Mourning Ruby (23 page)

‘We are doing well, Florence,’ she says gravely, as if
letting me know the fate of some invalid who is precious to us both. We never speak of the fact that the house is hers, the bath is hers and the profit is hers. I have never seen inside those account books.

God help Marguerite if she doesn’t buff the porcelain to shining whiteness each morning, and again between clients. The bath must appear pristine, as if no one else has ever lain in it.

I like the bathroom in the early mornings, when our bath lies in its lair like a lion couchant, waiting for the officers. Nothing has happened yet. The towels are folded. Danielle and Marie-Claude run about in their kimonos with their hair scraped back off their foreheads, like little girls. And so do I. We drink our coffee in the garden before we dress. It’s cool and the dew is on the grass in the orchard. Claire holds my hand and we go to visit the hens.

But this man was in our house at ten o’clock in the morning. He bent forward and sluiced his face. He took the long-handled bristle brush and began to scrub his back. I watched. He groped for an enamel can of clean water that stood on the edge of the bath. He lifted the can high, and poured fresh hot water over his head in a long stream.

I knew that the water would be fresh and hot. These things were my responsibility that day. Madame Blanche was away on a visit, but she might come back at any time, perhaps in two hours, perhaps in two days. She never tells me, or anyone. She opens the well-oiled front door with her silent key and she’s suddenly there among us. Her eyes go straight to the rumpled bed, the smear on a glass,
the girl with her face red and sweaty after romping on the orchard swing. And especially she sees everything I’ve done. I am in charge now until she returns. I’m her deputy, her aide-de-camp, her lieutenant.

Will was naked. The fresh hot water parted his short hair and flattened it, and the sun shone on it. Water flowed over his face, his shoulders, his chest. The clean water disappeared into the milky, dirty water that lapped his waist. He sat in his dirt. He wasn’t young, I saw that at once. He was more than thirty, thirty-five maybe. Heavy-set.

The men who come to us are dirty. They don’t know it themselves, because they are so used to it. (Madame Blanche would correct me if I said that they were men. They are officers. We don’t take men.)

But they are all dirty. They smell of raw earth and sweat and metal. They smell of smoke and explosives. They aren’t aware of it. They wash before they come to us and they comb their hair and put on fresh clothes if they have them. Sometimes they wear lemon cologne. It makes no difference. All of them smell of war and it’s the dirtiest smell there is.

This is why Madame Blanche installed the bathroom. No other establishment has one to match it. I was doubtful because of the expense, but she was right, as always.

‘It will pay for itself ten times over,’ was what she didn’t say.

Madame Blanche never talks about money, but when you come to know her you soon realize that everything she thinks about and speaks of has the tang of cash in it somewhere.

Have you ever held a handful of coins up to your nose
and sniffed it? That’s another dirty smell, not like the smell of war but somehow akin to it. I am not saying that money is dirty, however. I am not such a fool as that. Money is why I am here. Those round dirty coins which stand for pigs or orchards or good square meals or your child sleeping in a safe warm bed with a full belly.

The men arrive. They drink wine in the garden if it’s fine, in the salon if it’s rainy or cold. Marie-Claude plays the piano. I pass around slices of sweet cake. Nobody eats it, but it looks nice: cake with wine. It has a feeling of home. Marie-Claude wears a white dress with lavender ribbons, or apricot ribbons. She plays the piano ardently. I make sure she only has one glass of wine, because otherwise she becomes tearful and tells everyone that she would have had a place at the Conservatoire if it hadn’t been for the war. This strikes the wrong note. The men become uneasy, because it reminds them of their sisters, who also take music lessons and dream of concert platforms. They don’t want to link girls like us with their sisters.

Marie-Claude plays on. The sun sparkles on Madame Blanche’s carp pond. From time to time she takes a young man aside in her motherly, discreet manner.

‘Would you like to bathe yourself?’

Madame Blanche’s bathroom is the talk of the town. These young men know what to expect. And they long for it. Deep, hot water, a cake of lemon soap and a towel that is big enough to wrap around you… it’s oblivion.

