Helene’s anxiety increased. The Place des Vosges was where Jean-Paul lived. With his wife and son. They would be returning this morning from Chantilly. Suppose he saw her?
Helene knew he wouldn’t be jealous of Alexis (well, not much). It was just that she didn’t want him to think she was spying on him.
And then she saw them. The two bells, the brass plates on the list: J-P Cordier. M.Cordier. There was an ancient oak carriage door, metal studded. Peering through a large worn old keyhole she saw a gravelled courtyard with a clipped parterre.
Stepping back, Helene looked up. The apartment, she knew, was on the first floor. It seemed endless. And the lights were on. She couldn’t see in, the windows were heavily draped, but she could imagine Jean-Paul returning here from the Left Bank, coming home to his wife after visiting his mistress.
The small passage door within the massive carriage entrance was opening. Helene wanted to run, but the snowy path they were on was icy in patches.
It couldn’t. It just couldn’t be Madame with her straw basket, off to market?
It was a Phillipina maid, lugging a bag of laundry.
‘Come on,’ Alexis urged. ‘What are you gawping at? I’m starving.’
Cosy in Ma Bourgogne, they ordered scrambled eggs, ham, toast and coffee, then, greedily, hungry after a night of almost non-stop sex, they asked for croque monsieur. Most other people had their hands wrapped round bowls of hot chocolate.
She and Alexis were talking about Angeline. ‘It’ll smell nice tomorrow when you get there for your lesson. She’s told me to beeswax all that absurd red leather on the walls.’
‘I’ve got a test,’ Alexis said.
‘Where are you up to in the book?’
‘Biarritz.’
‘What!’ Voici Biarritz was the very first chapter in ‘A Vous La France!’ Helene was up to chapter six, Explaining your needs, Making Choices.
‘I know. I feel as if I’ve been in bloody Biarritz for ever. But she won’t let you move on until you pass the test.’
Helene remembered Jean-Paul telling her how rigid the French teaching system was. She felt uneasy, sitting here in the Marais district, his territory –
‘And then, she yacks on. I mean, you remember all that guff in the book about the hotel posh in Biarritz?’
‘The Palais.’
‘Well Angeline has stayed there. Oh Alexis! It has the most exquisite salon. It gleams with mirrors and chandeliers. Even on the sunniest day the lights are blazing and as you relax with a cocktail you realise it is all so clever, because it is designed to make every woman in the room look enchanting.’
His take on Mademoiselle Ardoise was so mercilessly accurate, Helene swallowed a piece of toast whole. When her eyes had stopped streaming and a waiter had thoughtfully brought a glass of water, Helene said, ‘I suppose Biarritz would be a fashionable place for a Parisienne to go. Like Deauville. I mean, you can’t expect Angeline to be seen just anywhere.’
‘Sure, but she’s not Parisienne. She’s from Bordeaux. And Bordeaux women, she reliably informs me, are the most elegant and cultured in all France. Not that she’s biased, of course.’
‘What’s she doing slumming it in Paris then?’
‘Her mother came when her sister was widowed, and Angeline came to be near her mother. On Sundays they all get together and eat sticky cakes and complain about how vulgar the Parisians are.’
‘Presumably the mother and the aunt have a proper dining table. Angeline’s is always piled with books. Where do you think her guests sit, you know, when she’s entertaining?’
‘Oh, I asked her that. She turned on her arch look and said, But in bed! Naturally, we eat in bed.’
Helene shook her head. ‘Don’t believe it. Point one, she doesn’t cook. Point two, I change her sheets. I take them to the laundry. I’d know.’
She saw Alexis looking at his watch. ‘Have you got to work?’
‘Just laying up tables.’ He wasn’t looking her in the eye. ‘ What about you?’
‘No, she’s given me the day off. For my birthday.’
‘How did she know it was your birthday?’
‘Because before Angeline employs you, she requires references, date of birth, place of birth. She just stopped short of mother’s maiden name and first school.’
Walking home through increasingly slushy streets, Helene thought about the birthday business and being thirty-seven. It meant she was now looking at forty, not back at twenty. What on earth was going to happen to her?
