them, and I never quite know them, but I love Lise.

She is a brodeuse - or she has been a brodeuse. Now she sings English songs in a cheap cabaret in the Rue Cujas - Roses of Picardy and Love, Here is My Heart. She can't speak English at all. She is twenty two years old, three years younger than I am.

Everything about Lise surprises me - her gentleness, her extreme sentimentality, so different from what I had been led to expect in a French girl. Airs from Manon, pink garters with little silk roses on them, Gyraldose....'Is it true that English women never use a douche? Myself, I use one twice a day....And all my underclothes made by hand. Yes, every stitch.'

She has black, curly hair, a very pretty face and - unfortunately - thick ankles....'I love Gounod's Ave Maria. The music is like a prayer, don't you think?....' She often comes in and eats with us.

One night I am in the room with Lise. We have just had a fine meal - spaghetti cooked on the lamme bleue and a bottle of Asti Spumante. I am feeling rather good.

She says: 'I wish there'd be another war.'

'Oh, Lise, don't say that.'

'Yes, I do. I might have a bit of luck. I might get killed. I don't want to live any more, me.'

Then she's off. She has nobody. She doesn't think anybody likes her. The engagement in the Rue Cujas is finished. She can't get another. She will once more have to try for a job as a brodeuse. 'And the light in the workrooms isn't so good. Sometimes your eyes hurt so much that you can hardly open them.' She is going to have to go back to live with her mother, who keeps a grocer's shop at Clamart. She is afraid of her mother. When she was a little girl her mother beat her. 'For anything, for nothing. You don't know. And all the time she says bad things to me. She likes to make me cry. She hates me, my mother. I have no one. Soon I shall have to wear spectacles. Soon I shall be old.'

'My God, Lise, you've got a few more years, surely. Cheer up.'

'Non, j'en ai assez,' she says. 'Already. I've had enough.'

'Lise, don't cry,'

'Non, non, j'en ai assez.'

I also start to cry. No, life is too sad; it's quite impossible.

Sitting in front of the lamme bleue, arms round each other's waists, crying. No, life is too sad....My tears fall on her thick hair, which always smells so nice.

Enno, coming in with another bottle of Asti Spumante, says: 'Oh, my God, this is gay,' and laughs loudly. Lise and I look at each other and start laughing too. Soon we are all rolling, helpless with laughter. It's too much, I can't any more, it's too much....