For a few tense moments I heard only silence, and I began to think my phone had dropped the call. ‘You’re in luck, you caught me on a good day,’ Mr Frog said, finally. ‘I suppose I could leave in twenty minutes or so and work from home afterwards.’
‘Oh, thank you! I owe you!’ I was giddy with relief. ‘Give me a call when you arrive. We’ll be somewhere nearby.’
Mr Frog arrived half an hour later, and neither of us saw him approach at first. Sitting at a red Formica window table in the Café des Buttes Chaumont, Tadpole pored over a Dora magazine I’d bought in the newsagent’s next door, while I gazed blankly out over square Bolivar, my brain stuck in first gear, my fingers closed around an empty espresso cup.
Hearing her name, Tadpole looked up, overjoyed, her magazine sliding to the floor, forgotten. I flashed Mr Frog a grateful smile as he bent to retrieve it. I’d texted to tell him where we were, but hadn’t expected him so soon.
‘Daddy, DA-ddy, DADDY!’ Tadpole chanted, clapping her hands in delight. ‘Viens t’asseoir avec nous!’ Mr Frog took a seat beside Tadpole, who leaped on to his knee and threw her arms around his neck.
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I offered. ‘To thank you for coming all this way at such short notice?’
‘Okay, why not? I’ll have a pression,’ he replied. ‘It’s not often I get out of work in time for an apéro.’
When the waiter appeared at Mr Frog’s elbow Tadpole turned to him and introduced herself, holding up two fingers to illustrate her age. ‘Aujourd’hui, je suis avec ma maman ET mon papa!’ she added with a wide smile. The waiter raised an eyebrow. As far as he was concerned she was only stating the obvious. He couldn’t be expected to understand what a rare occurrence this was.
Looking from my daughter, to her father, and back again, I felt a lump in my throat. I was adept at justifying everything I’d done – to my readers, to my friends, even to myself – reasoning that because Mr Frog now spent far more one-to-one time with his daughter, and they were closer than ever before, everyone was better off. But that meant glossing over the fact that I’d robbed Tadpole of the chance to be with us both at the same time. Seeing how ecstatic she looked now made my heart heavy.
Mr Frog appeared to be wearing a new suit. It was well cut, a change from the jeans and T-shirts James worked in from home, and I had to admit he looked quite handsome. I wondered if he was seeing anyone. He never talked about his personal life to me, and no doubt I’d be the last to know if there was someone special. ‘Yes, it is new,’ he said, seeing my appraising stare and anticipating my question. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I do,’ I replied simply. ‘It suits you.’ Not so long ago I would have tutted over how much it must have cost, and made a barbed comment about how Mr Frog spent all his money on himself, and never saved for the future. Now, as long as he paid Tadpole’s maintenance on time, it was no longer any of my concern: there were far fewer subjects for us to do battle over these days. ‘Thanks again for getting away so quickly,’ I added. ‘We’d probably only have been halfway to my office by now.’
‘Yes, well, perhaps by way of thanks you could write a post about it,’ Mr Frog joked, taking a long sip of his beer. ‘After what you wrote about me shirking my responsibilities when I called you at work, that time, it would be nice to show those readers of yours that I’m not entirely evil. Give me an image makeover.’ I blushed. I had no idea Mr Frog was following petite anglaise so closely. How ironic that he should be taking more interest in the blog now.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I replied grudgingly. ‘No more Mr Frog the bad guy. As long as you behave, of course…’
As I counted out the correct change and we rose to leave, my thoughts already turning to what on earth I could make for Tadpole’s dinner, I hung back with the pushchair, watching Tadpole walk hand in hand with Mr Frog to the front door of my building. I feared there might be tears when we parted. It must be confusing for her to see Daddy unexpectedly like this, and it would be cruel to wrench her away from him so soon after he’d arrived.
‘On se voit jeudi, ma puce,’ Mr Frog explained gently when we reached our destination. ‘We’re going to visit your school together on Thursday.’ Tadpole nodded, apparently satisfied with this arrangement, and Mr Frog and I exchanged relieved smiles over her head. Handing me the keys, he bent to kiss Tadpole lightly on the cheek.
