MOURNING
BECOMES ELECTRA(Revised)
All the English girls admired the French
girls for their chic and sense of style.
A pencil slim black skirt and tailored white blouse seemed ‘de rigueur’,
but when we tried to emulate them we never achieved the same effect. We were built on a larger scale than
the small boned French girls, whose dress sense went back for generations.
With
an expatriation allowance, an allowance for my mother and a much higher salary
than I had in London, we were now much better off. I started buying my own clothes, rather than my mother
making them for me, and I began to develop a sense of my own style and what
suited me.
One
morning, as I was walking along the corridor, wearing a black and white pleated
skirt, white blouse, Chanel style loosely woven black jacket, and a pair of
sling back, open toed green sandals which had caught my fancy, I passed M.
Woirin.
“Le
deuil sied å Electre” he murmured as he passed me.
It
was a moment or two before his words sank in. “Mourning becomes Electra.” He had paid me a compliment! I smiled broadly to myself.
I
wanted above all to meet French people, they were very hard to get to know
socially, so I joined a club which was ostensibly for foreigners to meet the
French. The nearest I got to this
was a Rumanian girl called Arlette.
Her parents had emigrated to Paris and she had been born there. She was about my age, and very
friendly. She was dark, with curly
black hair, vivacious, exotic and dramatic. Although brought up in France, she seemed never to have
become fully integrated in French society. We began to go out together. We were very different, but we both needed a friend, someone
to be with.
Arlette
was full of enthusiasms which came and went. Her work, vaguely connected with the arts, was never very
well paid and she knew all the cheap places to go to and where one could go for
free. She had lots of casual
acquaintances and so in this way I began to meet people. I remember one occasion when we were
having a drink in a café with several others, probably on the Boulevard St
Germain. It was possible to sit
for hours in the cafés. Two women
were giving us a psychological test:
we were given a piece of paper with various symbols which we were asked
to complete. One was just a dot,
representing the self. I added
lines raying out from the dot and then drew a line round the rays, making a
wheel.
“Ah”,
said one, “that means self development.
We haven’t seen that one for a long time,” turning to the other woman. I thought nothing of it, I had no idea what that might
mean. But I did not forget
it.
At
one time Arlette was working in the Musée du Petit Palais, a fine arts museum
just off the Champs Elysées.
She asked me if I would
record for her an English translation of La Fontaine’s famous fable of
The Raven and the Fox. This was to
go into a machine in the museum, on which, at the touch of a button, one could
hear a version of this fable in several different languages. I did so, though I did not like the
sound of my own voice, it made me think of the Queen, but I was tickled to
think that my voice would be heard by people from all over the world.
Another
time I was having a coffee with Arlette in the Pub Renault on the Champs
Elysées, a very French version of an English pub, with two of her male
acquaintances. One of them was a
palm reader and he offered to read our palms. This was always an interesting diversion. He looked at my hand and said:
“You
are either a genius or you are mad.”
“How
can you tell?”
“Because
your head line is criss-crossed with tiny lines, denoting intense
mental activity.”
This
certainly gave me food for thought, and often, later on, I did wonder if I
could be mad.
My
mother and I explored the area where we lived. From our flat we were soon on the Champs Elysees. From there we would walk down to the
Place de la Concorde, cross its huge expanse and go into the Tuileries Gardens,
formally laid out with gravel paths and classic flower beds. We visited the Orangerie to the left of
the gardens, where paintings by the French artist Monet were displayed. Done in later life when his eyesight
was going, these four huge paintings of
the water liles in his gardens were shown, one on each wall, a blaze of
colour and light.
Running
alongside the Tuileries Gardens was the rue de Rivoli, with plenty of smart
little shops where my mother and I loved to window shop. There was an English bookshop, WH
Smith, with a tearoom on the first floor, which was very popular with the
French. We often went there and
had toasted teacakes, but the tea was always disappointing, much too weak. The French never could make tea.
Although
my mother and I loved the area where we were living, we were beginning to find
living in the flat increasingly uncomfortable. The cooking facilities were inadequate, and my mother loved
to cook. There was
nowhere for us to wash up the dishes and we ended up by washing them in the
bathroom. I often went to bed with
an upturned pile of dishes, pots and pans in the bath. My mother was also finding walking up
two flights of stairs, laden with shopping bags, too strenuous for her. We were living in what had basically
been a long corridor, with two rooms running off it, one with no window at
all. At first it had seemed like
an adventure but the novelty of it was now beginning to wear off.
I
reluctantly began to look around for another place to live. Flats in Paris were very expensive and
hard to find. I eventually found a
ground floor flat with all the proper facilities not far from the Arc de
Triomphe, so it was still central and easy for me to get to NATO. It was not entirely satisfactory, as it
was dark and gloomy, and it was
surrounded by dismal little streets, but it seemed we had no choice. We gave in our notice to the Comtesse,
who was surprised and upset, and moved to our new flat.
It
was to be the first of several moves during our time in Paris.
