Tessa looked sceptically at Ted who gave her a broad grin. ‘Your mother told you this?’
‘In a much, much longer version over many nights and with many deviations and variations over the years. But that was it, in essence. I told you she was special.’ He raised his glass to Tessa and winked. ‘I think she was trying to tell me something about paternity. My own, maybe. My father was a lot older than her and much absent. I used to think about it over the years, though I never confronted her.’
Outside a cloud had burst. They could hear the rain splattering on pavement and awning. A couple came excitedly through the doors, chose the table next to theirs and sprinkled them with wetness as they removed jackets.
‘Some dessert while we sit it out?’
Tessa nodded. ‘And the moral of your tale?’ she asked a little breathlessly, wondering whether he was offering to act the troubadour to her lady.
‘Just what I was getting to. Long way round.’
Irony played over his features.
‘Well, when I grew into the age of reason, I used to think it was that women are our touchstones for nature. To witness a birth is to know by the evidence of our senses, to know with certainty that the child is the mother’s child. Hers by nature. Biologically hers. As for the father, well… they say that one per cent of males are responsible for partnering sixteen percent of females.’
He flashed her a rueful smile which she didn’t know what to do with. She cleared her throat but he rushed on before she could speak.
‘All of which means that paternity has to be authorized, confirmed by law or by belief, an act of faith. Like Mary and the holy spirit. Or the public records office. And our entire civilisation has been built on this difference between men and women. The entire apparatus of law and property came about because we can only be certain about maternity. Nature doesn’t like the male, so he has had to defend himself from it, shore himself up. Now we’re a little more even.’
This was not the moral Tessa had expected. Or wanted.
‘So that’s why you’re a biotech enthusiast,’ she said with more bitterness in her voice than she had intended. ‘Get rid of women, get rid of the natural altogether. Mix goats and pigs in a test-tube.’
‘No. No. You’re jumping to conclusions.’ He eyed her shrewdly. ‘Though you see what a topsy-turvy world we’re moving into. We’re in the midst of a revolution and half the time we don’t know it, can’t bring ourselves to know it. It’s too distressing. And too exciting. I suspect that’s why we’re in such a mess about sex roles. Technoscience has ruptured the link between mother and nature. You can no longer know for certain, by the evidence of your senses, whether the mother you see giving birth to a child, is really that child’s biological mother. And presto,’ he snapped his fingers like some cabaret magician. ‘Everything, all identity, is up for grabs. Brilliant.’
‘And only you scientists by administering your little DNA fingerprint tests can tell us for certain.’
‘You don’t like this conversation.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re an old-fashioned girl who’d like her hot water bottle.’
Tessa shrugged.
‘And a child.’ He said it softly. ‘Presumably your own?’
She met his eyes for a fierce second, then looked away. ‘The rain’s stopped.’
‘Good. Let’s go. Though I don’t know if you’re gonna enjoy where I’m gonna take you.’
Moments later they were standing in a small boutique on the Rue Jacob. On folds of muted blue velvet, chains of thickly coiled silver, archly linked bracelets, earrings roped and thonged, pendants with cryptic fetishes rested like so many miniature items of bondage laid out for a secret rite.
Tessa suppressed a shiver. She looked up at Ted without knowing quite what to say.
‘Like it? Come and meet the artist. She’s an old friend.’
The woman he introduced her to looked neither old, nor like the kind of woman who could ever be a friend. She was tall and blonde with a blondness that smelled of diamonds and villas on the Riviera and with lips that looked as if they had been stung by a whole hive of bees carrying paintbrushes.
‘Sylvie dos Santos. Tessa Hughes.’
Stung lips curved into the glimmer of a smile. Fringed hair swished gracefully and Sylvie dos Santos put long cool fingers into Tessa’s unwilling hand.
‘Enchantée.’ She dangled a pair of keys towards Ted. ‘Enjoy.’
With a glimmer of apprehension, Tessa wondered what it was that was to be enjoyed. Wondered, too, as Ted led her through vast double doors into a courtyard, whether she had made a serious mistake.
