And What Do You Do?

by Sarah Long

  ‘Let us drink a toast to love, as it was perceived by Voltaire,’ he smiled. ‘He defined it as the stuff of nature, embroidered by the imagination.’

  ‘How very concise of him,’ replied Laura. She would not be the passive victim, the betrayed wife. She would be the active protagonist of a wonderful love affair, she would be healed by her infidelity. And it was so poetic to slip into adultery under the auspices of a venerable French philosopher. It made her feel almost as self-righteous as her cultural tours of the Louvre.

  ‘I also rather like Chamfort’s definitions of love,’ Antoine continued, carefully steering the conversation away from husbands and heartache. That really wasn’t what he had in mind; it was so boring to ruin a tender moment with tears and recriminations. ‘Rather more cynically, Chamfort said it was nothing more than the exchanging of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises. But to my mind, those can be two very powerful forces.’

  ‘Hitting skin,’ said Laura.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Hitting skin. That’s how American teenagers describe having sex, apparently.’

  He looked affronted.

  ‘That suggests the crudeness of raw youth. Believe me, my dear, I am utterly incapable of any such brutality. And a skin as soft as yours can only deserve the most attentive of caresses.’

  To reinforce the point, he laid his hand lightly on her shoulder and ran his forefinger along the hairline at the back of her neck.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘shall we order? I rather thought I might have the lobster.’

  As a practised seducer, Antoine made a point of letting Laura know early in the lunch that he had reserved a room upstairs. It was better to have that knowledge simmering below the surface so there was no awkwardness or sudden lunging over coffee and petits fours. Instead they just left the table and went up to their room as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Disarmed by the talk of poetry, and wholehearted in her commitment to adultery, Laura soon forgot her reservations about exposing her body to a stranger. Their bodies were almost irrelevant – it was the fantasy that drove them, that locked them in excitement as the delicious intimacy deepened between them. Afterwards, Laura stretched out luxuriously in the bed, feeling the cool Egyptian cotton of the pillow beneath her fingers as Antoine slowly dressed before her.

  ‘I love hotels,’ she said. ‘I love these crisp sheets and having fifteen fluffy towels in the bathroom. It’s so decadent.’

  Antoine slipped on his Rolex and smiled at her.

  ‘I am glad the accommodation is to your liking. But I hope you also appreciated the entertainment.’

  ‘I can think of worse ways to fill my time. Beats shopping any day.’

  He looked at her in amusement.

  ‘Shopping is the consolation of the loveless. But surely that’s not all you do?’

  ‘Of course not. I run the house, the children, this and that, you know. Barely a moment to call my own – that’s the myth we non-working women like to promote. But I am more than happy to find you a regular window in my crowded diary. Unless you’ve lost interest in me, now you’ve had me. Isn’t that what happens in these cases? I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of my territory here.’

  Antoine slipped into his rather too pointy shoes. It was funny, thought Laura, how otherwise impeccably dressed French men always fell down on their shoes, which were too insubstantial and made them look like Italian car salesmen.

  He sat down beside her on the bed and ran his fingers down her spine.

  ‘First of all, I have no interest in one-night stands, or even one-afternoon stands. Secondly, you are far too desirable not to become my mistress. I have every intention of meeting you as often as we can both arrange it. I can see that we have many hours of pleasure ahead of us, which we must enjoy as regularly as we can.’

  He kissed her and stood up to leave.

  ‘Shall we say next Friday? In this room? We can have lunch brought up.’

  Laura nodded happily as he slipped out of the room, like a panther leaving his lair. A grey panther, as Jean-Laurent would no doubt categorise him, a lush, mature target for the marketing men. She stepped out of her adulterous bed and walked into the bathroom, running herself a bath into which she poured the contents of all five miniature bottles provided. She sank into the foaming water.

  Lorinda was right, this was a million times better than crumpling into a tearful heap of self-pity as the wronged wife. The boot, she felt, was now well and truly on the other foot. La botte est sur l’autre pied, she smirked to herself, and lifted her right foot out of the bubbles to turn on more hot water. Good God, she thought, my toenails are like claws. How on earth did I miss that in my rigorous beauty routine? Luckily, Antoine hadn’t seemed to notice, and somehow she didn’t think it would have mattered if he had.

