The Steppes of Paris Read online

  On his way back from viewing the paper’s apartment in Neuilly, Edward felt extremely grateful to Henry Hirshfeld. He had gone there straight away his first afternoon. “There’s no point your pretending to do any work for a day or two, is there?” Henry had said amiably. The apartment was on the fifth floor of an anonymous de luxe block, hygienically sealed off from any trace of local colour by double glazing, air-conditioning and an entry-phone. Edward had been just momentarily tempted by all the plush accoutrements: the closed-circuit television screen which enabled you to see who was down at the front door, the infra-red cooking rings under a see-through slab in the kitchen, the champing garbage guzzler. He had briefly imagined having his friends from London to stay there, and how impressed they would be by the rich lifestyle he had swiftly attained. But he had stood in the silent living-room, looking out of the tinted-glass sliding windows which occupied one wall, and he had experienced a dismal sensation of being nowhere. He was sealed in an unnatural quiet: no traffic noises, no remote sound of human voices. Judging by the synthetic climate and the view from the window of an utterly undistinguished, well-to-do, suburban street, he might as well be anywhere. He would be tucked up in a sleek grey box if he moved in here. He would not even be in Paris. This impression was reinforced by the traces of the apartment’s present occupant, a visiting American journalist who was a friend of Henry’s. He had left, strewn around the various see-through coffee and bedside tables, copies of Time and Newsweek, a disconcerting array of bottles of prescription medicines, and, in the kitchen, several boxes of American breakfast cereals, expensively priced in French francs.

  This was what was likely to happen, Edward concluded, if you chose to live in a place like this. He imagined himself installed there, reading his Guardian Weekly in one of the black leatherette easy chairs, his hi-tech kitchen stocked with Marmite and English staples from the Marks and Spencer he had already noticed on the Boulevard Haussmann. Sooner or later, he would give in to the memory of Rosie and her relative proximity and, prompted by the clinical emptiness of the apartment, ring her and invite her for a weekend.

  He was about to help himself to a cup of coffee (instant and decaffeinated) from the kitchen when it struck him that this could be the first small step in succumbing to the easy comfort of that life. He replaced the jar. He would go out and drink a real café crème sitting at a small round table in a real café. It was while he was looking for the keys, which he had inadvertently put down on a piece of furniture somewhere as he arrived, that he noticed the hum. The whole building, or everything in it, was infested by a high, continuous hum: the air-conditioning hummed, the strip lights, the security system, the deep freeze and, for some inexplicable reason, the window panes. In winter, doubtless the central heating would hum as well. Edward was so horrified by it and by the thought that he might not have noticed it and unknowingly moved in to live alongside the hum, that, having found the keys, he hurried to leave. He forgot the ferocious static electricity from the door handle, which had snapped at him as he came in, and he grabbed it, to receive a stinging charge in the palm of his hand. Swearing and nursing his smarting hand under his left armpit, he rode down in the big, matt metal box of a lift. Outside, where it was once again a warm late summer’s afternoon, he decided to skip the coffee in his haste to get well away from the humming apartment house. He caught a bus back into the centre of Paris, although a taxi would have been legitimate, and on the way he offered appreciative thanks to Henry Hirshfeld for having sensitively given him the option not to live there.

  He had been rather favourably surprised by Henry Hirshfeld. From the name, which he had been told in London, he had imagined someone so much less likeable that, when he met Henry, he had had to struggle with complete disorientation, as well as the natural apprehension associated with meeting the man who would be his boss for the next year or two. He had been glumly expecting a jowly cynic. He thought Hirshfeld would be the American counterpart of those desk-bound diners he had so raged against in London; a complacent, chauvinistic armchair traveller, content just to finish his career in comfort and roundly dismissive of any innovations or enthusiasms which Edward might come up with.

  He sprang to his feet when Edward appeared in the doorway of his office.

  “Mr Hirshfeld?”

  Henry Hirshfeld stretched out not one but both big hands and shook Edward’s extended one in a protracted double clasp. He appraised Edward with a pair of shockingly piercing bright blue eyes and then pronounced in a rumbling voice, as though it were a conclusion he had come to, “Pleased to meet you, Edward.”

