2. 2
The coffee seller leans back, resting the weight of the tank on its stick behind him. Does the fellow have to stand for the next hour or more? John murmurs, “Would you care to sit?”
“Can’t, monsieur.”
“Oh, the tank doesn’t… it’s not possible to set it down? That must be a nuisance.”
The coffee seller shrugs, philosophical.
John shuts his notebook and stands up anyway to stretch his legs. It’s already getting stuffy in this crowded carriage. He steps over the brown spit and inches around the coffee seller to pull up the window’s belt and let it down a notch. He waits to see whether anybody objects. When he returns to his space on the bench, it’s narrowed by several inches.
“What’s that?” The plumed girl’s question startles him. “What you putting in your little book?”
His fingers curl over its spine. “Just, ah, notes, mademoiselle.” The words come out with a hitch and a slight wheeze.
“I go by Anna Lamor,” she volunteers. “My stage name.”
So she’s a dancer or actress; that doesn’t mean she’s not a prostitute too.
“Anna with an h .”
Synge smiles but doesn’t follow. “Hanna?”
She shakes her head. “ H at the end.” She scratches her monkey’s whorled head, no bigger than a large walnut shell.
Funny that, to insist on a silent letter in a made-up sobriquet. Is she trying to make it harder to spell? John tries again: “Annah.”
She nods as if she hears the h this time. “Annah Lamor. Lamor sounds like love and death both.”
L’amour , love, and la mort , death. “Very clever.”
She’s not propositioning him, is she? Just making conversation? Years ago John resolved never to marry and risk passing on his weak constitution to any children. But that hasn’t freed him from the thrall of women. Sometimes the intensity of his response to their charms makes him tremble.
He pushes himself on. “So you’re a performer, Mademoiselle Lamor?”
“Call me Annah.”
“It seems stage names are the rule these days—Nini-Legs-Up, Glutton, Gelignite…” He’s trying for the tone of a habitué of cabarets, even though he can rarely afford so much as a concert.
A shrug from Annah. “It’s not a rule, just chic.”
But chic would be a rule in her set, John guesses. The truth is, he spends most evenings walking around, mostly to save on heating his room. Not a boulevardier seen at parties so much a flaneur who wanders past and hears their distant music. He loves the night-hushed backstreets of Paris; he makes notes on the flutter of moths around a gas lamp, the skitter of a rat, the hoot of an owl.
“These notes in your little book—notes of music?”
“No, no.” John tries to recall the last thing he was writing before getting on the train, or at least the last thing that wasn’t some feeble sentence about the parabola of a woman’s hem. “I’ve been, ah, looking into the folklore of Normandy. Sayings, stories… fairy stones and devil’s bridges, that sort of thing.”
Annah Lamor fixes her bold gaze on him. “Tell us a story, then.”
“Ah…” John stammers: “A, a story from Ireland?”
She jerks her thumb over her shoulder in the direction from which they’ve come. “Normandy!”
“Oh, right, Normandy, yes. Shall I?” He flicks through his jottings in a sweat. Is everyone in this crowd listening? Yes. (Well, probably not the conehead woman, who’s now trying to persuade the mewling baby under her shawl to settle onto her breast.) “I did pick up a legend about the Normans attacking the Chateau of Pirou. Which was held by the English during that era,” he puts in because otherwise the story makes no sense. Though how can he expect the young traveller from the Far East to know what era he means?
The man who spat on the floor before does it again now. Is he expressing scorn for the English this time? Or is he just suffering from catarrh?
John blunders on: “Probably the twelfth century.”
Annah makes a get-on-with-it gesture, her feathers dancing. “They attack this chateau?”
“Yes, the Norman soldiers burst in, but all they found was one bedridden old Englishman—a wizard. He showed them his book of spells and informed them triumphantly that he’d just turned his lord and all the guards into wild geese—to let them escape, you see? But the attackers burnt the castle to the ground, and the wizard with it.” Spoken aloud, the story sounds savage, bizarre. “And for want of that spell book to bring them back, the English lord and his men were condemned to fly round Normandy in feathered form forever.”
