Footnotes to Sex

by Mia Farlane

  ‘Yes, I will carry your bag if you like.’

  ‘May, no! I am teasing you. Really, you are behaving like the boyfriend I never had!’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be behaving like a man,’ May said. ‘I don’t see myself like that.’

  Francine asked, ‘How do you see yourself? This is interesting.’

  ‘Not like a man,’ May said. She felt embarrassed.

  ‘You see yourself as a woman then?’ Francine said, and she laughed.

  Francine was either being mean, or she was being flirtatious. ‘I am a human being,’ May said.

  ‘Yes, but you are a woman also.’

  ‘That’s true, yes.’

  They walked in silence for a while. It was so cold; the wind was icy. They crossed the Pont-Neuf, past the statue of Henri IV on horseback, looking over the prow of the island, towards the Seine.

  ‘What a wind!’ Francine said. ‘It’s horribly cold!’

  ‘I can give you my gloves.’ May pulled them off. ‘I can put my hands in my pockets.’ She gave them to Francine.

  ‘Keep your gloves. Keep them! You will need them. In any case, it is time for you to go back to your hotel. It’s late and you don’t need to walk me all the way to my apartment.’

  ‘No, I’d like to accompany you.’ Did Francine not want May to walk with her?

  ‘You can walk with me as far as my street,’ Francine said, and she accepted the gloves.

  If Francine (May let herself think this) ever – which she wouldn’t – May would probably… yes, she probably would, but Francine probably wouldn’t in the first case, which was fortunate – but she might. May pictured it, the beginning only, opening the door in the dark, but she couldn’t imagine more; that would be sacrilege, unless Francine was the one to… in which case…

  They arrived at the Théâtre de l’Odéon.

  ‘May, this is my street,’ Francine said as she stopped on the corner. ‘And these are your gloves.’ She took them off and gave them back.

  May put them on. ‘I could walk with you as far as your place,’ she said.

  ‘And what is Jansen doing this evening?’

  ‘She’s been working. But she’ll be sleeping right now, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose? And she is not accompanying a woman back to her apartment?’

  May said nothing. Then she said, ‘No.’

  It felt safer to pretend a simple question had been asked.

  ‘Fine. Now I am going to say bonsoir and bonne nuit. Sleep well.’

  May took another sip of her café-crème. She was in the bar-tabac near the hotel. It was early and there was only the waiter and one other customer, a man perched on a stool at the bar, smoking, drinking a small black coffee, and reading Le Parisien. She felt tired; her face was tight and dry from lack of sleep, and the coffee was giving her a headache. She was behaving, she thought, like someone who was falling in love. (Or were moments spent with a woman like Francine bound to feel vaguely sublime?) She looked at her watch: eight forty. Six hours before the train back to London. Francine seemed to be suggesting that May was in love with her; and she judged May for it. But that wasn’t fair, and May wasn’t even sure she was in love (she loved Jansen). Also – it was all a bit disturbing – was Francine’s behaviour completely above board? May bit the crispy tip of her croissant au beurre. Perhaps she’d wander along the Seine; or she could go to the Gibert-Jeunes near Saint-Michel Métro and find a few second-hand books, or to the open-air book market at the Parc Georges Brassens. Not that she needed any more books or anything else to read; she still hadn’t finished L’Ange et les pervers, and she had semi-read but had not understood Francine’s essay on Delarue-Mardrus (so she needed to reread the essay), and now Francine had given her nine more essays to read.

  May opened L’Ange et les pervers at the beginning of chapter seven:

  ‘Me voilà lancée dans l’immoralité des autres… se dit Miss Hervin rentrée chez elle…’ (‘Here I am launched into the immorality of others… Miss Hervin said to herself once she was back home…’)

  10

  Tamsin

  The clothes were too careful; the colours were too bold; the shirt was done up too high; she didn’t eat biscuits, ‘thanks’; she didn’t drink coffee, ‘oh, no thanks.’ If they had ordinary tea though, she’d be interested. How could Jansen ever have had a thing for the woman? Her smooth, soft voice was so calm, as if she had camped in a library all her life; it was as if some disaster had occurred, and her voice had got stuck on ‘soothe’. Talking to her, you started to feel like you were a crash victim. And what were her plans for the Easter holidays? A silent retreat.

