Leontyne (12 page)

I was rather anxious about where to moor. It is usually possible to find a mooring on the rivers of France, but here we were in the capital, and though I did not have any clear idea where I could tie up, I did know where I wanted to. I have always been very fond of the Pont des Arts, a footbridge which crosses the Seine from the Louvre to the bottom of the Rue de Seine on the Left Bank. The bridge, which has been recently rebuilt after a barge smashed one of its piers, is just where I like to be in Paris. As luck would have it there was a space right underneath the bridge itself, alongside some neat sandstone steps. When we had tied up I remember Ray went to the stern of the
Leo
and just sat and watched the last moments of the sunset. I sat on the hatch on the barge and
wondered how it was that I had been lucky enough to fetch up in a place like this.

Ray was leaving the boat in the morning for a few days with his girl in an hotel, so I left him to go for a walk round
la rive gauche
. I crossed the
quai
, walked up the Rue de Seine, and peered into the shops. On my way I passed the house at No. 1 where my friend Louis Fleury lived in his prime, when he was the man to whom all American and English film companies went if they wanted to make films in France.

Fleury arranged permissions and that sort of thing, but he was an unofficial ambassador for France. A huge man with enormous charm, it was quite impossible to get down to the boring part of business with him because he was always recounting some amusing incident on a film he had handled. The polish with which he could handle the cross executive who had just flown the Atlantic to get to the bottom of a financial matter from a past film location was wonderful to see. His apartment was in a house which belonged to the Ville de Paris and he paid very little rent but had furnished it well. He had a wife who always kept in the background on these occasions in the upstairs kitchen. When the visiting fireman panted to the top of the stairs, Louis would begin his performance by offering a cup of hot
bouillon
which was probably the very last thing the visitor expected. I do not know what was in that soup but I remember watching it calm the angry, get-to-the-bottom-of-it-all type many times. Because the soup was hot and served in a drinking bowl its consumption required a lot of concentration, and this was when Louis started his solo. I never saw him fail: whatever the financial outrages from the past, they were polished away with the ease and speed of a professional waiter wiping the table tops outside a Parisian café.

A few doors further up the street, I passed the house where the English bookshop had been. It was run by the Olympia Press and was famous for selling books banned at that time
in Britain, like D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
or Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
, and, for the less literary-minded who had strayed into the tiny shop, straight pornographic novels. It was here that I first met a man who has since become one of London's leading film critics, but at that time was penniless in Paris and making ends meet by writing these steamy novels for the Olympia Press. I remember asking him what it was like to have to write blue books. He said that the sheer repetitiousness of the sexual act, and the need to have a torrid scene every two or three pages to warm the readers up, was what got him down.

Paris is a city that seems to renew itself from time to time in the most dramatic ways. Haussmann, in the nineteenth century, tore out the heart of the medieval city and replaced it with the great boulevards everyone knows today. In the 1970s Les Halles, the romantic food markets, were destroyed and replaced by one of the most offensive buildings in the Western world. The reasons for this destruction were reported to be traffic problems and vermin in the old markets. The traffic problems have not been improved and the vermin in the myriad restaurants that have sprung up in their place literally live off the fat of the land. The Left Bank, apart from the monstrous Tour de Montparnasse, has been renewed in another way which is more insidious. All the character that made it the intellectual heart of the city has been eroded by expensive shops and tourists who have come to experience the Paris of Hemingway; but behind the great doors of the houses on the boulevards there are still sleepy courtyards which have a whiff of the old Paris.

As I walked I wondered why I liked this city so much. The first time I had gone to Paris as a very young man I can remember being more lonely there than at any other time in my life. I had flown there in the fifties for a holiday after a long location in a dismal part of the world. I made all the tourist trips but, knowing no one in Paris, I decided to return to London earlier than I had planned. In those days, when
there was bad weather, air passengers were sent back to London on a train – and first class at that. In the corner of my compartment was a
soignée
middle-aged woman, who for no apparent reason told me why she was going to London. She had been a nurse for the Free French Forces in Cairo during the war and had fallen madly in love with a handsome British officer. A
coup de foudre
, she said, and she told me of the romance of the pyramids in the moonlight as we rattled through the valley of the Somme.

I was wondering where this conversation was leading when she told me that she had met the same Englishman at a party in Paris a few years before and, though both were married, they'd started an affair, perhaps meeting once a year. She was travelling to London for a rendezvous which, they had planned, was to decide whether they were going to leave their respective spouses and go off together. He was leaving for the States that evening and they were to have had the day together to decide whether she would simply leave with him, but the fog had put an end to all that. While I had trundled round the world quite a lot for a 23-year-old, I found this story very French, immensely grown-up and therefore fascinating. I made her promise to let me know how things ended for her in London. As I had suspected it ended badly: he had left a huge bunch of flowers in her hotel room with a note telling her that he could not leave his wife and had gone off to America alone. She went back to her scientist husband, and I felt I had a friend in Paris: from that moment I have always loved the city. It was like seeing that answering flash in a woman's eyes, when you decide whether you are going to like each other or not.

Mornings in Paris in June are a wonderful time. I bought a croissant for the gentleman of the road, or
clochard
, who was sleeping under the Pont des Arts alongside the boat. When he woke, I gave him a cup of coffee and asked him about his life. I had half expected some philosopher of the road but he was more concerned with minutiae of his day-to-day
existence. He had been on the road sleeping rough for eight years (twelve years is about the average time for sleeping rough, after which the bronchitis kills). He had started when he was twenty when, as the eldest of eight children, he had left his widowed mother in Strasbourg unable, he said, to face the responsibility. Friday morning was the time to avoid under the Pont des Arts, he told me, because the authorities washed the slatted walkways on the bridge above and any gentlemen of the road got a thorough soaking if they were sleeping below. He managed to get by from day to day by helping load and unload in the market at the top of the Rue de Seine, and it had made him enough to be really quite smartly dressed, which he said was essential for keeping out of the clutches of the police who were always searching his colleagues for drugs. He clearly had quite serious problems with his chest and wheezed and coughed all the time I spoke with him. When I asked him why he did not get himself fixed up with a room somewhere, he pointed to the Seine in the beautiful morning light, which had pulled a fine theatrical gauze over the river and the city, and asked where he could find a room with a view like this.

