Weekend in Paris

by Robyn Sisman

  Molly Clearwater had been a mistake. She’d looked bright enough on paper, in fact wildly overqualified, and she’d put in the hours, he’d give her that. But she had no office savvy. For example, she’d take messages for him, nicely presented with the time and phone number and all that crap, but never seemed to get the point of them and initiate the necessary action. Half the time she acted like a startled deer; then she’d go all exasperated on him, as if she could run everything much better, given the chance. Her niggling corrections drove him mad. Who cared if “phenomena” was singular or plural? Work was about having a bit of a laugh, doing a job adequately and moving up the status ladder.

  He’d only chosen her because of her looks. No point hiring a dog, was there? A man needed attractive women around him. He owed it to himself. Normally he wouldn’t go for that wide-eyed English-rose type, but there was a ripeness to Molly that had excited him. Banked fires, he’d thought, under that virginal exterior. He’d like to see her begging for it. Alone with him in Paris, what with his experience and a few drinks, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. Not a chance, Malcolm repeated to himself, blotting out the memory of the way she had sometimes looked at him, as if he was a cross between an escaped lunatic and Attila the Hun.

  Christ! Look at his hair. He couldn’t go back to the conference like that. Malcolm grabbed his gel, slicked it over his scalp, then combed his hair smooth apart from an erect cowlick at the front. Sex-ee.

  Molly had fancied him, all right. Why else would she have done those extra jobs for him, rushed out to buy his favorite coffee whenever he asked, stayed late most days? She couldn’t have missed the signals he’d sent her—complimenting her on her clothes (especially those shirts with the straining buttons), letting her drive his motor to the garage (bet she was dead impressed by the turbo charge), then this Paris trip, with the prospect of the best night of her life at the Crazy Horse Saloon, and himself for afters.

  What was it with women? You did one tiny thing wrong—so tiny you couldn’t even guess what it was—and they were off. Molly Clearwater had dropped him right in it. Time of the month, probably. By rights all this stuff littering his floor should be in her room, with her to sort it out. Malcolm glowered at the brochures, reports and folders emblazoned with the words “XIIIth International Meeting of Gastroenterologists,” at the boxes of blank name tags, customized pens and freebie umbrellas with the PLB logo. What a circus it all was.

  This hotel was stuffed with doctors from across the world—mainly consultants and “opinion formers,” with a sprinkling of young turks—plus big-wigs from Phipps Lauzer Bergman and the other drug companies who were sponsoring this conference. The doctors all pretended they were coming to discuss new research and read each other mind-bogglingly boring papers about the small intestine (between six-course meals and lavish entertainments). The drug companies, who paid for the damned thing, knew better: this was their chance to “persuade” doctors to prescribe their drugs, offer funding for research programs and cozy up to the boffins in charge of clinical trials—all of which might result in millions of pounds of profit. The golden rule for drug companies was to present themselves in the most flattering light possible. Without that disk Malcolm was going to look a complete prat—and his company likewise. His bosses would not be pleased.

  He’d kill Molly if he ever saw her again. At the very least, he’d make sure she never got another job in this industry. As for a reference, he could hardly wait to write it.

  Meanwhile, what was he going to do for female company? There hadn’t been time to organize another girl from the office. Two very expensive tickets were awaiting him at the Crazy Horse saloon, which meant that this was some bird’s lucky night. The only problem was finding her. He’d have a discreet word with that concierge bloke downstairs—slip him a banknote, ask about les girls, wink wink. These things could be done. All it took was a little sav-wah fare, as the French said.

  Malcolm checked his watch. Time to go. He switched his phone to “vibrate” and slid it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. Pausing before the mirror, he adjusted the position of his Mensa badge and gave himself a last squirt of Tiger. Looking good, Malc, he told himself, and hurried to join the conference.

  7

  Oh, no . . . please. She didn’t want to wake up. What brute had switched on the light? Molly turned over with a groan and nuzzled her pillow. It felt unfamiliar, unyielding, as if it was packed with sand. There was something odd about her bed, too, made with sheets and a tickly blanket instead of a duvet.

