The new waitress at Bistro Fourrier is largely ignorant of the interest and speculation her arrival has caused. She is aware only of the peculiar delight of being mistress of her own destiny, answerable to no one but herself.
Alice likes the room in the attic, this low triangular space beneath the twin slopes of the roof. It is so far removed from the vast bedroom in London where she, like a blot of ink in that cavernous white expanse, craved privacy. A place, however small, truly hers: somewhere free from the intrusions of the maids, her mother, or even – God forbid – her stepbrother.
From the small bedroom window she can see for miles: across the slate roofs of the Latin Quarter in their variations of grey, lavender and mother-of-pearl green, past the dome of the Panthéon and the bluebell-shaped turret of St Étienne-du-Mont, as far even as Sacré-Cœur, gleaming a burnished silver above the city.
Sometimes, in the quiet of the early morning, Alice thinks of Tom, with the same tentative, gently self-destructive manner as someone probing a bruise. On several occasions she has picked up pen and paper to write to him, and her various attempts to explain her actions litter the small desk in the corner of the room. None, thus far, have been sent.
In the opposite corner from the desk is a washstand where Alice performs her morning toilette with the aid of one of her few extravagances – a small sliver of soap scented with Attar of Rose. Then she steps into her uniform: a fitted black dress, a plain serge apron. When she dresses in the mornings she thinks, sometimes, of Chebworth – of how those in uniform were like a different race, a separate species. How they would gawp to see her now, all of them.
At six o’clock, she makes her way carefully down the three flights of stairs, past the rooms occupied by the other lodgers. She enjoys the atmosphere of anonymous slumber. She even rather likes the peculiar smell of the place: creeping damp and cigarettes and the cheap perfume of strangers.
Downstairs in the bar, whilst the rest of the city sleeps, Madame Fourrier will make them each a short, dark coffee with a thick sediment in the bottom. Alice will sip hers gingerly, wincing even as she enjoys the strange bitter savour, whilst her employer tosses hers back with finessed nonchalance, slamming the cup into its saucer with a clatter.
Alice relishes these early hours before opening, the hush of the square outside, the sleeping buildings. The only sounds are within, it seems – their voices, occasionally, and the clang of cutlery landing in the metal bucket after Alice polishes it, the tick of the clock, the whine of the hot water in the pipes. It is a time for quiet, companionable industry.
She has grown fond of big, red, loud Madame Fourrier – which is not to say that she isn’t slightly afraid of her. In her forthrightness, her undemonstrative kindness and her small eccentricities, the Belgian woman reminds her of Aunt Margaret. She is a woman who is proud of her aloneness, who draws from it strength and authority.
Some of the customers at Fourrier’s are known to Alice by sight, if not by name. These are the regulars: people who come back almost daily to sample Madame Fourrier’s brand of Belgian cooking – her eel stews and mussel broths, her superior hot chocolates, her waffles with their thick crust of caramelized sugar.
There is the professor of literature who comes for his baked eggs every morning before cycling off on his ancient bicycle, bound for the nearby Sorbonne. He stops Alice as she takes his order one day and tells her that he is becoming quite alarmed by the version of the language – ‘polluted with Belgian horrors’ – that she is imbibing from Madame F. ‘You must read,’ he tells her, ‘it will fight against the infection.’ The next morning he hands her a canvas bag, extraordinarily heavy, crammed with books. She lines them up on the shelf next to her bed, where, along with the volumes she has acquired herself, they provide the only real colour in the room. In such a small space they are luminous, jewel-bright in the low light.
Then there is the writer, an American, who lives in a flat across the square, but insists he has to remove himself from his apartment in order to work. ‘The silence is deafening,’ he told Alice once. ‘In there, the work becomes all-important, and therefore impossible. Here, in the café, with the noise, it is merely another part of the scene – small, unexceptional … and hence achievable.’ He writes, longhand, in notebooks, but often ‘work’ seems to consist of little more than staring out at the square, drawing greedily on a cigarette.
The writer, Madame Fourrier tells Alice, used to be part of a far larger scene here in Paris, but many of his former cronies have moved on now – back to America, to London, to Marrakech. ‘They would take over one corner of the bar,’ she tells her, ‘for a whole day … long into the evening, until they’d got drunk and foolish and I had to tell them to leave. There were always some very attractive girls that dressed like boys.’ She raises her gingery eyebrows expressively. ‘Those English and American girls. So modern.’
One night, the American writer asks Alice to have a drink of pastis with him at his table. She watches in fascination as the water he pours into their glasses turns the spirit an exquisite bluish white. They speak in English because, despite having lived here for several years, his French is abominable.
‘You fascinate me,’ he tells her, with no preamble.
‘In what way?’
‘That accent. I may be a Yank, but I know that’s not the way I’d expect a French waitress to talk, even if she’s talking in English. You are English, aren’t you?’
Alice smiles and takes a sip of her drink, but doesn’t deny it.
‘I knew it. Cut glass, that’s what they call it, I believe. You speak like a duchess. Are you a duchess?’
Alice shakes her head and laughs, partly in an attempt to convince him of how far from the mark he is, and partly in secret recognition of how close he is to the truth.
‘The way you hold yourself, your profile – there’s something regal about it. I think I’ll write about you, if you don’t mind. The English aristocrat, slumming it as a Paris waitress. I like that.’
‘Well, I’d be honoured. Even though you’ve got it all wrong.’
‘You don’t want to set me straight?’
‘No. Surely it’s better that way? It leaves you more room for the fiction.’
He chuckles and touches his glass to hers.
When she isn’t needed for serving, Alice begins to work some evenings as an amanuensis for the writer. She uses his Corona, which they set up on one of the tables in the quietest corner of the bar. The going is slow at first – she has to ask him to repeat sentences and occasionally whole paragraphs, and the keys stick and the ribbon jams. But after a couple of weeks it becomes easier, and she realizes that she is able to type without thinking about it: to type better, in fact, if she lets her fingers move almost of their own accord.
The work isn’t paid, but Alice earns enough from the waitressing to manage her rent. And the writer introduces her to Paris by night. They attend parties where men dance with men and women dressed in three-piece suits kiss one another openly. They watch the dancers flit and shimmy across the stage at the Bal Négresse to the beating of drums and the howling of the saxophone. They visit a nightclub called La Coupoule – where the writer’s current lover works as a barman. Here they dance and drink until an egg-yolk dawn has broken on the horizon and spread pale gold along the Seine and the men who come to fish the water near the Île Saint-Louis have begun to unpack their kit and bed in for the morning’s sport.
On these mornings, viewed through tired eyes, the city is at its most beautiful. At the same time it is, for Alice, tinged with melancholy. Why? Perhaps because the mad distractions of the night are over, because there are still several hours before she is needed at work … leaving nothing for her to do but think. So it is now, more than any other time, that she remembers what, or specifically who, she has left behind. He who would appreciate this beauty even more than she – who would, no doubt, attempt to harness it for her.
Not for the first time, she wonders if she should write to him. But what to say? So difficult, with this lie between them. What would be the good in it? What would be the point of having started this new life? Of having left him free to find greatness? Because she knows that he will be great.
So she comforts herself by reading the papers, scouring the arts pages for any mention of his name. It is only a matter of time before it will appear, she is certain of that.