Apart from Hilly, she had no links with her schoolfriends. Should she join Friends Reunited? You heard such stories, childhood sweethearts finding one another once more in middle age, and falling in love again. Would she meet Robbie? Part of her longed to see him, to know he was all right. Would he still like her? Would he remember? Or, if she reminded him, But you were in my class at school, would he ask, Really? What did you teach?
Above all, would he forgive her? Could he assuage the racking remorse she still felt about him? When they split, if he’d learned that the price of love was grief, what she’d learned was that an emotion worse than regret, was remorse. You could regret not posting a letter, avoiding a blind date with someone who turned out to be devastatingly good-looking, or losing your temper. But remorse struck when you knew that a deed could not be undone. That you had seriously injured someone. Remorse, the gnawing pain of conscience, was poisonous. You could convince yourself it was life-threatening.
And Hilly. What was her twin doing today, on their birthday? Helene hoped it was something reckless. As a teenager, Hilly had been something of a rebel, streaking her hair green and sneaking off after Scripture Union to meet a boy who knew how to make bombs. When he blew up the local library, he hid in the woods and Hilly smuggled him food. He was the one she married but it didn’t last and she fetched up in the safe haven represented by Olly.
Helene was waiting for her to revert to type. She had learned this at school, the way however naughty they all were in the Fourth Form, by the time they got to the Sixth it was the girl who, on day one, had come priggishly marching in with her violin case, it was she who adopted a grave expression and got herself elected Senior Prefect. Reverting to type.
It was the same with land. You could fence it (expensively), spray it, cultivate it. But if you neglected it, within a very short space of time it would be a tangle of waist-high grass, weeds, brackeny stuff and fallen trees as, remorselessly, nature reclaimed her own.
Crossing the Pont de Sully, she thought of Jean-Paul. This was ‘their’ bridge, where often, she stood at her end and watched him out of sight, walking back to the Marais and his home. Helene started to compare her two lovers. Of course she did. Both had fatally attractive smiles. Jean-Paul was kind, generous, considerate. She could tell him anything. He loved her. She had no doubt that he loved her.
And Alexis. Mile-a-minute Alexis who made her feel stunned with lust. He was unfaithful, imaginative, inventive and exciting in bed. She just hoped she could match him.
Before they parted, Helene had asked him to Sunday lunch. ‘You can meet Elodie.’
‘Oh good,’ said Alexis. ‘Does she fuck?’
Chapter Seven
In fact, over the Sunday roast chicken Helene learned more than she ever knew existed, or wanted to know, about the active anti-ageing properties of grapevine polyphenols.
They offer powerful protection, Elodie told Alexis, the future wine-maker, from the damaging effects of free radicals, which are responsible for 80% of skin ageing.
‘They stimulate the production of collagen and improve the skin’s microcirculation. It all started in the research lab at the University of Pharmacy in Bordeaux.’
Helene and Alexis exchanged glances. Elodie didn’t really need to add: ‘Mademoiselle Ardoise told me.’
*
In the kitchen of the Ardoise apartment the next day Helene found a bottle of vinegar, a can of beeswax and a note. The note instructed Miss Brook to use one t
ablespoon of the vinegar in a bucket of water to wipe down the walls, before letting them dry and applying the beeswax. It was a high-ceilinged apartment, so the job was going to take a long time.
Afterwards, as usual, Helene polished the glass work table, tidied the kitchen and bathroom and changed Mademoiselle Ardoise’s sheets. Valerie Laverie was closed on Tuesdays so Helene put the linen ready in a carrier bag to take to the shop tomorrow. She recalled wryly that she had seen the Place des Vosges maid taking the laundry in a large plastic bag, but Angeline, typically, had provided a shiny Chanel carrier, logoed of course in signature black and white.
After a morning staring at the blood-red walls and thinking, crossly, why doesn’t she get red, white and black loo rolls as well, Helene was tired and hungry as she left the apartment.
To her annoyance, she heard a familiar yapping behind her. Turning, she saw Valerie with Nanette on an extension lead. As Valerie hurried to join her, Helene thought hell, now I’ve got to speak French.
