‘Bien, merci.’ Maryline stepped inside, towering over me in her heels, her face powdered and painted with far more skill than my own.
‘Merci d’être venue, en tout cas…’ My taxi would be clocking up extra euros in waiting time downstairs, but it would be indecent just to hand over Tadpole and run. A couple of minutes of insincere small talk were de rigueur first. But pyjama-clad Tadpole was so excited to see ‘Ma-Leen’ that she took her by the hand and began clamouring for a bedtime story before the poor girl even had a chance to take off her jacket. Seizing my opportunity to make a quick getaway, I hugged Tadpole, brushed my lips across her damp, shampoo-scented hair and slid my feet into my shoes. Secretly, I hoped my daughter wouldn’t give Maryline too easy a time of it. Let the designer babysitter earn her handbag money, for once.
‘Her daddy will be home before me,’ I called over my shoulder, as I snatched my mac from its hook and slid my arms into the sleeves. ‘Mobile numbers are on the notepad by the phone, as usual, and you can help yourself to drinks and biscuits… Faites comme chez vous.’
Employing Maryline took me back to my own babysitting days as a teenager in the Yorkshire village where I did most of my growing up. The internet was an unknown quantity then, but I surfed the bookshelf instead, foraging for forbidden titles. A well-thumbed paperback by Dr Alex Comfort here, some D. H. Lawrence there: most of my sex education probably came from other people’s bookshelves. Given my own track record, I’d rather not imagine what Maryline got up to when I wasn’t home. The computer was switched on, and I doubted she really was using it to do her homework. I suppose it wasn’t inconceivable that she might have a blog of her own…
My Taxi Bleu was parked across the corner of rue Pradier and had clocked up ten euros on the meter before I’d even given my name and slipped inside. The driver, who smelled strongly of perspiration and cigarettes, wasn’t chatty, which suited me fine. One of those interchangeable French women who sing Céline Dion-style ballads was warbling on the stereo and, fastening my seatbelt, I let the music wash over me, the knots in my stomach unravelling a little.
I wanted to savour the delicious taste of freedom, as unfamiliar as the lip gloss on my mouth, but the fact remained that, with the exception of Elisabeth/Coquette, the taxi was speeding towards a roomful of strangers. A hundred or more people had signed up for the event, and the idea of battling through the crowds to find my friend was intimidating, to say the least.
What would the evening hold in store, I wondered, fiddling nervously with the ring on the middle finger of my left hand. Given my readership was mostly made up of Brits and Americans, would anyone present at this very French gathering have a clue who petite anglaise was? Maybe not, in which case I wouldn’t have to worry about fulfilling any preconceived notions people might have of how I should look or behave. But if they did, what then? Should I be myself, or try to be more like petite? I suspected I’d need a stiff drink – or two – on arrival to give me the confidence and poise which my alter ego seemed to have in spadefuls.
Our Paris by Night tour was scenic: the taxi plunged into an underground road tunnel north of Les Halles, one of those twisting, turning, high-speed shortcuts which always remind me of Diana and Dodi, then surfaced, suddenly, by the Samaritaine department store, pausing at the traffic lights, the Pont Neuf and its kissing alcoves stretching across the river ahead of us.
My eyes drank in the view: the series of floodlit bridges visible in both directions, the spires of Notre Dame to my left, the riverbanks lined with majestic buildings as far as the eye could see. The necklace of lights which illuminated them was duplicated; reflected in the murky darkness of the river. A bateau-mouche passed under the bridge below us, unseen, its presence betrayed by the whooping of teenaged tourists, delighting in the sound of their own echoes.
I’ve always found Paris to be at her most beguiling at dusk, her imperfections masked by shadows, her ageing beauty shown to its best advantage in the soft halo of flatteringly placed lights. My pulse quickening, I felt a sudden surge of affection for my home, this city I rarely had the leisure to appreciate.
When had I last crossed the river to the Left Bank, I wondered? A year ago? Two? Could it be that I hadn’t crossed the Seine since Tadpole was born? Where once I’d seen Paris through a wide-angle lens, delighting in every detail, boasting that I had covered almost every street on foot, my City of Light was now reduced to a series of stock Polaroids: office, apartment, park, métro. Anything beyond a pushchair radius of my home, or a lunch-time dash of my office, was basically off limits, no longer existing in my everyday, circumscribed world. Paris had shrunk to fit my new lifestyle: it was possible to live here, and yet, at the same time, to miss her terribly.
