The Other Side of a Frontier, page 30
‘See that? No, there. That waiter looking at that woman – mentally undressing her. Victor, that’s what I can’t stand about this place. I’ve got to get my transfer.’
Yet if a pretty girl passed us, his face would become dreamy:
‘Look at those breasts,’ he would say.
But if the girl happened to look at him he would put on a stern look; if she looked at me, he would say, warning me:
‘They’re brazen.’
Outside a newspaper kiosk near the Palais Royal when, in a fit of showing off, I had stopped to buy Le Crapouillot, a gossipy paper about the arts and the theatre – he started spouting his favourite lines from Fanny’s First Play, the ones about the cockatoo. He was running over the scene with Knox. I have looked them up.
My Uncle Phil was a teetotaller. My father used to say to me Rob, he says, don’t you ever have a weakness. If you find one getting hold of you, make a merit of it, he says, your Uncle Phil doesn’t like spirits but he makes a merit of it and is Chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee. I do like spirits; and I make a merit of it, and I’m the King Cockatoo of the Convivial Cockatoos. Never put yourself in the wrong.
He came out strongly with the last lines:
‘Convivial Cockatoos, Victor! Can you beat it?’
A load of tourists were going into the hotel there. One or two looked cross because they thought he was shouting at them.
‘What I’ve got to show is the change in Gilbey’s character,’ he said and he walked worrying under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli.
The bond between us, as he saw it, was that we were fellow artists, both at the beginnings of our careers.
I did not see much of him and then, in August, when so many shops and restaurants put up their iron shutters that the streets look blind, and when the Seine has its white August gleam, Mrs Shaves’s sister, the genuine Rooter, came over from New York, looking like something out of a bazaar. She soon put on the fashionable tawny, orange make-up and became parrot-like – Mrs Shaves never had more than a dab of powder on her face – and took the family off to Brittany, leaving Mr Shaves behind. I saw him sagging in the Café de la Paix. He was lost without them all. This brought out his confessional side. One Saturday afternoon we walked together. A walk with Mr Shaves was like walking with someone undressed. We paused in fascination at Maxim’s. What wickedness went on there! Up the Champs Elysées we strolled under the trees. We came to a stop at a café opposite Fouquet’s where we sat and where his look alternated between the showy and the agonized. The quickness of his fantasy and its sudden extinction gave one the impression that he was shady. He was not. He was tormented. Enthusiastically tormented. There was his enthusiasm for the affection of the two sisters. He sunned himself in it, congratulating himself on being adjacent to it.
‘I have a lovely family,’ he said.
But a cloud came over the sun. The sister-in-law had taken the whole family to Fouquet’s to dinner the night before their holiday.
‘I ought to have starved. Father starved when he was young.’ This theme returned.
‘I ought not to have gone into the bank.’ This lead on to ‘ruin’.
‘I could not ruin them.’
Looking for money in his wallet he found a photograph.
‘She’ – he showed me his wife’s picture; she was a slender young woman at that time – ‘could have had anything she wanted. I have ruined them already.’
There was remorse in this but out came the sun again, and his foot wagged faster and he hissed a tune and rolled his head from one side to the other, in time with it, happily. It was, I gathered, a kind of coup to have ‘ruined’ someone who was almost a Rooter, a liberation.
He said: ‘The Thousand Islands – ever heard of them? You haven’t head of the Thousand Islands? Well, whad d’ya know! On the St Lawrence – that’s where we spent our honeymoon. It took me six months to break the hymen. It all dates back to that – then the war – I was away. I came back. She wants something higher, Victor. She says I’m holding her back from God. Her sister’s the same. That’s my problem – I can’t make it. I’m not pure, Victor!’
He looked at me with dreadful appeal.
‘I sometimes undress and look at myself in the mirror. I get a funny pleasure out of looking at myself.’
‘Tolstoy used to do that,’ I said.
‘What – Tolstoy the writer?’ said Mr Shaves, amazed.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, whad d’ya know!’
