7
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu
“Where IS she?” shouted Katie Maureen Carrano, her cheeks bright red.
Johnny ignored her.
“Johnny! Come out of that bloody book! Where’s MUM?” she screamed.
Her brother raised his head briefly from his book. “Europe.”
“WHAT?” she shrieked.
Looking bored, Johnny replied languidly: “Europe. It’s that piece of land above the Mediterranean. Bounded on the east by that piece of land called Asia, Kate M—”
“SHUT UP!” she bellowed.
Johnny shrugged, and retired into his book again.
Katie Maureen paced round the family-room, breathing heavily. “Johnny— Pay attention! Johnny! When did she go?”
“After she’d been down to the farm to see Grandma,” he said in a vague voice into his book.
“I thought she was in Taupo with Pete and Jan!” she cried.
“Mm? –No. That was before.” He lowered the book and gave her a dry look. “As you’d have known if you hadn’t been off in Massachusetts furthering that career of yours as Dad’s heir.”
As expected, she retorted angrily: “You and bloody Davey aren’t interested in the company!”
“This is true,” he murmured, picking up the book again.
“Look, exactly when did she—” He still wasn’t paying attention. She marched over and wrenched the book out of his hands.
“I was reading that,” he objected mildly.
“Shut up. When did she go? And don’t give me any bullshit about after she’d been down to the farm!”
“Well, it was. Um... well, quite a bit after I got back from Japan. Um, dunno, really. Um, she was going on about the new professor of linguistics at Sir George Grey, said the woman’s a hen.” He shrugged. “Knew I’d made the right move, picking Auckland instead.”
“For God’s sake, Johnny! With Mum’s connections you could’ve got in at Oxford or Cambridge or the Sorbonne!”
“Or Strasbourg, like Mum—yeah. Not to mention with Dad’s money.”
“It wasn’t MY idea to give that ruddy great donation to Harvard Business School!” she shouted.
Not half. She’d only had to mention she’d like to go there and Dad had outed with the cheque book. Johnny didn’t bother to point this out, however. “You’ve got the brains to get in there in any case,” he noted mildly.
The wind taken out of her sails, Katie Maureen swallowed. “Um, yeah. Um, ta.”
Johnny looked at her small, contumacious figure, and sighed. She was so bloody bright and so managing, and so—well, pushy, was the word that sprang to mind, to be honest, but perhaps entrepreneurial or pro-active or some such, in the unpleasant jargon of the 21st century—anyway, so that, that you were apt to forget she was only twenty, after all. Which, in Johnny Carrano’s considered opinion, never mind what the bloody EnZed politicians might have decided in order to bump up their vote count and pull in the liquor tax, was not nearly adult. Not nearly.
“Look, as far as I can remember,” he said heavily, “she came back from Taupo and did her nut about the new professor of linguistics at Sir George Grey, and we went up to the bach for a few days and she put in her resignation—”
“What?” she gasped.
“Um, yeah, I thought you kn— Um, sorry. Well, she had said she might. Anyway, she didn’t just write it out, she went to see that CEO bloke. She reckoned he’s retiring himself, this year, though he could have stayed on, they don’t have compulsory retirement at sixty-five, so he’d understand. Forget his name.”
“Alan Kincaid!” she said impatiently. “Are you saying he didn’t talk her out of it?”
“Yes,” replied Johnny succinctly. He looked at her dropped jaw. “Uh—well, everyone always said that Dad was the stubborn one, eh? But Mum’s as bad, once she’s made her mind up.”
After a moment she said in what was a very small voice for her: “But—but why, Johnny? Was it because of the new professor?”
“Well, no: in spite of the adverse comment it didn’t seem to be, actually. She said she felt she’d done all she could in that direction and there was no challenge in it, any more.”
“What? Look, it’s post-traumatic stress, why didn’t you stop her?”
When had Johnny ever managed to stop any of his determined family going ahead with anything? He eyed her drily. “Well, in the first place I couldn’t have stopped her, if he couldn’t, and in the second place, she’s got as much right to make her own decisions as you or me or Davey. Thought you were all for self-determination and free will and stuff?”
“Not when the person’s husband’s just died, Johnny!” she cried with tears in her eyes. “How could you let her?”
He sighed. “Katie Maureen, if you were so concerned about her, you could’ve passed up that trip to flaming Boston and kept an eye on her.”
“I didn’t know she’d do something like that! She seemed quite—quite...”
“—sane,” finished Johnny drily. “Yeah. Well, we were all doing our own things, weren’t we? And we did have that family meeting and agreed it’d be best just to carry on, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t know she’d go and do something mad like this!” she wailed.
Possibly some of them might have had an inkling. “Look, isn’t it obvious she just needs to be left alone to do her own thing, however mad it might be, and get over it in her own way?”
She licked her lips. “Um, maybe...”
Silence fell in the comfortable Carrano family-room. Johnny eyed his book, now sitting on the coffee table, but didn’t dare to set her off again by getting up and grabbing it.
“But where is she?” asked Katie Maureen on a pathetic note.
She was in Europe, like he’d said! Johnny took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. She booked herself on a plane to Zurich, I do know that. But it might’ve been because it was the first available flight. Um... and she did mention she might go to Paris, drop in on... Well, some old mate from her student days; Thierry, was it?”
“No!” she snapped. “He’s the one that died of AIDS, yonks back! You’re hopeless!”
“Uh—Jean—Uh— Not Jean-Jacques Casassus, he was years and years older than her; I know he’s dead, because I had a look at the Festschrift—putrid recycled garbage, totally old-hat, he’d have despised—”
“Shut UP, Johnny!”
Johnny shut up. It might have been Jean-Claude Whatsisname, come to think of it, but he wasn’t sure, and anyway, it was entirely Mum’s own business.
“She’s not answering her email,” his sister finally announced.
“Mm? –Oh. Doesn’t want to be bothered, I expect.”
“Bullshit! People stopped sending stupid messages of condolence ages ago!”
“True. But while A is true and B is also true, is there necessarily any connection, even a negative one, betw—”
“Shut UP!”
He shrugged, got up, grabbed his book and proceeded to bury himself in it.
Kate Maureen’s hands clenched. “If only she was on Twitter or Facebook! I keep telling her: it’s easy, you just—”
It finally got to Johnny. “Look, she’s been computer-literate since the Eighties, for God’s sake! She doesn’t want to be on Twitface, because she’s not a twit! And stop loading your guilt on me! You weren’t here, and Mum took off! Finished, finito, the end!” He marched out.
Many girls of twenty might have burst into tears at this point, but although her jaw shook, Katie Maureen Carrano was made of sterner stuff. “I’ll contact Jean-Claude,” she said grimly to herself. “I bet he’s on Facebook! And her friend Annick in Strasbourg, she’s sure to get in touch with her!” She paused. “Anyway, it’s worth a try,” she decided grimly. “Who else does she know over there? Um... Well, there’s that nit Roger Browne in Oxford. Anyway, I’ll try them all, and if nobody’s heard from her I’ll get onto the European offices!” Her face brightening at the thought, she outed with her iPhone.
Of course Zurich was flaming freezing at this time of year. Polly had given in and brought her ruddy mink coat. She’d told Jake not to chuck good money away on it, people didn’t wear fur these days, hadn’t he ever heard of animal rights? But naturally he’d ignored her. Well, with a few pithy words about these’d be the same people what wore leather boots, would they? Actually it felt lovely: really soft, and very, very warm, and if it hadn’t been for the uneasy feeling that an animal righter might accost her in the street, Polly would have loved wearing it. But she’d firmly demoted the short brown mink jacket he’d given her ages ago to everyday wear. And in New Zealand people’d just assume it was rabbit or maybe possum, and that she’d got it at a recycling shop. The coat was brown, too: he’d reckoned that black was too hard-looking for her complexion or some such garbage...
Help, no sooner had she set foot in the hotel lobby wearing it than they sprang to it. Going out, Lady Carrano? Would you like a taxi? Directions to—? Of course! All of them, even the concierge—no, especially the concierge—considerately using English. They’d done it when she checked in, too. Was it because you assumed that a corporate wife wouldn’t speak any foreign languages? Oh, well. She let them load her into a taxi and give the driver directions—help, explicit directions!—to the place in Jake’s silly letter.
Uh... it did look vaguely familiar, actually. She must’ve been here with Jake—or was she thinking of some other place he’d dragged her to? A big old-fashioned stone building—could have been in any European city, really. Smallish notice by the front door, gold lettering, “Zweig & Friebel.” “Is it a bank?” she asked the taxi driver.
Yes, of course it was, madam, and was she sure it was the right address? Feebly Polly repeated the name and he confirmed that this was it.
No sooner had she set foot in the place than a very smooth, zoot-suited young man was at her elbow. Could he help her?
