William Boyd

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Ghana and educated at the Universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He has written several novels including “A Good Man in Africa” (1981) and “Brazzaville Beach” (1990) both of which won literary prizes; also film scripts and short stories. “Gifts” is taken from a collection of his stories, “On the Yankee Station” (1981).

English teenagers who have left school and intend to go to University often take a’ year off’ to work or study abroad, see a different life and culture, and, they hope, learn a foreign language. Edward is unusual in actually attending a University, but this University is providing special language courses for foreigners. Some of the courses will be quite short, others will last a year. Boyd can assume that the majority of his readers will have visited France, probably several times, so that they will feel more experienced than Edward. He ensures that Edward himself explains what is relevant for understanding the story.

……..I enroll at the University. This takes place at a building called the Centre Universitaire Mé dité rrané an or CUM as it’s generally known (the French pronounce it ‘cume’). The building is on the Promenade des Anglais and looks like a small exclusive art gallery. Inside there is a huge lecture room with a dull mythological mural on three walls. This morning I am the first to arrive and there is a hushed marmoreal stillness in the place. In a small office I enroll and pay my fees. I decide to postpone my first class until the next day as I have to find somewhere to live. A secretary gives me a list of addresses where I can rent a room. I look for the cheapest. Mme D’Amico, it says at the bottom of the list, 4 Rue Dante. I like the address.

Mme D’Amico is very small − well under five feet. She has a pale thin wrinkled face and grey hair. She is dressed in black. On her feet she is wearing carpet slippers which seem preposterously large, more suitable for a thirteen-stone man. I learn later that this is because sometimes her feet swell up like balloons. Her eyes are brown and, though a little rheumy, are bright with candid suspicion. However she seems to understand my French and asks me to come in.

Her flat is unnervingly dark. This is because use of the electric lights is forbidden during hours of daylight (1). We stand in a long gloomy hallway off which several doors lead (2). I sense shapes – a wardrobe, a hatstand, a chest, even what I take to be a gas cooker, but I assume my eyes are not yet accustomed to the murk. Mme D’Amico shows me into the first room on the left. She opens shutters. I see a bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe. The floor is made of loose red hexagonal tiles that click beneath my feet as I walk across to look out of the window. I peer down into the apartment building’s central courtyard. Far below the concierge’s alsatian is scratching itself. From my window I can see into at least five other apartments. I decide to stay here.

I am not the only lodger at Mme D’Amico’s. There is a muscle-bound taciturn engineer called Hugues. His room is separated from mine by the WC. He is married and goes home every weekend to his wife and family in Grenoble. Two days after I arrive the phone rings while I am alone in the flat. It is Hugues’s wife and she sounds nervous and excited. I somehow manage to inform her that Hugues is out. After some moments of incomprehension I eventually gather that it is imperative for Hugues to phone her when he comes in. I say I will give him the message. I sweat blood over that message. I get my grammar book and dictionary out and go through at least a dozen drafts. Finally I prop it by the phone. It was worth the effort. Hugues is very grateful and from that day more forthcoming, and Mme D’Amico makes a point of congratulating me on my French. She seems more impressed by my error-free and correctly accented prose than by anything else about me. So much so that she asks me if I want to watch TV with her tonight. I sense that this is something of a breakthrough: Hugues doesn’t watch her TV. But then maybe he has better things to do.

Almost without any exertion on my part, my days take on a pattern. I go to the Centre in the morning and in the afternoon for my courses. At lunch and in the evening I eat at the enormous university cafeteria up by the Law faculty. I return home, have a cup of coffee in the Cave Dante, then pass the rest of the evening watching TV with Mme D’Amico and a neighbour – a fat jolly woman to whom I have never been introduced but whose name, I know, is Mme Franchot.

Mme D’Amico and Mme Franchot sit in armchairs. I bring a wooden chair in from the hall and sit behind them looking at the screen between their heads. While the TV is on all other source of illumination is switched off and we sit and watch in a spectral grey light. Mme D’Amico reads out loud every piece of writing that appears on the screen – the titles of programmes, the entire list of credits, the names and endorsements of products being advertised. At first I find this intensely irritating and the persistent commentary almost insupportable. But she speaks fairly softly and after a while I get used to her voice.

My relationship with Mme D’Amico is very formal and correct. We converse in polite phrases that would not disgrace a Victorian drawing room. She asks me, one day, to fill out a white fiche for the police – something, she assures me hastily, every resident must do. She notice my age on the card and raises her eyebrows in mild surprise. She says she hadn’t supposed me to be so young. Then one morning, apropos of nothing, she explains why she reads everything that appears on TV. It seems that Mme Franchot is illiterate. If Mme D’Amico didn’t relate them to her, she would never even know the names of the old films we watch nightly on Monte Carlo TV. I find I am surprisingly touched by this confidence.

I see that it was a misplaced act of generosity on my part to lend Rida and Ali the money as I am now beginning to run short myself. There is a postal strike in Britain which is lasting far longer than I expected. It is quite impossible to get any money out. Foolishly I expected the strike to be short-lived. I calculate that if I radically trim my budget I can last for another three weeks, or perhaps a little longer. Assuming, that is, that Rida and Ali pay me back.

