A Fairly Good Time Read online

  This is where I have been since last evening, she began all over again, trying to make some sort of story stand up for Philippe. I came home this morning from Renata’s by Métro (true) and I stopped in the rue du Bac to shop for food for our lunch (plausible). I have been shopping. That is what I have been up to for the last sixteen hours. I’ve got olives and anchovies and garlic sausage and two sorts of cheese . . . But no, because she had no money, not even a centime, and they would not have needed the anchovies because every second Sunday they went to Philippe’s mother’s for lunch. Today was a gala Sunday, with a gâteau St. Honoré fourteen inches high, studded all over with candied violets, stuffed with the very lightest cream until the cake seemed to float, all because Colette was safely home from her visit to New York. Colette, who was a hairdresser with an almost exclusively foreign clientele, had been taken there on the whim of a client who wanted her to show this woman’s coiffeur exactly how Colette had obtained a certain shade of russet brown—so Colette had explained to her mother. Shirley imagined the three Perrignys around the gâteau St. Honoré. Whenever she saw Philippe and his family together, even in her mind, she thought she had been meant to save him and that this was what their marriage was about. “I was afraid of becoming like Maman,” he had said once, which was alarming, for in his eyes his mother had no detestable qualities. Not long after their wedding Philippe had read Shirley’s future in the lines of her hand, which perhaps meant he had not been able to see it in his mind. She lay on a high hospital bed in Berlin and looked past him to a leathery sky. His back was to the window. He said that her head line was shallow and the fate line broken in two; it took up an uneven course a little after the break. A choppy life, an American life, he told her. She thought that he was attempting to make her pain seem inevitable because he felt responsible for it. He had dragged her across half of Europe in a Deux-Chevaux. He thinks he has caused the miscarriage, she said to herself. But it was an accident, both our faults. This wasn’t the reason why he married me. Was it?

  “Perhaps you had a religious crisis once, and that explains the break,” he said, not mocking her, but trying to find in her hand a subject she avoided. We have been abandoned was all she knew about the universe. She shook her head. “Or else it means you will do something foolish.” He pressed her fingers back until her arched palm resembled a leaf.

  “I may have done it, the foolish thing.”

  “You will forget it,” he said gently, thinking she spoke of today. “I see you with seven children.”

  “Good. So do I.” Why did he say he could see her and not himself? She could speak without weeping about her dead father, she never mentioned her dead young husband, she was not crying now, and so he believed that she cast sorrow off easily and that grief was a temporary arrangement of her feelings. He thought this to be an American fact which made for a comfortable existence, without memory and without remorse.

  She was not as careless as he seemed to want her to be: at least she knew what she dreaded. Her accident had shocked him. He felt culpable, but misunderstood what the feeling meant. She had considered Philippe invulnerable and, because he was accurate, superior to herself. None of the wretched friends she had received so willingly into her affections had ever known how unclean she thought them. Now she saw that Philippe was still learning: aged twenty-nine, he discovered that the best of days contain wicked surprises. Her easy sympathy, her quick good faith and ready remorse were going to be of no use to him. Obsessed with the hidden meaning of ideas, he still believed people to be as they seemed—worse, that they were as they had to be. He thought that secrecy of mind was essential and that attitudes of the heart were easily defined. She had expected him to build a house for her, intellectually and sentimentally, and invite her inside. But as it turned out, it was she who invited him. The housing shortage in Paris, which now spanned two docile generations, created rules: one of the partners was supposed to provide an establishment. Two homeless persons simply never married. Philippe left his sister and his mother for an apartment where there was plenty of space but no room for anyone but Shirley. She made a place for his clothes by flinging her own across chairs, and they might have stayed there forever if Philippe had not put them back where they belonged.