  TEN

  The weekend that followed Laura’s fall from virtue was not to be spent in the country, a decision that suited both Laura and Jean-Laurent, who were absorbed in their separate preoccupations.

  When Jean-Laurent announced after breakfast that he was going into the office, Laura was relieved, not disappointed as she would have been until recent events had turned her life around. She didn’t even bother to speculate whether he had a rendezvous with Flavia: frankly, she couldn’t care less. She was struck by the fragility of relationships, the complicit bond with her husband had been pared down to a thin thread that either of them could snap at any moment. Was it the end of love when the noise of the cherished one eating his muesli was enough to invoke cold revulsion and the need to leave the room immediately?

  Asa, on the other hand, was not pleased to find the family still installed on Saturday morning. She considered that the apartment belonged to her at weekends, and she had planned to spend the day sifting through Laura’s wardrobe for something to wear that evening as she had invited a few friends from the group round to watch Friends on video and eat popcorn. Devon had even said he might drop in later on.

  She sighed as she slumped down on the sofa next to the children, frowning at the noise of the cartoons they were watching and pulling a nail file out of her dressing-gown pocket. Now she would need to ring round and cancel everyone. She stood up and picked up the phone and was just retreating to the privacy of her bedroom when Laura intercepted her.

  ‘Asa, are you in this morning? I thought I might get my hair cut if you don’t mind looking after the boys. It looks as though you’ll be busy on the phone anyway.’

  Asa shrugged with a bad grace.

  ‘And if I’m not back by twelve, you can give them lunch.’

  Laura could feel the wave of resentment as she pulled the door shut behind her. Asa had better get used to it, because from now on she was going to do what she was told. No more pussyfooting around. Laura was in charge and that was that.

  The rue de Passy was vibrant with the anticipation of pleasure that distinguishes Saturday mornings in Paris. Baskets on wheels – strictly the preserve of old ladies in England – were towed by men and women alike in their manic search for the best possible ingredients for that evening’s dinner party. In the covered market, Parisians became almost convivial in their exchanges with stall holders, their usual cold formality relaxed in the knowledge that today they were indulging their particular talent for l’art de vivre that set them apart from the rest of humanity.

  Laura hurried past, glad that today she didn’t have to lay on a show-off dinner where every course would be discussed and analysed. The merits of cèpes versus pieds de moutons mushrooms would not be a topic around her dining table this evening, thank goodness.

  She thought of all that time she had spent preparing elegant dinners for Jean-Laurent’s friends – ‘friends’ was pushing it a bit; ‘business acquaintances’ would be more accurate – evenings when she had sat back listening to her husband holding forth about where to buy the best smoked salmon, or the influence of Lacan on French psychology or how the Cac 40 was holding up against
the Dow-Jones Index; enjoying the novelty of hearing him speak his own language, seeing him in a new light.

  When they moved to Paris, he was no longer the foreigner to be smiled at and helped along in conversation – he had turned from listener to shouter, and she had loved to see him in a more dominant role.

  But all along he had been deceiving her. While she was spending her afternoons alone, filling meringue nests to create a successful evening for him and his important associates, while she was pushing aside all thoughts of herself, fighting back the niggles of self-doubt to further his career – all that time he had been knocking off that pretty blonde, laughing behind Laura’s back, making a mockery of her life’s purpose.

  Since her discovery of his betrayal, she had said nothing to him. She knew that to broach the subject would open the floodgates of resentment and create a scene she didn’t think she was ready to cope with. Instead she had frozen him out, trying to have as little to do with him as possible.

  She arrived at La Muette and continued her journey down the avenue Mozart where the other Parisian obsession apart from food, that of Keeping Up Appearances, was equally well catered for. Here were beauty salons and shoe shops interspersed with poodle parlours, bon chic, bon genre children’s boutiques, and even a lavish mink coat emporium, the French having no truck with the limp-wristed notion that fur was morally unacceptable.

