With Men For Pieces [A Fab Fifties Fling In Paris] Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  With Men For Pieces

  by

  Sophie Meridith

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Published by

  WHISKEY CREEK PRESS

  Whiskey Creek Press

  PO Box 51052

  Casper, WY 82605-1052

  www.whiskeycreekpress.com

  Copyright Ó 2013 by Sophie Meridith

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 (five) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-61160-647-8

  Cover Artist: Angela Archer

  Editor: Melanie Billings

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For my Friends, Past and Present

  PART ONE—1956

  Chapter 1

  I’d been languishing in London for a year. I was living at the top of a tall house in Earl’s Court, trying to pluck up the courage to give in my notice at the school in Highgate where I was paid a measly sum to endure the sulking of a class full of spoiled brats. The other teachers were all wierdos, and the balding headmaster made a pass at me every morning, somewhere on the premises. His wife was a part-time secretary in his office, so he had to behave in the afternoons.

  Beryl’s wedding broke the monotony. I was bridesmaid. It started off respectably enough. The religious part was at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. In the vestry, we signed the register with a pen once handled by the Queen Mother. Beryl and Bryn emerged into Trafalgar Square to be photographed for the Evening News under an archway of guitarists, instruments aloft. Bryn was leader of a skiffle group. I still have his card, black script on yellow. The guests then scrambled into a motley collection of decrepit old cars and taxis. Some rowdy gate-crashers laid claim to my taxi, so I had to walk to the reception up Charing Cross Road. I didn’t mind in the least as the guitarists insisted on accompanying me, playing all the way. I sometimes manage to hide my crippling shyness under a front of sheer exhibitionism—this was one of those occasions.

  The festivities lasted four days, but the middle part remains a blur in my memory. I do recall arriving—musically—at Bunjie’s Coffee Bar just as Beryl was cutting the cake. Then, while her thousand or so aunts from Bromley were stuffing it into their mouths between scandalised comments on the mixed bunch of artists and criminals who were there for the groom (Bryn’s family remained a solid mystery with dark overtones), the bride and I retired to change.

  Like all self-respecting coffee bars of the fifties, Bunjie’s was in a cellar. The crude, dark cavern where we flung off our silken finery seemed to have evolved as an afterthought. I kept expecting to stumble over a figure crouched above dynamite sticks, preparing to blast through to a neighbouring bank vault. As soon as we re-emerged in black drainpipes and towelling sloppy joes, the tone of the party hotted up. We seemed to spend a lot of time bundled in the back of old cars or jostling about noisily in tube trains. Eventually, we merged with another group of merrymakers. Their beards were less straggly, their chins less evident and their accent more Eton and Balliol. But they had the same adventuresome spirit and apparently similar tastes in music as they took to the strumming accompaniment and insisted we bring it along to what one of them was convinced was his uncle’s flat in South Ken. He declared loudly and clearly, as one of our lot picked the lock, that the old boy never minded him bringing friends round when he was away.

  I thought it was a bit odd—especially when I took in the valuable-looking books and pictures, the elegant furniture, the grand piano. This instrument became a sort of liaison point for the two groups. Underneath, lay one of the Eton types in silk shirt and scarlet cummerbund and well-trimmed, though bushy beard. He was fast asleep, but there was some sort of activity going on around him. Two of our girls, wearing one long earring each, way ahead of their time, were busily inserting a lighted candle in the said beard. They had already taken off his trousers.

  I retired to the lavatory. I wanted time to collect my thoughts and decide between the two youths who had been pursuing me for hours. Dougie was tall, clean and lean. He wore a huge, shabby sweater and had a sweet, appealing baby face. He was a drummer in a jazz band. Tim was tall, clean and lean. He wore pin-striped trousers and an immaculate blazer and had a sweet, appealing baby face. He was on the run from his National Service. Before I could decide between them I realised that I was not alone. Huddled in the corner, clutching a whisky bottle and staring at me was Yves Smythgate-Tyne. He was Bryn’s manager, whatever that signified.

  “God, you’re lovely!” he said suddenly.

  He crawled over to where I stood leaning on the wash basin and began kissing my bare feet. He worked his way up and at the waistband pulled aside my clothes to probe my belly button with his tongue. Unfortunately, that’s my ticklish spot and I was having difficulty controlling an outburst of giggles when there was a loud rap on the door.

  “Yves! Are you in there?”

  It was his wife Connie—a very dominant lady.

  He looked at me in abject pleading.

  “Sorry darling!” he called, still on his knees. “I’ve been frightfully ill…I won’t be long now.”

  We heard her hurry away. He grasped my buttocks.

  “You ravishing creature!” he cried. “You live at Eardley Crescent, don’t you? I can visit you every Wednesday—have you a spare key?”

  I shook my head. I was dying to laugh, but if I offended him, Bryn, and consequently Beryl, would never forgive me. Some wedding present to get Bryn fired. Someone rattled the handle. He put a finger to his lips in exaggerated warning, waited till the coast seemed clear, then slipped out. I shot the bolt behind him. I’d had enough of the party. I climbed out of the awkward, tilting window, dropped into a tiny courtyard and made my escape.

