Mary Stewart: Nine Coaches Waiting

My eyelids stung suddenly, and I shut my eyes and leaned back against the shabby upholstery. But still through the open window Paris met me, assailed, bombarded me. The smell of coffee, cats, drains, wine and wet air… the hoarse voices shouting France-Soir, Paris-Presse. .. someone selling lottery tickets… the police-whistles… the scream of brakes. Something was missing, I thought vaguely, something had changed… but it was only when the taxi swerved violently and I opened my eyes to see it miss a pack of cyclists by inches that I realised what it was. He wasn't using his horn; the incessant blare of Paris was gone. I found myself looking about me all at once as if I were a stranger and this were a new town and a new experience.

Something inside me welcomed the change. Quite deliberately I turned my thoughts away from the easy path they were treading, and made myself think about the future. I was back in France; that much of the dream of the past nine years had come true. However prosaic or even dreary my new job might be, at least I had come back to the country I had persisted in regarding as my home. If I had deceived Madame de Valmy, I had done so under a pressure that was to me a necessity. Well, here I was. This was France. The lighted suburbs that were swimming past me were those of my home. Not very long now and we would be in the heart of Paris, thrusting our way down the confusion of the Rue Royale to shoot out into the great glittering spaces of Concorde, where the windows of the CrilIon look out through the still-bare chestnut branches towards the Seine. Then tomorrow we would set off again, deeper into France, across her pastures and vineyards and hills and high alps till we reached the Château Valmy, perched above its forests by the little village of Soubirous in High Savoy… I could see it in my mind's eye now, as I had pictured it a hundred times since the journey started -the fairy-tale castle of a dream, something remote and romantic and impossible-a sort of Walt Disney advertisement for Gibbs Dentifrice. Of course it wouldn't be like that, but all the same..,. The taxi checked, then ground to a reluctant halt behind a stationary bus. I clutched my handbag tightly on my knee and leaned forward, staring out of the window. Now that I was here, even this tiny delay became suddenly intolerable. The bus moved a yard or so and pulled to the right. The taxi shot past with three centimetres to spare, did a quick in-and-out between two terrified pedestrians, and tore on its way. Hurry…

Suddenly, unbidden, verses were spinning in my brain.

Nine coaches waiting-hurry-hurry-hurry-But here, surely, the quotation was desperately inappropriate? What was it, anyhow? I racked my brain, remembering… Something about the pleasures of the palace, securèd ease and state… banquets abroad by torchlight! music! sports! nine coaches waiting-hurry-hurry-hurry… some tempter's list of pleasures, it had been, designed to lure a lonely young female to a luxurious doom; yes, that was it, Vendice enticing the pure and idiotic Castiza to the Duke's bed… (Ay, to the devil) … I grinned to myself as I placed it. Inappropriate, certainly. This particular young female was heading, I hoped, neither to luxury nor the devil, but merely to a new setting for the same old job she’d abandoned in England. Miss Linda Martin, nursery-governess to Philippe, Comte de Valmy, aged nine.

In a few minutes now I would be there. Madame de Valmy, silver and elegant and so upright in her chair that you thought a draught would sway her-Madame de Valmy would receive me. I abandoned fairy-tales, dragged a mirror from my bag, and began to tidy my hair, making myself recall, as if it were a lesson, what I could remember of my new employers.

Madame de Valmy, when I had talked to her in London, had not told me a great deal about the family I was to serve, but I had gathered the essentials of what seemed to have been a fairly complicated story. The old Comte de Valmy, Philippe's grandfather, had been enormously wealthy, and on his death the property had been divided between his three sons, the new Comte Étienne, Léon, and Hippolyte. To Étienne went the bulk of the fortune, the Château Valmy, and the Paris house; to Léon among other things, a lovely little estate in Provence called Bellevigne, and to Hippolyte a large property on the edge of Lac Léman, a few kilometres below the Valmy estate. At the time of the old Comte's death the eldest son, Étienne, had not been married, and had been thankful when his brother Léon offered to stay on at Valmy and run the estate for him. Étienne preferred Paris, so to Paris he went, while Léon stayed on at Valmy and managed it, running his own Midi property from a distance. The younger brother, Hippolyte, who was (I gathered) an archaeologist of some standing, lived quietly at his house in Thonon-les-Bains, in between bouts of travelling and "digging" abroad. So things had gone on for some years. Then, long after anyone had ceased to expect him to do so, Étienne had married, and within a couple of years Philippe had been born. The family had stayed on in Paris until, last year , when Philippe was almost nine years old, tragedy had struck at him even as it had struck at me. His parents had been killed together in an air crash on their way back from a holiday in Italy, and Philippe had left Paris to live with his uncle Hippolyte in Thonon. Hippolyte was still unmarried, "but," said Madame de Valmy to me, poised in that silver elegance of hers beside a Regency mirror in her sitting- room at Claridge's, "but the child had seen a lot of him, and is very fond of him. Hippolyte-my brother-in-law-wouldn't hear of his coming to us at Valmy, even though, officially, Valmy is Philippe's home…” She smiled then, that remote sweet smile of hers that was about as cosy as an April moon, so that I thought I saw Hippolyte's point. I couldn't exactly picture the exquisite Héloïse in a romp with a nine-year-old boy. Philippe was certainly better off at the Villa Mireille with Uncle Hippolyte. Even an archaeologist, I thought, must be more approachable than Madame de Valmy. At least he would share the normal small boy's passion for grubbing in the mud.

But an archaeologist must occasionally grub to order. Philippe had been only a few months at the Villa Mireille when Monsieur Hippolyte had to fulfil an engagement which took him to Greece and Asia Minor for some months. The Villa Mireille was perforce shut up, and Philippe went up to Valmy to stay with his other aunt and uncle for the duration of Hippolyte's tour. And his Paris-bred Nanny, restless enough in the little town of Thonon, had struck at the prospect of perhaps half a year's sojourn in the remote Savoyard valley, and had removed herself with tears and reproaches, back to Paris…

So here was I. And it was curious that, in spite of the familiarity with which Paris invaded me, I didn't yet feel at home. I was a stranger, a foreigner, going to a strange house and a strange job. Perhaps loneliness was nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you, yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you…

The taxi swerved across the Rue Riquet and swung right- handed into streets I knew. Away on the right I could see the dome of Sacré-Coeur sharp against the daffodil sky of evening. Somewhere below it, in the spangling blue dusk of Montmartre, was the Rue du Printemps.

On an impulse I leant forward, my hands tight on the clasp of my shabby handbag.

"Do you know the Rue du Printemps? It's off the Avenue Verchoix, Eighteenth Arrondissement. Take me there, please. I-I've changed my mind."

I stood on the damp pavement outside the open door and looked up at Number 14, Rue du Printemps. The paint was peeling off the walls; the wrought-iron of the balconies, that I remembered as a bright turquoise, showed in this light as a patched and dirty grey. A shutter hung on one hinge beside the first-floor window. Monsieur Bécard's canaries had long since gone; there wasn't even a patch of darker colour on the wall where the cage had hung. The top balcony, our balcony, looked very small and high. There were pots of straggling geraniums arranged round its edge, and a striped towel hung over the railing to air.