Polly had of course planned what to say about a million times but now that it came to the crunch she floundered. “Ja—uh—danke.” Help, would it be better to say who she was, or not? Would mentioning the key’s number be enough, or— Oh, blow it! If Jake had been that worried he could’ve written down exactly what to say, couldn’t he? Not to say what not to say! “Uh—guten Morgen. Ich heisse Polly Carrano—”
That did it, and he was all over her—in English, natch. Just over here, if he might trouble her—please, do sit down, Lady Carrano! Might he introduce himself? Richard Schultz.—In that case, that little notice on his desk wasn’t lying.—Now, how could he help her?
Limply Polly produced her key. “Um, I’ve got this key—”
“But of course, your safety deposit box. Would you like to access it?”
“Yes. Um, is it okay if I take the stuff out of it?” she asked inanely.
He blinked but made a quick recover. “Of course, Lady Carrano, whatever you wish. Zweig & Friebel are completely at your service.”
“Thank you, Mr Schultz,” said Polly weakly. Help, what if they made her sign something or—or checked and found the blimming thing wasn’t in her name but in Jake’s, or—
Smoothly Mr Schultz explained that Annette would help her: if she cared to step this way?
Annette was pretty smooth, too: maybe in her mid-thirties, a handsome, dark-haired young woman, the hair in a superbly smooth bun, the make-up flawlessly discreet. Cripes, no nail polish! Naturally the business suit was completely discreet. Nothing visible above its top button but a fine-knit jumper in a much paler shade of grey than the suit. One ultra-discreet clip allowed to appear on the lapel. Tiny silvery studs in the neat ears—probably platinum, it was much more practical than silver, wasn’t it? Jake had once actually had the brass cheek to say this, as he tried to foist a whole set of Edwardian jewellery on her—really lovely, pearls and diamonds set in the aforesaid—but although usually she let him—it didn’t hurt anyone, and it made him happy—that time he’d gone too far and she’d knocked him back with the comment that if he was feeling practical he could give that disgusting sum of money to Save the Children, and let it be of some practical use. As the flaming set had included, if you please, a ruddy tiara, he hadn’t been able to claim that she’d be able to get a lot of wear out of it. She’d regretted that set ever since—well, it had been very, very pretty, in that charming, rather lacy style typical of Edwardian jewellery.
Ugh, Annette was looking up something on her computer! Was she gonna say it was illegal for Polly to access the box as it wasn’t in her name, or did she have proof (a) that she was who she said was and (b) that the legal owner of this here box was dead and (c) that she was the legal heir to the said—
She read a number out, and looked up and smiled at her. “Yes, of course. I remember the day you and Sir Jacob took the box.”—Yeah? It was more than she did! Polly goggled at her.—“I had only just started with the bank and I was being shown the ropes by the person who had this job. Not that I expected to take over from him, at that stage,” she smiled. “But cadets must get to know all the routines, you see.”
“Very sensible,” she croaked feebly.
“Ja, I think so. You were wearing, if I may say so, a very pretty yellow suit and a small hat—I think the style is called ‘pillbox’ in English—with multicoloured flowers on it.”
“Multi— Oh! My nasturtium hat! Um, sorry, that’s what I call it, I’ve still got it. Oh, yes—that day,” she said feebly. “It was a lovely warm day, and afterwards we found a nice café that did ice creams.”
“Yes, it was a pleasant summer’s day,” Annette agreed.—Whether the woman actually recalled it was anybody’s guess.—“May I ask, what is ‘nasturtium’?”
Ooh, heck! “It’s a flower,” she said feebly. “Um, edible. Orange, usually, or shades of dark red and yellow. I’m sorry, I don’t know the German word. Well, the French is capucine.”
“Oh, of course! Thank you so much! Yes, the flowers on the hat were just like that.”
“Yes. –Capucines is a good name for them, they do look just like dear little hoods. Sunbonnets,” said Polly with a reminiscent smile. “My little girl had one that was just like a deep yellow nasturtium. Um, years ago,” she ended, biting her lip.
“Very sweet,” she smiled. “Now, here is Hans”—as another zoot-suited one, younger than Mr Schultz, suddenly appeared—were they on wheels, like the flaming Daleks? They were soundless!—“He will come with us, in case you should need some help to lift the box.”
Smoothly she bent down and, judging by the movement of the elbows, though Polly couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, apparently opened something. A cupboard? No, be a safe. Yep, it was, she saw, as Annette straightened with a key in her hand and closed the thing’s door. So in order to rob the dump you would first need the box’s owner’s key, then you’d need access to Annette’s safe, then you’d need... Okay, the secret combo to this here giant double wrought-iron door. Very fancy—lacy. You’d’ve thought this was Vienna rather than Zurich. Except that young Hans had “budding gnome” written all over him. Uh—okay, plus and, going down some marble steps, the secret combo of this GIANT non-lacy, very workmanlike, quite probably solid titanium door. Or a lot of explosives to blow it up—yeah. Vault door, that was it.
Polly held back. “It’s a bit claustrophobic, isn’t it?” she muttered.
Annette came up very close. “One does feel that, a little, but of course it is very secure: the bank has a legal obligation to its clients to take such precautions. But we have a pleasant adjoining room in which you may examine your box, it is not claustrophobic at all. And Hans will be on call all the time.”
“You—you don’t mean I have to shut the door?” said Polly in a voice that trembled in spite of her.
Annette gave Hans a warning look. “Not if you do not wish to, Lady Carrano. One of us will stay with you also, if you wish. It’s just that usually our clients wish to be private with their boxes.”
“Yes,” said Polly feebly. “I’d rather you stayed, actually, Annette.”
“I shall certainly do so, in that case. –Hans,” she said rapidly in German, “advise Herr Baumann immediately that the client requests my presence.”
Would mobile phones work— Um, no. He was using a wall phone. What he said was exactly what she’d told him to say, too.
“Your box is just over here,” murmured Annette. “Now, you insert your key—yes. And I insert mine.”
Polly licked her lips uneasily. If this called for any sort of synchronized anything, she was absolutely bound to balls it up. “Do we—do we have to turn them at exactly the same time?”
“No, no.”
Phew! So they turned their keys and Hans hauled the box out. Oh God, it was obviously heavy, what the Hell was in it? It was much bigger than she’d expected, about twenty centimetres high and about that wide, and forty deep.
Limply she let Annette take her elbow and steer her into an adjoining room. Not surprisingly, there were no windows, but the walls were pale cream painted plaster—over what, she wasn’t gonna ask—and the table and chairs were quite pretty: polished carved wood, the chairs with upholstered seats. Not bank-like leather but a floral brocade. And there was a little bunch of flowers in a cut-glass vase on the table!
Hans had thoughtfully placed the box so as Polly could sit facing the door. “This is much nicer,” she said in relief.
“Yes, a pretty little room,” Annette agreed. “Now, I shall be just here.” She took a seat on the opposite side of the table, but politely turned away.
Limply Polly lifted the thing’s lid. Shit. Bearer bonds, all right. Well, presumably. “Um, Annette, is this a bearer bond?” she croaked, passing one to her.
Yes, it was. Help, there were piles of the ruddy things! What on earth could she do? Parcel them up and post them to Oxfam? Would the Swiss even let you do that? And then, you'd have to put a—a—un truc pour la Douane, they’d always called it when she was a student—one of those on it, saying what it was, or the authorities at the other end would open it—and if they saw it was exchangeable currency they’d probably seize it—
“There’s a lot. I was planning to give them to Oxfam,” she said wanly.
From the door young Hans was heard to gulp.
“Most laudable,” said Annette in a very firm voice, not so much as giving him a reproving look, wasn’t she wonderful?
“But—but how could I get them to them?” asked Polly in a wavering voice.
“The bank could change them for you, Lady Carrano.”
“Y—um—I don’t think I ought to carry that much money!” she gasped. Help, Jake would have exploded at the mere thought!
“No, no, ve could make out a bank cheque, Lady Carrano,” put in Hans helpfully. “Then you could post it, or bank it in your chequing account, ass you pleased.” –His English was slightly more accented than Annette’s or Mr Schultz’s, but only slightly.
“So could you make it out to Oxfam, Hans?” she said in relief.
Annette gave Hans a warning glance. “Most certainly, Lady Carrano. The cheque could be made out to whomever you wish to nominate. Or the bank could arrange an electronic transfer.”
“Yes, do you have the number of the bank account you vould like us to transfer the amount to?” asked Hans eagerly.
“No,” said Polly in dismay. “That—that sounds a bit complicated.”
“If it is to go to Oxfam then we would certainly be able to ascertain the details of the account,” said Annette quickly.
“Would you? I think that might be best, Annette; I don’t really want to have to carry a cheque for a lot of money in my purse.”
