City of Darkness and Light (12 page)

“
Bonjour,
madame,” I said, smiling at her.

“What do you want?” she asked, staring at me as if I was a worm that had just crawled onto her clean floor. “There are no rooms available if you are looking for one.”

I recoiled at the unfriendly reception. “I’m here to visit my friends, Mademoiselle Walcott and Mademoiselle Goldfarb, who reside here,” I said, my brain wrestling with long-forgotten French. “I am Madame Sullivan, just arrived from America. Perhaps you can tell me the number of their apartment.”

She folded her arms across a large bosom. “They are not here,” she said coldly.

Twelve

“Pardon?” I asked, not sure that I’d understood her correctly.

She repeated it, spitting out the words slowly as if for an idiot.

Of course, I thought, realizing my stupidity. They had gone to the station to meet me as planned and somehow been delayed. I should have waited longer.

“I expect they went out to meet me at the station and somehow we missed each other,” I said in my halting French. “Do they keep their door locked, do you know? Or do you have a key so that I can go up and wait until they come back?”

“I told you, madame. They are not here,” she repeated. “They have gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?” I demanded. I could hear my voice, shrill and echoing in the tall narrow hall.

“How do I know? I have not seen them for one, maybe two days. At least I know they did not return home last night because they were not here when I locked the front door at eleven. This is a respectable household. The door is always locked at night.”

“And they didn’t tell you where they were going?”

“I am the concierge, not their confidante,” she said. “I do not ask questions. They pay their rent and what they do with their time is their own. The rent is paid until the end of the month. It matters not to me whether they are here or not.” And she gave a very Gallic shrug.

“But they are awaiting me,” I said. “I sent a cable from America. They replied that they were glad I was coming. They told me to send a telegram to inform them which train I was taking from Le Havre and they would come to meet me.” I fought to find the words to make this clear to her in French. “Did a telegram not arrive for them this morning?”

“The telegraph boy did come. I told him they were not here. He went again.”

By now the cabby had brought my bags into the hall and stood there behind me, waiting to be paid.

“This is mad,” I said, not knowing the word for ridiculous. “It doesn’t make sense. They are not the type of people who would depart and not tell me.”

But a small voice nagged at the back of my brain that they were that type of people. They did lots of crazy things on impulse. The one thing they wouldn’t do would be to let down a friend.

She shrugged again. “What can I say? If they are not here, you cannot visit them, can you? I suggest that madame return her bags to the vehicle and go to a hotel until her friends come back. If they decide to come back, that is.”

I was tired, I was weak. The floor was beginning to sway again as if I was back on the ship, and now I was angry too. “Absolutely not,” I said. I opened my purse and rummaged in it. “Look.” I waved a piece of paper at her. “Here is their cable. Do you see? I will translate if you don’t read English. It says, ‘So excited you are coming to stay. Send telegram with arrival time and will meet train at Saint-Lazare.’ You see. They are expecting me. Obviously something has delayed them but they will return shortly. Now please escort me to their room and I will await their return.”

My confidence in speaking a foreign tongue grew with my indignation until at the end I was gesturing with my free hand like a true Frenchwoman. She sighed. “Very well. I will take you to their rooms, if you insist. You’ll have to wait for the trunk. My husband will bring it up when he returns. Me, I do not intend to carry it up five flights of stairs.” She started for the staircase. “Follow me,” she said.

I hoisted Liam higher on my hip, and followed her up the stairs, then a second flight, then a third. Our footsteps echoed in the high stairwell. We passed closed doors on each landing, there was no sign of life except for the woman in black and myself. As we started the fourth flight my weakness overcame me and I began to feel dizzy again.

“I must stop and rest,” I said, leaning against the bannister. “I have been unwell. That was why I couldn’t travel on from Le Havre before this. I should have been here two days ago.”

She spun around, glaring at me. “I hope you don’t bring a sickness into this house. What was wrong with you?”

“Mal de mer,”
I said. “The ship came through a bad storm.”

“Oh,
mal de mer
.” She shrugged again as if I was making a fuss over nothing. “You are not at sea now, are you?” And on she went again, up the next flight, leaving me to stagger after her with Liam in my arms.

