by Sarah Long
‘OK, go and get Pictionary Junior.’
Pierre-Louis ran off happily to his bedroom and Jean-Laurent flicked back to Stephen R. Covey’s advice on marriage. ‘Proactive people make love a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love is a value that is actualised by loving actions.’
That was all very well, he thought, but what happened when those unsubordinated feelings resulted in a mistress carrying your child? Where did that put you and your wretched values and responsibilities? He wished that he was like Stephen Covey: clean-living, church-going, goal-achieving and, to boot, damned rich. Instead of which he was a useless reactive wreck who was being pissed over by his so-called girlfriend. Now there was someone really proactive. Flavia had her circle of influence well in control of her circle of concern, and her personal mission statement was clearly going just the way she wanted.
Pierre-Louis ran back in, clutching the game, his eyes shining with excitement. Jean-Laurent hugged him.
‘I love you, Pierre-Louis, do you know that? Now go and bring me that bottle of wine from the fridge, and a glass and the corkscrew.’
After all, when you made a deposit you could surely make a small withdrawal, couldn’t you?
Laura had taken special care with her appearance before delivering Charles-Edouard to the party that afternoon. By chance, the seven-year-old host lived in the Villa Montmorency, and Antoine had been delighted by her suggestion that she call in to see him. Sylvie was away, and three to six was as good a time frame for adult indoor games as it was for a children’s party.
She drew up outside the party boy’s house, a dilapidated old hunting lodge that sat scruffily between its nouveau-riche neighbours, and escorted her son up the path. The door was opened by the father, a scion of the wealthy aristocrat who had once owned the entire estate until he had sold the land to developers. He bore all the trademarks of the last cry of European aristocracy – a booming voice, negligible chin and cavalier disregard for fashionable clothes. It was what the French termed fin de race, enough to turn the mildest citizen into a class warrior. There was no more powerful advertisement for the benefits of racial integration than the sight of this product of centuries of inbreeding.
‘Come in, je vous en prie. I’m afraid Alexandre’s rather upset, he’s just sat on his guinea pig.’
Laura and Charles-Edouard looked on aghast as the maid removed the flattened animal in a dustpan.
‘He was so excited – it was a present from his uncle. He put it on a chair, and next thing you know, he’d forgotten all about it and sat down – and there you are.’
A chubby, red-eyed child came forward and took Charles-Edouard’s present, which he tossed on the pile on the hall table. An adult dressed as a harlequin was applying festive make-up to a solemn ring of children sitting on the floor.
Parisians didn’t do musical bumps and pass the parcel. They rang agencies to send in clowns or fairies with puppet shows and fishing lines for pêche à la ligne so the children could reel in their own presents at the end of the party. You couldn’t expect much change from three hundred euros, but then your child would recoup at least that in gifts from his guests, since video and computer games had supplanted the ladybird book or six coloured pencils that were expected in Laura’s own childhood.
She said goodbye and drove round the corner, past Antoine’s Regency villa, and parked her car discreetly a few doors up. She didn’t know anybody else who lived here in the Villa, but you couldn’t be too careful. The gate buzzed open and she made her way past the sheep statues up to the front door, where her ardent lover stood waiting.
He was dressed in leisurewear, which was slightly disappointing. She had only ever seen him – clothed – in a suit before, and she had to admit this was the better option for men of a certain age. Whereas Jean-Laurent looked rugged in joggers or jeans, Antoine looked somehow wrong in his pressed casual trousers and lemon cashmere sweater. His voice, though, was as irresistible as ever.
‘You look beautiful,’ he said. ‘And as Stendhal said, beauty is the promise of happiness.’
Laura returned his kiss and followed him upstairs into the neutral elegance of his child-free salon. A three-tiered silver platter bearing sandwiches the size of postage stamps was placed on the coffee table. He served her coffee in a tiny porcelain cup.
‘Welcome to my home. I am so pleased you could come. And so much has changed since you were last here,’ he said.