‘There. Seemed to me it would be more fun to drive out to the fair.’ He ushered her into a white, soft-top Mercedes. ‘And quicker.’
‘A fair. I see.’ Tessa slid into upholstery and mocked her own dark fears. ‘Your Sylvie dos Santos is a very fetching woman with a very fetching car,’ she murmured as he manoeuvred the narrow streets with the dexterity of a native.
‘Mmm…’ Ted wove his way through cars, shifted gears with pleasurable aplomb, came to a sudden halt at a red light as they crossed the Pont des Invalides. ‘Quite often the boys make the most gorgeous women.’
‘What?’ Tessa knew she hadn’t heard him correctly.
He revved along the opposite quay, swung down a ramp so that they were on a level with the river. He laughed. ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but Sylvie used to be a boy.’
‘What?’ Tessa repeated inanely.
Ted threw her a comical look. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to go all puritanical on me.’
‘I think I am. Puritanical, I mean. You’re not serious. About that woman. Sylvie?’
He took her hand and placed it on his thigh. ‘You weren’t so very puritanical last night,’ he said softly, then laughed. ‘And I’m perfectly serious. I told you identity was up for grabs these days. Sylvie was a very unhappy young man whom one of my sons befriended in Rio. And then she became a woman. I helped her find a clinic, all that medical side. And then she moved to Paris. She’s talented, beautiful. She’s okay.’
By the time they had whizzed along a stretch of motorway then slowed into a suburb and arrived at the vast stony expanse of the Chateau de Vincennes, Tessa thought she was probably just about okay, too. She stole a glance at the man at her side. She liked the decisive ruggedness of his profile, the sprawling size of him. She liked the feel of his thigh too, beneath the soft wool of his trousers. His enthusiasm. For everything. She hadn’t thought of Stephen or felt resentful for at least an hour. She cleared her throat. ‘And what is this fair you’re taking me too?’
‘Pharmaceuticals. Instruments. I’ve got a meeting at Stand G in twenty minutes or so. It shouldn’t take too long.’
He swung into a road which cut through graceful woods, then into a car park surrounded by trees. A path led them to a large exhibition hall. Inside everything was shrill voices, a dazzle of light leaping off shiny surfaces, a bevy of computer screens.
Ted was evidently in his element. ‘If we lose each other, or you feel like wandering, we can meet back at the main door at about five. Okay?’
Tessa nodded. But she didn’t stray from his side as he whizzed round from stand to stand, pouring information in her ear. About new drugs and magically constituted hormones. About nerve growth and diagnostic techniques and probe assays and lasers and Ciba and Roche. He paused to pick up leaflets here and there, stopped for a moment to talk to one white-coated man and then another and another. She had no idea whether he knew any of them or whether the friendly manner was simply Ted Knight.
Stand G bore the name Pharmacor. Behind its polished counter, stood a striking long-legged woman in a black suit, which showed no trace of blouse beneath its severe jacket. Her dark up-swept hair left her ears free to display heavy thonged rings. These bore a distinct resemblance to the jewellery Tessa had seen earlier.
The woman moved towards Ted and smiled at him from sultry
eyes. Tessa stood aside. She had no doubt, this time, that here indeed was an old friend.
‘Give me a few minutes.’ Ted left her to follow the woman through a door at the back of the stand.
Tessa waited. She sat on a chair at the stand’s side and glanced nervously through a stack of glossy company reports. Pictures of women and men in laboratories, white masked and capped and goggled. Vials and bottles and syringes. Children of all colours and sizes benefiting from drugs, offering testimonials.
As she flicked pages and looked round her, she realised that she felt like some fish who had strayed from its familiar school and blundered into an alien sea. Headier, more brightly coloured waters, filled with vivid objects, exuding danger. Stephen had never taken her into these waters, though presumably they were his as well.
