Paris Noir

MINOR KEY by JOHN HARVEY

It used to be there under Birthdays, some years at least. The daily listing in the paper, the Guardian, occasionally The Times. 18 September. Valentine Collins, jazz musician. And then his age: 27, 35, 39. Not 40. Val never reached 40.

He’d always look, Val, after the first time he was mentioned, made a point of it, checking to see if his name was there. ‘Never know,’ he’d say, with that soft smile of his – ‘Never know if I’m meant to be alive or dead.’

There were times when we all wondered; wondered what it was going to be. Times when he seemed to be chasing death so hard, he had to catch up. Times when he didn’t care.

Jimmy rang me this morning, not long after I’d got back from the shops. Bread, milk, eggs – the paper – gives me something to do, a little walk, reason to stretch my legs.

‘You all right?’ he says.

‘Of course I’m all right.’

‘You know what day it is?’

I hold my breath; there’s no point in shouting, losing my temper. ‘Yes, Jimmy, I know what day it is.’

There’s a silence and I can sense him reaching for the words, the thing to say – ‘You don’t fancy meeting up later? A drink, maybe? Nice to have a chat. It’s been a while.’

‘OK, then, Anna,’ he says instead, and then he hangs up.

There was a time when we were inseparable, Jimmy, Val, Patrick and myself. Studio 51, the Downbeat Club, all-nighters at the Flamingo, coffee at the Bar Italia, spaghetti at the Amalfi. That place on Wardour Street where Patrick swore the cheese omelettes were the best he’d ever tasted and Val would always punch the same two buttons on the jukebox, B19 and 20, both sides of Ella Fitzgerald’s single, ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.

Val loved that song, especially.

He knew about goodbyes, Val.

Later, anyway.

Back then it was just another sad song, something to still the laughter. Which is what I remember most from those years, the laughter. The four of us marching arm in arm through the middle of Soho, carefree, laughing.

What do they call them? The fifties? The years of austerity? That’s not how I remember them, ‘56, ‘57, ‘58. Dancing, music and fun, that’s what they were to me. But then, maybe I was too young, too unobservant, too – God! it seems impossible to believe or say – but, yes, too innocent to know what was already there, beneath the surface. Too stupid to read the signs.

Patrick, for instance, turning away from the rest of us to have quick, intense conversations in corners with strangers, men in sharp suits and sharp haircuts, Crombie overcoats. The time Patrick himself suddenly arrived one evening in a spanking new three-piece suit from Cecil Gee, white shirt with a rolled Mr B collar, soft Italian shoes, and when we asked him where the cash came from for all that, only winking and tapping the side of his nose with his index finger – mind yours.

Val, those moments when he’d go quiet and stare off into nowhere and you knew, without anyone saying, that you couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t touch him, just had to leave him be until he’d turn, almost shyly, and smile with his eyes.

And Jimmy, the way he’d look at me when he thought no one else was noticing; how he couldn’t bring himself to say the right words to me, even then.

And if I had seen them, the signs of our future, would it have made any difference, I wonder? Or would it all have turned out the same? Sometimes you only see what you want to until something presses your face so fast up against it there’s nothing else you can do.

But in the beginning it was the boys and myself and none of us with a care in the world. Patrick and Jimmy had known one another since they were little kids at primary school, altar boys together at St Pat’s; Val had met up with them later, the second year of the grammar school – and me, I’d been lucky enough to live in the same street, catch the same bus in the morning, lucky enough that Jimmy’s mother and mine should be friends. The boys were into jazz, jazz and football – though for Patrick it was the Arsenal and for Jimmy, Spurs, and the rows they had about that down the years. Val now, in truth I don’t think Val ever cared too much about the football, just went along, White Hart Lane or Highbury, he didn’t mind.

When it came to jazz, though, it was Val who took the lead, and where the others would have been happy enough to listen to anything as long as it had rhythm, excitement, as long as it had swing, Val was the one who sat them down and made them listen to Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker, Desmond with Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Lester Young.

