A Stranger in Paris

by Karen Webb

  ‘On this actual boat? So, you’ve been here years then?’

  ‘Yes, with my mother, father and sister. But when my mother died the boat was auctioned off. I wanted a barge to remember her by and started to look for one of my own. One day there was this ad in the paper. I called up and came out here to see her. Of all the boats in the world, she had to sail back into my life. A bit worse for wear, but still Le Rival. Even found some of my graffiti on the bunk beds downstairs.’

  I was intrigued by the fact that Jay had lived in France for so long. It explained why his French was flawless.

  ‘You went to school here?’

  ‘I didn’t go to school after we came to France. Not from the age of about twelve.’

  He took some time to tell me the story, but as night drew in, we moved closer together like moths around the storm lamp, as he told me that his father had been a criminal, on the run from the police in the United Kingdom.

  ‘We fled to France and lived in hiding for years. We never dared ask how or where the money came from, but Dad would disappear and come back with it, in dribs and drabs. Then Mum got sick. She kept it quiet for a long time, knowing that she couldn’t go to the doctors, or give her real name. She never got any treatment thanks to that bastard and then she died.’

  ‘What? Here?’

  ‘Yes. Here.’

  We went below deck and I looked at the narrow galley kitchen and the living room with the wooden bench which ran around three sides of a small table and imagined what it must have been like cooped up in these few square feet with a man on the run and a mother who was suffering, but too scared to seek help.

  ‘He must have done something pretty bad, then?’

  Jay didn’t answer.

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’

  He snorted. ‘Yes, quite recently in fact! I decided to let bygones be bygones. He tracked me down and came to stay in my flat. Gave a sob story about how sorry he was. We had a meal, drank a lot of wine. He went to bed, and when I woke up in the morning he’d gone and taken all my bank cards with him. Cleaned me out.’

  Several hours later, up on deck, we kissed. It felt strange to kiss an English man. All the men to occupy my thoughts in the past year had been French. It felt comfortable, like eating mash with warm butter and HP sauce: home-grown; familiar. It was more romantic than with Steve, but a lot of that was to do with the boat creaking beneath the bows of an old oak, and the stories Jay had told. We drove back to Paris and Jay dropped me off.

  ‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ he said as I opened the car door. ‘She’s German. We’ve been together for ten years, but we don’t make love anymore.’

  I knew already that this was not meant to be.

  Jay and I met several times after work. Our relationship had shifted foot and become more of a friendship, mutual loneliness bringing us together. We clung onto a loose attraction, knowing that neither was right for the other: two foreigners lost in a city where, to the other, each felt like home. We caught the metro into Paris and bought a beer in Chatelet les Halles. Jay let me into a secret. He came home this way to visit the sex shops, not to sleep with women, but to pleasure himself before he went back for the night. It wasn’t the kind of secret I thought he would tell me if he intended me to fall in love.

  Sickened but somehow curious, I followed him into a shop which sold the usual gimmicks, and where I witnessed the extent of his sadness: the plastic penises, the dressing-up gear, the rows of pornographic videos which, despite their French titles, reminded me of some of the films the rugby set would watch in the TV room back in Ifor Evans Hall of Residence. I remembered how the men used to cram in, and switch the lights off, calling obscenities at the screen. I’d tiptoed in once and pretended not to watch, marvelling at the mechanics of a process of which, at the time, I’d had no experience.

  Jay’s lonely visits here were bleak and heart-breaking. I asked him how often he visited, and he said perhaps two or three times a week, before going home and lying in bed next to a woman who had no desire to be touched by him. Her name was Kristine. He showed me a photo. She was a stunning blonde peering majestically over a glass of champagne.

  The sex shops of Chatelet les Halles were infertile places for love to grow. It was a plastic and clinical world of handcuffs and blow-up plastic dolls with garish faces, but Jay wanted to share his after-work haunt. Perhaps he hoped that I’d shock him out of his own sad routine. He had fallen into a world stripped of emotion and couldn’t find his way back. His face was white and strained. He’d been more at peace painting the barge as it swayed beneath the willows that moonlit night. I thought of the boy who had taught himself Maths and English, who read books in his bunk bed to educate himself, before finally paying his own way through French business school. He’d done all that, yet he hadn’t found love.

