‘What does that mean, “the right moment”?’ Pascale was up close to me when she said this – I’m sure of it, looking back. That was the right moment, or anyway the moment as far as she was concerned. She was looking around nervously. I can’t quite remember, but I think she put her arm around me and that she peered into my face. I took this as concern. Misdirection more like.
My grandmother was putting the silver watch back and was asking to look at another. I had my eyes on her so I didn’t see the man come up behind me. ‘The right moment?’ I began. ‘It’s –’
‘Excusez moi, mademoiselle.’ A security guard had put his hand on my shoulder. A woman, hair the colour of dead grass, with a name badge on her jacket, was standing next to him. Her chin jutted in my direction. She said something which must have meant ‘empty your pockets’ but I hadn’t worked out what was happening, or what she was saying, so I just stared at her. So, then the security guard said something to her and she began frisking me. I was wearing that jacket from Oxfam – grubby green suede – that I’m pretty fond of. The only thing is the pocket linings have frayed away and anything put in them tends to fall into the hem at the bottom. I know that – I’ve lost a couple of ten-pence pieces down there and the odd bit of tissue – nothing else. But Pascale didn’t know that.
‘Pascale!’ I cried. She was edging away, the little cow! She was way over towards the gloves and handbags. ‘Come back!’ I yelled. Until now, it had been very discreet, no one had raised their voice. But at this, lots of people looked round at us, including – oh God, no… yes – my grandmother.
The woman in the suit had found what she was looking for. The security guard made me take the coat off and he rummaged around, his arm disappearing inside the lining like a vet’s when delivering a calf. Then he passed something to the woman.
‘Hah!’ she said, holding up a silver necklace.
He passed something else.
‘Hah!’ she said again, holding up a pair of sunglasses.
He passed something else.
‘Ehr?’ she said.
Mortification: it was a battered tampon.
‘I’m English,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t me. Believe me, please! PASCALE!’
I’m surprised Pascale hadn’t scarpered. I suppose she thought that would look more guilty than staying. Maybe she hadn’t thought it through. Maybe she was torn. Anyway, to give her her due, she came back.
She stood there sulkily.
‘Pascale. Did you do this? Please tell them if you did. Tell them it wasn’t me.’
I know my French isn’t great, and I was so desperate my tenses were probably wrong, but she said, ‘I don’t understand you,’ and looked away.
The security guard had got out his radio and was talking into it. He was keeping hold of me with his other hand.
‘Can I help, please?’
The woman with the neat grey hair – my grandmother – had come across. She spoke in English. I looked into her face – I had no doubt now: it was lined and papery, but her eyes were the same shape, the same nut-brown, as Mother’s – and my own eyes welled with tears. This was awful. It was not how it was meant to be. I opened my mouth but no words came out. I didn’t know what to say. I’m Constance? Why haven’t you rung me? Or should I pretend to be someone else? Was this it? Would I never be able to tell her who I was? Was this the first and last time we would ever meet? Was I about to be thrown into prison for the rest of my life?
‘I…’ I began to speak but it turned into a wail. ‘Pascale! Please…’
Two policemen with guns arrived on the shop floor and were walking towards us. Pascale’s eyes filled with panic and she turned and ran. It was the best thing she could have done – for me anyway – because the security guard shouted and one of the policemen ran after her and caught her by the changing rooms. She struggled in his arms, but he dragged her over towards us.
My grandmother had been talking to the woman in the suit and now she turned to me and said, ‘I speak English. I will come to translate for you.’
It was all too, too dreadful. I thought if I didn’t answer she might go away, but she didn’t. The security guard, the woman in the suit, the two policemen – and their guns – and my grandmother led Pascale and me to the lifts and to an office behind the children’s clothes on the second floor. We were made to sit on chairs by the wall. They obviously thought we were a teenage gang: the Connie and Clyde of the shoplifting fraternity. I kept shaking my head and saying, ‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,’ but they just ignored me.
The security guard left, leaving the policemen at the door, and the woman got out a form, which she placed next to the necklace and the sunglasses and – please! – the battered tampon in front of her. She jerked her chin at us and said something.
‘They need your names,’ said my grandmother. ‘And then you will go with the police.’
I looked at her dumbly.
Pascale said, ‘Sophie Danone.’
They just looked at her.
Grumpy, but resigned, she said, ‘Pascale Blanc.’
There was a silence. The woman in the suit looked up at me. Everyone was waiting.
So, this was it. This would have to be the right moment.
I stared into my grandmother’s face.
