‘Madame Canet? Ça vous irait de nous rejoindre pour la sortie, jeudi?’ I frowned, irritated at being addressed with Nico’s name, as though I were his wife. As for the school trip, I had an inkling I’d read something about it on one of the printed handouts Lila brought home, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where the children were going. At any rate, helping out was an impossibility. Thursdays were one of my most hectic days.
‘Je suis navrée,’ I apologized, ‘mais c’est vraiment pas possible Je travaille toute la journée… Et, en fait…’ I was about to remind Lila’s teacher of my correct surname, but my sentence died on my lips. Sandrine had already turned away, setting her sights on a dishevelled-looking father and son who’d somehow managed to arrive even later than Lila and me.
‘You’re not called Canet, are you, Mummy?’ said Lila indignantly. ‘La maîtresse did get it wrong! Daddy and me are Canet, but you’re a Marshall.’
‘Never mind, sweet pea.’ I planted a kiss on Lila’s forehead and shooed her inside the classroom. ‘I’ll talk to Sandrine about it some other time. You have a lovely day at school, won’t you? I’ll see you tonight…’
Nonetheless, I was fuming as I half walked, half jogged down to the bottom of rue de Belleville and veered left into the newspaper kiosk to grab my copy of Libé. Being called ‘Mrs Canet’ was tantamount to a slap in the face. Hadn’t I made a point of taking Sandrine to one side at the beginning of the school year and apprising her of the fact that Nico and I were separated? And while I could forgive her for not having memorized my unfamiliar, English surname – after all, she had twenty-five children in her class – using Nico’s by default was a clumsy mistake to make. Less than half the babies born in France these days have married parents and, even when they do, many married women choose to retain their maiden names. Wasn’t it more prudent, under the circumstances, for teachers like Sandrine to simply call every mother ‘Madame’, rather than to risk causing offence?
As I hurtled down the concrete steps into the bowels of Belleville station, my watch read 8.49. I was going to need unusually clement métro conditions to get me to my first appointment on time. Thankfully, as I reached the platform, a train was pulling into the station. Darting inside, I perched on one of the fold-down strapontin seats by the doorway and opened my newspaper. The day had got off to a shaky start but, with any luck, there would be a new Transports amoureux for me to translate. Anything to prevent me from checking my watch every thirty seconds as the train clanked and rattled its way through the tunnels.
‘Métro ligne 8, Ledru-Rollin/Madeleine, mardi 15 septembre vers 19h00,’ I read. ‘Regards échangés et connivence immédiate. Vous: cheveux blonds et rire exquis. Moi: veste en cuir et cœur conquis.’
The French sounded so graceful and concise, but I knew from experience that, once I transposed the words into English, any poetry would be lost. My best effort went something like this: ‘Glances exchanged, immediate complicity. You: blonde hair, exquisite laugh. Me: leather jacket and conquered heart.’ I’d managed to convey the meaning accurately enough, but, just as I’d thought, the result not only no longer rhymed but read more like a stilted telegram than a love poem.
I’d once had a discussion with Kate – who naturally knew of my fondness for the Transports amoureux – about the kind of man we thought might pen such a message. ‘Definitely not Yves,’ she’d said with a smile and a shrug. ‘He’s much more at home with numbers in spreadsheets than he is with words…’
‘Nico can only write in long-winded legal jargon,’ I’d retorted. ‘So that rules him out too.’ We’d come to the conclusion that, of all the men we knew, we couldn’t imagine any of them in the role of métro Romeo. Kate’s theory was that all the ads were sent in by the same person, a single sensitive soul who rode the métro and fantasized about strangers all day long.
When I’d pooh-poohed that idea, pointing out that the targets were of both sexes, even if the majority did seem to be written by men, she’d raised an eyebrow. ‘I know you’ve led a sheltered life, Sal,’ she joked. ‘But have you never heard the expression “swings both ways”?’
