by Sarah Long
Francine ushered Laura into her salon, which was a triumphant piece of retro glory, bright tapestry seats on extremely shiny gold legs, as thin and bent as any inbred aristocrat’s. She was the first guest to arrive, which didn’t surprise her. She was usually first – there was nothing to detain her, after all, no last-minute emails to reply to or preparations to make for the following day’s meetings. And since Asa could just about muster the energy to do the children’s tea and baths, she liked to set out nice and early: it made her feel she was getting her money’s worth.
While they waited for the others, Francine treated her to a private viewing of her latest pottery collection, which was decorated with a few vague blue and green lines.
‘I took my inspiration from Matisse’s chapel in Vence. Less is more, you know – it’s all a question of what you leave out.’
It seemed to Laura that quite a lot had been left out, but luckily the doorbell rang before she could respond.
It was the guest of honour, Sylvie Marceau, former rock chick, now transmogrified into all-purpose legendary French celebrity. She might be way beyond the peak of her career, but she was still famous enough to bring a flush of excitement to Francine’s cheeks as she made the introductions.
‘Laura, can I introduce you to Sylvie. You’re almost neighbours, you know, over there in the bourgeois sixteenth. And this is her husband, Antoine. Clever woman, she married her doctor. And not just any old doctor, but an anti-ageing specialist if you please! Can you imagine anything more perfect? It’s no wonder she looks so wonderful!’
They must be good friends, thought Laura, if she can make jokes like that. Sylvie didn’t look the type to enjoy a good laugh about her appearance.
‘Enchantée,’ she said, though she was never sure if this was an appropriate way for a woman to salute another woman, or whether instant enchantment was considered a gallantry reserved for men.
Sylvie Marceau still had her girlish shape and trademark blonde fringe, but her face was curiously bland. Stretched smooth of lines, it had that agelessness that is only associated with the surgically enhanced, where the normal range of emotions is supplanted by a permanent look of mild surprise. As Laura shook her lifeless, chilly hand, she made a discreet inspection of her temples and thought she could just make out the giveaway silver lines, a tiny hair’s breadth, set back beyond the outer edges of her eyes. The anti-ageing specialist clearly wasn’t averse to referring his celebrity wife on to his colleagues at the sharp end of the business.
In contrast to his wife, Dr Antoine Bouchard exuded vitality. His face was tanned, almost orange in fact, but apparently free of surgery scars. His hair curled energetically close to his finely shaped head, and his dark eyes were lively as he took Laura’s hand in his and pressed it warmly before raising it to his lips. It was a strangely old-fashioned gesture, and reminded Laura that he was probably older than he looked. How old would he be, she wondered? Forty something? Maybe fifty? She felt the energy from the touch of his hand, and instinctively knew that this was a passionate man.
Passion was a word the French used loosely and without fear. They could be passionate about Vacherin cheese and Rodin’s sculptures and equally passionate about new motorways and income tax. Strong feelings were approved of, not regarded with suspicion as they were amongst the British. And Laura had a feeling that Antoine Bouchard was a man of many and varied passions. He was quite classically beautiful, almost Michelangelo’s David, though obviously a more mature version. And probably better with his clothes on, she thought, stopping her imagination short of picturing him mounted in naked glory on a marble plinth.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, lapsing into English in her embarrassment.
‘Moi aussi,’ he replied, and made no attempt to release her hand.
She tried to wriggle her fingers free. It wasn’t that she wanted to snatch her hand back, but she was aware of Sylvie watching them from the fragile sofa, where she was perched like a bird observing the spectacle of this gauche English girl being taken in by the debonair seduction of her husband. He did it all the time, of course, but French women were a little more elegant in their handling of his attention.
Sylvie reached forward for a handful of canapés which she offered to the two pint-sized dogs that had accompanied her into the room.
‘Ah, Laura, Francine has told me so much about her little English friend. I believe you live just off the avenue Paul Doumer? Tell me, do you know the Canicoiff salon? I always take my girls there.’
Antoine finally let go of Laura’s hand and she turned with relief to answer his wife.
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t have any dogs, only children. Do you always bring them with you?’
‘Of course. They are perfectly behaved. But you English are so brutal about your animals, always leaving them stranded. And with your ridiculous rabies quarantine laws. Do you know, when we lived in London I had to leave them for six months in these horrible kennels in Southampton. I used to travel down twice a week to bring them prime steak from my butcher in Chelsea.’
‘Did you like London?’ asked Laura, although the question was redundant. All chic Parisians adored London, and to admit otherwise was tantamount to being a provincial.
‘Of course. But I had to move back. The men in London do not look at you. I don’t know why, perhaps it is because of your boarding schools.’
Francine’s husband Dominique made a theatrical entrance at the doorway, bearing a tray of champagne glasses. He had been fussing about in his cellar for the past hour, inspecting his collection of fine wine, a passion he shared with Jean-Laurent and which usually formed the basis of lengthy discussions on evenings such as this.
‘Englishmen only want women to be their friends,’ he said, as he made his way towards them. ‘They like them to wear rugby shirts or to dress like gardeners. Whereas we French know how to look at a beautiful woman, to drink in her elegance with our eyes.’ He handed her a glass of champagne, making his point with a smouldering gaze.
