The Train to Paris Read online

  ‘Professor Williams, I presume,’ he said, and despite my exhaustion I could not help but laugh. ‘You took your time. What happened?’

  I didn’t know where to begin, or where to end. I mentioned nothing of Élodie, much as I wanted to impress him with the improbable story. Instead I gave him a version which suggested that I had slept on a bench in the Gare d’Hendaye.

  ‘Oh man, I feel for you,’ he said. ‘I heard about those strikes, and I was wondering. Shame you missed out on the gig last night. The Swedes were there. You remember Helga, don’t you? She bought me a drink afterwards. I wasn’t complaining.’

  ‘I don’t remember anyone of that name, Casanova. I’m amazed that you do.’

  I allowed him to go into every sordid detail. It seemed that Helga had just left. He occupied one side of the living room, and his clothes spread from an open suitcase, his fold-out bed taking up half the room with a rumpled pile of sheets. The corner by the window contained his laptop and keyboard. This was where I had planned to put my writing desk. He had left the window open, and flies were crawling over the dirty dishes. The liquor supplies were depleted. A bottle of gin, which I could remember opening the day before I left, was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Have you had dinner?’ Ethan asked. ‘I’ve already eaten. And there isn’t much in the fridge. Haven’t gone to the market yet.’

  ‘I’ll pick at something. I’ve run out of cash.’ There was no point in asking him for money. He would gladly lend it, but only if he had any.

  ‘Suit yourself. If you don’t mind, I’m about to lay some tracks down. It’s going to be surreal pop excess. It all builds up from this resonant keyboard line, then climaxes with this looped orchestra sample that lines up with the main riff. You’ll love it.’

  ‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘Are you going to clean this place up?’

  ‘Sorry, man, I have to get this done while the juices are flowing. Maybe tomorrow. By the way, Sophie called a couple of times.’

  He disappeared into his headphones. I brought the telephone through to the bedroom, but not to call Sophie.

  The number took a while to connect. It rang several times, during which I felt my pulse rate rise. I was venturing into unknown territory.

  ‘Selvin Studios,’ said a woman in an American accent, ‘how may I help?’

  I put the receiver down in shock. This was strange. Had Selvin given Élodie this number in case she wanted to revive her acting career? Or perhaps it was a cover for them to stay in contact without arousing their spouses’ suspicion.

  I started up my laptop. There were a few emails that had come through since my departure, but I ignored these and made straight for the browser. I typed Selvin Studios into the search engine. The screen burst into life with images of tanned women with oversized breasts, bent over and displaying their backsides to the camera. Starving cougars get their prey went the description. One of them was rubbing her nipple and looked pleadingly up at the man who stood over her. Another wore lace lingerie and gartered stockings, and I watched as her partner undid the clasps. He reached beneath the fabric and she gave an exaggerated moan. This made me flinch away from the screen and turn the volume down. Was Élodie in one of these videos? I searched for her name, but nothing came up.

  Suddenly I felt nauseous, even though this discovery wasn’t a surprise. Selvin, after all, had that air to him: a seamy and tyrannical voyeur. This did nothing to abate my humiliation. Was Élodie a porn star? The possibility made more sense the more I remembered of our night together. She must have given me the standard treatment, just without the cameras. I felt indescribably sad.

  I closed the site. It was almost funny. What a fine joke for Élodie and Selvin to have played on me. She was nobody. That answered every last one of my questions. I decided then and there to forget Élodie Lavelle, and whatever fetid bag of history she carried with her.

  Two of the emails were from Sophie. They both asked where I had got to, and the second one said that she was at the airport in Berlin and she wanted to hear my voice before she left for New Zealand. What was I going to tell her?

  Returning to the main room, I overfilled a glass of wine. Ethan insisted on playing me the track that he had finished, and I leant against the dining table to hear all nine minutes of it. He closed his eyes and played along with an imaginary guitar. It was everything wrong with modern music. I told him so, and he was glad to hear it. This made me think of the tune Élodie had danced to on the terrace the previous day, and how cool and unforced it had all been. It was not so long ago, but it felt like an eternity.

  Bolstering myself with the wine, I called Sophie on her mobile phone. She answered on the first ring.

  ‘Well hello,’ she said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Sorry I didn’t call. I got waylaid in Hendaye.’ The words felt wrong even as they left my mouth. ‘The railway unions were on strike.’

  ‘Oh Lawrence, that’s awful. I thought something like that must have happened. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. It was stressful, and I’m tired, but I’m here now.’

  ‘You don’t sound fine. Eat something and make sure to get some sleep. They’re about to call my flight, so I haven’t got long.’

  ‘Sure. I don’t have much more to report. But I did want to say I’m sorry that we didn’t have a better time in Madrid.’

  I could tell that she was about to ask me what I was on about, but she held back.

  ‘There’s always another time,’ she said. There was a note of reservation in her voice. ‘Although I don’t think I’ll be over there in December. But we can talk about that later. Promise you’ll call?’

  ‘Of course I will. And I love you.’

  ‘What was that? The connection is terrible here. Don’t worry about it. This call is costing a fortune.’

