durand,” said the voice on the intercom.
“Third floor,” I replied. I pressed the buzzer to release the door in the hall, and then stepped out of the apartment to wait on the landing.
We lived at that time in an old Haussmann building, and a tiny lift had been added years after the construction of the house, in the stairwell, in the space around which the mahogany banisters curled. I could hear the lift ascending. Through the black metal grille, the man named Durand would be able to see the blue doors of the apartments on each floor as he went up. I watched the looped cables rise and fall. The roof of the lift appeared, and then I could see him within it as, with a heavy clunk, the lift stopped right before me. He opened the metal grille, then the protective glass door, and stepped out.
“Bonjour, Madame.”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Durand.” We shook hands, and he followed me into the apartment.
“Such a fine autumn day,” I remarked, as I led him down the corridor, and he said in reply, “Three rooms, yes?”
We went in turn into each of the rooms that needed painting. They were empty, with slightly grubby walls and herringbone parquet. Two of them—our son Martin’s room and the room that was to be the nursery for the baby when it arrived—looked out onto the courtyard. The third room, the salon, gave onto the street.
Monsieur Durand looked up at the ceilings. He inspected the plasterwork and folded back the shutters at the windows; he gently touched the walls. We discussed the sort of paint he would use, the type of finish that would look best in an apartment such as this. He said that my suggested color, blanc cassé, a kind of softened white, was a good choice, as pure white would be too stark in such big rooms. He spoke a slow, clear French, which I found easy to understand, and that was a relief to me. Only a week earlier a plumber, who was a native of Marseille, had come to fix the shower, and I had been bewildered by his accent. Although I was studying hard to improve my French, it was still a long way from where I thought it should be.
I had just turned thirty. Durand was older, in his late forties, possibly his fifties, with dark curly hair that was going gray and a short beard. He was casually dressed, in jeans, a red and black check shirt, a black leather jacket, and trainers, but the overall effect was of extreme neatness. He was self-contained and self-possessed; even by Parisian standards, he struck me as exceptionally reserved and formal. He had no small talk whatsoever; he was unsmiling but not unfriendly. A stocky man, of medium build, he seemed to me bigger than he was, such was the force of his presence.
When we had finished discussing paint, we moved on to prices and the timescale for the work. Monsieur Durand, (or Mister Durand, as I already thought of him: why, I don’t know) would begin at eight-thirty each morning, and work until four, Monday to Friday, for the month that he estimated it would take him to do the job.
“I don’t work Wednesday afternoons,” he added bluntly.
“That’s fine.”
“Even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter,” and he said again, “I don’t work Wednesday afternoons.”
“Truly, that isn’t a problem.”
The price he asked struck me as more than reasonable, but when my friend Gloria had recommended him to me in the first instance, she commented on how long he took to do the work: “He’s not expensive at all, but he’s an exceptionally slow worker, a real perfectionist.” I knew that Scott would balk at the very thought of having a workman in the house for such a length of time, but I would remind him of how seldom he was at home because of his job, and point out that he might not see Mister Durand, not even once, while the rooms were being painted.
Mister Durand asked to be paid in four installments, one on each of the four Fridays, and I agreed to that. He also told me that there was nothing I needed to provide: he would bring his own food and drink, all brushes, ladders, and equipment, as well as dust sheets to protect the floors.
This meeting took place on a Friday, and we arranged that he would start work on Monday, just over a week later. I saw him to the door of the apartment, and we shook hands again. The lift was already there, and he opened the glass door, then the grille, then stepped in and closed himself inside. I stood watching as the lift fell away, carrying him down, like a miner descending to his labors.
as i had expected, Scott was unhappy at dinner that night when I told him how long the work would take, and when I tried to explain, he only became more impatient.
“You’re too soft with these people, Caoimhe. I’ve told you before, you have to show them who’s boss.” I started to try to tell him what Gloria had said, but this was also brushed aside. He doesn’t like Gloria: he never did.