  He was built on a big scale, a thick-set man with short-cropped iron-grey hair, but everything else about him confounded Edward’s expectations. He took Edward out to lunch, at a Japanese restaurant.

  Disconcerted by the geographical distance between the interior of the restaurant and the pavement outside, Edward took a while to adjust to this unexpected new personality. Across the low table from him was not a jaundiced habitué of expense accounts and business-class travel, but a man still avidly alive, exhibiting keen, almost boyish enthusiasms, which glimmered through his surface traits of silver-rimmed spectacles and calm, wry irony.

  He began by outlining humorously to Edward how the office worked. There were five of them: himself, Edward, whose official job title, he observed drily, might be assistant to the bureau chief, but who would find himself running the bureau pretty much single-handed during Henry’s frequent absences. There was Monsieur Marchais, whose role was, he smiled, “not easily categorisable”. Monsieur Marchais had been with the paper in some undefined capacity for far too many years to get rid of him, now that he had outlived any original usefulness. He came in erratically two or three times a week and it was wisest simply to regard him as a part of the fixtures and fittings. “Above all,” Henry twirled a little pink piece of raw tuna judiciously on his fork, “I would suggest you keep off the topic of the French Communist Party. Our Monsieur Marchais hates to be reminded of good old Georges.”

  Edward could not help giving him a short, startled look. Apart from his general good humour, there was absolutely no sign of a joke on Henry Hirshfeld’s broad, crumpled face.

  The rest of the paper’s staff consisted of the telephonist-receptionist and the secretary, Marie-Yvette and Aurore. “So far as they’re concerned,” Henry said, “I have no cause to poison your mind with prejudice.”

  He said nothing about work. Edward, who was eager to know something about the extent of his responsibilities, if he would have his own by-line, how many trips he was likely to land, was a little dismayed. But it seemed crass and priggish to raise the subject when Henry didn’t. So he sat and listened, in growing astonishment, to Henry discoursing knowledgeably on art and architecture, the very real threat posed by the rise of the National Front, and Zola’s J’Accuse. Edward felt increasingly uneasy. Here was a man he would actually like to impress. But, out of pique, he had done almost no background reading on France before he left London. He hadn’t even taken the elementary precaution of reading through Hirshfeld’s pieces. He must find a decent bookshop, he decided, at the first possible opportunity.

  In response to a later question from Edward, Henry also explained how it was he had come to spend the last fifteen years of his life in Paris, and why, if fate so willed it, he would quite contentedly finish his days there.

  He had been around. He used the phrase with a smile. He had rolled up in Paris at the very end of the Sixties, when the memory of ’68 was still fresh and the municipality was busy replacing the cobble stones with concrete. As well as the sentimental lure of Paris for any even mildly literate American, there was a real feeling of ferment in the air. It was an exciting place to be. In the course of researching a book – Edward did his best to look as if, naturally, he knew what the book was and Henry, modestly, didn’t tell him – he had met, fallen in love with and pretty quickly married a young Vietnamese art student. One year had followed another, they were putting their c
hild through school here, until eventually Henry realised that, even if he had wanted to, it was too late to return to Chicago.

  At the end of the meal, Henry brushed aside Edward’s offer to come and begin to familiarise himself with the office.

  “Plenty of time for that later,” he declared. “Go out and choose where you want to live. Take a look at Neuilly and decide if it’s what you want. If it isn’t, your first assignment will be to find somewhere to live.”

  As he walked through central Paris in a largely apricot-coloured evening, after he had been to Neuilly, Edward’s mood vacillated unsteadily between depression at the concrete evidence that here he was, settling in Paris, and a completely unexpected, bracing anticipation of possible exploration ahead after all. For this, he knew he had only Henry Hirshfeld to thank. For a man as exceptionally impressive as Hirshfeld to have chosen to live here when, with his credentials, he could live anywhere, the place must have something challenging going for it. Henry had straight away understood Edward couldn’t possibly live in the humming apartment house in Neuilly when he brought the keys back to the office at the end of the afternoon.

