There seemed no answer to that so she glided to the bedroom in her tailored silk dressing robe and returned with a beech-coloured bag labelled Missoni. She put it beside him on the sofa.
‘Present. I’m sorry it’s not gift-wrapped by me. You French may do brilliant stuffed birds but you don’t do decent wrapping paper.’
‘But this is for me? Truly?’
It was touching, his childlike delight, and as she looked at him tearing at the tissue paper, she could see the boy he had been. Helene had never yearned for children, but suddenly she wished she’d known that boy. She asked, ‘Were you an only child?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you never had to share. You never did You open the envelope, I’ll take the card out, You read the card…’
‘No, but I had the company of the girls on the next domain. One of them, I married.’
Jean-Paul was laying on the carpet the softly textured towelling robe in many colours. Colours that, being Missoni, being Italian, worked.
Black, lime green, coral, amethyst, raspberry, sky blue. She said, ‘When we change our wallpaper, you can choose a colour to suit your robe.’
Then she wondered, was the ‘our’ out of order? She hurried on, ‘I had an amazing time choosing it. Had a pleasant walk to the Right Bank and got to the Missoni shop sharp on ten. It wasn’t open. I went and had a coffee. Came back at twenty past. The place still wasn’t open. So I wandered down the rue Saint-Honore and did expensive window shopping, came back to Missoni at eleven, at which point I saw the lights were on and a bossy-looking girl was unlocking the door. I got in! Then I was locked in and the bossy girl stuck to me so hard I thought she was going to come home with me.’
She finished her whisky. ‘What I don’t get is how they make any money. They don’t open till eleven, they go for lunch from 12 – 2 and shut at five.’
‘Huge mark-up’ Jean-Paul said, taking off his clothes, slipping on the robe and admiring the effect in the mirror. He came back to her on the sofa and said, as she knew he would, ‘Chérie, you shouldn’t buy me things.’
‘But you are so good to me, Jean-Paul.’ She was kneeling in front of him. ‘I assure you, the pleasure is all mine.’
And she meant it.
Chapter Six
For her supper that night, he took her to a restaurant where the tables were fortunately far apart. Because, as soon as they had ordered, she realised he wanted to hear about Alexis.
‘His place is a tip. Is your son like that?’
‘His mother wouldn’t allow it. But Marc’s never been messy. Anyway, what happened in this pit of a room with this amour of yours?’
‘Oh it was all right, Jean-Paul. Fine. We went to this jazz club –‘
*
‘Yes, but what did he do, chérie?’ And Jean-Paul kept on, to such an extent that Helene realised he really did want every detail. So in the end she told him and he listened with an attention that was by turns concerned, amused, affectionate. Always mindful. When she faltered, he refilled her glass, or held her hand. You’re drinking too much, Helene reminded herself, and babbling on too much about yourself and you really should remember that however sophisticated Jean-Paul might appear, he’s a bloke after all, he has an ego, and hearing how a guy thirteen years younger could go at it for hours and hours – well.
As a diversion, she showed him the Easter Monday email from Hilly.
‘Why Hilly?’ he asked. ‘Is that an English name?’
‘No! She was meant to be Hilary. But when my father went to register us, he was either very tired or completely blotto or both. He just couldn’t spell Hilary. It went down in the official register as Hilaria. So she’s always been Hilly because my mother said she wasn’t having a daughter nicknamed Hilarious.’
Her glass was full again. ‘We’re not identical. We don’t look alike. We weren’t even in the same class at school. She did science, I was geography and history. Bad move. All those essays. And allow me to bore you sometime about Gustavus Adophus and the thirty years war. Still, Hilly and I get on, in that loose-knit Brit way. I just think of her as my sister rather than my twin.’
They followed their usual route to Brasserie Lipp. It had become ‘their bar.’
‘So after your father left, Hilly eventually found a safe marriage, and Oliver. And you didn’t. You didn’t want commitment. Responsibility. Because of your father. Because he had let you down. Betrayed you. And you didn’t want to give anyone the chance to do the same.’
