Exchange Place

The Yellow Coat

Kilpatrick walked to Montparnasse and took the Métro to Trocadéro. Montparnasse was not his favourite station, but it had a direct line to his destination, and at least it was not as labyrinthine as Châtelet/Les Halles, whose endless corridors he avoided if possible. He thought of Patrick Modiano’s novel La petite bijou, whose protagonist, unusually for Modiano, is female. She is the Little Gem of the title. The first page finds her in the Châtelet Métro station, as I translate it:

‘I was in the crowd on the moving walkway, going down an endless corridor. A woman was wearing a yellow coat. We were immobile, jammed against each other in the corridor, waiting for the gates to open. She was right next to me. Then I saw her face. The resemblance to my mother’s face was so striking that I thought it was her … She sat down on one of the station benches, away from the others who thronged the edge of the platform, waiting for the train. There was no room on the bench and I stood back a little from her, leaning against a ticket machine. Her coat had no doubt been of an elegant cut once upon a time, and its bright colour would have given her a flamboyant air. Une note de fantaisie. But the yellow had faded and had become almost grey…’

The faded yellow coat becomes a recurrent motif as the girl begins to follow the woman night after night, trying to establish the identity of the woman, which is linked to the girl’s identity, the yellow coat flitting ahead of her through corridor after corridor, exiting a suburban station on to dark streets, entering telephone boxes or cafés, as the girl follows the woman in the yellow coat to an apartment on the fourth floor of a block of flats, night after night. Kilpatrick thought of the camel overcoat he had seen in Rue du Sentier and wondered if he would see it again. Freddy Gabriel seemed to have seen it in Boulevard Raspail; but then camel overcoats were not that uncommon in Paris. In any event Kilpatrick wondered if his memory of La petite bijou was accurate, perhaps he had exaggerated the multiple appearances of the woman’s faded yellow coat. Perhaps he had merely had her wearing the coat in his mind’s eye every time she appeared in the story, whether she was described as wearing it or not, and the coat was a memory of its previous appearances. The train stopped at Champs de Mars/Tour Eiffel. A woman in a yellow coat boarded the train. She sat down facing him. Une note de fantaisie. For a moment he thought of her as having stepped from the pages of Modiano’s novel; but the coat was new, not faded to a near grey. Nevertheless he thought of the two of them as being somehow complicit as they travelled under the Seine to Passy and thence to Trocadéro, as if he had entered the novel himself.

Kilpatrick was bound for an exhibition at the Musée National de la Marine at the Palais de Chaillot, featuring Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He had read the book as a child, and it was one of the first films he had ever seen, in the old Alhambra Picture House in North Street. He recalled that underneath the Palais de Chaillot, which replaced the Trocadéro when it was demolished in 1937, was a huge aquarium built in a former underground quarry. He wondered whether to visit the aquarium or the exhibition first, and pictured shoals of exotic, brightly-coloured fishes, cobalt blue and emerald, turquoise, scarlet, yellow, gliding through the coral reefs of the quarry underneath his feet as he took in the Jules Verne exhibits. At the back of his mind, too, was an image from Marcel Proust, written while German Zeppelins and Gotha biplanes were bombing Paris. Dusk was falling, and the sky above the towers of the Trocadéro had the appearance of an immense turquoise-tinted sea, which, at low tide, revealed a thin line of black rocks, or perhaps they were only fishermen’s nets aligned next to each other like tiny clouds. Then it was no longer a spreading sea, but a vertical gradation of blue glaciers, and the narrator thought of the twin towers in a town in Switzerland. Disorientated, he retraced his steps, but as he left the Pont des Invalides behind him there was no more day in the sky, nor scarcely a light in all the city, and stumbling here and there against the dustbins, mistaking his road, he found himself, unexpectedly, after following a labyrinth of obscure streets, upon the Boulevards.

On his arrival, Kilpatrick was disappointed to find that the aquarium was closed for renovation. The exhibition, too, was disappointing, held in a space made to seem larger by the circuitous route one had no option but to follow, doubling back into itself in a cramped labyrinth, tricked out with interactive computer displays. He emerged from the exit feeling cheated, as a young boy might from a tawdry fairground show. The only thing of real interest was a display of Verne’s notebooks, written in a hand at least as miniscule as that of Walter Benjamin, must have been written with a crow-quill pen, thought Kilpatrick, on what looked like account books, the narrative adding up in column after column on the page, some passages colour-coded, with notes inserted in the margins, crossings-out, insertions, arrows leading back to previous sections of the text, a universe of detail, afterthoughts about those details, in their own way as impressive as the legendary galley proofs of À la recherche du temps perdu, the printed text snowed under by the blizzard of Proust’s handwritten emendations and revisions.

To cheer himself up Kilpatrick decided to venture to Charvet in Place Vendôme, Charvet the makers of exclusive shirts and ties, cravats, pochettes in multicoloured silks; Charvet, where the rainbow finds ideas, as Cocteau said once. Kilpatrick remembered a tie he had seen in the window display once, a black shantung silk with orange and emerald green splotches. The price was beyond his means. He intended only to window-shop, but then again, perhaps they would have an end-of-season sale. He entered the Aladdin’s cave of Charvet. Shirts were arrayed in back-lit alcoves, shirts of pale lavender and acqua and sky-blue, ties spread out on a dark mahogany table in a radiant colour wheel of blues, greens, reds, browns and yellows — paisleys, stripes, polka-dots in glowing silks and soft cashmeres. The impeccably turned-out shop assistant approached him, smiling. Monsieur. He held up his forefinger, went behind one of the glass-topped counters, and took out a long thin package wrapped in emerald green tissue paper. Kilpatrick was given to understand that Monsieur had been in the shop earlier that morning, had purchased the tie, and had asked for it to be put to one side while he went on to browse some more, but when the assistant had looked for Monsieur, he had gone. And when he saw him come in again in the camel coat, le manteau fauve … Kilpatrick was about to demur. Then he thought, why not? He thought of the letter that had come to him that morning. From one John to another. He thanked the assistant profusely, put the emerald green package in his briefcase, and walked out on to Place Vendôme. He would wear the tie that evening to Freddy Gabriel’s soirée.