He became furtive. ‘You know – the way my hair grows, everything about my body – interests me. I sometimes sit in a bus and imagine everybody there without a stitch on – nude. No kidding. I enjoy it. You say Tolstoy was like that?’
He sat like some steaming nudist beside me. He had put on weight in the last month or two, he said, his chest was over-developing; it worried him. Do men get like women? It was funny the pleasure you get from scratching your backside, almost like going to bed with a woman. That was why the Rooters got him into the bank: he’d got into a small touring company going to Detroit when he was sixteen and a girl in the company was very kind to him. The company was broke and she let him lie beside her, naked, in her room. No, he never touched her. They just looked at each other. Innocent. But the family found out and got him back to New York; he was too obviously following in father’s footsteps.
Mr Shaves, in confessions like these, would seem to swell. He was the Flesh, a man encumbered by his physical person. He saw the very pores of his skin through a kind of sensual magnifying glass: I often saw him hold up his hand and look at it with secretive wonder. Even in his walk, the roll of his gait, one could see he was bewildered by the obligation of carrying this warm throbbing load of flesh and tissues around, singing to himself as he went (I suppose), to distract his mind from it.
I sometimes saw Basil Shaves sitting at lunch-time with friends in one of the cafés on the Boulevard des Italiens. He had the gift of admiring his friends. He was casting himself for their lives. One day he called to me as I passed. I went to his table.
‘This is Victor, he’s a writer,’ he said.
I met a tall talkative Englishman, with sandy sidewhiskers, a military type; and a silent burly Frenchman. They said they were in the shellac trade. The Frenchman asked me, in French, what I was doing. Fatal question to a young man like me: I told him, at length.
‘Tell him about that office boy, and Mac. Go on,’ said Shaves. ‘Tell him about your father,’ Shaves said. I had an audience. The listening Englishman said to the Frenchman: ‘Just what we want, don’t you think?’ And to me: ‘Do you want a job?’
The Frenchman nodded. At the end of half an hour I found myself in the shellac trade at double my salary, employed as a commercial traveller. The minds of businessmen – as Walter Bagehot says – live in a sort of twilight: the Englishman had taken me on because he had read Maupassant; the Frenchman because I had never played Rugby football. He had been one of the first to introduce Rugby football to France.
The Englishman had been a Staff Officer during the war. He was a bookish man, a connoisseur of pictures and would-be Bohemian. His voice was icy and excitable. The Frenchman was dour and quiet.
The office – I was glad to find – was far from the despised Grands Boulevards, in the old Temple quarter on the edge of the Marais and the old bourgeois Paris of Balzac. It was in a small seventeenth-century building in the Rue Vieille du Temple. The staff were a grumpy French virgin who had been educated in an English convent and who soon needled me about the looseness of English morals; and a sad French salesman called Leger, an anxious, penny-counting man with a large family. He and the typist believed I was the son of a rich Englishman who had put money into the business and despised me. They were shocked by my light-headedness. He and the typist had a facility for hackneyed quotations. They talked like a French edition of the Reader’s Digest. When I told Leger about my writings he said – but with sinister overtones:
‘Le journalisme mène à tout.’
The girl said, with disapproval:
‘I see you are a follower of Montaigne rather than Pascal.’ She said that the English boss was going too far in discounting bills and putting unsold goods down to a varnish maker who had some connection with the firm; and by her look I saw she thought I was in the manoeuvre. Her tale was nonsense. The girl was in love with the boss who could not bear her. She tried to interest him by putting on a sulky look and saying men were always pinching her breasts in the Métro. I tried to smile away her sulks first of all; then I tried to dazzle. Another failure. I fell back on bickering; she liked that.
