Autumn Leaves Read online

  “Were there many?”

  “She wrote almost every day since she left England more than twenty-seven years ago.”

  “That’s what kept you in Sydney.”

  “I sat in her terrace by the harbor, the lorikeets screeching during the day and the bats squeaking in the fruit trees at night. I read every page, I couldn’t stop myself. They were boring and repetitive in the way all diaries are, even her constant trips to Europe, and yet… I sat in her house with no furniture but a bed and an armchair, building a picture of a woman it was too late to know.”

  The terrace had been cool through the summer, shaded and sandstone, while the rest of the city had boiled. The harbor had glittered and shimmied, dotted with yachts that bobbed through the endless syrupy sunshine.

  “My aunt came over one day and almost had a fit. I hadn’t been out in weeks except to the corner shop for biscuits and sherry and tea that I drank black so I didn’t have to bother with milk. I was in my grimy slip, with stains on the embroidered peonies of my mother’s favorite dressing gown, using her extensive teacup collection as ashtrays, sherry goblets, tea cups, soap dishes… I think my aunt actually screeched, galah that she is.”

  “What’s a galah?”

  “An Australian parrot. It’s also a nickname for an idiot. She shoved me into my coat and took me to her house to be cleaned, washed, dried, aired, fed, and watered. I had to stay until my hair was brushed shiny, my laundry dried and pressed, and I’d eaten three solid meals—although she scaled down ‘eaten’ to ‘attempted’ when I threw up mashed potato and chicken pie all over her carpet.”

  “What a galah.”

  “Precisely. The maids looked askance at the ragged adult niece. All except Martha, who just brushed my hair over my morning coffee, and said, ‘You’ve always been a scamp, Katherine. I don’t know why the Mistress thinks you’ll change.’ ”

  “My mother’s maid is also an ally from childhood.”

  “She used to darn the holes in my stockings I got from climbing trees. She would smile then too. Anyway, after two days of my aunt’s shrill harangue I was dragged into recovery. I threw out the black mourning clothes I’d been wearing and bought this red ensemble. I cut my hair short, I ordered a meal I could actually eat…”

  “Which was?”

  “Raspberry tart and cream.” I shrugged. “I didn’t have the heart for hearty. I sold the house and the teacups—do you know, the teacups fetched almost as much as the house? Apparently, they were rare antiques! Of course, the one I’ve kept for myself is chipped and cheap, patterned with nasturtiums and as big as a soup bowl. It was always my favorite. I packed up the few things I could take with me and booked my ticket for London.”

  “And your father?”

  “I haven’t seen him since the funeral.”

  “Kiki!” Bertie sounded shocked.

  “After the diaries… I just couldn’t.”

  “He was a brute to her?”

  “Worse. He adored her.” A slight breeze stirred the leaves on the water’s surface, flashing golden in the streaks of light from the shore. “I couldn’t face my father once I knew why he couldn’t face me.”

  “You look like your mother? Mrs. Button never had bobbed hair.”

  “She kept her long luscious locks to the end. But there was a studio photograph in one of the diaries, from the year before she married. We don’t look obviously alike, but there is an expression on her face, her expectant look into the camera… I’ve caught myself looking like that in the mirror more than once.” Her hair in a pompadour, shawl slipping off one shoulder to reveal flawless skin, her face full of hope, she seemed to lean forward into the camera with desire.

  “But I never knew her to look anything other than disappointed.”

  “Will he be disappointed that you left without a wave?”

  “He will always be disappointed with me, for not… well, for not being a ‘nice girl,’ as he likes to say. But I would’ve leapt into the waves, shoes and coat and all, if I’d stayed any longer.”

  In the enveloping dark, the river lapped at the barge, the cricket calls buzzed in the blood.

  “… so, Kiki?”

  “So, Bertie?”

  “So, who was your mother, then? How did she move from hope to disappointment?” He stroked back my hair. “That’s what kept you mired in misery, isn’t it? Reading the slow disintegration of a woman?”

  I couldn’t speak. How did he know, this darling friend? His face was all shadows in the almost-night.

  “I felt the same way about Teddy… you know.”

  His true love, KIA in 1916; in this moment I doubted Bertie would ever recover from Edward Greene’s death.

