Chapter 9

I had no clear idea what my aunt intended by her elaborate precautions. There was obviously little danger from the douanier, who waved me through with the careless courtesy which I find so lacking in the supercilious young men in England. My aunt had booked rooms in the Saint James and Albany, an old-fashioned double hottel, of which one half, the Albany, faces the Rue de Rivoli and the other, the Saint James, the Rue Saint-Honoré. Between the two hotels lies the shared territory of a small garden, and on the garden front of the Saint James I noticed a plaque which tells a visitor that here La Fayette signed some treaty or celebrated his return from the American Revolution, I forget which.

Our rooms in the Albany looked out on the Tuileries gardens, and my aunt had taken a whole suite, which seemed rather unnecessary as we were only spending one night before we caught the Orient Express. When I mentioned this, however, she rebuked me quite sharply. “This is the second time today,” she said, “that you have mentioned the subject of economy. You retain the spirit of a bank manager, even in retirement. Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flags a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth (the other Wordsworth I mean of course) if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Love-making too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino is not a writer for the young”.

“Perhaps it’s not too late for me to begin,” I said facetiously in an effort to close that page of her conversation, which I found a little embarrassing.

“You must surrender yourself first to extravagance,” my aunt replied. “Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times. In any case, this suite is not wasted. I have to receive some visitors in private, and I don’t suppose you would want me to receive them in my bedroom. One of them, by the way, is a bank manager. Did you visit lady clients in their bedrooms?”

“Of course not. Nor in their drawing-rooms either. I did all business at the bank.”

“Perhaps in Southwood you didn’t have any very distinguished clients.”

“You are quite wrong,” I said and I told her about the unbearable rear-admiral and my friend Sir Alfred Keene.

“Or any really confidential business.”

“Nothing certainly which could not be discussed in my office at the bank.”

“You were not bugged, I suppose, in the suburbs.”

The man who came to see her was not my idea of a banker at all. He was tall and elegant with black sideburns and he would have fitted very well into a matador’s uniform. My aunt asked me to bring her the red suitcase, and I then left them alone, but looking back from the doorway I saw that the lid was already open and the case seemed to be stacked with ten-pound notes.

I sat down in my bedroom and read a copy of Punch to reassure myself. The sight of all the smuggled money had been a shock, and the suitcase was one of those fibre ones which are as vulnerable as cardboard. It is true that no experienced loader at Heathrow would have expected it to contain a small fortune, but surely it was the height of rashness to trust in a bluff which depended for its success on the experience of a thief. She might easily have tumbled on a novice.

My aunt had obviously spent many years abroad and this had affected her character as well as her morality. I couldn’t really judge her as I would an ordinary Englishwoman, and I comforted myself, as I read Punch, that the English character was unchangeable. True, Punch once passed through a distressing period, when even Winston Churchill was a subject of mockery, but the good sense of the proprietors and of the advertisers drew it safely back into the old paths. Even the admiral had begun to subscribe again, and the editor had, quite correctly in my opinion, been relegated to television, which is at its best a vulgar medium. If the ten-pound notes, I thought, were tied in bundles of twenty, there could easily be as much as three thousand pounds in the suitcase, or even six, for surely bundles of forty would not be too thick… Then I remembered the case was a Revelation. Twelve thousand was not an impossible total. I felt a little comforted by that idea. Smuggling on such a large scale seemed more like a business coup than a crime.

The telephone rang. It was my aunt. “Which would you advise?” she asked. “Union Carbide, Genesco, Deutsche Texaco? Or even General Electric?”

“I wouldn’t like to advise you at all,” I said. “I am not competent. My clients never went in for American bonds.

The dollar premium is too high.”

“There’s no question of a dollar premium in France,”

Aunt Augusta said with impatience. “Your customers seem to have been singularly unimaginative.” The line went dead. Did she expect the admiral to smuggle notes?

