by Sarah Long
Returning from school, Laura managed to find a parking space just outside her home, which gave her a small thrill of satisfaction. It irritated her that she had to meet the children from school every single day. After all, she had taken on an au pair girl for the sole purpose of relieving herself of such tiresome chores. But Asa the Finn, their current live-in nightmare, had put her foot down early on about the school run.
Apparently there was a father who had taken a shine to her – unlikely, but apparently true – who was always hanging round the school gates and pestering her for a date. Laura had advised her to take no notice, or else to try dressing a bit less like a harlot, but Asa said that it was too stressful and having a negative impact on her attempts to overcome her eating disorder. So Laura had caved in, as she always did, and now fetched the boys each afternoon, while Asa lay on her sofa and drew up charts for her fourteen-day eating plan.
Laura parked the car, badly as usual, and unloaded children and plastic bags of groceries on to the pavement. She made Charles-Edouard hold the heavy doors open while she ferried the bags through the art nouveau hallway to the coffin-sized lift. There was a plaque at eye level warning visitors that the lift carried two people only – maximum 150 kg. Laura had spent many a tense ride up to the fifth floor pressed up against the flanks of a neighbour while holding her breath and carefully avoiding eye contact after the initial brusque ‘Bonjour’.
Today, the lift was out of order. Someone must have disobeyed the two-person rule, or else two fat people – rare in Paris – had tipped the scales beyond the 150 kg limit. It was going to have to be the escalier. Huffing her way up the stairs, weighed down by her shopping, Laura passed the blank double doors of her neighbours’ apartments, so unwelcoming with their undistinguishable façades and uniform rectangular mats. You had no idea what you might find inside. Someone had told her that the French deliberately keep the exteriors of their apartments austere to hide their vast riches from the taxman.
The boys reached the fifth floor first, Pierre-Louis wheezing slightly from his asthma. The weather report had given the air quality as mauvais today, another excuse for the Parisians to be grumpy, as if they needed one. Laura dropped her bags and fumbled for her keys.
The boys pushed ahead of her into the apartment. Shedding their coats on the hall floor, they burst into the salon, switched on the television and took up their positions on the sofa.
‘Goûter, please, Mum’, said Charles-Edouard, his eyes fixed on the screen where warlike Japanese cartoon figures were attacking each other in a series of crudely macho poses.
‘Coming.’
Laura picked up the coats and followed the windowless corridor that led from the grand ‘front-of-house’ reception rooms to a dark, poky kitchen which afforded little light and an uninterrupted view of the dustbins. This was the price they paid for their grand standing. Even though they had a fabulous ‘triple living’ – another piece of tortured franglais denoting three high-ceilinged reception rooms with tall windows opening boastfully on to a view of the Eiffel Tower – the room they really spent time in was pitifully inadequate. ‘Who cares about the kitchen when we’ve got those marvellous rooms to entertain in?’ Jean-Laurent had wanted to know when they had first visited the apartment. Laura had agreed, swept up in a wave of excitement, imagining herself at the centre of a buzzing salon.
They entertained less than they had envisaged, though. It was such a long way to carry the food from the kitchen to the dining room, and anyway, Jean-Laurent worked so late. Laura spent more time picking up morsels of fish finger from the kitchen floor than dishing out witty ripostes from the chaise longue.
Asa was perched at the kitchen table, picking over an unappetising plate-load of chickpeas and raw cauliflower. She looked up with a reproachful smile.
‘Hi, Laura. We’ve run out of Evian.’
‘I know, I’ve just killed myself dragging six bottles up the stairs. The lift’s not working again.’
Asa’s consumption of mineral water was a daily source of irritation for Laura. Everyone else drank from the tap, but not Miss Nordic Purity, oh no, she had to flush out her Scandinavian insides with melted snow. Asa had once spent half an hour explaining how other spring waters were no good, as they came from the polluted earth, whereas Evian came from the uncontaminated mountain tops that were depicted on each arm-stretchingly heavy two-litre bottle.
Asa helped herself to a bottle and watched Laura put away the shopping.
‘Oh good, you got some more carrots. Are they organic?’
‘No idea.’
Laura couldn’t understand why Asa was so interested in the provenance of her food, since everything she ate was discreetly regurgitated in the bathroom shortly afterwards.
‘I was wondering if you might babysit tonight, Asa. I thought we might go to the cinema.’
‘Sorry, I’ve got a meeting. It’s Tuesday.’
‘Oh, of course, it’s Tuesday, silly me.’
Silly me, thought Laura, for thinking there might be some point in having you here, hogging the kitchen table, eating my food and drinking my mountain water and passing your superior remarks about nutritional balance.
‘How’s it going, anyway, the programme?’
‘Oh, Devon is very happy with me. I managed to eat two rice cakes at lunchtime, but he would have preferred three.’
Laura was not sure about Devon. A fifty-something American who claimed to be happily married, he spent a lot of time offering fatherly support to the vulnerable young girls he met at the Overeaters Anonymous meetings in the basement of the American church. Laura had never met him, but he rang every day to speak to Asa. Apparently he was her programme sponsor so it was all supposed to be above board.
