Incidents in the Rue Laugier Read online

  Much of his present dismay had to do with the manner of his arrival. It had been swelteringly hot when he emerged from the Gare du Nord, and his decision to take a bus, worked out well in advance, had disintegrated as soon as he saw the last taxi on the rank preparing to drive off. He had leapt forward and secured it, had bundled his bag on to the rear seat, had squeezed himself in beside it, and had spent the journey to the rue Laugier trying to avoid the hot acrid breath of the driver’s dog, which kept a not too friendly eye on him and panted into his face. As the taxi jolted through the evening crowds he had briefly experienced the spirit of adventure which he had supposed would attend him as a familiar. ‘I have arrived!’ he told himself, dismissing a faint disappointment that there was no one to greet him. Fumbling with his money, also prepared in advance (but it was not enough), he had glanced up at the imposing grey stone building that was to be his home—for how long? He did not know. He had knocked on the glass door of the concierge’s apartment, and had announced himself. ‘Harrison,’ he had said, aware of thirst, and of his shirt sticking to his back.

  ‘There is no one of that name here,’ said a small secretive-looking woman. ‘How did you get in? You should have rung the bell.’

  ‘Someone was coming out,’ he replied.

  ‘But that was irregular. You should have rung the bell. Whom did you want?’

  ‘Vermeulen,’ he said.

  ‘Monsieur and Madame Vermeulen are in Brittany. They are not expected back for another month. Nicole!’ she called to someone in the room behind her, which he could not see, the door being open little more than an inch or two. ‘The soup! I regret, Monsieur,’ she said, making as if to close the door in his face.

  ‘But I am expected,’ he said. There was a pause. When the pause proved inconclusive he held out a ten franc note, which she took without acknowledgment, unless ‘Your name again?’ was the acknowledgment he had been waiting for.

  ‘Tyler,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ The tone was now pensive, detached. He added another note. Had he been less tired and thirsty he would have been gratified by the predictable nature of this performance, particularly by the detail of the soup, prepared, he supposed, for the evening meal. From the scarcely open door a smell of leeks stole out into the echoing stone vault under which he seemed condemned to stand for ever. He had read about this sort of set-up in a hundred novels, but now found himself too impatient to appreciate it. The note was abstracted, again without acknowledgment. No change of expression was reflected on the woman’s not unattractive face. Implacable, he thought; maybe it went with the job. The door silently closed. When it reopened the woman emerged, shutting and locking it behind her. In her hand she held a large key.

  ‘Tyler, you said. You are staying for how long?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure.’

  Unexpectedly, the flat was on the ground floor. The first impression Harrison received was of impenetrable darkness. When a light clicked on behind him, he found himself in a lobby surrounded by closed doors. Trying these he found them to be locked. Beyond the locked doors he imagined closed shutters. The concierge urged him forward. The one door that proved to be unlocked led into a small bedroom, obviously not much used by these Vermeulens, whom he had never met. Here too the shutters were closed, and the air stale and warm. The windows opened inwards, the shutters outwards: with enormous relief he let in air and light, which, since he was on the ground floor, was of a disappointing opacity. To his alarm he could hear footsteps outside the window, advancing and retreating. When he peered out to investigate he found that these footsteps led to a set of dustbins, aligned in a dusty courtyard. Not much of a view, he reflected: this room was obviously used to discourage visitors, who would take the hint and move to a hotel. He however would stay, he told himself, surveying the walnut bed covered with a dubious fur rug, the two armchairs upholstered in a dirt-defying brown material, the small table in faux bambou, the wallpaper with its design of autumn leaves, the mirror, again in a frame of faux bambou, and a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus.