I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden where an American couple (from the Saint James or the Albany) were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag, like a drowned animal, from his cup at the end of a cord. At that distressing sight I felt very far away from England, and it was with a pang that I realized how much I was likely to miss Southwood and the dahlias in the company of Aunt Augusta. I walked up to the Place Vendôme and then by the Rue Daunou to the Boulevard des Capucines. Outside a bar on the corner two women spoke to me, and suddenly I saw, bearing down on me with a happy grin of welcome, a man whom I recognized with apprehension.

“Mr. Pullen?” he exclaimed. “Praise to the Holiest in the height.”

“Wordsworth!”

“In all His works most wonderful. You wan those two gels?”

“I was just taking a stroll,” I said.

“Women lak that they humbug you,” Wordsworth said. “They just short-timers. They do jig-jig, one two three, out you go. If you wan a gel you come along with Wordsworth.”

“But I don’t want a girl, Wordsworth. I am here with my aunt. I am taking a little walk by myself because she has business to transact.”

“Your auntie here?”

“Yes.”

“Where you live?”

I didn’t want to give our address without my aunt’s permission. I had a vision of Wordsworth moving in, to the room next door. Suppose Wordsworth began to smoke marijuana in the Saint James and Albany… I was uncertain of French laws on the subject.

“We are staying with friends,” I said vaguely.

“With a man?” Wordsworth asked with instant savagery. It seemed incredible that anyone could be jealous of a woman of seventy-five, but jealous Wordsworth undoubtedly was, and now I saw the banker with sideburns in a different light.

“My dear Wordsworth,” I said, “you are imagining things”, and I allowed myself a white lie. “We are staying with an elderly married couple.” I felt it was hardly suitable to discuss my aunt like this at a street corner, and I began to move down the boulevard, but Wordsworth kept pace with me. “You got CTC for Wordsworth?” he asked. “Ar find you lovely gel, schoolteacher.”

“I don’t want a girl, Wordsworth,” I repeated, but I gave him a ten-franc note to keep him quiet.

“Then you have one drink with old Wordsworth. Ar know A-one first-class joint right here.”

I agreed to a drink, and he led the way into the entrance of what seemed to be a theatre, the Comedie des Capucines. A gramophone was howling below, as we descended under the theatre.

“I’d rather go somewhere more quiet,” I said.

“You jus wait. This A-one racket.” It was very hot in the cellar. A number of unaccompanied young women were sitting at the bar, and turning towards the music, I saw an almost naked woman passing between the tables, where a number of men, wearing shabby macintoshes like uniforms, sat before untasted drinks.

“Wordsworth,” I said crossly, “if this is what you call jig-jig I don’t want it.”

“No jig-jig here,” Wordsworth said. “If you wan jigjig you take her to hotel.”

“Take who?”

“These gels – you wan one?”

Two of the girls at the bar came and sat down, one on either side of me. I felt imprisoned. Wordsworth, I noticed, had already ordered four whiskies, which he obviously couldn’t pay for with the ten francs I had given him.

“Zach, chéri”, one of the girls said, “present your friend please.”

“Mr. Pullen, you meet Rita. Lovely gel. Schoolteacher.”

“Where does she teach?”

Wordsworth laughed. I realized I had made a fool of myself, and I watched Wordsworth with dismay as he entered into what seemed a long business negotiation with the girls.

“Wordsworth,” I said, “what are you doing?”

“They wan two hundred francs. I say no. I tell em we got British passports.”

“What on earth has that got to do with it?”

“They know British people very poor, can’t afford good dash.” He began to talk to them again in a kind of French which I couldn’t follow at all, though they seemed to understand him well enough.

“What are you talking, Wordsworth?”

“French.”

“I don’t understand a word.”

“Good Coast French. This lady she know Dakar well. Ar tell her ar work in Conakry one time. They say hunded and fifty francs.”

“You can thank them very much, Wordsworth, but say that I’m not interested. I have to return to my aunt.”

One of the women laughed. I suppose she recognized the word “aunt”, though I couldn’t for the life of me seewhy a rendezvous with an aunt should be funnier than a rendezvous with a cousin, an uncle or even one’s mother. The girl repeated “tante” and both laughed.

