by Robyn Sisman
His charcoal snapped.
Molly laughed, heady with her own power. “Don’t think of me as a woman,” she taunted.
“Molly . . .” Her name was wrenched out of him. He lowered his pad and took a step toward her. Molly strained forward. Then he stopped, his attention arrested. “Stay like that—just a moment.” He raised the pad again, grabbed another stick of charcoal.
“Fabrice . . .” she pleaded.
“Wait!”
“I can’t.”
“Neither can I. But we must. This will be good—the best. I can feel it.”
With a sigh, Molly held the pose. It was unbearably exciting. Now he was really looking. He drew as if in a fever, slashing across the paper. Tendons stood out on his wrist, muscles pulsed in his forearms. His eyes on her flesh felt as if he was stroking her all over with a feather.
Ri-i-ip. Thump! He finished the drawing, threw down the pad, and in two urgent steps was at her side. Molly leaned toward him, straining for his touch. He ran his thumb down her cheek, then reached out and drew a finger lightly under the nipple of each breast. Molly swayed dizzily. She put out a hand to steady herself, grasping at the waist of his jeans. Her knuckles grazed his flesh. She stretched her fingers down against the smooth, tight skin. Fabrice groaned.
“Put your clothes on,” he said.
“What?” Molly’s head jerked up. How dare he suggest such a thing?
“We will make love,” he told her, gently drawing her hand out of his jeans and pressing it to his lips. “But not here. You get dressed. I’ll pick up the drawings.” His eyes burned into hers. “Hurry.”
14
The room was dark, except for slats of sunlight that glowed on the carpet like rows of gold bars. It smelled of beeswax and woodsmoke. Molly tightened her grip on Fabrice’s fingers, laced with hers, as he guided her round lumpy shapes of furniture.
“Where are we?” she asked, in a half whisper. “Is this your flat?”
“Wait. You’ll see.” He disengaged his hand. She heard him fiddling with catches.
Bereft of his touch, Molly longed to snuggle herself against his back, nibble his shoulder, breathe in his smell, but Fabrice had gone silent and mysterious again, and she didn’t quite dare. She had no idea where they were. Their brief scooter ride had passed in a blur of Saturday traffic and crowds, from which she’d retained only random details: spurting fountains, curvaceous balconies, obelisks and spires rearing into the sky, bridges splayed above dark hollows and gushing water. Fabrice’s hips rocking under her hands as they took corners. His thighs jammed against hers. The taste of his hair in her mouth.
She was vaguely aware that they had crossed the river onto an island, before stopping beside an arched stone entranceway, massive enough to admit a coach-and-four. There were huge wooden gates painted dark green, into which a smaller door had been cut. Fabrice had tapped a code into a discreet entry-box, pushed open the door, humped his bike over the threshold and propped it in a cobbled courtyard. Molly followed in a daze. She seemed to have lost the ability to think, or the will to move. Fabrice had to unbuckle her helmet for her while she stood limply, then lead her by the hand into a cool corridor. He tapped more buttons, opened a door. The next moment, they were rising silently in a lift of black glass and brushed steel, while Molly’s stomach turned back-flips. At the top Fabrice produced a key and slotted it into the lock of a panelled door. Inside, it was so shrouded and still that Molly felt like a trespasser.
“What is this place?” she asked again, giving the back of his T-shirt a stealthy tug.
But at that moment, with a rattle and clank, Fabrice pushed open door-length shutters and stood aside to let Molly step onto a narrow balcony.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed. There was the Seine—right below her!—sparkling past like a torrent of diamonds. Through a filter of greeny-gold leaves she could see people sunbathing and fishing on the quays. To her right, almost close enough to touch, stood Notre Dame. On the far bank a line of old houses rose gracefully, balcony by balcony, to steep gray roofs inset with circular windows that seemed to mimic Molly’s round-eyed astonishment.
She felt Fabrice clasp her waist from behind and put his mouth to her ear. “It pleases you?”
“It’s fantastic!” She leaned her head back into his shoulder, wrapping her arms around his. “But who lives here?”
