Little Jewel

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EACH DAY I had to go over to the Bois de Boulogne district, to the home of some rich people whose daughter I looked after. I’d landed the job one afternoon when, as a last resort, I fronted up at the Taylor Agency, an employment agency that I chose at random from the pages of a telephone directory.

A red-headed man with a moustache and wearing a glen plaid suit showed me into a dark-panelled office. He told me to take a seat. I found the courage to tell him that it was the first time I’d tried out for this sort of job.

‘Don’t you want to continue with your studies?’

His question took me aback. I told him I wasn’t enrolled in any course.

‘When I saw you come in, I assumed you were a student.’

He pronounced the word with such respect that I wondered what wonderful things it evoked for him and I was truly sorry that I wasn’t a student.

‘I might have a job for you — three hours a day — a babysitting job.’

I immediately had the impression that no one ever made an appointment at the Taylor Agency and that this redheaded man spent long, lonely afternoons sitting at his desk, daydreaming about female students. On one of the walls, to my left, was a large sign on which were precisely drawn pictures of men dressed as maître d’s and as chauffeurs, and of women in what looked like nannies’ and nurses’ uniforms. On the bottom of the sign, written in large black letters: THE ANDRÉ TAYLOR AGENCY.

He smiled at me. He told me that the sign was from his father’s era and that I would certainly not need to wear a uniform. The people who were to interview me lived near Neuilly and were looking for someone to take care of their little girl each afternoon.

The first time I went to their place, it was a rainy day in November. I hadn’t slept the night before and I wondered what they would think of me. The man at the agency had said they were quite young, and he’d given me a piece of paper with their name and address: Valadier, 70 Boulevard Maurice-Barrès. It had been raining all morning; it made me want to leave my room, leave Paris. As soon as I had a bit of money, I would head for the Midi, or even further, down south. I tried to hang on to this plan, and not let myself sink into despair. I had to tread water, be patient. The only reason I contacted the Taylor Agency was as a last-ditch effort to persevere. Otherwise, I would never have had the courage to leave my room or my bed.

I could still picture the sign on the wall of the agency. The red-headed man would have been shocked if I had told him that I would not have minded wearing a nanny’s uniform or, especially, a nurse’s uniform. A uniform would have helped me to summon my courage and my endurance, the way a corset helps you to walk with an upright posture. In any case, I had no choice. Until then, I’d only been lucky enough to find two temporary jobs as a salesgirl, first at the department store Les Trois Quartiers, and then in a perfume shop on the Grands Boulevards. The Taylor Agency might find me a more secure job. But I had no illusions about my chances. I was not a performer like my mother had been. When I lived in Fossombronne-la-Forêt, I used to work at the Auberge Verte on the Grande-Rue. A lot of customers frequented this hotel, often people from Paris. My work was not very demanding: I was either at the bar, or in the dining room, or sometimes at reception. Every evening in winter, I used to light the fire in the little wood-panelled room near the bar, where you could read the papers or play cards. I worked there until I was sixteen.

The rain had stopped by the time I entered the metro at Place Blanche. I got out at Porte Maillot and was filled with dread. I knew this neighbourhood. I told myself that I must have dreamed about visiting these people for the first time. So now I was living what I had dreamed: the metro and the walk to their house, and that was why I had the sensation of déjà vu. Boulevard Maurice-Barrès ran alongside the Bois de Boulogne and, as I continued walking, the sensation grew stronger and stronger until I became alarmed. But then I wondered if I wasn’t in fact dreaming. I pinched my arm, I hit my forehead with the palm of my hand in an effort to wake up. Sometimes I knew I was in a dream, that I was in danger, but that none of it was really serious because I could wake myself up at any moment. One night, I’d been condemned to death — it was in England and I was to be hanged the following morning — and they’d taken me to my cell, but I was completely calm, I smiled at them, I knew I was going to give them the slip and wake up in the bedroom on Rue Coustou.

I had to go through a metal gate and down a gravel path. I rang the doorbell at number 70, which looked like a mansion. A blonde woman greeted me and told me that her name was Madame Valadier. She seemed embarrassed to say ‘madame’, as if the word didn’t apply to her but she was obliged by circumstances to use it. Later, when the fellow from the Taylor Agency asked me, ‘So, how did you find Monsieur and Madame Valadier?’ I said, ‘They’re a nice couple.’ He seemed surprised by my response.

