The Other Side of a Frontier, page 19
And then I felt a hand fingering my jacket and my trousers. It was the hand of Mme Chamson. She had been down at the quay once or twice during the week to have a word with Claudel. She had seen what had happened.
‘He ought to go home and change into dry things at once,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘You ought to take him home.’
‘I can’t do that. We’ve left five bales on the quay,’ said Claudel.
‘He can’t go back,’ said Mme Chamson. ‘He’s shivering.’
I sneezed.
‘You’ll catch pneumonia,’ she said. And to Claudel: ‘You ought to have kept an eye on him. He might have drowned.’
She was very stern with him.
‘Where do you live?’ she said to me.
I told her.
‘It will take you an hour,’ she said.
Everyone was silent before the decisive voice of Mme Chamson.
‘Come with me to the shop,’ she ordered and pulled me brusquely by the arm. She led me out of the bar and said as we walked away, my boots squeaking and squelching, ‘That man thinks of nothing but money. Who’d pay for your funeral? Not he!’
Twice, as she got me, her prisoner, past the shops, she called out to people at their doors, ‘They nearly let him drown.’
Three girls used to sit mending in the window of her shop and behind them was usually a man pressing clothes. But it was half past six now and the shop was closed. Everyone had gone. I was relieved. This place had disturbed me. When I first went to work for our firm Claudel had told me he could fix me up with one of the mending girls: if we shared a room it would halve our expenses and she could cook and look after my clothes. That was what started the office joke about my not having a mistress. When we got to the shop Mme Chamson led me down a passage, inside which was muggy with the smell of dozens of dresses and suits hanging there, into a dim parlour beyond. It looked out onto the smeared grey wall of a courtyard.
‘Stay here,’ said Mme Chamson, planting me by a sofa. ‘Don’t sit on it in those wet things. Take them off.’
I took off my jacket.
‘No. Don’t wring it. Give it to me. I’ll get a towel.’
I started drying my hair.
‘All of them,’ she said.
Mme Chamson looked shorter in her room, her hair looked duller, her eyebrows less dramatic. I had never really seen her closely. She had become a plain, domestic woman; her mouth had straightened. There was not a joke in her. Her bosom filled with management. The rumour that she was Claudel’s mistress was obviously an office tale.
‘I’ll see what I can find for you. You can’t wear these.’
I waited for her to leave the room and then I took off my shirt and dried my chest, picking off the bits of straw from the river that had stuck to my skin. She came back.
‘Off with your trousers, I said. Give them to me. What size are they?’
My head went into the towel. I pretended not to hear. I could not bring myself to undress before Mme Chamson. But while I hesitated she bent down and her sharp fingernails were at my belt.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said anxiously.
Our hands touched and our fingers mixed as I unhitched my belt. Impatiently she began on my buttons, but I pushed her hands away.
She stood back, blank-faced and peremptory in her stare. It was the blankness of her face, her indifference to me, her ordinary womanliness, the touch of her practical fingers that left me without defence. She was not the ribald, coquettish, dangerous woman who came wagging her hips to our office, not one of my Paris fantasies of sex and danger. She was simply a woman. The realization of this was disastrous to me. An unbelievable change was throbbing in my body. It was uncontrollable. My eyes angrily, helplessly asked her to go away. She stood there implacably. I half turned, bending to conceal my enormity as I lowered my trousers, but as I lowered them inch by inch so the throbbing manifestation increased. I got my foot out of one leg but my shoe caught in the other. On one leg I tried to dance my other trouser leg off. The towel slipped and I glanced at her in red-faced angry appeal. My trouble was only too clear. I was stiff with terror. I was almost in tears.
The change in Mme Chamson was quick. From busy indifference she went to anger.
‘Young man,’ she said. ‘Cover yourself. How dare you. What indecency. How dare you insult me!’
‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help…’ I said.
Mme Chamson’s bosom became a bellows puffing outrage.
