However Olga might be regarding her niece, of whose whereabouts sitting on a camel-saddle transformed into a chair Olga had no knowledge at that time; whether she might have felt occasional anguish at what had not been done for her sister’s daughter, or regretted the waste of all that had been done for her, it is clear that the advantage of having been sent at Olga’s expense to a school where she had learnt the elements of a foreign language was the deciding factor in her becoming part of an embassy household. There were very few customers at the shop. When she had occupied herself for an hour a day with disentangling the silver-wire jewellery webbed together by the hands of those who picked over but didn’t buy, Hillela sat on the camel-saddle chair in the chrysalis of her long slit dress as if she would have to be carried from there by force. She had been twice called to the Immigration Offices and warned that she would be deported if she did not leave of her own accord, or produce refugee status supplied by an accredited organization. Udi’s few words in the right quarter apparently had reached the limit of audibility; they did not carry far enough. Arnold, no doubt, she would not have scrupled to ask to intercede for her. Perhaps she had asked, and been refused because Arnold could not put the integrity of the cause at risk for any personal reason whatever; or, more likely, she was — clever enough? — to understand this and did not approach him, in the sense of seeking some advantage, although there is reason to believe — Udi had reason — she still spent Arnold’s rare leisure hour somewhere with him from time to time.
So the move from the care of an Udi willing but unable to advance her status, via the camel-saddle chair in Archie Harper’s shop to an embassy, with the Ambassador arranging residence papers for her to answer his wife’s convenience, was rescue. Arnold, with her for what he had a feeling would be the last time, saw it differently, even distantly admiring: —And now you’ve got yourself really nicely fixed up. — She was vague about what her capacity was to be in the ambassadorial household but certain of one thing. — I’m not going to be deported.—
Malice has it that she was once a nanny; but she was much more than that.
Here, once more, there were flowers in her bedroom and silver on the dining-table. Pauline would have smiled confirming this ‘refugee’ hardship, and Olga would have been relieved. Madame Mézières’ lucky find helped the children with their homework (they were disadvantaged at an English-medium school), supervised their safety while they played in the pool, shopped for their bothersome childish needs; it seemed that through the contacts of her friend and former employer she could get commodities the ambassadorial staff no longer had the trouble of ordering from Europe. She blow-dried Madame Mézières’ hair so creditably that it looked better than it ever had while Madame Mézières had suffered the heat and din of piped music in Salon Roma under the hands of an Italian from Somalia. She ran errands on foot, not fussy about where she went in this filthy town, and proved much more compatible as a driver than the Embassy’s black chauffeur. — Emile, he smokes kif, or whatever they call it here, I don’t know; I smell it on him.—
The Ambassador did not exert himself to deny any of Marie-Claude’s obsessive fantasies directly. — One smells drink on people’s breath, not drugs. You’ve got Hillela to drive you. — Marie-Claude could not pass on to her lucky find the oppressive responsibility that was compounded with the oppressive heat, in this posting: every afternoon, she had to sit over her children while they whiningly completed a daily quota of schoolwork from the syllabus and in the language of their home country. Here, however, positions were reversed for an hour; instead of receiving services from the girl, she did her a service. Hillela sat in on the lessons and improved her knowledge of the language along with the children. Now, because she joined in with them, the children tackled the task as if it were another of the games they played with her. — She’s my big sister. — Idiot, I’m your sister. She didn’t come out of maman. — Then she’s our cousin, like Albert and Hélène at home.—
It was a relationship in which Hillela had had plenty of experience, to explain her success.
Not only a find; she was a blessing. — Look at me, Emile, I’m myself again. I don’t have a headache all the time, that twitch in my eyelid was driving me crazy — it’s gone. Don’t I look like your Marie-Claude again?—
Eating a mango, licking her fingers, the girl was the amiable witness of private bonds recalled between the couple. With his usual indirection, the Ambassador addressed himself to the cause rather than gave the opinion of the result that was expected of him. He was slitting the wrappers on European newspapers with a fruit-knife. — Hillela has changed the life of this house.—
It was in that first ambassadorial residence, behind gates where black guards strait-jacketed in gabardine and braid slouched on homemade stools, and sometimes a visiting wife and children squatted humbly behind the hibiscus, that she must have picked up, just as Marie-Claude had picked her up, much that has made her assurance so provocatively perfect. Olga, looking through a magnifying glass years later at a newspaper cutting in which she is told she will be able to identify the hostess sitting between Yasir Arafat and the President of a European country, cannot take more than half the credit for having sat down that hostess, as a child, at a dinner table the way a dinner table should look. The duty of helping Marie-Claude arrange official dinners would have been what instructed Hillela so usefully in protocol, and her own usefulness as a personable dinner-table partner to fill a place beside a bachelor, or someone whose wife was not present, was what has given her the range of safe subjects and the permissible limits of response, the appropriate lies, level of voice and laughter between guests at official gatherings. In true tradition, her youth and bountiful bodily confidence, not modesty, made the run-up Archie Harper cottons pass among the formal clothes white diplomatic wives equipped themselves with in Europe. They had the jewellery they wore as the badge of an occasion, as men wear decorations; but she was unadorned by the nervous tensions that redrew their faces like tribal markings. Hers was the real, not the fairy story of Cinderella and the sisters.
With the corporate female sense of protection, Marie-Claude imperceptibly intervened when she saw among her guests men reading the wrong signal in the shining cheeks and market cottons. — Don’t worry, you won’t sit next to Frédéric again. And Henning Knudsen, too! I was watching … And he’s got a daughter your age.—
Hillela laughed. — He told me he could arrange for me to finish my studies in Denmark.—
— What studies?—
— I don’t know. Don’t you think he meant it?—
— I know what he meant. When we first arrived here, and Emile was recalled for a few weeks, he kept coming in to see if I was all right. Then I realized … what he meant, by looking after me … — And Marie-Claude herself gave the sexual beckon of the patchy blush she seemed able to summon at will from the warmth of her breasts in low-necked dresses, deepening the Old Masters’ pearl-pink of her skin against her Flemish gold hair.
— But you’re so pretty, Madame Mezieres!—
— Pretty! Is it our fault? We women. Can we help it?—
— You put a lot of work and money into it, mijn skatteke. — The Ambassador liked to tease his wife, and never simply; she did not like being reminded, even by an endearment, that she was a Fleming and not French-speaking by birth.
In the confidence that grew between her and her find, the secret mother tongue became a relaxation and a bond. Hillela could understand her when, alone together lying at the pool, no-one about to hear, she took up Flemish like a homely garment; Hillela could even answer, in a fashion, through her knowledge of Afrikaans. It was not possible to go on being addressed as Madame Mézières; as if she were old. When they were lying there, two young women in bikinis! (She had at once replaced the yellow knit rag with something from her own wardrobe.) And talking about Emile — how they had met, variously-edited versions of decisions they had made together about his career, etc., the Ambassador quite naturally became referred to and addressed as ‘Emile’ by the girl, as well.