The young woman’s face splits in a grin, and now she looks barely fifteen. “Poor connards .”
“Well, yes.” John manages to smile back.
On the overstuffed crimson seat in her carpeted First-Class carriage, Marcelle de Heredia gazes out at the passing countryside. A brown mare with her foal. Two donkeys. Black-and-white cows trampling the ground to mud around a pond of geese. The wafting smell of dung. Marcelle’s trying to recall the details of an article by a geologist arguing that Homo sapiens could have walked dry-shod from Normandy to Dorset. Or dry-footed, at least; she doubts cavemen had shoes.
A railway carriage is as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random. Marcelle is sitting in a velvet, teak, and iron cigar box—thick carpet underfoot, heavy lace-edge curtains, the door rimmed with gilt Morocco leather—cheek by jowl with four strangers. She’d actually get more space to herself in Second, since it’s less popular, but Papa would be horrified. (Having come from Cuba as a boy and then been subjected to so much insult in the National Assembly here, Papa always quietly insists on upholding his and his family’s hard-earned social position.)
The red-cheeked industrialist opposite her has introduced himself as émile Levassor. The wife (who uses both her first and second husbands’ names, going by Sarazin-Levassor) is splendid in a chartreuse travelling costume with dangling earrings. Marcelle, feeling rather underdressed in her tailored navy-blue outfit, is horrified to see that each earring is made of the head of a hummingbird. The girl, Jeanne, tucked beside her mother, is peeping at the glossy wooden hand of the dapper little silver-haired man in the other corner—Bienvenüe, was that it? Jeanne has volunteered to Marcelle that she’s seventeen, but she seems younger; she’s pale and lovely in a curly grey astrakhan coat with coloured embroideries of foliage over the lambswool. She’s clearly her stepfather’s pet, though Levassor has mentioned his stepsons fondly too.
Despite what fairy tales teach about remarrying, Marcelle often finds that second marriages have this quality of relaxation about them, perhaps because the match is based on sounder judgement. Her own mother had already been widowed when she married Papa, at twenty-four; Marcelle supposes that after a loss, what matters is to push on.
She leans back, but the scarlet velvet against her head is unnervingly doughy. She straightens again and watches the names on little blue signboards whipping past: Folligny, Saint-Aubin-des-Bois, Mesnil-Clinchamps. Villages where Marcelle will never stop, other lives she might have lived.
A serious student, she doesn’t move at the leisurely pace of most rich men’s daughters. As a rule, the women at her school of medicine don’t believe in taking holidays; they fear being seen as dilettantes if they’re gone for a week. They worship a tutor of theirs, an austere Pole called Madame Curie, who lives in a sixth-floor flat without heat, light, or piped water. Marcelle was impressed to hear from a classmate that this tutor wore a blue cotton dress to her own wedding, spent the gift money on a pair of bicycles for herself and her scientist husband, and went straight back to the lab afterwards.
Marcelle is aware that as well as her sex her colour may count against her. A pair of twits in her anatomy class once asked her to settle a bet as to whether she was a quadroon or an octoroon. She tries to shut her eyes to race hatred, given that there’s nothing she can do about it but submit work so strong that no one can possibly argue that the daughter of the famous Cuban doesn’t belong at the school of medicine.
She has to admit that her week away from her studies has been a tonic. Those cliffs yesterday evening! Marcelle was on narrow rue de l’égout, Granville’s steepest staircase, descending to catch the lemon-yellow October sunset over the Manche, that sleeve of salt Atlantic between France and England. The wind was in her face, so strong that she could lean on it as if on an invisible wall. The lacy, glittering sea was turning her thoughts towards her brother—his last childhood holiday, thirteen years ago—and perhaps that distracted her because when the wind whirled around without warning, Marcelle was suddenly sliding and skidding down the hill, bumping over hard hummocks, yelping with fright, trying to remember how far out the tide was and whether she was likely to plummet onto rocks or into the water—
But she grasped long grass and lichen and finally ground to a halt. Her skirt was torn; her legs were bruised.