The Brasserie Lipp waiter, who knew them well, was bringing coffee and cognacs. Helene gave a big sigh and realised the moment had come. It seemed to be a night for confidences. She might as well get it over.
‘Of course, it was partly my father. But the main reason I’ve never married was because of someone else. The Gangster.’
‘What?’
‘Well his real name was Robbie. He was part of our crowd at school. You know how you all have a sort of role. There’s the sporty one, the swat –‘
‘And you were the sexy one.’
‘No, I was the naughty one. Before I got thrown out of science classes, when I got bored, I’d climb out of the lab window and then climb back in through the next one, all while the teacher had her back turned at the blackboard. Then she’d wonder why the class was in fits.’
‘So the Gangster was a bad lot, like you?’
The point about Robbie, Helene explained, was that he was just a very nice, quiet, studious boy. He didn’t come top at anything, he didn’t get into fights, he didn’t get noticed, really. So almost as a joke, someone in the group called him the Gangster.
‘And the name just stuck. What happened was that he became that person. He embraced it. I don’t mean in a thuggish way. He just became a sort of maverick spirit. Doing the unexpected.’
Helene remembered running into him one Saturday down by Bristol docks.
‘What you doing here, Helen?’
‘Saturday job. Stacking shelves. What about you?’
‘I was trying to get lost. So I could become a missing person. But I haven’t managed it yet.’
Helen said thoughtfully, ‘Have you tried walking backwards?’
That was when she started to fall in love with him. It wasn’t difficult.
‘Frankly, Jean-Paul, for some time I’d been frantic. I was the only girl in our group who didn’t have a boyfriend.’
‘I find that very hard to believe.’
‘It’s true. Getting a boyfriend became the most important thing in my life, more important than passing my exams or getting into the tennis team. So there was Robbie and I suddenly realised he liked me.’
They became conspiritors, not least in concealing from his parents that he had a new persona.
‘His parents were from Aberdeen,’ Helene told Jean-Paul. ‘That means they were tight with money and disapproving of just about everything. His mother had this disconcerting way of opening the door to you and saying, Come away in. Then when you realised she meant Come in, she’d say firmly, And you’ll have had your tea.’
Choking with laughter, Jean-Paul called the waiter and ordered more cognacs. Helene was surprised.
‘I’m really enjoying myself,’ she said, wondering just how much she was going to tell him. ‘But won’t Madame be expecting you?’
‘She’s in the country. You know, she always stays down after Easter.’
It irritated Helene faintly that whenever he spoke of his wife it was as if everyone was expected to be aware of her movements, as if it had all been heralded in a Court Circular.
‘So you’ll be alone tonight?’
‘No, my son’s there. We’re going to watch the late movie. He likes anything with Juliette Binoche.’
She fingered the stem of her glass. ‘Tell me – do you and Madame still – you know…’
‘No, we don’t. She indicated some time ago that she wished that side of our life to be over.’
This woman was something else, thought Helene. Ind
icated! How the hell did you indicate that you didn’t want to have sex any more? At least, with him.
The cognac goaded her on. ‘Is she at it with someone else?’
He said gently, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Tell me the rest of the story about your Gangster.’
Helene told him how the Gangster went to Bristol University. She trained as a legal secretary, got a job and a bedsit. His sister got married, his parents moved back to Aberdeen and Robbie lived in Hall. Helene looked back on it as a perfect time. They were away from parental control. She had all the fun of university life but she wasn’t a hard-up student. The freedom was intoxicating.
‘And then,’ Helene stared into her cognac, ‘Then I just went off him.’
Jean-Paul regarded her with tender concern. ‘But why?’
‘I was nineteen. We’d been together for three years. And we’d become, you know, more friends than lovers.’
He nodded. ‘That happens. Of course the gloss goes off. You lose that sexual thrill – ‘
‘I didn’t want to lose it! I like that sexual thrill. That surge of excitement. If it’s not there, I feel physically wrong. I get restless.’
‘So you left him. Your Gangster.’