With a few other kids they knew, they made themselves into a band: Patrick on trumpet, Jimmy on drums, Val with an ageing alto saxophone that had belonged to his dad. After the first couple of rehearsals it became clear Val was the only one who could really play. I mean really play: the kind of sound that gives you goose bumps on the arms and makes the muscles of your stomach tighten hard.

It wasn’t long before Patrick had seen the writing on the wall and turned in his trumpet in favour of becoming agent and manager rolled into one; about the first thing he did was sack Jimmy from the band, Val’s was the career to foster and Jimmy was just holding him back.

A couple of years later, Val had moved on from sitting in with Jackie Sharpe and Tubby Hayes at the Manor House, and depping with Oscar Rabin’s band at the Lyceum, to fronting a quartet that slipped into the lower reaches of the Melody Maker small group poll. Val was burning the proverbial candle, going on from his regular gig to some club where he’d play till the early hours, and taking more Bennies than was prudent to keep himself awake. The result was, more than once, he showed up late for an engagement; occasionally, he didn’t show up at all. Patrick gave him warning after warning. Val, in return, made promises he couldn’t keep; in the end, Patrick delivered an ultimatum, and finally walked away.

Within months the quartet broke up and, needing ready cash, Val took a job with Lou Preager’s orchestra at the Lyceum: a musical diet that didn’t stretch far beyond playing for dancers, the occasional novelty number and the hits of the day. At least when he’d been with Rabin there’d been a few other jazzers in the band – and Oscar had allowed them one number a night to stretch out and do their thing. But this – the boredom, the routine were killing him, and Val, I realised later, had moved swiftly on from chewing the insides of Benzedrine inhalers and smoking cannabis to injecting heroin. When the police raided a club in Old Compton Street in the small hours, there was Val in a back room with a needle in his arm.

Somehow, Patrick knew one of the detectives at West End Central well enough to call in a grudging favour. Grudging, but a favour all the same.

When Val stumbled out on to the pavement, twenty-four hours later and still wearing the clothes he’d puked up on, Patrick pushed him into a cab and took him to the place where I was living in Kilburn.

I made tea, poured Patrick the last of a half bottle of whisky, and ran a bath for Val, who was sitting on the side of my bed in his vest and underpants, shivering.

‘You’re a stupid bastard. You know that, don’t you?’ Patrick told him.

Val said nothing.

‘He’s a musician, I told the copper,’ Patrick said. ‘A good one. And you know what he said to me? All he is, is another black junkie out of his fucking head on smack. Send him back where he fucking came from.’

A shadow of pain passed across Val’s face and I looked away, ashamed, not knowing what to say. Val’s father was West Indian, his mother Irish, his skin the colour of palest chocolate.

‘Can you imagine?’ Patrick said, turning to me. ‘All those years and I never noticed.’ Reaching out, he took hold of Val’s jaw and twisted his face upwards towards the light. ‘Look at that. Black as the ace of fucking spades. Not one of us at all.’

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Stop it, for God’s sake. What’s the matter with you?’

Patrick loosed his hold and stepped away. ‘Trying to shake some sense into him. Make him realise, way he’s going, what’ll happen if he carries on.’

He moved closer to Val and spoke softly. ‘They’ve got your number now, you know that, don’t you? Next time they catch you as much as smelling of reefer they’re going to have you inside so fast your feet won’t touch the ground. And you won’t like it inside, believe me.’

Val closed his eyes.

‘What you need is to put a little space between you and them, give them time to forget.’ Patrick stepped back. ‘Give me a couple of days, I’ll sort something. Even if it’s the Isle of Man.’

In the event, it was Paris. A two-week engagement at Le Chat Qui Pêche with an option to extend it by three more.

‘You better go with him, Anna. Hold his hand, keep him out of trouble.’ And slipping an envelope fat with French francs and two sets of tickets into my hand, he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Just his hand, mind.’