The minutes passed and with them came a glimmer of jealousy for the woman who was holding Ted in that back room. Unreasonable, she told herself. She had only known the man for a little over a day. But it told her she cared, though she didn’t quite yet know, sensibly, what it was she cared about.
To prove to herself that she didn’t care any more than she ought, she got up and started to walk around. She scanned incomprehensible video diagrams, watched miniature films with commentary in both French and English. At one stand where she paused for a film on HIV research, she was approached by a sweet-faced young woman who barraged her with information. Tessa thanked her in her clumsy French, then with a quick glance at her watch, pleaded an appointment and darted away. Ted would already be by the doors.
But he wasn’t. She waited with a sinking heart. That woman had kept him. By the time six o’clock had come and gone, she began to chastise herself for her own stupidity. She was chasing daydreams, like a schoolgirl, instead of taking her life in hand. Though Ted had seemed to be giving her exactly the confidence she needed to confront it. Gone now. Evaporated into a mist. Not that she could blame Ted. She couldn’t compete with the woman she had seen. She was too conventional. It was too long since she had engaged in passionate games. Stephen’s fault. Her own, too, if she was honest. The honesty didn’t taste good.
She started towards the taxi rank, joined a queue, had almost reached its front when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Ted.
‘I thought I’d missed you,’ Tessa murmured.
He muttered a brief apology, barely looked at her. There was an angry set to his shoulders. The scowl on his face transformed his features into something she hadn’t imagined. He looked hard, cruel.
He swung the car abruptly into gear and raced them along the wooded road, dusky with shadows now that evening had set in. When they met a snarl of traffic, she heard him curse beneath his breath.
‘Has something gone wrong? Would you like to drop me off somewhere?’ she finally forced herself to ask.
He gave her a blank stare, then focussed on her with evident difficulty. ‘No, no. Just a hiccup. But I have to get back to the hotel. Check some things out. Do a little work. Rearrange a meeting.’
He didn’t speak again until they had reached Notre Dame where with an abrupt change of direction he veered into a small semi-circular street and stopped short.
‘Can you wait here? It’ll save me a ticket.’ He suddenly smiled his charming smile and raised her fingers to his lips. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Tessa echoed.
She turned round to watch him go. With a start she realised they were next to the street where she had sat yesterday morning staring so vigilantly at a door. Ted now seemed to be heading straight for it. She got out of the car and stared after him. But she couldn’t see beyond the corner and with a shrug, she sat down again.
He was back within a few minutes, visibly more cheerful.
‘Sorry about all that. Business sometimes has to come before pleasure. And there’s just a little more of it.’ He stroked her hair. ‘Nice. I prefer blondes.’
Tessa wondered whether he was comparing her to the woman at the Pharmacor stand. She wanted to ask him whom he had just been to see, whether it might be a certain Simone Lalande Debray and whether she was a brunette too. But before she could phrase the question, he was chuckling, veering them into traffic with brash carelessness.
‘You remember your Raymond Chandler? There are blondes and blondes… That wonderful catalogue?’
Tessa didn’t like to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. She made a sound which was neither yes nor no.
‘Well, I suspect, though I’m not quite sure yet, you’re the perky, companionable sort, full of good old common sense. And you can toss a truck driver over your shoulder without missing a sentence out of the editorial in whatever highbrow paper it is that you read. Not the metallic one who has a disposition as soft as a sidewalk. Nor the shimmering, hanging on your arm sort, who develops that goddamned headache as soon as you take her home. No, the first.
Tessa wasn’t sure about the description, but she was pleased he was smiling. ‘Speaking of editorials, did you find me any prospective authors at the conference this morning?’
‘Not sure. You can always try me.’
‘Do you write?’
‘No. But fifty’s as good a time to start as any. Don’t you think?’
She raised mocking eyes to him, ‘You’ll do me a history of headhunting, no doubt. Blonde heads maybe. I’m not sure that’s quite in the press’s line…’
‘Maybe not,’ he said a little ruefully. ‘But there are other subjects I can think of.’
Tessa laughed. ‘Like the provenance of babies. Children and the Ethics of Origin. Something like that.’
