Petite Anglaise

by Catherine Sanderson

  ‘Do you have hidden cameras?’ asked Mr Frog, mock suspiciously.

  I snorted with laughter. ‘Just give me a call when you’re ready, okay?’

  Two hours later I leaned back in my chair looking up at my reflection in the mirrored ceiling, feeling sated and somewhat giddy. I wasn’t sure if it was the midday beer or the prospect of becoming a homeowner which was making me feel light-headed. Maybe a combination of both. ‘I can’t believe she managed to polish off a whole adult portion of chicken fried rice on her own,’ Mr Frog said, shaking his head in astonishment. Our impassive waiter arrived to clear the plates I’d neatly stacked, and we ordered a scoop of vanilla ice cream for Tadpole, plus two espressos for ourselves.

  ‘You do realize we’ll be here all day now,’ I said wryly. ‘Have you seen how long it takes her to eat one spoonful? She won’t put it in her mouth, she just licks the spoon.’

  ‘I’m in no hurry,’ Mr Frog replied. ‘It’s been great.’ Tadpole had been on top form throughout lunch, peering into the fish tanks which flanked our table, struggling comically to master her huge varnished chopsticks before hunger got the better of her and she cast them aside in favour of a dessert fork and teaspoon. Waiting for dessert to arrive, she was now busy drawing a picture on the paper tablecloth with a pencil I’d found in the bottom of my handbag. The stick lady with hair reaching to the bottom of her A-line skirt was no doubt supposed to be me. The man by her side, his head like a pincushion, was Mr Frog.

  ‘Well, if you feel comfortable with this, maybe we should do things together at the weekend more often?’ I suggested. ‘You know, when neither of us has any other plans…’

  ‘I’d like that,’ Mr Frog said, his eyes riveted to Tadpole’s picture. A short, curly-haired stick figure now stood between us, an impossibly wide grin stretching from one side of its face to the other, where the ears should have been.

  After bidding goodbye to Mr Frog and Tadpole, I caught a métro to Voltaire. By some miracle, I’d managed to secure a Saturday afternoon appointment with my bank manager when I’d called that morning, something that would usually have taken weeks to obtain. My account was still held by the branch closest to my very first Paris apartment, a Caisse d’Epargne on Place Léon Blum. I’d been banking with them for over ten years, which, come to think of it, was the longest I’d ever lived in a single town. Even as a child, back in England, I’d moved around the country, at the mercy of my father’s job.

  Emerging from the métro with half an hour to spare, I decided to take a stroll along rue de la Roquette, past my very first chez moi. The weather was indecisive: cloudy and menacing one minute, sunny and optimistic the next. Umbrella and sunglasses weather, I’ve always called it, because you never quite know which one you’ll need. Wandering around my old neighbourhood under changing skies, I paused at a few of my old haunts, my moods mirroring the weather, my memories bittersweet.

  So much had changed over the past decade, so many shops and restaurants had come and gone and, when I saw a place I recognized, I paused, grateful for some continuity. A faded sign in a traiteur’s window reminded its customers that, back in 1990, the shop had won a national prize for making the best fromage de tête. I’d never ventured in, unnerved by the concept of ‘head cheese’; which I suspected had more to do with ‘heads’ than ‘cheese’, but I was relieved to see the shop hadn’t given way to another soulless sushi bar or garish Chinese takeaway. Peering into the window, it was as though the clock had been wound back ten years, and I half expected to see my twenty-three-year-old self reflected back at me.

  A few paces further the air was filled with the pungent aroma of roast chicken. The prices were in euros, not French francs, but the white-overalled butcher’s assistant tending to the plump chickens turning on their metal spits looked familiar. He called out to me as I passed, a jovial ‘bonjour Mademoiselle,’ and I silently thanked him for not saying ‘Madame’, allowing me to preserve the illusion of time-travel for just a few moments longer.

  The tiny shop below my first apartment no longer sold records, now into its second or third incarnation as a mobile-phone discount store. Nonetheless, the front door of number 104, to the left, was still painted the same shade of brown, and I could have sworn the net curtains veiling the first-floor windows were the very same voilages my landlady had hung when I arrived – the gauzy material yellowed with age but the motif identical. I loitered for a moment in the doorway, trying in vain to remember the door code. Even if my memory hadn’t failed me, the exercise was probably futile. It had been ten years: the code must have been changed countless times since I lived there.