  It was like the room of someone who had died, some elderly relative, piously taken in, and removed in due course to a hospice, the room kept unchanged as an earnest of good intentions. He wondered why these Vermeulens, whom he understood to be quite rich, preserved this sad room, unless it were destined for the more unfortunate members of their family, who would, in their declining years, or under the threat of some mysterious illness, accept it as appropriate. He himself felt a curious sympathy for it, although he could see that it would be more acceptable in winter than in late summer, when its suffocating brownness, colluding with the faint smell of dustbins from the courtyard, made him determine to be out of it as much as possible. The concierge, crossing the room on silent feet, opened another, unseen door, and revealed a small bathroom.

  ‘I expect you will want the water turned on,’ she said.

  ‘Please.’ This time he had a note ready. ‘And the kitchen?’

  ‘Madame Vermeulen was quite clear that there was to be no cooking. The kitchen therefore is closed. Not available. There is a café on the corner if you wish to take breakfast.’

  He was a man who liked his cup of tea, who was used to his mother’s cakes and pies, and who, at Cambridge, had achieved not bad results in the kitchen of the house into which he had moved in his third year, and which had won him considerable popularity among his friends. Now there was not even a gas ring, not even a kettle: well, he would just have to make the best of it.

  ‘Thank you, Madame,’ he said. He was damned if he was going to give her any more money.

  ‘Be sure to lock up when you go out,’ she said.

  She was more prison governor than servant, he reflected; if he had been expecting a welcome of sorts, he had no more hopes or illusions on that score. Yet when she left he was momentarily disconcerted by the silence, a silence broken only by the occasional banging of a dustbin lid. He tried the other doors of the flat, which was now revealed as large, but with ramifications which supposed either an extended family or a set of ancillary sitting-rooms: all were locked. His room was clearly the last in a league table of possible rooms, the one that would lose nothing by being lent out to the son of a friend, whom one was obliged, by the terms of that very friendship, to accommodate. Harrison felt a qualm of unease; the arrangement with Tyler had been unofficial from all points of view. The Tyler parents knew nothing of it; certainly the Vermeulens, business associates of Tyler’s father, believed that Tyler himself was occupying the room, and would not have offered it had they known it was to be appropriated by an acquaintance of Tyler’s, or even a friend.

  Why then was he here? He could be in a decent hotel, one which would serve him breakfast, for a sensible outlay which he could well afford. He did not have to stay in this brown prison—there were bars, he noticed, on the window—until Tyler arrived. Tyler was the key to all this. Tyler had suggested it for reasons of his own, or perhaps out of genuine altruism. Being rich, Tyler was not given to spending money unnecessarily. It was far more natural for Tyler to stay in a room like this for no cost than to spend money vulgarly on creature comforts. Compared with Tyler, Harrison felt like any nouveau riche, with his craven dependence on laundry and refreshments, and his longing—yes, that was what it was—for a courtesy, however unfairly acquired.

  He supposed he must now stay here because Tyler had arranged it, and that he would have to wait for him in case he turned up. He berated himself for succumbing so easily to Tyler’s offhand kindness. There had been no need. But with Tyler it was almost a case of noblesse oblige: that is to say, Tyler’s nobility put everyone else under an obligation. There was a kind of flattery implied if Tyler spared one a thought. And somehow, if he were to move out now, as reason told him to, he would feel that he owed Tyler some sort of explanation, even apology. It would be unthinkable to reject this hospitality as being somehow not up to standard. Therefore he would have to stay here out of sheer emba
rrassment, reflecting that if he were Tyler, or someone of Tyler’s stature, someone not tormented by ideas of cleanliness and simple bourgeois comfort, he would find this dire room quite acceptable. In Tyler’s circle, he supposed, hotels were infra dig, refuges for conventionally minded people. Of whom I am one, he told himself. Nevertheless, after a wash he felt better. The presence of a telephone in the hall reassured him.

