‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Tadpole clamoured as soon as she clapped eyes on him, raising her arms aloft, desperate to be released from her high chair. Mr Frog stooped to plant a kiss on her forehead as he walked past, studiously avoiding my gaze.
‘Finis ton petit-déjeuner, ma puce,’ he said, gently brushing porridge from her top lip with the back of his forefinger.
‘So what is it today, remind me?’ I aimed for an even, neutral tone. It was a good job Mr Frog couldn’t see my face, because I looked like I’d been sucking lemons, not drinking milky coffee. But there was no need to conceal my bitterness: he’d already disappeared into the bedroom.
‘Une nouvelle présentation… the latest version of the storyboards… in London.’
There was a swoosh of legs sliding into trousers, a psshht of deodorant. ‘I don’t know at what time I’ll be back. The presentation is in the late afternoon, so I might be taking the last Eurostar.’ Mr Frog’s English was almost word perfect these days, give or take a few misplaced prepositions. Eight years of living with a petite anglaise and working with international clients had all but eliminated the blunders I’d found so endearing when we first met.
I choked back sullen words which rose up like bile in my throat. ‘Another late night?’ I wanted to say. ‘But we never see you!’ Most nights Mr Frog returned home hours after Tadpole’s bedtime; long after I had eaten, watched a film or retired to bed with my book. He would fix himself a sandwich and fall asleep alone on the sofa, bathed in the light cast by the flickering television. We’d lost count of the number of films he’d dozed through and, more often than not, I was called upon to fill in the blanks: an expert in the narration of closing scenes. In the mornings he either left before Tadpole awoke, or languished in the bath as he had today, struggling to gather the strength he needed to face the office while I scurried around getting myself and Tadpole ready.
On the worst days I would hear an ominous cough from behind the bathroom door, a telltale sound which meant that nerves had made his stomach heave.
Today I withheld my useless protests, too weary to pick another fight. Instead, I buttoned Tadpole’s dress with resentful fingers, then threw on my own clothes, grabbing whatever happened to be clean in my haste. Ready, by chance, at the same time, we squeezed into the rectangular lift, a modern afterthought the size of a photo-booth wedged in the centre of the carpeted stairwell. As it lurched towards the ground floor, I hoisted Tadpole up to mirror level so she could gaze at her reflection. In the unforgiving fluorescent light, a family portrait was captured fleetingly in the glass before us. Three pale faces, framed by blond hair; mine a thick, unkempt mane which I pulled back off my face for work in as sleek a ponytail as I could manage, Mr Frog and Tadpole’s sparse and downy. Three pairs of blue eyes: mine dark, distorted by the lenses in my glasses, father and daughter’s pale and flecked with grey. Tadpole fizzed with energy; Mr Frog and I looked brittle and exhausted, eclipsed by our daughter.
The lift doors folded back, concertina-like, and Mr Frog held Tadpole while I retrieved her pushchair from the store room with its floral wallpaper and lingering smell of damp – the gardienne’s quarters in days gone by. Planting a perfunctory kiss on his smooth-shaven cheek, I mumbled ‘bon courage’ and watched as he hurried off in the direction of his Vespa. The front door swung closed, and I remained in the quiet sanctuary of the hallway for a moment, fiddling with Tadpole’s straps and stowing my handbag under the pushchair. It was too early for the hairdresser to crank the jukebox into action, so all was quiet. The weekend’s dancing episode seemed like ancient history now, but conjuring it up for a moment, our peals of laughter echoed in my ears.
The morning walk through the Parc des Buttes Chaumont with Tadpole was the highlight of my day. We took the same route in reverse in the evenings, but by then I was invariably clammy and flustered from my brush with the rush-hour métro, and the return journey had the added disadvantage of being uphill. Bound for the childminder’s, however, the pushchair rolled gently down the sloping paths. My hands guided rather than pushed, and the lightest of nudges was required to spare us an impromptu shower from a water sprinkler, or steer us out of an oncoming jogger’s path. Lifting my head to inhale the scent of freshly cut grass, I tried to shrug off some of the resentment and worry that had descended over me like a dense fog that morning. Disillusionment with my daily routine tainted my view of Paris, if I let it. But I knew, deep down, that the city was not to blame: it was only guilty by association.
