Leaving Home Read online

  My awakening was rude, as awakenings are supposed to be. The room I was assigned in the quasi-college complex was mean by any standards. It contained a narrow bed, a rudimentary desk and a chair, and I could see that no amount of embellishment would ever make it sympathetic. The corridor rang with shouts as my fellow inmates made their way to the communal shower-rooms, while I sat on the bed, my bag unpacked, wondering how I was to survive. From the small window the view was of a poor approximation of a park, dotted with unconvincing buildings designed to evoke an impression of home for the multinational crowd of Moroccan, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese students who were supposed to count themselves lucky to have found a lodging in a city which I knew instinctively to be too rich, too authoritarian, and too confident to accommodate unfledged creatures such as myself, and no doubt some others like me, for whom home had been abruptly displaced. I was moved—by hunger, nothing else—to follow a smell of coffee and found a canteen where I should have to eat every day, for there seemed to be nothing in that prospect other than those overlarge though gimcrack buildings that closed the horizon, no restaurants, no cinemas, nothing but gravel paths leading to other installations not unlike the one I was in. As soon as I could I escaped into the open air, but it seemed that there was nowhere to go, and I felt as if I were in a sort of prison in which natural boundaries were observed but not indulged. I spent the rest of the day wondering how soon I could leave. This was far from the emancipation I had promised myself, and it was with a feeling of despair, which has stayed with me to this day, that I realized that I had embarked on a course of action which was in fact too difficult for me. That feeling too has persisted, although to all intents and purposes I have lived a life much like any other. In those early days I was careful not to make friends, although my fellow exiles were friendly enough, in case I should be tempted to reveal my horrible unreadiness, only to encounter in return an expression of surprise, even of condemnation, from those who had managed the transition better than I ever could. That impression too has stayed with me.

  Slowly, very slowly, I retrieved some sense of independence. I made my conscientious rounds of various libraries and print rooms, and discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I found the silent atmospheres, the bent heads of the readers, reassuring. I also found a way to negotiate the physical and moral distance that separated my own poor lodgings from the glamorous and beautiful city to which I made my way every morning, and which I left, with sinking heart, every evening. I saw no way in which I could bridge that gap, knowing myself un-equipped for decisive action. The docility of study, in which I felt at home, repaid me to some extent for the sheer discomfort of my life, and for a long time I was unable to decide whether this was genuine or merely a compensation I had worked out for myself. At any rate it persisted, so much so that I began to consider myself viable, albeit with that feeling of estrangement that was my initial experience of life away from home. The obvious solution was to find somewhere else to live, but I was constrained by my grant, which barely covered my needs. In a rare moment of resolve I decided to use up the money as expeditiously as possible and return to London, the work half-done but easy to complete at a time when I should have recovered some strength of purpose. I took to eating out on a Sunday, so as to mark the end of the working week, and found that a simple omelette at the Ruc, surrounded by vigorous talk and expansive gestures, did much to restore my appetite. I could see the way ahead, although I could not follow it. And on Sunday evenings, incarcerated once more, I felt that familiar lowering of the spirits which defined that home away from home which was now my lot. Mondays, which most people dislike, were my deliverance.

  Gradually I came to know and love the city, not only for its most public attributes, its history, its monuments, but in small overlooked corners, unfashionable churches, outlying bus stops where I found a quieter, more modest population, suburban squares where children played. On my conscientious visits to what had once been real gardens, to Vaux-le-Vicomte or Marly-le-Roi, I came into more meaningful contact with my subject. In those dignified but deserted spaces I could appreciate the symmetry which I had once thought rigid. I now saw that it guarded a secret, and if it enshrined a certain melancholy it also celebrated a divine proportion. I became attached to their absent owners, sought out missing features. In the Musée des Arts Décoratifs I found designs for fountains, miniature obelisks, portraits of long-dead pug dogs, delirious landscape drawings of massive overhanging boughs and branches, as if the artist were trying to escape the constraints of that preordained symmetry. . . . I could sympathize with all of nature, and, by contrast, with the echoing spaces of the museum, not much visited, where only the occasional footstep, or the creak of the wooden floor, broke the silence. I realized that I was becoming acclimatized, that the disappointment and loneliness that I still felt could be dispelled by such encounters, and that although I was habitually unaccompanied I could summon up an agreeable remark, a fragment of conversation, so that at no time, or so I flatter myself, did I reveal the existence of the sobriety that had overtaken me in that most vibrant of cities and which has remained my most constant companion.

