Ignorance (18 page)

I couldn't leave him just yet. His brown coat sleeve implored me to stay. At least twenty years old, that coat. Brown wool, shiny and rubbed. Smelling of tobacco. Perhaps she'd touched it once. I could touch the place where once she'd leaned her hand.

Georges said: you're a good, practical girl, aren't you. We could do with someone like you at the hostel. Want a job?

What kind of job? I was good at cleaning but I'd had enough of it. Laundry ditto. Nuns' vests, nuns' bloomers, nuns' bonnets: someone else could pound them, starch them, iron them. Never again would I have to plod out to that little back yard on a raw winter day, my cold slippered feet sliding in my clogs. In windy weather the sheets flapped and cracked on the line and smacked me as I tried to unpin them. Dolly's job to cope with the laundry now. Good luck to her.

Georges said: we could do with a decent cook. Someone who really knows what's what.

What was their kitchen like? Big enough to walk to and fro in, with a back doorstep where you could sit and feel the sun on your face while you topped and tailed beans. I could be in sole charge of it. No one bossing me around and ticking me off. I'd wear a smart white cap and apron and dip my ladle into the pots, tasting and testing. If anyone gave me grief I'd whistle up Whoreschild, get her to rear and kick and frighten them.

Then I would leave, when I was ready, to find my mother.

Georges said: you'd get paid. Not much, but something.

What did my mother look like now? If we met, what would we say to one another? Would we feel able to speak at all? It would be hard for us both. That would be our point of meeting. That difficulty. Would we get through it? I didn't know.

I said: I'll come and help you out for a bit, if you'll help me in return.

I pulled him to his feet. He said: for fuck's sake! All right, all right.

Jeanne

Just before the war broke out, soon after my eighteenth birthday, I found new employment; in a house in nearby Ste-Madeleine.

News of the vacancy zigzagged towards me like a paper dart. Neighbours picked up the dart, read its message, sailed it on. The fact of a job becoming available pleated itself into the way we learned of it. Madame Fauchon heard about it from her husband who heard about it from the man who had married the young maidservant in Ste-Madeleine. The newly-wed couple had moved to lodgings in Ste-Marie, where the husband had found temporary work at the forge. The husband brought his boots into the cobbler’s soon afterwards, and fell into conversation with Monsieur Fauchon. Monsieur Fauchon mentioned to his wife that the young woman had left her housemaid’s job. Madame Fauchon told Maman the job was going. Maman told me.

She shook silvery raindrops from her hair, stamped on the mat. She unbelted her coat, fished in her pocket. She unscrewed a scrap of paper. Here’s the address. Near the railway station, I think.

I took the paper from her, and her coat. I hung the sodden coat on the peg near the door, put down a wad of newspaper to catch the drips. The kitchen filled with the smell of damp wool. The cold came inside with the thick wet smell, muffling my mouth. I laid the draught-extinguisher against the bottom of the door. A patched bolster-cover stuffed with stockings past repair. Only just wide enough. You felt the wind trying to lift it aside at either end; whistle in.

Maman said: sounds like a lodging house. She bent, pulled on her slippers. Her dark hair showed grey threads. Write this evening.

I wrote on a leaf of paper torn out of an old school exercise book. My prospective employer wrote back on pink notepaper with deckled edges. A small hand, with neat loops and flourishes. Pale blue ink. The
patronne
suggested a week’s trial. She offered me my meals, a bed, my servant’s uniform. Maman said: you’ll be able to save your wages every week. She tied on her apron, began scrubbing a celeriac root at the sink. She spoke to the basin of water: I wish you didn’t have to go away from home. My mouth felt crowded with spikes. Bite down on thorns, on blood.

We didn’t own a suitcase, so I packed my clothes, books and art things in the old basket we used for collecting firewood. I mended the handle with string, and salvaged a box from the Fauchons to hold our kindling. I waited in their shop while Madame Fauchon emptied out a stream of silver nails. Monsieur Fauchon said: I wouldn’t like one of my little ones to go so far. Such times we live in! He handed me the box. But your mother’s always had her own way of doing things. His wife folded her arms. Just you watch out for yourself, that’s all.

