by Sarah Long
Sometimes, to be honest, she did get a bit tired of Sun Tzu.
‘I can’t see any snakes in here, though, Jean-Laurent, only ready meals, luckily. Do you want Goan fish curry or Chicken Tikka Masala?’
‘I don’t mind. But not that moussaka you got last time. One day, Laura, you will learn to cook. I will take you to live in France, we will go to the market and you will be ashamed to think of those days when you used to insult your French lover by giving him frozen food only fit for a dog.’
But he didn’t really care. He agreed with her that an hour wasted in the kitchen was an hour that could be spent in the bedroom, and the bedroom was where they liked to be.
Laura’s friends were gratifyingly jealous when she arrived at parties with her new French boyfriend. The women found him charming; his foreigness set him apart and added value to his already striking looks. The men ganged up defensively, agreeing that his failure to enjoy sinking six pints of bitter was clear evidence of his dodginess. Her gay friend Christopher hoped they were right, and didn’t bother to disguise the fact that he was green with envy.
‘God, that boy’s hot,’ he said one night, watching Jean-Laurent jiving to REM’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ (like all French people, he always danced ‘le rock’, 1950s style, no matter how inappropriate the music). ‘Do pass him on to me when you’ve finished with him. He’s obviously a woof. No offence, Laura, but when a girl gets a boyfriend who’s so much more attractive than her, it’s always a sure sign.’
Dinner parties were a little more difficult. Jean-Laurent’s English was fast improving but the quick-fire references over the dinner table left him feeling mute and foreign.
‘What did Clovis mean?’ he would ask, ‘about his boss being a bitter little redbrick person?’
‘Oh, it’s just a load of snobbish old nonsense,’ Laura reassured him. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you as an escape from all that stuff.’
When he became her lover, he still carried on paying the rent; she didn’t want it to seem that she was paying for his services. But of course she financed his lifestyle. He was only a student, albeit one with appetising prospects, whereas she was coining it in at the agency. Clients loved her – she was smart and a bit posh, but not so much as to make them feel inferior. Other people at the agency might smirk when the marketing director of Bartons bakery boasted that he probably had the best TV set in Orpington, but Laura would nod appreciatively and ask how wide the screen was, and whether he had integral speakers with Dolby surround-sound.
Jean-Laurent was fascinated by her tales from the office. She represented the world that awaited him, an arena where all his carefully learned business precepts would be put into action, where he would Learn to Fight, Do it Right, Burn the Bridges and Seize the Day as instructed by Sun Tzu. Until he arrived at that great day, he was happy to rely on Laura for providing food and wine and the company of those who were really starting to make a difference in their chosen careers. As a Frenchman he understood the importance of knowing the right people, and realised his employment prospects could only be enhanced by living with the youngest group account director of Soul, Baring and Fuchs.
When Laura fell pregnant with Charles-Edouard, it was to Jean-Laurent’s credit that he didn’t turn a hair. Other young men of his age might have been a little less calm, might even have harboured dark thoughts of fleeing on the next plane back to Paris, but Jean-Laurent had expressed his sincere joy, proposed marriage and suggested that the house should now be put in their joint names since they were effectively to become an economic unit.
The female lodger tactfully departed and was in time replaced by a solidly built Slovakian nanny whose unswerving interest in Jean-Laurent’s business studies might have presented a threat had she not looked like the back of a bus. ‘My employers are a wonderful couple,’ she would boom out to anyone who crossed the threshold. ‘I respect and admire them enormously.’
After completing his course, Jean-Laurent was snapped up by one of those conglomerates that you always associate with soap powder but who also make ice cream and instant custard. When his lithe torso slipped effortlessly out of his student jeans and into a navy blue suit, Laura felt reassured that the age gap between them had suddenly narrowed, and celebrated by conceiving a second child. By the time Pierre-Louis was born, they were just like any other married couple. Everyone said you would never think she was so much older, they looked so good together.
