A Fairly Good Time Read online

  “Forget what you owe me,” Shirley said. “I wouldn’t come all the way back here just for money. I don’t even know where I am. Never mind about the taxi. Forget everything.”

  “Taxi?” a voice cried. “Did Claudie ask for a taxi?”

  “Papa will give you the money,” said Claudie, undisturbed. “But until he has seen you for himself he will never believe my story.”

  Claudie’s mother held on to her gold brooch as if her strength were drawn from it. She said, “It is impolite to oblige madame to collect a debt. The money Claudie owes will be returned by post. How much is it?”

  “Oh, hardly anything,” said Claudie. “But I would like my friend to come back.”

  “No, it is wrong,” said the mother. Her facial tic became so strong now that it prevented her from speaking for a moment or two. She said, “Claudie has your address?”

  “Naturally,” said Claudie. “How could I not know where my friend lives?”

  “Then, Claudie, accompany madame to the bus stop.”

  “A taxi,” said the other voice, nearer now. “When I think that the tart rides in taxis. Bobby might have been sick.”

  The mother spoke quickly, in confidence: “And I would like it if you are free, and if you would consent to it, if we could—no, if you could—come here to lunch with us next Sunday. Then you will meet my husband and all that will be civilized.”

  Silence filled the stairwell. A man’s voice broke it with, “That’s courage.” A judge wearing heavy shoes was descending slowly.

  When Marie-Thérèse’s face came into view it was stiff with authority. A few steps above the group of three she halted until they were looking up at her, faces tilted at the respectful angle she evidently needed and desired. “Now, Maman,” she began, as though dealing with a moody child. “Gérald cannot give this young lady the sum she says Claudie owes her . . .”

  “I haven’t said anything,” Shirley objected.

  “. . . Because if Gérald does so he will never get a franc of it back from Papa. Papa will say more fool you, and there it will end. And we have four children. Claudie must confess to Papa and apologize and see what he will be willing to contribute. As for madame, she will not want a meal with a family she doesn’t know.”

  “No one asked you that!” Claudie cried.

  “No one,” said the mother to herself, as if she were describing herself too. The backwash of this would overwhelm her.

  Shirley’s alarm at the sight of Marie-Thérèse—those eyes!—had driven her around Maman and thus nearer the door to the street. “That part wouldn’t have bothered me,” she said earnestly. “About not knowing the family, I mean. But my husband is away and I have quite a lot to do at home. I have to put away all our winter clothes and get out the summer ones.”

  They stared—they were astonished. The invitation had been a means of saving face, a version of having good manners: Claudie has a debt, it is bad of her, but this woman is a careless stranger and if the debt is written off through a sham invitation no one will mind. The mother once had known of another system of behavior, but it had been washed away. It was almost with coldness that Claudie’s mother addressed Shirley in the third person: “Madame must do as she likes.” The three looked at Shirley as though she had been annoying them, interrupting, asking for advice or a job or a place to live. First she had been a help, then a curiosity, then finally an intruder.

  •

  Claudie caught up with Shirley. She still carried Bobby’s leash and hit at trees with it. “Don’t run, you will stumble,” Claudie said. “I can see you aren’t used to walking. You drive a car.”

  “I used to. But I saw an accident once, and it scared me. I might be over it now, but my husband drives and so I never have a chance to find out.”

  “I hate living far from the center of Paris,” said Claudie. She waved the leash at stucco villas, billboards masking vacant lots, odd, lost little houses with late spring gardens. “All this is going,” she said, “and then it might be better out here. There is a magnificent supermarket nearby. My mother has looked through the door. She hasn’t had enough courage to go inside and begin helping herself. She is afraid she will be accused of stealing.”

  On the rim of a traffic circle, contradictory signs directed them back to Paris. Claudie maneuvered into the queue waiting at a bus stop. “Any bus here takes you anywhere,” she said, quite sure of herself. “Now you know my name and where I live. Claudie Maurel. When you come to lunch next Sunday I shall come and fetch you at your home.”