  Laura went into one of the hair salons where a row of hard-faced women was being teased and prinked into elegance, as if one last brushing, as the French quaintly called a blow-dry, could really haul you back from the brink of ugliness. Someone should tell these women, thought Laura, that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And yet wasn’t that, after all, the point of elegance – making the most of the raw materials, whatever their quality?

  One thing anyone could do was turn into a blonde. It was unusual to find a woman over forty in Paris who wasn’t a blonde, and most of the young ones were too. Never mind the Latin genes and angry dark eyebrows; they could be tamed and plucked into submission. Blonde was it for Parisiennes. Laura had always thought that her skin colour wouldn’t allow her to take the peroxide route, but she was rethinking a lot of her ideas at the moment, and the decision to change her hair colour came to her in a flash when she noticed a woman sitting by the door. She had the complexion of a Greek olive, dark and wrinkled, yet was carrying a bob of dazzling pale straw.

  This is the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever done, she thought as she slipped into a geisha-girl gown and smiled into the mirror at the reflection of her coiffeur, who had started brushing her hair as though she were a dog in need of grooming. He looked at her enquiringly. What would Madame like today – the usual two to three centimetres?

  ‘Actually, André, I think I’ll have some colour today. I’d like to be blonde. Not old-lady silver-blonde – I want young sex-chick blonde, with dark roots showing through, like Gwyneth Paltrow, please.’

  André looked at her with a respect he’d never shown her in the five years of their relationship.

  ‘Oui, madame, ça serait beaucoup plus joli,’ he nodded enthusiastically, ‘but you have always refused to let me colour your hair. What has happened? Have you taken a lover, perhaps?’ He laughed to show that the remark was made within the bantering context of customer relations, then pulled out a book of blonde hair samples so she could select her devastating new look.

  Jean-Laurent gazed out of the window of Flavia’s apartment, watching a line of tourists in anoraks make their way up to the funiculaire, the cable car that would transport them up the hill to visit the Sacré Coeur. Flavia lived in Montmartre, at the heart of this oddly provincial part of Paris with its steep and narrow cobbled streets and dilapidated houses that showed no interest in undergoing any form of gentrification.

  Jean-Laurent liked the artistic ambience, the expectation of bumping into members of haute Bohemia at the corner café. He had wanted to live here when they first moved back to Paris, but Laura had complained that there were no parks or suitable schools for the children, and anyway, there wouldn’t have been anywhere to park the Porsche. Montmartre wasn’t what you’d call grand standing. It was, however, the perfect place to visit your mistress.

  Flavia called to him to come through for lunch, which was an Italian salad involving baby artichokes and figs, far more conducive to pleasure than the makeshift sandwiches that were all Jean-Laurent could have expected at home on a Saturday morning. She opened the fridge to take out a bottle of Sancerre, and Jean-Laurent noticed with pleasure the contrast between her sparse provisions – a bottle of champagne, two lemons, a packet of smoked salmon – and the heavy load of Laura’s giant fridge, which was always filled to bursting with nuggets and family packs of yoghurt. He sat down amidst the elegant minimalism of Flavia’s child-free haven where your eye was never offended by the discordant colours of nasty plastic toys.

  ‘This is a treat,’ said Flavia, filling his glass. ‘What have I done to deserve a weekend visit?’

  ‘Oh, you know, Laura didn’t seem to mind when I said I had some work to do. She seems to have relaxed a bit, thank God. I haven’t had the Inquisition bit recently.’

  ‘Good. Maybe she knows about us, and she’s preparing herself for the inevitable.’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Jean-Laurent said quickly. ‘Nice wine, lots of flint. Aren’t you drinking?’

  He looked at her empty glass.

  ‘No . . . not today. So you don’t think she’s got any idea, then?’

  ‘No. Look, can we not talk about Laura, please? That’s not what I came here for, you know.’

  Flavia looked at him provocatively over the table. Jean-Laurent noticed her breasts were gently spilling over her décolleté lace blouse.

  ‘Oh really? So what did you come for then?’

  He sipped his wine.