The Buttes Chaumont is my favourite park in Paris by far. Unlike the formal gardens of the Tuileries or the Jardins du Luxembourg, there are no manicured box hedges or signs beseeching visitors to refrain from walking on ‘forbidden’ patches of lawn; none of those sandy paths that I so detest which dust your shoes with a coating of white, floury powder.
Landscaped on the site of a disused quarry and rubbish dump, the sloping ground below our feet was a honeycomb, riddled with holes. A plaque in the nearby métro station cheerfully recalled an incident many decades ago when a mature tree had been swallowed whole by the park overnight, and I often wondered whether history wouldn’t repeat itself one day, the ground engulfing a uniformed park keeper before my very eyes.
Although it looks more natural than many of its rather sterile, over-groomed peers, everything about the Buttes Chaumont is artificial. The lake, the waterfall which feeds into it, the caves with their stalactites, all are manmade. Fences, which at first glance seem to be fashioned from knotty branches, are actually sculpted in trompe-l’œil concrete.
Sometimes I felt as though I were walking across a film set made to look like a park, although if that were the case, the costume designers would have a lot to answer for. The uniform of the average Buttes Chaumont jogger could be a truly disturbing thing to behold.
Aside from the distant drone of traffic and the chorus of early morning birdsong, the park was peaceful. Creatures of habit, we slipped into our morning ritual: Tadpole pointed, I described. A spider’s web glistened with morning dew on the wrought-iron park railings and, although its architect was nowhere to be seen, I launched into a current favourite, ‘Incy Wincy Spider’, while Tadpole mimed the actions with her fingers.
‘Incy Wincy spider climbing up the spout…’
I was distracted by the sight of a jogger in figure-hugging Lycra shorts, ‘spout’ clearly visible as he bobbed past, and my song died in my throat. Tadpole froze, fingers aloft, waiting for the signal to make the rain fall down. Stifling a snigger, I resumed my song and reprised it not once but three more times as we passed the meandering stream, the boarded-up tearooms and the suspension bridge leading to the rocky island in the middle of the lake. Given my daughter’s appetite for repetition, I didn’t need a vast repertoire of nursery rhymes.
Exiting by the main gate, we crossed the rue Manin in front of the mairie – where, in happier times, I’d dreamed Mr Frog and I would be married one day – and turned into the side street leading to the childminder’s flat.
In contrast to our own home, most of the assistantes maternelles I’d interviewed just after Tadpole was born lived in social housing, low-rent, state-owned apartments in tower blocks dating from the seventies which were often shabby but had the advantage of being spacious enough for several children to romp in. Our childminder was no exception and, as her children had now grown up and left home, she had two spare bedrooms in which her charges took their naps. To reach her building, I first had to circumnavigate the rubbish strewn across the driveway – a broken pushchair, the shell of a TV set – and there was a lingering odour of stale urine as we approached the entrance hall. The tenants might not show a great deal of respect for their environment, but they seemed to know one another well, and took the time to stop and chat. Everyone I came across greeted me with a polite ‘Bonjour Madame!’ and today two teenaged boys gallantly held the doors open to let us pass. In stark contrast, the apartment building Mr Frog and I called home had all the warmth of a mortuary. One old dear gene
rally spoke to me when our paths crossed but, as her memory was failing, we never got beyond her ‘Comme il est beau votre petit garçon’ and my defensive ‘Actually, she’s a girl.’
‘Tata’ was one of Tadpole’s first words although, at first, admittedly, the sound was almost indistinguishable from ‘Papa’. French childminders always seemed to go by this name, a childish rendition of ‘auntie’. Tata was a middle-aged Algerian lady with grey-brown curls falling to her shoulders, and her authoritative but caring demeanour had so impressed Mr Frog and me at our first meeting that we had quite literally begged her to work for us, Mr Frog conducting a gentle but persistent charm offensive by telephone until she caved in. Good childminders are a scarce commodity in Paris. They hold all the cards, hand-picking their charges.
A cloud of vegetable steam escaped into the hallway as Tata opened the front door, fogging my glasses and rendering me momentarily blind.
