This is a true story about my friend Phoebe’s mum. Phoebe told me it during our lunch breaks at the beauty clinic where we both work. These breaks are stingy, so it took a few of them, and Phoebe sometimes said, ‘Oh God, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, Karen,’ and I said, ‘I expect it’s because I’m a good listener, like I listen to all the clients’ stuff while I’m doing manicures and pedicures,’ and Phoebe said, ‘Yup, it could be that.’
Phoebe’s mum’s name was Julie. Her parents lived in an old brick cottage in Surrey, and in the 1950s they scrimped to send her to quite a posh school, near Epsom, where art was taught. Julie was so brilliant at art that the head teacher wrote to her parents and told them that when she was eighteen, they should send her to an art school in Paris, the Académie Something, where she knew the director. I don’t know how they afforded this, but they did. Before they let her go, her mother bought her a new tartan skirt and a pale green twinset from Marks & Spencer, and got her hair permed. Phoebe said that, at the time, Julie thought she looked excellent, wearing her twinset and with her dark hair in a demi-wave.
When she got to Paris, she was swept away by the beauty of things.
She walked around in a daze, making sketches of old lamp-posts and stone lintels. At the Académie, she learned to draw naked people and smoke Gauloises. No other girls there had perms or wore twinsets. They had long straight hair and wore matelot jerseys and tight, tapering trousers.
Julie packed away her twinset and stocked up on matelot jerseys from a cheap market stall in Les Halles. Then she went to a hairdresser and got the perm straightened and when that was done, the nice French hairdresser said to her, ‘Voilà. Now you look like Juliette Gréco.’
She found out that Juliette Gréco was a famous singer. But also a muse. Jean-Paul Sartre adored her. Jacques Prévert wrote songs for her. Men and women all over France fantasised about her. Handsome Monsieur Fabien at the Académie said she was the most seductive woman he’d ever laid eyes on.
Julie began buying her records. Her favourite song was ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’, which was about the way life separates you from people you love. She also studied photographs of Juliette, and she noticed that in every single one of these she was wearing a black dress. Then she read a newspaper interview in which Juliette said that she was adored by everyone in the world except one person and that one person was her mother. Famous as she was, her mother still didn’t love her or feel proud of her, so that was why she wore black – as a kind of mourning for her mother’s affection.
So then Julie began to think that her own mother didn’t love her either. She decided that any mother who insisted on perming her daughter’s hair had to have jealous feelings about her. She stopped writing letters home. She longed to be somebody’s muse. And one day she blew almost all her money on a beautiful black dress.
Phoebe then described how, when Julie put this dress on, she adored the sight of herself so much that she couldn’t bear to take it off. So she larded on some black eye make-up and went out into the street like that, and everybody in the street stared and stared at her, and she kept wondering, were these really stares of admiration, or was it just that it was winter and she was walking along in a cocktail dress and narrow little pumpy shoes?
During the Life Class at the Académie, Monsieur Fabien kept looking at her. At the end of the session, he invited her out to a café in St Germain des Près, where he put his suede blouson round her shoulders to stop her shivering in the winter cold. They drank rum and coke. A lot of people in the café gazed at them: at handsome Monsieur Fabien and Julie from Epsom in her Juliette Gréco dress.
He took her back to his studio. Now, she discovered that he wasn’t just a teacher of art, but a real artist, with an attic reeking of turpentine and lots of half-finished pictures of naked women standing around among scrunched-up rags on the paint-spattered floor. When he kissed her, she said: ‘Monsieur Fabien, I want to be your muse,’ and he said, ‘OK, ma belle. Fuck first. Muse later.’
Julie fell in love with Monsieur Fabien the moment he took her virginity away. She lay in bed with him, looking at her black dress hanging over a chair, and she told Phoebe that at that moment, the whole world became titchy and reduced itself to an attic and a slanty bit of Paris sky, and she thought, Right, this is where I’m going to stay for ever, and never see Surrey again.
I really liked Julie’s story up to here. The stories I have to listen to from the clients are never romantic like this; they’re actually quite dull, like nothing ever happens in rich women’s lives except buying furnishings and paying vet’s fees and worrying about Christmas. I was looking forward to the next instalment, but when it came, I felt gutted.
Phoebe said, ‘Well, you can guess how it ends, can’t you, Karen?’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to guess.’ And she said, ‘The dress got torn.’
‘And?’
‘He dumped her. She came home. She was miserable for a while. She couldn’t eat or make polite conversation. She played ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ over and over on my grandparents’ radiogram. I guess she kept imagining Monsieur Fabien with other women, each one thinking she was going to be his muse. She put the torn black dress in a drawer and sometimes looked at it, or held it to her face to breathe in the old scent of turpentine.
‘Then my grandmother gave her a talking-to and told her she was being selfish and putting everybody through hell for the sake of some philandering French fool with a dirty floor. So she agreed to go to a local dance, where she met my father, Hugh. And that’s the end of it, really. They were married within six months and then she had me. It pretty much ends there.’
‘How d’you mean, it ends there?’ I said.
‘Well, it does,’ said Phoebe. ‘Nothing more has ever happened to her.’
Our lunch break was finishing and I had an Aromatherapy Massage to prepare for, so I put on my white uniform and tugged back my hair into its tortoiseshell clip and left Phoebe fishing around in her bag for a photograph of her father, Hugh, mowing the lawn of his semi off the Ashtead road.
My Aromatherapy client, Mrs Tyler, seemed nice. She told me a bit about her brilliant job in banking while I worked on her back, which was tanned and smooth, and I caught myself wondering how many lovers had stroked it or touched it with their lips. But I didn’t really feel like making polite conversation. All I said to her was, ‘Can I ask you something random? Do you by any chance know how much a Eurostar ticket to Paris costs?’
I was using lavender oil, which is astringent, like turps. Mrs Tyler turned her head sideways to breathe in the oil, and a mesh of her dark hair touched my arm.
‘I think it varies, Karen,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper in the winter.’