‘You are safe now.Au revoir, madame.’
‘Oh, but no! Come inside for a moment, monsieur.’
Uncertain of himself, Andrew accompanied her, to be met by what he took for a host of servants. But that was odd, too. There were only a couple each of housemaids and footmen in servants’ livery, and at least half a dozen agitated women and girls, in expensive-looking dresses which seemed just a shade overdone for a casual evening. They acted like family, but were not sufficiently alike to be relatives. Indeed, one was dark-skinned, North African Andrew guessed, although her hair was more brown than black. All of them were exceptionally good-looking.
Two very large, hard-faced young men in dark suits sidled into view, and seemed to grow quite upset as they heard the lady’s tale. One of them appeared to remonstrate with her in some way, and yet they bore themselves like employees. A cane rapped against a table leg with a strangely dull sound, as if it was heavier than wood, and Andrew, through a better class of tailoring than the army’s, thought he could make out the shape of a hidden pistol. Who could this lady be, that she should need bodyguards? Or if she needed them, why should she have been alone on a dark winter’s night?
She had disappeared for the moment, and Andrew was shepherded into the salon, where he was given some kind of aperitif which banished the chill. He was surrounded by cooing females who were clearly moved by his assistance to their mistress, but whose chattering French he found hard to understand. A housemaid brandished a clothes-brush, clearly waiting for the mud on his uniform to dry, but they would have none of his suggestions that he should remain standing, or something be placed on the armchair before he sat down.
‘Is madame lying down?’ he asked. ‘Really she should, you know.’
For some reason they all giggled.
‘I must leave soon. Will you give my thanks to madame.’
‘Mademoiselle,’ said someone, and they all giggled again.
Then she was in the room, more transformed than he would have thought possible. She was wearing a green dress trimmed with lace, just a little more restrained and higher at the neck than the others’, and a necklace and earrings with some kind of matching stones. Her hair was up, and no trace remained of an ordeal that had happened, Andrew realised, not half an hour before. She made a gesture, and the crowd dispersed.
‘I must thank you, monsieur,’ she said, with a radiant smile. ‘I ‘ope you can stay to dinner.’
Now here was an odd thing. With what he already knew, why in the world should there be a trace of nervousness in her voice, which he sensed was not often nervous? Suddenly he very much wanted to stay.
‘Well, I need to be back… No, I don’t need to be back.’
‘C’est bien! It will be very quiet here. We are closed tonight.’
‘Closed? Do you have a business here?’
He wondered what it could be, for the girls certainly did not look like seamstresses, and there was too much of an air of luxury for any business he could think of.
‘Oh monsieur, do you not know? This is an ‘ouse.’
Andrew was mystified for a moment, for he knew a house when he saw one, and her words made no sense. The roof and the walls were a giveaway. He tried to think of some French idiom that might explain her words, and then he thought of the house in the Rue Voltaire, near Saint-Luc l’Église. He was in a rather grand version of the local brothel, and the lady…
‘Oh. I see.’
‘You must ‘urry somewhere, per’aps? I understand very well.’
Too well, Andrew thought, and faltered. He felt this was altogether too complicated for him, and he might have refused if it could only have made her think he was shy, childish, slow on the uptake or impossibly gauche. But it was typical of the boy, who had detected added strain in her voice, that he could not risk having her think he despised her. Ah well, it could be no worse than the Salient, that was for sure.
‘Well, I suppose… ‘
‘C’est dimanche, bien entendu.‘ She saw Andrew’s main fear, and her accent grew thicker. ‘We are closed, and no… no people will come here. You ‘ave be’aved like my true friend this night, and it is late and cold, and… and late to go open tins, no?’
‘And it wouldn’t inconvenience you?’
‘Can you believe we are so popular ‘ere, and yet we don’ ‘ave no superfluity of true friends?’
‘Well, maybe…’ Andrew believed her, and knew a surge of sympathy, for true friends were what he, surely the most natural of outcasts, had never lacked since he enlisted.
She led Andrew through to a little sitting-room, most exquisitely furnished and with a table ready laid. Andrew wondered who had been there before, and banished the thought.
‘You go in there, and take off your uniform. We clean. You can wash, and put on a robe.’
The place was a tiny dressing-room, with another door which opened into some other room. In an alcove was a shower-bath, which Andrew had never even heard of, but which he found marvellously refreshing when he worked out the principle. Afterwards he donned a brocaded dressing-gown, and left his uniform on the table.
‘Oh wonderful!’ the lady exclaimed as he emerged. ‘You look different. Very ‘andsome, I think.’