I am now running so low on money that I limit myself to one cup of coffee a day. I eat apples all morning and afternoon until it is time for my solitary meal in the university restaurant up by the fac dudroit (3). I wait until the end because then they give away free second helpings of rice and pasta if they have any left over. Often I am the only person in the shining well-lit hall. I sit eating bowl after bowl of rice and pasta while the floors are swabbed around me and I am gradually hemmed in by chairs being set on the tables. After that I wander around the centre of town for a while. At half nine I make my way back to the flat. The whores all come out at half nine precisely. It’s quite amazing. Suddenly they are everywhere. Rue Dante, it so happens, is right in the middle of the red – light district. Sometimes on my way back the girls solicit me. I laugh in a carefree manner, shrug my shoulders and tell them I’m an impoverished student. I have this fantasy that one night one of the girls will offer to do it free but so far I’ve had no success.

If I’ve saved up my cup of coffee for the evening my day ends at the Cave Dante. I sit up at the zinc bar. Lucien knows my order by now and he sets about making up a grande crè me as soon as I come in the door. On the top of the bar are baskets for brioches, croissants and pizza. Sometimes there are a few left over from breakfast and lunch. One night I have a handful of spare centimes and I ask Lucien how much the remaining bit of pizza costs. To my embarrassment I still don’t have enough to buy it. I mutter something about not being hungry and say I’ve changed my mind. Lucien looks at me for a moment and tells me to help myself. Now every night I go in and finish off what’s left. Each time I feel a flood of maudlin sentiment for the man but he seems uneasy when I try to express my gratitude.

One of the problems about being poor is that I can’t afford to send my clothes to the ‘ Pressings ’ any more. And Mme D’Amico won’t allow washing in the flat. Dirty shirts mount up on the back of my single chair like so many soiled antimacassars. In a corner of the wardrobe I keep dirty socks and underpants. I occasionally spray the damp heap with my aerosol deodorant as if I were some fastidious pest controller. When all my shirts are dirty I evolve a complicated rota for wearing them. The idea is that I wear them each for one day, trying to allow a week between subsequent wears in the faint hope that the delay will somehow have rendered them cleaner. At least it will take longer for them to get really dirty. At the weekend I surreptitiously wash a pair of socks and underpants and sneak them and spread them on the pebbles where a watery February sun does a reasonable job of drying them out……….

I wake up to a tremulous knocking on my door. I feel dreadful. I squint at my watch. It’s seven o’clock. I can’t have been asleep for more than an hour.

‘Monsieur Edward? C’est moi, Madame D’Amico.’

I say come in, but no sound issues from my mouth. I cough and run my tongue over my teeth, swallowing energetically.

‘Entrez, Madame, ’ I whisper.

Mme D’Amico comes in. Her hair is pinned up carelessly and her old face is shiny with tears. She sits down on the bed and immediately begins to sob quietly, her thin shoulders shaking beneath her black cardigan.

‘Oh madame, ’ I say, alarmed. ‘What is it? ’ I find it distressing to see Mme D’Amico, normally so correct and so formal, displaying such unbashed human weakness. I am also – inappropriately – very aware of my nakedness beneath the sheets.

Gradually the story comes out. Apparently Monsieur D’Amico, sufferer from Parkinson’s disease, was having a final cigarette in his room in the sanatorium before the nurse came to put him to bed. He lit his cigarette and then tried to shake the match out. But his affliction instead made the match spin from his trembling fingers and fall down the side of the plastic armchair upon which he was sitting. The chair was blazing within second, Monsieur D’Amico pyjamas and dressing gown caught fire and although he managed to wriggle himself onto the floor his screams were not sufficiently loud to attract the attention of the nurses immediately. He was severely burned. The shock was too much for his frail body and he died in the early hours of the morning.

I try to arrange my sleepy unresponsive senses into some sort of order, try to summon the full extent of my French vocabulary.

Mme D’Amico looks at me pitifully. ‘ Oh Monsieur Edward, ’ she whimpers, her lips quivering.

‘ Madame, ’ I reply helplessly. ‘ C’est un vraie tragedie. ’ It seems grossly inept, under the circumstances, almost flippant, my thick early-morning tongue removing any vestige of sincerity from the words. But it seems to mean something to Mme D’Amico, who bows her head and starts to cry with light high-pitched sobs. I reach out an arm from beneath the sheets and gently pat her shoulder.

There, there, Madam, ’ I say ‘It will be all right.’

As I lean forward I notice that in her hands there is a crumpled letter. Peering closer I still can’t make out the name but I do see that the stamp is British. It is surely for me. The postal strike, I realize with a start, must now be over. Suddenly I know that I can stay. I think at once about Jackie and our bizarre and unsatisfactory evening. But I don’t really care any more. My spirits begin to stir and lift. I get a brief mental flash of Monsieur D’Amico in his blazing armchair and I hear the quiet sobs of his wife beside me. But it doesn’t really impede the revelation that slowly overtakes me. People, it seems, want to give me things – for some reason known only to them. No matter what I do or how I behave, unprompted and unsought the gifts come. And they will keep on coming. Naked photos, cold pizza, their girls, even their grief. I feel a growing confidence about my stay in Nice. It will be all right now, I feel sure. It will work out. I think about all the gifts that lie waiting for me. I think about the Swedish girls at the Centre. I think about spring and the days when the sun will be out…

The bed continues to shudder gently from Mme D’Amico’s sobbing. I smile benignly at her bowed head.

‘There, there, Madame, ’ I say again. ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. You will see. Everything will be fine, I promise you.’