‘Connie Pickles,’ I said.
Chapter Eight
New vocab: on a fait savoir la famille (the relatives have been informed)
Same day
Bathroom, 9 p.m.
I didn’t want to leave off there, but I had to go downstairs for supper. No sign of Pascale or her father, just Madame, Didier et moi. It was a sticky, silent meal. His father not being in the room, Didier switched the television off, so there wasn’t even that to dilute the tension. I couldn’t wait to leave the table.
It’s a relief to be back in the privacy of my own diary.
My grandmother looked at me and put her hand to her mouth. Her voice trembled. ‘Constance?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Oui.’
She didn’t hug me then. She hugged me later, after she’d persuaded the higher echelons of La Liberté not to presser les charges (or whatever they do in France); after Pascale’s parents had been telephoned; and after we’d been escorted from the premises, with a warning from them and a promise from us never to do it again. (I had to promise too, which was very enraging as I didn’t do anything in the first place.) We landed on the street, and my grandmother stopped a taxi and bundled us both in. She sat in the front and it wasn’t until we were on the pavement outside her apartment block that she put her arms round me and held me to her. She felt frail and brittle. I was like a giant against her. When she pulled apart she said, ‘Constance. I would not have known. You are not like your mother. You must look like your father, no? Though now I look, your mouth… it is like Bernadette’s. Yes, I see my Bernadette in your mouth.’
My mother is slim and very petite. It’s quite galling actually. ‘I’m a bit fatter than usual,’ I said hopefully. ‘It’s all those French pâtisseries.’
We went through the doors then, past the concierge, who winked at me, and upstairs to the apartment where she took our jackets and made us sit in the drawing room while she rang Pascale’s parents to tell them where we were and prepared coffee. It wasn’t small, but the furniture felt like it had come from a bigger house. A large wardrobe – which she later told me was called a buffet – took up one side of the room. There was a formal dining table and chairs in one corner, and a big brown velvet sofa, where we sat, in the other. Paintings – lots of horses and hunting dogs and gloomy fruit bowls – covered the walls. Vases and china shepherdesses dotted every surface.
She came back in with cups and a plate of cakes on a tray. She moved some magazines from the mahogany coffee table, laid the tray down in front of us and sat in a leather armchair next to the sofa.
‘So. My Constance,’ she said. ‘Ah.’
I told her I was glad she seemed so pleased to see me, that I�
��d been worried because she hadn’t answered Mother’s letter to say I was coming – she said she had never received it, so where did that go? – or phoned me, and she said, ‘But how could I?’ It turns out I’d written down one of the digits of the Blancs’ phone number wrong. I am so STUPID.
She asked me all about Mother and she cried a little bit and said how sorry she was that Mother didn’t speak to her, that she regretted her behaviour all those years ago but that my mother was so proud… she broke off. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind what you say.’
‘Well, he was not the man we wanted for Bernadette. He was not French, he was not Catholic, he had no job…’
‘He was an actor,’ I said.
She looked at me.
‘He was in that advert.’
‘An advert?’
‘It was for a drink called Cariibod. I think it was vodka and pineapple juice mixed. They don’t make it any more. And…’
‘And?’
‘Well, that was it, I suppose. But you never know what might have happened.’
‘If it hadn’t been for his horrible, horrible motorbike accident. I know.’
Pascale was looking a bit left out, because all this went on in English, so then my grandmother asked her some questions about school, her parents and La Varenne. I noticed my grandmother sat back in the armchair when she talked to her, as if she might catch something like nits or herpes. It’s the black make-up: it can be off-putting. Oh, and I suppose the shoplifting didn’t help. I’m so relieved she seemed to believe I hadn’t done it. Maybe she knew it in her bones. Our bones.
There was the sound of a key in the door and the stooped man in the heavy green coat walked into the room. He stopped short when he saw us girls huddled on the sofa and his face went white. His lips and cheeks and everything. It was as if the blood just drained away.
My grandmother jumped up and said, ‘Pierre, this is Constance!’
He made a small movement towards Pascale and she stood up and put out her hand.
‘Constance!’ he said, and there was a lot of emotion in his voice. Horror mainly.
‘I’m Constance,’ I said, standing up quickly. He turned towards me. When I put out my hand, he cupped it in both of his and looked deep into my face, and this time he didn’t say anything at all.
And then a loud bell pealed, and pretty soon Didier was up in the apartment, looking grim-faced and angrier than… well, than a very angry, angry thing. I introduced him to my grandparents and he was courteous, but the full significance of the occasion may have been lost on him. He wanted us down into the car – and quick.