“That vill work well,” decided Hans happily. “Naturally there vill be a small SWIFT charge—”
But at this he'd gone too far, and Annette cut him off in his flow: that would do, and we must not bother the clients with inessentials, was the gist.
Besides the great wodge of bearer bonds there were a lot of small boxes and parcels. Polly unwrapped a parcel gingerly. Shit! Talk about nicked from the flaming Hermitage! The haloed saint leered at her. Quickly she parcelled him up again. “Um, is there a branch of Sotheby’s here?” she croaked.
There was. Good. Polly had brought a fourre-tout. Not the sort of shopping carrier you picked up at the Puriri Emporium for under five dollars when you needed something to carry all those second-hand paperbacks and cheap Chinese fish-pattern plates and unnecessary cocktail sticks with cunning folded-paper fruits on the end of them that you hadn’t set out to buy—no. A rather soft leather, bright emerald. It probably wasn’t an In shade, but she liked it. And it exactly matched the small boxy emerald leather handbag with the clip that Jake had claimed wasn’t real gold. He’d also claimed it was a late Forties design, but hadn’t quite dared to say it was second-hand. Certainly the interior—darker green silk—was completely fresh-looking and the bag itself showed no signs of wear. Quickly she shoved the ruddy ikon into the fourre-tout.
It didn’t exactly get worse—how could it, after that? Short of a recognisable Old Master. A lot of loose rubies. Uh—well, there’d be lots of jewellers in Zurich but would they demand provenance or... Well, at least they weren’t blood diamonds. That parcel went into her handbag. A small jeweller’s box— What on earth? Uh... an order? She goggled at it. Turkish? Egyptian? It was that elaborate. Oh, well, Sotheby’s. Into the carrier bag. Next! Nice gold wristwatch. Why the fuck was it in here? He’d had drawerfuls of them at home!
“This watch looks a bit old. Um, ‘Patek Philippe,’” she read out dubiously.
“Mein Gott!” gasped Hans.
Annette glared at him. “I am sure Sotheby’s will be able to help you with it.”
Yeah. Right. Bag. Next! Next was packets and packets and packets—this was getting ridiculous!—and packets of Japanese netsukes! The man was barmy: they could have had them in a cabinet at home, instead of leaving them here to—
“Ooh, look! A dear little mouse!” cried Polly, holding it up.
“Ja, very cute!” beamed Hans.
“Charming. I think it is a valuable piece,” offered the valiant Annette.
Yeah, yeah. Bag.
At this juncture Annette took a very deep breath. “My dear Lady Carrano, I think it would not be wise—though Zurich is a most safe city—for you to be in the streets with these valuable items in your carry-bag.”
Excitedly Hans suggested in their native language that he could escort her in a taxi to Sotheby’s! Annette gave him a repressive look but agreed that would be best.
Polly had just discovered that ruddy pearl and diamond Edwardian set in one of the larger parcels: she felt too weak to object to anything they might suggest. So the bank graciously accepted the bearer bonds and wrote out a receipt, and blah, blah, she didn’t listen— Oh, thank God! A cup of coffee! Ooh, and a pastry, how very thoughtful: thank you, Hans! At this his colleagues—by now there were several of them clustered round her in an office belonging to that Herr Baumann that Hans had been made to ring on the wall phone—exchanged relieved glances, so it looked as if young Hans wasn’t gonna get it in the neck after all for offering her what must’ve been his own morning tea. It was yummy.
“Thank you so much. I feel much better,” said Polly with a sigh.
Immediately the bank personnel, exchanging more glances, expressed themselves so glad, and Mr Baumann added formal condolences upon the death of her husband. Help, they must all have been warned not to, earlier—well, perhaps it was bank policy not to bring up a personal topic—and he’d now adjudged it the appropriate moment!
She did finally get away, the burly Mr Baumann in person escorting her to the door and making sure Hans put her into a taxi, cripes.
As it turned out little Hans had never actually been to Sotheby’s Zurich before, fancy that. He wasn’t too sure what to do but funnily enough the minute he mentioned her name to the superior zoot-suited young man who had received them with the intelligence that today wasn’t an auction day but if they wished to view, next Tuesday— All over them, yep. Gee, they thought they could manage to sell the stuff for her, fancy that.
“What about Oxfam?” hissed Polly as a much higher-up gent whose name she hadn’t caught smoothly took down details what time a gangly-looking guy with horrid designer stubble that didn’t suit him examined the netsukes, trying not to actually dribble, and a plump, self-satisfied-looking character with a nasty short, dark, over-shaped beard consulted over the ikon in lowered tones with a lady in a smock. Who surprisingly looked quite normal. She actually had a pen behind her ear. Gee, just like Dorothy Perkins that was, that she hadn’t asked to come to Zurich with her because of course now she was married... Oh, well. Sometimes it seemed like only yesterday that Dorothy had been the Librarian at Puriri Library, putting Polly’s name down for the newest Dick Francis and kindly letting her take out the Church Cat books that the rest of Puriri County had apparently decided were too literate for their kids... Katie Maureen had loved them.
“What?” she said, jumping. “Entschuldigen, Hans. What did you say?”
“I say that after, vhen they have sold them, you may write out a cheque for Oxfam,” said the young man kindly.
Ulp. Yeah, and what were the odds the EnZed Inland Revenue Department would demand to look at her bank account? They’d be sure to try to claim it was income, and even if it turned out it wasn’t, there’d have to be lawyers involved and it’d drag on for months and months… “No, um, couldn’t they send the money straight to them, like the bank’s doing?”
Hans looked dismayed. “I do not think that iss a usual arrangement.”
At this Herr Smoothie said quickly that naturally they would arrange anything that Lady Carrano wished. It would be no problem to credit the monies received directly to Oxfam, and natürlich they would send her the appropriate receipts—repressive look at poor Hans. And of course, should be there anything else she might be interested in selling at a later date—? Lovely smooth smile, not disguising the shark teeth.
She might not’ve said it, but the shark teeth were so very evident—! “You wouldn't like to auction off a smallish 18th-century French decorated ceiling, I suppose?”
Gee, he actually blinked, and the hangers-on went into a collective tizz in German. Funnily enough it was the nice woman in the smock that came out with: “No, he didn’t buy the château itself, it was about to be demolished when he bought the ceiling. I believe it’s in their house in New Zealand.” Limply Polly agreed, when the fuss seemed to be over, that of course Sotheby’s could auction the ceiling. Served her right for bringing the topic up at all, eh?
At long, long last she and Hans were able to totter out onto the street again. Minus the loot and with a detailed description of the ceiling—cupids and stuff; mouldings; blue sky and clouds—in Herr Smoothie’s computer. Cripes, it was still daylight!
“I suppose we've missed lunch,” said Polly glumly to her young escort. They had: Hans confirmed with a gulp that it was past three o’clock. “Well, um, surely there must be some place we could get something solid to eat, though? Are you hungry?”
He was, very. So she told him firmly she fancied somewhere nice and ordinary, with something solid, like sausages. –Er, were the Swiss as addicted to sausages as the Germans and Austrians? Whether or not, Hans certainly seemed keen: his face lit up and although he did say, “Vell, if you are sure?” he happily took her to a very ordinary pub—ordinary in Swiss terms: sparkling clean, lots of shiny stuff inside, polished this and thats, but the furniture old wooden stuff and the few clients eating or drinking at that hour looking mercifully ordinary. Well-worn overcoats, fuzzy hats, kind of thing. Ooh, Fairisle jersey! And they had mercifully ordinary bangers and chips. With beer.
After a bit a burly man in heavy boots, a tired-looking padded parka of the slightly grimy round the edges variety and a woollen hat with flaps came in, ordered a beer, turned round with it in his fist and nearly dropped it. He strode over to them looking grim.
“What the Hell are you doing here in your employers’ time?” he demanded, of course in German.
“No, it’s work, Dad!” gasped Hans.
He gave Polly a glare. “It doesn’t look like it.”
“Dad, she’s a client, Herr Baumann told me to look after her!” he gasped.
“Yes,” said Polly quickly. “I had to go to Sotheby’s and Herr Baumann told off Hans to take me, and it took so long we missed our lunch. So I suggested somewhere with sausages, and Hans chose this place. The sausages are great here, aren’t they?”
He took a second look at her. “Yes, they do you a good sausage, but it’s not the sort of place for a lady.”
She sighed. “My dad was a very ordinary farmer, worked hard for his living all his life. My husband was rich but that’s not my fault. I wanted to come to a nice ordinary pub like this: don’t blame Hans.”
“She’s had enough of the rich life, Dad,” added Hans on a cautious note.
“Yes. I’m Polly. Sit down, join us, Herr—I’m sorry, I don’t know Hans’s surname.”
“Müller: sorry!” gasped Hans.
