by Sarah Long
‘I’m going shopping tomorrow,’ snapped Laura. ‘I daresay you can last that long. Store it up in your hump, like a camel.’
Asa looked at her uncomprehendingly, then sat down at the kitchen table and began filing her finger nails.
‘Jean-Laurent rang. He says he won’t be back until Friday.’
Damn, thought Laura. He had promised to be back in time for their usual Thursday evening trip to the cinema.
Asa read her mind.
‘Does that mean you won’t need me to babysit on Thursday? I was thinking of going to the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s their late-night opening.’
‘I suppose not. But don’t think you’re going to borrow any of my clothes to wear to your precious bloody exhibition.’
At last she’d said it.
But Asa wasn’t exactly crushed by her harsh words.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said loftily. ‘Anyway, they wouldn’t fit me.’
She walked out, flushed with indignation. So what if she did occasionally borrow that Ghost skirt. It was the only thing in Laura’s elephant-sized wardrobe that did fit her, provided she wore a belt with it, and why did Laura need so many clothes anyway? It wasn’t as if she ever went anywhere – only to school and the gym with her silly friend Lorinda and shopping for more clothes that she didn’t need. God, she hoped she never became like Laura. At least she was young and had a life, even if she did have some emotional issues to address through group therapy support groups.
Laura sighed. As usual Asa had stolen the moral high ground and made her feel like a nit-picking old bag. She’d have to apologise and make it up to her yet again, or go through the tedium of finding a replacement.
She dialled Jean-Laurent on his mobile to leave a message, but to her surprise he answered.
‘Hallo.’ He sounded distracted.
‘Hallo, it’s me. I didn’t think I’d catch you at this time – I thought you’d be bonding with all those international buzzards. It sounds very quiet, though.’
‘No, well, I just forgot something in my room. I’ve got to go back, actually, I’m preparing a presentation.’
‘OK, I won’t keep you. I got your message – I’ll see you on Friday then. By the way, I’ve invited Lorinda and Arnaud with Francine and Dominique for Saturday night. Francine’s brother’s coming, he’s an eligible bachelor, so I thought you might invite someone from work for him. What about that research girl you used to go on about, that one with a silly Latin name – she’s single and gorgeous, isn’t she?’
Jean-Laurent hesitated for a fraction of a second.
‘Who? Oh yes, Flavia. I don’t know, it might not be her thing.’
‘What do you mean, not her thing. We’re not that dull, are we?’
‘No, it’s not that . . . she’s probably busy.’
‘She might not be. Or ask someone else. All my friends are married, so it’s up to you to find a dishy dolly for Arthur. Don’t want him to think we haven’t made an effort.’
‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. Everything else OK? How are the boys?’
‘Fine. Pierre-Louis says he’s the smallest in his class, but he doesn’t mind because he has lots of friends.’
‘Sweet boy. Give them a big kiss from Papa. See you on Friday. Bye!’
Jean-Laurent replaced the phone and Flavia looked up from the bed.
‘Did I hear you mention my name?’
He looked at her nervously.
‘Laura thought you might like to be the spare female at our dinner party on Saturday.’
‘At your apartment? How thrilling!’
‘I told her you’d probably be busy.’
‘I can’t wait. How shall I dress? Virtuous fille bourgeoise or femme fatale?’
‘I’m not sure this is such a good idea.’
‘Why ever not? It will be enormous fun. And finally I get to see you on a Saturday!’
Jean-Laurent frowned at the thought of the boundaries breaking down in his carefully compartmentalised life. On the other hand, Laura had made it clear that he had to invite someone, and wouldn’t he rather be opposite Flavia than some other female dredged up for the occasion? The lightly moustachioed Hélène was a fine secretary, but she wouldn’t exactly adorn his dinner table.
He lay down beside Flavia and traced his fingers over her smooth flank.
‘All right then. But promise me you’ll be discreet.’
‘How could I not be? I’m hardly going to blow your cover, am I?’