The club was on the rue de la Huchette, close to the Seine, a black metal cat perched above a silver-grey fish on the sign outside; downstairs a small, smoky cellar bar with a stage barely big enough for piano, bass and drums, and, for seating, perhaps the most uncomfortable stools I’ve ever known. Instruments of torture, someone called them and, by the end of the first week, I knew exactly what he meant.

Not surprisingly, the French trio with whom Val was due to work were suspicious of him at first. His reputation in England may have been on the rise, but across the Channel he was scarcely known. And when you’re used to visitors of the calibre of Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, what gave Val Collins the idea he’d be welcome? Didn’t the French have saxophone players of their own?

Both the bassist and the drummer wore white shirts that first evening, I remember, ties loosened, top buttons undone, very cool; the pianist’s dark jacket was rucked up at the back, its collar arched awkwardly against his neck, a cigarette smouldering, half-forgotten, at the piano’s edge.

Val and I accepted a glass of wine from the proprietor and sat listening, the club not yet half full, Val’s foot moving to the rhythm and his fingers flexing over imaginary keys. At the intermission, we were introduced to the band, who shook hands politely, looked at Val with cursory interest and excused themselves to stretch their legs outside, breathe in a little night air.

‘Nice guys,’ Val said with a slight edge as they left.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I said and squeezed his arm.

When the trio returned, Val was already on stage, re-angling the mike, adjusting his reed. ‘Blues in F,’ he said quietly, counting in the tempo, medium-fast. After a single chorus from the piano, he announced himself with a squawk and then a skittering run and they were away. Ten minutes later, when Val stepped back from the microphone, layered in sweat, the drummer gave a little triumphant roll on his snare, the pianist turned and held out his hand and the bass player loosened another button on his shirt and grinned.

‘Et maintenant,’ Val announced, testing his tender vocabulary to the full, ‘nous jouons une ballade par Ira Gershwin et Vernon Duke, ‘I Can’t Get Started’. Merci.’

And the crowd, accepting him, applauded.

What could go wrong?

At first, nothing it seemed. We both slept late most days at the hotel on the rue Maître-Albert where we stayed; adjacent rooms that held a bed, a small wardrobe and little else, but with views across towards Notre Dame. After coffee and croissants – we were in Paris, after all – we would wander around the city, the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés at first, but then, gradually, we found our way around Montparnasse and up through Montmartre to Sacré Coeur. Sometimes we would take in a late afternoon movie, and Val would have a nap at the hotel before a leisurely dinner and on to the club for that evening’s session, which would continue until the early hours.

Six nights a week and on the seventh, rest?

There were other clubs to visit, other musicians to hear. The Caveau de la Huchette was just across the street, the Club Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Trois Mailletz both a short walk away. Others, like the Tabou and the Blue Note, were a little further afield. I couldn’t keep up.

‘Go back to the hotel,’ Val said, reading the tiredness in my eyes. ‘Get a good night’s sleep, a proper rest.’ Then, with the beginnings of a smile, ‘You don’t have to play nursemaid all the time, you know.’

‘Is that what I’m doing?’

Coming into the club late one evening, I saw him in the company of an American drummer we’d met a few nights before and a couple of broad-shouldered French types, wearing those belted trench coats which made them look like cops or gangsters or maybe both. As soon as he spotted me, Val made a quick show of shaking hands and turning away, but not before I saw a small package pass from hand to hand and into the inside pocket of his suit.

‘Don’t look so disapproving,’ he said, when I walked over. ‘Just a few pills to keep me awake.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘Of course.’ He had a lovely, disarming smile.

‘No smack?’

‘No smack.’

I could have asked him to show me his arms, but I chose to believe him instead. It would have made little difference if I had; by then I think he was injecting himself in the leg.

The next day Val was up before eleven, dressed and ready, stirring me from sleep.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Just a shame to waste a beautiful day.’

The winter sun reflected from the stonework of the bridge as we walked across to the Ile St-Louis arm in arm. Val had taken to affecting a beret, which he wore slanting extravagantly to one side. On the cobbles close to where we sat, drinking coffee, sparrows splashed in the shallow puddles left by last night’s rain.