“Sit down, Herr Müller,” said Polly, smiling at him.
He sat down, looking dry. “Maybe you better call me Dieter, Polly. If we’re being that democratic.”
“Stop it, Dad!” hissed Hans, turning purple.
Polly laughed. “That’s all right! I can take it! So why aren’t you at work in the middle of the afternoon, Dieter?”
Grinning, the burly Dieter explained that he was a carpenter and he’d finished the lady’s job and he’d rung the other lady that wanted her window sash fixed but she’d said it was inconvenient and he hadda come tomorrow as arranged.
“No wonder you’re off rich ladies,” said Polly tranquilly. She twinkled at him over her beer.
Poor little Hans choked into his but his dad just raised his tankard and said solemnly: “Yeah. Perdition to ’em.”
After which somehow Hans ended up being dispatched back to work, no arguments, the bosses’d be expecting to see him back, and Dieter ended up taking charge of Polly. He was divorced, and his flat wasn’t much, but Hans had his own place— Somehow the gin chasers seemed to settle it, so they went off to Dieter’s flat—it was quite near—in his rattly old van.
The obliging Dieter then gave Polly a screaming come—with his tongue, he didn’t seem to mind doing that for her at all—and then got up her and came with a roar himself.
“Thanks!” he panted, quite some time later.
“You’re welcome!” replied Polly with a smothered giggle.
“You, too.” He tweaked a nipple. “These aren’t bad.”
“For my age, yeah,” she acknowledged ruefully.
“Mature women are more interesting than young dollybirds—not that I’ve got any of those lining up for me, mind you!” he said with a chuckle.
“They must be mad, then,” replied Polly comfortably.
Dieter gave a startled laugh. “Uh—thanks!”
After that somehow she ended up staying the night. The evening was a bit more of the same, after a large potato omelette—he was quite a good cook—and another couple of beers. Except that this time Dieter capably brought her to the brink with his tongue before plunging into her, at which point Polly gave a shriek, put her legs right up, and came like fury.
Next morning funnily enough Dieter was up for it again, so she let him put it into her and have a come, why not? He then generously insisted on giving her one. He had a really great technique, one finger up her and rubbing with the thumb—Jake had sometimes done that, too. Or something very— Oddly enough this thought was interrupted by a certain amount of shrieking. …Ver’ sim’lar. Mmmm.
“I could do with a bit more of this,” he said ruefully, getting up and pulling the curtains back, “but I gotta get to work, that lady’s expecting me to do her bloody sash window at half-past eight.”
“I hope that’s all you’re gonna do!” replied Polly with a giggle.
He made a face at her. “Yeah. She’s the sort of lady that doesn’t consider working guys to be real people.”
“Mm. There’s a fair bit of it about.”
“Even in New Zealand?” he said cautiously. “Thought it was kind of a classless society?”
“Huh! That may be the image the tourist brochures try to convey—that and the glorious blue skies: bit like those glorious blue skies over the ski slopes of Switzerland,” she noted, glancing at the window, which was revealing, through the double glazing, a sliver of dark grey sky and a piece of the aged greyish apartment building opposite. “But in actual fact the place is crammed with the nice middle-class sort that think that a man that works with his hands is beneath their notice. Their husbands all work in insurance offices or,”—her eyes twinkled—“banks.”
“Upwardly mobile,” agreed Dieter blandly.
“Yeah. –Come to think of it,” she said thoughtfully, “I’d say that most of them consider that sex is beneath their notice, too.”
He winced. “Got it.”
He was quite happy for her to stay for the day if she wanted to, but over breakfast—coffee, toast and jam, not that different from what she’d have had at home—Polly remembered guiltily that she hadn’t let the kids know she’d got here safely. She’d better go back to the hotel and phone them from there. Casually Dieter asked which hotel: he could drop her off in the van. She told him and the poor man gulped.
“It’s the hotel my husband used to choose,” she said lamely.
“Right, I get it. Not just well-off, like the lady with the sash window, but real rich, like the types that rent the big houses round the Genfersee and so forth,” he said glumly.
“Mm, but Dieter, that isn’t me.”
“Dare say you might feel that, but you been living that life for a good long time now, haven’t you?” said the burly carpenter on a bleak note. “I’ll just drive you back, okay? And we’ll call it quits. It was bloody good, mind you.”
Polly didn’t argue. In the first place, she never had been any good at putting her point of view over with blokes—not when it came to personal things; and in the second place, once a bloke had made up his mind it was pointless to argue with him. Lots of women did—well, bullied the poor guys into giving in, more like—and then they complained bitterly because it all went pear-shaped! No—pointless.
“Okay. Thanks,” she said wanly.
Dieter swallowed hard, but didn’t change his mind. That bloody great rock on her left hand wasn’t green glass, he now realized. And the brown fur coat couldn't be rabbit, that was for sure.
His decision was kind of confirmed when, as she got down nimbly from the old van, one of those smooth business types in a heavy overcoat, the sort that looked sort of upholstered into their clothes, dashed forward and gasped: “Lady Carrano! I hope nothing’s wrong?”
“Oh, it’s you, Herr Baumann. No, nothing’s wrong, thanks.” She turned back to the van. “Thanks for the lift, Dieter. And—and everything.”
“Yeah. So long,” replied Dieter drily, driving off.
Annick Bellot poured herb tea, looking very dry. “And that was it, was it?” she said in her native language.
Polly smiled weakly. “Not quite, Annick. –Merci beaucoup,” she said as her old friend passed her a cup. “Ooh, tilleul!” she beamed. “Lovely! It’s impossible to get it back home.”
“Mm, you’ve said. Go on, I suppose I can stand it!” she said with a faint laugh.
“Um, well, I didn’t exactly mean to—”
“Polly, you never exactly mean to.”
“No,” she admitted with a silly smile. “Well, it was a coincidence: he was walking to work, and he doesn’t always come past the hotel but that day he decided to come a different way.”
“Pure coincidence right past your hotel,” noted her French friend drily.
“Um, well, maybe he was hoping—you know!”
Annick sighed. She didn’t, really. Men only hoped that sort of thing when you were very, very pretty and completely curvaceous. Plus and didn’t mind letting them know you thought they were fine figures of men. The maddening thing was, she and Polly were the same age, almost exactly! But her own figure, which had never been anything remarkable, was now sort of squarish—exactly like Mémé’s had been, in fact, though she hadn’t yet given in to the extent of wearing shapeless black dresses and shapeless black cardigans like Mémé.
“Anyway, he was quite worried—that socio-economic bracket doesn’t expect to see women it knows getting out of rattly old vans—and insisted on seeing me inside, and he asked me to call him Jean—even though his name’s Baumann he’s not from Zurich, he’s actually from Geneva, his parents are French-speaking. And it seemed sort of mean just to brush him off: he was being so kind.”
“Good-looking, was he?” she asked drily.
“Well, quite. Not as good-looking as Dieter. But that solid, smooth look, y’know? It’s not unattractive if they haven’t run to fat.”
“And hadn’t he?”
“No, it was all muscle!” said Polly with a loud giggle. “Don’t look at me like that: I didn’t actually drag him up to my room straight away.”
“So when did you?” she asked very drily indeed.
“I merely agreed that it would be nice to meet up for lunch. But it was pelting down when he got there, so we thought we’d better just lunch at the hotel. He was very firm with them and wouldn’t let them give me anything mucky. So we had plain fillet steaks with salsifis as the vegetable.”
Annick rolled her eyes. Back when they’d been in their twenties and Polly had just finished her degree and to the dismay of all her friends in Strasbourg insisted on going home to New Zealand instead of staying in France, she’d written begging her to send her a tin of the things because in New Zealand they’d never heard of them. “That would’ve done it.”
“Very nearly! Then we had a lovely salad—”
“Don’t tell me: la mâche: you can’t get it in la Nouvelle Zé—”
“Not quite: Jake actually found a place that grows it, not long back. No, just a laitue, but an excellent sauce vinaigrette. And then some lovely cheese.”
Annick shut her eyes. “Münster, they’ve never heard of it in—”
“No! Camembert!” she choked, going into a gale of giggles.
“Then the brandies and then up to your suite: I get it. I presume the sex was good?”
Polly nodded hard, wiping her eyes. “Not bad at all!”
“Don’t give me the details, thanks, I don’t think I can take it at my age,” she said drily.
“Annick,” said Polly with a gurgle of laughter, “you said that over twenty years ago!”
“Did I? Well, it’s still true.” Annick drank her tilleul slowly: maybe it’d give her the strength to ask. Though the answer was obvious, of course. “Polly, he is married, is he?”
Polly looked airy. “Which one?”
“Don’t give me that!” she cried. “The banker, of course! The other man would be quite unsuitable!”
“Mm. Well, at Jean’s age? An ultra-respectable gnome? Of course he’s married, what else?”