  In my mind’s eye I saw a younger me striding out of the door, a copy of the Rough Guide in her hand, determined to cover every inch of the city on foot. I glimpsed the same girl, looking tired and slightly the worse for wear, meandering homewards from a nightclub in the early hours of the morning. She was carefree, sometimes reckless; still convinced that youth conferred some sort of magical immunity which would keep her safe from harm. And as for Mr Frog, she hadn’t even met him yet.

  Drifting along the road, as if in a trance, I neared the red and white laundrette – the laverie featured in Chacun Cherche Son Chat, the film which had made me cry when I’d seen it just as I was contemplating leaving Paris years before. A young man with a chequered laundry bag pushed open the door, releasing a gust of humid air and the scent of lavender fabric conditioner into the street. Inside, students flicked idly through magazines while the drone of spin cycles lulled them into a pleasant torpor.

  The sight of the clock on the laundrette wall startled me out of my reverie, breaking the spell. It was nearly three. If I didn’t get a move on, I’d be late for my appointment, and that wouldn’t do. Retracing my steps, I promised myself a return visit another day, when I’d allow myself more time to linger before I yanked myself back into the present.

  Soon, if everything went according to plan, I’d be moving into a new flat, not much bigger than my first foothold on rue de la Roquette, with my half-French daughter. I had responsibilities now. I was a mother, soon to be a homeowner. And I was, now more than ever, wedded to the city that the girl from rue de la Roquette had chosen to make her home.

  If she could have peered into the future, curious to see exactly what Paris held in store for her, I hoped that, seeing me now, she wouldn’t have disapproved.

  34. Whole

  Toby had returned from his travels once more, but everything had changed. Our conversation was hopelessly maladroit. We blundered around in ever decreasing circles, stripped of our usual articulacy, then lapsed into excruciating silences. Each time he attempted to describe how he felt, his words hung in the air uselessly, devoid of any actual meaning. We were supposed to be having a serious, meaningful conversation about where we were headed – or indeed why we were headed nowhere – but it was proving impossible. Banter was the only register we seemed capable of and, without it, we’d lost all means of communication. We sat side by side on the sofa, light-years apart.

  It was my fault, entirely. The previous evening, emboldened by a couple of gin and tonics, I’d taken it into my head to provoke some sort of confrontation. We’d been chatting to each other by instant messenger while he’d been away, and the frequency of our contact seemed to be increasing, but when he announced his imminent return I realized I was tiring of our games, fed up with trying to second-guess his motives, weary of trying to hold myself aloof so that I wouldn’t lose face.

  I’d begun to suspect that something would have to give the last time we’d met. The transition from banter to bedroom had become awkward: sex felt like an unnatural transaction, tacked clumsily on to a friendship, with no affection to cement the two together. But despite all this, and despite the fact that Tadpole lay sleeping in the next room, I’d still applied nail varnish and moisturizer, and made liberal use of depilatory cream. These laborious preparations were the proof that some part of me was still hoping for something tonight: a turnaround, a decl
aration. Now I sat with my chin resting on my knees, my hair loose, tickling my calves, waiting for him to speak.

  ‘I don’t know what to say that won’t sound clichéd,’ said Toby apologetically.

  ‘Well, please try to avoid “It’s not you, it’s me” if you want to get out of here alive,’ I suggested, looking down at my ineptly painted toenails.

  ‘I read your blog, finally,’ he said suddenly. ‘It was the weirdest thing.’

  I cringed inside. There were two, maybe three posts about us, in total. I’d hinted that I was having a hard time with our unspoken pact of superficiality. I’d used that phrase about ‘selling little pieces of myself to the lowest bidder’. I only hoped he hadn’t read the comments. To say that some of my readers had been tough on him would have been putting things mildly. His treatment of me had been called ‘shabby’ and I’d been told I had ’all the wrong instincts with men’.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, it was very odd… I didn’t recognize myself in your descriptions of me at all. I didn’t recognize you. It was like reading about a couple of strangers. We only spent two or three nights together, and I was honest about my expectations from the start…’ He shifted awkwardly on the sofa. The whole thing was so excruciating that I just wanted it to end, to push him out of the door.