“It’s my father’s apartment. But he’s not at home,” he added quickly, feeling her start of alarm. “He’s gone to the country for the weekend.”
Molly turned in the circle of his arms to face him. “But I thought you didn’t get on with your father. Doesn’t he mind you bringing, er, friends here?”
Fabrice shrugged. “I am his son, after all.” He let go of her and stepped back into the room. “All these things, I grew up with them.” He swept his hand in a wide arc, inviting her to look. “They are mine as much as his.”
Molly followed him inside. The unknown territory she had crossed in the darkness turned out to be an elegant living room, poised just above treetop height. Watery sunlight, reflected from the river, washed over ancient beams and decorative plaster-work, gleamed richly on antique tables, shimmered across finely wrought silver and glazed china, turned Persian carpets to jewels. There was a grand fireplace of marble, embossed with fauns’ heads, a carved bookcase packed with glossy hardbacks and odd-looking paperbacks with stitched spines. At any other time she would have been curious to look more closely, but now her mind welled with questions. What were they doing here? Why hadn’t they gone to Fabrice’s own place, wherever it was? Was he ever going to kiss her?
Fabrice seemed jumpy. He picked up objects and set them down in different positions, flopped for a moment on a plump cushion, then stood up again, leaving it dented. One moment he flashed her a smile; the next, he stood hunched at the window, staring out, his hands shoved into the back pockets of his jeans. Molly decided that he was giving her time to absorb the messages of this stylish, civilized apartment. He wanted to reassure her that he wasn’t just anyone, but from a “good” family—as if she cared! But the French were like that, as she knew from Proust. She wondered what Fabrice would make of her mother’s cottage, with muddy trainers drying on the back of the Rayburn and Alleluia’s hairs shed all over the foam-rubber sofa.
“It’s lovely,” she told him. “Your father must be successful, even if he’s so horrid to you. What does he do?”
“He’s an architect. Fairly well known, I suppose.” Fabrice made a disparaging face. “But one could not live in such a place on the income of an architect. The Île St-Louis, you know, nowadays it is only for rock stars and rich Arabs. My father cultivates the air of an intellectual, but he likes the good things of life. A gauche caviar, you understand?”
Molly took a moment to decode the phrase, then nodded. “Champagne socialist. We have them in England, too.” Though not, as far as she knew, in Minster Episcopi.
“The money comes from my mother. Her family is very wealthy. My father sold our childhood home a couple of years ago, and I moved out to start at the university. Some things he brought here, some he sold.” Fabrice frowned.
Our childhood home, he had said. “So do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Two sisters. But they are much older. The nearest to me in age is thirty already, married, with little children. They occupy themselves with their houses and husbands, and lead la vie bourgeoise .” He jerked a shoulder dismissively, and toyed with an object lying on a sideboard: a small silver candle-snuffer. “This, for example, belonged to my mother. Eighteenth-century. It must be worth a thousand euros. My father never even uses it.”
“Never mind,” Molly said softly, wanting to smooth away the hurt on his face.
Fabrice looked up and gave her a sudden, melting smile. “Shall we drink something?”
“If you like.”
He started to leave the room, then abruptly circled back to her, cupped her jaw in his lean fingers, and gave her an urgent kiss on the li
ps. The next second he had disappeared, leaving her reeling. What was he up to? She didn’t want anything to drink, she wanted him. Was that very wicked? Henry James had been quite right about Paris: it turned one’s ideas of sin upside-down. Look at what’s-his-name in The Ambassadors, who was sent out to Paris from some God-fearing, narrow-minded part of America to rescue a young man from the clutches of a foreign temptress, but ended up convinced that the “loose” woman, and the society in which she moved, were far more civilized and life-enhancing than the arid existence that awaited the young man back home. “Live all you can,” was the message of the book. “It’s a mistake not to.”
Molly nodded to herself, reassured by this precedent. She used to believe that, no matter what other girls did, she would never go to bed with a man she’d known less than twenty-four hours. And now she couldn’t wait! Molly was ashamed of her impatience. How crude she must be, how unsubtle, how English. The French, of course, were experts at l’amour. She must follow Fabrice’s example, and prolong the moment of delicious expectation.