What else, indeed? Annick didn’t bother to point out he couldn’t be as respectable as all that if he did other women behind his wife’s back. Besides...
“Polly, I don’t want to—to rake up the past—”
Not half! thought Polly, looking affectionately at her horribly pragmatic French friend. Goodness knew why she liked her so much, but she always had. Well, perhaps because she was so utterly down-to-earth and practical; with no pretensions at all.
“But,” said Annick on a firm note, making up her mind to it, “all this sounds horribly like that time when we were doing our doctorates and we went to Paris for that conference and you met that guy who was a carpenter, too—”
“No, a plumber,” she corrected mildly.
“Eugh—was he? Okay, if you say so. A plumber, and, well, quite a decent man, though of course you had nothing really in common, but at least he was single; only then you let Jean-Jacques Casassus make a pass, and everybody told you he was married, Polly!”
“Yes, but if he didn’t mind I didn’t. He was a joli-laid, ’member? The Yves Montand type, I suppose. We don’t get them, back home: I’d never met one in the flesh before.”
“Polly, you went nuts over the man, and there was never the slightest hope he’d leave his wife!” she cried.
“Yes, but I always knew that.”
“Then why did you bawl your eyes out for months on end?”
“Because while part of me knew quite clearly it was never gonna go anywhere and actually, couldn’t even envisage living with him, part of me wanted to bawl her eyes out.”
“What?” she croaked.
“Yes.”
“You can’t have—I mean, if you knew—” Words failed Annick.
“You’re rationalising it. It isn’t a rational thing,” she said tranquilly. “But don’t worry, I’m definitely not hung up on Jean Baumann!”
“Yes, well, if was just a fling—“
“Of course.”
Annick sighed. Well, Polly always had liked men too much, and no doubt she was really thrown by Jake’s death, poor thing, and—well. At least she wasn’t taking these flings seriously.
“I’ve always wondered what became of Michel, actually,” said Polly thoughtfully.
Not another one! “Qui ça?”
“Michel. The plumber; that was his name. I’ve always wondered what became of him.”
Annick swallowed. Bon Dieu, surely that wasn’t why she was going to Paris? “Polly, it was a long time ago,” she croaked.
“Mm? Yes, of course it was,” she agreed with her lovely warm smile. “Now, what have you got planned for dinner? Is that funny little place we used to go to still going? The one with the really good boudin aux pommes!” she prompted her.
“Les Deux Pigeons? Yes, it’s still going, but I haven’t been there for ages. It’ll be full of students,” she warned.
“Good, they’ll be serving solid nosh, in that case!”
So they went. The hors d’oeuvres were a choice between sliced fresh radis noir au sel or tinned mackerel, and the mains a choice of pot au feu de Madame—lots of beans and vegetables to relatively little meat but it smelled good and was obviously going down a treat with the students—or steak frîtes, too dear for most of the students, or hurray! Boudin aux pommes!
“Heavenly!” said Polly with a laugh, having swallowed her first mouthful.
“Oh, good. Can you really not get good black pudding— No.”
“Only English-style,” said Polly with a face. “Well, it’s edible, but it’s stodgy. And even it’s almost unobtainable, now. Modern kids don’t know what it is.”
Annick looked round cautiously. It didn’t, actually, look as if modern French kids knew, either. After a bit, as the students finished and left, Madame herself came over for a chat. Their generation—right. Thrilled to learn that Polly remembered the restaurant in the old days, when her parents had run it. And so glad that mesdames liked the boudin. Mind you, it wasn’t like the old days. All the children had those silly mobile phones. Pierre had had to forbid them in the restaurant in the end, it made the atmosphere unbearable for the older people—not just shouting into the things, the kids all seemed to be deaf these days, didn’t they? No, it was the incessant ringing.
Polly and Annick approved Pierre’s decision loudly, and she sighed. “Yes, but it’s lost us a lot of custom, I’m afraid. But when the students all go home, we’d be left with no custom at all, but for our old regulars. We get a few tourists, but we’re a bit out of the way, here. Oh, well...”
“I’ve never maintained,” said Polly slowly as Annick drove them back to her neat little flat, “that anybody’s perfectly all right over the age of thirty-five—or even twenty-five, in a lot of cases—but sometimes, looking at someone else’s life from the outside, you do find yourself thinking wouldn’t it be nice to be her, don’t you?”
The down-to-earth Annick had never had such a thought in her life. “Eugh—well, no, Polly, I can’t say I— You don’t mean Madame at Les Deux Pigeons?”
“Ouais. At first she seemed... j’sais pas. Settled, and—and happy in her work.”
“Eugh, I think she is. She really loves the cooking. Old Pierre—he’s a lot older than her, he’d be eighty, I think—he does one or two special dishes, there’s a rabbit stew he won’t let her do, but she does most of it. Most people have their troubles, Polly,” she said cautiously, “especially if they’re running a business. But the two of them have always struck me as pretty content.”
“Mm.”
Annick sighed a little, and didn’t say anything about Jake’s and Polly’s marriage. Partly because she knew perfectly well that they’d been as happy together as it was possible for two intelligent people of very different temperaments to be—given that he’d always tried to spoil her rotten and she’d never approved of conspicuous consumption; and partly because it was pointless: brooding on the past never did anyone any good, did it? She merely changed the subject and asked who Polly thought she might visit in Paris.
A vicious wind whistled down the narrow Rue de l’Échiquier. It was the sort of wind that seemed to find every nook and cranny in your clothing and—and pierce through them! Polly shivered and hunched into her fur coat. Think God she’d worn it! And that she’d brought a long scarf. She’d wound it round her head and neck and crammed a Jake-chosen Russian-look fur hat right down over it, but the wind was still managing to find crannies and crevices here and there. She pulled the scarf up a bit to cover her nose and mouth, but that still left her sinuses exposed, and they began to feel as they were going to crack. Talk about à la recherche du temps perdu! That certainly brought back the long-ago! Of course they’d been to Paris loads of times since, but, come to think if it, not this early in the year, or if it had been Jake would have bundled her from centrally-heated hotels into taxis and thence into the centrally-heated Tour d’Argent or its like, or much smaller but even trendier nosh-houses with food in fancy little piles which he’d then proceed to condemn as unspeakable.
Back in the very long ago—before she’d met Annick, it was when she was having what the kids these days called a gap year, though it hadn’t been the year after leaving school, it had been after her first year at university—back then, they’d had a student flat along here somewhere... Well, basically it had been quite a nice flat, and the area had been starting to go up-market even back then, but the lease had belonged to some guy who’d inherited it from his parents—you could, in France, it was a civilised country—and he’d decamped with his girlfriend to pig it in some dump in the country without running water—a mistake, as it was to turn out—but anyway, he’d sublet it, quite probably illegally.
The thing was, old Uncle Jack Mitchell had left her a bit of money and old Aunty Vi, whom she’d boarded with in Auckland while she was at secondary school, had thought it’d do her French good to have a few months over there staying with her friend Mlle Duplessis, that she knew from their mutual days as Unesco typists in the Dark Ages, only then the woman had dropped off the twig. By this time Polly had had almost a year at varsity but she was still just short of her eighteenth birthday, so Aunty Vi had done her nut and said that she mustn’t go without someone to keep an eye on her.
However, Aunty Mary Macdonald—no relation, actually: she was married to one of Mum’s cousins—had written to say that her son Hamish, who was quite a bit older than Polly, was looking for someone to share a flat with for a year while he was in Paris on an exchange fellowship or something— Put it like this: it had been one of those family jack-ups. Old Aunty Vi had kindly accepted on her behalf. She’d always been very keen on a girl’s having a decent education—she was a spinster herself, and had done very well, but only as a secretary. A year in a foreign country would do Polly good, the brisk, managing little Miss Macdonald declared. Hamish was completely reliable, and it was an opportunity not to be missed! So Polly went, ignoring the fact that her mother bawled down the phone for a solid half-hour when the news was imparted to her. Well, she’d also bawled when she went up to Auckland to board with Aunty Vi for her secondary schooling, when she decided to go to varsity, and— Yeah. Mum was a watering-pot. Good or bad news, didn’t matter: she bawled her eyes out. The lamenting over her only daughter going to the other side of the world was as nothing to the floods when the first grandchild arrived!