Helene covered her face. She couldn’t tell Jean-Paul how destroying it had been. Robbie was wearing an eau-de-nil coloured sweater she had bought him. He was distraught. Sobbing.
‘Don’t leave me. I’ll do anything. Anything. Just please, please don’t leave me.’
But Helene did. She lied. She had to. She told him she’d come back. She didn’t. She went to London, knowing that from now on her emotional life must be different. Sex, yes. Commitment, involvement, no. She wasn’t cut out for it. Never again, never could she put someone through what she’d inflicted on Robbie.
‘I thought, Jean-Paul, I must never do this to anyone again. I mustn’t put myself in the position of being able to hurt someone so much.’
‘Have you seen him again?’
‘No.’
Helene told him how, a few years later in London, she’d run into his sister. A little diffidently, Helene had asked after Robbie. The sister’s tone was cool. ‘You left my brother in pieces, Helen. It took him over two years to get over you.’
In Brasserie Lipp, Helene’s eyes were wet. Jean-Paul passed her his handkerchief. ‘What you have to remember, chérie, is that he learned something much earlier than you. He learned that the price of love is grief.’
‘You’ve been having rough sex,’ accused Elodie.
Helene, naked (apart from paper knickers) on the massage table, was not in a position to dissemble. It was a week since her session with Alexis, but her bruises were the sallow yellow of Elodie’s salon curtains.
‘Who is he?’
‘Oh. Alexis.’ Helene attempted to sound casual. ‘About my age, but twice as fit. Ouch!’ Elodie’s strong hands were torture on her thighs.
‘When are you seeing him again?’
‘Sunday night.’
‘I’ll give you some arnica. And wrap up. It’s going to snow.’
While Helene was getting dressed Elodie said, ‘I hope you don’t mind. Your jewellery. I did something.’
Helene’s heart thudded.
Elodie continued, seemingly unaware that her client’s blood pressure was going through the roof, ‘I have a client in the jewellery business. I showed her your pieces. And you know what? You have five brooches. And not one of them is worth less than 25,000 euro. Your lover has given you your pension, mon ange.’
*
At seven o’clock on Sunday Helene walked briskly across the Pont de Sully. In view of the impending snow, she was wearing black leather boots and her pink coat, with a matching pashmina thrown round her hair. It was bitterly cold, with very little light penetrating the jaundiced sky.
She saw Alexis waiting, as arranged, at the end of the bridge. He was in a sheepskin jacket, not done up, revealing an open necked shirt with two buttons missing.
Helene repressed the urge to tidy him up. Just as she wasn’t going to let herself clean his flat, wash his dishes, organise his laundry. Don’t mother him, she instructed herself.
His face lit up as he looked at her, and kissed her. ‘How pretty you are,’ he said, his hands caressing her pashmina.
And suddenly, he had it round her eyes, knotted at the back of her head. She writhed and wriggled, but he was gripping both her hands.
‘What the hell are you playing at, Alexis? I can’t bloody see!’
‘That’s the idea. We’re going for a mystery meal. Now, I’ve got hold of you, and you’ll be perfectly safe. As long as you don’t fight me.’
It would not, of course, have been impossible for her to wrench her hands free and snatch the cashmere blindfold from her eyes. But why spoil the fun?
‘What would you have done if I hadn’t been wearing this pashmina?
‘I have a silk scarf in my pocket. I’ll use that for something else later on.’
She stopped abruptly. ‘You’re not to gag me. I don’t-‘
‘It’s all right,’ he led her on, ‘I like to hear a woman make a noise.’
From the sound of the traffic, she guessed they crossed two major roads. She heard buses, and the distinctive throaty roar of a Ferrari. Then everything quietened down.
‘Not much further,’ he said. ‘Hungry?’
‘I didn’t have lunch.’ She’d been in too much shock thinking about how much she’d got sitting in the bank that Elodie had bodyguarded her to.
‘Here we are.’
She heard a door open. Felt a welcome gust of warm, foodie air. A woman was giggling and untying the belt of Helene’s pink coat.
‘I warned them earlier what was going on,’ said Alexis. ‘They think it’s a scream.’
