Inside the house, which they entered through the kitchen door, Peter and his mother met the old man’s wife who was tall and grey-haired and beautiful. The kitchen had a wood-burning stove and flowery china displayed on shelves. The table was laid with a cloth and on it sat a fruit cake and a plate of scones along with little pots of jam and cream. The teapot wore a sleeveless silver jacket, hinged in the middle, over the orb of its fat body, but with its spout and its handle sticking out.
In the living-room there was a fireplace with what looked like a small iron cupboard on legs. It had red glass windows through which you could see the glow of burning wood, and beside it on the hearth-stone, judiciously placed, lay a pile of big, hard-covered books with pictures of moles and armadillos and aeroplanes and soldiers in uniform. Inside they all said ‘Peter Dent’ in a childish, pre-war hand.
Beyond the cottage, down a crunching gravel path, lay a well-house, like a glorified shed, full of choppers and hurricane lamps and pulleys and planks of wood. After tea, the old man took Peter, along with Serious Syrius the Star Dog, into a field to check rabbit traps. Peter was beside himself with joy and returned to the cottage armed with several straight sticks which he sharpened into spears. He did so with the active assistance of the old man who had proffered a bone-handled Bowie knife.
‘Fais attention, Pietro!’ Gentille said.
‘Dear,’ the old woman said solicitously, ‘I really do not think that the boy has had much experience with knives.’
‘Don’t fuss, Heather,’ the old man said. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said to Peter, ‘charming creatures, women, but they’re always inclined to fuss.’
While Gentille talked to the old man’s wife, Roland excused himself, saying that he had letters to post and would walk the mile into the village to do so. He longed for air and exercise since, damn it, the oldies couldn’t be sweeter, but they would insist on a fire, even on a warm April evening. Furthermore, he felt the party to be perfectly balanced without him. His mother had taken to the Frenchwoman and his father to the Frenchwoman’s boy. He spent all his working life with boys and right then he was on holiday. Plus it had to be admitted that the Frenchwoman’s boy was more than a little bit wet, poor kiddo, doubtless through no fault of his own.
Yet on his return, Gentille had expressed such unequivocal enthusiasm for the local drama society’s production of The Provoked Husband that he had found himself, graciously on cue, suggesting they attend it together and leave Pietro to spend the night with his parents.
The Frenchwoman had surprised him by turning out to be thoroughly clued up on Restoration Comedy – far more so than he – and he found her an agreeable companion, thoughtful, calm and unaffected.
And, next morning, after returning from an hour’s ride, he had humoured his father by agreeing to trot tamely down a section of the lane and back, with the boy sitting in front of him on the saddle. Roland could feel the boy’s terror against his own body but, once safely back on the ground, the child had turned it all into hostility.
‘Mon père n’aime pas les chevaux,’ he said. ‘Il préfère aller par avion.’
It was Gentille who made the first move. She had been thinking about Roland intermittently during certain evenings alone after work. A series of pleasurable images had lingered after her return to Paris; an image of Roland drinking beer with her in the churchyard during the interval of that ridiculous English play – all dolts and parsons and lechery; an image of Roland waxing his size forty-eight walking boots on the doorstep of his parents’ charming kitchen. Then there had been all those photographs that had stood in frames on the piano – photographs of Roland almost invariably engaged in field sports, water sports and cook-outs. His evident sportiness entertained her with its novelty, since her own life was – had always been – conspicuously unathletic.
Roland was marking Sixth-Form maths books when the telephone rang. He picked it up immediately, sounding a little preoccupied.
‘Gentille,’ he said cordially, though he had not been thinking about her at all.
‘You are well?’ she said.
‘Most certainly,’ Roland said, who was never ill. ‘Thank you. And you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, dismissively, wishing to proceed to other business. ‘And you are busy? But you will have a short holiday next week.’
Roland’s laugh was like an admission. ‘You’re very well informed,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ Gentille said. ‘I am a journalist.’
Roland said nothing. He waited for her to go on.
‘I invite you to spend your holiday with me in Paris,’ she said.
He was startled and disarmed by her directness. ‘Well –’ he said.
