Page 9 of Daughters of Paris

Again, there was the sound of jazz, but tonight it was only a recording that sounded even more scratchy and discarded. The café was almost empty apart from a group sitting close to the bar with three of the round tables pushed together. Sébastien was sitting at one, alongside the red-headed man who had played the clarinet. Fleur waved timidly from the door and Sébastien rose to greet her with rapid kisses on both cheeks.

‘I didn’t think you were ever going to come,’ he said, with obvious pleasure at having been proven wrong.

‘Neither did I,’ she admitted, sitting on the chair he pulled up to the table. ‘My aunt is a housekeeper for a family, and we live on the premises. As well as working in the bookshop, I help her as there is often lots to do in the evening.’

‘So you have to work twice as hard to be able to live there,’ said the clarinet player. He spoke with a clipped accent Fleur could not place. ‘I suppose they grew rich off the back of honest workers?’

‘Are you communists?’ Fleur’s voice came out as a squeak, and she clamped her lips shut. Someone pushed a glass of red wine into her hand, and she grasped it tightly.

‘If you are asking, are we dangerous men who will forcibly take property, then no,’ Sébastien assured her.

‘But a few have everything and others have nothing. Does your aunt’s employer work harder than your aunt to merit his wealth?’ asked another man.

‘I don’t know, but he does work hard.’

‘Harder than his employees?’ Sébastien asked gently.

Fleur took a small sip of wine and considered the question. ‘He spends a lot of his time at his factory. His wife complains of it.’

But she could not deny that in the evening, when Monsieur Nadon sat with a cognac, reading the newspapers in the late sunshine,TanteAgnes was still ironing his shirts despite her arthritis that was becoming a curse. Fleur looked up and caught a glance between Sébastien and one of the others.

‘You’re thinking, I see,’ Sébastien said. ‘We are socialists, not communists. We want people to think and then perhaps change a little. Though I am not too sure about Brendan, but he is an American so we will excuse him.’

The red-haired man laughed and raised the middle finger of his left hand at Sébastien. American. That explained his accent at least.

Sébastien refilled Fleur’s glass.

‘Santé!’

The others echoed his toast, Fleur included, and they all drank.

It was a strange introduction into a world Fleur had never imagined. Sébastien’s friends were either students or had recently been. They aspired not to own factories or businesses, much less labour in them, but to create art or music or write. Fleur met with approval because a bookshop was the source of knowledge and she was supporting herself.

Sébastien was from a village in Brittany. Brendan’s grandparents had emigrated from Ireland to New York decades earlier. He had been travelling to Enniskillen, but had stopped in Paris for a weekend on the way from Chicago two years previously, fallen in love with the city (and a dancer named Celeste), and never left. He shared an apartment with Ike, the saxophonist, whose father had been an American soldier. Then there was Daniel, who was studying to be a doctor as his father wished, but preferred painting, and Pierre, a poet. Odile had dismayed her parents by moving in with an artist who painted her naked in hues of green and purple.

‘I think my parents might have been less offended had the nudes been at least flesh-coloured,’ she drawled, which made everyone hoot with laughter.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Fleur toldTanteAgnes when she arrived home that evening, her aunt listening to everything Fleur said with a disapproving expression. ‘They are men and women from all over Europe and further away who have seen what possibilities the world can hold. If I can’t travel, this is the next best thing.’

‘God-fearing men and women would not behave in such a way,’ Agnes said crisply. ‘I thought your friendship with Mademoiselle Colette was unsuitable, but now I wish she was still here to guide you.’

Fleur bit her lip, a little of her joy melting under Agnes’ fierce disapproval. Listening to Sébastien describing the work of daring artists, or Ike declaring equality for black men must come before long, she felt swept up in their enthusiasm and passion. She didn’t care if Colette, with her love of pretty clothes and vapid men, never returned. She had new friends now. The world was too exciting. Too perfect.

That changed in the spring of 1939 when Fleur arrived at the café one evening to discover serious faces and no music playing. Brendan announced he had decided to return to America following the annexation of Czechoslovakia two days earlier. ‘I thought about going on to Ireland, but my mam wants me back home.’

‘War is growing closer,’ Sébastien muttered, pouring everyone a shot of brandy.

‘When it comes, I will be ready to fight,’ Daniel announced.

‘We all will,’ said Pierre. He was an attractive-looking man with black curls and dark eyes, whose quick tongue frightened Fleur a little.

From that point on, the talk of war was never far from the surface. Areas of the city that had once been parks had been dug up and were now trenches. The sight of flowerbeds and wide lawns where families used to sit now housing bomb shelters was chilling. Her hand slipped to the box at her side. Gas masks had been issued to all citizens, along with the instruction to carry them at all times, but no one believed they would really be needed.

‘My mother andtantenursed during theGrande Guerre,’ she said. ‘So did Madame Nadon. I would do the same if it became necessary.’

‘You can tend my wounds and give me bed baths,’ Pierre said, blowing her a kiss, and they all laughed.

‘What about you?’ Fleur asked Sébastien.

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