Leonora by Elena Poniatowska Read Free Book Online

them around the corridor. At night, as they fall asleep, mother and daughter reprise their accounts of the day, and their vivid commentaries surpass the lived experience. To Maurie, all is transformed into a fiesta. How delightful it would be to always live like that! Despite the fact that to Leonora it is wholly incomprehensible that any woman would wish to be married to Harold Carrington, Maurie’s life had at least been made easy.
    â€˜Your father is a highly attractive man.’
    â€˜I hardly think so.’
    â€˜He’s a man of character.’
    â€˜That I’m well aware of it, as I suffer from it.’
    â€˜He is endowed with a superior intelligence.’
    â€˜In this respect I agree with you.’
    â€˜What we are we owe to your father.’
    â€˜I do not owe him a thing,’ Leonora replies with irritation.
    Ever since she left Ireland at the age of eighteen, Maurie Moorhead had lived life as a vertiginous round of entertainment. Games of croquet (ugh, how Leonora loathed them); hunting in red jackets on red horses with red foxhounds after a red fox; charity sales; bridge parties; massages booked with Madame Pomeroy at Piccadilly Circus; hair salons; beauty treatments; fittings for the latest garments at top couture houses: the fact that Maurie creates the latest fashion without ever being in fashion is just part of her charm. According to Leonora, their mother-and-daughter partnership unfailingly arrives either early or late to every occasion.
    â€˜The catwalks displaying the latest in French haute couture,’ says Maurie, ‘they are the starting point of fashion worldwide.’
    â€˜Just like at the horse races?’ asks Leonora, enchanted by the insane creativity of Schiaparelli in the Place Vendôme.
    â€˜Let’s go to Lanvin, we can call in at Poiret, even if we end up in Au Printemps.’
    Maurie is disappointed at being unable to find coffee-coloured satin knickers. She is also obsessed with procuring leather buttons for a tweed bag she has, and none of the ones she finds are quite to her taste.
    â€˜We might as well be in London,’ she tells Leonora, ‘and I could find the same ones in Regent Street and at half the price…’
    â€˜One doesn’t come to Paris to purchase buttons.’
    â€˜So what do we come here for?’
    â€˜To buy a Van Gogh.’
    Maurie selects a sailor’s cap which suits her very poorly. Leonora is amused to discover a nightclub on the Rue de Boissy d’Anglas called The Ox on the Roof and asks the maître d’ there – who looks like he could well be a member of the French Academy – where the place got its name. He replies: ‘In honour of Jean Cocteau, who comes here from time to time. I think tonight may in fact be his night.’
    Maurie flatly refuses to go to any cabaret until she has found her satin knickers.
    â€˜No – let’s instead go for tea at Rumpelmayer.’
    While Maurie takes her nap, Leonora goes to the Café de Flore without her purse. In France, it’s so easy to drink a glass – or two – and pay up an hour – or two – later. By then her mother will have woken up. She orders a cocoa.
    â€˜There is no cocoa,’ answers the waiter. ‘Café au lait, herb tea, black tea, hot chocolate, wine, beer if you will, but no cocoa.’
    â€˜ Thé, alors .’
    At the next table is a young man who won’t stop staring at her.
    â€˜I assume you are English, since you have ordered tea. I have been to London, and found the Thames very pretty. Then I stayed on in Southampton, which was very green.’
    â€˜Yes, I suppose it would be green. The green of Ireland is of a shade that makes it look as if there were a fire under the ground beneath it.’
    Thus an hour went by and the young man, Paul Aspel, requested that she join him for dinner, Leonora suddenly comes to her senses.
    â€˜I need to go and collect my