  The following days were spent walking. Each morning he left his room with a sense of deliverance, vowing not to return there until he was so tired that all he had to do was go to bed. The weather was still glorious; on the street people congratulated each other, as if responsible for this prolonged sunshine. He found the café the concierge had indicated, had his breakfast, and walked down to the Louvre, his collar open, his jacket over his arm. He found himself going to the Louvre every morning, mainly because he could not think of anything else to do; he was entirely free, and freedom was beginning to breed a certain anxiety. He found to his dismay that he was almost indifferent to the paintings, but liked to linger by the glass cases containing Egyptian scarabs, tiny secretive fetishes which bred in him a fellow feeling for smallness of any kind. Paris was too big, it seemed to him. Everything was too big; the buildings were too big, the streets too wide, the people too severe. The worldly Egyptian smile, encountered several galleries away, seemed to him strangely young, as if worn by a girl or a boy, sophisticated beyond his imagining. It was with a sense of relief that he left the huge building and took the bus across the river to the Luxembourg Gardens.

  This was the best part of his day. He drank another cup of coffee in the Place Saint-Sulpice and thought about his future. At this distance the shop seemed not such a bad idea as it had done at first, the prospect of travelling the world alone, like the Flying Dutchman, having lost some of its charm. Sitting in the hot sun, with the taste of coffee in his mouth, it occurred to Harrison to wonder whether this was all that was to be vouchsafed to him in the way of pleasure and contentment, whether those so distant dreams of his childhood gardens were merely Wordsworthian glimpses pointing to the glory that was lost rather than pointing forward to a joy that was to come. He was lonely, that was the truth of it. He had thought himself self-sufficient, and he had discovered that he was not. What mattered now, in the light of this revelation (for he had not felt this way before), was to create some sort of attachment for himself, not the spurious deferential attachment that drove him to the likes of Tyler, but a life containing some sort of affection, of stability.

  He thought of the furnished flat that he had rented so speedily, without really looking at it, such had been his haste to get away. It would have to do for the time being, he supposed, until he thought to acquire a permanent home. Home! It was a concept, not yet a place. Something else was needed to bring it to life. He thought of his parents’ placid undemanding existence, undemanding because they demanded nothing beyond what they already possessed. He more than envied them; he respected them, although he had left them quite happily, thinking to prolong that precious and now legendary childhood by leaving lightheartedly, secure in the knowledge that he could always return. Now, for the first time, he felt cast out, expected to make his life as a man, divorced from the caprices and the velleities of childhood.

  He would seek companions, he told himself, for he was newly aware of a coldness which made the heat of the day, the gleam of the sun on his watch, the heaviness of the summer trees little more than devices for throwing this new conviction into sharper relief. He would have to settle down, since he did not have the courage to do otherwise. He felt an access of grief that all his proposed adventures had reduced themselves to this brief interlude, in the hot sun of an exceptional summer, taking the place of those wider wanderings that he had always promised himself. Or had those wanderings been the illusion, the sea on which he had thought to embark and which had so swiftly proved to him his own inadequacies? He knew now that he was not a hero, and the knowledge shamed him. Here, on the Place Saint-Sulpice, he was visited by shame and sadness. It did not comfort him to know that he had done no wrong, that he was innocent. To be guilty—but to be guilty of extravagance, of accomplishment, of a certain grand carelessness—would have been a relief.

  Perhaps later, he thought, when I have settled down, made my way in life. That is the time to go away. Perhaps it was always a dream of maturity, of retirement even. Then I shall be fully justified, and surely more experienced, more courageous. Perhaps I am merely too young.

  He paid for his coffee and took a taxi back to the rue Laugier. In the hall of the flat he switched on the light, consulted his diary, then telephoned the shop in Denbigh Street. He had no confidence that the call would be answered; for all he knew Thomas Cook had decamped as soon as his back was turned. The man’s slightly effeminate voice, so at odds with his incurious face, came through quite clearly, making him jump: his nerves were decidedly on edge this morning.

  ‘Cook? Harrison here. Everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve moved in, if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I’ve just thought, don’t get rid of any of those books. Someone must want them. I might do a catalogue when I get home.’

  ‘When’s that then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Soon. I’ll let you know, of course. Have you managed to clean up at all?’

  ‘It’s looking OK. Wants a few coats of paint though. Navy’d be nice.’

