The Steppes of Paris (4 page)

After a fortnight, Edward had forgotten all about his early attempts at optimism. The last of the summer weather was appropriately succeeded by low grey skies and a spiteful diagonal drizzle, through which he went resentfully to and from the paper. Almost all his leisure hours were devoted to trying to find a place to live and he got so discouraged by the end of the second week that he even considered moving into the box in Neuilly after all. It was not that there was any pressure on him to move out of his hotel; Henry, when the subject came up, said easily, “Oh, give it at least a month.” But Edward was sick of his bedroom furniture, of the lace curtains, of the limply trickling shower. He was fed up too with what he felt to be the reception staff’s faintly condescending
“Bonjour,
Monsieur”
and
“Bonsoir,
Monsieur”
every time he went in or out. He was fed up, above all, with the lack of autonomy brought about by not having a place of his own.

The search for a flat did nothing to endear Paris to him. Of course, he had not been brilliantly well-disposed towards the place from the day he arrived when, in a moment of far-fetched global gloom, he had seen in a
charcuterie
window all his ambitions put to rest on a bed of aspic, glazed, reduced to a miniature
hors
d’oeuvre-
sized spoof of a journey, and trimmed with cross-sections of stuffed olives. He had come to Paris,
already disliking it, not only for what it was but for all that it wasn’t. In that first fortnight, the city exceeded even his dire expectations.

His first weekend would be memorable, he realised, even while he was getting through it, for its gloom. With the estate agents shut, he decided to have a look on his own. He bought several papers and tried telephoning some of the numbers given in the property columns. Out of six numbers he ringed, two were estate agents’ answering machines informing him in bright metallic voices that their offices were closed on Saturday, two of the flats were already let and the final two, which he managed to make appointments to view on the Saturday afternoon, both led him to such grotesque and unpleasant encounters that he was faintly shaken.

He took a taxi to view the first one which was in the fifth
arrondissememt
, near the Jardin des Plantes. Three times, the driver flew into vicious shouting altercations with other drivers: someone had run someone else too close, somebody had braked too sharply, somebody else didn’t know left from right. When the traffic slowed to a complete standstill, the driver explained to Edward where the problem lay, bawling his abhorrent theory at the top of his voice above the battery of furious car horns: the fault lay with the immigrants from backward countries. That wasn’t just his opinion; it was a recognised fact. In the first place, there were too many of them, which in itself caused congestion; it was obvious. But the real trouble started when they got behind the wheel of a taxi; they had no road sense at all. What could you expect; they came from countries where there weren’t proper roads, just dirt tracks, for the most part, and they had no idea how to drive in a modern metropolis. They drove here, around the Etoile and the Place de la Concorde, as if they were still in the bush and, not surprisingly, there were straight away accidents and terrible traffic jams. And the worst of it was you weren’t allowed to say a thing. If you stood up in public and reproached them with anything, there were immediately howls of “Racist!” It drove him mad. He wasn’t a racist, there was nobody less racist than he; he just believed in everybody in their proper place, that was all. He had nothing against those Mohammeds back in Sidi-bel-Abbès. It was when they
came over here that he began to see red. Would he go and set up as a taxi driver in Sidi-bel-Abbès and take away their livelihood? They were ruining the reputation of taxi drivers, the way they carried on.

He deposited Edward at the address he had been given. His abuse, provoked by the reproachfully small size of his tip, followed Edward across the pavement until, losing patience and taking out on the driver the steadily mounting hostility he felt towards the entire city, Edward turned and stuck two fingers in his direction.

