Harm's Way (3 page)

One of my biggest faults was my capacity instantly to dislike people, writing them off for making a single statement I didn't agree with. So I found it hard to rationalise the immediate warmth I felt towards Beth. Yes, there was a complete honesty about her which was very appealing – a lack of undertones in anything she said or did that made any
arrière-pensées
impossible – but it was more than that. With friendships, as with lovers, there is always one who is keener, more impatient to reach the point of intimacy than the other, and at that moment I felt that I needed to seduce Beth, to convince her of my worth. When I questioned her about her reasons for coming to Paris (how could a forty-year-old woman not have strong enough ties to make such a move impossible?) it surprised me to discover that I was genuinely interested in her answers.

Cheeks flushed by the heated lamps above our heads, Beth told me – halfway through another anecdote – of her mother's death from cancer when she was only eighteen and the onset of her father's Alzheimer's several years later. Being forced to look after her little brothers and ailing father had ripped a hole in her youth, which she was clearly trying to fill here in Paris. I gained the impression that there was more to it than that. But when, with the flourish of a pink-knuckled hand she suddenly exclaimed, ‘
Et voilà
!' I knew that despite her apparent openness, that was all I would find out that day. Avid to find out everything about her by now, I hoped that the bruised quality I sensed beneath her cheerfulness would be explained as I got to know her better.

Looking back I can only compare the way I felt when I left Beth later that day to falling slightly in love. Here was a conduit for my experiences and feelings, and I adored her for it. My life in Paris, hitherto filled only with my burgeoning love of the city, suddenly seemed filled with possibility. Beth and I could discover things together, share experiences, get bored
together.
I fell asleep less nervous about my first day at the museum than I had been, and looking forward to dinner at Beth's the following evening.

I was at once relieved and disappointed when Stephen opened the door to the flat on the top floor of a building in rue des Gravilliers, an insalubrious street off the rue de Turbigo. When I had read, too young, Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
I'd been struck by the accuracy of his description of her – of all women perhaps – as
‘voulant retirer de tout quelque profit personnel'.
As soon as I saw Stephen I recognised him as one of those men from whom I would be able to draw no profit at all. Tall, dark blond and blandly good-looking, with a strong forehead but a certain weakness around the lower part of his mouth, Stephen was one of those rare men for whom on a sexual level I felt absolutely nothing – not even my usual desire to have him fall in love with me.

Perhaps he felt the same. As he struggled to shut the door, still sticky with fresh paint, and commented on the powerful fumes (‘Try not to breathe too deeply or you might keel over') I saw his eyes flit over my body approvingly, but not lingeringly.

Beth was in the kitchen, stirring something sweet and meaty in a large saucepan. My first impression on seeing them together was that, had they not looked so different, one might
have mistaken them for brother and sister. They had adopted many of each other's mannerisms, especially the way Beth had of nodding slightly when she laughed, as though confirming her own joke. I watched from a high stool as they laid the table and bickered over which herbs to season the salad with, waiting until I had an audience for my description of my first day at work.

It hadn't gone badly. I'd pushed through the revolving doors into the grand atrium of the Musée d'Orsay feeling no great trepidation, only a growing curiosity to discover the details of my daily routine. I had dressed carefully, and felt smart in my new suit, wearing just enough make-up to look like I was wearing very little, with my hair tied in a low ponytail. My pride in this attention to detail was overshadowed by the clicking arrival of Céline, the impeccably dressed small-boned woman of uncertain age I could see coming towards me, a purposeful expression on her face. She walked briskly, though with downcast eyes, in the manner of someone with a very specific, emotionless job to do. The tap of each heel sent a reverberation of efficiency through the halls of the museum, enough to make the figures in the Impressionist portraits sit up straight within their frames.

‘Anna?'

‘Yes,' I had said, as brightly as I could.

‘
Bienvenue,'
she pronounced, with anything but a welcoming expression on her face.

And therein, I thought, lies the talent of that certain breed of Frenchwoman: the words the circumstances demand are there, but their meaning is somehow lacking. Holding out my hand I remembered, too late, that the customary British
gesture could provoke embarrassment and a faint irritation in France. My hand wavered a split second too long in mid-air before she took it, with the gracelessness of a teenage boy holding a baby.

‘Follow me and I'll show you where you can hang your coat. Then we'll have a little chat about what you'll be doing.'

In some indefinable way Céline made it clear that I was to follow behind, not beside her – perhaps as a gentle payback for the moment of discomfort I'd caused her when I held out my hand. She took me to the staff room: a smallish locker-lined space with high frosted slit windows beneath the ceiling through which one could decipher the mottled greys of Paris. More civil than friendly, she explained my duties and hours, never pushing the boundaries of conversation so far as to enquire about my living arrangements or what had brought me to Paris. It took me a few more encounters to register that Céline smiled only when she wanted to, never out of decency like everyone else. Introducing myself to two of my co-workers – a dark-skinned girl in a voluminous smock and a tall, shaven-headed man who were neatly stashing their possessions in lockers – I noted a similar abruptness of manner which fell slightly short of rudeness. It was a Parisian trait I was going to have to get used to, a world away from the instantly indiscreet confidences exchanged in any office by the supposedly stiff and inhibited British.

All this rang bells of recognition over dinner. The Frenchwoman's most outstanding talent, Stephen assured me as he picked a piece of
mâche
off the tablecloth, lay in her genius for silently undermining any surrounding females. Since these were national characteristics that could never be changed, the only way to handle them was to develop a tough exterior that
guaranteed instant respect. Gratuitous kindness in Paris was not a quality; it was a weakness. I nodded agreement, remembering a cautionary tale the mother of a Parisian-born friend had told me. In the playground the Englishwoman had been in the habit of telling her little boy, ‘Now don't push forward. Be nice, and let the other children have a go on the slide before you,' until she overheard French mothers berating their neat and polite-looking offspring for letting others push ahead of them. As I was quickly to discover, it all made perfect sense.