It was impossible to keep still. She roamed the room, noticing the unfamiliar details of a real French house: its tall, narrow doors with pull-down handles, the walls covered with fabric instead of wallpaper, windows that opened inward and shutters that opened outward, the exact opposite of the cottage at home. She examined paintings, peered sideways at the spines of books, touched a display of stunning blue hydrangeas, massed in a vase, to see if they were real. (They were. A petal fell off. She hid it under a magazine.) She caught sight of herself in a gilt-framed mirror, looking flushed and tousled as if in the grip of some tropical fever, though quite pretty, she thought. But she was still wearing her jacket. No wonder Fabrice wasn’t concentrating on her. She took it off and tugged down the neck of her dress as low as she dared, in case he needed reminding. No, no, how could she stoop to such vulgar tricks? She jerked it up again.
On a small, inlaid table she found the photograph of a woman, very slim and chic, with dark hair drawn back. Molly picked up the silver frame and studied the face. The woman was beautiful, with molded cheekbones and dark eyes like Fabrice’s: his mother, Molly was sure, though she would not be so insensitive as to ask. She sighed with pity. It was all so clear: the beloved mother, dead; the older sisters, too busy to bother with their brother; the cruel, spendthrift father, ignoring his son, throwing him out of the house. Poor Fabrice. She would make him forget, if only he’d let her.
There was the sound of quick footsteps, a musical clinking. Quickly she replaced the photograph in its exact position, and whisked herself to the other side of the room.
“Champagne!” Fabrice announced, entering with two gold-rimmed goblets wedged between his knuckles, and a bottle swinging from his hand. His physical presence, eyes alight, moodiness gone, drove all other thoughts from her head.
He set down the glasses. Molly stood by him and watched his long fingers peel gold foil from the mouth, untwist the wires that secured the cork and slip off the little cage. Holding the bottle cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, Fabrice revolved it gently while holding the cork tight, until the two parted with a soft pop! and a ghostly mist of spume. He poured the champagne. Bubbles foamed to the top, then subsided to liquid topaz in a shower of fine spray.
He handed her a glass. “Nineteen ninety-six,” he announced importantly.
He looked so ridiculously serious, so absurdly handsome, that Molly nearly burst with love. “A very good year,” she replied, mimicking his tone.
He took a drink, eyeing her suspiciously. “Bad girl. Are you teasing me?”
“Of course not.” Molly batted her lashes innocently and gave him a naughty smile over the top of her glass as she drank. She saw his eyelids lengthen into a slow, smoldering smile. The corner of his mouth curled. They were flirting! Molly felt light-headed with delicious danger, like someone standing on a high cliff, momentarily tempted to jump for the sheer exhilaration of falling through the bright, blue air.
“You think I’m funny, hein?”
“Mais non.” Molly tried to pout, but her lips wouldn’t stay in position. He stepped close, pretending to look menacing. His eyes danced under dark lashes. The blood began to hum in her ears.
He put down his glass and grabbed her playfully by the arms. “What do you know about champagne, you little English girl?”
“Nothing!” she squealed. “Mind my champagne.” It slopped out of her glass and trickled down her front. “Careful, Fabrice. My dress . . .”
“What dress?” asked Fabrice.
She felt the glass pulled out of her hands, and heard it chime against some hard surface. Then his arms were around her, jerking her hips to his so tightly that she swayed off-balance and her head sank back. His breath was hot on her face. His lips grazed her mouth as he repeated, “What dress?” His hands curved over her bottom and yanked up her skirt. She felt them slip inside and slide up her flesh, peeling the dress from her skin. Molly’s arms drifted up helplessly as he pulled it over her head. Somehow her bra came off too.
Fabrice tossed them both aside and looked her over with scorching eyes. “I like you like that,” he said. “Just the boots and la petite culotte. Oh, look, there’s champagne on your breasts. I will lick it off.”