Laura blushed at the memory of her first visit to the house. It must have been so obvious why she had casually arranged to drop by, although she had so strenuously denied it at the time.
‘I’d like to introduce you to my library,’ he continued. ‘Here, what shall I read to you?’
He showed her the bookcases which ran from floor to ceiling across one wall of the room.
‘I had to fight for this, you know. Sylvie’s designer insisted there was no place for unmatching book spines in his concept, but I couldn’t live without them. Thornton Wilder said literature was nothing more than the orchestration of platitudes, but I believe that books are the second greatest source of happiness. Do you like the work of Abel Bonnard?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him. How come you are so well read? In England all our doctors are terrible philistines.’
‘I believe that is because all your cleverest students turn their back on the sciences. In France, it is only the intellectually ungifted who sit for the literature bac at school. The able students follow the scientific route, which means there are plenty of unfulfilled poets following careers as doctors and engineers. Here, let me read to you from Bonnard’s Savoir Aimer.’
Laura couldn’t help noticing the book looked rather well thumbed. Perhaps he made a habit of reading to his mistresses from an all-time top ten of literary favourites.
He read aloud in his rich low voice, and it struck her yet again how French was the only language for love.
‘To love is to grow as you forget yourself. It is to escape through one soul being the mediocrity of all the rest. It is to be more alone through trying to be less so. It is to become like everybody else while imagining that you are like no one else. It is to give a rendezvous to happiness in the palace of fate.’
Antoine looked up and saw his words were having the hoped-for effect. Laura opened her eyes.
‘You’re right, that is very beautiful.’
‘Do you know any Shakespeare by heart?
‘By heart? Of course not. The only lines I can remember are from pop songs.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, they hardly bear repeating.’
‘Don’t you love the line from Romeo and Juliet, “love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or Lamartine’s “The Lake” from his First Meditations. Such a pressing sense of urgency.’
‘Go on then, recite it for me.’
Antoine knelt beside Laura.
‘Let us love then. / Let us love then. / Let us hurry from the fugitive hour, let us rejoice: / Man has no point of port, time has no river bank. / It is running, and we are slipping away.’
He wrapped his arms around her legs.
‘I believe it was your own Oscar Wilde who said that love was a sacrament that must be taken on one’s knees.’
He pushed up her skirt, his voice becoming muffled as he continued his theme.
‘He also said that the sex of a fascinating woman is a challenge, not a defence.’
So ends my lesson in European literature, thought Laura as she closed her eyes once more and leant back into the neutral harmony of the plushly upholstered meridienne.
Asa cast her eye around the bathroom to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. Her toilet bag, the size of a medium suitcase, lay open on the floor, exposing a neatly packed battery of beauty products.
Real beauty, of course, came from inside, which is why she was so careful about what she allowed to ar
rive in her stomach. Vegetables make you beautiful, that was her mantra, and these could be welcomed in any form. It was Empty Calories and Bad Cholesterol that had to be ejected from her system before they took their evil toll.
In time, she knew that she would be able to resist them altogether, but for now she still needed to feel the sweet rush of chocolate and candy bars, which she strictly disposed of shortly after swallowing. Otherwise she would become a ‘beautiful person’ in the fat sense of the word, the disparaging false compliment that was often attributed to the overweight, as though shining hair and a caring concern for others was any substitute for the lissom thighs and waif-like self-absorption of the truly beautiful.
So as Asa fuelled her interior beauty with vegetables, she spared no expense on maintaining an exterior to match. Exfoliating face scrubs, anti-wrinkle creams, cellulite removers, purchased at a cost out of all proportion to her modest income, lay in obedient rows in the case alongside the tanning machine.
She added one or two jars that she had helped herself to from Laura’s dressing table – a perk of the job, really, like using office envelopes – then fastened the beauty bag and carried it into the hall, where her clothes were already packed up into two larger suitcases along with a few towels and pillowcases that she thought might come in useful for her new life with Devon.