I managed to keep going because I had to and I was terrified of fainting with Liam in my arms. At the top of the stairwell there was a skylight and rain drummed on it loudly. The concierge stopped outside one of the doors, now breathing heavily herself, and stood, hand on bosom, catching her breath, before she produced a bunch of keys from her belt. She examined them, selected a key, then turned it in the keyhole. “Voilà, madame,” she said, and motioned for me to go in. “As you can see. There is nobody here. I leave you to decide what action you wish to take.”

“I will stay and await my friends,” I said. “And I will need a key if I choose to go out. Do you perhaps have an extra one?”

“In my office, downstairs,” she said. “I will want a deposit of five francs.”

“Madame is kind,” I said, with sarcasm. “I am Madame Sullivan. May I know your name?”

“Hetreau,” she said. “Madame Hetreau.”

I nodded, not able to bring myself to say I was pleased to make her acquaintance.

“I’ll leave you then,” she said, and slammed the door shut behind her.

I stood alone in a large, light room; sparsely furnished and with a cold, damp feel to it. The smell of oil paints, linseed oil, and foreign cigarettes lingered in the air. The high ceiling was molded and an improbably grand chandelier hung in the center of it. On one side long windows opened onto a narrow, wrought-iron balcony. Rain was streaking those long windows.

“Hello?” I called hopefully. No reply.

A look around me revealed a faded velvet sofa and two high-backed armchairs on one side, a dining table on the other, and in the window an easel set up with a canvas on it, a sheet beneath to catch the spatters. A palette of paints rested on a table beside it and brushes stood in a glass jar of some kind of cleaning fluid—was it turpentine? I tried to remember.

As I walked over to examine the painting I spotted Gus’s favorite black fringed shawl thrown carelessly over the back of the sofa. A book lay open on a side table. Sid’s ebony-and-silver cigarette holder lay across an ashtray. There was a loaf of bread on the table, crumbs on plates, fruit in the fruit bowl, a cheese board with rind lying on it. Everything about the scene indicated that this was a room in which people had been living until very recently. More than that—as if people were in the process of living in it at this moment. I half expected them to come leaping out from that door on the left, laughing at my face. “Surprised you, didn’t we, Molly. How did you like our little trick?”

But then I reasoned that they were playful but not cruel. Surely they would not have put me through something as harrowing as this, knowing I had been ill. And anyway, the concierge had said they were not here. Presumably she had checked before she locked the door last night. And the messenger boy had been sent away with the telegram undelivered. Then I noticed that among the correspondence on the mantelpiece there was another telegram—the one I sent from the dock saying that I was unfit to travel on from Le Havre.

Could it be that they went to meet me there after all? And couldn’t find me for some reason? Perhaps they mistook the name of the pension in which I was staying, or … I broke off this train of thought as I tried to remember … did I actually say I was docking in Le Havre? Surely Daniel had done so in his cable to them. But what if neither of us had spelled it out and they had mistakenly gone to Cherbourg instead? I gave a sigh of relief at having come up with a plausible explanation and went to explore the rest of the apartment. There was a small kitchen to one side of the living room. On the other was a hallway with a large but rather primitive bathroom containing an enormous claw-footed tub, a lavatory, and a bidet. Beyond it was a bedroom with a ridiculously ornate bed and a chest that might have come from Versailles, and finally a small box room containing a narrow bed, made up with fresh linens, and beside it a baby’s crib. Seeing this brought tears to my eyes. They were expecting me. They did know I was coming. I’d have to show this to the hostile concierge woman to prove that I had a right to be here.

I went back to the main room, put Liam down on a bearskin rug by the fireplace, and wondered about lighting a fire. It felt awfully cold and damp. There were ashes in the grate, quite cold, but there was a half-f scuttle of coal beside it. I found newspaper and started a fire. The chimney was smoky but I began to feel better as the welcome warmth spread across the big room. I sat in the armchair by the fire and nursed Liam. Then as he fell asleep, I put him in the crib and decided that I felt hungry myself. The remains of the meal on the dining table looked inviting until I discovered that the bread was hard as a rock. I cut myself a slice of white soft cheese and then scooped some pâté out of a crock. Suddenly tiredness overcame me and I went to lie down next to Liam.
When I wake up they’ll be here,
I told myself.