‘What manners,’ she said. ‘I am not one of your tarts. I am a respectable woman. This is what I get for helping you. What would your parents say? If my husband were here!’
She had got my trousers in her hand. The shoe that had betrayed me now fell out of the leg to the floor.
She bent down coolly and picked it up.
‘In any case,’ she said, and now I saw for the first time this afternoon the strange twist of her mouth return to her as she nodded at my now concealing towel, ‘that is nothing to boast about.’
My blush had gone. I was nearly fainting. I felt the curious, brainless stupidity that goes with the state nature had put me in. A miracle saved me. I sneezed and then sneezed again – the second time with force.
‘What did I tell you!’ said Mme Chamson, passing now to angry self-congratulation. She flounced out to the passage that led to the shop, and coming back with a pair of trousers she threw them at me and, red in the face, said, ‘Try those. If they don’t fit I don’t know what you’ll do. I’ll get a shirt,’ and she went past me to the door of the room beyond, saying, ‘You can thank your lucky stars my husband has gone fishing.’
I heard her muttering as she opened drawers. She did not return. There was silence.
In the airless little salon, looking out (as if it were a cell in which I was caught) on the stained smeared grey wall of the courtyard, the silence lengthened. It began to seem that Mme Chamson had shut herself away in her disgust and was going to have no more to do with me. I saw a chance of getting out, but she had taken away my wet clothes. I pulled on the pair of trousers she had thrown; they were too long but I could tuck them in. I should look an even bigger fool if I went out in the street dressed only in these. What was Mme Chamson doing? Was she torturing me? Fortunately my impromptu disorder had passed. I stood listening. I studied the mantelpiece, where I saw what I supposed was a photograph of Mme Chamson as a girl in the veil of her first communion. Presently I heard a voice. ‘Young man,’ she called harshly, ‘do you expect me to wait on you. Come and fetch your things.’
Putting on a polite and apologetic look, I went to the inner door which led into a short passage only a yard long. She was not there.
‘In here,’ she said curtly.
I pushed the next door open. This room was dim also, and the first thing I saw was the end of a bed and in the corner a chair with a dark skirt on it and a stocking hanging from the arm, and on the floor a pair of shoes, one of them on its side. Then suddenly I saw at the end of the bed a pair of bare feet. I looked at the toes; how had they got there? And then I saw: without a stitch of clothing on her, Mme Chamson – but could this naked body be she? – was lying on the bed, her chin propped on her hand, her lips parted as they always were when she came in on the point of laughing to the office, but now with no sound coming from them; her eyes, generally wide open, were now half closed, watching me with the stillness of some large white cat. I looked away and then I saw two other large brown eyes gazing at me, two other faces: her breasts. It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a naked woman, and it astonished me to see the rise of a haunch, the slope of her belly and the black hair like a moustache beneath it. Mme Chamson’s face was always strongly made up with some almost orange colour, and it astonished me to see how white her body was from the neck down – not the white of statues, but some sallow colour of white and shadow, marked at the waist by the tightness of the clothes she had taken off. I had thought of her as old, but she was not: her body was young and idle.
The sight of her transfixed me. It did not stir me. I simply stood there gaping. My heart seemed to have stopped. I wanted to rush from the room, but I could not. She was so very near. My horror must have been on my face, but she seemed not to notice that, but simply stared at me. There was a small movement of her lips and I dreaded that she was going to laugh, but she did not; slowly she closed her lips and said at last between her teeth in a voice low and mocking: ‘Is this the first time you have seen a woman?’
And after she said this a sad look came into her face.
I could not answer.
She lay on her back and put out her hand and smiled fully. ‘Well?’ she said. And she moved her hips.
‘I,’ I began, but I could not go on. All the fantasies of my walks about Paris as I practised French rushed into my head. This was the secret of all those open windows of Paris, of the vulture-like head of Sacré-Coeur looking down on it. In a room like this, with a wardrobe in the corner and with clothes thrown on a chair, was enacted – what? Everything – but above all, to my panicking mind, the crimes I read about in the newspapers. I was desperate as her hand went out.