  I sat in my minuscule room in Earls Court and rocked with laughter at the thought of Yves Smythgate-Tyne visiting me here. My guests usually found it necessary to spend most of the time on the landing—there was hardly room for me between bed and wall, especially when I was cooking on the gas ring. Anyone with a tendency to claustrophobia did not come a second time.

  What may have been days later—as I say, I had lost all sense of time—there had been whisky galore in Uncle’s cocktail cabinet, I suddenly remembered that I had arranged an interview with an editor with a view to having a try-out as a journalist. I switched on the radio, hoping to get a clue as to the date and rummaged through my wardrobe (that, too, lived on the landing). During my first year of earning a living, teaching at a village school in Derbyshire, I had amassed a respectable bank balance of one hundred pounds. I had blued the lot during my first month living in London—mostly on dresses from the King’s Road, Chelsea. I picked out my favourite, a lime green body-hugging wool with an intriguing row of buttons from throat to hem. I swung off towards Fleet Street.

  Things might have gone better if it had
been the right day—maybe I could have brazened it out. But, being ushered into an impressive, all-leather office to be faced by Redbeard, last seen smouldering and trouserless under a piano…I fled. I didn’t much care for his avant-garde, satirical little magazine anyway.

  I telephoned school to explain that my bilious attack had prevented me putting in an appearance for the last few days. The Headmaster was decidedly chilly.

  So—I decided to catch the night ferry to France. A group of layabouts from the Gyre and Gimble coffee house were going. It was a regular Friday night outing for skifflers. I seem to remember the fare working out at less than five pounds and most of them could earn three times that during the weekend playing in clubs or on street corners in Paris. One character with dyed orange hair—this was years before the Punk Movement—it was rumoured he had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs—took his tub base. Most of the others carried washboards, kazoos or genuine guitars. I had no luggage. I slipped away from the others at the Gare du Nord and trudged alone through the dawn streets of my favourite city to call on my father’s friends.

  Chapter 2

  The Bernaud apartment was just as I remembered it when I’d stayed there with my father—the last time, I must have been fifteen. Jeannine welcomed me warmly, having little difficulty, it seemed, in recognising me, the grown-up version of the gawky teenager.

  “And you are now a Beatnik!” she remarked in amusement, drawing me inside through the great double doors that had always seemed of Versailles proportions.

  “No,” I corrected her. “A Bohemian.”

  “Even better!” she cried. She ushered me through another pair of elegant doors and revealed the acres of red-checked tablecloth in the dining room—their main reception room.

  “So—you want a job on Pierre’s paper!” Jeannine laughed. “Well, he has just gone out to get the croissants. He will be back soon and we can ask him.”

  She began the complicated ritual of making the coffee, grinding the beans first and releasing such a delightful aroma that I realised I had not eaten for about twenty-four hours.

  Pierre, too, was delighted to see me, and the way he eyed me lasciviously made it quite clear that he would have no objections to a ménage à trois.

  “I must get ready for the office, now,” he said after they had both watched me devour three croissants and drink two huge bowls of coffee. “Will you come into the bedroom and talk to me while I change?”

  I glanced at Jeannine, embarrassed. She shrugged and lit another cigarette. I got the picture.

  “I have a date,” I lied. “I must be going.”

  “Of course,” she said, and she wasn’t laughing now.

  Neither of them offered to move, so I saw myself out. So much for a newspaper job in Paris, I thought. I decided it was better to starve steadily in a garret than deliver myself to the tender mercies of Pierre Bernaud. Unfortunately, the garrets of Montmartre were very crowded—three to a room and mostly unfriendly Arabs. By the time I had recovered from my dashed hopes and sore feet at a pavement café table, it was nearly dusk. I wandered down to the Seine, looking out for a bridge or a bench where I could sleep rough. I paused opposite Ile Saint-Louis, leaning over the parapet, watching a family on one of the moored barges preparing their supper. Lovely smells drifted up. I leaned further over. Suddenly I realised that the fat woman was waving at me.

  “Viens! Viens ici!” she was calling.

  Prudence warned me not to get involved. But the appetising odours had got to work on my digestive juices and prudence was quickly absorbed and eliminated by pepsin.

  I hurried down the steep wooden steps. I stood shyly on the quay. Two of the six children leaped the gap and helped me aboard. I’ll never forget that meal. We sat on deck at a proper table covered by a red-checked cloth identical to Jeannine’s. We began with radishes, daintily served with a pat of butter and crusty bread. Then a huge pot of cassoulet with tender beans and delicious morsels of sausage and preserved goose. A wonderful frisee salad with bits of crisp bacon tossed in it. Goat cheese. And an amazingly light and fluffy mousse au chocolat. The conversation was general and in such rapid French I missed three quarters of it. After coffee my hostess said, in the slow version reserved for babies, animals, imbeciles and foreigners, “And where is it that you will sleep tonight, my young friend?”