He had liked the idea of being near the Jardin des Plantes. Judging from his admittedly brief exposure to Paris parks, he doubted if it would be of any use for any of the normal purposes of parks: jogging, lying on the grass, relaxing. But the location was promising and the rent well within the limits sanctioned by the accountant, Monsieur, it turned out, not Rat but Rapp. He was a bit discouraged to see that the house seemed to be the most run down in the whole road; next to it was a building site, still at the early stage of being a rubble-filled pit, and it looked as though this house might any day follow suit. Dispiritedly, Edward rang the front door bell and pushed the dark green front door, which had clicked open in response. He found himself in a small, dark but very strong-smelling entrance hall. Someone had been boiling vegetables in the vicinity for a number of years. As instructed, he climbed the ill-kept round staircase to the third floor and rang the bell of the left-hand flat. Almost at once, the door sprang open, as though the flat owner had been listening to his footsteps coming up the stairs, and Edward was confronted with one of the most grotesque human beings he had ever seen.

For some seconds, he was unable to decide if the person in front of him was a woman or a man. Its clothes, not to mention its physical attributes, indicated clearly that it was a woman: a tight-fitting green skirt and a peach blouse filled with a fairly hefty bosom. It had light red hair, elaborately styled and set. But there was something in its bold stance as it stood, legs slightly too far apart, on the threshold, and continued to hold onto the door handle with one large hand, which was unmistakably male. Its voice, when it spoke, put an end to any doubt.

“You’ve come to see the flat, I take it?” he asked in a scratchy but not unpleasant tenor.
“Entrez,
Monsieur,
s’il
vous
plaît.”

Edward hesitated on the landing. “Are you Monsieur Comblat?”

The person laughed, a high-pitched, strained trill.

“Madame or Monsieur, whichever you prefer.” He took a step back and beckoned again to Edward to come inside. He added confidingly, “I prefer Madame.”

Ninety-nine per cent of Edward wanted to stay out on the landing. But some tiny perverse hunt for a story persuaded him to go in. Besides, it was a bit difficult at that stage to think of a polite reason not to.

The small flat looked as if the owner had no intention of moving out in the near future. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with records and yellowing back numbers of distinctly odd magazines. A tailor’s dummy sporting garish theatrical make-up dominated the living-room.

After a guided tour in which he successively mocked each of the cluttered rooms with a disproportionately grandiose commentary, the owner explained cautiously to Edward what he had in mind. He wished to let the flat but not completely, as it were; he had just got a new job which was going to involve a lot of touring – he was, he informed Edward airily, in “
le
showbusiness
”
– but he wanted to hang onto his Paris base. What he proposed was that Edward rent the flat, complete with all his trappings and weird magazines, but at an exceptionally low rent, on the understanding that every fortnight or so he would be free to come back and spend a couple of nights there to “recharge his batteries”. Edward declined the offer to stay and reconsider his decision over coffee, which followed his prompt refusal. He gave Monsieur Comblat an unnecessarily wide berth in the front hall and still shuddered at his hard, vindictive handshake halfway down the stairs.

He was so very relieved to be out of the house and safely in the street again that he didn’t take note of where he was going. He found himself walking beside the railings of what was presumably the Jardin des Plantes. Suddenly he was shocked by a perfectly hideous, inhuman cackle. Only after a moment of
extreme alarm did he notice the netting of a big aviary beyond the railings and realise that inside was the zoo.

After that, he thought that whatever the second flat had in store for him would be an anti-climax. He was tempted, in fact, to give it a miss altogether. He was tired and he couldn’t believe that Paris had anything worthwhile to offer him, that weekend or at all. But the flat was almost on his way back to the hotel and he thought that he had nothing better to do with the rest of his afternoon.

He found the rue Guynemer for the second time on his flapping
Plan
de
Paris.
It ran alongside the Luxembourg gardens and until he saw its stern, shuttered houses, he thought it might be rather an agreeable place to live, lying as it did at almost the dead centre of the map. He was greeted by a small but visibly ferocious old lady, dressed in a raincoat and holding a furled frilly umbrella. For a moment, he thought she was going to tell him that the flat had already been let; she was only waiting for him to arrive to go out. But it turned out that, although she had given him her address over the phone, the flat to let was actually off the rue Guynemer, a few minutes’ walk away. She didn’t allow Edward so much as a glimpse of the inside of her own flat. She whipped the front door shut behind her and double-locked two locks at the top and bottom of the door. As they bustled over to the other flat – the old lady’s heels rapped severely on the pavement – she cross-questioned Edward about his credentials, shooting sharp sideways looks at him as they scurried along. She appeared displeased that he was a journalist. She repeated several times, approvingly, that the previous tenant had been a gynaecologist. She asked Edward which paper he worked for and, when she hadn’t heard of it, to tell her the French equivalent; was it
Figaro
or
Le
Monde?