The day before I left was a Sunday. In the afternoon we got dressed up and went to the dance hall near the factory. I wore Maman’s old yellow frock, taken up and taken in. Maman wore its sister frock, in coral. She put on lipstick and powder, pinned up her hair into a glossy black roll. The lights in the hall burned red and yellow and blue. Men thronged at the bar, while women and girls sat on benches at the side. I found a vantage point behind the benches, in the shadows, peeped out between bare necks, ridged hairdos. Bare, shining floor. Fizz of fiddles. Smell of fresh sweat, lavender, musky perfume.

Plenty of men asked my mother to dance. They whirled her in fast waltzes, as though she were a spool of ribbon they were unwinding and shaking out. They spilled my mother tumbling coral silk across the floor and she gripped them and gazed at them seriously as they spun her round.

Halfway through the afternoon, the band began playing country dance music and the crowd on the dance floor thinned a little. A clear space showed me Monsieur Jacquotet standing by a wooden pillar on the far side of the hall. A dangling bouquet of bunched blue, yellow and red bulbs illuminated his shapeless blue jacket and orange shirt. The older men and women formed up in lines like the spokes of a wheel. As they moved off, arm in arm, going round in strict time, his pencil began dancing across the page of a small sketchbook.

My mother ran up to take part, joined a row of neighbours from our street, fell into step with them, advancing, pointing her toe, jigging forwards and back. People were grave-faced, concentrating. Only my mother smiled. The country dance finished and the wheel disintegrated. People scattered. A polka began. Maman hovered near me, under a yellow light.

Monsieur Jacquotet got up, crossed the floor, held out his hand to her. She flowed towards him, fitted herself into his embrace. A group of boys holding glasses of beer blocked my view. I pushed round them, peered past them. One of them glared at me, swore: mind out, big nose! His friend hissed: Jewish cunt! I ducked away. Couples merged into a mass of circling bodies. Maman’s red frock kept flicking past. The music dictated the swerve of her narrow, spirited waist, her thin ankles. She was whippy and quick, her skirts twirling. She’d forgotten me completely. A chisel drove into my belly, twisted its point round. Tearing flesh. Spill of blood and guts. I wanted to howl. Hold in the howl, hold in the chisel. Gouged inside, chisel twisting to and fro like polka music.

The polka finished and movement stilled. The dancers became individual figures once more. Monsieur Jacquotet bowed to Maman. He smiled. Took a pace backwards, into the crowd. One face among many. A blur. He vanished into the dark jostle of bodies. The air closed on his absence, on the smell of beer and hot flesh and cigarettes. I looked down at the scratched, muddied floor. The tips of my shoes. I hadn’t let my shoes dance, though they’d wanted to. Too shy. Anyway, no one had asked me. Anyway, I didn’t know the steps.

Maman’s lily-of-the-valley scent approached. Her light tap on my shoulder: time to go. Walking home, she hummed a polka tune. Footsteps clattered behind us. I said: hush! Someone might hear you. She said: so what if they do? She loitered. She just wouldn’t hurry. I dragged along beside her, fists in my pockets. She said: what are you sulking about? I was trying to give you a treat. Don’t go spoiling our last evening. I burst into tears: I’m not sulking!

A hulk of male bodies ahead on the street, blocking our way. Drunken voices punched the dark. Jeering. Someone called: Jewish whores! Maman straightened up double quick. She grasped my hand, pulled me along. She thrust her key into the lock and we fell indoors.

In order to walk the ten kilometres to Ste-Madeleine and arrive on time I had to leave early in the morning, while it was still dark. I put on my old school coat. Maman held out her boots: wear these. They’re smarter than yours. She held my face between her hands. I shut my eyes. She kissed my eyelids, my cheeks.

Entering Ste-Madeleine, I walked from the end of night into a grey day smudged with pink dawn, the sky runny and wet like a watercolour. I’d try to paint this freshness, this creamy crescent moon. Monsieur Jacquotet had chosen to paint me. Not my mother. He mixed the paint on a grey china plate. His fingers squeezed pink paste from a silver tube and I added the water. He’d do this landscape on cartridge paper. He was hiding behind a zigzag cartridge paper screen. He folded it into an origami bird and flung it at the sky and I followed a frilly-winged pink and grey pigeon swooping ahead and forgot to look at the street names and so lost my way. Riffle of paper, riffle of unfolding images. A fountain. A marketplace. A church. Tiny squares surrounded by tall houses. A bell chimed the hour and a whole flock of pigeons flurried up.