  ‘All right. Travel well.’

  She hung up. I poured myself another glass of wine, in the hope that this one would send me to sleep. I drank it too fast. Élodie would have been quick to reprimand me. But no, I could not think about her, or what she would have done under any circumstance. She belonged to her own curious world, and I had escaped from it.

  I spent a while by the window, watching the pedestrians on Rue Saint-Sulpice. And then, as if by accident, I found myself lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling while my vision blurred and whirled. It was a balmy evening, but the fan stayed off and the window stayed closed, because I was stuck to the bed, incapacitated. I had trouble sleeping that night.

  Part II

  12

  A lot can happen over the course of four months, and yet it is just as possible for nothing to happen. University began in September, and while this did provide some distraction, I was haunted by my unplanned holiday in Biarritz. My nostalgia was so profound that I slipped into lethargy. I slept for long hours and inoculated myself with caffeine for what little of the day remained after I had woken up and dressed.

  Every day I waited for Élodie to call. Whenever the telephone rang and my pulse quickened it was only ever Sophie on the other end. She would report whatever was going on in New Zealand—the drinks she had with friends that I had forgotten about, and the gossip of their lives. We would discuss the art she was studying, and she would email me her essays to read. I would edit them severely. Sometimes I would send her one of my essays in return, and she would have no suggestions for improvement. ‘It’s good,’ she would say. ‘It’s really good.’ And that would be that.

  During this time I accompanied Ethan to his gigs, which were in dank bars over in the Eleventh and the Fifth. He performed solo with his guitar and his keyboard and his laptop and his microphone, wearing sunglasses and purple trousers, and he would command his audience. Sometimes he would remove his shirt and throw it into the crowd. The French worshipped him, and they would all buy him a drink afterwards and fawn over him while I stood off to the side and tried to find somebody else to talk to. Inevitably he would find a girl to bring back to the apartment, and I
would be relegated to my bedroom for the rest of the night.

  On those rare occasions when we found ourselves alone, without the company of his French artist friends and their outrageous opinions on everything, we were able to drink and talk about philosophy and books as we used to. He knew all the grimy student bars around the Latin Quarter. One in particular served sangria and had a jukebox that played nothing but old jazz songs. It reminded me of Spain. I was glad to spend hours there, listening to Ethan read me his poetry. I asked him what the point of it all was, and he told me that there didn’t need to be a point. He expressed whatever was on his mind, and he did not need to justify it.

  The rest of my time I spent trying to live like a Frenchman, drinking wine and eating bread and cheese. University required me to spend most of my spare hours reading. Élodie would have been quick to point out that this pastime was designed for such a terrific bore as me. In my imagination, I responded by asking what pastime was designed for such a terrific whore as her. This was perhaps the result of spending so much time in my own company. I tried hard to rid myself of such thoughts, but Élodie haunted me.

  Paris returned to its usual bustle as the year went on. I would walk out into the street after a morning of reading, and let the ebb and flow of humanity dictate where I ended up. Sometimes this took me as far as Boulogne, or Montmartre, or down to the Place d’Italie. I remembered Élodie mentioning her pied-à-terre in the Eighth, and I would walk up and down the Boulevard Haussmann, hoping to catch sight of her emerging from a boutique or a gastronomic restaurant with an inconspicuous doorway. Of course, it never happened. There was nobody but a throng of tourists, photographing the Arc de Triomphe on their mobile phones and eating snails and frog legs in overpriced bistros.

  I turned twenty-one in November and I pretended that it hadn’t happened. Ethan would have insisted on a celebration if he had remembered. Sophie called in the morning and reminded me that her family never celebrated birthdays, in an effort to cheer me up. I told her she should be here in Paris with me. She told me that she missed me and to treat myself to another wander through the Musée d’Orsay. I did not leave the apartment for the rest of the day. I asked myself why I was clinging to Sophie when she was the lone reminder of what I had left behind. It was because I needed a friend, I told myself, and she was a good friend who had loved me for who I was, back in the days when I knew who I was.

  The weather cooled in early December, and the grand overcoats and scarves returned to the shop windows. It was more excusable to be badly dressed in the summer, since I could have called myself a tourist at that time. But now, in cafés and bars, I could sense that the locals disapproved of my fraying clothes. I had kept Élodie’s acquisitions, but lacked the occasion to wear them. Her scent stayed on the collar of the jacket for weeks. Where had she found such a potent perfume?

  So it happened that one day I decided to line up all of my clothing and make an assessment. I went through everything, and decided that they were consistent only in their ragged hemlines and misshapen cuts. ‘One simply cannot go around Paris in an oversized brown shirt,’ as Élodie might have said. I collected the rags together in a bundle and heaped them in my suitcase. They needed to be replaced. Wallet in tow, I left the apartment.

  The shops at this end of Saint-Sulpice were no good. Those that did not have dead flowers inside and whitewash over the windows were cheap and bleak. I walked past the more conventional shops at the western end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, reasoning that Élodie would disapprove of them too. I waited at the intersection with the Rue Bonaparte and planned my next move. The buildings in the foreground were bathed in shadow, and the Tour Montparnasse at the end of the street reflected the gold of the setting sun. A folk band played outside the church across the road, attracting a crowd.

