Weekend in Paris

by Robyn Sisman

  “Well, speaking for myself, I’d like to punch him on the nose. Of course you did the right thing! He’s just ashamed of himself, and so he should be.”

  “Do you really think so?” Molly asked waveringly.

  “Yes, I do.” His conviction was wonderfully bracing. “And as for you, you don’t strike me as either a prig or a slut.” He stepped forward and gestured at the statue. “Look at that girl, with her sweet, trusting face. She might be making a mistake to fall for the artist, but it’s a mistake, not a fault. People show their characters in the way they behave. It’s his weakness, not hers, that he doesn’t value her. How dare this Fabrice whisk you off on his motorbike and then not treat you properly? I hope you were wearing a helmet, by the way.”

  Molly had to smile. Amazingly, he was cheering her up. His kindness, his interest, his sheer bulky masculine presence made her feel protected and cherished. “So you don’t think I’m totally useless?” she said. “You’re not too disappointed in me?”

  “Disappointed? Disappointed to find I have a beautiful, brave daughter, brimming with intelligence and integrity? I’m so proud I could roar. In fact, I’m going to roar. Rrrrrah!” He beat his chest for good measure. Molly blushed, laughed, looked away, half embarrassed and half pleased. A pair of impossibly chic women, with their scarves and handbags arranged just so, were walking past on the path. They turned their heads at this uncivilized noise, raised their eyebrows in ladylike astonishment and then . . . smiled. Suddenly Molly saw what they saw—a father teasing his daughter. It gave her a strange feeling.

  “Mind you,” he went on seriously, “it’s not my opinion that counts. Nobody but you can dictate what sort of person you are: not your mother, not me, not your boss or your friends, certainly not some thoughtless young Frenchman on a scooter. Your mother may have instilled in you certain principles. I may have given you half my genes. But your identity is your own. Remember that, Molly.”

  His words poured into her head like a cool, clear stream. Her identity was her own. It was a liberating thought. At the same time another, more mischievous realization tugged at her. He was lecturing her, speaking disapprovingly of “young men,” and warning her about road safety: just like a dad!

  They stood in companionable silence, contemplating the statue and their own thoughts. A pigeon fluttered down, settled itself on the head of the painter and crapped copiously on his riotous locks. Molly caught her father’s eye, and they both burst out laughing. “Portrait of the artist as a bit of a shit?” he suggested. “Come on, let’s leave him to the birds.”

  It was not just the eyebrows they had in common, Molly reflected, as they walked on together. She liked his humor. She liked his quick intelligence. She liked strolling beside him, alive to the charm of the scene, and feeling that they belonged together. “I wish I’d known you before,” she said impulsively. “Didn’t you ever think of trying to find me, despite what Mum said?”

  “Of course I did. I used to fantasize about meeting you one day by chance. I had dreams of heroically rescuing a little girl from drowning in the sea, then discovering she was my lost daughter. I imagined myself curing you of some disease. I dreamed that one day there’d be a knock at the door, and I’d open it to find you standing on the step. Crazy stuff!”

  Not so crazy as believing herself to be the illegitimate daughter of the Count of Montepulciano, Molly thought. But it was a revelation that he, too, had made up fantasy encounters. She felt as if a long-locked secret door was swinging open. “I used to dream about meeting you, too,” she said simply.

  “Did you?” he asked, eyes shining. “Did you really?” He seemed to turn the thought over in his mind. “Oh, Molly, I won’t say I thought about you consciously every day. But you were always there like a distant ache, or a wonderful secret—a great question mark hooked deep into my heart. Although I admit it didn’t really begin to plague me until my wife and I started to have children.”

  “Your wife! You’re married? You’ve got children?” The words tore out of Molly’s throat. She tried to calm herself. It was natural, of course it was, that a man of his age would have a family.

  “Rory’s thirteen, Ben’s eleven, and Charlie will be eight next week.”

  Molly could hardly take it in. Three human beings she had not until this minute known existed, all sharing the same genes as herself. Three little boys whom this man had hugged and played with, whose birthdays he had celebrated, whose bumps and bruises he had kissed—whom he had probably seen being born! Jealousy bit into her heart.