  She opened her eyes a crack, wincing at the light. But it wasn’t a light, it was the sun, forcing its way through the thin curtains and invading her room in a yellow blaze. Not her room . . . a different room . . . a hotel room. Molly’s eyelids flew wide and her heart gave a leap.

  Paris!

  Fabrice!

  She jumped out of bed, ran naked to the half-open window and pulled it wide, draping herself with the curtains. The morning was already well advanced. Warm air flowed across her skin. The sky was happy-go-lucky blue daubed with innocent white cloud. Sunshine danced along the pale walls and peeling shutters of the houses opposite, turning window-panes to crystal and imparting a magic to each tiny domestic drama being enacted on the small balconies: a woman beating dust from a carpet she’d draped over the iron balustrade, an old man tenderly picking over his scarlet cascade of geraniums, a white terrier running back and forth, barking at something in the street.

  Leaning out, Molly peered down at the shiny roofs of parked cars: one provided a sun bed for a paunchy cat. Outside the brasserie opposite, a trio of girls with sunglasses perched on their heads sat gossiping at a metal table; she could hear the swoop and twitter of their voices. An old woman in black, grey hair coiled at her neck, walked with slow dignity down a narrow strip of shade, hauling shopping bags sprouting with greenery. Molly could smell hot pavement, fresh coffee, a gingery tang from the takeaway place next door (spécialités chinoises—thaïlandaises). Inhaling deeply, she tilted her face to the sky. Somewhere out there, across the rooftops, over the chimneys, was Fabrice. She felt so happy she could explode.

  She was in love! Madly, passionately, helplessly. Had there ever been anyone so handsome, so romantic, so intelligent—so French?

  And Fabrice: was it the same for him? Might he, too, at this very moment, be leaning out of some high attic window festooned with vines, dreaming of her? Molly turned from the window, blinking away sunspots. They said men were different. How was one supposed to know? What would it be like to be loved, really loved, by a man?

  He’d said she was beautiful. Molly padded across to the mirrored doors of the wardrobe, and stared at her milky reflection smudged with pink, at her tangle of tawny hair and the darker scribble between her thighs. She slid her palms slowly down the curves of her hips, back up beneath her rib cage, over the silky undersides of her breasts and across the already hardening nipples. A hidden fuse sparked as she remembered the smell of his skin, the dark languor of his eyes, the lick of his tongue against hers.

  What was she doing? What was she thinking? Molly snatched her hands away, yanked on her dressing gown, and decided to take a quenching shower. Of course she wasn’t in love—not after one night, not with someone she could barely talk to. It was ridiculous. Key clutched in one hand, sponge bag and towel under her arm, she stalked down the corridor toward the bathroom.

  But look at Romeo and Juliet. They’d fallen in love at first sight.

  And killed themselves shortly afterward.

  Well, anyway. All she knew was that she’d never felt like this before, certainly not with Gavin “I am a genius” Thorpe, who’d managed to monopolize half her time at college and blighted the rest. Molly locked the bathroom door behind her. Who was to judge what love was, or how swiftly it could ignite? As Shakespeare had so rightly said, “Tell me where is fancy bred? Or in the heart or in the head? Tum-te-tum . . . et cetera.” She might not have known Fabrice for more than a few hours, but so
what? She’d been able to talk to Gavin all right, and certainly vice versa—but that had turned out not to be love. Not at all. Cautiously Molly turned on the tap marked “C,” cleverly remembering that in French this did not stand for “cold.” After a few painful experiments she was standing in the yellow-stained bathtub holding a shower-head above her scalp. As the water alternately drizzled and spurted, her thoughts trickled back to the big, windy campus on the hill, the seminar rooms with their polecat fug, herself eager, intense and slightly plump in her new Gap jeans with daisies embroidered on the hems. Ah, how naïve she had been in those days.