  At the back of the shop there were three cubicles with black curtains like the changing rooms in Next. We went into one and he sat on the stool. I sat on his knee. This could have been a photo booth and the two of us perched there for a romantic photo. There was a screen in front of us and a slot for coins.

  ‘This is where I watch stuff,’ he said.

  He didn’t feed in the coins. That was a step too far. Beside us, in the armrest, there was an ashtray stuffed to the brim with used tissues. I knew there must be love out there somewhere. We were orphans united in our loneliness, not lovers. There must be more to love in Paris than this.

  Chapter 21

  Shortly after Jessica’s return to England, she mailed me a letter, addressing me as ‘Pig,’ her special name for me that harkened back to an old English class when we had decided to incorporate the word pig into every Shakespearian text – Othello thus becoming Pigello, Hamlet becoming Piglet, and so on.

  Dearest Pig,

  I am home where I belong. Back in Blighty. I realise now that there is beauty here in the Cheshire countryside, with its gentle rolling hills, that cannot be matched anywhere else in the world. You can keep your Pyrenees, you can keep Paris. It is not for me. I realise that what I want most of all is what I had all along – England. I want to find my little cottage here. Yes, I’ll even grow pink roses around the door and think of you. I realise that everything I want is everything I thought I despised. I don’t want to struggle in a foreign language.

  Today I drove out with Mum up into the hills and we had scones in a tearoom and looked at antiques in bow-windowed shops. I thought how staggeringly beautiful our own countryside is. I could stay here and discover something new every day of my life. Why do I need to ever leave again?

  Come home, piglet. Blighty always welcomes back its own.

  Love or what you will,

  Jessica x.

  Besides the letter, Jessica left me one last parting gift: a blind date. She’d been threatening it for weeks, and now that she had finally departed, it was about to happen. It was one of her colleagues from the law firm on the Place Vendome, and although he was French, his name was William – not Guillaume. Despite Jessica’s promises that as soon as we set eyes on each other we would hit it off, I was sceptical. Jessica had such strange taste in men that I could not imagine finding anyone she approved of attractive. Later, William told me the same thing.

  ‘Jessica was such a strange girl,’ he said. ‘I imagined that you would be one of her weird friends. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. Tu étais si belle.’

  We were both pleasantly surprised. William was a tall, blond man, handsome to say the least. He had a toned body with floppy boyish hair like Antony Andrews in that infamous BBC production of Brideshead. He had a French accent with an American twang, having spent two years working in New York and Philadelphia. More recently he’d been temping at the law firm where Jessica worked on the Place Vendome, and was about to start a new permanent job as a trader.

  Our first date was at a Chinese restaurant in Paris. I had grown edgy around Chinese food but didn’t like to make a fuss. Conversation was facile and flowed all night. Afterw
ards, William drove me home and we kissed in the car outside the house. A woman sang on the radio: ‘Come closer, do you want to know a secret, I’m in love with you,’ and for the first time since David, my heart felt light and gay. William didn’t have a German girlfriend and hadn’t suggested we swing by the Chatelet sex clubs on our way home. Things were on the up! We started to date and I was hopeful.

  I took William home and introduced him to Lisbeth and Charles-Henri. We met on Friday evenings and spent the weekends together. William had temporarily moved back into his parent’s home and I soon learnt that his father, who was a small man like Napoleon, expected to be obeyed in pretty much the same fashion as the military general himself. He would not hear of William using the family home as a hotel, and forbade his only son to use his childhood bedroom without sharing the family meals and eating home each night. This was annoying and frustrating and the only reason we ever argued. William was twenty-six and a full five years older than me. I couldn’t imagine living at home and still being told what to do by my parents. William dressed neatly, his shirts carefully ironed by his mum, and radiated the kind of good health which came from three regular meals a day. I was torn between annoyance at the security which cosseted him and a desire to slip into his warm and safe cocoon far from the dangers of the world and to run myself a nice warm bubble-bath back at his place in the suburbs. We’d been to William’s family home a few times already, usually when his parents were away, creeping around like intruders in a museum after closing hours.