  “I didn’t say I would come.”

  “Yes, you must. It will make Marie-Thérèse so angry when she sees you again! I can hardly wait to see her face. Will your husband still be traveling?”

  “That’s what I don’t know,” said Shirley.

  When a bus drew up, the queue broke and became a crowd. Everyone except Shirley carried babies or shopping bags filled with branches and flowers. “Priorities! Priorities!” the conductor called. Important cards in plastic holders flashed under his nose, signifying that the holder had a great many children or had been wounded in any of several wars. Shirley let herself be carried forward until she felt a tug on her arm.

  “Let it go,” said Claudie. “I have something else to say to you. The next bus will be empty.”

  “That’s not how it works!” Shirley shook free too late.

  “I want to tell you,” said Claudie, impassively watching the bus depart, “that my father paid fifteen million francs for that apartment, but he hardly ever lets me buy a new toothbrush.”

  A few minutes later Claudie, who was stuck to the day like a postage stamp, followed Shirley into a taxi. Seine, Eiffel Tower and deep sunlight flashed out of the late afternoon. Claudie said, “I felt I had borne a child for them. Marie-Thérèse has four boys but she keeps them to herself. My parents took mine, and he must not be brought up as she was or I was. Do you see why? Did you hear Marie-Thérèse? I am the other kind of product of that upbringing, and I am not proud of myself, believe me. I would do anything to get away, but I have no money. They never let me study anything. When I was pregnant my father wouldn’t hear of an abortion, but afterward my mother reproached me for not having had one on the quiet. She said she and my father need never have known. Even if they had known, we could have pretended I wanted the abortion money for something else. We could all have played a game. I was seventeen.”

  Shirley said, “Why do you live with these dreadful people? Why have anything to do with them?”

  “Why, they are my family,” said Claudie, staring at Shirley, “What funny questions!”

  “When you are unhappy anywhere with anyone, family or not, you walk away and never look back.” Shirley believed every word she was saying at that moment.

  “I never minded for myself,” said Claudie. “Now I mind for Alain.”

  “Take him away. Work.”

  “Yes, I shall work,” said Claudie passionately. “Doing what?”

  “I’ll think of something,” Shirley said, as her own mother had often said before her to any number of Claudies.

  In the courtyard of her house she suddenly remembered she had not paid for the taxi. When she came back to the street it had disappeared. She supposed that the driver and Claudie would come to some sort of an arrangement. Claudie, who seemed lazy and helpless, was clearly more competent than Shirley in some domains. She thought that she and the girl were alike; both of them probably denied all experience unless it hinged on chance and chance encounters.

  •

  Philippe had not returned. From the kitchen doorway Shirley considered the stacked dishes, the frying pan and the stove, which was buried under casseroles and saucepans. “I don’t mind helping with the dishes,” Philippe had once said. “We both have more important things to do, so these inferior tasks can be shared. I do not consider women lower in quality than men.”

  “Neither do I.” Mrs. Norrington’s daughter was quite astonished at the suggestion that anyone m
ight. She did not dare ask what the “more important things” were. He seemed to imagine that she was gifted but overly modest. He often said that his own work bored him and that he was repeating himself. The magazine that employed him wasted his energies, exploited his intelligence, blunted his reasoning powers.

  If that were true, then they were both exhausting themselves in the wrong activities, Shirley said. She did not enjoy keeping track of laundry and making certain there was enough butter for each day’s breakfast. Perhaps they ought to make a change.

  “Change what? You mean that you want me to shop and cook while you work for us both? You haven’t yet shown what you can do, except for your funny little jobs here and there.” He teased her, laughing, and because of the teasing she became mean-spirited and decided it was impossible to talk to a man who took everything literally.

  She tried again. “I meant change everything. Go away from here. Change flats, for instance.”

  “That is the paint-the-kitchen theory about marriage,” he said. “When we have painted the kitchen everything will be better.” When, not long after that, she began to paint the kitchen and he refused to help, which was unlike him, she remembered this conversation.