Marcelle can never tell her parents about the near miss; she’s the only child they have left, even if, at twenty-two, she’s no longer a child. What a foolish way it would have been to lose her life. But the fall left her feeling oddly exhilarated.
Only yesterday, and her palms are still rough with scratches, but it seems like weeks ago. Marcelle’s ready to get back to work—this minute, in fact; if she had the carriage to herself, she’d pull her typewriter (the best thing her father has ever bought her) out of its case. However, she can’t face the raised eyebrows of elegant Madame Sarazin-Levassor. It draws attention if a lady does anything other than knit or embroider.
émile Levassor grins across the car as if reading her mind. “Sorry to crowd you so, mademoiselle. The trains are so popular these days, we must put up with being shipped about like parcels.”
Marcelle rouses herself to make chitchat. “You’re not fond of the railway, monsieur?”
“Oh, it gets me to the general vicinity of where I’m going, but I’d rather steer myself right to the spot.”
“My husband drives automobiles,” Louise Sarazin-Levassor explains.
“Electric?” Marcelle asks with interest. Now that her father’s retired from the National Assembly, he’s been investing in those; the way of the future , he calls them.
Levassor shakes his head. “Internal combustion.”
“And Papa designs and races his cars too,” the girl boasts. Two spots of colour on her cheeks.
He laughs that off. “Well, mostly I sell them.”
“He won a race in June—down to Bordeaux and back at an average of twenty-five kilometres per hour!”
“Came in first but didn’t win,” he corrects his stepdaughter, “as the race was meant for four-seaters and mine has only two.”
“That’s just a technique—technic—”
“Technicality,” murmurs the wife.
“He drove it solo for forty-eight hours and forty-eight minutes,” Jeanne says, “and the next car didn’t show up for more than five hours .”
The other man, Monsieur Bienvenüe, blinks up from his periodical. “Forty-eight hours and forty-eight minutes, really?”
“Mm, the figure’s suspiciously neat,” Louise Sarazin-Levassor agrees. “Darling, are you sure you didn’t reach Paris five minutes earlier and drive around in circles till you got to forty-eight hours and forty-eight minutes exactly?”
Levassor pantomimes outrage. “Believe me, I’d have been prouder to come in earlier.”
Marcelle is enjoying this family. “Did that include breaks to sleep?”
“Only catnaps on the steering wheel.”
“A few breaks to dine, bien s?r ,” his wife says teasingly.
Jeanne’s giggle turns into a cough.
Her mother buttons up the sable collar on the girl’s coat and kisses her creamy cheek. “In ten years, everyone will have a motorcar.”
“And we’ll have to eat all the horses, I suppose,” Levassor says.
This raises a general laugh.
“Never the dogs, though,” Jeanne protests, rubbing her spaniel’s ears.
“If I may—that would seem a rather horrid prospect.” That’s Bienvenüe.
“Oh, Papa didn’t mean it, monsieur,” Jeanne assures him. “He loves all animals.”
“No, no, I mean the traffic jams that would occur if every man were really to have his own automobile. The stink of petrol, for one thing.”
“It could hardly be worse than the pong of dung on the roads,” Levassor jokes. “But no, I much prefer to drive in the countryside rather than in Paris—setting my own pace.”
His wife pokes him. “Meaning as fast as the engine will go!”
He shrugs. “What can I say, ma chère ? Speed is the only new pleasure invented since the ancients. The thrill of danger, the rush in the veins…”
Marcelle’s heard men talk with such zest about love but not about motion.
“Skiing down an Alp, say,” he goes on. “Your body feels on the brink of death, yet you’re laughing!”