‘Bonjour! Comment va mon petit ange?’ she cooed, scooping a giggling Tadpole out of the pushchair for a hug, delighted, as always, to be reunited after a weekend apart.
‘Nous avons passé un très bon weekend,’ I replied, groaning inwardly as I noticed that in my haste I’d managed to dress Tadpole in non-matching socks, ‘Elle a été adorable. Et vous, vous allez bien?’ It was a loaded question, as ever. My greatest fear was always that Tata would get sick, and I’d have to use up all my holiday leave to care for Tadpole. Luckily, our childminder seemed to be invincible: so far she hadn’t missed a single day’s work.
‘Any luck with the apartment hunting?’ Tata enquired. Her greatest fear, now that she had grown so very attached to Tadpole, was that we would find a place to buy in a different neighbourhood and no longer require her services.
‘No, another visit, but no good. A shame, because it was just around the corner. Anyway, I’m running late, I suppose I’d best be off…’
As the lift doors slid closed, a tiny hand waved from the other side of the glass pane, causing my heart to somersault in my ribcage. The cabin, and my spirits, plummeted: my favourite part of the day was officially over. I looked at my watch. 8.43 a.m. If a train pulled into the station as I arrived, I might just make it to the office on time. By ‘on time’ I meant 9.05, my current personal best.
Arms weightless and oddly redundant without the pushchair, I hurried along avenue de Laumière, pausing to snatch a free magazine from the rack in front of the estate agent’s. Seeing there was no queue in the baker’s shop, I darted in to fetch a pain aux raisins. At this rate, the remaining kilos I still hadn’t quite managed to shift since Tadpole’s birth would never leave me, but it was Monday morning, and I was in need of a high-cholesterol morale boost.
My violet Navigo pass made its satisfying ‘drrriiinngg’ as I swept my handbag across the scanner inside Laumière station. ‘Je peux passer avec vous?’ muttered a man’s voice behind me and I recoiled as I felt a stranger pressing up against my rear – far too close for comfort – as I reluctantly allowed him to pass through the metal turnstile with me, without paying. Taking the stairs down to the platform two at a time, I prayed the first train wouldn’t be crammed full, imploring the god of the RATP to spare me delays on ligne 5. As luck would have it, a sparsely populated train pulled into the station right on cue and I dived in, making a beeline for a fold-down strapontin seat by the door. Holding my breakfast away from my work clothes – its twisted paper wrapping already translucent in places as butter bled through – I scrutinized the small ads. Any new two-bedroom flats on the market? Apparently not. Of the five or six properties listed, we had seen three, and rejected two others on the grounds that they were on the wrong side of the Canal de l’Ourcq, out of range of the park. My eyes drifted across the page to the longer list of one-bedroom apartments, and I made a rapid set of calculations to see what I might be able to afford, just supposing I were to buy something on my own.
‘If I’m going to live like a single mother, caring for our daughter and for this home on my own, even though I work too, then I might as well be a single mother,’ I’d barked at Mr Frog in a heated moment, the previous week. ‘At least that way I’d have one less person to take care of.’ We’d had one of those arguments which started with me rebuking him for not washing up – or something ridiculously trivial like that – but escalated into a rant about every single thing that was wrong with our lives, according to me. Mr Frog took my protests with a pinch of salt, as he always did, filing them under ‘hormones’ or ‘empty threats’ and withdrawing into himself, refusing to argue back. It was intended as an empty threat, of course; an unexpected, brutal bolt out of the blue, calculated to provoke a reaction. He and I both knew my bark was worse than my bite: however fed up I was, I couldn’t really imagine taking such a leap.
Whether Mr Frog took my outbursts seriously or not, my discontent was nonetheless very real. Just how and when had my life in Paris turned from wine to vinegar, I wondered, oblivious to the throng of poker-faced commuters hemming me in. I was supposed to be living my dream, wasn’t I? On the surface, all the ingredients for happiness were present: my Frenchman, our beautiful half-French daughter, our lovely home, our well-paid jobs. And yet I couldn’t help feeling deeply disappointed with our day-to-day reality. As the years had passed by we had melted into the background, Mr Frog and I, focusing first on our jobs, then on Tadpole; welcome distractions from the uncomfortable truth that our feelings for each other had dimmed. And as if this wasn’t enough, my dream Paris had also melted away, dissolving before my very eyes, replaced by a leaden routine of métro-Tata-work-Tata-sleep. Lately I’d become a bitter, resentful shadow of the breathless, enthusiastic petite anglaise I once was; a person I was far from sure I even liked.