  The formality which is the essence of the classical garden settled on me like a beneficent shroud, shielding my melancholy from intrusive eyes. But my work, my disguise, consoled me for what I was obliged to forgo: love, friendship, warmth, familiarity. It was only when I returned to that awful room that I was impelled to reflect on my lack of everything that makes a way of life desirable. Strangely I did not think too much of my mother, who was immutably fixed in my mind’s eye, sitting in a corner of her sofa, with a book in her hands. I had no plans to return to her. My home-going instincts, which were strong, had widened, deepened, so that I thought once again of fabulous opportunities provided by others, leading me into a future that would encompass a real home, a home of my own. Though there was no sign of this, I kept it in the forefront of my mind and was thus enabled to confront the long empty days.

  3

  FRANÇOISE, MY ESSENTIAL POINT OF REFERENCE IN this strange enterprise—which I found benign but increasingly unrealistic—was not at her station behind the catalogues but was clearly audible in the stacks, undeterred by the anguished ‘Mademoiselle!’ from M. Bonfils, the librarian, who decreed a monastic quiet for the benefit of his readers. Françoise ignored this, and was, if anything, applauded for her flouting of correct procedure, was indeed greeted with a loving smile by the elderly scholars to whose desks she delivered the bulky volumes from which they derived those facts which would enable them to create bulky volumes of their own.

  We had become co-conspirators, clearly but wordlessly allied in our unspoken desire to subvert the solemnity of the reading-room. On the surface she merely provided me with those pattern books and prints which I studied with the utmost application and docility, until the darkening sky beyond the tall windows signalled the end of the working day, but behind our apparent rectitude we were alike in experiencing a form of anarchy which was, if anything, directed towards those innocent bent heads which I knew were serious, admirable, dedicated, but which I was in no hurry to resemble.

  Sometimes she dropped a note onto my open pages: this signified that we were to meet for coffee and a sandwich at midday in one of the cafés she favoured. My assent was equally wordless. In fact I was the only person to whom she did not speak. To others she expressed herself cheerfully and kindly, and in complete indifference to the rules. Even when M. Bonfils emerged from his office, not so much to reprimand her as to see what occasioned her ebullience, she did not much modify her loquacity. She appeared to know everything about everyone, enquired how the work was going, an enquiry that was always welcomed, even if the answer was delivered in muted tones. It was her departure to her desk, and the relative silence that followed, that signified the real start of the working day.

  I had initially warmed to this universal friendliness— quite indiscriminate, quite unmotivated—and my first impressions were positive. She seemed to me a
repository of goodwill of a sort I had not previously encountered. After the first few days of our acquaintance my eyes instinctively sought out her presence, and if she were engaged in one of her laughing colloquies with this professor or that I took pleasure in studying her mobile features and her splendid figure, which she did not seek to disguise with the sort of suitably drab garments that might have been thought suitable to her activities. Indeed it was part of her charm that she lavished her presence unstintingly on those so staid readers to whom she represented something between a daughter and a mistress. The only person indifferent to her charm was M. Bonfils, but he was also slightly frightened of her: her vitality, he seemed to know, might sweep him away, and so apart from his ‘Mademoiselle!’, which she largely ignored, he appeared to have made his peace with her potentially disruptive presence and to have declared a truce which was acceptable to both parties.

