Some days later I was back in the white marble foyer of their building on rue de Babylone. She said she was still interviewing people, but she took me upstairs to the kitchen and sat me down at that long wooden table. She thrust a piece of paper in front of me, instructing me to note down Laurent’s sport days and holidays. She watched me, a finger at the corner of her mouth, with an expression at once vague and mistrustful, as though she were sure I was doing something wrong but wasn’t sure what.
– Viens, I’m going to take you to his school in the car today.
She addressed me in the familiar form. The decision had been made, I had the job.
Mme Durebex, like most people seeking au pairs, had put up an ad in the American church and I, like most young foreigners seeking work, had gone there. I copied numbers from the noticeboard. I stood in a crowd of young anglophones doing the same thing, disconcerted by the evidence that there existed so many others like me in Paris. If you had no carte de séjour, if you weren’t American or British, if your written French was not perfect, then your job options were reduced to private English tuition and au pairing.
An au pair usually got a wage and a chambre de bonne in exchange for babysitting, English tuition, and often housework as well. But I just got the wage, I was independent, I was really just an English tutor. I considered myself very lucky – this was probably one of the best jobs around. Mme Durebex didn’t want to know about me outside of my working hours, and for this I was grateful. She never even understood my real name.
– Siobhan Elliott, I said. Sho-vawn, it’s an Irish name.
– Quoi? she said, over the echo of her heels on the marble staircase.
I squeaked down after her in my thick rubber soles, repeating my first name, disliking the fuzzy sound it made. It sounded wrong in a French accent, incomprehensible in an Australian one.
Mme Durebex went into the bathroom and wrenched a tissue from the box, a gold and white shiny thing that I would have kept my jewellery in, if I’d had any.
– Sheu … Sho … She struggled: the tissues didn’t stop coming. A ream of floral pattern trailed into the sink. I stood in the doorway spelling my name, which only confused her further. She frowned in the mirror, dabbing at an invisible blemish. The arrangement of letters seemed chaotic even to me. I had learnt every sound in the French alphabet by spelling my name over and over to French people.
Mme Durebex shook her head.
– Oh no, it’s too hard … Alors, Shona?
– Almost.
– Bon. We’ll call you Shona.
Shona. The name of my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Out of the French air Mme Durebex had plucked a name as foreign and idiosyncratic as my own; a name that displaced me, that at once reminded me of and removed me further from a time I’d left behind.
But I couldn’t help liking this new appellation.
Vaguely, Mme Durebex asked why I was here, what I was doing. The first answer that came into my head was that I was learning the language. She asked which university I was attending. When I said none, she sent me a puzzled look then rearranged her hair in the mirror near the front door. I followed her outside and down the street to the garage where the car was kept. She asked if I could live on my wage, and I said that I could, feigning nonchalance at the wine-coloured Rolls Royce we were getting into.
– But how come you speak such good French? Mme Durebex asked.
– I studied it at school. And I was here last year for six months.
The car tilted up the ramp and emerged from the basement garage like a submarine. The length of bonnet in front of us equalled the entire length of most other cars on the road.
– Ah, she nodded. And you went home to your family in England for summer?
– No, I smiled. Australia’s too far.
But Australia didn’t register with her.
– We travelled in summer, I continued.
– We?
There was a clamouring of horns. Mme Durebex manoeuvred the Rolls through an angry knot of cars, and along streets I’d never walked. Clean, stark streets of shuttered buildings, each much like the other, pale in the afternoon sunlight. We drove onto a boulevard and colours began to disturb the monochrome, people moved around us. With a 360 degree view I was captive; I felt exhilarated. Up on my high seat, being driven – this was something I never normally did in Paris. The last car I’d been in was the cab I got from the station on the night I came back here. Shoulders aching from carrying my pack, I’d deserved that cab.
We turned down an avenue hooded with plane trees, then arrived at the school.
Mme Durebex leaned on the horn and I was glad for the tinted windows that hid us from view. Eventually a boy trotted out of the throng of children and parents. He seemed small for an eight-year-old, but I have never been very good at telling the age of people younger than me. I am the youngest in my immediate family, the youngest in my extended family; Matthew was older than me, my friends in Sydney were all older than me. Everybody has always been older than me.
I turned and smiled at my pupil-to-be. Laurent’s legs stretched across the leather seat; his feet dangled off the edge, waggling fiercely. A gash of red ink on his cheek gave him a piratic air. He corkscrewed a finger into his ear then examined the extract, and all of a sudden I felt too young to teach him things, and too old to enter his territory. He had the same rich holiday tan as his mother, and her Latin eyes. They stared at me defiantly from beneath a mop of dark hair, while the ear-waxed finger slid down the back of the driver’s seat.
– Have you rung Brenda? he piped to his mother. Because it’s me that’s going to do the talking.
Mme Durebex waited for the lights to change, hands restless on the steering wheel. Her right thumb was curled under, and the large ruby on her middle finger twisted from side to side.
– Maman!
Mme Durebex glanced at me then accelerated.
– Brenda didn’t speak French very well, she said with a hint of apology in her voice.
Later, I would remember this sentence, when it became clear to me it was my French that had got me the job of English tutor to Laurent Durebex.
– Take his satchel, Mme Durebex gestured to me as we got out of the car.
Laurent pushed past me and ran up the stairs on all fours. Mme Durebex seated us at the kitchen table and banged cupboards, heated hot chocolate for her son, spilled a packet of madeleines onto a plate, all the while talking, repeating, Now, open his satchel, look in his diary to see what homework he has. And check. Don’t wait for him to tell you. He’ll get it wrong. He always forgets. Make him learn the vocab; he has tests this week, don’t you Laurent?
– No!
– Don’t be silly. I know he has tests. He must learn it all by heart.
I flicked through his books in the commotion of Mme Durebex rushing in and out, and Laurent trotting from one side of the table to the other, sitting on the bench, kneeling, sitting, spilling his hot chocolate, fiddling with his fountain pen, demanding another biscuit. Nadenne the valet stood in the background, languidly stirring soup.
– Pass Laurent another biscuit, Sh—
– Shona, I said, and got up to fetch the plate from the sideboard just behind Laurent.
Nadenne smiled at me sympathetically. He looked Indian and I smiled back at him, wanting him to know that I came from the same hot hemisphere. But we had no chance to talk.
– She’s better than Brenda, Laurent yelled to his mother, who was yelling into the telephone on the landing.
Mme Durebex put down the receiver and redialled. In pidgin French she explained to the girl called Brenda that she was no longer needed.