  One Saturday evening around Christmas, William took me into Paris. Despite the cold I was wearing a silky dress which clung to my body and highlighted the outline of my knickers. William had borrowed his father’s glistening Peugeot 605 for the occasion and told me that my outfit would look better without the harsh knicker line. I slipped the offending undergarment off and pushed it under the seat, my head on William’s shoulder as he drove down the rue de Rivoli to the Place de La Concorde.

  It was nice to see Paris above ground for once. With the loan of William’s father’s car at the weekend, I had no need for my carte orange train pass and had exchanged my daily rodent-style trek through the long interconnecting tunnels of the metro and the RER for the lights of Paris as we zoomed up the Champs Elysées. Paris truly was magical, and much deserving of its sobriquet the ‘city of lights’. I hadn’t much experience of it yet having spent too much time ironing in submarines, trekking to work through tunnels, or on the run.

  Surprisingly, although his parents were in residence, William invited me to sleep at the house, so that he could return the car in time for Sunday morning, and we could have lunch with his parents. I was apprehensive, but we arrived home in the early hours of the morning, both tipsy. The Launay family lived in a suburb to the south of Paris in a modern house built in the early 1980s to their design. The address in rue de Nord was as frosty as its name. It was decorated monastically with zero clutter: no books, or ornaments visible. The living room housed a cold leather Chesterfield sofa, a heavy oak dresser polished within an inch of its life and a finger-print free glass coffee table. The walls were adorned with the kind of pictures found in hotels or impersonal office spaces. The floor tiles gleamed brightly enough to show my drunken reflection.

  It was the kind of house certain to show up the slightest smudge; the sort of place where it is easy to put things in the wrong place, to knock over objects from fear, or sully work surfaces; an environment which made me feel as awkward as a giant, life-sized stain myself. Shoes were left in a hallway cupboard along with their coats and jackets. There was a ritual shedding at the entrance hall. I was offered a pair of tartan slippers. My naturally phobic side shied away from wearing other people’s slippers – slippers smelt of their owners’ feet – but it was this or freeze to death. I chose to freeze. Jessica would have happily donned anyone’s cast-off underwear or shoes. Not me.

  We crept to the bedroom where I discovered to my amusement that William slept in a polished sleigh bed. I expected Rudolph and his other pals to pull him up through the night sky. The bed smelt of beeswax and the sheets were of the starched and matching variety. There was a dressing-table to one side and a sliding cupboard in which his neatly ironed clothes hung. The family bathroom gleamed with a raised bathtub and symmetrically hung towels. I quivered in excitement at the idea of a bath. I’d only had showers since leaving the Blanchard household. The Launay house was as impersonal as a hotel, yet unfortunately we were not alone and could not ring for room service or ask for breakfast in bed. This was not a house where crumbs in beds were authorised.

  The only element of fantasy in the whole house was a fox terrier called Rush. His tightly knitted curls clung to his aged head and he skidded to greet me. I was surprised that the family didn’t keep this bundle of joy outside. Time and again I learnt that the French did not have the same sentimental attitude to animals. Dogs were often left tied up outside or in a sad garden kennel. Happily for Rush he was allowed inside with the other members of the family, though I was surprised to see that he wasn’t wearing slippers. I suspected his paws were wiped down before he was allowed onto the clean floor tiles.

  William and I fell into bed and make muted love. The general sparseness of the house encouraged sounds to reverberate (Monsieur Launay père snored and snorted so loudly I wondered if he might be under the sleigh bed). Being with William felt far more natural than my kiss with Jay and I was beginning to wonder if, physically at least, I would ever feel at ease with an English boyfriend again. Not that I’d ever made love with an Englishman, since Steve was Welsh.