Her coat was removed. She was led to a chair. More giggling as her hands were tied – presumably with the silk scarf – to the back of the chair. She heard wine glugging and then a glass was pressed against her lips so she could drink.
‘I’ve already ordered,’ Alexis said, ‘so I’m going to feed you, and you have to guess what you’re eating and where you are.’
Helene hadn’t a clue what she was eating. Every taste was new to her, and utterly delicious. Foreign, obviously. Lebanese perhaps? Or Turkish? And then she smelt something that told her.
It was the smell of chicken soup.
‘Jewish!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’re in a Jewish restaurant!’
She felt him untie her blindfold, and release her hands. ‘Well done. Seemed a good choice for a cold night.’
‘It was the soup that told me,’ Helene said. ‘Mum used to make it when Hilly and I were ill. It was wonderful. Totally restorative.’
‘Jewish penicillin. Can you make it?’
‘I don’t. Doing all the stock would stink the flat out. Anyway, tell me what I’ve been eating.’
‘You had chopped herring, salt beef and latke – that’s a potato cake and new green cucumber.’
‘And where are we exactly?’
‘The Marais. rue des Rosiers, the old Jewish quarter.’
Helene’s eyes were drawn to an adjoining table. ‘Oh, they’re having cheesecake!’
‘Well you’re not,’Alexis said. ‘You’re having something else.’
And there was the pretty waitress with an iced cake, fizzing with sparklers.
‘Happy birthday,’ Alexis said, and kissed her.
‘I thought you’d forgotten,’ Helene laughed as everyone at surrounding tables serenaded her. It was sincere, and heartwarming and Helene felt flooded with grateful camaderie.
Birthdays. Parties with Hilly. ‘You had more presents than I did.’ ‘I didn’t.’ ‘You did! Because you invited your entire class!’
Outings. Skating, bowling, pop concerts. Robbie. A meal which gave her indigestion at a fancy restaurant he couldn’t afford. Then London, lunch with the girls delayed until the weekend, and the arrival of an extravagantly beribboned arrangement of twigs from
Noel.
When they left the restaurant, they found themselves engulfed in a blizzard of white.
‘Holy shit,’ Alexis said, blinking snow out of his eyes. ‘Big lumps.’
‘Big lumps. And it’s settling.’ Taxis would, of course, have vanished. It was going to take ages to get home.
Alexis turned her round and led the way back into the restaurant.
‘Alexis, I had all that cake. I don’t think I can eat another thing.’
‘No need,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have an early night.’
Ten minutes later they were in bed with a bottle of red wine in a simple, clean room over the restaurant.
‘How did you know about this?’
‘I work here in the mornings. Cleaning up.’
‘Cleaning up! You?’
‘Well that’s why I don’t have time to do my place.’
‘But you’ve got enough money. You don’t need to come here, cleaning.’
He grinned. ‘No, well, that waitress … she’s one helluva sassy piece…’
And there was this useful room just up the stairs, Helene thought. ‘All right, Alexis. But presumably she has to start waiting table at midday. So how –‘
‘She’s very interested in English customs. So I taught her how we have elevenses.’
Carefully, he poured the wine and placed the bottle on the varnished bedside table. Downstairs, the restaurant was in full roar. People had started singing.
‘We’re not going to get a wink,’ Helene said.
Alexis smiled. ‘Sleep wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’
*
They awoke to hushed streets romantic with white beauty. It had stopped snowing and the sun was out in a hyacinth blue sky.
‘Come on,’ Alexis said, as they left the restaurant. ‘Let’s walk round the Place des Vosges. There’s a brasserie there. We could get an early brunch.’
‘Oh.’ Her tone was listless.
He slid her arm through his. ‘Are you all right? Was it last night – you know – what we did?…’
‘No. That was okay. Don’t worry.’
They wandered through the arcaded elegance of the Place des Vosges, where chic boutiques nestled with discreet art galleries and ethnic grocers. In the square, a restful haven in summer, the benches were heaped with snow, tomb-like.
The Price of Love Page 7