SIX
Sometimes Laura found it hard to remember why she had chosen to trade in her proper job for her current position as part-time, unpaid chauffeur. In her past life, she had been the one sitting in the back of the car flicking through her papers or gazing out of the window while the company driver negotiated the traffic. Now the tables were turned and she had been demoted to the driver’s seat, while her children sat sullen and ungrateful in the back seat, complaining loudly if she dropped them more than a few metres from the school gates.
On Wednesdays, she was particularly sensitive to the pressures of her role as chauffeur, since the children spent only half a day at school. It was a clever idea that the French had come up with. Rather than incorporate sport and art into the week’s curriculum, the schools came to an abrupt halt at midday on Wednesday, so that the roads were jammed with children’s chauffeurs – mothers and nannies, including one or two proper, professional ones in uniform – rushing them home for lunch before driving them on to their fencing or dance classes.
Of course, no parent of any ambition would be content with a one-dimensional child. There was no point in having a crack tennis player if he was inadequate in musical skills or ‘les arts plastiques’. So mid-afternoon, it was all change again as pinched-faced women viciously competed with each other for parking places outside the Conservatoire (for young Mozarts) and the Louvre (for young Michelangelos).
All that wasted energy, thought Laura, all that educated manpower, and all those car exhaust fumes going into ferrying around little Henri and ensuring his proper épanouissement. This was a favourite word among the French. It described the condition of flowering fulfilment which all this education was supposed to bring about, although you certainly didn’t see much evidence of it amongst the adult population; at least not in Paris where dissatisfaction and snarling resentment seemed to flourish at the expense of all else.
Laura’s own Wednesday routine was less frenetic since she had opted for the expatriate solution. This came in the form of an out-of-town British country club where ladies of leisure like herself could congregate while their children beefed up on outdoor games in grounds that would put the finest English public school to shame.
Every Wednesday at midday, she picked up Charles-Edouard and Pierre-Louis and drove out into the leafy western suburbs, deep into a forest until she reached this little piece of France that would be forever England, and which prided itself on possessing the country’s only full-size cricket pitch. Here they would take lunch, then the boys would be despatched to their sporting and artistic activities, leaving Laura free to join the other mothers – and the odd, eagerly received father – to sit around eating Swiss roll from Marks & Spencer beneath a portrait of the Queen and complain about the French. Mostly the complaining was done by those who had married French partners and thereby consigned themselves to a lifetime of exile, but there was also a fair sprinkling of short-term expats, proper housewives waiting around in pale tracksuits for a couple of years until their husbands were posted back to Surrey.
Laura ordered three plates of ham and chips in the bar, and prepared for a long wait. It was astonishing how the club bar, though staffed entirely by French people, managed to completely bypass the brisk professionalism that characterised even the humblest café in France. Instead it seemed to take pride in importing the shambling service and indifferent food of a British transport café, but without any of the warmth and atmosphere. The food eventually arrived,
on cardboard plates. Laura helped the boys to ketchup.
‘Yoo-hoo! Laura! Over here!’
Laura looked across the bar and saw Flo Knightley beaming at her, a lovely full-blown English rose in exile. She was exactly the kind of wholesome, blonde, large-hipped beauty who could make you feel homesick for the Shires, except that Flo was a long-term resident of Paris who had been a mainstay of the club for nineteen years. She once told Laura that she had got rid of her dining chairs because men didn’t feel comfortable in them: ‘Men can’t relax unless they’re sitting in a proper chair, dear.’ She must surely have been talking about wide-bottomed, Johnnie Boden-style English men, because French men only seemed to look right when perched nervily on the edge of a fragile piece of repro.
Laura set her tray down at Flo’s table, where two women in cardigans were already installed.
‘Hallo, Laura, do you know Hilda and Rosemary? We met at the Laura Ashley fashion show. We were just saying, isn’t it ridiculous that they’re spending all that money resurfacing tennis courts that can’t be used in winter? I think we should all go to the AGM to make that point. And you know they’ve managed to sack that new groundsman? They just put some money in his path, then hid and pounced on him, caught him red-handed!’