As I watched him walk away, his Vespa helmet swinging from his right hand, I couldn’t help thinking that, in spite of everything we’d been through, our family was in remarkably good shape.
On the phone with James later that evening, I played down the impending school visit as much as I could.
‘I’m doing it for her dad really,’ I explained. ‘So he feels involved. And so that when I tell him about visiting the school in Rennes, in a few months’ time, he’ll have a point of comparison. But in many ways it feels like a pointless exercise, wooing the headmistress under false pretences when we all know I have no intention of staying in Paris…’
‘Hey, you’re doing the right thing,’ said James. ‘Maternelle is a whole ten months away. A lot can happen in ten months.’
‘I suppose so,’ I replied, disappointed with his response. I’d rather hoped James would react by telling me the visit was a waste of time; that I was being over-cautious. I craved reassurance. His unwavering certitude was the best antidote to the doubts which had begun to surface in my mind since I’d first given voice to them, in conversation with Amy. ‘I wish I didn’t have to do all this lying,’ I added. ‘Well, not lying exactly, but holding back information. At first it was just keeping the blog secret from my colleagues. Now I’m keeping quiet about leaving Paris so my boss doesn’t find out, lying to the school admissions people…’
‘You’re doing the right thing,’ said James firmly. ‘You’ll tell them the truth if and when they need to know.’
‘If and when?’ I was suddenly fearful. ‘Are you giving yourself a get-out clause?’
‘Of course not,’ he said sharply. ‘You know what your problem is? You read far too much into every little word. You over-analyse.’ His remark stung and for a moment I was too taken aback to respond.
‘An occupational hazard,’ I replied defensively, once I’d gathered my wits. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t know that about me long before we met…’
‘I did,’ James said, interrupting me before I could finish, ‘but I’d like to think that together we should be able to conquer some of these insecurities of yours.’
‘And we will,’ I said decisively. ‘When we really are together, instead of hundreds of kilometres apart. You’ll see.’
When I saw Mr Frog striding towards Tadpole and me on the day of the infamous school visit, I was struck once more by how handsome he looked in his new suit. I’d made an extra-special effort that morning too, both with my clothes and Tadpole’s and, outwardly, at least, we looked the part: a well-turned-out family.
‘We’d best get a move on,’ I said, looking pointedly at my watch. ‘Our appointment’s in five minutes, and we don’t want to make a bad first impression, or make ourselves late for work.’
The school was a typical sandstone municipal building dating from the turn of the century, and I noticed as we drew closer that the ground-floor windows were all barred, which gave it the air of a prison rather than a place of learning. It wasn’t a patch on the pre-school I had my eye on near James’s place, nestled between the Thabor park and a seventeenth-century Benedictine abbey. The headmistress, to whom I’d spoken on the phone a few days earlier, had a rasping voice suggestive of a forty-a-day Gauloise habit. I sincerely hoped she’d forgotten I’d initially mistaken her for a man when she answered the phone, addressing her as ‘Monsieur’.
‘Nous avons rendezvous avec la directrice,’ I said to the elderly African lady who’d answered the front door when we rang the buzzer and now stood, arms folded across her batik-print tunic, guarding the door. I supposed I should find it reassuring that not just anyone coul
d waltz into a French school, but was it too much to ask for a welcoming smile?
‘C’est par ici,’ said the woman with a curt nod. Leading us through a hall where children clattered around on makeshift stilts made from upturned buckets on strings, she abandoned us at the foot of a flight of stairs, gesturing for us to turn left at the top. As we made our slow ascent, Tadpole clutching both our hands and gazing spellbound at the gaudy artwork which filled every spare centimetre of the walls, I spoke to Mr Frog in a low voice.
‘Now, no mention that we’re separated, or living apart, and nothing about moving to Rennes in the summer,’ I said in a tense whisper, not quite able to meet his eyes. ‘There’s no need to complicate matters at this stage, it’s none of their business.’ We were getting our stories straight; lying by omission. It would be a relief when I could bring my life out into the open, dispensing with the web of half-truths.