  I hung my head. I suddenly felt ashamed at being so feckless.

  “Mabiche!” said her husband. “You must send her to Tante Elisabet.”

  I was not to realise until I had lived in Paris for much longer that the expression “ma biche”—literally “my doe”—was not a Christian name, rather an affectionate term on a par with “my angel,” “my flower,” “my pet.” To me, the huge, plain-faced woman with the big smile would always be Mabiche. The whole family embraced me with the four kisses of the Parisian—left, right, left, right. One of the skinny little boys was detailed to conduct me. I followed him up the steps and across the Pont de l’Archevech on to the Cité. Then we shot up a narrow alley in the very shadow of Notre Dame. I was convinced that the house before which he stopped was a brothel. And the woman in the doorway could be nothing if not the Madame.

  The boy whispered to her. She opened the door wide and I saw a long, cheerless passage lined with crucifixes and holy pictures. It was some kind of hostel. On the stairs, we passed several miserable-looking and very plain girls. Another such person was kneeling in prayer in a sort of chapel-cum-living room. I was shown into a cell-like room with a small, hard bed.

  In the morning, Tante Elisabet brought me a small, bitter coffee and demanded the equivalent of two pounds ten. I looked so horrified she immediately reduced her price to a pound.

  I ignored Notre Dame, though the night before I had fully intended spending an hour inside, gathering moral strength. After the stark and unfriendly religiousness of the foyer, however, I needed something different. I wandered through the Flower Market and across the Pont au Change. Then I made my way to the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Being penniless, I needed to look at the most expensive shops in the world.

  I stood in front of a window containing one perfect sage-green velvet gown. By some trick of the light my reflection seemed to be wearing the creation. There was a gasp from behind me.

  “Perfect, don’t you think?” said a deep, masculine voice.

  I turned and saw what nowadays is called a “queer,” a “gay,” a “pouffter.” Then, one would have said at the most—a fop. Personally, I was so naive I had never grasped the subtle differences in behaviour of such people. This chap just looked extra well-turned out—a bit…frilly. He was about forty-five and very attractive.

  “I’ve always liked that colour,” I said.

  “Ah!” He spoke now in English. “Well—come along in and try it.”

  Without laying a finger on me, he managed to propel me through the door. Once inside, I realised that he must be somebody important. There was a lot of heel-clicking and a studied avoidance of staring at me.

  He shook hands with all of the assistants and then led me through to an elegant, perspexy office. I realised, aghast, that he was the proprietor.

  He sat down behind the transparent desk and gestured me into a black glass shell of a chair opposite.

  “I won’t ask you to strip off straight away,” he said and his eyes were twinkling with mischief as he watched me blush. He picked up a see-through phone and gabbled away. I caught the word brioches and warmed to him in spite of his shock tactics.

  “How long have you been in Paris?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Twenty-four hours,” I said shortly.

  “And—before that?” he asked.

  “London.”

  “Ah!” He leaned forward and studied me closely. “You know London, eh?”

  There was a discreet tap on the door and in came one of the smart, ageless saleswomen in her smart, ageless little black dress. She was carrying a large tray with two huge blue bowls of steaming coffee and a basket of warm croissants
and tiny brioches. After indulging in this sublime breakfast I was almost ready to submit to any of his demands. Anyone who could produce such comforts just when most needed was well worth sticking to.

  All he asked me to do was try on the green dress.

  A young girl with a slight deformity of one shoulder pinned it round me in a curtained alcove.

  “Monsieur Lemoine will be enchanted,” she declared, standing behind me looking at my reflection in the old-fashioned pier glass. I was not so sure. The draped Grecian lines did not exactly go with the woolly hat pulled down over my ears. But anything was better than revealing my hair which was three days overdue for its essential weekly wash. The flat black pumps did not do anything for my model’s walk—but at least they did not show. I wished I had some mascara in my pocket—my eyebrows had practically disappeared. The result being that my eyes sort of merged into my freckles.

  He held out his hand and introduced himself as though he had never seen the woebegone creature in jeans and duffel coat that had been swallowed up in his changing room.

  “Jacques Lemoine,” he said. “Enchanté.”

  “Gabrielle Parker,” I replied.

  “Gabrielle,” he repeated. “Gaby. Gaby Parker. Oui! Splendid.”

  He sent me back in the cubicle and little Marie-Christine soon appeared with a black and white striped blouse and a cropped grey jacket. It seemed I was meant to keep on my own drainpipes.

  Chapter 3

  He took me to lunch at the Brasserie du Terminus Nord. He’d asked me to choose a restaurant and now, sitting opposite me in one of the brass-railed booths, he asked me why this one.

  “I came here with my father,” I said.

  “Ah!”

  He waited.

  “He was a journalist—more a reporter really—on a little provincial paper in the Midlands,” I explained.

  “And a Francophile, I presume,” he said.

  We were sipping Kir Royal, the speciality of the place—the champagne went straight to my head and loosened my tongue.