  “His mother let me read his letters when I visited her. She was relieved that there was someone to cry with, someone who also wanted to go over and over all of her beloved boy’s quirks. I think she chose to ignore the true nature of our love. She just needed someone who adored him like she did.” I heard Bertie exhale too loudly in the darkness.

  “Teddy’s letters… over the year and a half he was in the trenches he became more and more disillusioned, until he was in despair. He used the worst kind of black humor—you know, the gory jokes of dismemberment that are so funny when you have your foot in a corpse, but truly horrifying when back on solid ground. He wrote these things to his mother. I never noticed.”

  “How could you have noticed?”

  “How could any of us have noticed until it was all over? But Teddy’s trench was a grave that he garlanded with flowers. If it hadn’t been that mortar, it would have been a bullet or gas or shellshock. He would never have survived the war.”

  It was too dark to see Bertie now, but I could clearly hear his gulps as he swallowed his sobs. I felt for his hand and he clutched it.

  “That knowledge, Kiki… it makes the sadness indelible.”

  “The absence larger but easier to carry. It’s wrapped around every limb.”

  I tipped the final drop of whisky onto my tongue as he pulled me closer to him. Bertie lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and much swearing. The night wrapped around us, now warm and now chill as gusts blew over the water. The banks glinted and fizzed but their light barely reached us under the sheltering branches. Bertie smelled of printer ink and pomade, the air smelt of tobacco, river mud, coal smoke. I needed human warmth, I needed a breathing body with all its sweet and sour smells. Without even really thinking, I started undoing Bertie’s waistcoat buttons with one hand, my stockinged leg slipping over his suit pants.

  “Do you need some comfort, Kiki?”

  And he kissed me.

  * * *

  The cold air pricked my skin as we lay naked in the darkness, the only light from our cigarettes and the flickering moon. Bertie absentmindedly ran his hand up and down the length of my torso, stopping occasionally to run his thumb over my nipples, a trick he had played only a little while before, but now I was too spent to do anything more than move my cigarette to my mouth to inhale. We lay there for a long time, wrapped in each other but isolated in our separate loss. Bertie kept turning to me to stroke my hair and look into my face, as though by staring he could drag himself into the present and its hope of happiness. I gazed back in the intermittent moonlight—his messy hair, his big brown eyes, the stains on his fingers from ink and tobacco and lack of care—I let myself be his anchor, as he was mine.

  “You know it wasn’t just your mother you were grieving, don’t you, Kiki?”

  A flash of moon showed just how sharp his cheekbones had become.

  “I do, sweet Bertie. Though I didn’t at the time.”

  “Never at the time.”

  “I was just floating in the underworld—”

  “All the ghosts caressing and claiming you in half-waking dreams—”

  “When I resurfaced and I realized whole days had disappeared—”

  “Whole seasons—”

  “It was suddenly late autumn and my hair had grown past my shou
lders—”

  “You’d missed a birthday and were a whole year older—”

  “Then I realized, Bertie.”

  He leant over and kissed my shoulder.

  “It felt pagan, Bertie, almost elemental. All the ghosts wore khaki uniform, they had the King’s shilling in their mouth to cross the Channel instead of the Styx. Mother’s grave was a door and the war marched back through it.”

  “As it will, every time.” He lit us each another cigarette. The flare from the lighter scratched shadows into his stubble. “So, who was your mother? Did you find out?”

  I could feel his breath, the smoke he exhaled over my body.

  “I’ve only just returned from my year in death, Bertie. Ask me in a few months’ time. Right now, I’m here for life.”

  3

  “limehouse blues”

  “Do you live on this boat permanently now?”

  “Yes.” He smiled; a slash of morning sun in a sky pale with the night’s exertions.

  “But your suits, your shoes…”

  “Mavis at reception sends them to be pressed and polished before I stow them away. Look.”

  He showed me all the ingenious compartments in his barge. We spent what should have been our breakfast hour exploring cupboards and boxes and hidden drawers. I was particularly impressed by the shaving kit that folded out of the bathroom cupboard.

  “This is just about the coziest trench I’ve ever seen,” I said. Bertie clenched his jaw.

  “Isn’t it though.” He said it quietly. All I could do was kiss him.

