I'll Never Be Young Again by Daphne Du Maurie

Author:Daphne Du Maurie [Maurie, Daphne Du]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781844080694
Amazon: 1844080692
Publisher: Virago UK
Published: 1958-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

2

Seventy-five francs I spent on drink. At that time it did not seem to me that there was any point in saving money. I had left the Rue Vaugirard, of course. It was not humble enough for me now. I found an attic at the top of a gaunt bare-faced building in the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. There was a laundry beneath me, and a dirty épicerie where they put stale slabs of chocolate in the window, bottles of congealed sweets, and sticks of thin spaghetti. Flies used to fasten on to these, and drowse sleepily in the sun against the hot dusty pane.

My room was at the back of the building; it looked down upon a square court where all the dogs of the neighbourhood, poor, restless, flea-bitten mongrels, used to come regularly to make love. It was almost impossible to sleep, the heat was terrific, and no air seemed to find its way into the tiny room from the high window. I would wake up in the middle of the afternoon - I used to try to sleep during the day and spend the nights outside at a café - and there would float up to me from the court the boiled hot smell of dirty linen in soft soapy water; this was the work of the blanchisseuse, and the irritating scream of her voice ‘Marcelle! Marcelle!’ and then another smell of rubbish left in the corner of the yard, not cleared away, and used as a lavatory by people who did not mind, and the monotonous murmur of voices arguing in the room beneath me, a baby fretful and the smell of wet blankets and milk in a bottle, and then, sharp and sudden, the squeal of a bitch in pain, and a panting yelping dog, and somebody laughing, and somebody leaning out of his window with a fat belly and a white shirt, yawning horribly, and the rasping sound of a throaty, high-pitched gramophone playing the same tune over and over again.

And away down the boulevard the groan of a tram, the tinkle of its bell, and the heavy wheels of a cart lumbering over cobbled stones, the silly rise and fall of a taxi’s hooter, and again ‘Marcelle! Marcelle!’ screamed the blanchisseuse.

I could not sleep, so I lay on my back and read the torn page of an old newspaper printed on green paper. I read the account of an assault in a wood near Rennes, and a thief battering a woman’s head in Tours, and then the day’s racing at Maisons-Laffitte, a cycling course at St Denis, and so on to the advertisements of ‘masseuses’ at Montmartre, and pills for impuissance, and how to cure ‘l’action brève’ by a special treatment guaranteed ‘dans trois jours’.Then getting up from bed, not bothering to wash or to shave, and yawning a little, and lighting a cigarette, and so down the grimy flight of stairs to the dusty street, and crossing the boulevard, and walking about to stretch my legs, and then sitting down at a café and watching the people, and drinking too much.

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