‘But we hate that,’ said Laura. ‘It gives us the creeps, being stared at. We find it aggressive.’
She was aware of Antoine smiling at her, his head on one side, challenging her.
‘There is no harm in looking, surely,’ he said. ‘Only a barbarian culture would outlaw the appreciation of beauty.’ Laura noticed his voice was low and soothing. She knew what to call it in French – une voix d’alcôve. She had read it in a romantic novel one rainy afternoon. An alcove voice, a voice made for soft exchanges in secret places, and Paris was full of hidden alcoves where you could be lulled into oblivion by this man’s words.
Sylvie, of course, was long past being taken in by Antoine’s sweet nothings.
‘Let me just say that I am happy to be back in civilisation,’ she said. ‘I could never feel properly at home in a country where the men do not look at the women. That, after all, is the whole point of our existence, don’t you agree?’
She gave a coquettish shrug.
‘So, Laura, you must be happy to live in Paris, and I think you chose well to live near us in the sixteenth. We have the Bois de Boulogne to walk our dogs and to stage our romantic trysts. I don’t know why Francine is so scornful about it. She thinks she is so central, to live here on the Ile Saint Louis, but you know this used to be the dustbin of Paris? People would bring their stinking rubbish here – it was crawling with diseases.’
Francine smiled indulgently. She could afford to, living in a plush apartment in the city’s most enviable location, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame but a world away from the busloads of tourists whose itinerary never included the understated charms of the small island adjacent.
The front doorbell rang and Francine left the four of them to continue their eulogy of the sixteenth arrondissement while she welcomed the new arrivals. When she ushered them into the room, Laura felt a familiar twinge of panic, for Hugues and Marie-Françoise were one of those intimidating Parisian couples whose clothes and demeanour smelled
of old money and effortless achievement.
The wife was from a famous champagne producing family and now ran the business empire, which included a bank and a clutch of exclusive hotels. Like many successful French career women who had been born to inherit, she assumed the mantle with regal nonchalance, untroubled by the glass ceiling that kept her less well-connected fellow women firmly in the lower ranks.
As she recounted her day with aristocratic ennui, Laura withdrew into a quagmire of inadequacy. She hoped to God she would not be quizzed about her own professional activity this evening; she could already envisage the embarrassed silence and swift change of topic that would entail.
Francine cast her hostess smile around her assembled guests.
‘So, now we are just waiting for Laura’s husband.’
‘I’m sorry he’s late – hopeless at time. You know, typical French,’joked Laura.
‘Ah, the famous English humour’, said Dominique. ‘I love it – Monty Python, Benny Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral.’
Laura smiled weakly.
Antoine turned to her.
‘One would hardly know you were English, you speak French so well,’ he murmured, ‘though I suppose you do have that sexy little Jane Birkin accent that we find so irresistible.’
Laura could have kissed him. OK, so maybe she was a nothing little housewife with no business empire to run, but at least she had a gorgeous English accent and was fluently bilingual.
‘Of course she is English,’ boomed Dominique, ‘can’t you tell from that marvellous rose complexion? You know it is quite true that English women do have the most exquisite skin. There is a freshness to them – you can almost drink the dew off their cheeks.’
‘Well, we must remember the words of Coco Chanel,’ said Sylvie. ‘“At the age of thirty, a woman must choose between her face and her behind.” And I think you will agree with me, my dear, that you English women mostly choose the face. We French, on the other hand, prefer to know that we can still look stunning in a size thirty-eight, whatever our age.’
‘Until you turn round, that is,’ retorted Laura, adjusting the flowing contours of her long black skirt and feeling grateful that at least she was sitting down and not offering her hips up for general inspection. ‘I mean, not you personally, of course, Sylvie. It’s just that sometimes you can be following a fantastic little French bottom down the street and you’re thinking, look at that girl, why haven’t I got a figure like hers, then suddenly she turns round and it’s like a horror movie, there’s this ancient face . . . you know, like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane . . . I suppose there’s always a price to pay for that tiny figure . . .’
She stopped, realising that she was getting into deep water. Fortunately Sylvie didn’t seem to be taking offence, and was clasping her hands together in an actressy gesture of delight.
‘Ah, my dear, I do admire your esprit, it is always so refreshing to hear a foreign view of how we appear, but that reminds me, too, of something I see in English girls. They very often can have good legs, but then, they have this little pot, le ventre, wait, I am trying to think of the English word . . . I have it, a beer belly, yes. Is it because of going to the pub? Do you think that they all drink big glasses of beer with the men? Such a shame, I think, to have this pretty face and then spoil it with a big tummy.’
‘I’m more of a champagne person, myself,’ said Laura, unwilling to be cast as a hefty beer-swilling Anglo-Saxon sinking the gallon on a Friday night with a marauding band of cavemen.
‘Of course you are, Laura,’ said Francine hastily. ‘Come on, everyone, we will not wait for Jean-Laurent, he can join us at the table.’