  The shops changed as I walked down the Rue du Cherche-Midi, which was narrow and quiet. An old woman walked by with her papillon, and little boys in suits and ties were hurried along by their nanny. Halfway up the street I came across the right sort of a place, which had no display windows but did advertise menswear, comfortably removed upstairs.

  The assistant on the third floor was the master of his realm, and I was an intruder. He wore a low-cut shirt that showed his chest hair and baggy trousers and suspenders. I was out of place here. I began to search through the racks for something that would not make me look like him. He came over to stand behind me.

  ‘Oh my friend,’ he said. ‘You need help.’

  His words made me wonder if I had misunderstood. I had not, and the next hour was spent in the midst of a flurry of clothing and accessories that I could not fight my way out of. There were no other customers. I was imprisoned with the assistant as he turned me around and then around again, pressing more items into my arms. I might as well have been one of the mannequins.

  ‘This is a miracle,’ he said, as I withdrew from the dressing room in a violet cardigan and a tight pair of jeans. ‘You have the perfect body for everything.’ He could not contain his excitement, and he clapped his hands as he searched through the racks for yet another combination. ‘Has nobody ever told you this before? Well, hear it from me. You are an object of envy, young sir.’

  By the time he had finished revising my wardrobe, satisfied that I could be seen in public again, he collected the items together in a pile and followed me down the staircase.

  The female voices on the first floor were heated. I paused on the corner of the staircase as I recognised one of them: a lightning-fast, confident French tongue with the accents accentuated and the Rs rolled. I stopped breathing.

  ‘This is an illegal policy,’ she said. ‘I bought this two weeks ago. Therefore I should be able to return it, since it does not fit.’

  The shop assistant tried to explain something, but Élodie must have thrown her arms up. She clicked her heels across the tiles. I stood rigid, halfway up the stairs. She wore a woollen overcoat, which did not flatter her frail figure in the same way that her summer dress had, but the jewellery and the make-up were there. Her skin had lost all of its radiant tan, and it was a Hellenic shade of white. She paused at the doorway, putting on a pair of sunglasses even though it was overcast. Her head drew up and our eyes were briefly brought together. I stood paralysed, waiting for her to react. But before I could begin to move, she pushed the sunglasses down like a visor and strode into the crowded street.

  My first impulse was to run after her. But she had walked away too fast, and I needed to pay for the clothes.

  ‘Who was that woman?’ I asked the assistant at the counter.

  ‘She demanded to return the dress that she bought here two weeks ago. We have a strict no-returns policy. Why do you ask? Do you know her?’

  ‘I thought I recognised her. Perhaps not.’

  ‘She is old enough to be your mother.’

  I laughed at this, in such an airy way that I could have been Élodie. The male assistant wrapped my new acquisitions in white paper, all the while explaining what a stroke of good luck my presence had been.

  The female assistant took my credit card. ‘There aren’t many men who could do that,’ she said with something close to sincerity. ‘Have you ever considered modelling?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’m not the type.’

  ‘You most certainly are. You should think about it. Male models are always needed in this city.’

  I excused this as her attempt, however flattering, to validate the sale.

  All faces were replaced by Élodie’s as I walked up the Rue de Rennes. They were impossible to ignore, all judging me in much the same way that she had, as though I were a bad memory that needed to be repressed. I shuffled past them all. It had been thrilling to see her again, although it had also been shocking to find her so changed. She could have aged ten years. I thought back to Selvin’s claim that she was forty-five. In the summer I would not have believed him. But now I could see that she was old, as old as my own mother. And why had she come to the Sixth to shop for clothes?
She had not even thought to call me, and she knew that I lived around the corner.

  Ethan was at home. He stared as I entered. This confused me, until I remembered that I was carrying more than one shopping bag for possibly the first time in my life.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  I dropped my bags by the dining table. ‘Just giving my wardrobe a bit of an overhaul,’ I said.

  ‘A bit of an overhaul? It looks as though you’ve bought up the whole of the Left Bank. What’s the occasion? First date?’

  ‘You know I’m not dating.’

  ‘It has to be something. A monk like you doesn’t go out shopping for no good reason.’

  I was about to explain the assistant’s opinion that I could be a model, but I caught myself. Ethan would tease me about it. I went through to the bedroom.

  ‘Aren’t you going to give me a demonstration?’ he called out.

  ‘Not right now. I’m going to have a bath.’

  I needed sanctuary. I liked the bathroom because it was the least dilapidated room in the apartment. The walls were covered in faux-marble tiles and the ceiling was plastered. The other rooms showed the warped wooden beams, and I always found this disconcerting, because it suggested that the whole building could fall down at any moment.

  I drew the bath too hot, and it took me a few minutes to adjust to the change in temperature.

  Soon my mind filled with possibilities. Élodie had come over from the Eighth for a reason. It could not have been accidental. Élodie never made mistakes. And then I realised that she must have wanted me to run after her. That much should have been obvious. Perhaps it would happen again, and I would have the confidence to seize the opportunity. But did I want to?