  ‘It was more like five or six times, actually,’ I said quietly. ‘And, obviously, petite anglaise can’t resist playing to her audience a bit, I’ll admit that. And I’m sure my speaking voice isn’t the same as her writing voice. But isn’t this more about how two people can read the same situation in two completely different ways? I’ve been busy resisting the urge to build castles in the air, like I always do, and you just saw whatever it was that you wanted to see…’

  When he left, I closed the door behind him with an audible sigh. It stung, this new rejection, but it was also a relief to put an end to the ambiguity and incertitude, which had definitely begun to rankle. I had been deceiving myself the day I decided I could master the art of detachment, or maybe the mistake was to allow things to go on in that vein for as long as they had. Taking my pocket diary from my handbag, skimming over the past few weeks, I found the proof that I’d been wrong, but so had he. We’d seen each other exactly four times.

  I’d played it up, he’d played it down, and the truth lay somewhere in the middle.

  I heard the creak of a door the next morning, followed by the pattering of bare soles against the floorboards. Pulling the bedclothes up to my chin, I hastily closed my eyes, preserving Tadpole’s illusion that she was responsible for waking me.

  A hand grazed my cheek, and I braced myself for her ‘WAKEY WAKEY, MUMMY,’ the volume of which never ceased to amaze me. How could such a small pair of lungs produce such a booming voice? Surely it went against all the laws of physics?

  Instead, to my surprise, I felt tiny fingers exploring the contours of my face, and it was all I could do to prevent my mouth twitching involuntarily. I kept my eyes tightly closed, savouring the moment, hoping to prolong it for as long as possible. ‘Mummy got lovely eyebrows,’ a sleepy Tadpole voice muttered as she traced the curve of my right eyebrow. ‘And Mummy got beautiful lips,’ she whispered, her fingers feather-light against my mouth. I basked in her unconditional love like a cat in a patch of sunlight. Toby had been disturbingly immune to my charms, but here was someone who thought I was special, regardless of my bed hair, the sleep in my eyes and my Miffy pyjamas, a Christmas gift from my mother.

  My mouth was ajar, and I felt an intrepid digit venturing inside to probe my front teeth. I was sorely tempted to nibble on her finger, pretending to bite, but reluctant to break the spell. Before I could make up my mind, she spoke again. ‘Mummy have very pretty yellow teeth…’

  ‘Yellow?’ I spluttered, eyes wide open, all pretence of sleep abandoned. Tadpole withdrew her finger, hastily. ‘No, not yellow! Mummy’s teeth are white. Not as white as your lovely baby teeth. A different white.’

  ‘No, Mummy!’ Tadpole frowned, patently unconvinced. ‘They yellow, like your hair.’

  ‘Could I have less of the brutal honesty and more of the unconditional love, please?’ I groaned, pulling the bedclothes back over my head in mock protest. But as Tadpole slipped into bed beside me for our morning snuggle, begging me to scratch her back, ‘avec tes griffes’, as though I were an animal with claws, rather than a mummy with mere fingernails, I had to admit that – yellow teeth or no – there were far worse ways a person could start her day.

  Mr Frog lolled on his sofa, while I sat cross-legged in his new leather armchair, leaning towards the table from time to time to swipe a handful of crisps – salt and vinegar flavour, because in our time together I had managed to convince Mr Frog of the merits of certain English foods. Finding myself at a loose end on my night off, I’d slipped across the road for a chat. Tadpole lay sleeping in Mr Frog’s bedroom. For a while we’d exchanged anecdotes about her, in a spirit of light-hearted one-upmanship, our naturally competitive streaks coming to the fore.

  ‘You should have seen the tortoise she drew this morning before school on her magic board,’ I said. ‘It was fantastic, totally life-like. She patterned the shell and everything. Although it may have had five legs, now I come to think of it…’

  Mr Frog stood and went over to his desk, rifling through a stack of papers, pulling out a sheet of A4 paper and bringing it over to me with a triumphant smile. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ It was a perfect snail, complete with antennae poking out from under its hat at a jaunty angle, very reminiscent of Brian in the Magic Roundabout.