  Next morning, we woke late. There was some confusion as to how quickly we could shovel breakfast in before it was time for lunch. French meals are served on time with military precision, and William’s mum had been clattering pans around in the kitchen for several hours, the parents having dutifully respected the breakfasting hour and had their coffee and croissants four hours earlier, having showered and dressed at the crack of dawn and shot to the bakers for bread before ten.

  A meaty smell wafted down the gleaming hallway and crept beneath the bedroom door. Not for the first time in my life I marvelled at the superhuman effort it took to be a traditional French wife. Not only did Madame Launay run her home to five-star standards of cleanliness, she held down a serious job as an accountant and provided regular home-made meals. She made jam with plums and apricots sent down from the family farm in Normandy for breakfast and laid fine slithers of apple on home-rolled pastry for dessert. Like most French husbands, Monsieur Launay had never touched an iron or an oven in his life, and yet was quite happy to complain if his food was not on the table in time or prepared to his liking. (‘This broccoli is too cooked. The cauliflower is underdone. The meat appears a little dry?’) If I had to be re-incarnated as a man, I’d choose to be French every time.

  William was tense and anxious that we were out of synch with the family routine, his parent’s displeasure tangible at fifty paces.

  ‘We have to get up. My dad doesn’t like late risers.’

  I sneaked into the bathroom, determined to make use of the pile of fluffy towels and have a good soak. There was a jar of bath salts on the side and I helped myself liberally. The last few lean months had taught me to make the most of what was available. There was something about knowing that this grumpy French father was waiting that made me want to take my time. Being a Gemini, I sensed that recalcitrant, devilish twin on my shoulder, whispering to its angelic partner: ‘Go on, take your time. You work so hard all week. You deserve a little “me time.”’

  After half an hour of soaking William knocked on the bathroom door to tell me that lunch was ready. I quickly tried to put some order back into the bathroom. It is a truth universally acknowledged that in a tidy house you always make more mess than if you’d tried to wreak havoc. There were puddles on the floor where I’d forgotten to place the bathmat, my crumbling blusher had made a powdery mess on the side, and as I tried to guess which toothbrush might b
e William’s so I could clean my teeth, I knocked over a jar of cotton-wool buds. The air was as steamy as a Turkish bathhouse. I pulled on my crumpled dress, but I couldn’t find my knickers. Never mind. No-one would know.

  William’s parents, whose names were Claudine and Jacques, a confusing element since I had abbreviated these names to Claude and Jack in my head and could no longer remember who was who. My first impression on arriving in the dining room, was that the parents had been waiting a long time. They were seated bolt upright on uncomfortable looking chairs with backs as straight as rulers. No-one spoke. Jacques looked at his watch and muttered something under his breath. There was an awkward silence. I couldn’t imagine sitting so formally à table with my own parents. In the middle of the table there was a collection of glasses and I was offered a choice of sherry, port, or some sickly-looking mixture that smelt of oranges. I had managed to miss breakfast and didn’t feel like a morning tipple (although by now it was close to one o’clock in the afternoon). I plumped for the port, smiled and held out my glass, fighting back a rising sense of nausea.

  Jacques filled my glass, wiping a stray drip carefully with his paper napkin. There was a small bowl of peanuts in the middle of the table, and a second bowl of Pringles which lay together neatly as if each had been dusted and then replaced symmetrically. Claudine passed round the bowl of Pringles and we crunched silently. Mine crumbled into smithereens between nervous fingers, and I tried to push the pieces under my plate.

  As if remembering something, Jacques jumped to his feet, saying something I didn’t understand. Neither of William’s parents could speak English, which made the choice of their son’s christian name bizarre when ‘Guillaume’ would have been a more obvious choice. William turned to me looking puzzled. ‘He says he has found something of yours in the car.’ I couldn’t think what I might have left in the neatly hoovered car. My carte orange perhaps?