  Though she could no longer remember exactly how or why, from about the age of eleven Molly had formed the determination to get to university—a proper one, not some fancily rechristened institution that handed out degrees in Food Technology and Tourism Studies. She’d dreamed of a different world, a world bigger than local gossip and what had been on TV last night, where you could discuss books and ideas and not worry about wearing the right brand of trainers. It had taken a great deal of effort to achieve the necessary exam results, and almost as much again to sort her way through all the different courses and application forms. Her teachers, though vaguely encouraging, provided no real guidance; neither did her mother, an art-school drop-out who always claimed to have been “useless” at school. Money was another hurdle, though by taking out a student loan, and working weekends and in the holidays, she had scraped together enough to see her through the first year on the tightest of budgets. She hadn’t possessed the temerity even to think about Oxbridge; the offer of three places elsewhere, including one at a northern university famed for its English department, was like being showered with gold. Her expectations had been accordingly sky-high.

  She had wanted to learn—to engage with other minds, to feel intellectual sparks fly. It had been a shock to discover that most other students just wanted to drink and muck about. In a big city far from home, awed by the size of the campus and terrified of failing, Molly had initially kept her head down and worked. Beyond a small circle of friends, mainly girls, in whose company she was relaxed enough to be herself, it felt safer not to be noticed. And she wasn’t, until she met Gavin.

  It was a perfect spring day at the beginning of her second year. She’d been sitting on the library steps, half luxuriating in the sun, half reading 1984 for her Literature and Politics module, when a voice behind her said, “Brilliant book, isn’t it? An absolutely excoriating denunciation of Stalinism.” Molly jerked herself upright and turned to see an eager-looking man in glasses crouched a couple of steps above her beside a battered, bulging briefcase: a tutor, she assumed. He was too old to be a student.

  “Actually, it rather reminds me of the Blair government,” she’d replied, showing off. “All those slogans and news management and saying the opposite of what you mean. Winston Smith’s a kind of spin doctor who sees the light.”

  “My God, you’re right!” He ran his hand excitedly through sandy curls, revealing a forehead of noble proportions. “What a brilliant insight. Though, of course, historical contextuality has its own critical validity.”

  “Absolutely.” Molly hadn’t a clue what he meant, but she was so flattered to have been called “brilliant” that she was hardly going to ask.

  For the next forty minutes they talked about Orwell and dictatorship, death camps and the power of television. It was the best conversation she’d had yet. He didn’t look at her breasts once. Moreover, it turned out that he was a Cambridge graduate writing a doctoral thesis on D. H. Lawrence. When he asked if Molly would accompany him to the opening night of a new play that weekend—he’d be fascinated to hear her opinion—she accepted without hesitation.

  The theater date was followed by an art exhibition, then a concert of Baroque music (“certain stylistic tendencies in 17th-18th cent. arts,” according to Molly’s dictionary), then dinner at his flat where, with some ceremony, he served her daube provençale (stew, basically). Gavin wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense (or, some might have said, the unconventional). What Molly found overwhelmingly seductive was being taken seriously by an older man. Gavin talked to her of critical theory, Thatcherism, the situation in the Middle East. He played her German opera and avant-garde jazz, often with a finger raised to alert her to a particularly fine phrase. He told her about his journeys to New Mexico and southern Europe “along the Lawrentian trail,” as he put it. Wherever he traveled he carried a Krugerrand sewn into the lining of his safari jacket in case the local economy should unexpectedly collapse. Molly was dazzled.

  His thesis was provisionally entitled “The Plume and the Serpent: Themes of Androgyny in the Works of D. H. Lawrence.” Although it was not yet finished—still, in fact, at the complex and unendingly fascinating research stage—Molly soon shared Gavin’s conviction that it needed only the transposition of ideas into words to land like a bombshell on the international academic scene. She had been thrilled to find herself by no means too inferior to carry out the more pedestrian aspects of his work, to spend long hours discussing the different psychosexual makeup of men and women and, in due course, actively to research these between the burgundy sheets of his double futon.

  By her second year she had more or less moved in with him. (The fiction of a flat shared with other girls was preserved to stop her mother flapping.) It felt wonderfully grown-up to talk together in the evenings over a meal she had bought and, increasingly often, cooked, then retire to their separate desks to work. Sometimes, when he wasn’t too busy, Gavin offered to read her essays, which he did with fastidious concentration and a poised pencil while she nibbled her nails. Of course they went to parties, too, but their relationship did not depend on such fripperies. This was a meeting of minds.