  Jansen set the tray of tea, coffee and rejected biscuits on the floor in front of them, and Tamsin moved forward, politely eager, from the sofa, dropping her jumper onto the tray.

  Jansen leaped off her chair. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it.’ She picked up the jumper, and shook the crumbs out over the sink. ‘You’ve got chocolate on it, I’m afraid,’ she said, handing it back.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tamsin said. ‘That’s so clumsy of me.’

  ‘No, you’re fine.’ Jansen poured the tea and passed a cup to Tamsin, who immediately spilt it over the biscuits.

  ‘Blast! What’s wrong with me today?’ Tamsin said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You really don’t like my baking, do you?’ Jansen laughed, carefully picking up the plate of soggy biscuits and taking it over to the bench.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tamsin repeated. She went bright red. ‘Is that all the biscuits?’

  ‘We’ve got Digestives, I think. It’s not a disaster.’ Jansen sponged up the rest of the tea on the tray, got a packet of biscuits out of the cupboard, and sat down again. ‘Oh, May!’ She had thought of something they could talk about: ‘Tamsin and I were remembering our army days –’

  Tamsin smiled here and shook her head, closing her eyes as if it was all too ridiculously amusing, and nodded to Jansen, to get her to continue.

  ‘We were remembering the night the SIB came to the camp, the “Special Investigation Branch” – of the Royal Military Police,’ Jansen explained.

  ‘And did a search.’ Tamsin took over now, coming to life. ‘A warning came through on the switchboard: “Quick! The SIB’s coming!” You weren’t allowed any alcohol at all in the block, but a lot of people had their secret supplies. So everything was piled into plastic bags – vodka, sherry, wine, some people had dope to get rid of, letters, cards, magazines – and Jansen drove it all out to someone’s brother’s for safekeeping.’

  Laughter.

  ‘Being a chauffeur’s not exactly the same: long waits at Gatwick and Waterloo for late arrivals,’ Jansen said. ‘Missed connections –’

  ‘Yeah but what about the rich and famous?’ Tamsin reminded her. ‘Who was it you had in your car the other day? Mick Jagger, wasn’t it? Or Mick Fleetwood? I always get them confused,’ she said, laughing at herself.

  ‘Mick Fleetwood,’ Jansen told her.

  ‘That’s right, you told me.’ Tamsin blushed again. ‘I’m useless with names.’

  The conversation moved on to job-hunting: how to fill in an application form, the importance of following the ‘person specification’, interview skills: it was so important what you wore; first impressions were everything, and if you could show you were enthusiastic.

  At a lull in that conversation, Tamsin announced she was ‘pretty whacked’, that she’d head off now – if that was all right – and leave them to get on with their packing. Jansen nodded in silence, said, ‘Fine, yeah’ and accompanied her out of the bedsit to the front door of the house.

  ‘Is she always like that?’ May asked Jansen after she returned. ‘I felt as if we were at an intensive course for job-seekers. I don’t think I could’ve coped with much more than an hour. Thank God she was tired.’

  Jansen squirted dishwashing liquid into the baking tray, and filled it with hot water.

  ‘All she seemed to want to talk about was work.’<
br />
  ‘She’s looking for a job at the moment; of course she’s going to want to talk about work. She’s just had an interview.’ Jansen handed May a tea towel.

  ‘“I would really enjoy making sure each customer felt looked after.” I wanted to say, I’m not thinking of employing you; you can relax now. But I think she really meant it; she was being sincere.’

  ‘Some people enjoy going to work; just because you don’t.’

  May made a face. ‘What irritates me is that, behind all those CV profile clichés, she really believes everyone else should live to work, like she does.’

  ‘Is there anything you actually like about her?’

  ‘She’s got a “I’m really conservative” look about her. Sometimes I question your taste.’ May yawned.

  ‘Yeah. I question it too.’

  Then Jansen left the bedsit. She left the house. Without slamming the door – she never slammed doors. It was freezing outside, and she didn’t even have her jersey on.