It had been fortuitous, his chambre de bonne falling vacant at just the moment when she felt she could not carry on at Laura’s. In exchange for her room, she would do a few hours’ housework; there were no children, of course, which would leave her free to concentrate on planning her future. And she would also help Devon with his research, for which he would pay her a small salary. It would be wonderful to have him close at hand to continue monitoring her progress.
She had just sat down in the kitchen to write her letter of farewell when she heard a key in the lock. Laura came in and looked in surprise at the bags in the hall and at Asa sitting in her coat at the kitchen table.
‘Oh Laura, it’s you,’ said Asa. ‘I was just writing you a note.’
‘Obviously.’
‘I hope you don’t mind, I wasn’t planning to say goodbye – I thought it would be easier if I just left. I hope you are not angry with me.’
‘No, I’m not angry,’ said Laura. She couldn’t be less angry. In fact, she was absolutely bloody delighted. At last the cuckoo was leaving, and she hadn’t even needed to deliver her often-researched speech about Asa being a Beautiful Person but them all needing their Own Space.
‘I quite understand,’ she said, taking Asa by the shoulders and hugging her warmly. ‘I think it’s absolutely the right decision.’
‘You do?’Asa looked disappointed. She had rather hoped that her departure would drop Laura well and truly in the shit.
‘But you don’t even know where I’m going.’
And I couldn’t care less, thought Laura.
‘Whatever you have decided,’ she said, ‘is bound to be the right decision.’
Asa was not about to be put off by Laura’s lack of curiosity.
‘I’m going to live with Devon,’ she explained. ‘And his wife, of course. They are letting me stay in their chambre de bonne. Devon will be able to keep a closer eye on me. I think it’s what I need.’
‘Well, that all sounds very cosy,’ said Laura. ‘I hope the three of you will be very happy.’
Asa stared at her blankly. That dreadful Scandinavian dullness, thought Laura. Thank God I won’t have to put up with that any more.
‘I was going to ask you to send on my salary,’ said Asa, ‘but as you’re here . . .’
‘Absolutely.’ Laura couldn’t open her purse fast enough. She pulled out a handful of notes. ‘Here, with my blessing. Have a happy life.’
She eagerly opened the front door.
‘Do you need a hand with your bags?’
‘No, I can manage. Goodbye.’
The farewell hung in the air as Asa negotiated her cases through the swing doors of the lift and nodded a final goodbye. This is the last time, thought Laura, that I will ever have to meet that cold grey look.
She watched as the coffin-lift carried away its heavy load, then turned back to reclaim her territory. Asa’s bedroom still carried her smell, a heady confection of unguents overlaid by the faintest trace of vomit. The wardrobe doors hung open to reveal a satisfying row of empty coat hangers. The shelves were free of self-help books, the blank bed wondrously unoccupied.
In the kitchen, she took a bin liner and opened the fridge. In went the zero-fat yoghurts, low-fat spreads, slimline meals for one and cans of Diet Coke. Out of their hiding places came the packets of biscuits, cereals, sweets, all the satanic temptations that with the cunning of a fallen angel she had kept out of the reach of the pillaging Finn.
Laura made herself a cup of creamy hot chocolate, went through to the triple living, kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the sofa, luxuriously alone. She made a mental list of all the things she couldn’t stand about Asa and thought how much richer her life would be without her. The inconvenience of having no babysitter was negligible compared with the freedom she would now enjoy. That was the thing about domestic help – it was supposed to free you up, but all it did was create chains to tie you into a tense interdependent relationship with someone you invariably came to hate.
She was still there half an hour later when Jean-Laurent let himself in. Hearing his key in the lock, Laura thought for a horrible moment that Asa had changed her mind until she remembered that her keys had been handed over and safely relegated to the kitchen drawer. She smiled brightly at her husband as he walked in.