‘Well, you’re certainly making up for it now,’ said Laura as Asa set about cutting up half the contents of the fruit bowl, which she carefully mixed into a generous dish of fat-free yoghurt. ‘Would you mind leaving a couple of pears for the boys’ tea?’
‘Mum! Come on, gouterl’ Charles-Edouard’s command rang down the corridor. ‘Coming.’ Laura rescued the pears from the depleted fruit bowl and opened a packet of biscuits.
‘Do you want orange juice or apple juice?’ she shouted, raising her voice to be heard above Power Rangers. Really, children just had too many choices these days.
A moment’s consultation, then, ‘I’ll take orange and Pierre-Louis will take apple.’
As if they were in a restaurant. Which they were, really. A hotel-restaurant with a staff of one. You couldn’t count Asa’s sulky contributions to the domestic household effort.
‘OK, coming.’
Laura loaded two glasses and two plates on to the tray and carried it down the corridor to set before her sons.
‘Here you are. Would you like omelette or chicken nuggets for tea?’
‘Chicken nuggets. Could you move out the way, please, I can’t see.’
Charles-Edouard frowned as he craned his neck. Laura decided, as she did most days and with negligible effect, that it was time to assert herself.
‘I think we’ll have the telly off now. Why don’t you do your homework straight away, then it’s done?’
Charles-Edouard looked at her with a contemptuous sneer that wouldn’t disgrace an adolescent. ‘It’s much too early, we haven’t even had tea yet.’
‘So? You don’t always have to leave it until the last minute.’
‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘No. Asa is.’
‘Good. I don’t like Asa. She doesn’t let us watch TV. I hate it when Asa babysits.’
‘Don’t be horrible about Asa,’ said Laura, wondering if her dislike of the girl had been subconsciously transmitted to her son, or whether he had simply inherited her own keen judgement of character.
Laura contemplated the tea/bath/homework/bed routine stretching ahead in all its dreary predictability. At least, she thought, there was some compensation for being confined to quarters. She and Jean-Laurent would b
e able to spend an intimate evening in on their own without the omnipresent Asa. She would make sure the children were safely tucked up in bed before he got back, so she could give him her full and undivided attention. She would change into one of those flimsy pieces of lingerie she had bought this morning, and maybe wear the jacket from the Kenzo suit. Unfortunately the skirt needed altering – she had left it with the shop for them to let out an extra inch or two around the waistband – but her old elasticated Ghost peasant number would go perfectly well. She would go to town on the food, too, something nice and rich from this month’s Cuisine et Vins de France, with a proper pudding, maybe a pressed chocolate cake. They would dine at the formal table, looking out on to the Eiffel Tower, and Jean-Laurent would talk her through his day.
It was marvellous that she had so little stress now in her daily life that she was free to give full attention to her husband. So much better than the old days in London when she was caught up in her own career and barely had time to listen to him. Poor love, it had been so tough for him: he used to complain that he was the forgotten member of the family, lurking at the bottom of her busy list of priorities along with putting the rubbish out twice a week.
Thank God those days were well and truly over; now she had become the perfect French wife. And tonight Jean-Laurent would be enthroned in his rightful place as her Number One Priority. She would make sure they were safely cuddled up in bed before the heart-sinking sound of Asa’s key in the lock announced her return to the fold and the end of their glorious intimacy.
She went back to the kitchen and took a packet of chicken nuggets and a magret de canard from the freezer.
‘Rice or pasta?’ she bellowed back to her boys. Why did she always offer them choices? Why not just put it in front of them? Why try to please them all the time? The unhelpful answer came ringing back.
‘Pierre-Louis will take rice and I will take pasta.’
It served her right for asking.
TWO
Three hours later, Laura’s master plan for a seductive dîner à deux was running perfectly to plan. The children were in bed and she was snipping the ends off the haricots verts, while listening to the Archers crackling faintly from the radio that was placed against the window to minimise interference. Radio 4 played a larger part in her life now that she lived abroad. She had never had time to listen to it much in London, when the Archers coincided with handover time with the nanny and the phone was always ringing.
Jean-Laurent used to get home earlier in those days, when he was studying for his MBA. Her younger man. He was usually back before her, and she would come home from the office to find him bouncing Charles-Edouard on his knees, a picture of carefree youthfulness, his student files tossed carelessly on the kitchen counter while the nanny smiled indulgently as she prepared the baby’s bottle. He liked the way she dressed then, in tight powerful clothes. ‘I love to be your kept man,’ he would say as he slipped his hand up her short skirt. ‘You know, I just have this thing about older women. Especially businesswomen in tiny little suits.’
He had been her lodger before he became her husband. Her girlfriends had been quite jealous when her advertisement in Loot turned up the good-looking Frenchman – he was certainly a cut above the sad cases that usually came crawling out of the woodwork in response to her demand for a single professional male. Not that she had been advertising for a boyfriend, of course. She did have friends who had gone down that route: finding themselves single at the age of thirty, they had commendably set about doing something about it and joined discreet dating agencies called things like Drawing Down the Moon or Reining In a Man. Her old school friend Caroline Murray had tried placing an ad – she called it an advert, though Laura kept telling her this was old hat and immediately marked her out as unmarriageable – in Time Out’s lonely hearts, then read out the replies to an assembled committee of girlfriends who helped her sift them into two piles: Too Sad to Contemplate and Worth a Sniff.