When Polly got there it was to find an absolutely ropeable Hamish—he’d grown up in Scotland, he was half Scottish with red hair and a temper to match. Oops, his properly arranged nice bourgeois flat had fallen through. A friend had put him on to this bloke that wanted to sublet his dump in the Rue de l’Échiquier. He was staying with the friend at the moment but there was no room for her. So they went round to look at the flat just off the Grands Boulevards. Aw, gee, when they got there the bloke already had two students lined up that were looking for someone to share with. This hadn’t been part of Hamish’s plan at all—given that he was about ten years Polly’s elder and already had his doctorate and was a serious political scientist, it wouldn't have been, no. But he was really stuck because his friend’s wife had taken one look at Polly in her skin-tight, high-necked jade skivvy and her artfully faded flared jeans and turned as frosty as Hell. So he gave in and agreed to take the flat over. But—glare at the students—he would be responsible for managing the rent, and they’d have a kitty for food and anyone who didn’t pay their share would be slung out. Get it? The two students, Jean-Claude and Charles-Xavier, agreed cheerfully: “D’ac!” So Hamish and Polly moved in.
It took a whole month for Hamish to discover that the cheery Charles-Xavier hadn't paid any rent and was eating other people’s food, especially his, Hamish’s, milk, coffee and cheese. As it was at about this time that the legal lessee descended on the flat and bodily removed the fridge and the stove—you were allowed to do that in France, one owned one’s stove, it didn’t automatically go with the place, as in the British Empire—he was more ropeable than ever. So Charles-Xavier was chucked out. Hamish ignored Polly’s point that he wouldn’t be able to store his milk and cheese anyway, with no fridge, but his ears turned very red, she wasn’t too sorry to see.
Jean-Claude then proposed and seconded his friend Thierry to take Charles-Xavier’s place. When Thierry turned up it was very evident, even to the ferociously upright, ultra-respectable Hamish, that he was gay, the more so as he had two friends with him, known respectively as Charlot—a giant blond hulk—and le petit Guy—a very pretty, dark-haired, well-dressed lad who looked about twenty-one but was subsequently revealed to be only seventeen with a mother who was completely opposed to the relationship with Thierry. So he only came round now and then. Charlot didn’t seem to be anyone’s boyfriend: that was, not of the flatmates, but he sometimes spent the night. As the choice was to share Polly’s narrow one-person bed in the tiny second bedroom or Hamish’s narrow one-person bed in the now ferociously neat small living-room, or Jean-Claude’s and Thierry’s big double mattress on the floor in the main bedroom, which was en suite with the bathroom, guess which bed he shared?
Occasionally a girl turned up to spend a night, or maybe a few days. Skinny, with a thick mop of curly, very pale brown hair that had an odd greenish sheen to it: very unusual. Giselle, surname never disclosed. She was a student, too. She shared the big mattress as well. Funnily enough, by this time Hamish was grimly ignoring the whole bit. Polly didn’t care: she liked Jean-Claude and Thierry, and who they slept with and how far it went was their own business. Giselle was okay, too. Well, a Libber, but they had plenty of them back home, so Polly just took her usual tack: she agreed with everything she said and let it wash over her. Well, some of it was spot-on, but was there any need to be so rabid about it? After a while, as Giselle’s visits became more frequent, it dawned that, liberated or not, she’d developed a crush on Hamish. Oh, dear, poor Giselle! There was no hope there. Certainly not after she’d hennaed the strange but lovely hair: he said, fortunately only to Polly, that it made her look cheap.
In any case he was having a thing with one, Francine, a terrifically up-market French lady Pol. Sci. lecturer: she’d come to the flat once, duly looked down her nose at it whilst not addressing a word to any of its occupants, and never reappeared. He’d meet her at the nice little restaurants she decided on and presumably go back to her place when she decreed they would—at any rate, he was quite often out all night. Those evenings were lovely: Polly, Jean-Claude and Thierry, and whoever else might be around at the time, might eat in—nothing fancy, Jean-Claude’s idea of cooking was merguez from the Algerian grocer down the road at the local market, barbecued over the open fire in the sitting-room. Whether Hamish ever realized they did this when he was out was doubtful. He had once caught them letting Giselle sleep in his bed, and he’d done his nut about that, but he’d never mentioned the smell of sausages, so presumably it had never dawned. Well, the flat was very small and if you cooked anything on the stove he’d had installed at his own expense—everyone else including his distant cousin firmly refusing to cough up anything towards it—you could certainly smell it in every room. So a Hamish-less meal might consist of a wedge of pâté from the convenient shop just round the corner of one of the streets off the Grands Boulevards or alternatively from the market, in the other direction down their street, followed by the merguez and then possibly by a nice salad and then a nice cheese if anyone had remembered to get them at the market, with coffee to finish off, very likely Hamish’s coffee if everyone else’s had run out, or maybe just merguez and coffee if no-one had done any shopping.
Failing that they quite often went to the local Chinese restaurant: Jean-Claude had a terrific crush on one of the waiters there. He always insisted on having Peking Duck and also insisted on paying, and as Polly knew that in spite of the way he was living his family was quite well off, she didn’t argue. Sadly, as far as was ascertainable the pretty young Chinese waiter barely knew he was alive, oh, dear. It was especially sad after Thierry found someone else and moved out. Jean-Claude and Polly went to the Chinese about once a week, then, but the waiter still never took any notice of him.
Polly looked uncertainly down a side street: was this the street where the Chinese restaurant had been? Um... if you went up to the Grands Boulevards, there had been a big cinema just round the corner which only showed porno films. Um, yes, maybe. She went up it a little way. Grey, grimy, null, and completely unpopulated: just as she remembered. But no restaurant. She retraced her steps.
The Rue de l’Échiquier was also grey, grimy and unpopulated. True, you’d have to be a mad foreigner to be out at this time—mid-afternoon: the market had closed for the morning and wouldn’t reopen until early evening, and in any case it was back the other way, this bit was all residential. Once upon a time there had been a dear little kosher deli back towards the Rue de Metz, but it had vanished. Um, there’d been a posh-looking hotel, a boutique hotel, you’d probably call it these days, she and her friends had always steered well clear of— Ooh, yes, here it was! Still looking as if it kept itself to itself. Discreet, was probably the word. She didn’t cross over towards it, she carried on for a bit and then crossed over. Mm. This had been their building. Oh, dear. The huge entrance door was open at this time of day, and you could see the letterboxes within the big archway. If you left an empty, crumpled Caporal packet in the box—leaving the said box unlocked, of course—Jean-Claude’s supplier would know that you needed a refill of marijuana. It was so long ago that she couldn’t even recall what they’d called it: they’d had terms for the different kinds, she did remember that. Le libanais? Mm... Jean-Claude had given her quite a dissertation on the different sorts and their virtues, but Polly had just nodded and smiled kindly and not really listened, she’d never been into addling the brain: when you needed your brain for your work, you’d be mad to endanger it, eh?
It wouldn’t be the same concierge, of course, after all these years. She had been a massive, red-cheeked woman, with a very strange accent which Polly had at last worked out was méridional: she was from Marseilles. Her husband had sometimes been around—just sitting, in the tiny cramped area behind the window through which you spoke to Madame. Maybe he’d been gainfully employed, but they never knew as what.
Polly sighed and turned away. What now? Go back to Jean-Claude’s neat urban flat and just wait for him to come home from work? It was too cold to be on the streets, really. She could catch the Métro at Strasbourg-St. Denis, it was their old stop. Well, there was another one, a bit closer along the Grands Boulevards, but only one line went through it, it wasn’t as useful. Um, there was a tiny bar on the corner, just down there, she’d hardly ever been able to afford to go there and Hamish didn’t approve of anyone of her age drinking, he’d never taken her there, but she had been there with the others. Jean-Claude had been fond of playing at flipper there; he’d said guess what it was a substitute for, and demonstrated the pushing and shoving with the appropriate motions of the hips, and she’d said: “For fucking?” And he’d replied happily that that was a good guess, but no, it was masturbating, and Polly had laughed, and after that the two of them had got on like a house on fire—he’d been pretty wary of her before that. Well, you couldn’t blame him, she was ruddy Hamish’s relation!
True, over the years Hamish had mellowed a lot—he and his second wife, who was actually another of her cousins, were settled not far from them in Puriri County, and he’d been head of Auckland’s Pacific Institute of Political Studies for years. Due to retire, now. Not that he was the sort of person that’d stop working, in fact he was already planning another book and Mirry, his wife, was very cross about it, she'd been planning a lovely overseas trip...
People didn’t really change fundamentally, did they? Mellowed, maybe—yes. But not fundamentally. Polly hurried off in the cold towards Métro Strasbourg-St. Denis.
Jean-Claude, when you came to think about it, hadn’t really changed fundamentally, either. The gay thing had distracted him for quite a while, true, he’d been really into it—well, he wasn’t the only one to be distracted by sex at that age! And back in the mid-Seventies you more or less had to flaunt it, even in Paris where they were traditionally more tolerant about homosexuality than the Anglo-Saxons. But he’d worked pretty hard at varsity and got his degree, and then a respectable office job; and by the time Polly was doing her doctorate at Strasbourg had been leading a perfectly conventional middle-class life during the day, going in to the office regularly. Even if his evenings had still consisted of “sorter draguer” in the intervals of accepting gifts of expensive Scotch whisky from besotted older gentlemen who were never gonna get anywhere with him! “Je hais les hommes” had been his theme-tune.