‘She’s gone!’ she announced, forgetting the crisis in their marriage in the euphoria of the moment.
Jean-Laurent took in her happy face and thought for a second that she was referring to Flavia. Flavia and the foetus, disappeared in a puff of smoke. If only.
‘Asa has gone,’ Laura explained. ‘Packed up her troubles in her old kitbag and gone to seek redemption in the arms of Devon, or at least in his chambre de bonne. Isn’t that fantastic?’
‘I suppose. Yes. Bon débarras. Good riddance.’
He sat down beside her on the sofa, his shoulders tensed, his head between his hands. He was clearly preparing to launch into the difficult conversation she had been dreading.
‘Oh Laura, what has happened to us?’
But she didn’t want to go along with it, this heavy unburdening of his guilty secrets that she already knew. She was determined to keep things light.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘remember the motto on your office mug: “Cheer up, it may never happen”.’
It used to be a private joke between them, mugs with jokey messages. Jean-Laurent had found it a peculiar trait of British office life, colleagues forever brewing each other tea and coffee – it all tasted the same – served up in mugs saying things like ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here – but it helps!’ Those damned mugs, you couldn’t go into anyone’s office without seeing them steaming offensively on the desk. ‘My mate went to Skegness and all I got was this useless cup.’ He had read in the British press that five million cups of tea a week were spilled at work because of the wires sticking out of people’s computers. Five million cups! Damn the Brits, why couldn’t they have their coffee before they got to work, like civilised Europeans.
But bad British jokes were the last thing on his mind right now.
‘It’s no good, Laura. I need to talk to you. There’s something I need to tell you.’
So this was it, then – he had decided it was confession time. Laura felt strangely calm. She even felt sorry for him. In fact she felt so sorry for him that she decided to let him off the hook.
‘It’s all right, I know.’
He looked up at her in surprise. A glimmer of hope appeared before him.
‘You know?’
Laura, good old Laura, his helpmate, his companion. She would sort it out for him. She would know what to do.
&
nbsp; ‘You and Flavia. I know,’ she said.
He laughed.
‘Oh Laura, you don’t know what a relief that is to me. You know. Thank God.’
He buried his face in her lap.
‘But how? And why aren’t you angry? I thought you’d be furious, I thought you’d throw me out.’
‘I was angry. I was devastated. I still am, I suppose. But I’m not the first wife that this has happened to. It goes on all the time, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s really rather banal. Sex in the workplace. In the old days it would have been with your secretary; now that’s too infra dig, so you go a notch higher and bed the hoity-toity research consultant, though I do think you might have had the imagination to look a bit further. But then you always were lazy. You married your landlady because it saved the effort of going elsewhere, and now you’ve shagged the first little hot ticket that made eyes at you across the meeting room. I can’t say I’m not disappointed in you, Jean-Laurent.’
The shamed adulterer hung his head. Banal? Disappointing? How swiftly his glorious affair was reduced to a pedestrian bit of after-hours jiggy-jiggy.
‘Laura, I am so sorry. I have been such a fool.’
Laura shrugged.
‘Shit happens, Jean-Laurent, and you let it happen.’
She was surprised at her cool self-control. If she hadn’t had her own delicious secret to draw on, she would now be flailing around in a scene of wild sexual jealousy. Instead of which, she could enjoy the spectacle of her husband squirming like a butterfly under the pin of her noble forgiveness. How wise she had been to follow Lorinda’s advice.
Then Jean-Laurent dropped his bombshell.
‘If it wasn’t for the baby, it would be so simple now. I could just walk away and we could be like before. You’d forgive me and we could pretend it never happened.’
Laura’s carefully constructed shell shattered around her so loudly she could hear it crashing in her ears.
‘Say that again,’ she said faintly.
‘I said, if it wasn’t for the baby—’
‘She’s having a baby,’ whispered Laura.
‘You didn’t know? No, of course you didn’t know, how could you? It’s just that when you said you knew, I thought you meant you knew.’