Dolly (7 page)

At that stage, however, at the moment of our first meeting, I merely registered her as an unusually taut presence, conveniently symbolised for me by the tautness of her silk dress, which, as she took care to point out, had been made by hand. Her enthusiasm, which was her normal mode on
social occasions, nevertheless had something fitful about it, as if she longed to be somewhere else, as of course she did. Yet I could not quite forgive her impatience, since it seemed to make my mother anxious, while my father’s politeness became even more pronounced. I lingered in the room long after the time at which I was expected to leave it, for Dolly had the gift of arresting and detaining one’s attention, a gift which she was never to lose.

I have mentioned the primal scene, that imaginary sexual encounter which children reconstruct for their parents and which some believe that they have actually witnessed. This primal scene I unhesitatingly ascribe to Dolly and Hugo. Her angry smiles, her sidelong glances at her husband, her brightening of expression as the day drew towards evening, all put one in mind of a sexual life lived not too far out of sight. At the time of our first meeting Dolly was in her middle forties: was it the anguish of ageing that had brought these matters to the surface? Yet I do not believe that she thought of her substantial attractions as waning, rather the opposite. Her impatience, as I now see, had to do with frustration, as if the amiable Hugo had failed to come up to the mark. In this respect, as in so many others, she might have been the natural daughter of my grandmother Toni. Toni too had been embroiled in a primal scene, although of a more authentically Viennese stamp. Toni too had had expectations of men and had been disappointed. Both Toni and Dolly had the same restless imperious turn of the head, the same beautiful predatory hands. I see those hands now, stretched out to take the cards, beringed, vainly admired. Their initial ardour, which was succeeded by the most virulent
antagonism, also indicates a closeness of relationship which was always denied to my mother. For this reason my mother became involved as a witness to their drama, from which she always considered herself to be slightly removed. In this, as in most other matters, she felt apologetic. I upheld her, of course, as I always did, even when such feelings were still a mystery to me. But then, for as long as I can remember, our particular closeness had no need of explanations.

M
arie-Jeanne Schiff, who was always to be known as Dolly, was born in Paris, in the rue Saint-Denis, in March 1922. Her parents, Jacob and Fanny Schiff, had arrived in Paris from Frankfurt two years earlier, a surprising move given the anti-German feeling of the time, but they were politically ignorant, as they were in most worldly matters. They migrated partly in order to better their prospects: they were poor at home, they would be rich abroad. They were naïve, hopeful, and a little unrealistic, as if one place were as good as another, so long as it held the possibility of wealth. Jacob Schiff was congenitally restless and was always ready to try a new town or city where he could exercise his not very advanced skills as a watchmaker. It was probably his wife who chose Paris: she was a dressmaker, in an extremely small way of business, but already more determined than her husband was ever to be. She knew him to be indecisive, unstable, and unreliable as a breadwinner. He had already left her and returned to her three or four times, not for another
woman but from a simple desire to be elsewhere. On his return he was eager for her welcome, as if nothing were amiss, but was unapologetic, wide-eyed, smiling, and indefinably dilapidated. A
Luftmensch:
the type is less common today, or if it exists is to be found among the young, a left-over from the hippie years and therefore slightly different in character.

They settled in the rue Saint-Denis, fifth floor, no lift. The flat was tolerable and more than they could afford: there were two main rooms opening out of one another, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a
cabinet de toilette
When their child Marie-Jeanne was born, Fanny Schiff slept with her in the bedroom, while her husband lay on a couch in the living-room under a mock tigerskin rug. Shortly afterwards he decamped, this time for good. Fanny received a postcard from Colmar, but otherwise never saw or heard from him again. She moved herself into the living-room, together with the dressmaker’s dummy she had bought: the child, whom she called Dolly, had the bedroom to herself. Soup simmered all day in the kitchen. Dolly was always to remember this as the smell of childhood. The memory was alternately resented and cherished.