  6

  BECAUSE of the system of numbering houses in Paris, where a collective address sometimes took up half the block, Shirley’s friends never could find her the first time they called on her. The double doors leading to the courtyard were closed and looked as if they had never been unlocked. There was no concierge to guide anyone: the squalid quarters of the last of these had been fumigated a year ago and turned into the office of a Japanese importer. A blue-and-white plaque reading “44” seemed to belong only to Madame Roux’s brica-brac antique store. Visitors inevitably would blunder into the wrong building, lose themselves up the wrong urine-smelling staircase, and be driven back to the street by a guardian like a cloud of wasps. Madame Roux was then careful how she chose to answer the pitiful, “Is this number forty-four? I mean, is it the real forty-four? Because there seem to be a couple of others.”

  If the stranger were French, or for any other reason unlikely to be bullied easily, Madame Roux would send him away with clear instructions about doors, stairs and light switches; but when the visitor had the manner both she and Philippe described as “Anglo-Saxon,” and that combined, in their eyes, extreme ignorance and a total absence of charm, she would smile before she replied. The smile, men had told Shirley, informed the stranger he was in the presence of a true woman. A true woman was one who could tend a shop eleven hours on end without showing fatigue and still have time to wander about the museums, climb up to the top of the Arch of Triumph to take in the view, and spend the rest of the day in the many picturesque markets of her beloved city. She would return from her excursions with a kilo of peas, a bunch of marigolds, and a large drum of detergent for washing socks—the stranger’s, if he were lucky. Her nature was a unique mosaic of art, thrift and sensuous generosity. She would shell the peas while talking wisely and amusingly, and when she took someone home to bed it was always for his sake and never her own. The Anglo-Saxon world, devoid of such women, was headed for nothing but sterility and defeat—so Shirley’s friends said.

  Madame Roux had great hips and fragile wrists. She wore a soft cardigan draped on her shoulders and she knotted the empty sleeves while she talked. She favored turquoise, to bring out the color of her eyes, but had thought of switching to something safer after having read that the sight of blue inspired the Japanese to rape. The Japanese importer had the habit of parking his car in front of her shop, and she wondered if he was not hoping for quick voyeur pleasures every time he glanced at the windows. She was tolerant of men but did not wish to give satisfaction to an Oriental. Explaining this, she would slip her hand inside her blouse and absently stroke the skin between her shoulder and breast.

  “You may go straight through the shop and out the back,” she would tell those friends of Shirley’s she had elected. “Yes, behind the bead curtain—you will find a door to the courtyard. My shop is not a public highway, but for Mrs. Higgins what wouldn’t one permit?” (Even after her marriage to Philippe, Shirley remained to most people “Mrs. Higgins.” It was a name that suited her, whereas “Perrigny” seemed merely borrowed.) Madame Roux aspirated the “H”—she had somewhere in her past entertained an English husband or lover. Her short fair hair was reddish at the roots. She smoked a long Pall Mall that moved when she talked. She buttoned the blouse where it had slipped open at the straining point and murmured, “Mrs. Higgins is my friend. Oh, don’t bother looking at the silly treasures I keep to sell. They are not for such connoisseurs as you.” She hugged herself, pressed her arms under the loose sweater, and watched the connoisseur bump against a tray heaped with crystal bottle tops that rolled everywhere. She did not put out a hand to save the toppling books that were labeled “For Decoration” and that were sold by the meter. She laughed, as if her shop and her livelihood were nothing worth speaking of.

  “But I am interested,” the victim would protest. “You’ve got some lovely—euh—stuff here.” In terror and embarrassment his hand would settle on a decayed pincushion or a disgusting mouse nest of a purse worked by a Victorian child. “A present for you,” the friend would tell Shirley later. “I dropped into that store downstairs to look around. She’s got some interesting . . .”

  “Yes, I know. Thanks a lot.”