I too had been uncertain about her when I first met her the preceding winter, not long after we arrived in Paris from Germany. Berlin is where Scott and I had met and married and where Martin was born. We had both worked in the same pharmaceutical company, Scott as a manager and I as a bilingual secretary. My degree was in German and Italian and so, selfishly, I was slightly dismayed when Scott was promoted and posted to Paris. I only have school French, and I had to give up my job when we moved. Scott encouraged me to stay at home and not worry about finding work in France, but I didn’t like the idea of being dependent. Even though I was very happy as a mother, it wasn’t enough for me. Our arrival in France coincided with Martin being of an age to go to nursery school, the maternelle, so I found myself at home on my own for long hours. All told, my new life had been a shock to me. I tried to master the language and hoped for the best.
Gloria’s husband, Ted, was one of Scott’s new colleagues in Paris; all three of them were American. Gloria and Ted were quite a bit older than we were, and they had been settled in France for more than twenty years. We met at a drinks party that Scott had insisted that we needed to attend.
My first impressions of Gloria that evening had not been good. “I’m a company wife, too,” she said gaily when we were introduced. “All I do is spend Ted’s money. I’ll help you spend Scott’s. Hey, Ted,” she called across the room, “I’m taking this little Irish girl under my wing. What’s your phone number, sweetie?” I cringed at this, and tried to avoid her for the rest of the evening, but she was hard to shake off.
Even though I knew her for years afterward, and she became perhaps my dearest friend in Paris, when I think of her now the image that comes to my mind is how she looked that evening, perhaps because, sitting in a little gilt chair with a glass of champagne in her hand, relaxed and voluble, she was in her element. I see her cloud of fluffy blonde hair. She dripped money, and I see the expensive detail of her smallest possessions—her pen, her powder compact—and I see her sweet face. Her French, to my mind, was atrocious: fluent, yes, but inaccurate and heavily accented. I would have been ashamed to be speaking the language so badly after such a long time in the country. And yet with Gloria, it didn’t seem to matter. She had no difficulty in making herself understood, even in quite complex and sensitive situations. I was to discover that she could make flinty waiters smile, that the most icy vendeuses would melt before her charm. There was something almost mystical in her ability to connect with people.
In spite of my resistance, on that first evening she did do something that endeared her to me. My name always—always—gives people problems. But when I introduced myself, she immediately took out a notebook and asked me to repeat my name, to spell it, and then I could see her write “Queeva,” a phonetic version of her own devising. “Caoimhe,” she said, faultlessly, frowning at the notebook. “Caoimhe, Caoimhe, Caoimhe,” and for the rest of that evening, and indeed, in the many years that followed, she never once mispronounced my name, which is more than I can say for pretty much anyone I have ever met outside Ireland, including, it has to be said, Scott.
“If that awful woman does call, just make an excuse,” he said in the taxi on the way home afterwards. But I can never assert myself against anyone whose will is stronger than mine, which means, in practice, just about anyone: Scott above all should have known that. And so when Gloria rang me three days, later, I reluctantly agreed to meet.
mister durand rang me once the following week, to say he had bought paint and that he would begin the following Monday morning, at half past eight, if that still suited me, an arrangement to which I agreed.
When the day arrived, the doorbell rang at exactly the time we had specified. I could very soon see how it was going to take him a long time to do the work. He began by making a great many trips in the tiny lift, to bring up a considerable quantity of materials: tins of paint, bottles of solvent, brushes, dust sheets, and a stepladder. When everything was in place he put a set of large loose overalls, dark blue and remarkably clean, on over his shirt and jeans, and changed into a pair of shoes that he evidently kept for work.
When I looked in later to ask him if he needed anything, he was at the top of the stepladder, brushing dust from the central rose around the light fitting, with a brush fine enough to paint in watercolor.
“I need nothing, Madame,” he said, gesturing toward the plastic lunch box and bottle of Vittel on the floor.
I tried to stay away from him on that first day but found it hard to resist finding reasons to look in on him and flutter around the door. Eventually I saw that he found it distracting and annoying.
“Et vous, Madame, vous faites quoi?” he asked rather sharply at one point in the early afternoon, when a silence from the next room had made me feel compelled to go in yet again.
“I’m studying.” I showed him the French grammar book I was holding by my side, with my index finger between the pages to mark my place.
“Your French is very good,” he said gruffly. “You don’t need to study anymore.”
“I want to pass as a French person. I want to speak the language so well that no one will know that I’m not from here.”
“You won’t learn that from a book,” he said. “You need to get out into the street,” and he indicated with a toss of his chin towards the shuttered window. “Get out and talk to people.”