The memory of that discussion made me smile, momentarily, but lacked the force to sweep aside my hangover and the black clouds which had been gathering ever since I’d opened my eyes that morning. To add insult to injury, Tuesday was my least favourite teaching day. In a stuffy, windowless room, which was little more than a cupboard, I taught three ninety-minute lessons one after the other. The client – a French recruitment consultancy – was in dire need of an office makeover. The rooms where they met with clients were presentable enough, but the day I’d first stepped behind the scenes, I’d been shocked by how cramped their offices were. My teaching room was separated from the photocopying room by only a thin, plasterboard partition and, as a result, lessons were set to the regular, mechanical sound of sheaves of paper being sucked through the copier, punctuated by the occasional frustrated opening and slamming of drawers whenever some unlucky soul fell foul of a paper jam.
My empty stomach began its persistent grumbling at eleven, but I was out of luck: my lunch break wasn’t scheduled for another two and a half hours. Meanwhile, I kept catching myself staring blankly at the whiteboard in the corner of the room with its half-erased scribblings – the images forming upside down on my retina never quite making it as far as my fogged-up brain – and I had to haul myself forcibly back to the task in hand. I’d have to avoid wine on weeknights in future. I wasn’t sure which was to blame, slipping the wrong side of thirty or becoming a mother, but my body didn’t seem able to recover from a few glasses of red the way it used to.
As for Florent, I’d studiously avoided thinking about him all morning, knowing full well that it wasn’t a good idea to dwell on how our exchange had come to an unexpectedly sticky end when I was feeling so fragile. When my third student bent her head over a reading comprehension about the town of Florence, however, I found I could hold the memory at bay no longer.
To Florent’s ‘How about I tell you over a drink?’ I’d replied with a flippant ‘Why not?’ It was only then that the practical implications of what I was doing began to hit home. This coming weekend I’d be with Lila. My next free evening, as things currently stood, wouldn’t be for another ten days. There was a girl I occasionally called in to babysit, but I had no idea if and when she’d be free. And, even if she could help me out, was I willing to pay eight euros an hour for the privilege of going on a – more or less blind – date?
‘Saturday night?’ Florent suggested. I looked at Ryan and groaned.
‘I’d love to,’ I typed, ‘but there’s the small matter of finding a babysitter…’
There was an ominously long pause. ‘Ah, okay… I see,’ Florent replied. ‘I hadn’t realized you had a child.’
‘So much for saying he liked the look of my profile,’ I wailed, curling my hands into fists. ‘He never even bothered to read it.’ I was busy casting around for a suitably sarcastic retort when I realized, with a sickening jolt, that Florent was no longer online. He’d fled the chat room, without so much as a word of farewell. ‘Well,’ I said flatly, slumping back into the sofa, ‘it would seem you’ve just witnessed my very first online rejection.’
‘Look at it this way, sweetie,’ Ryan said gently, slipping an arm around my shoulders and giving my arm a consolatory squeeze. ‘Better to work out he’s a loser today than to waste precious time meeting the guy… Don’t worry, not everyone out there will be like Florent, Sally.’
‘They’d better not be,’ I said darkly. ‘Otherwise I’m going to regret the day I signed up for a twelve-month membership…’
I’d learned two things about Rendez-vous that night. The first was that there was no guarantee prospective suitors would have even bothered to read the profile I’d so painstakingly created. The second was that normal rules of etiquette didn’t seem to apply in the virtual-dating arena. Not only had Florent changed his mind about wanting to meet me, mid-conversation, but he’d felt h
e owed me no explanation. Out of common courtesy, couldn’t he have at least said ‘Thanks but no thanks’, or ‘Goodbye and good luck’ instead of vanishing into thin air?
What I found most depressing, though, was that my initial fears about joining Rendez-vous hadn’t been so wide of the mark. Some people really would dismiss me outright as dating material when they noticed I was a mother. Bracing myself for this eventuality hadn’t made it any easier to stomach. I’d held my tears in check until Ryan left, but as soon as the door had closed behind him, I’d taken the tissue box to bed and held a pity party for one.
When the morning’s interminable lessons came to an end at last, I bought a Pomme de Pain sandwich to take away and began tucking into it on the platform of St Augustin métro station, en route to the management consultancy where my two afternoon lessons would take place. Fellow travellers gave me disapproving glances as I dabbed at the corner of my mouth with my serviette, removing the excess mayonnaise which was seeping out of my baguette. Despite the arrival of an army of gleaming vending machines on underground platforms a few years earlier, I hardly ever spotted French people eating on the move. It seemed to be an activity they frowned upon. But my timetable was so tight I often had no alternative but to weather their withering stares and munch heroically on. I could hardly go hungry.