  ‘You’re right. I’ll have it refurbished when I get back. You could take a few days off if you wanted to. Just as long as you’re in the flat. I don’t particularly want the place to stand empty.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Perhaps I’ll take a week when you get back. Having a good time?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ He was amazed how easy it was to communicate with this man, whom, after all, he hardly knew. But then, he had not done much communicating recently, he told himself. And maybe the book business would not be too bad after all. This afternoon he would take a look at the secondhand boxes by the Seine to see what was on offer and how it was priced. He had, when he thought about it, a great deal to learn, and the process might take him some time.

  But in the event he went back to the Luxembourg Gardens, and merely sat in the sun, thinking back on the emotional changes that the last few days had brought about. Now that his future was, as he thought with a pang, more or less settled, he was in less of a hurry to move, to put himself out. It was as if his resolution, or his defeat (for he thought of it as a defeat), had afforded him a further interval of freedom. He would not go back to the Louvre, he thought; he would have a holiday. After more coffee in a nearby café he took an iron chair, sat down, folded his arms, and prepared to spend the afternoon in this manner. Almost immediately he felt restless. All this would be more than tolerable, he reflected, if he had a girlfriend with him. Or even a friend. The girls he had left at home now appeared to him distant and diminished, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope, or in someone else’s photographs. They had all been pleasant, those friends of his sister’s, with whom he had grown up: agreeable, uncomplicated, polite to his mother, and more than willing to keep him company. He was thought to be attractive, with his slight but wiry frame, his hungry smile, but somehow it had been impossible to misbehave in such a setting, with so much goodwill being demonstrated around him, his mother bringing out a tray of lemonade into the garden, his father offering to run the girls home. And the garden, always that garden.

  He had made up for lost time at Cambridge, but here again he had been lucky; his girlfriend, Sally, had been just as decent and friendly as the companions of his blameless adolescence. Therefore making love at last had involved no loss of innocence. It was not even a rite of passage, more an extension of play, with an unexpected conclusion. Guilt and anxiety were unimaginable, though now that he was on his own he knew both. He had been remarkably fortunate, he now reflected. He and Sally had kept each other faithful company for three years, sleeping together but as often as
not going on long walks or listening to music. Their liaison was regarded as a settled thing by their friends; they were neither challenged nor disturbed. It had been an interlude of almost miraculous harmony, of lack of tension. Yet perhaps for that very reason, at the end of three years they knew that they would part, and would part no less amicably than they had stayed together.

  He would see her again, he thought, but vaguely, without urgency. He was ready now for something different, something that would fill his horizon and take the place of that pilgrimage he had promised himself to the end of the world and for which he had proved unready. It was not sex he wanted, for sex had never seemed to him to present any problems, to be readily available, to be enjoyed without impatience or anxiety, to be an extended form of friendship. He wanted someone to fill the void, to appease the sudden lack which afflicted him even now, sitting in the sun, watching the children being fed their afternoon snack by their mothers. These mothers smiled at him, which made him feel shy, unworthy. He did not quite know what to do with himself, although the day had passed somehow, and not unpleasantly. He supposed that he might spend a few more days in the same manner, just to prove to himself that he was having a holiday. Then, he thought, he would pack it in and go home.

  If the days were tolerable the evenings were not. He seemed to be too early for the night’s activities. He took his bath at six, glad to get rid of the dust of the afternoon, and then, refreshed, walked out to find a brasserie for his apéritif and dinner. Yet he seemed always to be the first customer, and was paying his bill just as others were arriving. Then began more wandering, although, tired by now, he did not move far from the Place des Ternes, and after a final cup of coffee, he would be back in the gloom of the rue Laugier by nine-thirty at the latest. Sleep was no problem; he could always count on sleep. But sleep seemed a poor substitute for the adventures he had planned. In bed, ruminating the day’s emptiness, he reflected that although little had happened since his arrival a week ago, he had been bedevilled by thoughts, all of them, for no reason he could fathom, unwelcome.