Paris revisited was more beautiful than ever. As our taxi took us once again along the sunny high-shouldered streets towards Montparnasse, I seemed to be seeing it through Stanley’s eyes as well. We went straight from the station to the Jules-César and took a double room.
‘We’ll look around for a studio tomorrow,’ said Graeme.
Stanley filled the bidet and was soon chirping and splashing around like a bird, while Graeme and I shaved.
It was one of the first warm days of April. The old women were already selling muguet from their barrows, and after buying Stanley a bunch we took a table on the Dôme terrace and drank Chambéry-fraise. Everyone we knew stopped to talk, and Stanley, in a tan tailored suit and a lemon-coloured beret, was eyed with amusement and lust. Schooner sat down and was soon joined by Caridad. We said we were looking for a studio or cheap apartment.
‘You are in luck,’ said Caridad. ‘I am going to Amsterdam tomorrow with an industrialist and I will let you have my little place around the corner for a month. Shall we say six hundred francs?’
Schooner rolled his eyes and Graeme protested at the figure.
‘Well, since we are friends you can have it for four hundred. Plus the gas, electricity, water, linen, and concierge, naturally. And I hope you will be happy as three pigeons in my little nest. Now, how about lunch? This spring weather makes me so hungry!’
The next day we moved into her apartment on the rue Delambre. The courtyard had a big chestnut tree in the middle, flowering shrubs all around it, and a disused well surmounted by a life-size stone figure of some deity; outside the concierge’s lodge was a double cage full of canaries and nightingales, all of them singing like mad.
‘How heavenly!’ said Stanley, looking around the courtyard as we entered the great doors. ‘I didn’t know places like this existed.’
‘Wait till you see the apartment,’ said Graeme. ‘It’s pretty small.’
It was barely large enough for the three of us, and there was no room for all our luggage. But Stanley ran around the three tiny rooms in ecstasy, poking into drawers and cupboards, bouncing on the big bed and looking out of the window. There was a bain sabot, the kind in which one sits instead of reclining—one of those triumphs of French ingenuity, designed to save space, water and physical effort. Stanley climbed into it.
‘This is divine,’ she said, smiling up at both of us. ‘You know, I can hardly believe I’m here, in Paris, in Montparnasse, and in a lovely joint like this. I’m so glad I met you boys. If I’d come to Paris on my own, you know where I’d be?’
‘In the Cité Universitaire,’ I said, ‘in a recommended room.’
‘Right. In a goddamn women’s hostel, with a lot of stringy school-marms and earnest types with spectacles and cold-sores. Improving myself.’
‘We are showing you life,’ said Graeme. ‘And you are adding charm to ours. Now we’d better go out and lay in a small stock of liquor.’
The following weeks of spring were delightful. We had enough money to eat and drink well; we took Stanley to the Opéra, the Opéra Comique, the Cirque Médrano and the Folies-Bergére. One morning when we were having breakfast at the Dôme, Daphne Berners appeared, elegant but haggard and distrait; she joined us and ordered a Pernod. We had heard that Angela had left her to go to the Marquesas with a surrealist painter.
‘You’re a painter, Miss Berners?’ said Stanley.
‘I am indeed.’
‘You don’t look like a painter. I mean, the only women painters I’ve ever met had dirty fingernails and were full of a lot of yap about somebody called Turner. I guess they couldn’t have been much good.’
‘Turner is all very well, of course—but he’s no longer a subject of discussion. Any more,’ she turned to Graeme, ‘than shall we say Tennyson? or Wagner?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Tennyson,’ said Graeme, ‘except his ideas.’
‘I cannot stand Wagner,’ said Stanley. ‘All that schmerz. And why does he have to say everything five times? Oh, I hate German music. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—the three biggest fakes that ever lived.’
‘Miss Dahl,’ said Daphne in a deep caressing voice, ‘you are such a sweet heretic. What kind of music do you like?’
‘All the eighteenth-century Italians—Pergolesi, Boccherini, Frescobaldi, Vivaldi, Corelli. And Mozart: he was the best of them all.’
‘I’m so glad you have no opinions on painting. I suspect you would like no one but Fragonard, Chardin and Boucher.’
‘I’ve never heard of them. Miss Berners, do you paint from the nude?’
‘Of course I do. But please call me Daphne ... I’ve been wondering, in fact, if you wouldn’t pose for me some day, my dear.’
‘When?’
‘Why, this afternoon would do very nicely. If you are free.’
‘I’m always free.’
When Daphne had left, Stanley looked thoughtful. ‘She’s awfully nice, isn’t she?’
‘She’s as nice as she’s beautiful,’ said Graeme.
‘I hope we’re not in the process of losing our Stanley,’ he said that evening as we sat in the little tabac drinking Cinzano and waiting for her.