‘You have never seen a woman before?’ she said again.
I moved a little and out of reach of her hand I said fiercely, ‘Yes, I have.’ I was amazed at myself.
‘Ah!’ she said, and when I did not answer, she laughed. ‘Where was that? Who was she?’
It was her laughter, so dreaded by me, that released something in me. I said something terrible. The talk of the morgue at the bar jumped into my head.
I said coldly, ‘She was dead. In London.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Mme Chamson, sitting up and pulling at the coverlet, but it was caught and she could only cover her feet.
It was her turn to be frightened. Across my brain, newspaper headlines were tapping out.
‘She was murdered,’ I said. I hesitated. I was playing for time. Then it came out. ‘She was strangled.’
‘Oh, no!’ she said, and she pulled the coverlet violently up with both hands until she had got some of it to her breast.
‘I saw her,’ I said. ‘On her bed.’
‘You saw her. How did you see her?’ she said. ‘Where was this?’
Suddenly the story sprang out of me, it unrolled as I spoke.
It was in London, I said. In our street. The woman was a neighbour of ours, we knew her well. She used to pass our window every morning on her way up from the bank.
‘She was robbed,’ said Mme Chamson. Her mouth buckled with horror.
I saw I had caught her.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She kept a shop.’
‘Oh my God, my God,’ said Mme Chamson, looking at the door behind me, then anxiously round the room.
It was a sweetshop, I said, where we bought our papers too.
‘Killed in her shop,’ groaned Mme Chamson. ‘Where was her husband?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘in her bedroom at the back. Her husband was out at work all day and this man must have been watching for him to go. Well, we knew he did. He was the laundryman. He used to go in there twice a week. She’d been carrying on with him. She was lying there with her head on one side and a scarf twisted round her neck.’
Mme Chamson dropped the coverlet and hid her face in her hands, then she lowered them and said suspiciously, ‘But how did you see her like this?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it happened like this. My little sister had been whining after breakfast and wouldn’t eat anything and Mother said, “That kid will drive me out of my mind. Go up to Mrs Blake’s” – that was her name – “and get her a bar of chocolate, milk chocolate, no nuts, she only spits them out.” And Mother said, “You may as well tell her we don’t want any papers after Friday because we’re going to Brighton. Wait, I haven’t finished yet – here, take this money and pay the bill. Don’t forget that, you forgot last year, and the papers were littering up my hall. We owe for a month.”’
Mme Chamson nodded at this detail. She had forgotten she was naked. She was the shopkeeper and she glanced again at the door as if listening for some customer to come in.
‘I went up to the shop and there was no one there when I got in –’
‘A woman alone!’ said Mme Chamson.
‘So I called, “Mrs Blake,” but there was no answer. I went to the inner door and called up a small flight of stairs, “Mrs Blake” – Mother had been on at me as I said, about paying the bill. So I went up.’
‘You went up?’ said Mme Chamson, shocked.
‘I’d often been up there with Mother, once when she was ill. We knew the family. Well – there she was. As I said, lying on the bed, naked, strangled, dead.’
Mme Chamson gazed at me. She looked me slowly up and down from my hair, then my face and then down my body to my feet. I had come barefooted into the room. And then she looked at my bare arms, until she came to my hands. She gazed at these as if she had never seen hands before. I rubbed them on my trousers, for she confused me.
‘Is this true?’ she accused me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I opened the door and there – ‘.
‘How old were you?’
I hadn’t thought of that, but I quickly decided.
‘Twelve,’ I said.
Mme Chamson gave a deep sigh. She had been sitting taut, holding her breath. It was a sigh in which I could detect just a twinge of disappointment. I felt my story had lost its hold.
‘I ran home,’ I said quickly, ‘and said to my mother, “Someone has killed Mrs Blake.” Mother didn’t believe me. She couldn’t realize it. I had to tell her again and again. “Go and see for yourself,” I said.’
‘Naturally,’ said Mme Chamson. ‘You were only a child.’