“I’m talking to you.”
“Yes, but I need to get on with my work, Madame.”
As I returned to my books, I wondered what Mister Durand would have thought had I told him that my son was being educated at a German school in Paris, at my husband’s insistence; he was anxious that Martin should not lose his childhood fluency. I thought it was more important that the child learn to speak French and integrate socially in Paris, but Scott was having none of it.
Language was of great importance to me, and my desire to pass as French was not just a whim, nor was it an unrealistic goal, for I prided myself always on my linguistic ability and spoke flawless German and excellent Italian, both of which I had studied at university. My German I had perfected when I was living in Berlin. My knowledge had become an obsession and something of a joke, as I made it my business to cultivate a Berlin accent and to learn colloquial expressions and the most arcane words of vocabulary. I knew the German names of so many wildflowers; I knew a word for every nuance of emotion.
When I told Gloria of my desire to bring my knowledge of French to a similar level of expertise she, like Mister Durand, was neither impressed nor enthusiastic.
“Why would you want to do that? The French won’t like it, I can tell you that now. They’ll be suspicious; they’ll wonder about it. Keep things the way they are. They’ll find it part of your charm.”
In any case, for the rest of that first day I stayed out of Mister Durand’s way, and at four o’clock there was a gentle tap at the door of the room where I was working.
“A demain, Madame.”
“what has he done, only settle himself in?” Scott asked, when he came home that evening and looked into the room where Mister Durand had set up his equipment. I have to say I could see his point, but in fairness, Mister Durand had left everything in impeccable order, with the cans of paint neatly lined up, and the blue overalls folded into a perfect square and set on the floor beside the working shoes.
Toward the end of dinner that night, Scott asked me why I kept yawning, and I realized that I was exhausted. I saw how tense and anxious I had been having Mister Durand in the house.
To my surprise, then, the following day I felt much more relaxed about his being there. On his arrival, again at precisely half past eight, he hung his leather jacket on the stand in the hall, put on his overalls, changed his shoes, and began to work. I spent the morning trying once more to engage with the pluperfect subjunctive of some irregular verbs, and discovered that I had actually made some progress. It didn’t interfere with my concentration or bother me to know that this stranger was in the apartment. On the contrary, I found that I was happy to know that there was someone else around. I realized that I didn’t want to talk to him much, any more than he wanted to talk to me. I felt like a cat that is happy to sleep on a chair, knowing that there are people nearby. I barely saw him that day, and yet I did not feel lonely, as I sometimes did when Scott was at work and Martin was at the maternelle.
I did not approach the room at all that day. It was Mister Durand himself, who, when he was putting on his leather jacket to go home, invited me to look in. He had made a start on the first room, and I was shocked by the contrast between the new paint and the old. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how shabby the rooms were.
“Might I remind you, Madame,” he said, “that I’ll be leaving early tomorrow.”
when I opened the door to him on Wednesday morning, he was in an uncharacteristically good mood. He even smiled as he greeted me but did say again that he would be there for only a half day.
We both worked steadily during the morning, Mister Durand at the painting while I made a poule au pot and a chocolate mousse. As well as studying the language, I was trying to teach myself French cookery, another of my attempts to assimilate. At half past twelve, he came to the door of the kitchen. He looked cheerful, excited even.
“My granddaughter,” he said, “ma petite fille. I have to go now and buy chocolate for my granddaughter, Mireille. Every Wednesday I go to see her. My daughter doesn’t like her to eat too many sweet things, but Mireille knows I always bring chocolate. She wouldn’t believe it if I turned up empty handed. Sometimes I tease her. When she comes to me, she says, ‘Chocolate, Grandpa,’ and I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. ‘No chocolate,’ I say. ‘No chocolate today. If you don’t believe me, check my pockets.’ And I throw her my jacket, and she looks through all the pockets and then her face, Madame, when she finds the little bar of chocolate in the inside pocket, ah Madame, it’s such a beautiful moment!” In his own face, his voice, his whole manner as he told me this, there was an animation and a joy which I had not seen until then.
And how strange it is to think of all this after so many years, my memories distant but not dim—no, they are of a preternatural clarity, as if I were still living in those high, pale rooms, and Mister Durand still stood before me, bewitched by his love for Mireille.