  We had to rush all the chores we had ignored yesterday. Bertie hailed a passing tugboat to pull us back to central London, giving us time for a quick wash at his little sink. As he placed the key around my neck, Bertie gave me detailed instructions of how he had maintained my studio apartment in Montparnasse while I was away. Last year, Bertie had secured me the gossip columnist job at his magazine. This year, he brought out all the sales figures, he got Mavis at reception to organize biscuits, I was armed and ready to ask our editor for my job back—all unnecessary as our editor agreed without hesitation while on the telephone. I didn’t even get to see him as he closed the door on Bertie as soon as he’d grumbled, “Yes.” But it meant I could leave London today, I could catch the Blue Train to Paris this minute. Bertie fed me biscuit pieces as I exchanged Australian pounds for British pounds and French francs. I was going to miss Bertie but felt not a single pang as I left him for the Underground.

  But when I got to Victoria Station the train had been delayed. Sheep on the tracks, gulls in the smoke stack, a passenger from Calais had expired en route; no one could tell me anything except that the train wasn’t leaving until later this afternoon. I was advised by a guard who was more moustache than man to “go and ‘ave some elevenses, miss, it’ll be a good while yet.”

  I had intended to go into the station restaurant for a proper breakfast. I had intended to go to a tea house, a bun shop, a pie cart so that my entire diet wasn’t cigarettes, whisky, and the occasional biscuit. But each shop had something wrong with it—this one was muggy with steam, that one smelt of cabbage and soap, another was full of middle-aged women who frowned at my short hair—and I couldn’t bring myself to take a seat. I wandered down to the river and stared at the water, last night so magical and this morning so ordinary. I wandered east along the bank until the sign for Westminster Station jerked me out of my reverie. The palaces of Westminster were just ahead. All around me were the government offices of civil servants and ministers and men like Dr. Fox.

  I’d had absolutely no intention of seeing Fox, in fact the opposite, I’d had every intention of ignoring and avoiding him. Yet the merest slip of unmarked time and here I was, standing minutes away from his office. Bertie had told me the address last year and, try as I might, I hadn’t forgotten it. I had looked up the street, once, and now I walked there even while I argued with myself that I mustn’t, I shouldn’t, I didn’t want to, not even a look, as not even a spare glancing thought should be given to Fox… and yet here I was, in front of his building, staring like a tourist at the rows and rows of windows in the gray stone façade.

  The seconds passed with treacle slowness. Every window showed a memory of Fox. Here he was when I first met him, in his bloody gown at a field hospital outside Rouen, looking at me with his cold gray eyes as I shivered in my uniform. There he was over the operating table, quoting Wordsworth, his hand out for scissors to snip off the stitching thread. A flash of a person in the window was a flash of Fox as he left my tent, where he’d been watching me sleep; I was told he did this often but I had only caught him once. The clouds’ reflection in another window was his steel gray hair as we drove back from Amiens, just the two of us. Full bellies had made us lax and happy, the sun bright in the apple orchard, I had run in to pick up apples that had fallen on the ground. I sang as I gathered fruit in my skirt, flashing my petticoat, and he had smiled, his first real smile.

  I couldn’t move as more memories crowded the windows. The first intelligence mission he gave me that had me bicycling back from the front line with a notebook in my pannier, sweating despite the freezing temperature. The nights he spent quizzing me on Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, but especially Keats, growling at me when I couldn’t instantly supply the next line from “Ode to a Nightingale.” Window after window of the times he made me gather intelligence inside brothels and estaminets, dressed like I was there to work and, sometimes, living up to my costume. The smell of all those men, the creep of their breath down my neck, the stink of mud in their uniforms. The telegram he sent me last April that called me back to him, my spymaster, to resume spying for him. A black window, as dark as the office at the Café de la Rotonde, where he called me last year to give me my new mission, to discuss clues, to make me remember how he had almost tricked me into marrying him. How it took all my willpower to resist his quicksilver voice. I couldn’t move as memories from the past eight years flitted by, the war and my return to Paris, bringing with them the discordant smells of disinfectant and coffee, cordite and champagne, the sounds of bombs and moans of the dying, the clink of glasses in the Rotonde, his voice, toxic and beautiful down the telephone line: Darkling I listen.