At around that time he and Thierry had got back together again—Thierry wasn’t old enough to be classed as un homme, presumably! And certainly not macho enough. They’d stayed together, with minor tiffs and wanderings, for about ten years and then AIDS had struck. Poor, sweet, harmless Thierry, he’d been totally bewildered by it. Why him? He hadn’t done anything different from everybody else... In their circles this was true: everybody had slept around and spent their evenings en draguant... What on earth would the English be? Um, cruising? Yes, probably. With just a touch of turquoise eye-shadow and the most discreet application of light brown eyeliner, in Jean-Claude’s case...
Gee, the suits had been smart back then. Really sharp! Wide lapels, beautifully cut jackets, flared trousers—and of course, high-heeled boots. Up in the 19ième you saw a lot of young African men in this great gear: very tall and slim, it really flattered them: the effect was completely overpowering! Funnily enough, not in a sexual way, but as stunning as a great work of art. One of Hamish’s student friends had a minute studio, so-called, up there, at Métro Stalingrad, where the 19ième met the 18ième and adjoined the 10ième—one stretcher-bed, one tiny table, two wooden chairs, a two-element burner and a minute bathroom which managed to cram a toilet, a shower, a handbasin and a bidet into the sort of space that most Antipodean homes wouldn’t have considered adequate for a shower cabinet. Jenny Walsh, that was her name: she was an Australian. Aunty Vi had insisted on Polly signing up for some university courses: she wasn’t going to waste her year; and had more or less bullied the Auckland University authorities into agreeing to accept anything she passed as credits for part of her B.A. Jenny wasn’t in the least like Hamish: she was very easy-going, and the only reason she’d become mates with him was that she didn’t know anybody in Paris and they were both doing Pol. Sci. She was, however, a very hard worker, and it was her example, really, that had kept Polly’s nose to the grindstone. The French universities at the time had been very into Structuralism, and though you could say it had been a good grounding it had been more like a trial by fire, really! Anyone who thought that Giselle and her fellow-Libbers were rabid ought to’ve sat through a session with the mad Structuralists, then they’d’ve seen what rabid really was! And of course you didn’t have a hope of getting anything published unless you toed their line! Even as a second-year undergraduate, and one who’d left school at barely seventeen, at that, Polly had realised that.
She’d said to Hamish and Jenny: “It strikes me that you have to approach any sort of university research in a spirit of complete hypocrisy,” and he’d been horrified, absolutely horrified! Jenny, however, had seen precisely what she meant, and agreed with her whole-heartedly, laughing as she did so—she was a terrifically good-natured person... What had become of Jenny? If only they hadn’t lost touch! She was one of the very few people Polly had ever felt she had anything truly in common with. Blow, what an idiot, she should have insisted on getting her home address and writing to her, once she left Paris.
In the sufficiently big interchange at Métro Strasbourg-St. Denis she hesitated. She could go straight down to St. Michel without changing lines and maybe have a cup of coffee at the trendiest of cafés in the Place, and wander up to the bookshops. Or... um, yes. Go up to Gare du Nord, change there, and on up to Métro Stalingrad. There was a little bar right on the corner of Jenny’s street, only two steps from the Métro station, providing you took the right exit, where she and Jenny had several times had coffee or hot chocolate and croissants... Though the croissants wouldn’t be fresh at this time of day. There wouldn’t be any gorgeous African guys in spiffy sharp suits, either. Jenny and her had never thought of picking these guys up—and they had certainly never even seemed to notice the two of them, huddled in their bedraggled Afghan coats that had been the required student wear, that year. No, they’d just looked at them in admiring awe...
No, she wouldn’t bother. You couldn’t go back, really. If only it wasn’t so cold she would go up there, in fact maybe go first to the fancy florist’s not far from the old flat, next to the place that had the great pâté de campagne, and buy some flowers, that she’d never been able to afford back then, and take them up to the little shrine she and Jenny had found—would you call it that? A memorial plaque, anyway, way up on an obscure stretch of canal up there somewhere, marking the spot where an Allied pilot had ditched his plane, avoiding—was it a school? Maybe it was, or maybe she was extrapolating, so long afterwards. Anyway, he’d ditched it in the canal and died, and the French had put up a little plaque, and on the day they’d found it, it had had a fresh bunch of flowers in front of it. Wasn’t that lovely? Nearly thirty years after the end of the war in Europe, it must have been, and the Parisians still remembered and were grateful. But could she even find it again? Um, no: she’d need a proper map, they’d only happened across it by chance on one of their walks around the grungier parts of the city...
She gave in and hopped on a train, direction Porte d’Orléans, which took her straight to Métro St. Michel and thence the trendy restaurant. Jean-Claude’s cry had always been: “You don’t want to go there!” Years later, though, Jake had liked it. It was touristified, of course, but the croques weren’t bad, and the coffee was good. And it was great fun sitting outside and watching the world go by. Today the wind was too cold for that. She went inside and got a table in the window—it wasn’t very busy.
She didn’t need anything filling to eat, Jean-Claude had insisted on giving her a very French lunch, and part of the object of this afternoon’s exercise had been to walk it off. Foie de veau had been the main dish. Very filling, but yummy. And, coward that she was, she hadn’t asked suspiciously like a good Anglo-Saxon if it was milk-fed in order to refuse sanctimoniously to touch it. Um... just a coffee? Oh, blow it! When in Paris. She had a baba au rhum with the coffee. It was just the same as she remembered, thank God! Absolutely nothing like those abortions of babas she’d seen on a bloody cookery programme—well, served her right for watching a stupid Pommy cookery programme, didn’t it? They’d been flat and smothered in cream and fruit. Fruit? Fruit on top of a baba? Mais merde! And pale, come to think if it. This baba was high, in its little paper cup which was definitely a baba cup, not a bloody Anglo-Saxon paper patty thingo that these days the ladylike suburbanites who thought they were up with the play relentlessly made cupcakes in—you saw those on TV every other day, too—but a real French baba case. The baba itself was appropriately dark on the outside and spongy and rummy and yeasty on the inside. Yum!
Polly sat on happily for quite a while, not thinking, just enjoying the moment... Then it penetrated that those American tourists two tables over—what they were doing here at this time of year, goodness only knew—that they weren’t managing to make the waiter understand them. The tables immediately surrounding them were empty but there were several people near enough to hear the lot but, as you’d expect in Paris, they were all ignoring the situation completely. Polly was very tempted to pretend she was a Parisian, too… Oh, blow it, she couldn’t let the poor things suffer!
“Can I help you?” she said kindly, going over to them.
They burst into speech. Just wanted a coffee with cream—cripes, she hadn't heard that phrase since last time she and Jake were in Phoenix, AZ, visiting his mate Harry Teitelbaum: all their New York friends were thoroughly Starbucks-ized, these days, and his LA mates were worse. And a beer. Had looked the word up in their phrasebook— Yikes.
“Um, yes,” she said limply, “bière does mean beer, but it doesn’t mean a beer. Just ask for un demi.”
There was a puzzled silence and then the female said: “I thought that meant half?”
“Only literally.”
“So how do I ask for a coffee with cream, honey?” she asked brightly.
Er... Absolutely none of Polly’s friends had ever drunk that during the day, in fact she’d never met anyone in France who did. For breakfast they’d all had un grand bol de café au lait. Oh, blow it, if it was wrong, too bad! And come to think of it, one very cold winter’s day at that tiny bar near the Bibliothèque nationale she had heard someone order it round lunchtime!
“I think you’d better ask for un café au lait. It won’t be what you’re used to, but it will be milky coffee.”
“That sounds okay, hon’!” the male encouraged her.
Looking aggrieved, the waiter burst into speech. Possibly the Americans understood the repeated word Américains: they certainly looked even redder and more ruffled at the end of it than they had before.
“I know: they all expect the whole world to speak English,” Polly agreed in French. “They only want—attendez un instant. –Did you want anything to eat?” she asked them.
The phrasebook was produced, Jesus! They thought this here— Since they pronounced the word as “croak” it was hardly surprising the waiter hadn’t got it, eh?
“Paulette and George recommended them. Mind you, their Annabella, she said something else was better, only you know what young people these days are,” the female explained. Possibly not explained: elaborated. Elaborated unnecessarily, yep.
“Yeah, well, croques are like toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. Quite filling,”
This was the wrong thing to say, because they both burst into loud complaints about their feet, the incomprehensibility of the Métro, the incomprehensibility of the map, and the completely confusing nature of all the little streets.
At this point the waiter interrupted crossly. Did they want anything, or not?