At Gare du Nord, where commuters from the northern suburbs, fresh from the RER, elbowed their way inside, I released my folding seat with a reluctant clatter and pulled myself upright. Through the windowpane, opaque with grime, I gazed into dusky tunnels.
In my mind’s eye I could see myself running alongside the train. Out of breath, not quite as fast as I used to be, but there, all the same.
4. Online
The clocking-in machine read 09.06 as I swiped my plastic card, its loud beep sounding uncannily like a reprimand. I hurried along the grey-carpeted corridor, past the portrait of QE2 wearing her blue sash – the embodiment of the quintessential Englishness of the small accountancy firm where I’d worked for the past two years – and up the stairs to the fifth floor. Our office straddled two levels of an imposing building on avenue de l’Opéra, a chic address halfway between the old opera house and the Louvre.
The two floors couldn’t have been more different, mirroring the diametrically opposed styles of the managers who presided over them. My boss, whose fiefdom was on the upper floor, had opted for an open-plan layout, his own office separated from the shop floor by a glass pane. From my desk I often watched silent films play out inside, divining my boss’s mood from his gesticulations, the colour of his cheeks and the cowed posture of whoever had been summoned inside. A balding Englishman in his early forties, he was technically brilliant but also incredibly demanding. The fact that only a window separated us left me feeling exposed: if he raised his head, my monitor was clearly visible from his desk.
The lower floor, in contrast, was divided into a series of smaller offices. George, the firm’s other Paris partner, held court in the grandest of these, sitting behind an immense varnished desk that would have done a cabinet minister proud.
My first stop, once I reached the top of the stairs, was the communal kitchen. I wasn’t much use to anyone without my second or third fix of caffeine so, as there was no sign of my boss yet, I planned to fetch a double espresso and enjoy a leisurely breakfast at my desk with an online newspaper open on my screen. I flicked on the photocopier as I passed, then the lights, which stuttered as they warmed up, as reluctant to be spurred into action as I was. Hanging my coat in the cupboard, I slipped into the kitchen and set my mug under the coffee machine, w
hich whirred loudly, setting my teeth on edge, as it began to grind espresso beans. Monday morning tended to be a slow starter. The majority of the professional staff, who worked flexi-time, were unlikely to surface much before ten.
The metallic in-tray suspended above my desk was reassuringly empty, so once I’d skimmed through the contents of my boss’s inbox I was free to browse the day’s headlines with a clear conscience. My hand remained immobile on the mouse for a moment as I felt the familiar vibrations of the métro passing, making the foundations of the building shudder. Then, as I scrolled down the screen, an article about an internet diarist with a French pseudonym caught my attention.
Belle de Jour, I read, was a high-class call girl who had won awards for her writing. Some people believed she really was who she claimed to be, citing her insider knowledge of the oldest profession, but sceptics were convinced she was an aspiring author using salacious subject matter to snag a lucrative publishing deal. The very existence of ‘blogs’ – as these diaries were apparently called – had escaped me until that day, even though I considered myself internet-savvy. I was fascinated – both by Belle and by the blogging phenomenon. That day, whenever my boss strayed a safe distance from his desk and there were no dictations to type or phone calls to answer, I surreptitiously hopped from blog to blog. Call Centre Confidential reminded me of an episode of The Office – a different register from Belle, but so dry and witty that some of the entries had me snorting coffee down my nose. Little Red Boat was whimsical, meandering and utterly hilarious and, after reading a handful of posts, along with the funny comments left by readers, I was hooked.
Anyone could create their own little outpost on the internet in a matter of clicks, according to the ‘how to’ articles I found. Maybe I could start a blog, I thought to myself. I’m often trapped in front of a computer screen with nothing much else to do. It might be fun. Why ever not?
Petite Anglaise Page 4