  •

  The day moved: she dragged her iron park chair a few inches out of shadow. She remembered you had to pay to sit down in parks in Paris, and wondered what she would say when the slut with her paper tickets came by. She read, “There is no night in heaven, for the angels are never tired of singing, and they never wish to sleep. They are never sick, and they will never die.” Each time the story she was composing for Philippe touched on the truth, it became improbable. Who would ever believe that her mother’s oldest friend, Mrs. Cat Castle, had refused to lend Shirley so much as bus fare? Perhaps Philippe was right and it was best to imagine other people only as they ought to be. Shirley would then be described by any of the Perrignys to survive her as naive, puritanical and alcoholic, for in their eyes that was the North American makeup. At least it was explicit; she had no firm picture of anyone. Early this morning, dragging her way home after the long night at Renata’s, she had caught sight of herself in a charcutier’s plate-glass window. She expected to see the face of someone easily exploited (how reliable Geneviève’s mirrors turned out to be!) but the reflection said, “This is what you are like,” and gave her back ruthlessly. Also, she was absurd. The belt of her macintosh trailed. On a glowing June morning she was prepared for rain and for night. Not caring for this memory, she rearranged it, and had herself proceeding up the rue du Bac adequately clothed and as daunting as her sister-in-law Colette. She backed up and saw the street from a distance. Across the road, pursuing Shirley in a bumbling sort of fashion, came a melancholy follower, a Turgenev hero with undone shoestrings. Properly managed it could take up to twelve minutes of any boring European movie. For an American film either of the two would have to be screaming. She laughed, and one of the children crouched at her feet thought she was mocking him. He tried to cover whatever he had been tracing in the dirt, but his hands were too small. He had drawn a lion or a sphinx with large feet; his creature was wearing boots. He said to Shirley, “It’s a gentleman.”

  “I knew that,” she answered. “I could tell because of the boots.”

  I was wearing those plastic boots from Canada, she would say to Philippe. I had the raincoat your sister has described as looking like part of a Boche uniform. We had all been promised a weekend of rain a few hours earlier, but as always I was the only person in Paris who had taken the forecast to heart. I was dressed for one or two events that never took place. You had said I shouldn’t wear the macintosh because it was dirty. But you wouldn’t let me give it to anyone, which would have been so easy and sensible! No, you advised me to take it to a cleaner’s and have it dipped in embalming fluid.

  My mother wrote, “If you marry him two things will always separate you—hygiene, because he is bound to be unwashed, and a way of considering worldly goods, because he is sure to be stingy.” Wide of the mark. I think so. What now? Cross the park. Walk home. Find some money. Where? James, of course. My neighbor, James Chichalides. Philippe will be furious. All right, she said to Philippe. I can’t keep on apologizing. I know you think my friends are trashy and I suppose they are; but where are yours? Another thing my mother wrote was, “Remember, they have no friends.” You’ve got Geneviève, but I have never seen her. There is Hervé. School together, military service, Algeria together, but now you have wives and your wives pull you apart. I could describe a Geneviève, though I haven’t seen one, but how to describe a Hervé? Hervé wouldn’t know his own name if it weren’t typed on a card and stamped by the police. He doesn’t look in a mirror—he looks at an identity photo. If the police have sworn that face is Hervé, then of course it must be. If the police couldn’t see him then he would either be invisible or he’d be somebody else. I have done something foolish, she said to Philippe. You said in Berlin I would. You saw
it in my hand.

  •

  It stood to reason that all of her telephone calls could not be imaginary. In the shuttered living room she dialed his mother’s number. The exchange (Galvani) conjured up heartless streets and dentists’ wives wearing gloves as they lined up at bus stops. Colette answered and said, “Oh, it is you,” with a new rasp to her English. She let Shirley ramble, or chatter, for a minute or two before breaking in with, “Dear Shirley, don’t have the bother to come now unless you are hungry. I am tired after my journey and I am going to bed. Maman is resting. We are all tired here. Why are you sorry? Sorry about what? But no, but no. A friend of your mother’s is equally important. No, Philippe has not gone to Le Miroir at all. He will not be working. That I can tell you without error. Wait, please, he says to me . . . no, he says that he says nothing. Furious? Even not. What dramatic language you use. Apologize for what? No need, no reason, so please stop. I must leave you now. That is it. I leave you. Good-bye. Shirley, please say good-bye, it is simpler than so much apology. Now I leave you. I hang up.”