‘Why did you do it?’ Val asked me.

‘Do it?’

‘This. All of this. Throwing up your job-’

‘It wasn’t a real job.’

‘It was work.’

‘It was temping in a lousy office for a lousy boss.’

‘And this is better?’

‘Of course this is better.’

‘I still don’t understand why?’

‘Why come here with you?’

Val nodded.

‘Because he asked me.’

‘Patrick.’

‘Yes, Patrick.’

‘You do everything he asks you?’

I shook my head. ‘No. No, I don’t.’

‘You will,’ he said. ‘You will.’ I couldn’t see his eyes; I didn’t want to see his eyes.

A foursome of tourists, Scandinavian I think, possibly German, came and sat noisily at a table nearby. When the waiter walked past, Val asked for a cognac, which he poured into what was left of his coffee and downed at a single gulp.

‘What I meant,’ he said, ‘would you have come if it had been anyone else but me?’

‘I know what you meant,’ I said. ‘And, no. No, I don’t think I would.’

‘Jimmy, perhaps?’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘Perhaps Jimmy. Maybe.’

Seeing Val’s rueful smile, I reached across and took hold of his hand, but when, a few moments later, he gently squeezed my fingers, I took my hand away.

Patrick was waiting for us at the hotel when we returned.

‘Well,’ he said, rising from the lobby’s solitary chair. ‘The lovebirds at last.’

‘Bollocks,’ Val said, but with a grin.

Patrick kissed the side of my mouth and I could smell tobacco and Scotch and expensive aftershave; he put his arms round Val and gave him a quick hug.

‘Been out for lunch?’

‘Breakfast,’ Val said.

‘Fine. Then let’s have lunch.’

Over our protests he led us to a small restaurant in the Latin Quarter, where he ordered in a combination of enthusiastic gestures and sixth-form French.

‘I went along to the club earlier,’ Patrick said, once the waiter had set a basket of bread on the table and poured our wine. ‘Sounds as if it’s going well. They want to hold you over for three weeks more. Assuming you’re agreeable?’

Val nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘Anna?’

‘I can’t stay that long,’ I said.

‘Why ever not?’ Patrick looked surprised, aggrieved.

‘I’ve got a life to live.’

‘You’ve got a bedsit in Kilburn and precious little else.’

Blood rushed to my cheeks. ‘All the more reason, then, for not wasting my time here.’

Patrick laughed. ‘You hear that, Val? Wasting her time.’

‘Let her be,’ Val said, forcefully.

Patrick laughed again. ‘Found yourself a champion,’ he said, looking at me.

Val’s knife struck the edge of his plate. ‘For fuck’s sake! When are you going to stop organising our lives?’

Patrick took his time in answering. ‘When I think you can do it for yourselves.’

In his first set that evening, Val was a little below pat, nothing most of the audience seemed to notice or be bothered by, but there was less drive than usual to his playing and several of his solos seemed to peter out aimlessly before handing over to the piano. I could sense the tension building in Patrick beside me, and after the third number he steered me outside; there was a faint rain misting. ‘He’s using again,’ Patrick said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Anna, come on-’

‘I asked him.’

‘You asked him and he said no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Scout’s honour, cross my heart and hope to die. That kind of no?’

I pulled away from him. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Treat me as though I’m some child.’

‘Then open your eyes.’

‘They are open.’

Patrick sighed and I saw the grey of his breath dissipating into the night air.

‘I’m not his jailer, Patrick,’ I said. ‘I’m not his wife, his lover. I can’t watch him twenty-four hours of the day.’

‘I know.’

He kissed me on the forehead, the sort of kiss you might give to a young girl, his lips cold and quick. A long, low boat passed slowly beneath the bridge.

‘I’m opening a club,’ he said. ‘Soho. Broadwick Street.’

‘You?’

‘Some friends I know, they’re putting up the money. I thought if Val were interested it would be somewhere for him to play.’

