The Steppes of Paris Read Online Free Page B

stern standpoints, of a grim feminist with whom he had once shared a house in London.
    He asked her in return, “Are you always Marie-Yvette?” and she answered snappishly, “Always, always. No abbreviations.”
    They had been chatting for five or ten minutes when Aurore, the office secretary, who had been out on an errand when Edward came in the previous day, arrived in a whirlwind of concern at her lateness. She was a tall, very pretty young black woman from Martinique; all vivaciousness, ebullience, deep giggles, and a quite extraordinary contrast to stern, drab Marie-Yvette. She shook Edward’s hand formally but then tut-tutted teasingly over the difficulty of pronouncing his name: “Ed-ward, Ed-ward. Ts-ts-ts-ts-ts. Before wehave How-ard, now Ed-ward.” She sighed in mock exasperation.
    “You can call him Eddie,” Marie-Yvette told her in French.
    Aurore looked Edward up and down. “No,” she declared. “It does not suit him. He is, hélas, Ed-ward.” And, hanging up her jacket, she went off into a volley of provocative giggles.
    Marie-Yvette shrugged. She put her hand on the telephone receiver to answer the first call of the day, which had been flashing for some moments on the switchboard, and retorted, “You create your own problems, Aurore.”
    Ed-ward concluded, as he sat down in the small room which had been allocated to him, that he was stupid to have wondered if Henry Hirshfeld had been responsible for employing the paper’s present staff. Only Hirshfeld, he thought, smiling, would have picked such unlikely characters from among the city’s ranks of well-finished female automatons. He felt a brief moment’s warm anticipation at the prospect of working for the man.
    Henry, arriving soon after ten, was astonished to find Edward there and only refrained from ticking him off for a completely unnecessary display of keenness when he heard him making appointments on the telephone with the two accommodation agencies.
    Edward spent the best part of the next three days looking for a place to live. He had heard that it would be a problem; by the second week of September a lot of places had already been taken. But, even more than the limited number to choose from, it was the sort of apartments the agents were showing him which dismayed him.
    Although he had imagined, before he came here, that he didn’t care at all where he lived, that being in Paris was a death sentence to adventure, and the shape or form or shell it took was immaterial, he had realised nearly at once this was wrong. His only hope lay in finding the right flat, one which would let him into some authentic layer of the city and enable him to travel, as Henry Hirshfeld had, simply by living there. This was precisely what the glass cube in Neuilly would not do.
    The estate agents showed him three more cubes on Tuesday and Wednesday. They seemed convinced that a journalist ona prestigious paper, even if only a young trainee journalist, must want to live in a modern block. They glossed over the undesirable, virtually suburban locations: Porte de Choisy, Porte de Châtillon, Vincennes. They dwelt in each case on the newness, the shiny kitchen, the anonymous, still paint-smelling hall. Edward told them three times, increasingly unpleasantly each time, that he wanted to live somewhere old, didn’t they understand, prior to 1914 at least, somewhere with a bit of character. Where was the problem? In the whole of Paris, crammed as it was, if you believed the literary stereotypes, with crummily picturesque locations, surely they could find somewhere a little less soulless for him?
    By Thursday, they claimed to have understood what Monsieur Wainwright had in mind and the long-suffering woman from the agency drove him out to the extreme edge of the sixteenth arrondissement to show him what she said was the ideal property. It was in a solemn, grey stone street opposite the Bois de Boulogne, a street whose absolute silence oppressed them as soon as they