  She was a striking woman, with bold Gallic features, not beautiful but more than that, electric with an energy that made her presence in the library dangerously welcome. Her face was alight with humour, as if she found her position quite ludicrous, but not so ludicrous as the owners of those bent scholarly heads. Yet she never showed any antagonism towards them, though she equally clearly thought them less than normal men, as if they were disqualified from the business of living, and for that reason to be treated as invalids. What she expected from a man was all too obvious, which made her kindness towards those incapacitated by the nature of their calling all the more remarkable. Before we had exchanged a few words I was fascinated by her provocative behaviour, and the way in which she tempered it so as not to alarm those to whom she presented not only the books they had requested but herself. I envied her for this. I also wondered, as no doubt did those others, how she maintained this good humour, and who was the lucky partner to whom she went home and who was no doubt responsible for keeping her in such fine condition.

  Perhaps because of her appeal to men of all ages she did not much commend herself to women, which was where I came in. My studious calm appeared to please her; no doubt she saw me as harmless, and harmlessly receptive. Certainly she had observed my sobriety, and had decided that I was a suitable confidante, whose evident admiration she was not likely to overlook. Maybe she considered me initially as one of the unqualified, the incapacitated, yet when we got to know each other she found me acceptable in other ways. I was her audience, but then I was also in some essential way the one to whom she could reveal herself without fear or favour. When she discovered that I was the daughter of a widowed mother, as she was, she found it easy to assume that we had a great deal in common, although this was in fact inaccurate. Surely, I thought, the mother who had raised so confident a daughter could hardly resemble my own, with her silences, her reclusion, her so discreet love for me. But Françoise appeared to consider her mother as much of a problem as I did mine. She did not, however, betray in any way the anguish I had long felt in connection with my mother; rather the opposite. Her mother, I gathered, was something of a cheerful antagonist whom she understood perfectly. Only the tie of possession, which they both felt, was stronger than this.

  ‘You went home this weekend?’ I asked, as we sat down in the corner we always sought out in whatever café she favoured at any particular time.

  ‘Of course. I always go home at the weekend. My mother usually invites friends, neighbours, on a Saturday evening.’

  ‘Relatives?’

  ‘No, we have no close relatives, only distant ones. My mother and I are quite cut off.’

  Her face momentarily clouded as she exposed their isolated condition. My own face must have mirrored hers; she gave the sort of rueful smile that was her version of candour. There was no need to explain; my useful function was to quiz her as if I were some sort of interrogator, well-disposed but objective, the sort of discreet official who simply desired to be in possession of the facts.

  ‘And you drive back to Paris on a Sunday night?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m glad to. That man is looking at you,’ she went on in an uninflected voice. ‘Don’t turn round. He’ll come over if he’s really interested.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ I said. I was sincere: such approaches were for Françoise, not for me. ‘Are you happy with this arrangement?’

  ‘I’m happy to get back to my flat. Happy to get away from my mother’s supervision.’ She laughed. ‘Maman thinks she can oversee everything. I am to marry the offspring of one of those so respectable neighbours, it doesn’t matter which. Whereas I have other plans.’

  ‘Why would you not want to marry?’

  ‘I intend to decide what I want for myself. Oh, later on, perhaps.’ She shrugged. ‘But not to fall in with my mother’s plans. She is the most conventional woman in France. I think she is frightened of what I might do without her there to restrain me. She speculates, of course. She thinks she has pandered to me by allowing me to live alone, at least part of the time. But I know she suspects me of having lovers, many lovers. Have you noticed how very correct women have unbridled imaginations?’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Well, what about you? You’re correct enough. What do you think about?’

  ‘Well, I think about marriage, oddly enough. If I married there’d be two of us to be a family. I’d like that.’

  I did not tell her that I envied those young lovers who walked hand in hand, still less those elderly couples doing their shopping together on a Saturday morning. I saw their closeness as a bulwark against encroaching solitude, and I wanted it for myself. I did not see how random intimacies, of the sort Françoise favoured, could compare.