When she did her lesson, cocooned in Angeline’s prestine apartment, the book guided her to the subject of the chapter, so she had a some idea where she was going, and what her responses should be. But when someone rushed up in the street and started gabbling on, Helene didn’t know whether they were saying, Hey, there’s strawberries at the market, or Sorry, my dog has just peed on your foot.
‘I’m so glad I saw you,’ Valerie was glowing. Breathless. ‘He has been here!’
‘Who?’ Helene wanted her lunch, not this babble.
‘Monsieur Rory! He brought you a present. He said I must give it to you myself.’
Beaming, she thrust a small parcel at Helene. She couldn’t imagine what was going on, but the writing on the packet was certainly Hilly’s.
When she got home she made a chicken sandwich, poured a glass of wine and, seated on the sofa, opened the parcel. It contained a jar of Colman’s mint sauce, a nightshirt and a brief note from Hilly: ‘Email explains all.’
Helene opened her laptop. Sure enough, there it was – Subject: Rory!
Helene wondered what it was about this guy that made women talk in exclamation marks.
‘He came to the Bring and Buy! Can you believe it? Evidently the lease is up on his East Cliff house and he’s bought a place further up the coast, right on the beach and he was looking for saucepans, kitchen stuff. As it happened, there wasn’t any at the Bring and Buy but of course I’ve got tons in the garage doing nothing that the dragon doesn’t need because she either microwaves or eats with us.
‘Anyway I took him home with me. His dog, Tweed, is a right character and was trying to round up the dragon’s pooch. Then Megan came tearing in from school and the upshot is we are looking after Tweed for a few days while Rory’s in Paris.
‘By now you’ll have met him of course – he said he’d get the parcel to you personally – so you don’t need me to tell you how dishy he is. And not married. I checked!
‘Meanwhile I am very busy with my new career. Do you remember West’s Vests? We used to wear them at school. Well they still exist and deluge me with catalogues and promises of free gifts. Beryl, the Managing Director’s Personal Private Assistant, sends me pleading little notes saying they are concerned they haven’t heard from me as they regard me as a Highly Valued Customer (I had ordered two vests.) I didn’t want poor Beryl to lose her job so I put in an order but honestly it all takes hours of your life, writing all the catalogue numbers, sticking the YES sticker on the form to enter you in the £25,000 prize draw, ticking the box for a mystery present, finding the cheque book and the West’s envelope and I know I could ring up but it’s all press one and press two, despite Beryl’s assurance that the Managing Director has instructed her to give me her special attention.
‘Well thrill of thrills. In the bag along with your nightshirt was my free gift. A toy lamb. Tweed has just carried it off to the beach, so I fear the worst. But the nightshirt’s quite pretty, don’t you think?’
Helene held it up. Actually, as these things went, it wasn’t too bad. It was white with a pink trim at the neck and a deep frieze of spring flowers round the hem.
Kind of Rory McEwen to bring it, and the mint. She was sorry to have missed him. But perhaps she might run into him one night at VTR.
*
The following evening Jean-Paul arrived as usual at 5.15. Helene poured the champagne. She was wearing an ivory silk negligee, bias cut. It was her favourite. It made her feel like a Thirties movie star, seeming to flow round her body, while cleverly emphasising her curves. How marvellous to have lived then, and wear clothes like this all the time.
They sat together on the sofa and gently, he twisted her auburn curls while, as he insisted, she told him in detail about her evening with Alexis. The mystery meal, the blizzard, the upstairs room, his silk scarf.
‘Being blindfolded, when he was, when we were having sex, it was like being on a ghost train. You feel things touching your face, touching all over, but you don’t know quite what’s happening next.’
‘Did he do anything new?’
‘He said he wanted to do my bottom. I said isn’t that likely to be messy and he said if it’s not messy it isn’t real. Actually it wasn’t messy, particularly.’
Jean-Paul drew her to him, and Helene realised she’d said enough. They made love on the sofa, on the pink and gold throw she had bought in London. It was extraordinary, Helene thought, the way each time with Jean-Paul, it just got better and deeper and more intense.