The flat was desolate; it was at the back of another sombre apartment house like her own, high ceilinged and spacious but almost without natural light. Its rooms, which all opened off to the right of a long, sinister hall, looked out onto an adjacent blank wall where a scrawl of etiolated ivy only underlined the bleakness. The room smelt unpleasantly of mothballs and the furniture was mostly hidden under opaque plastic covers, two of which, the old lady informed him, she would ask him to keep
on to protect the better armchairs. The bathroom finished him off; it was a skimpily partitioned slice of the hall, without a window, into which were crammed what looked like half a bath with an indecent little step to sit on, an antiquated washbasin, a bidet and a monstrous water heater which, when the old lady switched it on momentarily to show him how the system worked, started to pant horribly with steadily mounting hoarse breaths. The old lady chose this moment of maximum horror to tell him that there had been a misprint in the advertisement. The figure given for the rent was too low; where they had put a five, there should of course have been a seven. Edward turned to her, pleased with his outward calm. “I know plenty of more cheerful cemeteries where I could stay for a lot less,” he said.

Later, in the evening, he went out to find something to eat and some entertainment if he could. He found himself drifting back towards the Marais where he had had dinner the night before. The streets which had been closed and silent had somehow or other come back to life. They were full of the most exuberantly un-Parisian people bustling to and fro and the shop window shutters had been raised to reveal equally un-Parisian displays of seven-branched candelabra and silver tasselled shawls. He found a shabby North African restaurant in a backstreet which was pleasingly unlike the smart expense account sort of place he could have been eating in. Although half the items on the menu were unintelligible to him –
Brik
à
l’œuf,
Merguez
– he managed to have a reasonable meal amid the high-pitched Oriental music and the constant coming and going of the owner’s acquaintances for what seemed to be free glasses of mint tea. He took as long as he decently could over his dinner to stay in the restaurant’s social embrace, although he was forced to give up on a deathly sweet pastry which seemed to set all his fillings jangling like alarm bells.

Afterwards, he couldn’t find any entertainment he wanted to see on his own. With Roland or Guy, he might have gone to jeer at somewhere like the Crazy Horse but on his own it seemed profoundly sordid. He walked back to the hotel through the party-going crowds of a Saturday night, feeling like the classic outsider from French A-level, and Sunday,
when he couldn’t make any business appointments to reduce the time available to stew, was even worse.

On Thursday or Friday of the following week, as he came back into the office from some specious errand he had invented to make himself seem busier than he yet was, Marie-Yvette told him he had had a phone call from Mrs Hirshfeld. She handed him the number and added, “It was something to do with a flat.”

Edward’s heart plummeted. The last thing he wanted was for the paper to get involved in his accommodation arrangements. The more elusive his Paris flat became, the more convinced he was that it would be his only hope of redeeming his time here. Above all, he didn’t want that slender possibility appropriated by the paper too, so that his single remaining chance of displacement was removed.

He went into his office and sat there for a while, feeling disgruntled and also apprehensive, before he lifted the receiver and dialled Henry’s home number.

The phone was answered by Dinh. While she was fetching her mother, Edward prepared a polite explanation of why he could not take up Mrs Hirshfeld’s proposition, whatever it might be. Her bright, “Hi, Edward” interrupted his train of thought.

He mumbled, “Oh, hello, Mrs Hirshfeld. I was told you telephoned while I was out. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to speak to you. I’d just gone off for a bit to deal with some bureaucracy.”

Her laugh was high and concise like a wind chime. “Don’t worry, Edward. Have you found a flat yet? Henry told me the other day you were still looking, you were having a lot of problems.”