In the street Fanny Schiff greeted the ladies who walked up and down with a timid
‘Bonjour, Madame’
. I think she hardly knew that they were prostitutes: she thought of them as young girls in search of a husband, as she had once been. Now all that was over: she only wanted the child to grow up beautiful and healthy. She also wanted her business to prosper, as it had begun to do. Her sore eyes, her few hours of sleep on the couch in the workroom, and the eternal smell of
soup were a small price to pay for solvency, a solvency she had never previously known.

She soon had a clientele among the girls, cheerful, stoical, good-natured creatures who petted the baby and took to spending their off-duty moments in the workroom with Fanny. There was nothing downtrodden about these girls; they regarded ordinary married women with scorn and pity. All were actively saving up for their retirement. Those who had a man were planning to open a bar or a small restaurant, somewhere in the south. Nice, they said, Saint-Raphaël, Fréjus. Fanny listened as she stitched away. The child Dolly, of whom they made a great fuss, also listened. Another life! A better life! She loved her mother, could see her tired eyes at the end of the day. As soon as she was old enough she was sent downstairs to buy
mille-feuilles
and éclairs: one of the girls, Lucette or Michèle, always brought a present of good coffee. They were kind and generous, felt sorry for Fanny and Dolly, knew that there would be no time for them to have more than soup for their supper, as the machine whirred on late into the night. Their diet was irregular: a great deal of coffee, cakes when the girls came, on Sunday a couple of slices of ham with potatoes in oil, sometimes a cutlet followed by a spoonful of preserves. Nevertheless Dolly grew up beautiful.

She was dark haired, with a taut faintly gleaming French complexion. She held her head high, even as a child: her dark eyes, her direct gaze challenged all who came within her field of vision. She went to school, where she made no friends; in any case she preferred the company of Lucette
and Michèle and others like them. Sometimes she dropped into a church on her way home but left again discontented; there was nothing there to feed her solitude and her longings. Moreover she resented the atmosphere of self-denial she encountered among the shabby women in the pews, and took her resentment to the highest authority. Who was Jesus to say that she must not lay up treasures on earth? Where else could she enjoy them? Even at a young age she had strong desires, impulses, movements; she had nothing in common with those women in headscarves, their knotted hands patiently joined. She felt murderously towards them, as if they were undermining her own existence. Jesus she held directly responsible for her mother’s uncomplaining nature and also for her hard life, the one being a consequence of the other. She resolved to be different, not knowing, or if suspecting not believing, that her slender resources might not take her as far as she wished to go.

She had more ambition than her mother, but less application, knew only that she did not want to work as her mother continued to work, did not as yet connect her idea of a better life with a man. The men she saw passing up and down the street she considered far less important than the women. When she was sixteen, seventeen, she began to attract attention, but the word went out that she was not to be touched. She already considered her future to lie elsewhere, away from the rue Saint-Denis. She was determined, but dreamy: she wanted to live in a better house, with better food, and for her mother not to work so hard. Her heart was rudimentary. She was only prepared to love one or two people, one of
whom would almost certainly be her mother, and the other probably herself.

Her mother kept her at home, for her business had picked up and she was busy. Lucette and Michèle had brought other girls, for whom she made short swinging skirts and beautiful crêpe de Chine blouses. Dolly was sent out to buy buttons,
passementerie
, perhaps a length of fabric. The rest of the time she sat brooding in the workroom. With the rumours of war one or two of the girls spoke of leaving Paris, but most of them stayed. If France were invaded business was bound to be good. It might not be what they were used to, but there was an officer class in every army, and after the war, which would surely end quickly one way or another, there was that bar in Saint-Raphaël to be thought of, that bright reward for their many days and nights of hard work. If they worried about anything they worried about the fate of Fanny and Dolly Schiff, for ‘Schiff’ denoted a suspect foreignness. Fanny, who had learned a certain amount of worldly wisdom, gave it out that she came from Alsace, although Schiff is not the most common of Alsatian names. Remembering her husband, of whom she never thought, she said that she was from Colmar. The disappearing husband had also been Jewish, but that was easy to overlook. These days she sometimes went to church if she were not too tired, but, like her daughter, in matters of faith she was entirely uninvolved. She did not need to learn patience, judged her fortitude to be equal to the task, and felt only discomfort when asked to contemplate Christ’s wounds.