  She could smell his cigarettes and something resembling the scent of her mother’s house, which was of herbs drying, apples, dark books and camphor. She was smiling, as if the conversation with Colette had been something of a joke. In the bedroom the spider had vanished, but here was a reminder that Shirley had friends. She had to hold James Chichalides’ letter close to her eyes because someone had told him once that a tiny hand was the sign of an intellectual. As she had guessed, it was an invitation to a party. “Bring anyone,” he wrote, as if Philippe were anyone. His first message to her, almost two years ago, had pleaded, “Your records drown out my radio. Don’t you think such noisy neighbors should get together?” He liked writing in English, which he spoke haughtily. “Donhent yo thenk?” was how he would have read his own phrase aloud. She remembered how often she had climbed two winding flights, always in search of something. Pressing the doorbell (chimes) she would remember that today was Sunday, that Paris was empty, and all the Saturday parties were over.

  •

  James answered the door, sure of himself and sly, smiling with his head down, and she thought, as when she had first seen him, “Black fox.” She held out his letter. “All right, I’m here,” she said. “But you ought to stop addressing letters just to me. Philippe doesn’t understand things like that. That’s partly what I came up to tell you.”

  He took the letter and stuffed it in his blazer pocket as if he intended to use it again. His front door opened straight onto a living room in which two fair-haired girls sat with their shoes kicked off and a heaped amber ashtray between them. On a card table were a tray of drinks and the remains of a large untidy breakfast.

  “We were expecting you last night, Madame Perrigny,” said Rose O’Hara, rising to meet her. “James said he gave the invitation to your husband. I told him it wasn’t tactful to address it to you.”

  “Philippe never comes,” said James, “so why bother?”

  “He hates parties,” Shirley said.

  “I know,” said Rose. “And we bore him. I’m sorry.”

  She and Shirley, comfortable in each other’s presence, smiled, excluding the others. Rose was tall and awkward. Her mouth was large, her skirts too long, and she wore her soft, floppy hair Gin Lane style, held with combs, pins and even what seemed to be bits of string. Once, sitting on the edge of James’s bathtub, Shirley had watched Rose hopelessly trying to fasten the limp strands, and she had listened while Rose told her that there were not enough men to go around, that clever men chose stupid women because of their restful qualities, and that anyone left over was subaltern. She meant James and herself; that was what Rose was talking about. But Shirley had taken it as a reference to Philippe, and she understood that she was the uninteresting girl keeping an intelligent person out of the hands of a woman more suited to him. She said she was sorry, to which Rose replied, “Oh, you needn’t feel sorry for me.”

  The second blond girl, who had kept her eyes closed until now, as if hoping to be surprised, suddenly opened them. “Oh, a woman,” she said, in a light German accent. “Why not a man, finally?”

  “You mean you couldn’t hear me?” Shirley said.

  “It is Sunday, my dear, and Madame Perrigny has dropped by for an aperitif,” James said, trying to provoke a new decorum. He stared at the girl as if to say, Don’t do anything that can shock Madame Perrigny or frighten her away.

  “James, are you and Rose adopting children again?” Shirley said. “You’re going to be in the most horrible trouble one of these days.”

  “What you have just said is not interesting,” said James. He had a long nose and slightly troubled skin, as if he had scratched at chickenpox. His hair gleamed like a freshly washed blackboard; his hands had been given middle-class European care, which meant their owner did not wish to be thought of as someone who had ever had to change a tire. He moved in this atmosphere of women like a bird in air. “What nationality would you think I was, if you didn’t know?” he asked Shirley.