The job in the shellac and glue trade was very suited to me. It was more interesting than work at the photographer’s. I was out of the office all day, calling on ironmongers, paint makers, furniture shops and sealing-wax factories, all over Paris and the suburbs. The glue buyers would hold my sample of glue up to the light, they they would give it a lick as if it were toffee. ‘Yes, very good, but we’ve got plenty.’ I never sold any glue, but we had interesting conversations. I always carried a book with me; some wanted to know what it was, and it was surprising among these tradesmen to find how many had views on Balzac, Hugo, Dickens and so on. I had a pleasant afternoon with a sealing-wax man, chatting about Manon Lescaut, a tale that put me in an erotic daze; he bought nothing, but twelve years later, when I was a known writer, I came across my old boss in London. He had given up shellac in the 1929 crash and was running three pubs near Leicester Square, and told me that the sealing-wax man had become one of the firm’s best customers. I don’t think this was true: my boss had the romantic belief in his own intuitions. I scarcely tried at all, for I was writing on or two more sketches and thinking of nothing else. The typist and Leger were scornful when I came back without orders every day.
The opportunity to go, with a purpose, into innumerable streets and corners of Paris, particularly in the old part where the big middle-class houses had been chopped into rooms for tailors, printers, cabinet makers and all the petty trades – had for me the excitement of real travel. And, since I carried with me my little rustling samples of shellac, I felt I had a working right to be there. I strongly wanted to belong to his world of small trades. A man who made varnish became a human being to me. I would admire the way he fingered the flakes of shellac or studied my opal gum. My boss was an enthusiast and was sure that I was just the bright young man the business needed; so did the French Rugby player. They took me out to smart restaurants. In spite of the story of my violent difficulties with my father – for I was always talking about this – the boss, I found, had convinced himself that, handled the right way, my father would buy me a partnership in the firm: he saw money in me. Nothing could possibly have made me present my father as a man willing to pour out money on his son: rather the reverse. Like so many Englishmen, like myself indeed, the boss was a daydreamer. Carried away by what I told him, he instinctively reversed it to suit his dream. In time he saw there was no hope in me and he became doubtful. He was a hard-working man and was surprised that I would not work on Sundays.
Presently there was a disaster. Leger, the salesman, had had a temporary triumph. He had sold a large quantity of copal gum and he sat working out his commission to the last centime.
But the copal (it turned out), was adulterated with gravel and quantities of cinder and dust; there was a row. The stuff – tons of it – was returned to the yard of the varnish manufacturer near St Denis to be sorted. The salesman, who was nearly out of his mind, was told to sort the stuff and I had to work with him.
The week was hot. It was a long way to the factory, which was in a street that might have been painted by Utrillo. Leger told me to get there at seven in the morning. He was eager to get the job done. I managed to arrive on the first morning at half past seven, but the following days I found it hard to wake up and I was an hour or more late. The tons of gum were stacked in a yard against a wall and looked like a heap of grey marbles. Our task was to shovel the gum and pass it through sieves: a cindery dust fell through and often left large stones which we had to throw out. We sieved and shovelled until six or seven every evening. The dust choked us, sweat choked us and, all the time, Leger was muttering about the swindle and groaning about his commission which diminished with every shovelful. He groaned about his wife and family and the recklessness of the boss and sneered when I came late: ‘You don’t care. Your father’s a rich man.’ The drains of the neighbourhood had gone wrong and gangs were digging up the road for half a mile and the air was sour with the stink of cess. At midday we went to a rough restaurant where the road workers crowded in. We sat down at long tables. The labourers shouted and swore, swallowed their food and then, having drunk a bottle of wine apiece, fell asleep, some of them with their faces in their plates. They looked a savage lot, most of them, naked to the waist. There was one from Marseilles who bawled out the sailors’ word for red wine: Encore du pousse-au-crime.
Back to work we went in the long afternoons. At the end of the day, Leger and I stripped off our filthy shirts and went to the pump in the yard. I pumped water over Leger’s back and he pumped it over mine. One or two women from the factory came to jeer at us.
After a week of this the heap wasn’t much smaller. We got careless.