After the Occupation, it did not occur to her to pray for
her own safety. She was too simple to believe herself in danger: in any event she had the protection of a street network of girls, many of whom had joined up with German officers. In due course Lucette and Michèle, Simone, Sylvie and the others had gone up in the world, had been elevated to the status of regular mistress, were being shown the sights of Paris as they had never seen them before. Their wardrobes increased exponentially: Fanny was busier than ever. She was paid in comestibles as well as in money, so that they never went hungry like the majority of Parisians. In this way they did quite well under the Occupation.

Dolly brooded throughout the long dark evenings, when there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. Her impatience was growing, the impatience which was to be so marked a feature of her later life. At twenty she was still a virgin, and her expression was becoming a little fretful. When the Americans liberated Paris she was in the crowd in the place de la Concorde: within minutes she was being picked up, kissed, whirled around by the tallest man she had ever seen. Because she was so darkly pretty, because she was so beautifully and simply dressed, she was appropriated by her tall American and given what he called a raincheck for later in the evening. He told her to meet him in the bar of the Crillon, a hotel she had hardly ever walked past. But there was no point in going home, and she was not frightened. She squared her shoulders, and marched into the Crillon, her own proud looks and her mother’s exquisite dressmaking guaranteeing her a respectful welcome.

Her American, Charlie, was with several of his friends; all seemed eager to know a French girl. She taught them a few
words of French, for which they seemed exaggeratedly grateful, and in return she learned her first few phrases of English, which she was to perfect rapidly in their company. The genius of Dolly was her adaptability. No sooner was she in the company of strangers than she learned their language, studied their habits, noted their susceptibilities. With Charlie and his friends, all handsome in their olive drab uniforms, with that crew cut cleanliness she found so refreshingly different, she went through several stages of a belated girlhood: she danced, flirted, and above all seduced men, one or two of whom were genuinely in love with her. She also ate the enormous meals to which the conquerors were entitled, smuggling home chocolate and American cigarettes in her handbag. Fanny Schiff was delighted with these midnight feasts. When Dolly sat on her bed, on the rug of mock tigerskin, and fed her mother a
petit four
, Fanny smiled and laughed as she saw her daughter’s glowing cheeks. She slept at last with a taste of sugar in her mouth. She may even, in her simple way, have thought that marriage was in the air. More probably she wanted her daughter to enjoy a freedom which she herself had never enjoyed. She had little time for men, but resigned herself to envisaging a man as part of her daughter’s future.

But Dolly could not settle for one man; she was having too good a time. She quickly learned that these Americans were relatively chaste, that they did not want to sleep with her but only to flirt with her, to practise their French, and to teach her the new dances. How they danced! Whirled around, thrown around, Dolly was in her element. Fanny had made her a short skirt cut on the bias which flared out as she
moved; it was her favourite garment, and she could not wait to get dressed for the evening’s entertainment. But as these evenings wore on the Americans became solemn and homesick; they could not drink like Frenchmen, and tended to become tearful, passing round photographs of the girls back home, some of whom they had married hastily before embarkation. None of this interested Dolly, but her adaptability stood her in good stead, and she feigned a sympathy which she did not feel, yawning a little in the ladies’ room and noting at the same time that her face did not reflect the lateness of the hour. She knew that all this would soon vanish, that she would be reduced once again to ordinary life. She liked the Americans well enough, loved their extravagance, their kindness, their well-groomed good looks, but she was a realist, far more of a realist than her mother had ever been. She sometimes reflected desperately that when they left, as they were bound to do sooner or later, life would be very hard, harder than ever now that two sources of protection had disappeared. The prostitutes who had consorted with German officers had gone underground, obtained false papers, turned up with a clean record in a different city. Fanny missed them. Dolly sometimes calculated their chances and was not optimistic.