My destination was almost as far from where I lived as it is possible to be in Paris without leaving the city limits, and the journey took twenty minutes or more. Following the rue de Rennes as far as the Montparnasse tower, the taxi left the main thoroughfare and tore through a network of smaller streets, deep into the fourteenth arrondissement, before pulling up, finally, in front of l’Entrepôt, near Pernety. The venue looked as though it must have once been a warehouse, as the name suggested and, according to the vertical red banners which hung above the entrance, it was now home to a cinema and a restaurant as well as a bar. I paid my taxi fare, slamming the car door closed more violently than I’d intended in my nervousness, and hesitated for a moment on the pavement outside, peering through the glass doors to the dimly lit, smoky main room inside. It was crowded – I was late, after all – but at first glance it was impossible to see whether Elisabeth was already there. I would have called, if it wasn’t for the fact I’d read on her blog the previous day that she’d lost her phone. As it was, there was nothing for it but to steel myself and plunge inside.
Standing by the entrance, allowing my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the semi-darkness, I scanned the room, in vain. The space was vast, but there were few tables, so most of the people assembled – and there were at least a hundred, maybe more – were standing between me and the bar. Some were in tightly knit groups, and clearly knew one another; others stood alone, or in pairs, looking shy. Most seemed to be French, and the overwhelming majority were male. Jeans and black T-shirts seemed to be their unofficial uniform.
I was about to head for the bar when I spied a table which had been set up to the left of the entrance. A couple of guys – the organizers at a guess – were consulting some sort of list and passing out name stickers. I sidled over and mumbled an almost inaudible ‘bonsoir’ to the most approachable-looking of the two, who was tall, with curly black hair and dark-framed glasses not unlike my own.
‘Bonsoir. C’est quoi le nom de ton blog?’
‘Petite anglaise,’ I said hesitantly. ‘You probably don’t know it, it’s in English…’
‘Ah, c’est toi la petite anglaise?’ he exclaimed, apparently very pleased to make my acquaintance. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, tongue-tied. ‘Guys,’ he said, beckoning to a couple of friends hovering nearby with beer glasses in their hands, ‘meet petite anglaise!’ My surprised hand was shaken with energetic enthusiasm. ‘My name’s Nathan,’ he added, ‘and of course I know about your blog. When you mentioned this meet-up the other day, hundreds of people followed your link to our website to check it out. Your audience figures are staggering!’ Nathan was grateful; but there was more to it than that. With a sudden rush of pride, I saw that he seemed to regard me as some sort of minor celebrity.
‘Oh, um, thank you.’ I blushed, uncomfortable under the gaze of several pairs of eyes, yet to master the art of accepting a compliment gracefully. ‘I don’t suppose you can tell from that list whether Coquette has arrived yet?’ I stuck the proffered name sticker on to my T-shirt. There would be no hiding from my alter ego now. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting her. She’s the only person I actually know…’
‘Oh yes, she’s definitely here too. It’s difficult to miss the girls tonight, they seem to be i
n the minority,’ Nathan joked. ‘Last time I saw her, she was at the bar.’ That didn’t narrow things down much, I thought to myself wryly, given that the bar was at least ten metres long. Promising to return for a chat later in the evening, I made my way laboriously through the crowds. Elisabeth, when I spied her at last, was deep in conversation with a tall, bearded guy at the far end. She had her back to me, and he saw me approaching before she did.
‘So who’s looking after Tadpole this evening?’ he enquired, as though we’d known each other for years. I looked at him blankly for a moment, until he gestured at my name badge by way of explanation. At the mention of Tadpole, Elisabeth had spun round. ‘Ah, there you are!’ she said, relief clearly etched on her face. ‘Am I glad to see you! Now, this is Mathieu,’ she added, once she’d recovered her manners. ‘He reads us both, leaves comments from time to time.’