  May had been rude; she’d been rude about Tamsin – again. She hadn’t meant to be quite so vocal, it was unattractive to rave on like that, but she found it hard to keep her mouth shut sometimes. May got Jansen’s jersey, and her jacket; she put on her coat, and went out in the dark to the Flying Bull, the closest pub, where – yes – there was Jansen, sitting at the corner table, to the right as you come in.

  May slid along the wooden bench opposite her. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  Jansen ignored her.

  ‘Is that an Irish Coffee?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I brought you your jersey – here you are – and your jacket.’

  They sat there, not talking. May didn’t know what to say; she couldn’t start inventing compliments she didn’t believe in. She knew it was because of Tamsin that Jansen had done something odd: gone into the army (as a truck driver, briefly); it was true that May’s bizarre experience – staying in the barracks with Jansen, the morning bugle et cetera – might never have occurred, had it not been for Tamsin. In fact, Jansen would never have gone to Belgium over the summer, and therefore May would never have met her, in a remote lesbian nightclub somewhere in the Flemish countryside. It was the fourteenth of July 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution. May had had too much to drink and was crying on a falling-apart armchair, because she had never heard of Théroigne de Méricourt:

  ‘One of the most well-known French Revolutionaries, one of the most important. It’s astonishing you’ve never heard of her really – considering how very interested you are in the eighteenth century…’ Nadine (a PhD student whom May had been hoping for months to impress) had told her, before strolling off in disgust to smoke her joint alone.

  May had not heard of Théroigne de Méricourt, and through her haze of vin rouge she was nevertheless quickly able to work out what this would mean: she and Nadine could never be lovers now. It was a dismal certainty.

  ‘Hello, my name is Jansen.’ She had leant sympathetically across the coffee table at that moment, and firmly shaken May’s hand.

  This out of place gesture, the handshake, such kindness, such formality, May remembered it.

  Jansen – her ‘real’ name was Jennifer Andersen, but no one called her that – was on leave from the army with a friend (Tamsin), and was, the following day, on her way back to Wilton, ‘but we’ve got time for a dance now, if you like?’ Such a kind smile.

  ‘How can I get to see you again?’ May suddenly developed the ability to be direct.

  ‘I’ll give you my number, but – to be fair – you’ll have to give me yours.’

  (Charming, the reply was charming.)

  They had a few dances together – ‘le rock’ and one ‘slow’ – and sat chatting. Not having a phone in France yet, May had then given Jansen her mother’s number in Canterbury, and, on the spot, determined to: give up her PhD research on Violette Leduc; forfeit her scholarship; and return to England, where she could get a teaching qualification, perhaps. May was not entirely ‘compos mentis’ when she made this decision to give up her PhD. But anyway, there was Jansen sitting opposite her now, nearly ten years later, calmly sipping on an Irish Coffee; and the only thing that really ever irked May was this blindness Jansen had around other people’s faults – it was a real blind spot of hers – and then, of course, her inability to lose contact with Tamsin.

  ‘You won’t have noticed, but she ignored me tonight, most of the time. As usual.’ May could not find anything nice to say, and she wouldn’t waste her time trying.

  ‘You haven’t seen each other for a while. She probably had no idea what to say, but I think she likes you.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jansen always thought the best of people. ‘I’d probably be a university lecturer by now,’ May said, ‘if it wasn’t for Tamsin.’

  ‘“If it wasn’t for Tamsin”? Ah, I see: it’s her fault.’

  ‘If you hadn’t gone with her, to her uncle’s in Mouscron –’

  ‘If you hadn’t met me: it’s my fault,’ Jansen corrected herself.

  ‘I’m not blaming you. It’s just a fact. If you hadn’t gone to Belgium that year –’

  ‘It was your decision to give up on your studies, May. No one forced you to.’ Jansen picked up her cup and put it back down again. ‘That’s why you’ve always been so obnoxious about her, though, isn’t it? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I am not always obnoxious about her. And I’m not saying anything’s her fault either. Or your fault. I am just saying.’

  ‘It’s not as if I got you pregnant,’ Jansen said.