Polly explained kindly that the Americans were very tired and they’d probably want something to eat, perhaps croques, ending that she’d had to explain what they were: “ils ne les connaissent pas.” Muttering something which also contained the syllable “con” but which had nothing to do with the word connaître, the waiter crossed his arms huffily.
The male was continuing with his complaint. They’d been looking for “Noter Dame” and did she think they could find it? Sheesh!
“It’s right there,” said Polly limply, waving a very limp hand.
“Yeah, sure, now we find it. Only taken us two days out of our trip,” he said bitterly.
“Two half days, hon’,” she corrected him.
“Something like that. Okay, you can have this coffee thing and I’ll have—what was that word you said, again?”
“Un demi. I could order for you but hadn’t you better learn how to do it?”
“Yeah, or stay dehydrated the rest of our vacation, huh?” he replied with a bitter flicker of humour. “Would you mind saying it again? –Write it down, hon’,” he ordered.
First waiting until the female of the species had found something to write it on, the inside back cover of the phrasebook being the eventual choice, and had been given his pen, the scuffling inside the giant, many-pocketed handbag having resulted in zilch, Polly said patiently: “If you want a beer, you say ‘Un demi, s’il vous plaît.’ And for a coffee with milk, um, cream, it’s ‘Un café au lait, s’il vous plaît.’ Um, s’il vous plaît means please.”
“Uh-huh. So if I want one of these here croaks, it’s Ung croak, see voo play, huh?” he said happily.
“Yes. Um, ‘Un croque,’” corrected Polly without hope.
“Sure, I geddit! So what’s two?” he demanded out of the blue.
Polly failed to field that one. “Um, sorry?”
“Two! Like, ‘I’d like two of them croaks, see voo play!’”
“Oh! Sorry. Deux. ‘Deux croques, s’il vous plaît.’”
Here the waiter interrupted with a cross demand to know if they wanted two croques, or not?
“Eugh—j’sais pas,” said Polly sheepishly. “Go on, give him your order,” she prompted.
“Deux—uh, hang on. Do you wanna croak, hon’?”
“Mais merde!” cried the waiter, at this point.
Polly gave in. “Dingues, hein?” she agreed. “Look, just place your order, you're driving the poor man crazy!” she said loudly.
In many parts of the world this would have resulted in loud clapping from the rest of the clientèle, but this was Paris, so nothing happened. The language question not being, so to speak, in question.
… “Polly,” said Jean-Claude heavily at the end of her report, “what else did you expect?”
“Dunno. Well, no Americans at this time of year?” she offered feebly.
“Huh! They’re always in there! Why did you go there?”
“I wanted to watch the world go by.”
“Uh—well, you’d do that, in the Place St Michel,” he conceded weakly.
“Yes. It was lovely, until I made the mistake of trying to help them,” she admitted ruefully.
“Just as well you don’t speak Chinese,” he noted drily.
She bit her lip. “Mm. There were some there, failing to communicate, but I’m afraid I chickened out, at that point.”
“Good,” said the Parisian heartlessly. “Thought about dinner? –Olivier’s gone to his sister’s,” he reminded her.
Olivier was his partner: about his own age, nothing that you could have called macho, though he didn’t do the overtly gay thing the way a lot of the Anglo-Saxon gays did. In fact he almost fell into the category of les hommes. Certainly Jean-Claude hadn’t been heard to use his once-favourite phrase since she’d got here!
Polly twinkled at him. “Have a heart, I’m barely over that lunch! Um, well, somewhere not too up-market, d’ac’?”
He brightened. “D’ac’! I know, talking of the Rive gauche, we could look for that little Vietnamese restaurant we used to like— Maybe you don’t remember? We took Hamish there once.”
Polly gaped at him. “It was a disaster, wasn’t it?”
“Uh—well, he hated it, but everybody else enjoyed it. And enjoyed him hating it!” he said with a laugh.
“Oh, yeah, I remember! We had Jenny with us, she told him he was a ‘fuddy-duddy’,” said Polly, enunciating the operative phrase in English.
“Hein?”
“It means hopelessly old-fashioned!”
“He was that, all right! Jenny had that other Australian with her: that’s right. I forget his name. He enjoyed himself, he’d never had Vietnamese food before but he really liked it. And Thierry always loved it.”
She looked at him anxiously. “Are you sure you want to go, Jean Claude?”
“Of course. I don’t want to forget him, poor darling Thierry.”
“No,” Polly agreed, swallowing hard. “Okay. We could sort of make it in his memory.”
“Sure, why not? –Come on, we can take the Métro, it’ll be just like old times!”
Actually he had quite often taken a taxi at night, he’d been a bit extravagant—well, family money behind him, he’d never known what it was like to be skint, or living off a scholarship. She didn’t remind him of this, however, but just went happily to get her coat, her muffler, and her hat. Not forgetting her woolly gloves, either.
... “Mais merde!” concluded Jean-Claude, glaring about the Rue St. André.
“Was it this street?” asked Polly dubiously.
“Mais si! –Eugh, non: peut-etre c’était... Non, c’était ici, j’en suis sûr!”
“Well, it isn’t here now.”
“Évidemment,” he agreed sourly.
“Um, there are lots of restaurants further up—”
“Tourist traps!” he cried bitterly.
This was true. “Yes, but they do serve food. And they’re warm,” she noted pointedly.
“Very well, we’ll go back that way, but we’re not going to that dump in the Place St Mi—”
“No, I don’t want to!” she said quickly. “Come on, then.”
They trudged up the street in the cold. On the way Jean-Claude decided it hadn’t been in the street, it had been down a side street, they’d had a bit of trouble finding it the first time, that idiot Charlot had recommended it, did she remember? But Polly ignored him.
“Pour les touristes,” he noted sourly as she found a quite acceptable-looking restaurant down a side street off the far side of the Place.
“Look, the rule of thumb is, if it’s got the menu in three languages, avoid it like the plague. Has it got the menu in three languages? –Hé bien?”
“Hé bien, non,” he conceded, glaring at the menu board, which was only in French. “Look: snails, they always serve snails for the tou—”
“We don’t have to have them. Come on, I’m frozen!”
Just as she expected, once he got a drink and some hot food into him Jean-Claude cheered up immensely. Well—gay or straight, they were all the same! Jake had been just like that: if he came home grumpy from work, the trick had been not to argue with him or overtly try to comfort him, just give him a stiff drink and listen quietly, then dumping a hot dinner in front of him as fast as possible, ignoring the grumpy enquiries as to what the Hell this was, and was this a bloody rotisserie chicken from that bloody chip shop or the bloody supermarket? Like that. As soon as the food was inside him the grumpiness would vanish like the dew.
Next day was Saturday. Olivier, unlike Jean-Claude and all of his gay friends she’d ever known, was an early riser. Over their grand bols de café au lait he said sympathetically to Polly: “So you never found this dratted Vietnamese restaurant?”
“No. It might be down a side street, but my bet is, it’s long since vanished, Olivier.”
“Ouais. That whole area has changed quite a lot over the last thirty years,” he said kindly. “Not fundamentally, I suppose, but fashions in little eating places come and go.”
“Mm. The art nouveau place just off the Rue de Metz has completely changed.”
“O, mon dieu! I know it well! So you went there when you were flatting in the quartier?”
“Yes. Only a few times, but it was great. Very basic furniture, and good basic dishes, nothing fancy. It had its great art nouveau décor, but they hadn’t done anything with it. The people who worked in the quartier used to go there, and a few of us students. I always had boudin aux pommes... I didn’t even go in this time: it was full of trendies,” said Polly sadly.
“Yes. One can’t go back,” he said very kindly indeed.
“No. I suppose I just wanted to see some of the old haunts... And to taste real boudin aux pommes again. –It’s all right,” she said to his alarmed face, “Annick took me to a place we used to go to in Strasbourg that still does it!”
Poor Olivier sagged where he sat. “Oh, good,” he croaked.
“And it’s great just to be here. Well, and to get away from my relations.”
Olivier had had some of that: he tried not to wince. “One dinner with my sister and her family every two months or so is about all I can take, I must admit.”
“Yes. But at least you’re in France! New Zealand is so... stodgy.”
His family was pretty stodgy, too: there were few things as stodgy as your typical French bourgeoise. “Yes. I suppose one has more scope here; certainly in Paris.”
“Mm. –I will get rid of the house,” she said firmly. “I know everyone thinks it’s not the time for decisions—but if not now, when on earth is it? And you’re right about not being able to go back. And all that... It was all Jake’s idea, really, it was the way he wanted to live.”
“So what’s the way you want to live, Polly?” croaked Jean-Claude from the doorway.
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I suppose now’s the time to find out.”
Next chapter:
https://anothercountry-apuririchronicle.blogspot.com/2023/08/up-inlet.html
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