“Tomorrow?” Wordsworth asked.

“I am going with my aunt to Versailles and in the evening we take the Orient Express to Istanbul.”

“Istanbul,” Wordsworth exclaimed. “What she do there? Who she go for see?”

“I imagine we shall see the Blue Mosque, Santa Sophia, the Golden Horn, the Topkapi museum.”

“You be careful, Mr. Pullen.”

“Please call me by my right name: ‘Pulling.’” I tried to temper my rebuke with humour. “You would not like it if I continually called you Coleridge.”

“Coleridge?”

“Coleridge was a poet and a friend of Wordsworth.” “Ar never met that man. If he say ar did he humbug you.”

I said firmly, “Now I really must be off, Wordsworth. Get the bill or I shall leave you to pay.”

“You waste good White Horse?”

“You can drink it yourself or share it with these ladies.” I paid the bill – it seemed an exorbitant one, but I suppose the floor show was thrown in. A naked black girl was dancing with a white feather boa. I wondered what all the men here did for a living. It seemed extraordinary that one could watch such a scene during banking hours.

Wordsworth said, “You give three hunded francs to these ladies for private show.”

“The price seems to be going up.”

“Maybe ar make them say two hunded francs. You lef it to Wordsworth. O.K.?”

It was no use appealing to Wordsworth’s sense of morality. I said, “As you have a British passport, you should know that an Englishman is allowed to take only fifteen pounds in currency out of the country. Two hundred francs would exhaust the whole amount.”

This was a reason Wordsworth could understand. He looked down at me from his great height with melancholy and commiseration. “Governments all the same no good,” he said.

“One must make sacrifices. The cost of defence and the social services is very high.”

“Travellers’ cheques,” Wordsworth suggested quickly.

“They can only be exchanged at a bank, an official exchange or a registered hotel. In any case, I shall need them in Istanbul.”

“Your auntie got plenty.”

“She has only a travel allowance too,” I said. I felt the weakness of this last argument, for Wordsworth cannot have lived for very long with my aunt before learning that she resorted to ways and means. I changed the subject by attacking him. “What on earth did you mean, Wordsworth, by sending me away with Cannabis in my mother’s urn?”

His mind was elsewhere, brooding perhaps on the travel allowance.

“No cannibals,” he said, “in England. No cannibals in Sierra Leone.”

“I’m talking about the ashes.”

“Cannibals in Liberia, not Sierra Leone.”

“I didn’t say ‘cannibals.’”

“Leopard Society in Sierra Leone. They kill plenty people but not chop them.”

“Pot, Wordsworth, pot.” I hated the vulgar word which reminded me of childhood. “You mixed pot with my mother’s ashes.”

At last I had embarrassed him. He drank the whisky quickly. “You come away,” he said, “ar show you much better damned place. Rue de Douai.”

I harried him all the way up the stairs. “You had no business to do such a thing, Wordsworth. The police came and took the urn.”

“They give it you back?” he asked.

“Only the urn. The ashes were inextricably mixed with the pot.”

“Old Wordsworth meant no harm, man,” he said, halting on the pavement. “Those bloody police.”

I was glad to see there was a taxi rank close by. I was afraid he might try to follow me and discover the whereabouts of Aunt Augusta.

“In Mendeland,” he said, “you bury food with your ma. You bury pot. All the same thing.”

“My mother didn’t even smoke cigarettes.”

“With your pa you bury best hatchet.”

“Why not food with him too?”

“He go hunt food with hatchet. He kill bush chicken.”

I got into the taxi and drove away. Looking through the rear window, I could see Wordsworth standing bewildered on the pavement edge, like a man on a river bank waiting for a ferry. He raised his hand tentatively, as though he were uncertain of my response, whether I had left him in friendship or anger, as the traffic swept between us. I wished then that I had given him a bigger CTC. After all he meant no harm. Even in his size he exhibited a clumsy innocence.