‘Now there’s an idea. Might even surprise you and do it.’
They had pulled into an underground car park and were making their way towards the gilded glass doors of his hotel. In the lift, Ted rubbed his face with a grin. ‘But first I could use a shave. What do you think?’ He drew her fingers over his cheeks.
Inexplicably an image of the garden in her childhood home in Sussex came into her mind. The children were the weeders. Every summer Saturday, they went out into the garden and pulled and dug and cut creepers and twiners and lush moss and clover and dandelions. By the next day, as if by magic, there was a whole new crop. ‘Fertile soil,’ her father said. ‘Grows everything. Won’t stop.’
‘Mmmm,’ Tessa murmured, then suddenly laughed. ‘Look.’ She pointed to a small engraved notice beneath the mirrors of the lift. ‘A perfect rendition of French into English.’
She read aloud. ‘Please leave your values at the front desk.’
‘I’d be happy to oblige, Ma’am.’ He grinned and kissed her.
The next morning dawned as bright and crisply clear as Ted’s eyes when he waved her off at the door of her own hotel.
‘I’ll be back at eleven-thirty. Only got one meeting and a trip to American Express. So I’ll be punctual this time.’ His gaze was rueful. ‘And don’t forget to check out.’
Tessa went up to her barely used room and packed and wondered what the surprise Ted had promised would be. He had first mentioned it last night. She had left him to work in quiet and gone back to her own hotel to change and have a leisurely bath before dinner. Lord knew she needed the bath after what they had got up to. It made her realise that Stephen and she had never really had sexual passion, not that she could remember anymore, in any case. Not with her. She prodded her thoughts away from Stephen.
When Ted had come to pick her up last night, he had been as gleeful as a child to whom Santa had delivered a long-desired present. When she had mentioned it, he simply said he had missed her. He liked having her around. No-one she realised had said that to her in a long time.
As she folded her clothes into a case grown too small, it passed through Tessa’s mind that she had carried out none of her intentions in coming to Paris. She really ought to go back to that conference which should be ending about now and hunt down Stephen and have it out with him. There was just about enough time for it. And she would relish the look of astonishment on his face
as she flounced off and said she had a date with a better man. With the emphasis on man.
But she really didn’t want Stephen invading the dream she was living. There was a danger that he would confront her with his blurry uncomprehending eyes and reduce her to non-entity. To silence, too. No. The confrontation could wait.
In the midst of that last night of endless loving, a fantasy had pounced on her. It still caressed her with its soft paws. Another few days and she would cajole Ted into leaving those condoms aside. He had already asked her whether she wanted to accompany him on the next leg of his journey. East to Prague. The idea enticed her. Even more did the distant prospect of a softly rounded belly, a child, the occasional visit from a loving father.
As punctually as he had promised, Ted was waiting for her in front of the hotel on the Rue du Dragon. They wove their way through Paris traffic onto the Periphérique, and then past Fontainebleau onto the A10 towards the south-west. The vibrant rhythms of a tango filled the car and punctuated the flat expanse of fields.
‘I used to come mushroom picking around here,’ Ted boomed over the music, then turned it down. ‘If it were the right season, I’d take you off on one of these side roads and into a little wood.’
Tessa shot him a glance and thought she had a pretty good idea what he got up to in little woods. ‘You’d have to watch out. I’m an expert on mushrooms. I could feed you some meaty chunks of amanita muscaria and send you off into twitches and wild hallucinations. And you’d wake feeling elated. Or dead, of course.’
‘Dangerous woman.’ Ted overtook a car with swift precision.
‘Dangerous, common little fungi. Pretty though.’
‘I’ll have to watch you carefully.’
‘You do that.’ Tessa laughed.
‘And where’d you pick up all your lore? No, don’t tell me. You edited a book on mushrooms.’
‘I had a world expert for a teacher.’
‘No kidding.’ He shot a glance at her. ‘A lover, I imagine. You have that murderous look in your eye.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 8