They were both about thirty-five. He was tall, dark-haired, with a gentle voice, and quite elegant; his wife was ash-blonde. They sat next to each other on the couch, as self-conscious as I was. It was as if they were camping out in the huge living room on the first floor where — apart from the couch and an armchair — there was not a stick of furniture. Nor were there any paintings on the white walls.

That afternoon, the little girl and I went for a short walk on the other side of the avenue, along the paths near the Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park. She was silent the whole time, but she seemed to trust me, as if this were not the first time we had gone walking together. I, too, had the feeling that I knew her well and that we had been down these paths together before.

Back at the house, she wanted to show me her bedroom, a large room on the second floor that looked out over the trees of the Jardin d’Acclimatation. From the wood panelling and the two built-in glass cabinets on either side of the fireplace, I assumed that it had once been a living room or a study, but never a child’s bedroom. Her bed wasn’t a child’s bed, either, but was broad with upholstered surrounds. Ivory chess pieces were displayed in one of the glass cabinets. No doubt the upholstered bed and the chess pieces were in the house when the Valadiers moved in, along with other items the previous tenants had forgotten or didn’t have time to pack up.

The little girl did not take her eyes off me. Perhaps she wanted to know what I thought. Finally, I said, ‘You’ve got plenty of room here,’ and she nodded without much conviction. Her mother came in. She said they’d only been living in the house for a few months, but she didn’t say where they’d been before that. The little girl went to a school close by, in Rue de la Ferme, and I was to collect her every afternoon at half past four. I must have said, ‘Yes, Madame.’ At once, a wry smile lit up her face. ‘Don’t call me Madame. Call me…Véra.’ She hesitated, as if she had invented the name. Earlier, when she greeted me, I had taken her to be English or American; I now realised she had a Parisian accent, one that, in old novels, is described as working class.

‘Véra is a very nice name,’ I said.

‘Do you think so?’

She switched on the lamp on the bedside table and said, ‘There’s not enough light in this room.’

The little girl, lying on the parquet floor, at the base of one of the cabinets, was leaning on her elbows and solemnly turning the pages of a school exercise book.

‘It’s not very convenient,’ she explained. ‘We need to find her a study so she can do her homework.’

I had the same impression as I had earlier, when they talked to me in the living room: the Valadiers were camping out in this house.

She clearly noticed my surprise, because she continued, ‘I don’t know whether we’ll be staying here for long. As a matter of fact, my husband doesn’t like the furniture.’

She offered that wry smile again and asked where I lived. I told her that I had found a room in what had once been a hotel.

‘Oh yes…we lived in a hotel, too, for a long time.’

She wanted to know what area I lived in.

‘Near Place Blanche.’

‘Oh, that’s where I grew up,’ she said, with a slight frown. ‘I lived on Rue de Douai.’

At that instant, she resembled one of those aloof, blonde American women who star in thrillers; I thought her voice was dubbed — exactly like being at the cinema — and was surprised to hear her speaking French.

‘On my way home from the Lycée Jules-Ferry, I used to walk around the block and go through Place Blanche.’ She hadn’t been back to the neighbourhood for a long time. For many years, she had lived in London. That’s where she had met her husband.

The little girl was no longer taking any notice of us. She was still lying on the floor, writing in a different exercise book, without faltering, completely absorbed by her task. ‘She’s doing her homework,’ said Madame Valadier. ‘You’ll see…at seven, her handwriting is almost that of an adult.’

It was dark, and yet it was barely five o’clock. Silence everywhere, the same silence I had known at Fossombronne-la-Forêt, at the same time of day and at the same age as the little girl. I suspect that, at that age, I, too, had an adult’s handwriting. I got into trouble because I stopped using a fountain pen, and wrote with a ballpoint instead. Out of curiosity, I checked what the little girl was using: a ballpoint. At her school, in Rue de la Ferme, they probably allowed students to use Bic pens with transparent tips and black, red or green lids. Did she know how to do capital letters? In any case, I doubted they still taught edged-pen lettering.

They took me back to the ground floor. On the left, a double door opened onto a large empty room, at the end of which was a desk. Monsieur Valadier was sitting on the corner of the desk, talking on the telephone. A chandelier cast a harsh light over him. He was speaking in a strange-sounding language that only Moreau-Badmaev could have understood: perhaps Persian of the plains. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth. He waved to me.

‘Say hello to the Moulin Rouge for me,’ Madame Valadier whispered, staring at me with a sad look as if she envied me going back to that neighbourhood.

‘Goodbye, Madame.’