The cardigans nodded. It was just so English-village-hall – you expected the verger to appear at any moment, flanked by choir boys and peddling raffle tickets.
Flo pushed a plate of biscuits in Laura’s direction.
‘Here, have an M&S biscuit – back on sale at the bar, I’m glad to say. You know they’ve been banned for three months for being too expensive! When you think how much you pay for a pain aux raisins in any old boulangerie in this country. And Hilda brings them over from England in her Volvo, so there’s no delivery charge.’
Laura helped herself to a chocolate wafer and took a greedy bite.
‘Delicious,’ she said. ‘Just the kind of thing I can’t keep at home unless protected under lock and key from my supposedly anorexic au pair.’
‘Anorexics?’ said Flo.’ Don’t touch them with a bargepole, darling! Reformed drug addicts are what you want – they really are super. Thoroughly honest, God’s own!’
And the women were back on their second favourite topic of conversation (their very favourite being How Awful The French Are), which came under the broad category of Help. Help was the modern term for what a previous generation of expats used to call the Servant Problem. Help was what you needed when you lived abroad. It was all right to do your own dirty work when you lived in your own country, but there was no point in giving up a perfectly good job in London to come to Paris if it meant spending your days ironing vests and wiping floors.
‘My Australian girl was the best,’ said Hilda, who turned out to be a senior civil servant on an extended career break as a trailing spouse. ‘No problem mucking in. She had such a big appetite, though – cost me a fortune in cornflakes. That’s the great thing about Filipinos – they never seem to eat anything.’
‘No, they just help themselves to your jewellery instead’, said Rosemary, a former human resources manager who had sacrificed her career for the sake of her husband’s advancement in the world of toothpaste. ‘I’ve had the lot, believe me. I do it all myself now, it’s easier in the long run. By the time you’ve explained everything, you might as well just make the beds, wipe down the surfaces, load the dishwasher . . .’
Mercifully the inventory of her domestic chores was interrupted by Flo.
‘Your boys are doing tennis, aren’t they, Laura?’
‘Yes, two o’clock, then theatre at three, then art class at four-thirty – the whole damn show.’
‘Yes, well, I just wanted to warn you about bad language. There’s a little boy called Jerome in the tennis class who called my Philip a ‘conard’ last week.
How very perspicacious of him, thought Laura. She laughed.
‘I’m glad you’re not sitting in my car on the morning run, Flo, you would blush. But I’m glad to say my boys are too well bred to follow my example.’
After lunch, Laura accompanied the children outside to find their tennis teacher. The foul-mouthed Jerome was already knocking balls over the net and scowled at Philip as he arrived, clean and portly in his all-whites and side-parted blonde hair. Even though he was only six, you could see exactly the adult he would become – white shorts straining over broad backside, the mainstay of the tennis club. As physical types, her own boys were more like Jerome, weasely and scruffily dressed, and Laura was grateful for it.
She sat down on a bench and pulled out her book, thinking how infinitely preferable it was to read alone down here rather than rejoin the company upstairs. Few things were more depressing than the conversation of women with time on their hands. She opened La Maladie de Sachs, the tale of a country doctor putting up with the rantings of his hypochondriac patients. No wonder it had been a bestseller in France.
And tomorrow she would be taking lunch with her very own French doctor. Well, it had to be better than ham and chips on paper plates and Flo’s tales of the AGM. Although she couldn’t say she wasn’t nervous. Not to say terrified. She had picked up the phone twice to ring him to cancel, but on both occasions had told herself to stiffen her sinews and stop being a wimp. It was no big deal. It was just lunch. Think of all those men she had lunched with before when she was a career luncher. In fact, ‘Lunch’ used to be Jean-Laurent’s affectionate and slightly bitter nickname for her when he was still a student. While he would have to put up with a chicken tikka sandwich and apple trellis from some unspeakable café, she would be picking over her rocket and parmesan salad and anchovies and red peppers (she always ordered two starters and no main course) in front of the huge plate-glass windows at Kensington Place. Usually there would be a crowd of them, but quite often it might be just her and a client, often a man. So what? That didn’t send her into a flutter of girlish butterflies, so why should she be making such a fuss now about a simple lunch appointment with an ageing anti-ageing specialist? She should just treat it as a one-off, a piece of fun, and that would be that.