  ‘A free lunch, of course,’ he teased. ‘And conversation. And anything else that might crop up between friends.’

  ‘Friends? Is that what we are?’

  ‘Special friends, I’d say.’

  ‘How special?’

  ‘I’ll show you after lunch. If you’ve got time.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got plenty of time, Jean-Laurent. I’ve got all the time in the world. Time is usually your problem.’

  She picked over her salad and gave him a look that excited him yet at the same time set off a warning bell somewhere in the boring, rational part of his brain. He chose to ignore the dull voice of reason – it was the weekend, after all, and it wouldn’t do to ruin the pleasures of the moment with unspecified worries about the future. He had enough of that as it was, and every man deserved to live a little.

  He speared a forkful of carpaccio, air-dried almost to transparency.

  ‘You look nice in that blouse. Have you got a new bra, or are your breasts even more voluptuous than in my fondest imaginings?’

  ‘You’ll just have to see for yourself.’ She adjusted her neckline to offer him an even more advantageous view.

  He took a mouthful of salad.

  ‘You know, if these figs weren’t quite so succulent, I would say forget the lunch and go straight to the main course, if you know what I mean. It’s just too bad you can’t do both at the same time.’

  ‘Who says you can’t?’

  She stood up and walked over to him and bent down to kiss the top of his head. Her breasts swung against his mouth, still full.

  ‘Now just you carry on eating. Don’t worry about me.’

  She turned him on his chair to face her and kissed his face, then his chest, unbuttoning his shirt as she went and lowering herself until she was kneeling at his feet. She pulled at the buckle of his belt, releasing him into her power. His hands gripped her hair, and she pulled away to look up at him.

  ‘Go on, finish your salad. Take no notice of me.’

  He bit into a baby artichoke and leant back in his chair, closing his eyes against the overwhelming rush of pleasure.

  ‘Oh, Fla
via . . .’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘You must invite me for lunch more often.’ He took a sip of Sancerre, slipping his hips forward on the seat and arching his back.

  Flavia knew better than to talk with her mouth full. But just you remember, Jean-Laurent, she thought to herself, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

  ‘What has happened to you?’

  Asa opened the front door and stared aghast at Laura’s dazzling blonde bob.

  ‘I’ve gone native, Asa,’ said Laura. ‘As you know, Parisian women are all blonde, and I’m fed up with being the English frump. What do you think?’

  Asa shrugged.

  ‘In Finland, everyone is blonde, it is nothing special. Anyway, you can see your dark roots, you can tell it’s not natural.’

  ‘That’s the whole point. You need to show that you are a blonde from choice. I am in control of my life. I don’t have to stick with the colour I was born with.’

  ‘I think it must be the start of your menopause – you really should go to that class Devon’s wife is running.’

  Pierre-Louis came running out of the sitting room.

  ‘Mummy, I saw a—’ He stopped dead in his tracks.

  ‘Charles-Edouard! Look, Mummy’s got yellow hair like Madame Bertrand!’

  Madame Bertrand was their headmistress, who was well into her fifties.

  ‘Charles-Edouard came out to take a look.

  ‘Oh yes . . . funny!’

  ‘But nice, though, Charles-Edouard?’ said Laura. ‘Wouldn’t you say it looks nice?’

  ‘It looks OK.’

  Jean-Laurent seemed to think it looked OK, too, when he returned from Montmartre. He found himself in an inexplicably good mood as he poured a glass of champagne for Laura and himself in anticipation of their married couple’s video evening in.

  Things really could be a lot worse, he thought. He had been overreacting, worrying too much about problems that didn’t exist. He was in fact experiencing the living truth of one of his favourite business-book maxims: ‘There are no problems, there are only solutions.’ Perceived problem: his wife was rather lacking in the glamour department. Solution: she had suddenly got a sexy new blonde hair cut. Perceived problem: his mistress was getting too serious. Solution: he managed to placate her with a weekend visit, and got a reassuring blow-job. Everything was falling nicely into place, with no particular effort on his part. And now he was going to spend a cosy night in at home with the wife, in front of the video.