She wonders how that might work in terms of nerve response; how does the brain countermand the false reports?
Louise Sarazin-Levassor gives a shudder that makes her beaked earrings peck at the air. “I’d rather my body and brain were both quite clear on that point.”
“But if I may say, in favour of the railways”—Bienvenüe, in his thoughtful tone—“they democratize that pleasure.”
Democratize ; Marcelle likes the word.
Just then there’s a jolt, and Jeanne yelps.
“Merely going over a set of points,” the little man reassures her. “The Company of the West really should replace its rolling stock, but it’s in constant deficit due to all those underused branch lines in the western wilds.”
“You’re well informed, monsieur,” Louise Sarazin-Levassor tells him.
“Well, I hope so, as my job is engineer in chief for bridges and roads, and that includes railways.”
The Levassors murmur, impressed.
Engineer in chief , Marcelle registers—meaning for the whole of France. She looks at the man’s lapel and sees that of course he’s wearing the red rosette of the Legion of Honour, the insignia of important men, like her mother’s lawyer father. The one her papa would surely have been granted long ago if he’d been white enough.
The girl’s eyes are glued to Bienvenüe’s polished wooden prosthesis.
He smiles and extends it. “The railway took my arm—I was inspecting a train when I was so clumsy as to fall under its wheels.” The girl leans in, avid to see how it straps on at the elbow. “I have another in my study with spread fingers and grippers.”
“I wonder, monsieur, have you tried a typewriter?” Marcelle asks.
Bienvenüe nods, eager. “High-speed transport for the fingers, I call it.”
“Your accident hasn’t turned you against the business, then,” Louise Sarazin-Levassor marvels.
His smile is rueful. “If it were asked of me, madame, I’d give a great deal more than one arm.”
Like a zealot, this gentleman seems willing to offer himself piece by piece. Marcelle thinks of herself as dedicated to science, but if it came to it, how much would she sacrifice for it?
As Jeanne picks up her spaniel for a cuddle, Marcelle catches sight of a purple smudge on the girl’s inner arm. Only a tiny thing, but along with the other signs of frailty, it disturbs her.
The Levassors are asking Bienvenüe’s advice about their eldest son’s studies, so Marcelle takes the opportunity to talk to the daughter. She begins by admiring Ouah-Ouah, then slips in, “Did he nip your wrist there?”
Jeanne pulls down the lace of her cuff, sheepish. “Oh, I seem to bruise at the slightest touch.”
“Has your mother tried arnica on them?”
She wrinkles her perfect nose. “Yes, but I don’t like the smell. She fusses so.”
“It’s natural that she would, especially if… you’ve not been well?”
“Just tired, really.” A shiver.
“Little appetite, I suppose,” Marcelle suggests.
Another grimace from Jeanne. “They say I need bolstering, so Cook serves me horse soup. Steak tartare in puddles of blood.”
Who’s they ? Specialists, the family doctor, or just Maman and Cook? Sometimes people are too close to something to see it. Remorseless, Marcelle’s mind is compiling the list: chilly, thin, pale as paper despite an iron-rich diet, bruises easily … “I wonder whether your gums bleed at all?”
Wide-eyed: “Only when I brush my teeth.”
“And nosebleeds?”
“They’re such a nuisance!”
Merde . Marcelle lets out the curse word in the silence of her head.
“However did you guess that, mademoiselle?” Jeanne asks.
“Ah, I’m studying medicine in Paris.”
“You must be awfully clever.”
Marcelle smiles, troubled. “And—if I may—do you ever wake up in a sweat?”
“Only because Maman insists on giving me too many blankets,” Jeanne assures her.
No, no, no . Marcelle’s suspecting the worst now. But of course, she may be jumping to conclusions.
Jeanne’s looking at her with frank interest. “Were you delicate too when you were a girl?”
Marcelle hedges: “Perhaps a little.” Her head’s begun to hammer. She changes the subject to dogs and the particular charms of Ouah-Ouah.