  “My wife’s called Georgie—Georgina. She’s a doctor, too. Apart from my mother, she’s the only other person I’ve told about you. Funnily enough, it was one of the things that bonded us together. It made me realize I must really love her to trust her with such an important secret. I proposed to her a week afterward. We’ve been married—uh, let’s see . . . if Rory’s thirteen . . .” He squinted into the sun, nose wrinkled, mouth awry, making the calculation, and again Molly felt a shock of recognition. (“Don’t make that awful face, Mollypops. What if the wind changes?”)

  “Fifteen years,” he concluded. “Blimey.” He ruffled the hair over his ear and gave a small grin of wonderment.

  “So your children don’t know about me?”

  “Not yet. But I’d love you to meet them.”

  Molly thought about it. “Georgina” sounded posh, a bit jolly hockeysticks. And three half-brothers . . . What if they didn’t like her?

  “Do you still live in Birmingham?” she asked cautiously.

  “Christ, no. Didn’t I say? We’ve lived in London for years. ‘Clapham borders,’ the estate agents call it, otherwise known as Tooting.”

  Molly gaped at him in disbelief. “But I’m living practically down the road—‘Wandsworth borders,’ otherwise known as—”

  “Earlsfield!” they chorused.

  “We could have passed each other in the street,” she exclaimed.

  “You’ve probably seen me on the common, practising my golf strokes.”

  “Golf! ”

  “Oh dear. Is that very bad?”

  “Pretty bad.” She was smiling now, confident that she could tease him. “Mum and I hate golf. It ruins the countryside. People wear peculiar trousers and wiggle their bums.”

  “Don’t be golfist. Frankie always was a bit of a puritan. On Skye, I remember, she swam in this loch, where the water was so freezing I could barely paddle, and called me a wimp.”

  “Yep, that sounds like Mum.” Molly kicked through a drift of leaves, feeling defensive, affectionate and angry about her mother all at the same time. Would it be disloyal, she wondered, to become involved with this man, whom her mother had kept away from her for twenty-one years?

  When she was a child, there had been a school run between the village and the main road where the school bus stopped, a distance of perhaps a mile. The other mothers always went in the car; her own, of course, did things differently. “No need to drive,” she scoffed. “We can take the shortcut through the woods. Fresh air and exercise, a run for Alleluia, and no pollution. It will be fun!” Molly was mortified. She wanted to be like everyone else, strapped into her seatbelt in the back of some clapped-out Honda with packets of crisps being handed round. Instead, her mother had brought bananas and misshapen short-bread, home-made with organic flour. She wore wellies and an embarrassing Australian sheep-farmer’s hat, and often brought her battered bike so she could collect things in the basket and give the smaller children rides on the back. And yet it was fun, tramping back home on a mellow autumn afternoon like this, looking out for mushrooms, stopping to climb trees, collecting conkers. Sometimes they saw deer. In spring there were primroses and birds’ nests to find. On the way they played spelling and times-tables games (“If we found five nests with three eggs each . . .”); it never felt like homework. On gray days she even got them to sing songs like “One Man Went To Mow” to keep their spirits up. “Your mum’s weird,” a boy had told Molly one day, “but I
quite like her.” Molly had sighed: her view exactly.

  They had now looped round to the stone staircase overlooking the pond, where Molly had hesitated about meeting “A Friend” and almost turned back. Here again was the jet of water fizzing like champagne from a bottle, the giant stone urns casting hourglass shadows, the collision of extreme formality and almost pagan enjoyment that tickled the senses. Somewhere in the far trees a brass band was playing. Molly could just make out a collection of figures in uniform, their instruments winking in the sun. Once again she felt the flicker of an elusive memory.

  “You know what this always reminds me of?” he said. “The pompous statues, the palm trees, the palace with its flag flying and everybody having such a good time—”

  “The Babar books!” She’d finally got it. “Look, there are even those overlapping metal hoops around the edges of the grass. I can practically see Babar and Celeste coming out of that palace in their crowns and ermine robes.”