I was fiddling with the controls for the air conditioning, trying to coax the temperature of my teaching room a little higher, when Robert Cazenove breezed in for his two o’clock lesson. Tall and broad-shouldered, Robert was wearing a slim-fitting grey suit I’d admired before, and a salmon-pink shirt. Robert oozed self-confidence – he was a product of one of the Parisian grandes écoles, which groom their students to join the ranks of France’s elite – but, to my constant frustration, his level of spoken English never seemed to improve. I could repeat until I was blue in the face that he should never reply to ‘How’s your team?’ with ‘They’re very fine’ or ‘How’s your new assistant doing?’ with ‘She’s going well’, but it never seemed to make a blind bit of difference.
If Robert noticed I was a little out of sorts and more short-tempered than usual, he certainly didn’t show it. He remained as calm and unruffled as ever, and I was grateful for that. I was feeling so brittle today that even a solicitous glance might have cracked my thin veneer.
When his lesson time was up and he stood to leave, I caught myself staring at the band of pale skin on the ring finger of Robert’s left hand. I wasn’t sure I’d ever noticed his wedding ring when it was there – I couldn’t have said, for example, whether it was gold or platinum – but its absence, today, was striking. Ever since I’d left Nico it was as though I’d been tuned into a new frequency, hyper-aware of the evidence of other people’s break-ups and divorces all around me.
Once he’d left I crossed the room to the sideboard, where a metal Thermos of filter coffee stood on a tray alongside three bone china cups and saucers decorated with the company logo. Uncapping the flask, I’d begun wrestling with the screw-top inside when my mobile began to vibrate in the depths of my satchel. If the caller was Nico, I resolved not to pick up. But it was Kate, and she only ever called during teaching hours if it was an emergency.
‘Kate?’ I tried to keep my voice brisk and professional. ‘My two o’clock has left, and my three-thirty, Barbara, isn’t here yet. What’s up?’
‘Sal, listen, Barbara cancelled this week’s lesson – she’s out of town on business – and I’m afraid I completely forgot to warn you. I’m so sorry.’ Kate sounded flustered and contrite. She knew how much I needed every centime of my teaching income. Last-minute cancellations meant docked wages, and docked wages meant I’d be faced with a ‘fin de mois difficile’, when next month’s salary came up short. ‘Yves is away,’ Kate added, ‘and I’m preparing a couple of pitches to new clients. It’s no excuse, I know, but Barbara completely slipped my mind…’
This was most unlike Kate. She timetabled our lessons with military precision and it was the first time in five years that she’d forgotten to warn me about a no-show in advance. But there was no sense in making her feel worse than she did already. ‘Not to worry, Kate,’ I replied. ‘To be honest, I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather today anyway, and it’ll do me good to get home early.’ Cradling my phone between my ear and my right shoulder, I began sliding my folders and textbooks into my satchel, eager to make my exit.
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Kate’s voice betrayed only friendly concern for my health, but I knew her well enough to know her mind would be racing ahead, debating how best to cover the rest of the week’s shifts if I called in sick.
‘Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t sort out,’ I reassured her, unwilling to admit that I was simply hungover and feeling sorry for myself. There was a pause, and I could have sworn I heard an unfamiliar baritone voice in the background. ‘Oh, goodness. Are you out at a pitch meeting now?’ I said, wondering if she’d interrupted something important to speak to me. ‘You should have told me. I’ll leave you to it…’
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Kate said quickly. ‘I’m elbow deep in Tailor-Made admin at home, as usual, and I’ve got the radio on in the background to keep me company. But you’re probably right; I ought to get back to work…’
As the lift hurtled downwards, I savoured my imminent freedom. It had been a trying day but, perverse as it might sound, it had done me the power of good to be reminded just then that even Kate wasn’t perfect all the time.
8
I was sifting through a box of cereal – picking out a few extra chocolate-coated flakes to make their wholewheat counterparts more palatable to Lila – when the phone rang on Saturday morning. Lila, who was standing by my side, her hand darting out from time to time to intercept a particularly large chocolate flake before it hit her cereal bowl, got there first. ‘It’s Tante Sophie,’ she said, passing me the handset. ‘She wants to talk to you, Mummy.’