  At the beginning Madame Roux had not trusted Philippe. It had seemed evident to her that any Frenchman who chose to marry a foreign widow of modest income, of no great beauty, settled outside her own country for no apparent reason, must himself be a swindler or a fraud. When Shirley had said months before, “He wants to marry me,” Madame Roux had answered, “Are you sure he is French?” Then she said, “Does he think you own your apartment?” That seemed important. Did he know it was a mere rental, a warren of short halls broken by doors leading nowhere? The bedroom was on a court and never saw sunlight except for ten minutes on certain June mornings. The bathroom, large as a drawing room, had a fine view over a convent garden but it was virtually unheatable. The kitchen and the lavatory were separated by a partition that did not reach all the way to the ceiling, and the doors to both yawned in the entrance hall except when Philippe was there to keep them shut. A rotten scruff of carpets and curtains enabled the place to be called “furnished,” which meant only that the tenant could be expelled at the landlord’s liking.

  Shirley had paid eight hundred and fifty dollars for the use of these mothy draperies before she was allowed to set foot in the place. She had inherited the flat from a girl at NATO, who had used it as the base for a miserable love affair. It was considered an unlucky place to live; but to Shirley it was simply one more apartment set apart for foreigners who would pay any rent asked, who never demanded or were given a lease, and were often expected to swear to the police (as a favor to the landlord, for the sake of his income tax) that the flat was not rented at all but had merely been lent as a favor. Shirley had never known who the proprietor might be, and had never inquired. Like her predecessor, the NATO girl, she slipped her rent inside an envelope each month—in cash, again out of delicate concern for the unknown landlord’s income tax—and gave it to Madame Roux, who was kind enough to pass it on. The sole information Shirley had ever obtained was that the owner was a woman; the only name she had seen was a scrawled signature that might have been either “Curlew” or “Coulan.” Shirley imagined her landlady to be old, eccentric, avaricious, obese, half-crippled and chauffeur-driven. Once she had decided this, she accepted it as the sole possibility and thought of it no more.

  Madame Roux’s obsession with Philippe’s motives drove her to nag at Shirley: Shirley must never quit the apartment overnight, for that was known as leaving the domicile and it meant that Philippe could put her out if he so wished.

  “But I don’t want to know about things like that,” Shirley protested. “The less you know, the less can happen.”

  When Mada
me Roux next discovered that Shirley did not understand what a marriage contract was about or what was involved in a separation of property agreement, she slid low in her chair and sank her head in her hands. This was not one of her mocking gestures, but a sign of true, feminine desperation.

  At first Philippe had been just as suspicious of Madame Roux, and there had been some snobbery in his attitude, which Shirley minded. It made her want to seem fonder than ever of her friend, as if Shirley’s affection could increase Madame Roux’s stature. She protested that Madame Roux was useful: now that there was no longer a concierge, Madame Roux was obliging about taking in parcels, signing for registered letters, and directing visitors. Philippe replied that she was a busybody and a presumptuous bore and probably in the pay of the police. Shirley then admitted that Madame Roux was an intermediary between herself and Mademoiselle Curlew or Coulan. She meant that to be a clinching argument; instead it sent him downstairs to the shop intending to have a menacing interview with this undeclared agent and informer. He emerged from the interview her admirer for life. He too now spoke of Madame Roux as “a complete woman,” as if other women had parts missing. He said that she knew how to be a good friend and a clever businesswoman and still retain her feminine nature and her respect for men.

  “You mean she knows her place?”

  Yes, that was what Philippe meant. He thought it was a complimentary thing to say about Madame Roux, though he might have found it a vulgar remark applied to a servant.

  He began dropping into the shop and Madame Roux brewed her endless supply of Nescafé for him. Like Shirley, and gradually replacing Shirley—though neither of them quite realized it at first—he sat with Madame Roux behind the bead curtain at the back of the shop. From here one could see the door without being seen, and it gave the guest a feeling of being slightly more privileged than an ordinary customer. Sometimes the two Perrignys and Madame Roux were all three together, and then Shirley watched the others as though lip-reading. Philippe was no longer a man she had ever known intimately and Madame Roux had never said, “What he wants is the apartment.” They talked about Shirley as if she were their child.