It had slipped out but still she corrected me. ‘No. Goodbye, Véra.’

So I repeated it: ‘Goodbye, Véra.’ Was that actually her name or had she chosen it, one day at Lycée Jules-Ferry when she was feeling sad, because she didn’t like her real name?

She proceeded towards the door with the lithe gait of aloof, unfathomable blonde women.

‘Walk with mademoiselle for a bit,’ she said to her daughter. ‘There’s a good girl.’

The little girl nodded and gave me an anxious look.

‘I often send her round the block at night. She likes it. It makes her feel like a big girl. The other evening she even wanted to do a second trip…She wants to practise so she’s not frightened anymore.’

From behind us, at the end of the room, the gentle voice of Monsieur Valadier reached me, in between long stretches of silence and, each time, I wondered if his telephone conversation had come to an end.

‘Soon, you won’t be frightened of the dark anymore, and we won’t have to leave the light on so you can go to sleep.’

Madame Valadier opened the front door. When I saw that the little girl was about to go outside wearing only her skirt and blouse, I said, ‘Perhaps you should put on a coat.’

She seemed surprised and almost reassured that I might give her advice, and she turned to her mother.

‘Yes, yes…Go and put on your coat.’

She ran up the stairs. Madame Valadier looked at me intently with her clear, pale eyes.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ll know how to look after her…We are sometimes so lost, my husband and I…’

She was still staring at me with a look that made me think she was about to cry. And yet her face remained impassive and there was not the slightest trace of a tear.

We had gone further than around the block. I said to the little girl, ‘Perhaps you should go back home now.’

But she wanted to keep walking with me. I explained that I had to go and catch the metro.

As we went along the avenue, it felt as if I had been here before. The smell of the dead leaves and the damp earth reminded me of something. It was the same feeling I’d had in the little girl’s bedroom. Everything I had wanted to forget up until now or, rather, everything I had avoided thinking about, like someone with vertigo trying not to look down, all of it was going to emerge bit by bit, and now I was ready to face up to it. We were walking down the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and the little girl took my hand to cross the avenue in the direction of the Porte Maillot.

‘Do you live far away?’

She asked the question as if she hoped that I’d take her home with me. We had reached the entrance of the metro. I was convinced that if I just said the word she would follow me down the steps and never return to her parents. I knew exactly how she felt. It even seemed as if that was how it was meant to be.

‘Now it’s my turn to walk you home.’

She seemed crestfallen at the prospect. But I told her that next week I would take her for a trip in the metro. We were walking back along the path. It was two or three weeks after I thought I had recognised my mother in the corridors of Châtelet station. I imagined her at this time of day, crossing the courtyard of the apartment block, on the other side of Paris, wearing her yellow coat. On the stairs, she would stop on each landing. A missed opportunity. What is lost will never be found. Perhaps in twenty years’ time, the little girl, like me, would find her parents again, one evening at peak hour, in those same corridors where the train connections were signposted.

There was a light on in one of the French windows on the ground floor, in the room where Monsieur Valadier had been on the telephone. I rang the bell, but no one came. The little girl was quiet, as if she was used to this sort of situation. After a while, she said, ‘They’ve gone,’ and she smiled and shrugged. I considered taking her back to my place to spend the night. She must have read my mind. ‘Yes…I’m sure they’ve gone.’ She wanted to persuade me that we had no further reason to stay here, but, just to be sure, I went up to the lighted window and peered in. The room was empty. I rang the doorbell again. Finally, someone was coming. The instant the door opened a crack, in a ray of light, I saw the little girl’s face fill with awful disappointment. It was her father. He was wearing a coat.

‘Have you been here for long?’ he asked in a tone of polite indifference. ‘Do you want to come in?’

He spoke to us as if we were visitors who had called by unannounced.

He leaned over to the little girl. ‘So, did you have a nice long walk?’

She didn’t answer.

‘My wife has left to have dinner with some friends,’ he said, ‘and I was just about to join her.’

The little girl hesitated before going inside. She looked at me one last time and said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ her tone apprehensive, as if she wasn’t sure whether I’d come back. Monsieur Valadier was smiling vaguely. Then the door shut behind them.

I stood, not moving, on the other side of the boulevard, under the trees. On the second floor, a light went on in the window of the little girl’s room. Soon, I saw Monsieur Valadier hurry out of the house. He got into a black car. She must have been alone in the house and left a light on so she could go to sleep. I thought of how lucky we’d been: a little later, and no one would have come to open the door.