Several weeks had passed since Nico had mentioned Sophie would be getting in touch and, although I’d been apprehensive about her impending call at first, when she didn’t manifest herself, our exchange had slipped my mind. ‘Sophie?’ I leaned forward to rest my elbows on the countertop. ‘Ça va?’ I said cautiously. ‘Ça fait super longtemps!’
‘As I said to Nico, I didn’t want to lose sight of you,’ Sophie replied. She’d spent a couple of years living in London with an English boyfriend when she was in her twenties and had an impeccable English accent, although the occasional French turn of phrase – like ‘lose sight of’ instead of ‘lose touch with’ in this instance – gave the game away. ‘I thought maybe we could go in the park with the children one day,’ she continued. ‘That big playground at La Villette, perhaps. I would drive, and pick you up.’
‘I’m sure Lila would love to see Lucas.’ I tried to picture Sophie and me trying to make small talk while our children raced yelping around the playground. Usually I hated trying to catch up with fellow parents in that kind of context. I was incapable of conducting anything resembling a conversation while simultaneously trying to keep an eye on Lila, head spinning with the collective shrieks of a hundred children. Kate and I had set aside ‘grown-up time’ for our fortnightly lunches for that very reason, after a number of frustrating playdates at the Parc Monceau, peppered with unfinished sentences. In this instance, however, I suspected our children might be a welcome distraction. I’d only ever seen Sophie at Canet family gatherings in the past, never for a tête-à-tête.
‘I could pick you up in an hour,’ Sophie suggested, catching me off my guard, ‘that is, if you’re not doing anything special today?’ I had to hand it to her – she was crafty, obtaining my agreement in principle and then presenting me with a fait accompli, like that. I didn’t have sufficient wits about me to invent an alibi at nine in the morning, and a glance out of the window revealed pale-grey October skies, but no sign of rain.
‘Okay, we’ll see you then,’ I replied, trying not to sound as though I’d been backed i
nto a corner.
‘Marvellous,’ said Sophie. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’
A little over an hour later, Sophie, teeth white against the remnants of her deep summer tan, sprang out of her black Clio and raced over to give Lila a fierce hug and me a peck on both cheeks. After breakfast, I’d dressed both myself and Lila in haste and we’d raced down to the corner boulangerie for provisions. The least I could do if Sophie was ferrying us back and forth was provide some sort of late-morning snack. On our way back, just as we’d reached our front door, I’d heard the enthusiastic tooting of a horn. ‘Look!’ Lila exclaimed. ‘There she is: my Tata Sophie!’
Once Lila was strapped in next to Lucas in the back, she flashed her cousin a delighted smile. I might not have seen Sophie since Christmas, but Lila saw plenty of Lucas when she spent school holidays with her grandparents. Stowing my bag of provisions by my feet, I pulled the passenger door closed rather more enthusiastically than I’d intended, rocking the whole car. Inside, it was as immaculate as I remembered but, despite the air-freshener ‘tree’ hanging from the mirror, I could still discern a background odour of stale cigarettes. It had always amazed me that Dr Sophie, médecin généraliste, had never managed to kick the habit. She’d weaned herself off her Lucky Strikes with the help of nicotine patches while pregnant with Lucas but, as soon as he was born, she was back on the balcony of her apartment in the twelfth arrondissement, overlooking the cour Saint Emillion, puffing away. I reckoned she was terrified of putting on weight if she gave up, and she was certainly slim now. Covertly comparing my jean-clad thigh to hers was a depressing exercise.
Once I’d enquired after Sophie’s husband Jean-Luc – also a doctor – and the doctor’s surgery they’d set up together, I swivelled in my seat and began chatting to Lucas, leaving her free to concentrate all her attention on the road. There was no doubt Lucas took after his mother, with his glossy dark hair and hazel eyes, and the resemblance between Lila and her only cousin had always been striking. Sophie must have briefed Lucas beforehand, because he didn’t seem the slightest bit puzzled that Lila and I no longer lived in the same street as before. Nor did he ask why Tonton Nico wasn’t accompanying us to the park.
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