And now, several years down the line, it was payback time and Laura had been served up the perfect Parisian life of leisure. The student had become the serious earner, the career woman was now the kept woman. As an investment, Jean-Laurent had proved to be a sound bet, Laura thought smugly, inserting slivers of garlic into the dark red flesh of the duck breast as the jaunty theme tune of the Archers faded into the self-righteous urgency of Robin Cook preparing to Face the Facts.
She switched off the radio and poured a generous measure of extra virgin olive oil into a cup. It was funny how all olive oil claimed to be extra virgin. You couldn’t get the raddled old slightly soiled variety, which presumably must exist somewhere, probably in Italy where olive-growing peasants sacrificed all the virginal stuff to the export market and made do with the dregs.
She must look out for it next time they were in Umbria – it could make an interesting addition to her storecup-board. She was getting bored to death with extra virgin olive oil, to be honest. Not like vinegar, where you had infinite choice. Raspberry, balsamic, cider, sherry, white wine with a sprig of dried-up tarragon hanging down inside the bottle. She could remember a time when all you got was malt vinegar. Delicious on chips, but unthinkable on salad.
Uncorking a bottle of chilled Bourgogne Aligoté, Laura prepared herself a Kir. The thick blackcurrant syrup swirled into the wine, creating a deliciously adult version of Ribena. Quality of life – that was what they had, and now, with dinner prepared, she was free to enjoy her aperitif.
How different this was from when she worked. She thought back to that terrible time when she had returned to work from maternity leave after Pierre-Louis was born. Exhausted by night feeds and with a trying toddler competing for her attention, she had been looking forward to reclaiming the order of a structured adult world. But she hadn’t reckoned on her emotional fragility, and found herself wounded by snide remarks from colleagues like, Here she was again after a nice rest, and, How long before she popped out another one and took a few more months off?
Her boss, though legally obliged to appear supportive, had let slip that he found her rather less on the ball than she used to be. Once, during the Coffee and Networking session at a conference, she had forgotten a senior client’s name and had been gauche enough to ask him to remind her of it. ‘Buck up, Laura,’ her boss had said. ‘You’re not at the mother and baby group now, you know!’
She had toughened up after that and battled on, but like a trapped animal she began obsessing about finding a way out. It took two years for the opportunity to present itself. Two more years of hard grind until Jean-Laurent was offered a big job in Paris and his wife the chance to become the passive Trailing Spouse. Laura had thrown in the towel with unrestrained rejoicing and jumped on the long slide to domestic happiness. She remembered the relief, how thrilled she had been when she had told her friends. ‘Do you realise,’ one stressed-out working mother had said, ‘that you are the envy of every woman in this room?’
She carried her glass into the triple living and contemplated the perfection of her current life. While her friends in London were stuck on the treadmill, grinding up another rung on the oh-so-illusionary career ladder, here she was with nothing to do except look forward to a civilised evening with her gorgeous young husband who at this very moment was working his socks off to support his devoted family.
They usually ate in the kitchen, but tonight she was showing her gratitude by setting the table in the dining room with the fussy clutter of crockery, glasses and serviettes that Jean-Laurent liked
to sit down to. He had a very French respect for the importance of les arts de la table, and she had even put out the shell-encrusted centrepiece that he had bought her for Christmas, although she privately thought it rather ugly and not worth the space it took up. It was specially designed to support a plate of coquilles Saint-Jacques, and came with a set of eight gold-sprayed giant shells containing clusters of imitation pearls that you were supposed to put in front of each guest’s place setting.
Laura moved into the salon and settled into an armchair to watch the flashing lights of the lift slowly climbing its way up the Eiffel Tower. A view that people would die for, the stuff of a million postcards, and a far cry from the problem estate which was all you could see from her sitting room in Stockwell. Strange to think that they had wanted to pull down the Eiffel Tower after the Great Exhibition. Aesthetes found that its metal lines defaced the city skyline. No danger of that now. A few years ago they had hired a team of mountaineers to paint it. She used to watch them from her window, dangling off their cords, holding paintbrushes instead of ice picks.