  “I’ll call the comptable,” he said simply. “Let’s just check how much rent you’re allowed.”

  In totally fluent although unmistakably accented French, he had had a brief telephone conversation with a Monsieur – was it possible? – Rat. He handed Edward a sheet of office notepaper on which he had scribbled some sums and the addresses and telephone numbers of two accommodation agencies.

  “Happy hunting,” he had said. “And it’s an important decision, remember. Take your time.”

  Henry Hirshfeld’s “reasonably decent” hotel was in a narrow grey side street off the Boulevard Saint Germain and as he walked back towards it via a leisurely route, Edward was surprised to find himself registering a number of places where he thought it might actually be quite fun to live. He crossed the Pont des Arts and followed the quais as far as the Boulevard Saint Michel. He could live behind one of those stiff, po-faced façades looking out over the river. The caramelised yellow surface of the Seine would chug past on a summer’s evening, always consoling. Or he could live somewhere very high up, looking out over a roofscape: irregular grey slates and lurching television aerials and chimney pots. He caught himself; one day in Paris and he was succumbing to the chocolate box. Next, he would be reminiscing fondly about pitchers of vin rouge on café terraces like those old codgers in London. Determinedly sullen, he ploughed his way up the Boulevard Saint Michel. He overtook crowds of pedestrians of flamboyantly assorted nationalities, all strolling at a slow, self-conscious dawdle. Only a lot later that evening, eating, alone, a deliberately parsimonious pizza in a modest Italian restaurant, did he think that, now he was unavoidably here, surely the right thing to do was to enjoy it. If he acted intelligently, exploring the possibilities of Paris à la Henry Hirshfeld, then it wouldn’t be a selling-out. It would be a journey made against all odds.

  Around him in the dim bedroom, the furniture challenged this momentary optimism. His walk had ended in the Jardin du Luxembourg and there depression and disgust had threatened to win out. A chirruping crowd of Parisians, pigeons and little dogs filled the garden. The air was saturated with perfume and the sound of unsuitable footwear clipping over gravel. Edward had considered the jumble of green metal chairs, the statuary and the bulrushes and reflected that the park was, if possible, even more citified than the boulevard outside. A portrait gallery of Parisian intellectuals sat on the green metal chairs, reading – or perhaps only affecting to read – a selection of slim journals about philosophy, literature, music, art. He had been gripped by a ferocious physical and mental claustrophobia.

  It was the lace curtains, he decided drowsily, which he found most oppressive. The street light came through them where he had not completely closed the thicker brown ones, intensifying the pattern of curlicues and unimaginative flowers. They were redolent of primness, inhibitions, repression. Living behind that kind of curtains would be like trying to breathe with your head inside a polythene bag.

  Just as he was falling back to sleep, he became aware of the noise of two people starting to make love with considerable gusto in the room next door. It seemed to Edward they were laughing in Portuguese.

  In the morning, the hotel pipes blew like a hunting horn. Edward felt for his alarm clock, saw it was seven o’clock, and decided to make a good impression on Henry Hirshfeld by arriving at the office as soon as possible after eight.

  His shower put the first damper on his resolve; it petered, rather than anything else, out of the old shower rose so that, instead of beginning the day as he liked to with his normal all-over blasting of hot water, he was simply wettened. He dressed for the office, relieved that Hirshfeld, who had the day before been wearing corduroy trousers, a brown belt and brown shoes, was not a tie man. He kept an unbelievably battered old sports jacket on the back of his door and, at lunch time, he had simply shrugged it on, whereupon it fell into place about him like a baggy skin.