  “And Alexander and Pom in their sailor outfits, playing with the boats.”

  “Yes.” Molly’s smile wavered a little as she thought of all the children’s books he would never read to her.

  As they descended the steps, she caught sight of the clock on the palace pediment and was shocked to see that it was a quarter past five. “Oh, no! I’ve got to go.”

  “Already?”

  “My train leaves in an hour and a half, and first I’ve got to collect my luggage and—and everything.” It was too complicated to explain about her mother and Armand.

  “Sit down with me a minute first. I want to say something to you.” He led the way toward a couple of vacant chairs at the edge of the pond, although when they were seated he said nothing for a few moments, just gazed into her face with pleasure and amazement, as if she were one of the park’s statues miraculously come to life. “I can’t believe it, can you?”

  Molly shook her head, returning his incredulous smile. She felt a little shy again, under his scrutiny.

  His face grew serious. He leaned toward her, forearms on his knees. “Molly, I know it’s too late for all sorts of things, but now I’ve found you I want to get to know you properly. I’d like you to be a part of my life—a part of my family—in as much as you want to be. You don’t have to decide anything now. Of course you need to think, you need to talk to your mother—all that.” He reached into his jacket and brought out a card. “Here’s where you can reach me, if you want to talk. Any time. Otherwise, what I suggest is that we meet for lunch next weekend, just you and me. I’ll ring you in a couple of days to discuss where and when. Then maybe afterward, or maybe another time, depending on how you feel, I’ll take you home and introduce you to the family. What do you say?”

  “Okay.” Molly took the card. It was just an ordinary business card, printed on one side with several numbers handwritten on the back, but she held it in her palm as if it were a treasure. This was the first piece of solid evidence about her father she’d ever possessed. More than that, it represented a commitment to the future—a future together. She blinked at his formally printed name. “Um, I know this is a funny thing to say, but what should I call you?”

  He grinned. “Whatever you like. Jonathan will do for now. Can I walk you to wherever you’re going, or would you rather be alone?”

  “Alone, I think.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They stood up, took a few steps, stopped and faced each other.

  “I don’t know how we do this.” He laughed. “Do we shake hands?” He stretched out his arm with a kind of embarrassed gallantry, and Molly slid her palm against his, feeling his fingers close around her knuckles. They stood like that in the soft sunlight, looking into each other’s faces—shy, delighted—unsure what to say, neither wanting to let go.

  Afterward, she couldn’t have said who moved first, but suddenly they were hugging each other. He felt large and solid, and smelled of clean shirt. A part of Molly thought, What am I doing with my arms around this stranger? But a louder, jubilant voice insisted, He’s not a stranger. This is my father. I am flesh of his flesh. He was not like any of the thousand fathers she had imagined, just an ordinary man: Jonathan Griffin. But a nice man. And he was real, not a fantasy, not a dream slipping away with the dawn. Her grip tightened on him for a moment. She could feel a rim of flab round his waist. Tut. Not enough golf. She smiled into the lapel of his jacket. Yes, this was her father, for better or worse. It was not impossible that she’d be doing more hugging in future. She’d better get used to it.

  26

  “Which way now?”

  “Tout droit.”

  “That means right, doesn’t it?”

  “Attention, Fran!”

  “Or is it left?”

  “Non! ”

  “No! For Christ’s sake, Mum, straight on.”

  Armand’s car swerved violently, slinging Molly across the back seat and narrowly missing a pair of petrified tourists stranded midway on a pedestrian crossing. Molly’s mother straightened the steering wheel and sped onto a bridge in a blare of furious honking. “Hell’s bells,” she giggled.

  “Very good.” Removing his hand from his heart, Armand patted her shoulder. “You see, Fran? You drive like a true Parisian.”

  “It’s your car, Armand—so fast, so responsive, and all these exciting buttons! What does this one do?”

  Twin jets of water spurted into the air as the windscreen wipers leapt into action, spraying droplets back through the open sun-roof into Molly’s face. “Oh, sorry, folks.”

  Molly dried her cheeks ostentatiously, and glowered at the back of her mother’s head. “Mum, have you been drinking?”