She looked up and caught Charles-Edouard’s eye as he raced around the court picking up tennis balls and putting them into a basket. He smiled and waved at her happily. She waved back. Perhaps, she thought, the life of an unpaid chauffeur was not so bad after all.
The morning of Laura’s lunch date dawned grey and resentful. It was the kind of weather that doubled your journey time in the rush hour; a few drops of rain was enough to bring the traffic to a standstill for reasons Laura couldn’t fathom, and the Parisians became even nervier, making furious gestures to each other through their car windows.
‘School is boring,’ said Charles-Edouard as they crawled over the pont d’Iéna. ‘Every day the same: French, recreation, Maths. I wish Charlemagne had never existed, then schools would not have been invented.’
Laura gazed ahead at the Eiffel Tower, shrouded in grey clouds. Groups of tourists were already huddled round each of its four feet. God knows why anyone would want to pay to go up it today: there would be nothing to see. She looked at Charles-Edouard in her rear-view mirror.
‘Charlemagne only invented schools in France. Someone else invented them in England, so you could have gone to school there instead.’
‘Who invented schools in England?’
‘How do I know.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘I expect I knew once, but you forget things.’
They continued in silence, turning right on to the left bank.
‘It’s all right for you,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘you don’t have to know anything. You don’t even work, not like Dad.’
Pierre-Louis leap indignantly to her defence.
‘But mummies don’t work, Charles-Edouard!’
‘All my friends’ mummies work,’ said Charles-Edouard, ‘except for Olivier’s, but she’s got a baby and she’s on congé parentale.’
Laura pulled up outside the
school behind a large Mercedes driven by a woman who was clearly dressed for something more dynamic than sorting out the sock drawer, which was Laura’s vague project for the morning ahead.
‘Look, some mummies work, and some don’t, it just depends. It doesn’t mean that one is better than the other.’
‘But you’re always telling us to work, then you just do nothing yourself. Very fair I call that!’
Laura jumped out of the car and opened the back door.
‘Here we are, out you get. See you later.’
She waved them off with a sigh. How could it be that her elder son showed her so little respect? Did he not understand that it was for him and his brother that she had decided to sacrifice her career? He should be grateful to have his mother meet him out of school each day and not some hired hand, instead of which he slagged her off for being lazy and not doing anything. She would have to have a little chat with him.
It was at moments like this that Laura sometimes entertained creeping doubts about the path she had chosen. She imagined a high-spirited Australian nanny (gap year, nice and bright) taking the boys to school, all enthusiastic and asking them interesting questions, while she, Laura, went her separate way, back to the agency, maybe working on a pitch for a new piece of business.
She had always enjoyed that: the late nights, working to a deadline, the adrenaline rush of the presentation, engaging with prospective clients, fielding their questions off the top of her head, thinking quickly. Then the excitement when you won the account, five million pounds’ worth, which she, Laura, had directly helped to bring in to the business. There would be champagne in the office and the kind of massively extravagant blow-out in a restaurant that advertising people were so good at.
She had none of that now, no feeling of achievement, unless you counted her progress in cooking and her contribution to the stylish – or would you call it pretentious? – furnishing of their apartment. Why couldn’t she be like Jackie Kennedy, who used to come back to the White House from her daily morning ride and brief her thirty-strong household whilst still wearing her jodhpurs? Jackie was a model career housewife. Running the house for her meant directing a team of interior designers and museum experts to spend a vast budget acquiring major works of art, whereas Laura had only the useless Asa to do her bidding, and had to rely on her own judgement when nervously selecting suitable framed prints from one of the more affordable galleries in rue de Seine.