  There seemed something immature about having breakfast in the hotel, so Edward went out into the warm just faintly misty morning, intending to stop for a coffee and a croissant somewhere on his way. The pavements of the Boulevard Saint Germain were already quite busy, mainly with smart but grim-faced women, walking briskly like well-finished automatons to work. The few men about looked to him by contrast sorry; Lowry figures, hunched, with bent heads, scurrying. Aware of his own leisure – Henry had actually said to show up at the office only when it fitted in with his house-hunting – Edward enjoyed the walk. At the corner of the Boulevard Saint Michel, he chose his cafe, bought a paper, and went in, intending to sit for a good ten minutes on the glassed-in terrace, having a soup-bowl-sized cup of coffee and one or maybe even two croissants, while he turned the pages of his paper and watched the smart women snapping past. OK, it was a pose but, stuff it, a harmless one. He hadn’t noticed that most of the terrace chairs were still up-ended on the tables and when he tried to sit down on one of the few which weren’t, a waiter bad-temperedly mopping the floor shouted at him that the only place he could have coffee at that hour was standing up at the bar. Even the minor thrill of noticing that two of the men at the bar were drinking red wine for breakfast and one, for God’s sake, brandy, didn’t make the bar an appealing proposition. The same scene was repeated, although less bad-temperedly, at a second café he tried lower down the boulevard so, as it was after eight o’clock already, he ended up drinking a foul-tasting black coffee standing in a totally Americanised fast-food joint with large illuminated pictures of the hamburgers and milk shakes it served, and caught the Metro at Saint Michel.

  The office was deserted when, at a quarter to nine, he let himself in, with the master key Henry had given him. It wasn’t until gone nine o’clock that he heard another key wrestling with the lock and Marie-Yvette, to whom he had been briefly introduced the day before, fumbled her way in and gave every sign of severe shock at seeing him there.

  In contrast to the sleek, hard-faced women on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Marie-Yvette was anything but smart, and Edward couldn’t help wondering if it were Henry who had hired her. He thought, with a feeling that was very close to the beginning of affection, that it would probably be typical of Henry Hirshfeld to have employed someone so resolutely un-smart.

  Marie-Yvette had short, bedraggled henna-red hair. The day before, she had been wearing jeans and two unironed T-shirts one on top of the other, one navy blue and one white with a slogan. Today they were maroon and black. Edward had already noticed, and faintly reproached himself for noticing, that she had virtually no breasts. As she went through the office, switching on the lights, he also noticed that she was wearing open-toed sandals and not a scrap of make-up. Her pitted skin gleamed a little.

  She was looking him over at the same time. Despite her homespun appearance, she evidently wasn’t at all shrinking. When she had cleared the telephone answering machine of the night’s messages a
nd taken a couple of sheets off the telex, she invited Edward to join her for a cup of coffee, which she began to make at a murky percolator installed in a corner of the main office.

  “Ed-ward?” she pronounced carefully. “Not Eddie, like Murphy?”

  Edward hesitated. He was, he recognised, childishly particular about who used which version of his name. Eddy was only for intimates, for his very closest friends; he was Edward to everyone else. He opened his mouth to reply firmly, ‘Not Eddie, like Murphy or anybody else,’ but found himself instead answering incautiously, “Different people call me different things: I’m Edward, Eddy, Ed, Ted, Teddy, Ned. Take your pick.” He supposed it must be the keenness of the new boy to ingratiate himself on the staffers which made him answer so unguardedly; that, and the unexpected intimacy of sitting drinking a leisurely coffee in an empty office with a girl who turned out to be – it came up in the conversation – exactly his own age and who reminded him, with her scrappy looks and stern standpoints, of a grim feminist with whom he had once shared a house in London.

  He asked her in return, “Are you always Marie-Yvette?” and she answered snappishly, “Always, always. No abbreviations.”

  They had been chatting for five or ten minutes when Aurore, the office secretary, who had been out on an errand when Edward came in the previous day, arrived in a whirlwind of concern at her lateness. She was a tall, very pretty young black woman from Martinique; all vivaciousness, ebullience, deep giggles, and a quite extraordinary contrast to stern, drab Marie-Yvette. She shook Edward’s hand formally but then tut-tutted teasingly over the difficulty of pronouncing his name: “Ed-ward, Ed-ward. Ts-ts-ts-ts-ts. Before we have How-ard, now Ed-ward.” She sighed in mock exasperation.