Goodness, what was happening? He lowered his head with a growl. Molly twined her fingers in his hair as she felt him licking, nibbling, kissing. She grabbed at the back of his T-shirt and at last got her hands on that peekaboo strip of flesh that had been distracting her all afternoon. His back felt like warm suede. She pulled the T-shirt higher and higher, running her hands over the silky temptations of his ribs, his shoulders, his muscled neck, until Fabrice ducked his head out of the collar, and the shirt came off in her hands. She flung it away. They stood back from each other, panting.
Then Fabrice took her shoulders and spun her round to face the mirror. “Look how beautiful we are,” he murmured, nuzzling the curve of her neck.
Molly saw his golden arms wrapped around her marbled skin, his dark hair entwined with hers. “I thought you didn’t like me earlier,” she said, to his reflection.
“I like these,” he said, sliding his hands up and doing a bit of juggling.
“Stop it!” Molly giggled.
“All right. I’ll be very gentle. Hello, my little kittens. How’s that?”
Molly sagged against him, staring at the mirror through half-closed eyes as she followed the mazy, drifting, tantalizing tracks of his fingers back and forth, under and over, round and round. A rosy flush swept across her skin. She was hardly breathing. One of his hands sneaked over her rib cage, down her stomach toward the strip of white lace, dipped beneath it for an electrifying moment. “Time for the bedroom,” he declared.
With his arm around her shoulders, she stumbled blindly across the room, staggered as he stopped and bent down for something. “We’ll take the champagne,” he said. “It tastes even better on your skin.”
There was a corridor, a door, a small room with a vast bed. Fabrice banged the bottle down on a table, tore off the bed cover and flung himself onto the bed, pulling her down on top of him. She felt the rasp of his jeans against her bare legs. He swept the hair back from her face and kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Molly kissed him back with all her heart, wanting him to love her, to fill every crevice of her body and mind until there was no room for anything else. He was so beautiful! She snuffled the silky hair of his armpits and kissed her way down his golden chest, worshipping each curving rib, the taut concavity of his stomach. When she reached his navel she raised herself up until she was sitting astride him. The heels of her boots dug into her bottom: too late to take them off now. She shook back her hair to look at him. His face was intent, his eyes dark and mysterious as moorland pools. Holding her gaze, he reached for one of her hands and placed it on the rivet of his jeans.
Molly flipped the straining button out of its hole. Her thumb and finger squeezed the tongue of his zipper, ready to tug. She paused.
Oh, no. She’d forgotten the French for condom.
15
Préservatifs: that’s what the garlic-guzzlers called them. But where were they? This place was supposed to be a chemist’s (Pharmacie in Frog-speak), although it looked more like a cross between a beauty salon and a giant medicine cabinet, with a refined, reverential atmosphere that made him feel he should be tiptoeing. The staff was all female, intimidatingly young and well groomed in white lab coats, very different from the hatchet-faced harpies and gormless school-leavers at his local Boots. They reminded him of those masseuses in old James Bond films, who turned out to be wearing no more than a suspender belt and a suntan under their uniforms. Strict but sexy: just what he liked. But he couldn’t ask them for condoms, could he?
Avoiding their inquiring gaze, Malcolm skulked up and down the aisles, scrutinizing the unfamiliar products. One thing was for sure: the French were a bunch of raving hypochondriacs. You didn’t need to be a linguist to understand the words tonique, vitamine, hygiénique, dynamisme, that shouted to him from the shelves. He’d never seen so many different types of bandage, and freaky surgical aids involving rubber tubes and suction bulbs. The graphic packaging of bottles, capsules and powders betrayed a nation paranoid about ricked backs, dodgy kidneys, dicky digestive systems and something mysteriously called la grippe. What was more, he got the nasty feeling that some of the remedies were not to be swallowed but shoved up your you-know-where. Barbarians. How lucky he was to be English.
Things improved in the female section, thanks to the posters of naked girls languishing in bubble bath, or rubbing their perfect thighs with something that looked like a giant Brillopad. There was a lot of kinky stuff about régimes and le corps gymnastique . One cheeky brunette wore nothing but a tape-measure strategically twined round her body: “85, 60, 89!” boasted the caption. Blimey, she was a big girl—or was that centimeters?