When she opened her eyes she saw Jean-Paul examining the West’s nightshirt.
‘What is this, Helene?’
She told him, and he regarded her, languid in bias-cut silk. He said, ‘But a nightshirt? Chérie, I can’t imagine when you would ever wear such a thing.’
*
As they left the restaurant that night and took their usual route to Brasserie Lipp, he told her he was sorry, he wouldn’t be able to see her on Thursday evening.
‘I have to go to a rock concert. With my son.’
Helene concealed her amusement. She wondered what the sartorially correct Jean-Paul would wear to such an event.
Jean-Paul was watching the waiter scooting across with their coffee and cognacs. ‘Actually, I know Marc is younger, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing if he was more like your Alexis. I mean, more adventurous.’
‘Oh, Alexis just has that public school confidence,’ Helene said. ‘He was a City whizz-kid and now he’s taking over this vineyard and he just assumes he can pull it off.’
‘It’s harder than people imagine. It’s not the picking, that’s not too bad. The back-breaking bit is the pruning.’
Then Jean-Paul let out a long sigh. ‘Christiane is worried about Marc.’
Helene paid attention. Christiane! Usually he called her Madame, or ‘my wife.’
‘She has confided, she is worried that he doesn’t have any girlfriends. He doesn’t bring anyone home.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Well perhaps he doesn’t go for girls.’
Jean-Paul shook his head. ‘No, he’s got all the right instincts. I can tell, the way, you know, his eyes will follow a pretty girl down the street.’
‘Does he go clubbing? That’s where they usually meet.’
‘Yes, he keeps in touch with the boys who were in his band. Ripping Velcro. They’re playing at the concert.’
Helene waited. This wasn’t about Marc and his father bonding at a reunion of Ripping Velcro. There was something else, some other agenda.
Sidestepping, she asked Jean-Paul what he was going to wear to the gig.
‘Madame has suggested – a very light cashmere top. The type you wear to a summer cocktail party on a cool evening. It won’t need a shirt.’
Helene appreciated that it would be facetious of her to enquire if he was also going to sport a gold medallion. Besides, Jean-Paul seemed agitated. He was a little flushed, and there was a film of sweat on his brow.
<
br /> ‘Madame, you see, she thinks I should do more with Marc. We had a sort of – estrangement – when he left university. I had assumed he would join me in the business. I was looking forward to training him up, introducing him to the art world. But he was dead against it.’
Helene said gently, ‘Well if you’re looking for a rapprochement, the concert’s a good start. What else are you planning to do with Marc?
Jean-Paul finished his drink. Signalled for the same again. Oops, thought Helene. Champagne, two bottles of wine at dinner and now a second cognac. And Brasserie Lipp closed at forty-five minutes after midnight.
‘What I wanted to tell you, Helene, was that when I was seventeen, my uncle took me to Montmartre. To a Maison de Tolerance.’
‘A what?’
‘A Maison de Tolerance is a brothel.’
‘Really!’ Helene was fascinated. ‘How was it? Did you enjoy it?’
‘I was terrified. First of all there was this kitchen where all the girls congregated. They all knew my uncle, obviously. And it was – I didn’t know where to look – they had all their equipment, tawses and things they strapped on, all washed and hanging up above the sink. And then, oh it was dreadful, one of them took me off, to a room without a window.’
‘This was your first time?’ You never knew. Even then, some people were at it from age twelve. And, and, AND, Helene sensed that all this was just a preamble.
‘So. Did you learn much in that room?’
‘I was no good. Of course I wasn’t. At that age, you’ve thought about sex so much, well I just erupted all over the place, immediately. She was very sweet about it.’
She was being paid to be sweet, thought Helene. She said, ‘How old was she?’
‘She seemed old to me. But I suppose, about mid-twenties.’
‘And then?’
‘Well she cleaned me up, and then we talked for a bit. She was very funny, very down to earth, but not vulgar. And then, without me realising really, she started playing with me. Putting my hands, my head here and there. Showing me what to do.’
The Price of Love Page 8