A Week in Paris by Rachel Hore Page B

street, then in through the door of a building so nondescript that nobody would have noticed it unless they knew it was there. Instantly they could hear a wonderful swell of music. She followed Gene up a rackety flight of stairs. The music grew louder as they climbed. At the top Gene thrust aside a velvet curtain and drew her into a large square room swirling with smoke. It was noisy and packed with people, and the windows had been thrown open to the night, God help the neighbours. There was a bar in one corner and a makeshift stage draped with crimson in another, where three Negro musicians were playing to a swinging rhythm. The smudged, dancing notes of the piano and the rich, lilting sound of the trumpet snaked inside her in a way that was thrilling and strange, and yet at the same time felt perfectly natural.
    Gene guided her to the bar and bought her more champagne. He seemed utterly at home here, and soon they were joined by friends of his – a slight, dapper fellow American whom Gene introduced as ‘the renowned writer Jack Miles’, and a charming, sandy-haired Irish-American by the name of Bill Delaney, who was a journalist on the Paris
Herald Tribune
. The third was a woman, a girlfriend of Bill’s. Claudine was a thin, elegant Frenchwoman in her thirties with a feather in her headdress. She contributed very little to the conversation, simply smoked a cigarette through an ivory holder, but there was a mysterious air about her that fascinated Kitty.
    Later, much later, in the cab home, Gene held her hand and she leaned against him, half-drunk on the champagne, the music, and happiness.
    ‘I enjoyed myself so much, thank you, but I’ll never get up for my class in the morning,’ she murmured.
    ‘You must, or I’ll blame myself,’ Gene said, squeezing her hand. ‘I can’t have you cutting your lessons. Your uncle would never forgive me.’
    ‘He wouldn’t approve of jazz. “Music of the gutter”, I once heard him call it.’
    ‘Oh, don’t spoil it, I was liking what I heard about your Uncle Pepper.’
    ‘He’d like you, I’m sure,’ Kitty said, laughing. ‘It’s in matters such as music and painting that he has strong old-fashioned views.’
    ‘I hope to meet him one day then,’ Gene said as the cab drew up outside her alleyway. ‘
Attendez un petit moment s’il vous plaît
,’ he instructed the driver.
    She was glad to have his arm to cling to in the silent darkness of the alley. Where it opened out into the square, all bathed in moonlight, he stopped and turned to her. ‘It’s been the most wonderful evening,’ he murmured. ‘May I see you again?’
    ‘Yes,’ she whispered, while glancing anxiously at the shuttered mansion, ‘but you’d better go now in case we’re seen. I don’t want to get thrown out of my lodgings.’
    At the gate of the convent he waited while she stole in through the front door using the key Sister Thérèse had given her. Upstairs, safe in bed, she fell asleep at once, but her dreams were full of the sinuous, caressing music of the evening and Gene’s soft lazy voice.
    They saw each other as often as they could after that, and on his days off Gene made it his business to show Kitty Paris. It wasn’t always the main tourist sights, but the out-of-the-way places, the secret nooks he took her to – a shabby theatre showing Grand Guignol melodrama, the Jardin des Plantes by the School of Botany, Chopin’s tomb in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. Best of all, Kitty loved a little piano shop in St Germain, where she roamed about marvelling at the beautiful old instruments whilst Gene chatted easily to the proprietor, learning the stories about the pianos and the people who’d owned them. In the evening he might accompany her to a concert, or they’d dine together and visit one of the
boîtes
to listen to some woman in black with a smoky 4 a.m. voice, singing heartbreaking love songs that left Kitty with the melancholy sense of how time effaced everything. Not