  They must have been debating this when Shirley rang the bell. He wanted to be taken for something he was not, but what was he? “That Greek upstairs,” was what Philippe called him. To Shirley, “Greek” took in everything at the other end of the Mediterranean. Greeks, Turks, Egyptians and Lebanese were to be encountered at large cocktail parties with smart, dark wives covered in lamé and Chanel pearls. When a group formed and drifted out to eat supper somewhere, the Greek or the Turk always was along to pay the check. He never seemed to feel slighted; all he wanted was to be seen, with his wife, paying for a crowd of strangers in an expensive place: but seen by whom? Concentrating on James, whom she knew well—perhaps, in a sense, better than Philippe—and on Athens, which she had never visited, she cast up “Byron” but could get no further. James’s French had been inculcated by a self-exiled provincial schoolmaster. He sounded like those stateless Egyptians who always replied, when asked what they were, “My culture is French; I have read Racine.” James’s clothes were English, but so flawless that they could only have come from a Merrie England boutique on the continent. At least James has a name, she thought: the Lebanese banker or the Alexandrian lawyer ordering champagne for twelve strangers never tells his name, or no one asks.

  “I’d say you looked sort of French-English,” she said.

  He lifted a hand as if to bless her. Sunlight poured into the room. “More French, or more English?”

  Thinking of Philippe, she said, “More English.”

  “There,” said James to the other two. “She knows.”

  “You hate them because of Cyprus, you said, and because they never did anything for the Christian community,” the German girl complained.

  “It is true,” said James. “They built playing fields and encouraged young boys to wear baggy gray shorts and never to change their underwear and to run round and round to no purpose, but other than that they did nothing for the Christian community. I agree. Everyone hates them. Everyone likes being mistaken for them.”

  “Oh, James, I don’t think so,” Shirley said. “Not any more. Perhaps in hot countries. Even there . . .”

  “Not in one cold country I could mention,” said mild Rose fiercely. She stood up and shook ash from her skirt. “Give Madame Perrigny a cigarette, James, instead of standing there preening and embarrassing her with questions.”

  James saw Rose out as far as the landing; Shirley could hear a whispered quarrel.

  “She had missed Mass this morning,” the German girl explained. “Now she had gone to her own home to pray and to have a bath. She will not use James’s bathtub.”

  “Does he still keep books in the clothes hamper?”

  “Only The Whip Angels now. We know it by heart. It was written by a very moral lady who had seen strange things in her youth. The English is without fault.”

  “Was her name Miss Thule?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Does James read aloud to you or do you read in
turn?”

  “Why? You think he is not like other people? Oh, it is not so, I assure you. Er nimmt schon Frauen, aber es muss doch immer einer dabei sein.” She spoke scornfully, with her head tossed back, as though copying James. When she slipped into German, she evoked the thick white stockings and buckled shoes, the laced bodice and the petticoats of a postcard costume. It was nearly a dialect; for Frauen she had said something close to vrown and Shirley had not at first understood what she meant. “We have all slept here because it was so late after the party,” the girl continued, “and we are believably tired.”

  “You mustn’t tell me things about Rose,” Shirley said.

  “I am telling you of myself,” said the girl. She repeated her own name—it sounded as if it might be Crystal Lily. In her mind Shirley corrected it to “Christel.” “You have nice hair,” said Crystal Lily, presently.

  “Have I? My husband won’t think so when he sees it. I cut it with someone’s nail scissors around three o’clock this morning.”

  The girl was slightly offended. “I have often been told I have nice hair.” She paused, accustomed to some tradition of reciprocal compliments: none came. “So has James,” she said presently. “Very nice natural hair. Rose used to admire his decadent Roman head, as it is called, though he is without error a Greek. Now she is tired. Every evening he goes to her after work. After her work. We do not know James to work. He carries an English newspaper, which he inspects, and a bottle of wine which he will not let her put on ice, though she is made sick at heart by warm wine. She will not drink it warm, so he drinks it all. He says, ‘A gentleman looks after the drink.’ This is said to be English. Rose buys a chicken already roasted and frozen peas. James can eat a whole camembert. Rose dislikes the smell, and she has to leave the table. They make love à l’Américaine; at first it was so as to save time, but now she has taken advice from her father, and she will no more. And so she prays, and she has several baths a day.