Mr Frog, his face impassive, did not reply. The word ‘Rennes’ always produced that effect, and I couldn’t blame him for reacting that way. It tore me to pieces too, imagining how hard the transition would be; how excluded Mr Frog would feel when we moved away. I could insist until I was blue in the face that my plans weren’t all about putting my happiness first and giving myself to James, that I wanted to give Tadpole the picture-postcard school, the cottage I dreamed of with a rambling garden. But poor Mr Frog would only ever see the future in terms of what he stood to lose.
‘Les poux sont de retour!’ warned a poster taped to the door which I supposed must lead to the directrice’s office. Seeing the picture of a head-louse tap-dancing across a child’s head, I put a hand to my hair instinctively and scratched a phantom itch.
‘Entrez!’ said a gruff voice, in response to my hesitant knock.
‘I thought you said it was a directrice,’ whispered Mr Frog, ‘not a directeur.’
‘I did. And it is,’ I said, stifling a giggle. ‘Although let’s just say you’re not the first one to make that mistake…’ Mr Frog smirked, raising his eyebrows, and I smiled widely. Without any need for further explanation he had understood my gaffe. It was a rare moment of complicity, and I savoured it. All tension between us had dissipated and, for once, Mr Frog smiled with both his mouth and his eyes.
Composing a blog entry about the school visit later that day, I dwelled on the awkward exchange in the stairwell, failing even to evoke the moment of complicity between Mr Frog and me outside the headmistress’s door. Homing in on one and not the other, I wasn’t being dishonest, exactly, because it would be impossible to document every waking second of my life. But why leave it out? Maybe I wasn’t ready to confess – to James, or to myself– that over the past week or so, between the café and the school, my happiest moments had been spent with Mr Frog.
24. Lemsip
‘I don’t want my life to be perpetually mapped out like some sort of military campaign,’ objected James, an uncharacteristic hint of irritation creeping into his voice when I prodded him, for the sixth time, about his daughters’ Christmas whereabouts.
‘I’m sorry. I know I keep hassling you,’ I said, squeezing my teabag with the back of a teaspoon, cradling the phone awkwardly between my ear and my shoulder. ‘But playing at happy families isn’t easy. We have to take so many different people into account: your ex, my ex, all our children’s grandparents… So we can’t just play everything by ear. I’m only wondering whether to post the girls’ presents in advance, or to bring them with me, that’s all.’
That wasn’t all, of course. I was wondering whether Christmas would be an adult celebration or a cosy, family affair. Secretly I craved the former, although I wasn’t about to admit to that and risk being accused of plotting to sideline James’s children.
The festive season had been carved up so that everyone in Tadpole’s life got their timeshare slot. First Mr Frog would take her to stay with Mamie and Papy while I spent the holiday weekend in Brittany with James, with or without Carrie and Amanda. On Boxing Day evening I would leave James with his leftovers, TGVing reluctantly back to Paris for a few morbidly quiet days in the office. When Tadpole returned, she and I would fly to Yorkshire together to spend New Year with my family.
Plotting Tadpole’s movements, ensuring that no one felt left out, slighted or short-changed was challenging, to say the least, and my plans had been laid months in advance, a fact which was clearly not to everyone’s liking.
‘Okay, well, look, I’ll speak to the girls’ mum and see if I can pin down exactly what’s going on at our end,’ said James grudgingly. ‘If they are going to be spending Christmas with us, I’ll have to work out where on earth I’ve hidden the decorations.’
‘Good luck with that!’ I said sarcastically, immediately wishing I’d held my tongue. The first time I’d visited James, his apartment had been spotless; on subsequent visits, less so. It wasn’t dirty – just cluttered and riotously untidy – but if Tadpole and I were to move in, I was adamant that James would have to change his ways, if only to make space for us. Whenever I visited I had to hold myself in check, even though I was itching to sort the paperwork fanned across the floor around James’s desk, or to gather up the clothes strewn across every surface of his bedroom. That was how he liked things, James insisted and, until I moved in for good, that was how things would stay.