‘You know Paris, of course?’ she said.
It came to him, suddenly, that he had never properly been there. Once, changing trains on his way to a climbing fortnight in the Alps. Once again, as a schoolboy, on a day trip during a memorably dreadful French ‘exchange’, throughout which the host family had alternated between ignoring him and watching him with interest as he struggled to consume jellied tripe – ‘la treep’, as he still thought of it with a shudder. He had subsequently gone on to acquire a perfectly decent pass in O-Level French, but he still, in his heart, associated the language not only with animal innards, but with the frightful Madame Lazarre, who had swept into his prep-school classroom once a week to fire incomprehensible questions. For many years, he had considered that her ‘Réponds en français!’ sounded suspiciously like ‘Rapunzel!’
‘No,’ Roland said. ‘No, hardly at all. I spent a little time just north of Paris once. It’s going back a bit.’
‘So you will come?’ she said. Roland hesitated. ‘Pietro goes to my mother,’ she said. ‘The time will be quite free.’ After a pause, she said, ‘I have the Musée d’Orsay here, just down the street . . . There are of course many little restaurants and bars . . .’ Then she said, ‘Or perhaps a trip to the country . . .’
Quite suddenly Roland thought, why not? Why not go? Open the mind. Breathe new air. A long weekend in a handsome foreign city not an hour away by plane – and in the company of a perfectly acceptable woman. After all, where’s your spirit? He felt shamed by his habitual insularity which drove him to spend his half-term holidays walking the Pennines, or canoeing from Ross-on-Wye to Tintern. Once, admittedly, he had gone to see his sister in Vancouver.
‘How very kind of you to ask me,’ he said.
And so it was arranged between them.
Roland had the taxi drop him off at the corner near the man who sold oysters from a wooden counter in the street. He collected the key from the art dealer with the Dufy seascape in the window and he climbed the fifty-eight stairs to the apartment. Gentille’s front door was painted pale matt grey. It opened on to a large, under-furnished room, the bare floor-boards and walls of which had been painted pale matt grey. She had left coffee for him in a pale grey thermal jug and alongside the jug stood an outsize, pale grey cup and saucer, the cup shallow and bowl-shaped. A couple of brioches were evident, wrapped in a pale grey napkin. They sat – jug, cup and brioches – like a monochrome still-life, upon a matt grey trestle table which was otherwise bare, except that Gentille had wedged a sheet of pale grey Ingres paper under the saucer. On it she had written: ‘Bon appétit!’
The room possessed two tall, uncurtained windows fitted with grey-painted shutters, now fixed open. The windows overlooked similarly tall, grey apartment houses across the narrow street. Under the windows were two solid, pale grey armchairs of curving art deco design, separated by a pale, matt grey coffee table upon which stood a vase, stippled in tones of grey and containing a dozen matt grey tulips carved out of wood.
Otherwise, the room contained a single shelf of books, a small music centre and a chrome replica, the size of a shoe box, of a 1950s Citroën DS. This last startled him, being the very model of a car he had once possessed and cherished before his girlfriend – fiancée as he had then thought of her – had driven it into the Tee
s on what had turned out to be quite the most miserable day of his life.
He turned quickly from the model and looked around. The room was the only one on that level, except for a tiny kitchen that was wedged under a flight of turret-like, winding stairs. In the kitchen, Roland registered that Gentille possessed a small table-top fridge and a glazed sink in which there lay two pale, matt grey dinner plates and two wine glasses, unwashed but neatly stacked. He wondered idly who had dined with her the previous night, or had it been the boy? Various utensils and two small pans hung from a grey-painted, perforated board fixed to the wall above a small cooker on cabriole legs. A packet of Gitanes lay open on the workboard alongside a giant grey ashtray.
Roland returned to the living-room and poured himself some coffee. Gentille had made it fiercely strong and the establishment revealed no sign of sugar or milk. He gulped it, wincing, and then sat down on one of the armchairs to eat the brioches. As he adjusted to the spare, immaculate space, he began to imagine that Gentille was sitting in the other armchair, her long legs stretched out before her, her ankles crossed, her feet in those curious, medieval, velvety shoes that came up over her insteps. He felt the scrutiny of her shadowy grey eyes and began to feel out of place. Why the hell was it all so grey? He was not, in the main, a defiant person, but now he felt that all the colours about his person – his clothes, his hair, his skin, his travelling bag – were attributes constituted in defiance of an inviolable orthodoxy.
