Филиппа Карр - The Song of the Siren

He took my hand and pressed it. It was the first sign of endearment I had ever had from him.

“We’ll find her,” he said.

The days that followed were like a nightmare. At the end of them I was completely exhausted and would sink on my bed and fall into a deep sleep until I was awakened by dreams of horror. In these I was always searching for Clarissa; I would be running through the streets and I would find myself in a cellar and people with dreadful leering faces would be closing in on me. Good Mrs. Brown was invariably there.

My dreams came from what I had seen during the days, for I did see terrible things.

I suppose I could have found life like this in any big city; but I had had little experience of big cities. Only once had I fallen into the clutches of Good Mrs. Brown of London and I had never completely forgotten it. It was an incident which had remained in my mind to be brought out now and then, and because of what I saw in this city it had been brought right into the forefront of my mind. I imagined Clarissa with Good Mrs. Brown; I imagined her running out of a house in a spangled shift and caught and taken back ... to what?

These were the dreams which followed the frustrating, exhausting days, and in those dreams Clarissa and I were one and the same person.

What could we do? Even Jeremy had nothing to suggest. He had discovered people who had known the Hessenfields. Yes, they had died; the household had been broken up. No, they had no idea what had become of the child. The servants? Oh, they had dispersed ... as servants do.

We had one clue. Jeanne had been a flower seller. It was a business she would know.

It seemed logical to presume that she would go back to it. Therefore we must question the flower sellers of Paris.

What a task! We walked about the streets. It was spring now.

“A good time,” said Jeremy in his new wave of optimism. “People buy flowers in the spring. They are so glad to see them, they remind them that the winter is over. There will be plenty of flower sellers about.”

It was a frustrating task. We bought flowers and engaged the sellers in conversation.

Did they know of someone called Jeanne, who used to be a servant in one of the big houses in the Marais?

Often we encountered blank stares; sometimes the flower seller would chatter volubly leading us on so that we thought we were on the trail. We even followed up one Jeanne who knew nothing of a child and was certainly not the sort of person with whom Carlotta would have left the child.

It was not only the fact that we found no success that depressed and frightened me.

It was what I saw and the realisation of what could happen to someone alone in such a city.

I saw the beggars, the drunkards, the pickpockets; I saw little children scantily clad with a lifetime’s misery written on their little faces. And in everyone I saw Clarissa.

We wandered through the markets; we saw barefooted children creeping between the stalls to snatch a bit of fruit; we saw them struggling with baskets as big as they were. We saw them beaten and abused; it broke my heart. Good Mrs. Brown seemed very close to me. It was as though she walked beside me chuckling at my naivete. I was being rudely awakened now.

I wanted to run away from all this, to go back to my couch, to be petted and pampered and shut out the world.

Of course it is so easy, I thought, to shut out the world if you are surrounded by people who love you. You can forget all this; you pretend it does not exist. You can shut yourself into a little cocoon and never, never think of Good Mrs. Brown and two people writhing on a four-poster bed.

But you cannot forget. You must know of these things. Because the more you know the more readily you will understand the trials of others ... and your own. Ignorance, shutting your eyes to evil, will not find Clarissa.

As the days passed my anxieties grew. I thought of what could be happening to my darling child in this wicked city.

Those days were like watching a show of pictures ... as soon as one faded another took its place. There was the bustle, the laughter, the excitement of the streets-the patched and perfumed ladies, the exquisite gentlemen in their coaches ... eyeing each other. I saw meetings arranged between languishing ladies and languid gentlemen; I saw the beggars, the market sellers and always those with the baskets of flowers.

It was the children who moved me most. I could not bear to look at them with their poor pinched faces already marked with shrewd cunning, already showing the signs of depravity. My impulse was to turn away to save myself the pain of looking. But how could I be sure that one of these was not Clarissa?

What really upset me were the women whom they called the Marcheuses. They were the poorest, saddest creatures I had ever seen. Jeremy told me that they had been prostitutes in their youth, and God knew they were not old now-in their twenties perhaps, though they looked fifty or sixty. They had become diseased and worn out in their profession and their only hope of earning a sou or two now was to run errands for their more wealthy kind. Hence their name, the Marcheuses. Worn out, weary, finished with life-keeping themselves alive until a merciful death came and took them.

I saw the milliners and sewing girls-young and innocent-coming out into the streets laughing and eyeing the apprentices ... and looking out for a milord who would give them a good supper in return for services rendered.

I knew I would never be the same after this experience.

It had taught me a great deal about myself. It had shown me that I had been hiding beneath my illness because I was afraid of what I would meet in the world.

If I were going to live, I must come out and face life. I must recognise the fact that there was evil in the world and it would still be there if I shut my eyes and refused to look at it. That was what I had seen in my frustrating rambling through the streets of Paris. But there were other things too. There was Clarissa to be found; there was the love of my parents; there was the goodness of Jeremy, who had given up his sheltered life to help me in my need.

We were two of a kind, for had he not come down to Enderby to hide from the world?

We were out in it now. We were living at last.

We had come in after an exhausting day. We had gone to our rooms. Jeremy had said:

“We’ll rest before supper.”

It was seven days since we had arrived in Paris and it seemed to me in a moment of despair that we were no nearer the end of our quest than we had been when we began it.

I lay on the bed for a while but I could not sleep. Images of what I had seen during the day kept intruding on my mind. I saw the stalls in the great market ... the women with their live chickens and their vegetables, the flower sellers who knew no Jeanne . .. the child stealing a purse from a fat woman who had come to market, being caught in the act and severely beaten. I could hear voices screeching out the merits of what they had to sell and the low but incessant chatter of two women who had sat on a low wall to set down their baskets and rest their feet awhile.

Sleep was impossible.

I got out of bed and went to the window.

It would be dark in half an hour. How tired I was. Jeremy had been right to say we should rest. He needed to rest, I know. His leg was painful at times.

I sat by the window watching the people. The street fascinated me. It had not yet changed its daytime face. That would come in half an hour. Now, respectable people walked by without fear. Dusk would fall and they would be no longer here ... I looked at the house opposite. Now it was presenting its almost smug face to the world. I shuddered to think of what went on behind those windows. I had looked for the little girl in the shift but I had not seen her again.