  I decided to skip the yellow teeth anecdote, which was funny, and would no doubt make it on to the blog in some form, but smarted, and had even prompted me to make an appointment at the dentist’s to investigate teeth-whitening procedures. Instead, I described how Tadpole had reacted to the blossom drifting down from the trees on the way to the childminder’s house that morning. ‘She said, “Mummy, it’s just like confetti!” She’s so poetic, our girl, don’t you think?’

  ‘Ah yes, I’ve heard her say it in French too,’ said Mr Frog, not to be outdone. ‘On dirait des confettis!’

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘I hardly ever hear her speak French these days. And I suppose you rarely hear her speak English.’ Mr Frog nodded. Effectively, a language barrier had been erected all the way along the fault line of our separation. ‘You getting out much?’ I said, not wishing to dwell on the things which divided us. But when Mr Frog shifted uneasily in his seat, I wished I’d held my tongue.

  ‘Yeah, quite a bit. Less than in the beginning though… I’ve calmed down a bit now.’

  I wondered if there was a girl, or girls, but wouldn’t permit myself to ask, not unless he volunteered more information first. There were lots of subjects I dared not broach with Mr Frog. I’d never asked him how he’d coped when I was seeing James. Whether he’d read my blog, back then, or whether Tadpole spoke about him. I had no idea how he felt about me, these days. Now that I was alone again, did he nurture any hope, however faint, that we might find a way to bury our differences and try again? Did I?

  ‘Well, I suppose I ought to head home,’ I mumbled when the conversation petered out. It seemed incongruous calling the empty apartment across the street home, while my daughter quietly snored in the next room. Ironic that I should have to leave, when the two people I cared about most in the world were right here.

  We stood in the doorway, lingering for a moment, as though neither of us really wanted to part. Something about the way he looked gravely into my eyes and inclined his head, almost imperceptibly, made me think he was trying to decide whether to kiss me. Not la bise, which in itself would have been a huge departure from the friendly distance we’d been maintaining for the last few months, but a proper kiss. On the lips. I stared at him, mesmerized, my thoughts a blur. Would he go through with it? And if he did, would I return his kiss or pull away? Where would either of those outcomes leave us?

  In the end, a
ll he did was give my arm a squeeze, before closing the door gently behind me. I stood in the darkness on the landing outside his apartment for a moment, my heart pounding, wondering whether I’d imagined the whole thing. And even though it was one of those perfect moments of high drama that I loved to immortalize, lingering over its significance, I realized I had no intention whatsoever of including the scene in my blog.

  Some moments had to be kept private: our continuing friendship was more important than full disclosure to a few thousand strangers, many of whom made no secret of their desire to see us reunited.

  I plunge into the bowels of the métro the next morning, my steps perfectly in time with the music filling my head. Though I am lost in my thoughts, gliding along on autopilot, my hips instinctively know the height of the turnstile barrier, remembering precisely how hard it must be nudged. My feet lead me to the correct spot on the platform, aligned with the exit I’ll need when I alight at my destination. I feel the familiar bumpy contours of the warning strip along the platform edge through the thin soles of my shoes.

  A full calendar year has now gone by since I first laid eyes on James. The song playing on my iPod is our song, ‘Gorecki’, by Lamb. The very same song I’d listened to in the métro when I left the Hôtel Saint Louis, ecstatic tears streaming down my face.

  I remember the woman I was before petite anglaise came along, that sleepwalker, deeply dissatisfied with her life, seething with resentment but unable to articulate what was wrong. I remember how by writing about the city around me, by writing about the people in my life, I began to see everything more clearly. I realized that being a mother, being in a relationship, shouldn’t have to mean burying my own needs deep inside, denying their very existence. That way only bitterness lay.

  When James fell in love with petite anglaise and came into our lives, I willingly clambered on to a rollercoaster. There were moments when I doubted the wisdom of my actions. Moments when I worried that the blog was living my life for me, or pushing me to reveal more than I should to satisfy my thirst – and my readers’ thirst – for drama, for material, so that the show might go on. Petite anglaise looked on with interested detachment, using me as a guinea pig, a lab rat, placing me in ever more unexpected situations to see how I would react. All the while furiously scribbling, documenting my emotions, recording my every move.