Gentille appeared in the lunch hour and walked with him to a bistro where they ate a few small clams and a salad made with dandelion leaves. After that she smoked her Gitanes and smiled and said very little and drank black coffee. Roland drank beer and felt hungry and said less. Then they walked through the Luxembourg Gardens until they got to the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where Gentille explained that, since her office was within a stone’s throw, he should return.
‘Before you become lost,’ she said.
‘I don’t “become lost”,’ Roland said, feeling an irritation which he had not yet diagnosed as proceeding from the inadequacy of his lunch. ‘I am quite capable of taking bearings.’
‘Ah,’ Gentille said. ‘Then you may walk with me a little further.’
That night she took him to a Japanese restaurant in the Rue Grégoire-de-Tours, where she taunted his stomach with dainty portions of bean-curd jelly and little parcels of raw fish. After that he slept on an air-bed on the floor of her living-room.
On Saturday morning, Gentille went in to work, but she returned at midday and walked out with him along the Quai de la Tournelle and on to the Ile St Louis, through a street of small exclusive clothing boutiques. One of these she suddenly, spontaneously entered and, once inside, obliged him to sit on a frail, bentwood chair, while both she and the sales assistant solicited his opinion of a pale, sack-like garment with far too many buttons in which Gentille had emerged from the changing room.
From the boutique they made their way, sans lunch and via two elderly churches rather too heavy with the trappings of idolatry, and two small bars, where Roland drank Belgian beer and Gentille drank Club Soda with a dash of what looked like liquid raspberry jam, to the Musée d’Orsay, where she stood, silent and reverent, for fully twelve minutes, before a small, severe wooden work-table designed by Philip Webb of Oxford in 1931.
She made supper for him in the apartment; a casual affair as it seemed to him, following upon several tots of Macallan’s and consisting of two very small poached eggs smelling faintly of fish and served on fine-cut circles of fried bread the size of cross-sections through tennis balls. Intermittently, she filled their glasses with white wine. He was uncomfortably aware, throughout the meal, of an insistently mournful female voice emanating from the stereo.
Roland ate as slowly as he could and leaned back to watch Gentille smoke. As the hour for sleep became inevitable, Gentille, after a brief spell in the bathroom while he cleared away the plates, inquired, with that slightly taunting smile which had begun to get on his nerves, ‘And you will be happy again to sleep here on the floor?’
‘Perfectly happy, thank you,’ Roland said, and then he lay awake, listening to the sound of her feet on the floor above as she crossed and re-crossed the room. He wondered what on earth it was like up there, since he had not ventured beyond her bathroom – a place which had struck him as being quite excessively cluttered with cosmetic jars and unguents, for a woman who appeared to wear no make-up.
On Sunday morning Gentille appeared barefoot from the turret, wearing a grey silk kimono. Roland woke to the aroma of her bath oil which had infused the apartment, cloyingly borne on steam. She brought two cups of coffee on a tray and four very small soldiers of toast with a measure of pink grapefruit marmalade. When she had placed the tray on the floor, she sat down beside it alongside the airbed.
‘Voici ton petit déjeuner,’ she said. ‘Tu as bien dormi?’
He sat up, shirtless, to lean his head uncomfortably against the wall, and took note, to his relief, that the coffee had been made with milk. He considered the possibility that she was addressing him in French in order to put him at a disadvantage. Rapunzel. Rapunzel. Réponds en français.
How cold she is, how snide, he thought, and his heart went out to the absent Pietro, whose stamp was nowhere to be seen in the apartment. Not that he was one to beatify the kiddie-winks – and, God only knew, he had had his fair share of dealings with the addle-brained, ‘child-centred’ parent – but where was there any evidence of the boy? Where were his toys, his drawings, his plastic soldiers? Where were all those bogroll and cornflake-box constructions that his sister’s kids bore home from playgroup? Where was the child’s Peter Rabbit mug, so to speak? Or was the poor infant required to quaff his Ribena from one of those punitive matt grey coffee cups?