‘What about the police? Isn’t that a risk still?’

Patrick smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s all squared away.’

How many times would I hear him say that over the years? All squared away. How much cash was shelled out, usually in small denominations, unmarked notes slipped into side pockets or left in grubby holdalls in the left luggage lockers of suburban railway stations? I never knew the half of it, the paybacks and backhanders and all the false accounting, not even during those years later when we lived together – another story, waiting, one day, to be told.

‘Come on,’ he said, taking my arm. ‘We’ll miss the second set.’

When we got back to the club, Val and the American drummer were in animated conversation at the far end of the bar. Seeing us approach, the drummer ducked his head towards Val, spoke quickly and stepped away. ‘It’s not me you have to worry about, you fucker, remember that.’ And then he was pushing his way through the crowd.

‘What was all that about?’ Patrick asked.

Val shrugged. ‘Nothing. Why?’

‘He seemed pretty angry.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. That’s just the way he is.’

‘How much do you owe?’

‘What?’

‘That bastard, how much do you owe?’

‘Look-’

‘No, you look.’ Patrick had hold of him by the lapels of his coat. ‘I know him. He was busted in London last year, thrown out of Italy before that, jailed in Berlin. He’s a user and a dealer, the worst kind of pimp there is.’

‘He’s OK-’

Patrick pushed Val back against the bar. ‘He’s not fucking OK. You hear me. Keep away from him. Unless you want to end up the same way.’

On the small stage, the pianist was sounding a few chords, trying out a few runs. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Val said, and Patrick released his grip.

All of Val’s anger came out on stage, channelled first through a blistering ‘Cherokee’, then a biting up-tempo blues that seemed as if it might never end.

Patrick left Paris the next day, but not before he’d set up a recording date for Val and the trio at the Pathé-Magellan studio. The producer’s idea was to cut an album of standards, none of the takes too long and with Val sticking close to the melody, so that, with any luck, some might be issued as singles for the many jukeboxes around. Val always claimed to be less than happy with the results, feeling restricted by the set-up and the selection of tunes. Easy listening, I suppose it might be called nowadays, dinner jazz, but it’s always been one of my favourites, even now.

It was when we were leaving the studio after the last session that the pianist invited us to go along later with him and his girlfriend to hear Lester Young. Val was evasive. Maybe oui, maybe non. The one night off from Le Chat, he might just crash, catch up on some sleep.

‘I thought he was one of your favourites,’ I said, as we were heading for the Métro. ‘How come you didn’t want to go?’

Val gave a quick shake of the head. ‘I hear he’s not playing too well.’

Young, I found out later, had already been in Paris for several weeks, playing at the Blue Note on the rue d’Artois and living at the Hotel La Louisiane. A room on the second floor he rarely if ever left except to go to work.

Val had brought a few records with him from England, one of them an LP with a tattered cover and a scratch across one side: Lester Young, some fifteen years earlier, in his prime.

Val sat cross-legged on his bed, listening to the same tracks again and again. I poured what remained of a bottle of wine and took my glass across to a chair opposite the door; traffic noise rose and faded through the partly opened shutters, the occasional voice raised in anger or surprise; the sound of the saxophone lithe and muscular in the room.

When the stylus reached the run-off groove for the umpteenth time, Val reached over and set his glass on the floor. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a chance.’

As we entered the club and walked past the long bar towards the stage, a tune I failed to recognise came to an end and Young, caught in the spotlight, stared out, startled, as the applause riffled out above the continuing conversation. Up close, he looked gaunt and ill, dark suit hanging ragged from his shrunken frame, pain all too visible behind his eyes.

I took hold of Val’s hand and squeezed it hard.

The drummer kicked off the next number at a brisk clip, playing quick patterns on the hi-hat cymbals with his sticks before moving to the snare, a signal for Young, saxophone tilted at an angle away from his body, to begin. Within the first bars, he had dragged the tempo down, slurring his notes across the tune, the same stumbling phrases repeated and then left hanging as he stepped back and caught his breath, the spaces between his playing wider and wider until finally he turned away and stood, head bowed, leaving the guitarist to take over.