I saw that he had a copy of ‘Tintin' which was his favourite reading, and he told me how much he liked Milou the dog. I asked him why and he told me it was because Milou never shat. One of the great problems of riparian life in any city is that river walkways are a favourite place for people to take their dogs to evacuate themselves, and consequently they are over-endowed with droppings. I do not think he liked dogs much: I suppose that they are an enemy of tramps everywhere. I noticed though, when he opened his book, that when Milou barked the speech-bubble read ‘Waouf, waouf', whereas all our dogs in Britain make a more manly ‘Woof, woof'. How can we possibly have a truly Common Market when such fundamental divisions exist, I asked myself
(‘Je me demande'
as the French would say. An excellent name for a gangster I have always thought: Jimmy Demand).
The
clochard
left, as he saw a couple of policemen coming, carefully hiding the bit of cardboard he had been sleeping on behind a buttress, and told me he would be back later.

I went back to the barge and as I did so the police arrived and asked me whether the
clochard
had been bothering me and then, like all policemen, started to ask me what I was doing and whether I had permission to be here at all. I have always believed that if you reply with sufficient authority more often than not the police will give up, and in this case they clearly felt that they were out of their depth and that if there was a problem it was definitely the responsibility of some other department.

I locked up and went to see a musician friend of mine, who lived in the Marais, a district of Paris that had once been marsh ground. Paris has the best urban transportation system of any great city that I know, the métro and the buses run regularly and they go very close to your destination. In years of making big-budget films, I had always taken taxis in Paris, but it was Michel who explained the subtleties of the system. As a leading expert on medieval music, he is constantly travelling round Paris and the world with his three-man group, and has a vast experience of waiting at airports for cultural attachés who do not turn up. He has therefore developed a knowledge of speedy urban transport systems which is second to none, and has convincingly proved to me that the transport provided by the city of Paris is quicker than taxis.

To arrive at your destination in Paris is one thing but unless you have the mind of a mathematical genius, it is vital to have written down the door codes that all Parisian houses seem to have these days. Most large houses which have been split up into flats have concierges (who are almost entirely Portuguese), which means that during the day the gates to the courtyards are open, but at night or at the weekends the only way to get in is to have the door code, as none of the entry systems have talk buttons. I had forgotten the code, of
course, and had to wait like a cat until someone came back from their shopping, and slip in with them. Like many old houses in Paris, it has a superb staircase made from oak and marble – the kind of construction that has stood the test of time for four centuries, but would not be passed by any local district surveyor in Britain today on the grounds that it would be unsafe in case of fire.

A delicious meal of broccoli and spaghetti was waiting, cooked by my friend's wife, a talented designer from Marseilles. The French have a talent, I believe, for being able to cook almost anything and make it taste delicious. They are, surprisingly, extremely precise in the way they prepare their food. All this domestic knowledge was suddenly becoming very important to me, for before I started on this voyage I had always had someone to look after me. While I had cooked the occasional meal I had never had to look after a household on a day-to-day basis, or to wash my clothes. Even when I had first moved to London and lived in a chummery in Pont Street, there had been someone to mastermind the household shopping. Before the days of launderettes, the laundry was delivered once a week in hard cardboard containers which were swapped for similar ones stuffed full of dirty washing. Heaven help you if you missed a week. Middle age is not usually the time to start being concerned about such things, but life on board in a confined space was very much conditioned by mess and planning.

In the second week in June, everyone who can play a note of music and quite a few who cannot, practise in the streets for the recently inaugurated ‘night of music', which the city fathers have decided should fall on the shortest night of the year, the summer solstice, 21 June. As I walked back to the boat I passed every possible type of musician, from a fine chamber group playing Mozart in the Place des Vosges, to a young English trombonist with his jazz band, tearing it off on the Île St Louis bridge with an excellent rendition of ‘After You've Gone'.

My musician friend and I called in to a pastry shop called Charlotte de Ville and talk to the proprietress who was known for her eccentric chocolate cakes and her poems. We sat in a darkened room at the back of the shop as an out-of-work Argentinian actress recited some of the boss's poetry, while she sat purring behind a large chocolate shoe with the Little Prince's flower, also in chocolate, stuck into it on a stick. Here was a side of Paris that put me well out of my depth. This huge lady with her sweet smile and cottage-loaf bun, looking just like a culinary Madame Arcati, the clairvoyant from
Blithe Spirit
, and her friend – who was clearly an accomplished actress – must have had some secret which was completely lost on me. Perhaps my French is not what it should be.

I left the cake shop alone and wandered back to the Pont des Arts, picking my way through the lovers and dogs. In Paris you must, apparently, have a lover or a dog. Walking either seems to follow approximately the same routine. The canine card-leaving occurs with approximately the same frequency as the osculatory pause. I need not have felt lonely, for when I reached the
Leo
she had become the centre of attention for a group of strollers. In no time at all I was answering all types of questions on our route so far, and where we were going. Most of the questioners found it hard to believe that we had crossed the Channel in such an unusual craft, but all said they would like to come along. I suppose the water is extremely romantic on a hot summer's afternoon in a big city.