‘Alors,’ she said. ‘Veux-tu aller à Versailles aujourd’hui? On pourrait faire un tour de bicyclette.’
‘Just out of interest,’ he said. ‘Why are you speaking to me in French?’
Gentille uttered a small, rippling laugh. ‘Parce que nous sommes en France!’ she said.
She kept a grey 2CV in the garden of a friend’s house in the suburbs. They went to fetch it on the métro. Then they drove to Versailles. Once there, they rented bicycles and cycled through the park. It was most invigorating, Roland thought, to have the wind in one’s face, and the landscaping was exquisite. And then there was that absurd little Toytown milking shed where the queen had played dairymaid while her subjects groaned under their taxes and starved. Roland’s stomach cried out in sympathy. He wondered, as they drove back in almost total silence, how it was that Gentille appeared to have no need to punctuate the hours with provender, or did she distil her nectar from the air?
Suddenly Gentille, without any visible reason, brought the car to a pointed halt along a quiet stretch of road. She sat for a while with her hands in her lap and said nothing.
‘So,’ she said eventually. ‘Now you have seen Paris.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘And you have seen Versailles,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Roland said.
‘And you have seen the inside of my apartment and the inside of my car,’ she said.
‘Gentille –’ Roland said.
She made a small, elegant, unfathomable gesture with her hands.
‘Gentille –’ he said again, and stopped. He thought, ought I to kiss her? But he merely sighed and did nothing. ‘Gentille, I’m sorry,’ he said, and they sat silent for a while longer.
‘There is another woman,’ she said eventually.
‘No,’ Roland said. ‘As a matter of fact, no, there isn’t.’
She turned her eyes on him, examining his face. ‘But there was,’ she said astutely.
‘Oh, gosh,’ Roland said. ‘But so long ago. Really. Hardly even a woman. A girl, I suppose. What I mean is, the women I’ve met ever since – well – I haven’t been able to persuade myself that any of them mattered, if you know what I mean.’
&n
bsp; ‘And I?’ Gentille said.
‘I don’t know,’ Roland said. ‘Forgive me, Gentille, but I can’t say.’
After a long pause, she said, ‘And the girl?’
‘I believed that she cared for me,’ Roland said reluctantly. ‘I believed that she really cared for me, you see. She was very shy. Very undemonstrative – but she had given me to understand –’ He stopped. ‘I was wrong,’ he said curtly. ‘I’d misread her.’ Then he was silent for so long that she thought he had given up his narrative. ‘I propositioned her,’ he said bluntly. ‘I put my arm around her as she was driving my car over a bridge. I – well, we had been going out together for almost a year,’ he said. ‘She was so determined to avoid me that she drove my car into the river.’
‘You forced her?’ Gentille said in disbelief.
‘Good Lord, no,’ Roland said. ‘I merely said, categorically, that I felt the time had come.’
‘And for this she drive your car into the river?’ Gentille said.
‘Drove,’ Roland said, correcting her involuntarily. ‘Yes.’ He was beginning to wish that he had never embarked on the disclosure.
‘And you were in the car?’ she said. ‘Both you and this –?’
‘Alice,’ Roland said. ‘She was called Alice. Yes. I shattered a window. I – she was concussed. She’d had a bad blow to the head.’
Gentille looked him over. Then she took up his right arm which was bare from the elbow and turned it over and stared at it closely, as if searching it for scars.
‘This girl,’ she said. ‘This Alice. You saved her life.’
‘Well,’ Roland said, wishing to deflect tribute. ‘End of car, however. Beautiful old Citroën. Just like the one in your living-room, actually. How do you come to have it?’
Gentille ignored the question. ‘And now,’ she said pointedly, never taking her eyes off his face, ‘because of this . . . this ridiculous . . . this hysterical English virgin, you sleep in my apartment two nights on the floor and you are with me like a monk.’
‘Good Lord,’ Roland said. ‘Gentille –’
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