  “Only a bit of wine at lunchtime. Armand took me to a fabulous little restaurant du quartier. Way off the tourist beat. You’d never find it unless you knew it was there. I had snails!”

  “Yeah, I can smell the garlic from here.”

  It wasn’t true. All Molly could smell was perfume, an insinuating magnolia-like fragrance that wasn’t exactly unpleasant, simply . . . unsuitable. Her mother used soap, not perfume. She ate lentils, not snails. What on earth did she think she was doing, driving Armand’s car? Apparently it had been his idea. Her mother, he claimed, needed more “adventure” in her life.

  In the hotel that morning, it had been agreed that Armand would drive Molly to the station, along with her mother and the luggage, the pick-up point being the entrance to some Arab Institute building that turned out to be a vast slab of steel and glass set on a windy corner by the river. Molly had been waiting for almost ten minutes before she heard the toot of a car horn and saw a glamorous blonde slow to a halt beside her. It was another ten seconds before she recognized her mother, wearing a slim-fitting jacket of dark green velvet with a silky white shirt underneath. “We’ve been shopping,” her mother explained, her eyes skidding away from Molly’s raised-eyebrow stare. “I went a bit mad.” Again the loony laugh. Molly had climbed wordlessly into the back seat and slammed the door.

  As well as shopping “in the Marais,” wherever that might be, and lunching at the fabulous little restaurant, they had spent some time strolling through a botanical garden. “Such a treat for me.” Molly’s mother smiled happily at Armand.

  “I’ve been to some gardens, too, as it happens,” Molly announced portentously.

  “What, darling? I can’t hear you over the roar of this mighty engine.”

  “You are teasing me, Fran, I think. Now, here you must be careful. Follow the blue Peugeot. Non, the Peugeot! Voilà. You see the new opera house? One says it resembles a hippopotamus in the bath, but some of the productions are magnificent. Perhaps . . . great pleasure . . . acoustics . . .”

  “I used to . . . Magic Flute, of course . . . so busy . . .”

  Burble, burble. Molly could see their heads turning toward each other, but as they did not have the courtesy to raise their voices, and since Molly felt it would be undignified to crouch forward like some eager doggy, their conversation reached h
er only in fragments. She folded her arms, sat back and jiggled a foot. And how was your day, Molly? Oh, you met your father at last? . . . So sorry to hear how my rotten son treated you.

  But no. Now Armand seemed to be commiserating about the dearth of culture in what he called Mince d’heure Épice-corps-pis.

  Yes, Minster Episcopi was a bit dull at times, agreed Molly’s mother, but . . .

  Molly gave her a wounded look in the rear-view mirror. What did she mean, dull? It was their home. And was that mascara she was wearing? Molly pinched her lips. She could wait. Soon she would have her mother to herself for three whole hours. Traveling back to London together had not been what she’d planned, but now the reproaches were bubbling up inside her like acid. I wasn’t happy. I did need him. He thought about me all the time. He wanted to see me, and you stopped him! No wonder I know nothing about men. No wonder my love life’s a mess.

  Her mother’s laugh rippled from the front seat. Strands of her long hair swirled in the rushing draft. The way she was behaving, anyone would think she was twenty-two, not forty-two. Why did she need that new jacket when she had a perfectly good Barbour? What on earth could she be saying to Armand—a sophisticated, cultured Frenchman—to make him respond with such attentive delight?

  Molly cleared her throat, sighed heavily, stared mournfully into space. She rather thought she felt a bit car-sick—not that anyone would care. In the end she leaned forward until she was virtually kneeling on the hard metal bump behind the handbrake, plonked her elbows on the corners of the two leather seats, and thrust her head between the pair of them. Immediately they fell silent, almost as though she was interrupting something.

  “How was the Rollerblading, darling?” her mother asked brightly.

  “All right.” Molly scorned this feeble attempt to make conversation.

  “And . . . Fabrice, is it? Did you have a lovely time?”

  How could she even ask? The insensitivity!

  “I’ll tell you on the train,” she said, in a low voice, eyes downcast.