‘I suppose we’re bound to lose her some time or other. This is almost too good to last. Well, well, here’s Morley.’
Morley was bubbling quietly. He told us he had now managed to meet Scott Fitzgerald, Michael Arlen and Helena Rubinstein. Bob had taken him to see Joyce; and his new novel was almost finished. But he was specially pleased to have boxed with Hemingway, and to have either knocked the great man out or given him a nosebleed—it wasn’t clear which. He was thrilled by this triumph, though he played it down modestly: in his quiet way he was able to invest the experience with a certain mystical quality. It was clear it was a major event.
‘Well,’ said Graeme after he had gone, ‘I’m glad he pasted Hemingway.’
We agreed it was peculiarly fitting that the master had been bested in the ring by a man smaller and stouter than himself.
‘Not that Hemingway hasn’t got a few ideas,’ said Graeme. ‘Underneath all that chest-hair and gush, that adoration of athletes, criminals and plain folks, he has discerned a connection between sexuality and death that is impressive for all its triteness. His heroes seem to equate the fact of love with the experience of death. Anyway, one always follows the other. The formula of the Hemingway hero is that he loves and therefore he dies. As one of his own hardboiled characters would say—he pokes and he croaks.’
‘Yes, but the process takes so long. In between, there’s all the travelling, drinking, fighting, fishing, laconic fornication, and all those peasants speaking their manufactured dialect. The message gets bogged down. It’s a pity he didn’t get it all into one short story and then go on to something else or just call it a day.’
‘Once you start writing,’ said Graeme, ‘I suppose it’s hard to stop.’
‘Neither of us can really tell about that yet. Anyway, I’m glad about Morley.’
‘It’s a real break for him, bless his heart. Here comes Stanley.’
She sat down and took off her lemon beret.
‘How was it?’ said Graeme.
‘I never got my picture painted at all! You see, she has this marvellous studio, and a gramophone too, with the nicest records. And then she’s a very down-to-earth person—really basic and sincere. She’s a peach ... Could I have a champagne cocktail?’
Our month in the rue Delambre was up all too soon and we were as usual faced with the problem of finding a place to live. It was then, in an evil hour, that we moved into a studio in the rue Daguerre, behind the Lion de Belfort. It was cheap and it looked clean; but waking there the first morning we were disagreeably surprised. Stanley’s neck and arms were covered with small red spots and so were mine. She looked at herself in the mirror, then at me.
‘We’ve got a disease,’ she said. ‘God, do you think it’s syphilis?’
Graeme drew me outside. ‘I don’t like to tell Stanley, but it’s bedbugs.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely. I saw one in the sheets this morning, running for cover. We’ve got to fumigate the place.’
‘Let’s move out.’
‘We can’t afford to. We’ve paid a whole month in advance.’
‘Hasn’t Stanley any money?’
‘I suppose so, but we can’t go on living on her at this rate. No. You take her out for breakfast and then go to the Cluny Museum and show her the chastity belt; she hasn’t seen it yet. I’ll get some sulphur and have the concierge swab the whole place down.’
Stanley and I went to the Café Buffalo on the place Denfert-Rochereau for breakfast, but she had no appetite; she began talking about syphilis again. To add to the dreariness, it began to rain.
Daphne Berners came in, looking very smart in a long black raincape. ‘Hullo,’ she said, sitting down. She ordered gin fizzes for all of us.
‘Do you hear anything from Angela?’ I asked.
‘Just one card from Nukuheva so far. How’s your book coming?’
‘Not very well. I’m thinking of stopping writing.’
‘Don’t be a fool. Bob says you’re good. All you need is someone to take you in hand.’ She looked so lovely in her felt hat and cape that I had a sudden desire for her. She reached out her hand, the wrist encircled by a silver chain-bracelet, and gripped my arm. ‘Someone to make you toe the mark.’
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
‘What’s wrong, Stanley?’ she said.
‘I’m not happy in the place I’m in.’
‘She thinks she’s going downhill,’ I said. ‘We have to cheer her up.’
‘Of course. Come for a stroll with me, Stanley, and tell me your troubles.’
After they had gone I went out and took the first bus that came along. Sitting in the second-class section, I bumped along through a Paris that was grey and sodden with the first rain of summer. The streets seemed unimaginably ugly and desolate, the tall buildings drab and withdrawn. This is an awful city, I thought, and life is terrible in its pointlessness.
The rain stopped and the sun came out. The city was once more all watery silver, unspeakably beautiful—and this only made things worse. I looked out of the window and saw we had reached the end of the line at the Jardin des Plantes. I remembered Samuel Butler had said the cure for all emotional disturbances lay in gazing at the larger mammals—elephants and hippopotami. However, on feeling in my pockets I found I hadn’t the price of admission to the gardens so I took the subway back to the Lion de Belfort.
Next day Stanley packed her bags and moved in with Daphne.