  ‘Yuk! Don’t be revolting.’

  ‘Shall we go home?’ Jansen gestured for the bill. ‘We should really try and finish the rest of the packing this evening: because I’m not going to be able to help you much during the week. We could do the kitchen area together, if you like, and then have a hot drink and a Digestive biscuit.’ She put on her jersey and her jacket.

  ‘And I could tell you how the dinner went with Francine,’ May added. ‘I haven’t even been able to tell you about it yet.’

  ‘No, May. Tomorrow. I’m really tired.’

  11

  The Call

  May wished she’d put the phone on ‘no-ring’. She was in the bedroom of the new flat, sitting at the writing desk, surrounded by a mess of half-unpacked boxes of books. It was Friday evening, Jansen was putting paintings up in the sitting room, and what May should have been doing was quickly shelving all these books; so she could get on with using the rest of the weekend to finish reading the Delarue-Mardrus novel, and then Francine’s essays. Because in one week she was going to Paris again, and she wasn’t prepared yet, because of all the business of moving; and although it was Jansen who had done all the calling and the talking to people et cetera, May had still had to go with her to look at the places (and it was May’s job to get the mail-forwarding set up, for example). In any case, May wasn’t prepared.

  ‘Kennington: that’s zone two – not bad,’ Elizabeth said. ‘So what’s it like?’

  ‘Hmm.’ There wasn’t anything to say. ‘It’s a sixties council block. We’re on the fifth floor. There’s no lift. There’s no balcony. It’s tiny.’

  ‘There’s a sitting room though, isn’t there?’ Elizabeth wanted to know.

  ‘There’s a small sitting room, yes.’ La Fayette, Labé; Leduc, Leduc, Leduc: she’d shelve them by century, perhaps – would be better…

  ‘And how are the neighbours?’

  ‘Quiet.’ May stared out of the window at a block of flats identical to theirs.

  ‘Great. That’s why you moved, isn’t it?’

  ‘How’s the sculpting class?’ She had to get off the phone soon.

  ‘Oh, I’m not going any more. I haven’t been to the last three sessions.’

  ‘What do you mean? You’ve dropped out?’

  ‘Dunno – s’pose so; there are only five or six more to go anyway…’ Elizabeth trailed off.

  May made an interested, uninterest
ed ‘mm’ sound.

  ‘It’s not really me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘And my flat’s falling apart; everyone’s on the verge of leaving. I think I might have to move out, too. Or I’ll be caught with the lease. Anyway, I’m thinking I might move down to London and be on the dole there for a while, meet new people, see what happens…’

  Elizabeth’s first aim in life was always: to ‘see what happens’, and mainly just to have a good time; when she turned eight she suddenly developed an interest in the performing arts; she invited a straggle of friends to join her in a production of Toad of Toad Hall: some of them had significant voice parts, others were more suited to mime, or costume or prop or popcorn duty and so on (Elizabeth’s specialty was scenery, plus dark-chocolate fudge) – and May’s job was to supervise; it was around the time of her A-level exams, and she was supposed to welcome the diversion of being babysitter to a home-based repertory theatre. May wasn’t threatened by Elizabeth, she didn’t want to be like her, she just found her exhausting; it was exhausting being in the presence of all that laughter, people being constantly amused and uplifted; it was a drain. A few years later Jansen met the teenaged, multicoloured-tights version of Elizabeth; and naturally she found her ‘really funny’ and ‘lots of fun’. At twenty-two, Elizabeth was still ‘having fun’, not taking life too seriously – and generally wasting it. (May was also wasting her life, quite possibly, but she wasn’t happy about it.)

  ‘All her flatmates are leaving,’ May went and told Jansen, who was standing on a chair, banging a picture-hook nail into the wall above the sitting-room bookshelf.

  Jansen stepped down off the chair.

  ‘So – guess what? She’s dropped out of her night class, and she’s thinking of coming down to London.’

  Jansen picked up their Rodin print and stepped back onto the chair with it.

  ‘It’s a really stupid idea. Already she’s doing practically nothing, and now she wants to do nothing at all! She could at least finish the term.’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘What?’