Laura was on her second Kir when the phone rang. She walked through the grandiose double door to the third room of the triple living, which served as an office. Or a study. They couldn’t decide what to call it, both functions being unnecessary to their home life. She picked up the receiver.
‘Allo?’ She answered with the standard French salutation which always made her friends from England laugh. ‘’Allo, ‘allo,’ they would reply jokily, getting into continental mode in anticipation of the nice free trip to Paris they were usually calling to fix up.
This time, though, it was her friend Francine.
‘Salut, Laura. Je te dérange?’ In spite of their reputation for rudeness, the French were always terribly apologetic on the phone, anxious in case they were disturbing some intimate moment. They certainly never called during mealtimes; that would be an unspeakable invasion of privacy.
‘No, not at all, how are you, Francine?’
‘Oh, ça va. I am just ringing to confirm dinner on Thursday.’
‘Yes, that’s fine, we’re looking forward to it.’
‘Bien. You have our address? So here is the code: AB 596. Ciao.’
Laura jotted the numbers down in her diary. After nightfall, most apartment buildings became impenetrable fortresses, accessible only to those equipped with the secret code. Gone were the days of the nosy concierge who knew exactly who was invited where. As a vigilante she had been supplanted by an electronic panel, which left her only the unglamorous tasks of cleaning the porch and dragging out the wheelie-bins each evening. No wonder the French considered it a job best left to the Portuguese.
Jean-Laurent de Saint Léger, twenty-nine and gorgeous, was reading a business book in his office. He spent quite a lot of time reading business books. He kept a pile beside his side of the bed, and a back-up supply at work, where he was earmarked as the bright young hope of marketing. He couldn’t get on a plane these days without picking up two or three slim manuals at the airport bookshop, books carefully targeted at jet-setters like himself who put them on their expenses.
Today he was flicking through Stress and Counterstress – Guidelines for Executives and High Achievers. He liked the message that stress was necessary. Giant sloths and koalas hung from trees and had no stress, and were now endangered through their loss of natural defences. That couldn’t happen to him. The point about being a big shot was that your stress level lifted you above the little people. Big shots did not creep home for a quiet night in with overweight older wives. No sir. Big shots met their girlfriends in buzzy happening places where they could be admired.
He reached for the phone and fiddled with his pen while he waited for Laura to answer. He was surprised how adept he had become at lying.
‘Hallo, it’s me. Look, I’m sorry, but something’s come up, and I’m going to have to have dinner with François to sort it out.’
Laura’s heart sank. Her careful preparations were all for nothing then.
Jean-Laurent heard the disappointment in her silence.
‘Hallo? Laura?’
She pulled herself together. She shouldn’t be ungrateful – it was hardly his fault that he had to make sacrifices for his high-powered job. She tried to lighten up.
‘Dinner with François, as opposed to dinner with André?’ she said brightly.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, just an allusion to a masterpiece of the French cinema. Don’t worry, you’re French, you wouldn’t know it.’
‘I’m sorry, it’s a real bore. I wish I could come home instead.’
‘It is a bore actually. I’ve done a magret de canard.’
‘Oh no, I thought maybe you would have eaten with the children. Are they OK?’
‘They’re all right. Pierre-Louis got eight out of ten for dictation. Not that that can be of any real interest to you, in your great office crisis.’
‘It’s much more interesting to me, actually, but you know what François is like, he gets very stressed out before these big conferences, so I just need to run through a few things with him.’
‘Well, he’s the boss. Oh, Francine rang. Are you still all right for Thursday?’
‘Oh . . . yes . . .’
He sounded evasive.
‘I might be a bit late, though. Probably better to meet you there?’
‘All right. I’ll see you later then.’
But she couldn’t entirely resist piling on the self-pity.
