Each morning I sat at that same table and wrote. I kept a sort of journal in one of those French notebooks with narrow grids. I wrote along every one of them till the page was filled with impenetrable, cramped writing.
My books were stacked on the ground beside the table. A Collins Robert French-English dictionary, about ten books I’d read, and about five I hadn’t.
I washed at the broad white sink, heating saucepan after small saucepan of water on the hotplate. I washed under my arms, douched myself, hoisted first one foot then the other into the sink.
I had a pocket mirror that showed me myself in pieces. Black eyebrows that slanted down in the middle, giving me a perpetual frown. Little Miss Serious, my father used to say, what are we going to do with you? Dark brown eyes with drooping bottom lids; eyes which always seemed to be looking up, though I am not short, just average height. Maybe it was the way I held my head, chin pulled in, avoiding my mother’s, Hold your head high, Siobhan. The broken-looking nose that told my surname, bump in the middle, lump at the end.
I rubbed cream into the patches of dry skin on my temples and checked the pimple on my top lip that had been there for years, going up and down every month, gauging my hormones.
My hair needed cutting. The ends below my shoulders had become pale and rough. I was always running my hands through it then rubbing the ends together. My mother would nag, but I never lost the habit. I used to tell her it helped me think. I stood shivering with conditioner in it, waiting for another saucepan of water to heat, when someone knocked at my door.
– Sophie? Are you there?
I let Chantale in. Her shrill voice filled the room like Christmas decorations.
– Mais t’es bête! You should come and have a shower at my place when you want to wash your hair.
– I thought you’d be at work.
– I quit.
The camp bed creaked under her weight. She was wearing three jumpers, a lodan coat, and walking boots. She had come to take me out for a walk, and a walk with Chantale could last for hours.
– Bar Piaf? she said.
Chantale lived in the building adjacent. Her father, who now lived in Provence, had rented the penthouse artists studio from the French government since Chantale was a child, and the room she was subletting me now had once been hers. I had met Chantale at an art opening when I was with Matthew. Too impatient to grapple with my name over the noise of the crowd, she had called me Sophie immediately. It made me think of Sophie Gilbert, who had done the most outrageous thing of anyone at my school: she had become a nun.
– I looked up au pair in the dictionary, I said to Chantale in the lift, and it means on equal terms.
I’d been pleased by this discovery, it had confirmed my view that my job was a fair and equal exchange of some sort. I watched the countdown of numbers over the lift doors – murky steel blue, the same blue as the chairs in my uncle’s surgery. Like my father, my uncle was a doctor. The surgery was at the back of his house in St Leonards, and that house is an antiseptic smell in my memory.
– Quoi? frowned Chantale. I’ve never heard that expression. It’s just jeune fille au pair, as far as I know.
So, the dictionary had lied. How was one expected to learn a language when dictionaries were unreliable? Doctors and dictionaries – I expected definite solutions when things went wrong, definitive translations word for word.
The first words I’d looked up in dictionaries were sex words. The shorter Oxford’s definition of masturbation was self-abuse. I’d checked the new edition down the back of WH Smith the other day and the definition hadn’t been changed. All over the English-speaking world, people were still abusing themselves.
We bumped to a halt, then the doors opened.
– But that might be perfectly valid as the English translation, Chantale added. The English have au pair girls too, for instance.
On equal terms. Maybe it was possible. But when we walked out of the building I felt adrift again, drowning in a sea of unknown words, changing meanings.
We crossed the boulevard and entered a network of cobbled village streets. There were houses here – tiny houses of dark stone stacked one after the other up the hill. The paving stones were littered with dog turds and I couldn’t wait for winter when they would freeze.
We walked down the hill to where the streets flattened and widened. Plane trees along the boulevard were shedding leaves.
There were signs all over Bar Piaf announcing the arrival of the new Beaujolais.
– Santé. We clinked our glasses.
– I’m in trouble with the concierge, said Chantale.
– Why?
– For subletting the room. It’s against the law. Ça se fait pas.
She twisted her face in imitation of the concierge, a shrivelled woman with steel-wool hair and a voice like the métro when it turned, wheels straining on the tracks.
My stomach tightened. Nowhere to live. Why was I back in Paris? What was I doing? Were my parents right – was I really just wasting my time? Not to mention money. Where would I go?
I watched Chantale fold the coaster of a soggy wine-stained Piaf in half, and half again. She flicked it around the tabletop. It reopened partially, and from where I sat it looked as though the microphone were a gun Piaf was holding to her head. Chantale picked up the coaster and tore it into little bits.
– I hate the French, I hate Parisians.
I smiled ambiguously. Chantale had an unpredictable temper. I couldn’t disagree because the attack would be turned on me, and I couldn’t agree because she was a Parisian herself. Paris was her family: it was her prerogative to criticise. Outside, an alsatian lifted its leg on a motor scooter. Chantale jerked her head at me.
– Look at that! They think their dogs are more important! Nothing but rules, rules, rules! And they obey like sheep. There are ten thousand empty apartments in this city, and so many homeless people.
– And I’ll be joining their ranks, I said. How long have I got?
– You can stay another month. Je me fous de la concierge! How dare she tell me it’s illegal? It’s my room.
Chantale flicked back her hair, a mannerism that also belonged to my sister Nora. Nora and I looked nothing alike, but people sometimes mistook Chantale and me for sisters. I don’t know why; Chantale coloured her hair to make it that dark and she was pale like me, but like so many other millions in Paris as well.
– I’m sorry about the room, Sophie, she said. But don’t worry. Tu te débrouilleras.
She got up to go to the toilet. Through the window I watched eddies of leaves scud along the footpath, catch in the tree grates. Would I manage? Chantale made it sound so easy. Would I sort things out? I had no sense of my capabilities, only of my will, relentlessly driving me. I knew I was moving, I just didn’t know where.
I signalled to the waiter for more wine.
– Mademoiselle …
The wine was placed before me and Chantale returned. I told her that the other waiter had called me Madame.
– What?
– Before, when I ordered the first round, the other waiter called me Madame, not Mademoiselle.
Chantale shrugged.
– It’s your age. Twenty-one. You could be either.
– Yes, but I’m not a child. Anyway, Laurent gets the vous form.
I recounted the shoe buying incident to Chantale as though it were something extraordinary.
– It’s because he’s rich, Sophie.
– But, Chantale, I still can’t tell when to use the familiar form or not. It’s so annoying. At school they made it sound like one simple rule.
– Not even we French always know. It doesn’t matter that much.