‘I Can’t Get Started’ was played at a funereal pace, the sound coarse and almost ugly: ‘Tea for Two’, one of the tunes Val had been listening to back in the hotel, started promisingly before teetering alarmingly off course; only a measured ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ rose from its foggy, thick-breathed beginning to become something that had moments of beauty between the self-doubt and misfingerings.

‘If I ever get into that state, poor bastard,’ Val said, once we were back outside, ‘promise you’ll take me out and shoot me.’

Yet in the succeeding weeks he went back again, not once but several times, fascinated despite himself, watching one of his idols unravel before his eyes. Then there was the time he went along and Young was no longer there; he’d cancelled his engagement suddenly and returned to the States. Two weeks later he was dead.

The evening he heard the news Val played ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, just the one chorus, unaccompanied, at the beginning of each set. The next day I walked into his room in the middle of the afternoon, and saw him sitting, half-naked on the bed, needle in hand, searching for a vein.

‘Oh, Christ, Val,’ I said.

He looked at me with tears in his eyes then slapped the inside of his thigh again.

I slammed the door shut, grabbed my coat and purse and ran out on to the streets. For hours I just walked, ending up who knows where. At a corner bar I drank two brandies in quick succession followed by a crème de menthe and was promptly sick. I wanted to go back to the hotel, pack my bag and leave. What the hell was I doing there? What game? What stupid dream? There was vomit on the hem of my dress and on my shoes.

When finally I got to the club it was late and Val was nowhere to be seen, just his saxophone, mouthpiece covered, on its stand. In answer to my unspoken question, the pianist just shrugged and, still playing, gestured with his head towards the street.

I heard Val’s shouts, muffled, coming from the alley that ran from close alongside the club down towards the quai Saint-Michel. Val lay curled in on himself, arms cradling his head, while two men took it in turns to kick him in the back, the chest, the legs, anywhere they could, a third looking on.

The sound of police sirens was too indistinct, too far away.

When someone helped me to my feet and I walked, unsteadily, to where Val still lay, unmoving, I thought that they had killed him. I thought he was dead.

For three days I sat by his bed in the hospital and held his hand. At night, I slept in the corridor outside, legs drawn up, on a chair. One of several broken ribs had come close to puncturing a lung. A week later I held his hand again as we walked in the hospital garden, with its bare earth and the stems of roses that had been cut back against the frost.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.

‘Fine,’ he said, wincing as he smiled. ‘I feel fine.’

After that there were always dull headaches that prevented him from sleeping and sudden surges of pain, sharp as a needle slipped beneath the skull. Despite the months and years of osteopathy, his back never sat right again, nagging at him each time he played.

Valentine Collins, jazz musician. Born, 18 September, 1937. Died, 13 April, 1976. Thirty years ago. No need any longer to take the ferry to Calais and then the long, slow journey by train, and not caring to fly, I treated myself to Eurostar, first class. A slightly better than aeroplane meal and free champagne. The centre of Paris in less than three hours. Autumn. The bluest of blue skies but cold enough for scarf and gloves. I feel the cold.

The Métro from Gare du Nord to Saint-Michel is crowded with so many races, so many colours, Val’s face would not have stood out at all. Not one of us, Patrick had said, and it was true, though not in the way he meant.

The rue de la Huchette is now a rat-run of kebab houses and creperies and bars, so crowded, here and there I have to walk along the centre of the narrow street.

Le Chat Qui Pêche is now a restaurant and the sign has been taken down. For a while I think I might go inside and have a meal, reminisce a little with the waiter, if he has a little English to complement my meagre French. But it is enough to stand here at the pavement’s edge with people spilling round me, wondering, some of them, perhaps, what this old woman is doing, just standing there, staring at nothing in particular, none of them hearing what I hear, the sound of Val’s alto saxophone, a ballad, astringent, keening, ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.