I awoke to thunderous knocking and leaped up, my heart pounding. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was but then I ran for the front door, hoping for a telegram.
Have been detained. See you tomorrow,
or something that might explain their disappearance. But it was only a thin and bony Frenchman with a drooping mustache bringing up my trunk. He lingered as if he expected a tip, then grunted when I gave him one that was obviously not as big as he expected. I hadn’t quite figured out French money yet, although there seemed to be about five francs to the dollar. I was glad to have the trunk; opened it and found a clean diaper for Liam. I would have to ask the procedure for doing laundry. I suspected that grouchy Madame Hetreau would not be pleased. I certainly couldn’t hear any other babies in the building. Maybe there was a laundry nearby to which I could send Liam’s clothes.

The question of money jumped into my head. If Sid and Gus were gone for a while, how long would the cross concierge let me stay? And I’d have to supply my own food.

“This is ridiculous,” I said out loud and my voice echoed from the high-molded ceiling. Something was seriously wrong. Sid and Gus cared about me like a sister. They would never let me worry about where they were and what had happened to them. As I carried Liam across to the bathroom to change him I tried to come up with plausible reasons for their absence. They had gone to the country for a day and been in a vehicle that had met with an accident. Or one of them had suddenly taken ill, as I had, resulting in their need to stay on.

But they could still have sent a telegram, even from the French countryside—unless they were both seriously hurt and lying unconscious in a hospital … or dead. I felt a great lurch of fear in the pit of my stomach. I was alone in a strange country. How would I ever find out what had happened to them? What would I do if they had died?

Calm down,
I told myself. So they have been away for one day. Maybe they are in a small village with no telegraph office. Maybe they are in an automobile that broke down miles from the nearest town. And at this very minute they are worrying about me arriving and finding nobody home. By tomorrow morning we’ll all be sitting around their fire, drinking Sid’s disgusting coffee, and laughing about this. Thus reassured I finished changing my son and went into the kitchen to look for something I could prepare for an evening meal. I was reluctant to go out just in case some message came from my friends, and I have to confess that I didn’t fancy going down all those stairs, out in the pouring rain, and then up again, with no buggy for Liam and no free hand to hold an umbrella.

There was plenty of butter and cheese in the larder, as well as potatoes, onions, and a few wilted carrots. I cooked the carrots and a potato and mashed them together with butter for Liam, then fried some potatoes and onions and drizzled melted cheese over them for me. After I had finished my meal I realized that I should write to Daniel. I had promised to write again as soon as I reached Paris. He would be worrying about us and want to know that I was safely with Sid and Gus. No need to tell him that I did not feel safe at this moment. I looked around and located Sid’s writing desk on a side table. As I opened it the first thing I saw was a postcard, showing a scene by the painter Monet, addressed to Miss Augusta Walcott, and on it were scribbled two words:
Absolutely not!
And it was signed, if I could read correctly,
Reynold Bryce
.

So they had made contact with Reynold Bryce although if this postcard was anything to judge by, it didn’t sound as if he had welcomed them in the way that they hoped. But it was posted three days ago, giving me proof that they had been here to receive it when it arrived. I turned it over in my hand, wondering what the “Absolutely not” referred to. Maybe they had been discussing a painting, maybe this was an academic debate they were carrying on by postcard and they were actually the best of friends. Still, one thing I knew now. Gus had met Reynold Bryce. If they didn’t turn up by tomorrow, at least I’d have one person I could go to.

Then I reminded myself that Gus had a cousin here too. He was a Walcott with money and influence. He’d know what to do if Sid and Gus were injured or in trouble. It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate him. I did have allies in the city after all. Thus comforted I decided to wait until tomorrow to write to Daniel. I got ready for bed, curled up into a ball between those cold sheets, and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come easily. Down below me the city was waking up. I heard singing, raucous laughter, shouts, a police whistle. This latter made my thoughts go to my husband. Was he safe? Would they make another attempt on his life? And how did you stop people who could throw a bomb into a carriage, or take a potshot at him as he walked down the street?