‘We rang the police,’ I said.
At the word ‘police’ Mme Chamson groaned peacefully.
‘There is a woman in the laundry,’ she said, ‘who was in the hospital with eight stitches in her head. She had been struck with an iron. But that was her husband. The police did nothing. But what does my husband do? He stands in the Louvre all day. Then he goes fishing, like this evening. Anyone,’ she said vehemently to me, ‘could break in here.’
She was looking through me into some imagined scene and it was a long time before she came out of it. Then she saw her own bare shoulder and, pouting, she said slowly, ‘Is it true you were only twelve?’
‘Yes.’
She studied me for a long time.
‘You poor boy,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’
And she put her hand to my arm and let her hand slide down it gently to my wrist; then she put out her other hand to my other arm and took that hand, too, as the coverlet slipped a little from her. She looked at my hands and lowered her head. Then she looked up slyly at me.
‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said indignantly, pulling back my hands, but she held on to them. My story vanished from my head.
‘It is a bad memory,’ she said. She looked to me once more as she had looked when I had first come into her salon soaking wet – a soft, ordinary, decent woman. My blood began to throb.
‘You must forget about it,’ she said. And then, after a long pause, she pulled me to her. I was done for, lying on the bed.
‘Ah,’ she laughed, pulling at my trousers. ‘The diver’s come up again. Forget. Forget.’
And there was no more laughter. Once, in the height of our struggle, I caught sight of her eyes: the pupils had disappeared and there were only the blind whites and she cried out, ‘Kill me. Kill me,’ from her twisted mouth.
Afterwards we lay talking. She asked me if it was true I was going to be a writer, and when I said yes, she said, ‘You want talent for that. Stay where you are. It’s a good firm. Claudel has been there for twelve years. And now get up. My little husband will be back.’
She got off the bed. Quickly she gave me a complete suit belonging to one of her customers, a grey one, the jacket rather tight.
‘It suits you,’ she said. ‘Get a grey one next time.’
I was looking at myself in a mirror when her husband came in, carrying his fishing rod and basket. He did not seem surprised. She picked up my sodden clothes and rushed angrily at him. ‘Look at these. Soaked. That fool Claudel let this boy fall in the river. He brought him here.’
Her husband simply stared.
‘And where have you been? Leaving me alone like this,’ she carried on. ‘Anyone could break in. This boy saw a woman strangled in her bed in London. She had a shop. Isn’t that it? A man came in and murdered her. What d’you say to that?’
Her husband stepped back and looked with appeal at me.
‘Did you catch anything?’ she said to him, still accusing.
‘No,’ said her husband.
‘Well, not like me,’ she said, mocking me. ‘I caught this one.’
‘Will you have a drop of something?’ said her husband.
‘No, he won’t,’ said Mme Chamson. ‘He’d better go straight home to bed.’
So we shook hands. M Chamson let me out through the shop door while Mme Chamson called down the passage to me, ‘Bring the suit back tomorrow. It belongs to a customer.’
Everything was changed for me after this. At the office I was a hero.
‘Is it true that you saw a murder?’ the office boys said.
And when Mme Chamson came along and I gave her back the suit, she said, ‘Ah, here he is – my fish.’
And then boldly: ‘When are you coming to collect your things?’
And then she went over to whisper to Claudel and ran out.
‘You know what she said just now,’ said Claudel to me, looking very shrewd. ‘She said, “I am afraid of that young Englishman. Have you seen his hands?”’
Did You Invite Me?
Rachel first met Gilbert at David and Sarah’s, or it may have been at Richard and Phoebe’s – she could not remember – but she did remember that he stood like a touchy exclamation mark and talked in a shotgun manner about his dog. His talk jumped, so that she got confused: the dog was his wife’s dog but was he talking about his dog or his wife? He blinked very fast when he talked of either. Then she remembered what David (or maybe Richard) had told her. His wife was dead. Rachel had a dog, too, but Gilbert was not interested.
