I gazed and gazed and gazed at the pinkening skyline, as if I were thirsty and this was water. I could no longer feel the pain in my foot, or my longing for a shower, or my general exhaustion.
“Your café,” said Sami, coming in my room without bothering to knock. “You really not like?”
I smiled.
“I didn’t see the balcony. It’s amazing. Amazing.”
He had given me a tiny cup of black stuff with a sugar lump sitting next to it. I normally just like lattes or Nescafé. I looked at him.
“Have you got any milk for the coffee?” I asked apologetically.
“Milk? No. Milk is a feelthy thing. You suck the teets of a cow. No. Milk. No.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Brandy? I have a leetle brandy.”
And as it was such a gorgeous evening, I said yes, why not, and we sat out on my little balcon (he had one too, on the opposite side of the sitting room; we could wave to each other in the morning) and drank coffee with brandy in it and looked out over Paris. I don’t think if anyone could have looked up and seen me (which they couldn’t, because we were up in the eaves, where pigeons flew by and the sky turned pink and yellow and lavender, and there was no one else there but the birds) that they would have thought for a second that I was anything other than as much a part of Paris as anybody else, and I looked out on the strange and extraordinary foreign landscape and I wondered. I wondered.
- - -
1972
Claire was totally charmed by Arnaud and Claudette, her charges. They were incredibly polite, thought her accent was hilarious, and tested her endlessly on words she did and didn’t know, marveling at the way she said “Mickey Mouse.”
In return, she let them dictate the pace of the lazy spring days; normally a stroll around the play park of the Tuileries, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower; a goûter, or snack, of warm croissants, torn apart and guzzled on a bench, followed by home for lunch. The two children still took naps in the afternoon, leaving Claire free to read or do her French grammar (Madame was very strict on the matter), and on Fridays, Madame liked to take the children to their swimming lessons, so she had the afternoon off.
At first, unsure what to do with herself, she took herself off to the exhibitions and museums she felt she ought to see, as if ticking things off in a guidebook. Madame would ask her questions about them when she returned and occasionally ask her to take the children. But it was hard for Claire to enjoy them; she felt lonely, among large families and young lovers and lines of schoolchildren nattering away without a care in the language she found so difficult to master. She didn’t know a soul here, and Kidinsborough felt a long way away.
But as she grew more confident, she began to stride farther afield, and she found, gradually, her fear falling away as she saw and visited more—Montmartre, with its winding streets, odd, highly perched church, and candy-colored steps stole her heart almost immediately. She spent many days there, looking at the young women with their scooters, helmetless, scarves tied around their thick hair, chatting and laughing with the young men on the steps, their cigarettes drooping from their mouths. She spent warm afternoons with books in the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing her legs go brown. Everywhere, it seemed, were couples kissing, chatting, gesticulating in the air, sharing a picnic with wine in unmarked bottles. To feel alone at seventeen is to feel very lonely indeed, and even as she looked forward all week to her free time, she found the Friday afternoons sometimes very long. It was a relief, as her French improved, to be able to slip into a cinema on the boulevard du Montparnasse, where it didn’t matter that she was by herself, or at least not so much. There were, she had heard, places for young English people to meet, but Mme. LeGuarde had made it clear she didn’t think they were a good idea if she was to have a proper French experience, and Claire always wanted to please.
So after meeting Thierry, she couldn’t deny it. She wanted to see him again—partly because she had liked him, she thought, but mostly because he had shown some interest in her, and at the moment, nobody was showing the least bit of interest in her; they were too busy being in Paris and being glamorous and busy and having stuff to do that she simply didn’t have. Two Fridays after the party, she found herself straying closer and closer to the part of the Île de la Cité where she’d heard, from fervent eavesdropping at one of Madame’s lunches, that the new shop was to open, the first of its kind in Paris. (Lunch with Claire’s mum when her friends came around was a large tray of homemade ham sandwiches on white bread with margarine and a packet of chocolate cookies for after, dished up with pints of dark brown tea. Lunch for Madame’s friends involved much planning, four courses, an ice bucket full of champagne, and lots of running back and forth to the fishmongers early in the morning.) There was Persion’s, which had been in situ since 1794 and was respected for that, but there was a rumor that its products had grown as dusty as its upper stories, and its offerings hadn’t changed in centuries.
Friday afternoon in early July on the Île de la Cité was hot and sticky and bustling with tourists. Away from the formal “placement” of the organized streets and wide boulevards, the far corner betrayed its twisty, hugger-mugger medieval origins: little alleyways springing hither and thither, roads narrowing to nearly nothing or ending abruptly at the wall of one of the great churches. It was hot; Claire had taken out a summer dress that she’d brought from home the weekend before, when she was to accompany the children as the family went to a wedding. Mme. LeGuarde had immediately shaken her head, pointed out to Claire that it didn’t actually fit very well, and disappeared. When she returned, it was with a soft brown and green silk dress, very loose and almost weightless.
“This was mine,” she said. “After the children, pfft. I cannot wear.”
Claire pointed out that she was very slim still, which Mme. LeGuarde knew but waved away.
“It does not matter, my shape,” she said. “It is my age, my outlook that cannot wear it.”
For a moment, she looked sad.
“Oh, these days come and go,” she said. Claire had barely met her husband, Bernard; he traveled almost constantly for work and seemed tired and distracted when he did appear. But the LeGuardes were, to her, so grown-up; far more so than her own warm family. They were sophisticated, worldly socialites who dressed for dinner and drank cocktails. Claire simply assumed that anything they did was correct.