“So why’d you walk?”
“Because none of it was going anywhere. One night, it hit me with the force of a revelation: they were not going to make it. If I stayed with them, I wasn’t going to make it either.”
“Is that how you felt when you walked out on me and Custine?”
“Yes,” she answered, without a moment’s hesitation.
Floyd eased the car past the broken-down lorry, touching a finger to the rim of his hat as the guards pointed the barrels of their guns in the vague direction of the Mathis. “Well, at least you’re honest.”
“I find it helps,” Greta replied.
They had their papers ready. Floyd watched the guard at the checkpoint grunt through his documents, then pass them back with a look of pursed disapproval, as if Floyd had committed an error of detail but was being let off with a caution. They were always like that, no matter how spick and span the paperwork. He supposed it was what got them through the day.
“Here,” Greta said, passing her documents over Floyd.
The guard took the papers, examining them under torchlight. He moved to hand them back, then hesitated, taking a closer look. He licked a finger and paged through Greta’s passport, pausing here and there like someone examining a collection of rare stamps or moths.
“Been travelling a lot for a German girl,” he said in heavily accented French.
“That’s what a passport’s for,” Greta replied, her Parisian accent flawless.
Floyd felt ice run through his veins and reached for Greta’s knee, squeezing it gently, willing her to silence.
“A mouth on you, too,” the guard said.
“It comes in handy. I’m a singer.”
“You should learn some manners, in that case.” The guard handed the papers back, making a show of giving them to Floyd rather than Greta. “This passport expires next year,” he said. “Under the new arrangements, not everyone will find it easy to obtain a replacement. Especially mouthy German girls. Perhaps you should reconsider your attitude.”
“I doubt it’ll be a problem for me,” Greta said.
“We’ll see.” The guard nodded at his colleague and slapped a hand on the window pillar. “Move on, and learn your girlfriend some manners.”
Floyd did not breathe normally until they had crossed the Seine, putting the river between them and the checkpoint. “That was… interesting,” he said.
“Buffoons.”
“Buffoons we have to live with,” Floyd snapped. Nervous, he crunched the gears. “Anyway, what did you mean, that it won’t be a problem for you?”
Greta shook her head. “It meant nothing.”
“Sounded like it meant something to you.”
“Just drive, Floyd. I’m tired, all right? I’m tired and I’m not looking forward to any of this.”
Floyd aimed the car towards Montparnasse. It started raining, first a light drizzle that softened the city lights into pastel smudges and then a harder rain that had people scurrying for the shelter of restaurants and bars. Floyd tried finding something on the car wireless, sliding past a momentary burst of Gershwin, but when he reversed the dial and tried to find the station again all he heard was static.
Floyd helped Greta carry her things up the stairs, into the spare room next to the small kitchen on the first floor of her aunt’s house. The entire place was cold and smelled faintly of mildew. The light fittings either emitted a feeble, stuttering glow, or failed to work at all. The telephone was dead, as Greta had claimed. The floorboards sagged beneath Floyd’s feet, sodden with damp and beginning to rot. The broken skylight above the stairwell had been repaired with a piece of corrugated iron against which the rain drummed sharp-nailed, impatient fingers.
“Put my things on the bed,” Greta said, indicating the tiny bunk-sized cot squeezed into one corner of the room. “I’ll go and see how Aunt Marguerite’s doing.”
“You want me to come along?”
“No,” she said, after thinking about it. “No, but thanks anyway. From now on I think it’s best if she only sees familiar faces.”
“I thought I counted as a familiar face.”
She looked at him, but said nothing.
“I’ll see if I can scrape up something to eat,” Floyd said.
“You don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.”
Floyd placed her things on the bed, along with the tin box containing Susan White’s papers. “I’m not going anywhere. At least not until this weather clears up.”
They had been let into the house by a young woman who rented a small room on the third floor. She was a French girl called Sophie, a stenographer by profession, with prescription glasses and a nervous, braying laugh that culminated in a nasal snort. Floyd filed her under “perpetual spinster,” and then felt immediately guilty when Greta told him about the girl.
“She’s been an angel,” Greta said, when Sophie was out of earshot. “Buying food, cleaning, writing letters, generally taking care of my aunt’s affairs… all the while still paying her rent. But she’s been offered a job in Nancy, and she can’t delay taking it up any longer. It’s been good of her to stay this long.”
“And that’s it? No other relatives but yourself?”
“No one who can be bothered,” Greta said.
While Greta was upstairs with Marguerite, Sophie showed Floyd around the enamelled metal cabinets in the kitchen. The place was spotlessly clean, but most of the shelves were bare. Abandoning any thoughts of eating, Floyd made himself tea and waited in the spare room, taking in the cracks in the plaster and the tears and stains in the fifty-year-old wallpaper. From somewhere else in the old building he heard very low voices, or rather one very low voice holding up one end of a conversation.
Sophie poked her head around the door and said she was going out to see a film with her boyfriend. Floyd wished her well and then listened to her footsteps descend the creaking old staircase, followed by the click as she closed the front door without slamming it.
As quietly as he dared, he left the spare room and climbed the stairs to the next floor. The door to Marguerite’s bedroom was slightly ajar and he could hear Greta’s voice more clearly now, reading aloud from the local pages of a newspaper, bringing Marguerite up to date on Paris life. Floyd edged closer to the door, freezing as he stepped on a creaking floorboard. Greta paused in her monologue, then turned the page over before continuing.
Floyd reached the door. He looked through the gap and saw Greta sitting on a bedside chair, one leg hooked over the other, the paper spread across her lap. Behind her, he could just make out the bedridden form of her aunt. She was so frail, so drained of life, that at first glance the bed just looked as if it had yet to be made, the bunching of the blankets only accidentally suggestive of a human form. He couldn’t see Marguerite’s head from the doorway; it was hidden behind Greta’s back. But he could see one of her arms, poking like a thin, dry stick from the sleeve of her nightgown. Greta held her aunt’s hand in her own as she read from the newspaper, stroking the old woman’s fingers with infinite kindness. It made something catch in Floyd’s throat, and for the second time that evening he felt ashamed of himself.
He stepped back across the hallway, avoiding the bad floorboard, and returned to Greta’s room. This couldn’t be Marguerite: not the lively woman he had known only a handful of years ago. So little time couldn’t have done so much harm to her.
She had been suspicious when he had first started dating her niece; even more suspicious when it turned out that he wanted her for his band. But by turns the two of them had come to a grudging state of mutual understanding, and that chill had thawed into an unlikely friendship. Oftentimes, when Greta had gone to bed, Floyd had stayed up playing chequers with Marguerite, or talking about the old films from the twenties and thirties that both of them loved so much. He had lost touch with her during the last couple of years, especially once Greta had moved into a flat of her own on the other side of town, and now he felt a wave of sadness pass through him like a sudden chemical change in his own blood.