‘No, surely not?’
‘Oh yes, surely yes. ‘Andsome. Surely, since your skirt is so dark, you must be ofle Waterloo Black Watch? But it is much shorter in the old paintings.’
‘It should come exactly to the top of the kneecap. And we don’t call it a skirt.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t think the French painter could have seen them. You will take an aperitif?’
They sat on a sofa, and a footman brought some sweet wine which Andrew liked very much. They chatted inconsequentially for a while, and then the footman brought a lightconsommé, so they moved to the table, which was just big enough for two. They exchanged names, and hers is a thing which no questioning would ever draw from Andrew. There was something indescribably delightful about the way she pronounced his, and he had never experienced, with any woman, such an impression of interest in what he thought and felt. A niggling little worm in his brain whispered that that was no doubt a professional skill. But why should she waste it on the likes of him, when she must have rated his finances even lower than they were? She seemed to be picking his brains, moreover, on everything to do with his life, and with his war. Andrew, who had an ear, would forever fall better into the rhythm of French, after that conversation, though it was mostly in English.
‘But I’m talking too much about myself,’ he said at last. ‘Would you like to tell me about you?’
‘About ‘ow I come to this life, you mean?’ she said, with a tilted little smile, and she made that strange French expulsion of air that Andrew, in others, had never much liked. People render it as ‘Pouf!’, but it has less to do with the voicebox than that. ‘That is what they all ask.’
‘Only if you it think matters.’
‘Andrew, it matters to me. My parents, to escape the mines, they leave Lens and go to Armentières, where I was born poor – poorer than you maybe. Do you know Armentières?’
‘It depends what you mean by know. I’ve never been there, but I know it’s close to the lines.’
‘Three kilometres. When I was very young my father disappear, and my mother come to Paris. Did you ever see anything like this?’
Her hands were exquisitely cared for, but where she pointed, on the inside of the top joint of her right index finger, the fingerprint was gone, and the pad might have been slightly swollen. It was the remains of an almost vanished callous.
‘From some kind of work, perhaps? It isn’t at all ugly’
‘It is from a great ugliness, just the same. I became a seamstress when I was nine, and those years… ‘ She opened a small crocheted case with an almost furtive glance around the room, and showed him a pair of gold spectacles. ‘You see? And inhaute couture, les salauds, in work only tiny fingers can do. Andrew, such things should not be. At fourteen there was old Monsieur Jarliet, who was a… a friend of my mother’s. It made my mother angry, for an hour or two, but what could she do? At sixteen I follow my mother onto the streets – you know, in places the lowest, Belleville at first. You know what is Belleville?’
‘No. A beautiful town, the name means.’
‘Beautiful?’ The Gallic expulsion of air was quite violent, like a sort of rasping snort. ‘Oh Andrew, you could not know, but it is thebanlieue industriale de Paris, un mauvais quartier. You think being on the streets don’ get worse? There are the streets of Belleville, where thep’tit bourgeois come for something dirty. At seventeen I identify my mother’s body after a week in the river, on that slab in the morgue, with water dripping from a little brass tap, and I see the marks and… you know, the traces, that I can’t make policemen see… It is strange I was not killed, like I think she was, or got diseases. But I know the secret, the thing which not one street girl in a thousand knows. I ‘ated my life, but I didn’ let myself ‘ate the person who was nearest, for it. Can you believe that in those years, despite all difficulty, I never go ‘alf a day without washing, or wear dirty clothes? When you start dirtiness, you never stop.’
‘Well yes, I understand – ‘
‘Oh no, Andrew, I am sorry!’ Her hand shot up, in front of her mouth. ‘A soldier becomes dirty from the things ‘e is made to do…’
‘I know what you mean. Go on.’
‘I know it is my job and my fortune always to make men ‘appy, the most I can, not the least I ‘ave to… And girls who make men happy, they don’ ‘ave so much trouble. Andrew, don’ you try anyexperiences about street girls.’
‘I wasn’t planning to… I mean…’
‘You don’ insult me with taking my advice, Andrew. Because I knew these things, and I was clean, and because I was lucky with structure of the bones, when I was seventeen I got a job in amaison tolérée, in Paris. A very grand place, for thebeau monde, do you understand? Can you understand, for a littlegamine like me, it was like a lifebelt when one is drowning? Madame Sophie, she liked me, and she taught me a million things. Ah, she had vision, Madame Sophie, for she saw what I could be. Do you think all this so terrible, Andrew?’
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