  Molly squeezed a blob of shampoo onto her hair and vigorously massaged her scalp, trying to obliterate the picture of herself striding across the campus like Joan of Arc among the unbelievers, averting her gaze from the posters advertising discos and Beer Nites. She had been so convinced she had chosen the Higher Path that it hadn’t occurred to her the lower path might be more fun.

  It had taken a weekend visit from her schoolfriend Abi and a disastrous meal à trois to cause the first tremor of doubt. “He’s a saddo.” (Abi had never been a great mincer of words.) “Boring and old and selfish. You’re a billion times cleverer. Honestly, Moll, he’s turning you into a middle-aged housewife. And D. H. Lawrence! How uncool is that?”

  Abi had returned home early after a major bust-up between the two friends, leaving Molly shocked, hurt and defiantly enraged, not least by an unwelcome piece of self-knowledge that told her she had half invited Abi (then studying Beauty Therapy at the local college back home) to impress her with sophisticated university life.

  But the spell was broken. Almost as soon as the words “boring” and “Gavin” had been used in the same sentence, Molly realized just how bored and boring she had become herself. She hated German opera. Who cared if the name Gavin was morphologically connected to Gawain of green-knight fame? How could it take anyone so long to not-actually-write a thesis? Where was the romance in doing a man’s academic research, not to mention his laundry? Within a week she had ended the affair. Shortly afterward, she was rewarded by seeing him with a pretty first-year—shy, smiling, flattered—and recognizing herself with bruising clarity. Belatedly she woke up, moved into a mixed household of students her own age and tried to grab herself some fun. But by that time she was in her final year, with exams pressing. Determined to salvage something from the wreckage of her illusions, Molly had thrown her energies into her work and, by sheer willpower, managed to scrape a first.

  But she hadn’t got a first in men. More like an F: F for failure, F for fool. Molly turned off the tap, squeezed the water from her hair and stepped onto the pink shagpile bathmat. How could she have made such a colossal, humiliating, wasteful mistake? No doubt a psychoanalyst would come up with some guff about a father substitute (although, to be fair, Gavin had been only n
ine years older than her), which just showed what crack-pots these shrinks were, as she’d been perfectly happy being brought up by her mother.

  Anyway, that was the old Molly, English Molly. She twisted a towel round her hair, swept it on top of her head turban-style and tucked in the ends. This was new, French Molly. Coquettish Molly. She wriggled into her dressing-gown. Desirable Molly. For a moment she allowed one shoulder to remain bare, and imagined Fabrice nibbling his way up her neck. Then she frowned severely, gathered her belongings and unlocked the door. Clutching the dressing-gown spinsterishly tight under her chin, she checked the corridor for perverts and peeping Toms and scampered barefoot back to her room.

  She had just stretched out on the bed to massage cream into her freshly razored legs when her glance fell on something she half recognized: a stiff circle of gold leather, concertinaed on the floor. Next to it a spiky-heeled sandal lay on its side.

  Molly sat bolt upright as a chunk of memory rushed to the surface of her mind, bobbing wildly. Zabi’s party . . . borrowing the clothes . . . the club. Last night, when she’d retrieved her jacket before zooming off with Fabrice, she’d had just enough sense to tell someone what she was doing. She remembered finding Alicia on the dance floor (in the cowboy hat!), swearing to return Zabi’s stuff the next morning and—oh, help!—agreeing to meet Alicia at some café at noon. She bet it was nearly that now.

  Hastily smearing the remains of the cream across her stomach, Molly leaped to her feet, yanked off her dressing gown and zigzagged back and forth across the room, simultaneously trying to comb her hair, drag on some clothes and find her watch. She had one leg in her knickers when she spied it in the Pernod ashtray. Hopping across the carpet with the comb in her teeth and hair spattering her bare back, she grabbed the watch, turned it the right way up, and let out a wail of panic. She was already five minutes overdue.