‘Okaay…’ I said, recovering from my initial shock, and tendering my cheeks for the obligatory bises. ‘Hi Mathieu. Pleased to meet you… I have a babysitter tonight. Mr Frog, er, my partner, you know, well, he’s working late tonight.’ Saying the words ‘Mr Frog’ out loud felt very odd indeed, but it didn’t seem fair to reveal his real name to complete strangers either. Especially not strangers who didn’t even know my name. But Mathieu didn’t press for any more information, and I began to relax, accepting his offer of a drink. He was with a friend, Stephan, who lost no time in telling me that he didn’t read my blog on principle because it had a pink background.
‘It’s not pink!’ I said sharply. ‘Not Barbie-doll pink, anyway. It’s dirty pink with shades of cappuccino and whipped cream. I picked those colours to set off the sunset image across the top…’
‘I was only joking,’ said Stephan with a smile, ‘no need to get all defensive. I can see you feel quite strongly about this blog of yours.’
‘I suppose I must,’ I said slowly, realizing as I spoke how deeply I did care. ‘It sounds silly, but it felt a bit like you just insulted what I was wearing or something.’
By the end of the night I was swaying cheerfully and talking to anyone who would listen. I’d lost count of the number of drinks I’d put away, and also of the number of strangers I’d spoken to who already knew many obscure details of my life.
Once I’d shrugged off the eerie sensation that people knew me, or petite – or at least thought they did – it was exhilarating to find myself in such diverse company. When I saw work friends, we tended to discuss the office; when I went for dinner with fellow mothers, we talked about children, or stretch marks, or moaned about how our partners didn’t pull their weight. All I had in common with the people assembled tonight was some form of internet presence. For once, I wasn’t playing the role of secretary, mother or girlfriend. Normal rules had been suspended for the evening, and I felt reborn, reinvented. With a few drinks inside me, I did feel confident, witty, elegant. Tonight I really felt as though I were petite anglaise. Assuming her identity had been a lot easier than I’d thought.
‘Maryline, mais tu es toujours là?’ I exclaimed, looking from my watch to her face, and back to my watch again. It was 3 a.m. when the taxi finally deposited me back home, my head spinning from an ill-advised mixture of beer and wine, and I had fully expected to find Mr Frog gently snoring and Maryline long gone, save the lingering scent of her perfume. Trying to rearrange my features into some semblance of sobriety, I apologized, far too profusely, and realized, mid-apology, that I’d slipped from ‘vous’ into an overfamiliar ‘tu’. I didn’t even have enough cash on me to pay her; I’d given every last euro in my possession to the taxi driver. Mr Frog was supposed to be taking care of that, and it hadn’t occurred to me that he would work this late. ‘Would you mind taking a cheque, just this once,’ I said anxiously, ‘or shall I pop down to the cashpoint while you wait here for five more minutes?’
‘Ça ne m’arrange pas vraiment, mais bon, juste pour cette fois,’ Maryline said grudgingly. I scrabbled in my bag for my chequebook and wrote with exaggerated care, rounding up the figure to compensate her for the ‘inconvenience’. Without so much as a nod of thanks, Maryline gathered up her handbag and coat and turned on her heel. Once the door had closed behind her, I kicked off my shoes and inched Tadpole’s bedroom door open. Praying the hinges wouldn’t whine, I stole inside to spy on my daughter in her sleep. A favourite rag doll nestled in the crook of her elbow, and she lay on her tummy, one leg cocked, the other straight, mimicking my own favourite sleeping position. Her nose was congested, and she made a snuffling sound as she breathed deeply. Bending closer, I discerned movement behind her eyelids and I wondered whether she was dreaming about her day, hoping she wasn’t remembering the moments when I’d lashed out with impatient, angry words.
I padded through to my own bedroom, discarding my clothes in an untidy pile on the floor, and snapped the bedside light off. The room rolled and tilted as though it were at sea, which did not bode well for the morning, and my hair smelled like it had passively smoked its way through an entire packet of cigarettes. I hadn’t seen the answering machine flashing, and wouldn’t hear Mr Frog’s tired excuses until the next morning. But as I slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep, a contented smile on my face, it didn’t even occur to me to feel angry.
7. Half-life
‘OK, petite, I know you didn’t ask for this,’ the email began, ‘but where would you go with the following? Happily married for eleven years (at least I thought so – never take anything for granted). Two delightful daughters, dream farmhouse in Breton countryside. Wife announces she’s leaving you. So far so normal, if a bombshell. Wife announces she and your best friend are together. Nothing “Our Tune” didn’t cover. Accidentally find solace with distraught wife of (now ex-) best friend. Develop intense relationship. Spend three years of wildly contrasting highs and lows, before finally splitting up. Remain great friends as she goes back to boyfriend from before her marriage; present (along with baby’s father) at birth of ex-girlfriend’s daughter. Firm friends with both her and boyfriend. Take stock of what the hell happened!’