‘You getting a tree?’ asked James, wisely preferring a change of subject to a petty argument.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ I confessed. ‘With all the to-ing and fro-ing, I’m wondering whether to bother…’
If I did succumb to temptation and buy one of the overpriced trees huddled on the pavement outside the local florist’s, the poor sapin would spend much of the Christmas period home alone, shedding needles which would embed themselves between the floorboards, only to reappear months later, as if by magic, whenever someone ventured barefoot across the living room.
It wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of other thrills on offer to get Tadpole in the Christmas mood. The mairie was frosted with tasteful white lights, outlining every window and hanging like stalactites from the roof. On the cobbled square in front of the town hall a Christmas market had taken up residence, a multitude of tiny stalls selling chocolate Yule logs, gingerbread Santas and plastic cups of vin chaud which spiced the crisp winter air with the lingering scent of cloves and cinnamon. Nearby, a free merry-go-round span in giddy circles, the yelps of children competing with the tuneless Euro-disco blaring from the sound system.
Our route home from Tata’s made this monstrosity impossible to avoid, much to Tadpole’s delight. Every evening I shivered stoically on the sidelines, my breath conjuring white clouds from the icy air, while Tadpole careered past in a shiny blue car, one mitten-clad hand on the steering wheel, the other vigorously waving.
Tadpole had even learned ‘Away in a Manger’ off by heart and I’d managed to record her rendition of it in readiness for a Christmas posting on my blog, to be accompanied by a photograph of her wearing reindeer antlers, voluntarily blurred in the interests of preserving her anonymity.
But there was still a vital something, or someone, missing from our Christmas, and I finally caved in and wheeled a tree home in Tadpole’s pushchair a week before the holiday season got underway. Anything that might make my first Christmas as a single parent feel more festive had to be worth a try, even if it was futile to try to deflect attention away from the conspicuous absence of the two men in my life by using shiny baubles and a few balding strands of tinsel.
‘Which sapin do you like best?’ I said to Tadpole, bringing her pushchair to a halt outside the florist’s on avenue Laumière. ‘How about this one?’ I fingered a small but perfect specimen with branches like bottle brushes, the needles an attractive blue-green. Soft-focus images swam around my head: Tadpole passing me decorations one by one, carol singers warbling on the stereo in the background. This might be the first Christmas Tadpole remembered in years to come. I owed it to her to make it special.
‘I like that one b
etter!’ Tadpole cried, pointing at a scrawny, parched-looking apology for a tree which towered high above my head. It looked as though the lightest of touches would dislodge any remaining needles, leaving it prematurely bald. This was definitely not what I’d had in mind.
‘Well,’ I said diplomatically, ‘that one is very pretty, yes, but Mummy hasn’t got quite enough money to buy it, and it would be very difficult to carry home…’ The journey through the park awaited us still and, as it was, Tadpole would have to walk alongside her pushchair while the sapin rode home in comfort.
Plumping for a middle-sized tree, I winced at the price and we set off for home, eager to begin decorating. Only then did the limitations of my fantasy become fully apparent. I’d forgotten just how fragile the eggshell-thin baubles were. I’d overlooked the fact that the assorted bent paperclips and safety pins I always used to hang the decorations were treacherously sharp. As for the carol CD which had featured in my daydream, it was nowhere to be found, and after the third ‘No, not like that! Careful, it’s going to break!’ Tadpole lost interest in the proceedings altogether, stomping off to her room in disgust. If she couldn’t juggle with the shiny balls or pop sharp objects into her mouth, where was the fun?
My daydream in tatters, I finished hanging the baubles alone. Standing back to admire my handiwork, I had to admit our tree looked the part, even if I’d done a rotten job of making us feel festive.
‘Sweetie, can you come back into the lounge? Mummy’s going to switch on the pretty lights now,’ I hollered, hand poised ready to plug the flex into one of the wooden two-pin sockets I suspected our landlord ought to have replaced years ago. Tadpole dawdled slowly back along the corridor, excited in spite of herself, but unwilling to give me the satisfaction of seeing her hurry. She hovered in the doorway, a felt-tip pen clutched tightly in one hand.
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