I can never make Madame Blanche understand that to bathe is not a reflexive verb in English. One of the reasons I am her aide-de-camp and her lieutenant is my command of the English language, but that doesn’t mean she’s prepared to learn from me.

‘Do take a bath, if you like,’ I murmur. ‘The bathroom’s awfully nice.’

Madame Blanche’s eyes slide towards me and I catch a gleam of satisfaction in them.

The men emerge from the bathroom as happy as babies. There’s still a tang of war on their clothes, but we can’t do anything about that. Even Madame Blanche hasn’t gone so far as to suggest that we open up a laundry. It would probably be illegal, anyway. I think that their uniforms are the property of the Crown.

Will’s uniform lay on the bathroom chair. I watched his back, with the runnels of silky water going down it. His arms were tanned, and his face, and there was a line where the white flesh met the tanned flesh. The sun was falling directly onto the bath and he was in his own sunlit world. He knelt up in the bath and began to soap his private parts with a care and thoroughness which I approved. He splashed more water over himself and as he did so he began to sing.

I love the flowers, I love the daffodils

I love the butterflies, I love the rolling hills

Boomdiara boomdiara

Boomdiara boomdiara

Boomdiara boomdiara

Boomdiara boomdiara

BOOM

I love the motor cars, I love the aeroplanes

I love the –

But he felt me at the door. He swung round and I saw his face full-on, frowning and wary. An adult face, not a boy’s face. The door was only a little way open and I stepped back quickly but I think he saw me.

I hurried back along the passage. I would not have put it past him to leap out of the bath on a wave of dirty water and come after me. I’ve seen how quick the reflexes of these men can be. At the turn in the passage I waited and listened. After a while the singing began again, loud and deliberate now, like a challenge.

Boomdiara boomdiara

Boomdiara boomdiara

BOOM

Petit Paul, who stokes the furnace for the baths, glided past me pressing himself sideways against the wall so as not to touch my skirts. Madame Blanche has drilled him. He is not to look at the young women here. He is not to burst into rooms. He is to knock, and wait.

He’s timid, anyway. He doesn’t want to touch us or look at us. He’s an undersized boy of fourteen who will be tall if he gets enough to eat. He is desperate to stay here because this is where food is, and war is not. If it means walking around with his gaze fixed on the floorboards all day, so be it.

I knew I mustn’t stand there. There were a hundred things to be done without fuss or haste, in the way Madame Blanche likes her household to run. I should go and listen to Marie-Claude talking about the piano lessons she used to have, and the day that her teacher told her that she had real talent, my child, real talent. If she
could empty her heart to me, maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to burst out with it in company. I had to order the meals for tomorrow, and make sure that Danielle kept the dentist’s appointment I had made for her. She’s afraid of the dentist. She thinks he’ll pull her tooth out, and she’s right. It must be pulled. Her breath is rotten. I had to visit Gabi in her room and inquire about the terrible period pains from which she’s suffering. Next, there were roses to pick, and my blue linen walking skirt to mend. I had to make sure that lunch was on the table at twelve sharp so that the girls could lie down for an hour before the bell rang for the first time.

I wondered again who had let the man in the bath into our house at ten o’clock in the morning. No one ever comes as early as that.

And if I listen carefully enough to Marie-Claude, I thought, and ask the right questions, she will be in a good mood and will play for a while to Claire before she goes for her nap after lunch. Claire will sit on my lap and one of her small round fists will beat gently against my breast in time to the music. She is not aware that she is doing this. Her early days flood back to me, when she beat her fist on my breast like that as she fed. And I told her:
You are mine, mine. I will never abandon you
.

Perhaps Claire is musical.

Perhaps Claire should have piano lessons.