It wasn’t unusual for me to strike up a correspondence with someone who left comments for petite anglaise. Sometimes I instigated contact when I felt like responding privately to a commenter, but more often than not a stranger would email out of the blue using the petite anglaise address I provided on the blog. A post I had written might strike a chord and move a reader to tell me their own story, in confidence. The more I divulged of my life, the more other people seemed to feel compelled to reciprocate.
I already had a soft spot for this particular reader, James, an English guy who had left forty or fifty intelligent, erudite comments over a period of several months as Jim in Rennes. He’d made the transition from comments to email one day by asking me the quickest way to get from Montparnasse station to Charles de Gaulle airport, which was innocuous enough. Then, a few weeks later, he’d made a cheeky request, asking me to namedrop his friend’s band in exchange for a ticket to see them play in Paris. I’d never done anything like that before, and it felt a bit like selling out, but I cast my reservations aside and decided to do what he asked. James would be in town with a few friends to see the same concert the following month, so it would be an opportunity to meet him. But this email, which popped into my inbox a few days later, marked a turning point in our budding virtual friendship. For the first time we had stepped beyond banter. Suddenly, for whatever reason, he had decided to open up his life to me.
Little snippets of that email, and of those which followed, lodged stubbornly in my head, and I re-read his words several times over the next few days, looking forward to meeting their author. He had lived through drama; he spoke of hard-won emotions and overpowering desire. His words thrilled me, but also unsettled me. When I delved into my own past, any moments of intensity or ‘wildly contrasting highs and lows’ I managed to excavate and dust down were so remote, they seemed to have happened to someone else. My relationship with Yann, my first French boyfriend, came closest. It had
been passionate but short-lived, eroded by jealousy, torn to shreds by bitter rows. But that had all ended a decade ago: it was ancient history.
Mr Frog and I seemed tame in comparison. Ours had been a quiet storm. Things had just felt right from the moment we met. We fitted, like my favourite, most comfortable flat shoes. We made each other laugh. He listened –so well that everyone who knew him confided in him eventually – and understood me better than anyone I’d known before. I remember lying on his lumpy futon the night we became more than friends. It was our third, maybe fourth meeting. Portishead played quietly in the background, and Mr Frog wore a silky-soft velour top which had become so threadbare over the years that it had to be relegated to the back of the cupboard, although he still refused to throw it away.
Our first night together was gentle: I don’t remember sparks, but I do remember feeling at peace, as though I’d known him half my lifetime. There were few dramatic peaks and troughs in our relationship, and I had convinced myself over the years that, far from being a bad thing, this was our unique strength, the reason we would go the distance, while other, more volatile relationships were doomed to fail.
But James’s messages had sown the seeds of doubt. What tantalizing possibilities lay beyond my comfort zone? Could there, should there be more to life than this? Had Mr Frog and I grown too complacent, flatlining through our lives? James summed up the way he felt in a way that made me wonder whether I might have settled for less than I deserved. ‘Would I turn back the clock?’ he wrote. ‘No. Don’t think I would. Monochrome contentment or Technicolor roller-coaster? No contest, is it?’
My relationship suddenly reminded me of Mr Frog’s velour top: faded, washed out, but occasionally comforting; languishing, half-forgotten at the back of the cupboard.
Bound for work a few mornings later, music from my new iPod setting my life to a dramatic soundtrack only I could hear, I leaped up from my seat just as the warning siren sounded, signalling that the doors were about to close. If I had come to my senses a few moments later I would have missed my stop. As it was, my escape route was barred by a young couple, locked in a passionate embrace. She was arty-looking – maybe Beaux-Arts– with dark, silky tresses of hair piled faux-carelessly on her head and secured with a pencil. He was clad in jeans and a blazer, his face obscured by an overgrown fringe. Something about his stance, his hair, reminded me of a former boyfriend from my university days. Positioned squarely in front of the doors, eyes closed, love’s young dream seemed oblivious to the commuters around them.
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