She led her guests through to the dining room, which had been transformed into an autumnal woodland glade. Dead leaves were artfully scattered over the table and the floor, while the candles were supported by twiggy branches. Each place setting was marked by a cluster of pine cones twisted together with a lavish golden ribbon. The dinner plates were painted with tiny squirrels gathering nuts, which produced the required flurry of congratulations. Jean-Laurent was ushered in shortly afterwards by the maid, smiling and apologising for being so late.
How handsome he looks, thought Laura, how unspeakably gorgeous. Even after a long hard day in the office, he still managed to give off the aura of someone who had just leapt out of bed, his hair tousled and shirt coming adrift at the side.
She felt like jumping up from the table and tucking it in for him and smoothing his hair. She remembered how proud she had been of him at London parties, so lithe and sexy and exotically French. The French bit counted for nothing now, of course, she had become the enigmatic foreigner, but his youthfulness was even more apparent tonight in contrast to this bunch of old fogeys – that spring in his step as he worked his way round the table, kissing the women on both cheeks, shaking hands with the men with just the right degree of masculine warmth before taking his place next to the hostess.
‘So, Jean-Laurent, how is the world of soap powder – all on course to keep us on an upward curve of cleanliness?’ asked Dominique. ‘Do try this Chablis Premier Cru, it’s quite surprising. My caviste acquired it especially with me in mind. You can tell how well he knows my tastes.’
‘Oh, you know, Dominique, building up the masterbrand architecture – I wouldn’t dream of boring you with the details . . . mm, yes, I see what you mean, plenty of honey, very well rounded.’
‘And yet with a flinty edge that prevents it from being overly feminine. You’re not too worried, then, about being out of a job when we get hold of this new washing machine they’ve invented in Korea that doesn’t need detergent?’
‘Pie in the sky. Anyway, women will always need to feel that they are making their mark on the family’s laundry by choosing the right product. It’s a basic emotive need, isn’t it, darling?’
He knew perfectly well that Laura couldn’t give a monkey’s arse what soap powder went into her machine. She gave an ironic little smile.
‘Oh, I leave all that to the au pair, as you know, Jean-Laurent.’
‘You see how fortunate I am? I have a whole battalion of women to make my life more comfortable!’
Jean-Laurent roared with laughter then held his glass up to the flickering light of the precarious twiggy candlesticks.
‘A perfect amber glow with just a hint of green. Lively but elegant. You might get me in a case of this, Dominique.’
Laura picked up her fork to take on the terrine de foie gras. At least while they were on the subject of wine she was safe from interrogation. And at French dinner parties, it was quite possible to stick to one topic all night, unlike in England where it was considered terribly bad form to bang on and on about anything for more than five minutes. She felt a hand on her forearm. Antoine had been seated next to her and was now leaning towards her, his voice intimate and low.
‘How sensible of you to leave the boring domestic work to an au pair. I could tell as soon as I met you that you were a dynamic woman of intelligence and style. Tell me, what do you do?’
Oh God. The dreaded question. So soon, and so directly aimed. There would be no wriggling out of it this time, no hasty change of subject, no oblique bouncing the ball back into his court. They all knew what he did – Francine had been careful to trumpet that out the moment he walked in the door. So now she would have to give an answer, the pitiful, boring, disappointing answer. She would be dismissed, a make weight at the table, a poor dull housewife. Why couldn’t she just brazen it out, like so many of her American friends? ‘I’m a photographer’, they might say, or ‘I’m a weaver’, meaning that they sometimes took a few snaps of the children or did a bit of needlework during the long empty hours. More enigmatically, they might just volunteer a verb: ‘I paint’, or ‘I write’, therefore I am. But she was just too British.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That is, I’m not working at the moment. You know, busy with the children.’
He looked disappointed, of course. She was
n’t what he had hoped.
‘Yes, I understand,’ he said politely, ‘children can take up a lot of time.’
Laura immediately sprung on to the defensive.
‘Expand to fill the time available, you mean? Parkinson’s Law?’
‘Please, I didn’t mean to criticise. I’m just surprised, that’s all.’
‘Surprised that I choose not to spend my life stuck in an office pushing forward the frontiers of soap powder or pumping drugs into the corpses of women old enough to know better?’
The voice took on an edge. ‘That is a rather harsh view of my profession and of that of your husband. I merely meant that you must surely need some kind of intellectual stimulation.’
‘I stimulate my mind at the Louvre and tone my body at the gym. I cook, I read.’ Now she was beginning to sound like an American, justifying her existence. ‘I enhance my knowledge of French cheeses and the fripperies of the fashion world by spending many hours going round the shops.’
He laughed.
‘Well, that’s something, I suppose. But judging from your passionate response to my innocent question, it is clear to me that you are not entirely satisfied with your life.’
How dare he. Ten seconds of conversation and here he was telling her she wasn’t happy. Well, she would show him she was no intellectual slouch.
‘I suppose it all depends,’ she said loftily, ‘on how much you need to cling to the trappings of professional success to make sense of your life. I have met a great many people who are absolute top brass, what you French like to call le gratin, admired and envied by the outside world, yet who are weeping inside, howling like dogs because they are so unfulfilled as individuals.’