‘Don’t worry about me, sitting quietly alone in front of the telly.’
‘But you like watching telly, and you always say you like to have time on your own. Go and have a bath and make yourself beautiful.’
‘More beautiful, I think you mean.’
‘More beautiful. Au revoir, chérie.’
‘What time will you be back?’
‘I’m not sure. Don’t wait up for me.’
‘OK. Bye then.’
‘Ciao.’
Alone in his office, Jean-Laurent sat back in relief. A slight twinge of guilt only served to add an edge to his excitement at the evening ahead. And anyway, he knew that he did not need to feel guilty. Flavia had made that quite clear. Their falling in love was not his fault, it had just happened. He was a highly charged person who needed to live life on a higher plane, not being dragged down by the suffocating domesticity that seemed to suit Laura so well.
When he had promised to be faithful to her, she had been as sharp-witted in the boardroom as she was hot in the bedroom. It was she, not he, who had changed. What had he done to deserve someone whose conversation these days rarely got beyond play dates, marks out of ten for dictation and cunning ways with polenta? Not to mention the fact that she was now a good two stone heavier than when he had first met her. Flavia had explained that in a previous age Laura would probably have died in childbirth anyway, so it was quite normal that he, an alpha male, would have gone on to other, better things, such as a twenty-eight-year-old Jungian psychologist with a fabulous arse.
He glanced back down at his book and studied the arousal-performance curve. It seemed you performed best when under some stress, just enough to get the heart and blood sugar up to a reasonable level of excitement. He picked up the phone to leave his message.
‘Flavia, I’ll meet you at Barfly, nine o’clock.’
Laura hung up and went into the kitchen, forcing herself to be positive. She enjoyed her own company and this was an opportunity for a lovely, quiet evening in on her own. But she would have preferred to spend it with Jean-Laurent. She loved to hear his stories of office life, who said what to whom, to applaud his moments of triumph and commiserate on the minor setbacks he encountered on his road to international business glory.
She shoved the magret de canard back into the fridge. Pity, she had been looking forward to that, but she certainly wasn’t going to cook it just for herself. How tragic could you get? For her birthday, Jean-Laurent had once given her a copy of a cookbook by
Delia Smith called One Is Fun. For when he was away on business, he said. As if anyone would bother to go to all that trouble so they could sit down for a lonely three-course dinner on their own. Is that what Delia did, carefully measuring out a solitary ounce of flour to create that memorable meal which she could then congratulate herself on in the echoing silence of her dining room? Laura thought of all the people she could give a copy of the book to: her recently widowed uncle, perhaps, or her still-single friends. A marvellously tactless gift for a fortieth birthday. Still unattached? Not much chance now – here, have a copy of One Is Fun.
She slid a frozen pizza into the microwave and refilled her glass. Carrying her downgraded meal through into the salon, she sank on to the sofa and switched on the television. The only thing that Libération had recommended was a documentary on Channel 5 about a high school in a suburb of Paris. Saint Denis was the suburb in question: it always was on these slice-of-real-life programmes. You saw it signposted off the A1 running north to the airport; the sign ought to read ‘Saint Denis, favoured location of gritty documentary makers’. The suburbs had a different connotation here in Paris. In London it suggested dull people mowing their lawns. In France, ‘la banlieue’ was high-rise territory where the social problems were.
Instead of brewing criminal tensions in the inner city, they were all banished to the no-man’s-land beyond the périphérique, to places like Saint Denis. This was what gave Paris its bourgeois, toy-town flavour.
She flicked channels. A tedious studio discussion on Channel 3 with thirty people having their say on the thirty-five-hour week. She changed to Channel 1 and found Sacrée Soirée, where the usual crew of French stars were having a conspicuously good time together, clapping their hands as best they could whilst holding large microphones and looking quite out of tune with the morose demeanour of most of their compatriots. That left her to choose between a dubbed American TV movie and something with people glowering at each other in a vineyard that she thought she might have seen before.