Narrow cobbled streets, seeming identical, led away in every direction. How to choose? Lured by the smell of baking bread, I turned left. Dark blue shutters hid the bakery. Street door closed, blind drawn down, gold light framing its edges. Next to it, a yellow oblong: a café, its door propped open by a wooden crate. Someone had just washed the floor and released a dark swirl of water, lacy with white scum, across the pavement, to flow towards the gutter. Smell of coffee and cigarette smoke. Clatter of aluminium. A woman’s hoarse voice. At the edge of the kerb someone had dropped a matchbox with a red and white label. I put down my heavy basket and stretched.

A blue-clad workman came out of the café, clumped across the soapy wet. He had a lively expression, sharp brown eyes. Morning,
petite
. I said: I’m a grown-up, if you don’t mind. I showed him the
patronne
’s letter with the address written in copperplate. Can you give me directions to the rue des Lilas? He gave me a quizzical look. New girl in town, are you? Working girl? He whistled. I said: what? He explained matter-of-factly. The tarts’ house. The
patronne
’s not a bad sort. Everybody knows her. I’ll show you the way.

Behind me the bakery door opened, letting out gold light, the smell of warm yeast. Soon, people would start arriving to buy their morning loaves. Take them home to their families. Eat breakfast with their mothers, just as they did every day. I wanted to dive into that yeasty scent, that shop full of loaves warm as mothers. I wouldn’t find her. She’d gone. A warm dent in her bed left behind. Absence warm as a loaf. As a child I’d often shared her bed, my arms round her, my head on her shoulder. Snuffing up her warm bed scent. Too old for that now. I scrambled my hands into my pockets, found my handkerchief and blew my nose. The workman said: my name’s Émile. Allow me to be your escort. He offered me his arm very grandly and I took it. I laid my hand on his blue sleeve. Workmen at home wore these blue jackets in heavy cotton, these blue trousers. A line of men, arm in blue arm, stretching all the way back to Ste-Marie. My mother in her blue apron at the end of the line waving hello to me. Waving goodbye. I said: my name’s Jeanne.

Together we walked through the town, Émile carrying my basket. He said: I remember you. The little girl who was crying, that evening near the bridge. Your face is just the same. He swivelled his glance over my coat, my hair twisted up under my beret. I said: it’s rude to stare.

Émile pointed out a side street: I work in the garage down at the end there. You can come and visit me, if you like. Tell me how you’re getting on. I said: I’ll see. Perhaps.

The girls worked at night. They got to bed at dawn. On that first morning there I cleaned the downstairs of the establishment while they still slept. A non-committal building, it seemed, from the outside, in a non-committal street lined with tall stone houses with blue slate roofs. A small round woman opened the door to me. She wore a shiny blue rayon dressing gown, frilled with black lace, which waved round her ankles, pink high-heeled slippers with blue pom-poms, her hair snailed up in pins under a brown hairnet. Small dark eyes expressionless as currants, face glistening with cold cream. Her glance dug into me, checking, assessing. You’re Jeanne Nérin? Take your basket downstairs. Your room’s the little one off the kitchen. Leave unpacking for the moment. You’ve work to do.

She drew me inside and closed the door. We stood in a dim hallway smelling of pastry and fried potatoes. A rubbed green velvet curtain hung across a doorframe jutting forwards on the left. A varnished door with an elaborate golden-gilt handle led off to the right. The kitchen’s down those stairs there, she said, pointing to the back of the hall: and the
salon
’s through there. Clean the
salon
first. Later on you can bring me a cup of coffee.

She pulled aside the green curtain and tapped away up the staircase it revealed. The curtain swung back into place behind her on its brass rings. Entering the
salon
, I inhaled; sneezed. Wine dregs, stale tobacco, musky scent, sweat. I pulled back the pink rayon curtains, pushed up the turquoise lace blinds, opened the windows. I piled a lacquer tray with dirty glasses, empty bottles and full ashtrays, took them down to the kitchen in the basement. I brought up an armful of cleaning things, then a basket of logs. I swept out the stove, brushed the rugs, collected up crumbs and shreds of tobacco, dusted the little occasional tables and the fluted pink china vases of mauve roses on the mantelpiece. I fingered the stiff crêpe-paper petals, blew on them, re-aligned the vases with the red-flowered porcelain cigarette box and black embroidered fan displayed between them. I swished a miniature feather mop over the ruched lengths of pink artificial silk, gathered in festoons tied up with gold braid, which draped the walls.