Perhaps, if I listen to Marie-Claude and make life sweet for her, she’ll be willing to teach Claire. And then, when Claire’s older –

I went up the stairs to the attic floor, rapidly but without the appearance of haste. I have learned this from Madame Blanche.
It’s also from her that I’ve learned to appear cheerful and agreeable to the girls and to our visitors, while remaining utterly faithful to the programme set out for me. I have learned these things from Madame Blanche and when she’s away I practise them still more carefully. She may return at any moment. Once or twice she’s doubted me. I knew it instantly. She looked at Claire with that long, considering gaze I’ve seen turned on a girl who wasn’t pulling her weight. As if wondering how and why my child was in Madame Blanche’s house, eating Madame Blanche’s food, living under Madame Blanche’s protection. And I was flooded with fear, and she knew it.

I opened the door to Claire’s room. She was standing in front of the washstand while Marguerite washed her face. Standing still like a good girl, her eyes squeezed shut in mute protest. Why does Marguerite have to wash Claire’s face as if it’s a plate?

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’ll do her hair today.’

Marguerite went out, banging the door not from annoyance but because to Marguerite doors exist for slamming, food for cramming into your mouth, men for ‘you know what’ as she calls it. But she’s willing and above all she’s cheerful, which is a cardinal virtue in this house. No long faces, please!

Claire leaned against my knee as I brushed out her soft, bloomy curls and wound them around my fingers.

‘I’ve got you a new ribbon,’ I said. It’s red, Claire’s favourite colour. I tied the ribbon into her hair and she stroked it proudly.

‘Sing me the new song, Claire,’ I asked her.

I have been teaching her:

Buttercups and daisies

Oh the pretty flowers

Coming ’ere the Springtime

To tell of sunny hours.

She knows all the words. She’s very quick.

‘Go on, try to remember,’ I urged her. She screwed up her smooth face.

‘Boomdiara!’ she announced. ‘Boomdiara, boomdiara, boomdiara, boomdiara –’

‘No, Claire. Not that song.’

Where can she have heard it? Has he been up here? They are not allowed up here, in the attics. I don’t have Claire downstairs in the salon when the visitors are here. In some establishments they have the children dressed up with their hair curled, like little monkeys on sticks. None of our visitors knows of Claire’s existence. Only the more experienced of them can tell that I have given birth to a child, and children so often die or are given away that there are no questions asked.

‘Boomdiara,’ sang Claire, looking straight at me.

She might have heard the song rising from the open bathroom window. To divert her, I picked her up and swung her high above my head so that she shrieked with laughter. I lowered her until her stomach was resting on my head, rubbing against my hair. I rocked her there and she laughed and laughed in the bubbling, unwilling way that Claire laughs, until she had laughed the song out of herself. And out of her memory, I hoped.

2

Madame Blanche

Madame Blanche is back. We know it without seeing her or hearing her. The flowers in the garden stand erect, and the cat who has been sunning himself on the front doorstep uncurls and disappears. The girls sit up straight, unless they are working.

I’m in the kitchen when I hear her footsteps. She is wearing a pair of lilac glacé kid boots, buttoned at the side, with low heels. The sound of her footsteps is both delicate and solid. It’s unmistakable. And inside me there’s the usual shiver.

I might be afraid of her. I’ve seen things which ought to make me afraid. No one is more ruthless, when she thinks she has cause. She knows too much about me, just as she knows too much about everyone in this house. Each of us, at some weak point, has yielded up her secret.

I’m in the kitchen, because Solange gave notice this morning, on the grounds that the noise of the shells is getting on her nerves. But it’s a bit late to be so sensitive. The shells can be heard in England, let alone here. One of the men told me that he walked on the cliffs in England, and heard the shelling.

Solange gave her notice this morning, and said she would go at once, never mind the wages owing to her.
She chose this morning because she knew that Madame Blanche was out of the house.

‘She makes me feel like dirt,’ Solange said, as she threw her belongings into her bags. Angry, stored-up words spurted from her. She was angry with herself, too, that she hadn’t dared to say these words to Madame Blanche. ‘But what’s
she
, I should like to know? Putting white gloves on her hands while her feet are wading in pigshit, that’s her.’