  Was that him? I held my breath as a figure looked down at me from an upper window. Gray-white hair, charcoal suit, chiselled jaw; from underneath I couldn’t get a proper look. I moved backward and almost tripped into the traffic. I grabbed a pause in the flow to hurry across the road for a better look. When I turned back, the figure turned and walked away. Had that been him? I hadn’t seen him since November 1918, when I had left his country house in Kent by stealing his car and driving myself back to London. How had he aged in the last four years? Was his hair now more white than gray? Was he thicker in the waist and thinner in the shoulders? I couldn’t remember how old he was; in fact, I might have never known, he always seemed both old and young simultaneously, his gray hair pointing one direction but his good teeth and relentless energy pointing another. Had that been Dr. Fox? I wanted to run inside and demand to see him, when I knew I should calmly walk away. In the end I stood by the side of the road until the growl in my belly made my legs wobble and I knew I had to find food or else fall over. The figure never reappeared, but even the possibility that I had seen him, finally, made me both frightened and elated. I chewed food I didn’t taste and stayed tense and floating, until the train stopped at Dover.

  Then grief and love and hope called me from the water and beyond. Fox was forgotten. Only Paris mattered.

  4

  “whirled into happiness”

  French chatter in the streets, the fickle air now damp, now crisp, diesel and cat piss and fried garlic and wine and the occasional waft of a Parisienne’s perfume. Is freedom not in leaving your home, but in choosing it? When you can’t choose, either to leave or to stay, you aren’t truly free—but when you can choose, then the city is yours, it opens up like a new lover, completely and with abandon—is that it? B
ecause that’s how I felt when I stepped out at Gare du Nord, crumpled and fuzzy-tongued after a breakfast of champagne and cigarettes. That’s how I felt as I waved away taxis and buses and started my walk through the boulevards and alleys toward Montparnasse.

  It wasn’t a short walk to my apartment, nor a comfortable one in heels with a suitcase. But every step rejoiced, every click of my heels said I was free, I was here, I was home. Cafés were scented with strong black coffee and stronger cigarettes. Corner boulangeries gave the hungering smell of fresh bread. Flower sellers wove between the pedestrians, professional sellers offering hothouse irises, beggars crooning over their wilting wild-bloom posies. Fashionable women, with hats down to their eyebrows, walked their dogs on short leashes. Shopkeepers in pinstripes and waiters in aprons darted back and forth to the footpath to meet, greet, cajole, and farewell. Across the Seine, men leaving the factories for lunch pulled on their flatcaps as they looked me up and down. Butchers whistled while shouldering carcasses. Soon the artists and assorted bohemians began to show up amongst the laundresses and off-duty cab drivers, the women hatless in impractical shoes, men in golden satin and burgundy velvet, all distracted by the cloud they found themselves living on. I moved onto Boulevard Montparnasse to see my favorite cafés, Café de la Rotonde and Café du Dȏme, my street just a few more steps away.

  The key was warm where it hung on a ribbon against my skin. My heart was beating so fast as I walked into rue Delambre that I had to stop to let it settle. The sky was pearly, the sun flirting with the footpath through the curtains of clouds. Wrought-iron balconies punctuated endless pale stone, shops displayed their salami and cheese, their corsets and stockings, their books and books and books, in windows that shone with golden script and scrubbing. People called in English to friends in the upper window of the Hȏtel des Ecoles, people passed by speaking French and Spanish, in the café to my left I heard people arguing in fierce Eastern languages I didn’t recognize. Was this really my home? This place with its aperitifs on check tablecloths set on the street, this place where a woman could wear trousers and revolutionaries fall in love and no one would raise an eyebrow? I bought a packet of Gitanes and a newspaper from the kiosk on the corner and walked to number 21 so fast I was almost running. I took the stairs in a little jig of impatience, my suitcase banging against my legs, the smells of soap and whitewash and poor drains that always lingered, to the roof with my little studio apartment—someone had oiled the lock recently, kept the floor clean, the air sweet, and the water fresh, as if I had only just left, as if the apartment itself had been waiting for me. I flopped on the bed and the sheets smelt of rosemary. I splashed my face and gulped crisp water from the jug. I ran my hands over my rack of dresses, so neatly hung, I kicked off my hat and coat and shoes and opened the window even wider. The geraniums were wildly blooming and the eave sparrows greeted me as the life of the party. I hung my legs over the window sill and lit up. Now I was properly home: here, this view over the four corners, over the streets and the gardens, all the way to the Eiffel Tower, here it was and so was I. The sky slid up its skirt to reveal hot blues and pinks but I was already seduced, I had been in love for years.