Laura, however, had been perfectly happy with her single status. She had already had one live-in boyfriend, so she knew she was capable of maintaining a happy relationship. She had reacted well when Simon had ended it, explaining that he wasn’t really ready to settle down and therefore it just wasn’t fair on her for them to carry on. She had thanked him for his honesty and agreed that they must remember the good times, that in no way did it represent five years down the pan. When he became engaged to someone else three months later, she had spent a weekend weeping under the duvet, but then emerged, calm and resolute, to count her blessings and remind herself that thirty was hardly the end of the line, that spinster was a joke word from another century and that the notion of being on the shelf was a cruel legacy from an age before sisters were doing it for themselves.
So when she advertised for a professional male housemate, it was simply a matter of seeking a balance in the house she owned in Stockwell. She already had one girl lodger and she didn’t want to turn the household into a seething pit of female hormones, all thin skin, empathy and synchronised cycles. She imagined she might get a sensible chartered accountant who ate square meals and played football at weekends; she liked the idea of his sports kit hanging up to dry alongside the lacy G-strings.
But when Jean-Laurent turned up on the doorstep she was, frankly, bowled over. He was so young, just twenty-two, and spoke English with a halting French accent you felt had been designed for the sole purpose of seducing recently dumped romantic Englishwomen. He was studying, he said without irony, to become a Big Businessman, and he had a copy of Porter’s Competitive Advantage tucked under his perfectly muscled arm as if to prove it.
She took him upstairs to show him the bedroom and stood back to let him in. He brushed against her as he passed, and as he walked over to look out of the window – at a rather frightening sink estate; she hoped to God it wouldn’t put him off – she took in his jeans, the way they hung around his hips with a louche insouciance that only really works on bodies not long out of adolescence.
He turned to her and smiled. Dark hair, blue eyes, a miraculous fusion of Celtic fringe and hot Latin lover.
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘And I like you, too.’
Laura tried to hold his steady gaze but was overcome by an old maidish flutter and quickly led him down to the kitchen for a mug of tea so they could continue the interview in less intimate surroundings.
‘I’ve got two more people coming to see it tonight, so I’ll call you after that,’ she said, trying to appear impartial.
He raised his eyebrows in mock dismay.
‘You mean you don’t want me?’
Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. The idea of not wanting him was so ludicrous it was beyond the realms of possibility. Not wanting him was about as likely as fancying Neil Kinnock.
‘Well, you might like to think about it,’ she said. ‘Stockwell isn’t exactly South Kensington, after all. Although it’s only five stops on the tube,’ she added quickly. Was she crazy, trying to put him off?
He twisted his beautiful face into a pout of disagreement.
‘No, South Kensington is full of French people. While I am here I want to live in the real London, with real English people. Like you.’
‘How long is your course?’ she asked, already in a panic in case he said six months.
‘Two years.’
Two whole years. With him under her roof. What bliss. She hoped he couldn’t see how much pleasure his answer had given her, and switched the conversation to the safe and general.
‘And what do you make of us over here? Us “roshifs”? Do we live down to your expectations?’
‘Oh, I like the people here. Very nice, very friendly. But you know, I think the English men are strange.’
‘Strange?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking at her meaningfully over his Princess Diana mug. ‘I think they do not look after their women.’
Laura knew he would look after her. He would cherish her. He would worship the ground she walked
on. He wouldn’t say he wasn’t ready to settle down and then get engaged to somebody else three months later.
He moved into her house the following week, and into her bed a month later. Laura was ecstatic. On Saturday mornings they lay entwined together while he read her passages from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for Executives.
It was extraordinary, he said, how the battle plans of some old Chinaman who was a contemporary of Confucius held such relevance in today’s business world. ‘Conquerors estimate in their temple before the war begins,’ he would proclaim as she came back to the bedroom with two cups of coffee. ‘The great general entraps the enemy but retains his own freedom.’
Then, as she took off her dressing gown and slipped under the covers, he would pull her towards him and get straight down to business. ‘The best military strategy is to use superior positioning,’ he would murmur as he took up his own vantage point. ‘Cross the mountains by following the valleys,’ he would add, with a light and thrilling caress, then, slightly less erotically, ‘When crossing a swamp, move quickly . . . keep away from gorges, hollows and crevices which form natural traps and snares.’
They would get up some time in the afternoon and go shopping to Sainsbury’s at Nine Elms. He always pushed the trolley, pausing at every shelf to study packaging for evidence of brand advantage. ‘You know, Laura, the troops of a skilled leader are like the simultaneously responding serpent that lived in the mountains of Chang. If its head is threatened, its tail attacks, if its tail is threatened, its head attacks. And if the body is threatened, both head and tail attack together. Brilliant.’