Free Liberty Silk by Kate Beaufoy

knew she’d been rumbled. ‘Well, that’s good to hear,’ said her new friend, with a small smile of collusion. ‘But any time you’re strapped, give me a shout. There are ways and means in this town, kid. Ways and means. And I don’t mean rag-picking.’
    Adèle had been right to be sceptical about Jessie’s claim that she was flush. Money was scarce, and it was getting scarcer. Jessie had taken to frequenting the pawnbroker’s near the Gare Montparnasse so often that she felt like spitting at the motto carved into the stone above the entrance.
Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité
. What a joke!
    Her watch had gone, and her Venetian glass beads, and her cashmere coat and – finally – her wedding ring. It had fetched fifty francs, which barely covered the rent on her room for a week. It had been a mistake, she realized now, to have pawned her coat. It had been a benign autumn so far, but winter was just around the corner. How would she manage without an overcoat?
    Every week she pawned another item, and every week her self-esteem sank lower as she handed her pledge to the clerk and took a place on one of the long benches alongside the dozens of other desperate-eyed souls who sat just as she did, watching their hands twist in their laps as they waited for the announcement that would determine how well they’d eat that evening. ‘
Numéro
32. Will you take forty francs for this?’ ‘
Numéro
33. Ten francs?’ ‘
Numéro
34. One hundred francs.’ One hundred! The eyes of the hapless cases would follow the lucky dog as he scuttled out, carefully stowing the wad of notes where no slippery-fingers could get at it. Jessie had long since taken the precaution of sewing her money into her suspender belt when she got back to her room.
    Her room was worse – far worse – than the lowest of the low-down places she’d stayed in with Scotch. She had tried hard to make it as homely as she could, but it was disheartening to see how depleted her possessions were. When she’d first moved in she had arranged her books and knick-knacks on the shelf above her bed: the pretty china flasks they’d bought in Certosa, and the silver Apostle spoons Scotch had haggled over in Siena – she’d even festooned the shelf with the handmade lace she’d collected on their travels. But everything was gone now.
    Most evenings she’d haul the washstand across the floorboards of the room to barricade the door for the night, before sitting cross-legged on the thin, lumpy mattress and devising works of fiction to send home to her parents. The bed, along with a washstand (for which basic bathing facility she paid the
patronne
extra), a small chest of drawers and a rickety bentwood chair, comprised the sole furnishings of this so-called
chambre meublée
. She’d discovered that the seat of the chair was easy to prise out, and when propped on her knees it doubled nicely as a writing desk.
    Her letters home were full of lies about how well she and Scotch were set up – although she always added: ‘
send letters still to Thos. Cook’s in case we should change our address
’. She was teaching herself to cook, she told her mother, and getting better at it all the time.
    Fantasizing about food was one of Jessie’s favourite ways of passing the time these evenings. She concocted lavish imaginary dinners: soups of carrots and potatoes and leeks enriched with butter and cream, followed by roast chicken or an escalope of veal with
pommes rissolées
and
petits pois
. Or perhaps a
cassoulet
– garlicky pork sausage layered with smoked bacon under creamy, golden-crusted haricot beans and fragrant herbs, served with red wine and a green salad, with cheese or fruit to finish, or perhaps a lemon soufflé. A lemon soufflé! The mere idea of it made her mouth water.
    It was ironic to think that just months ago she’d received letters from friends in England concerned about whether she was finding the living too hard on the Continent in the aftermath of the