‘Leave the stones in,’ shouted Leger in a rage.
We got used to the jeering girls. Leger uttered a few well-known proverbs about women – not relevant to our situation. There were two or three more women every day and they came nearer to us. Their jeers became dirtier.
‘Want to push your trunk upstairs?’ a big one shouted at Leger.
‘Whore,’ shouted Leger.
It was a mistake. He had just stripped and was under the pump. The big woman strode forward, got a quick grip of his trousers at the back and pulled them down his thin, hairy legs, to his ankles. The women screamed with laughter. Leger thought I had done this and, blinded by water, grabbed a bucketful out of the trough and emptied it on me.
It soaked me and, seeing my state, one of the girls copied the big one, pounced on me from behind and the fat one pulled down my trousers too.
‘Look at his little toy,’ the big one called out.
The owner of the factory had heard the shouts and found Leger and me trying to pull our sodden trousers up. The women ran off.
Leger behaved badly about this. He was getting his revenge. We sat streaming and soaking in the bus back into Paris, which was crowded with workers.
‘They pulled his trousers off,’ he called out, indicating me to the passengers in the bus every now and then, as new passengers got in.
Worse, he told the boss, and said I had started the water-throwing. He said he would rather finish the job himself. I was always late.
‘What indecency,’ the typist hissed at me in the office. ‘Like all the English. I know what the English girls at the convent were like. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’
The boss had lost money on this transaction and saw that after all these months I had sold little. He said he would give me one more chance. He was buying a consignment of ostrich feathers and I was to sell them in the Faubourg St Honoré.
I felt insulted and mystified by this new job. Everything connected with the dress trade depressed me. I liked the dirtier occupations. But feathers! A world of women! The milliners and dressmakers, I found, always seemed to be at the top of high buildings. Some stout or waspish woman would either shut the door in my face or tell me no one used ostrich feathers any more now. One said cuttingly, ‘Go to the Folies Bergère.’ I gave up trying. Leger was sarcastic and so was the girl. The boss had forgotten his loss and had had a sudden success with shellac. ‘Nothing as usual?’ he said, with a short laugh, to me. A distant look came on to his face. He wondered why on earth I was there. I was sacked. He gave up ostrich feathers, too – the final insult.
I left the office frightened by my situation, but also in a temper. I trudged glumly a good deal of the way to the Boulevard St Germain where the lights were brighter, and suddenly I realized I was free. I had a month’s money in my pocket. I felt the abandon of the workless. My sexual instincts, distracted by the anxieties of having to earn my living, came undeniably alive. I made a reckless decision and the sight of Sacré-Coeur on its hill had a curious part in it. I have told how, when I first arrived in Paris, it seemed like some evil and exotic bird regarding the city with cynical eye and frightening. Now it frightened me no longer: I felt it connived with me. The erection symbolized one thing only and blatantly. I found myself looking into the windows of pharmacies. I was working up courage to buy a packet of contraceptives.
The bother was that I knew only the slang words for these objects. My first attempt was at a small shop of the shabby kind. The assistant came to the counter, but I was unable to speak to him because of his face. He had a red nose with white pimples on it; he looked sly and horrible; his condition (I imagined) being the result of some sexual disease. I quickly changed my mind and asked for a headache cachet and when I got outside I threw it into the street. I walked on looking for a larger, less unpleasantly intimate shop. The next shop had several women in it. I moved on. At last, after passing and repassing the door and making a cautious study of the assistants in a larger shop, I went in. They wore white coats and looked like an impersonal priesthood. But when one of the men asked me what I wanted my aggressiveness turned to nervousness. The French language became jumbled up in my head and vanished. I stammered out ‘French letters’. The young assistant was puzzled. I tried one or two more slang names in a voice that was scarcely a murmur. The assistant was mystified. Another and older assistant came up and said, ‘What is it for?’ In the state I was in I could not tell him, except in a way that was meaningless. He listened and then suddenly he said: ‘In the second drawer.’