  She laughed as she saw my expression. ‘My mother would agree with you. She thinks that anything less than marriage— to someone she already knows—comes under the heading of bad behaviour. You clearly understand that, even if you don’t like it. You know you can always borrow the flat at the weekend, when I’m not there. If you have anything on.’ A passing scepticism was present in this kind offer. She was clearly intrigued by my lack of attachments, though in an odd way she was glad of it. There would be no occasion on which we would be forced to confront each other. And she would show no mercy if we were ever to be in competition. She knew this. Even I knew it. Both of us accepted a possible antagonism with equanimity. Both of us knew there is no chivalry among women.

  I had seen this flat of hers and had thought it murky enough to justify her mother’s worst suspicions. It was in the Boulevard Diderot, in the twelfth arrondissement, and consisted of a bedsitting-room, a cabinet de toilette, and an awkward annexe between the two containing a hot plate and an electric kettle. The whole thing was dark, secretive; the only window looked out on to a gloomy courtyard filled with the building’s accumulated dustbins. I could see no reason to cherish this place, particularly as I knew that the house to which she returned at the weekends was rather grand, certainly large, possibly ancestral, and to judge from the photograph she had shown me, a place of some consequence. She was evidently proud of this house, even vain, but Françoise was not averse to displaying her advantages. It was all of a piece with her striking unembellished face, as if she were playing with a more advantageous hand than other women and had no need of special pleading. The flat was useful for obvious reasons, for obvious purposes. It was a place to which men could be invited, and, like Françoise, had no need of embellishment. I had no desire for such a flat of my own, although the house, to which she had issued a vague invitation, interested me more. I wondered at the contrast between the handsome house and the slightly squalid flat; the one seemed to contradict the other, but I supposed that the flat was all that she could afford. I have never been able to solve the mystery of other people’s money.

  What this flourishing of attributes made me feel was increased discontent with my own arrangements, which formed a subject of conversation in which she appeared to take an interest. She was intent on improving me, and I felt myself irresistibly drawn to this process, as if only under the direction of one more
forceful and successful than myself could I take my place in the world. My room continued to impress me as truly dreadful; the only comfortable place to sit was on the bed, and even then it was preferable to lie down. This was in the prosperous late 1970s, and yet I lived like a pauper. I was too intent on staying within my means, for not to do so would mean asking my mother—or worse, my uncle—for money. And yet I was a little surprised that neither of them had offered, and deduced that we were so poor that we could not bear to discuss money, let alone ask for it. But I felt disbarred from normal pleasure, even the pleasure of returning home after a day’s work. I had no arrangements of the kind envisaged by Françoise, and I supposed that this was fairly obvious, but I should have liked to entertain the possibility. Françoise was both intrigued and aghast at my solitary state and frequently enjoined me to break out.

  ‘You’d be better off in an hotel,’ she said. ‘A room in a small hotel. It needn’t cost too much. Can’t you ask your mother? You can’t go on living in that place at your age. Don’t you want a man?’

  ‘I’d like a man for company,’ I replied. ‘That’s why marriage appeals to me.’

  She surveyed me with a total lack of expression.

  ‘My poor little Emma,’ she said finally.

  This was how this particular conversation usually ended. And yet, like water dripping onto stone, it finally had its effect. Would it be so terrible to explain to my mother that I was cold and uncomfortable in my present lodgings, and that I should have enjoyed hot baths like the rest of the civilized world? Contingent on this reflection was another, even more uncomfortable. I had not been home, had relied on weekly telephone calls from the post office to monitor my mother’s well-being. Yet even this task seemed to be beyond me, as if entering that zone of silence in Battersea were tantamount to relinquishing my rights. Françoise’s gift to me, apart from her unlooked-for friendship, was to encourage desires for expansion. She saw, as I did not, that I was in drastic need of a life of my own. So far this had not materialized, and she was indignant on my behalf, though only for a minute or two. She was too avid for her own satisfaction to waste time on so backward a pupil as myself. And yet she wished me well.