The gallery each guardian invigilated was always the same: gallery number fourteen was my lot. The most famous painting in my room was Manet's
Le Balcon,
flanked on the left by his arresting portrait of Berthe Morisot. Insofar as I had anything to do at all it was to make sure no bored child or ignorant tourist touched any of the paintings, spoke too loudly, or attempted to walk round an exhibition in the wrong direction – a misdemeanour of which Céline particularly disapproved. There was only one way of viewing an exhibition and that was in the order established by authority. For me the worst thing about my new job was that it was forbidden to read. And of course I was to become an unperson – something I was unused to and initially found it hard to live with. Very soon, however, I realised that being invisible had its advantages: I was able to overhear intimate conversations and study the people engaged in them. That first afternoon I had watched with a mixture of amusement and mild indignation as couples dressed in subtly gradated shades of black ignored me with the same studied dedication they devoted to the Impressionist works lining the walls.

Beth grinned into her wine as I finished my account of the
day and paused to take a mouthful of my now luke-warm
poule au pot.
They seemed genuinely entertained but I was keen not to appear self-obsessed. Had I been talking too much?

‘Your boss doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs,' said Stephen sympathetically. ‘Still, it must be fun people-watching all day.'

I had the impression Stephen wasn't too keen on the French, but Beth told me later that it was French men he had taken against. For all his mocking, the women he went for in a big way.

He and I soon became what I could only, at my most generous, qualify as ‘companions'. Like many supple-minded young men I have since come across from the world of magazine publishing, Stephen's interest in the surface of things was almost feminine – and something which, at that time, I could relate to. The slight campness of his manner seemed to be at odds with his love of women. Later I realised that these two carefully cultivated sides to his character worked harmoniously towards the same goal. We huddled together with the lazy ease of expats, but I doubt whether even if things had turned out differently I would still be in touch with him today. My friendship with Beth was something deeper. During those first few weeks it was a rare day when we didn't see each other, either for a quick coffee or for dinner at her flat before a night out. Her advice was always sane, tempered and completely selfless; my admiration for her grew with every hour we spent together. Still, I was beginning to learn that beneath the surface there was a disquiet which gave her an edge she might otherwise have been lacking.

Perhaps I listened when she talked more than I would have
done with my contemporaries, and asked many more questions, but otherwise I behaved almost exactly as I might with friends of my own age. Gone was the initial restraint, the swallowed swear words. Still, Beth had a disconcerting way of making me realise before I said something that it was childish, brash, or simply calculated to achieve a reaction. The first time we got drunk together I enjoyed watching the alcohol take effect, softening the more authoritative aspects of her manner, deflating her serenity, and giving me an inkling of the messier human being she must have been at my age. I wished then that I could see my mother, just once, in that same malleable state, and that we might share such an intimacy.

To begin with, I suffered pangs of guilt about not devoting more effort to making French friends, but my absorption with Beth quickly immobilised me, rendering virtually everyone outside her small circle worthless in my eyes.

I was fascinated by the dichotomy in her personality. Professionally, she could appear terrifyingly grown-up, but with me, although her opinions were more mature than mine, no subject seemed too juvenile to discuss. I had never been interested in fashion as a concept, not through any aversion to clothes but simply because I was reluctant to bother educating myself in trends I would never follow or dresses I was too young to afford. Yet after hearing Beth describing a Jean Paul Gaultier show she'd attended the previous week – she liked to check out the competition – I happily accepted her invitation to the Ungaro collection for the following season.

It was staged in a disused monastery in the Latin Quarter, now part of the Sorbonne University, and I drank in every detail of the cluster of industry insiders gathered outside. The
women seemed to me dressed with studied negligence, the men in a deliberately outmoded manner as if to elevate themselves above the world they inhabited. Once inside we were seated on velvet-cushioned chairs to observe the procession of limp-limbed models saunter by, their blank eyes fixed on a distant point, like over-made-up sleepwalkers. Earnest-looking journalists from
Le Monde
or
Le Figaro
made incisive scribbles in notebooks to praise or dismiss in a single, devastating word the quality of a certain style or cloth, thereby establishing a whole psychology of fashion for the year to come.

Fashion in Paris, Beth explained later in an overflowing brasserie on the carrefour de l'Odéon, was not the frivolous pastiche it had become in London. It was seen as a valid art form that serious men, as well as women, talked about over dinner. People laughed at fashion for being out of touch with everyday existence, but a deliberate sense of dissociation from reality was what these shows were really about: an entire industry built not on the way people actually lived or behaved, but on their aspirations.

Later she took me to the after-show party held in Les Bains Douches, so called because the premises were in a converted public baths. The bovine bouncer at the door, standing with his legs apart as if braced for a stampede, grabbed our invitations and surveyed them with indifference.

‘Allez-y,'
he relented, having impressed upon us his all-encompassing power. We stepped into a roaring din of fake laughter and the resounding smacks of air-kissing. As I listened to men with spray-on T-shirts discussing the benefits of cardio-vascular activity, I began to see what Beth had meant by dissociation from reality. My lack of attraction
towards Stephen meant that I had begun secretly to resent his presence on our outings. I wanted Beth to myself, and disliked the habit he had of turning our conversations away from us, as if determined to rob us of our companionship. When we were alone, Beth with her face propped in a frame of freckled hand, I found her willingness to listen to whatever I had to say infinitely reassuring.

‘You look quite lovely tonight …' she'd interrupted that night, eyes lazy and dark with drink. ‘I do wish you'd let me dress you next time we go out – I keep seeing things at work which would look great on you.'