So, my grandparents kissed me goodbye, I left them with the correct phone number and promised to go for tea on Saturday.
In the car, Didier let rip. He put Pascale in the front of the Citroën and me in the back but there was none of the holiday atmosphere of yesterday’s Fontainebleau trip. We drove back in heavy traffic and he talked at her the whole way. I felt sorry for her, particularly after she started crying – ugly, snotty sobs. Didier must have done too, because he calmed down, and when he got out of the car, he put his arm round her and left it there all the way to the house. I saw François out of the corner of my eye as I followed them. He was hanging around on the opposite side of the road. I bet he was waiting for me. I’d have felt freaked if I hadn’t already felt freaked enough for one day.
Monsieur Blanc opened the front door and pulled Pascale into the kitchen. I came up to the bedroom and have only left for supper since. Raised voices – her shrieks, his low, heavy drone – still fill the house. I’m happy to have met my grandparents. I did feel a sort of connection, though maybe not the electric charge that I was hoping for. I don’t know why, but I feel horribly homesick now. I wish I were anywhere other than here. I think back to how ‘perfect’ I thought this family sounded, how ‘restful’, and realize I couldn’t have been more wrong. Just because a family looks nice on the outside doesn’t mean it’s nice on the inside. This one’s full of wrong connections: it keeps fusing. It’s as if all the people in it come from different families. I wish I was back in our small house in London, with Cyril and Marie running wild, and Mother regaling me with stories from the bra shop where she works and Jack, my stepfather, dropping in with his usual load of dodgy fish and knocked-off DVDs. It may be chaotic and unconventional, but it’s home.
P’s bedroom, 10 p.m.
I still haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower.
My bed, 11 p.m.
(I miss William too.)
Chapter Nine
New vocab: on est privé de sortir (we’re grounded)
Thursday 3 April
Bathroom, 11 a.m.
We’re grounded. Or rather, Pascale’s grounded, so I might just as well be too.
Pascale is helping her mother vacuum and then scrub the tiles downstairs. I’ve been cleaning the bathroom. It was so pristine already it was about as useful an exercise as ironing an envelope. I found one pubic hair (yuck) behind the bidet, but otherwise it was spit-spot. It’s a funny room, quite old-fashioned. There’s this old white boiler above the bath and you have to put the hot tap on the right way to make it fire up.
I’m perched on the toilette now. I don’t want to go downstairs quite yet so I’m going to use the time for some self-examination.
I have been in France for almost a week.
Things achieved so far:
1. Cultural expansion of mind: I have seen the Pompidou Centre, Fontainebleau, a local market, several rooftop views of Paris as a whole.
2. Forging of new family ties: I have engineered a reunion with my grandparents.
3. Moral instruction of exchange student: I may have been partly instrumental in teaching Pascale The Wrongs of Shoplifting (and Theft in General).
4. Snog (third), not unsuccessful: 7.5/10
Things still to be achieved:
1. Eiffel Tower: you can’t come to Paris and not see the Eiffel Tower.
2. Reunite Mother with my grandparents/her parents.
3. Spend remaining euros: buy something black?
4. Forget William.
The most important is number two. I’ve got to get Mother to Paris. I was longing to ring her last night, but I didn’t dare ask to use the phone, the atmosphere being what it was. I’m going to ring her in a minute and come straight out with it. She needs to get on a train and come to Paris herself. It’s the only thing for it. In fact, I’m going to ask if I can use the phone right NOW.
Bathroom again, 11.10 a.m.
That was stupid of me. She was at work. Jack answered. He’d come round to look after Cyril and Marie (his mother, Granny Enid, usually helps out but she’s at St George’s this week getting a new hip).
I asked him how the fish were going – his latest scheme has been selling them door to door – but apparently the floor’s fallen out of the door-to-door fish market. ‘Cut-glass fruit bowls, Con,’ he said. ‘That’s where it’s at now.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘Mail order?’
‘Yeah. Nah. That sort of thing. Offices, Con. Deliveries. People don’t like to buy different bits of fruit. They don’t want to have to pick and choose themselves. They like it presented. Pretty bowl on the desk to pick at. Bit of banana. Bit of apple. A plum. Easy money, Con.’
‘Don’t tell me. You’ve “come into” some cut-glass fruit bowls and you’re cooking up plans to offload them?’
‘Raw fruit, Connie. I keep telling you.’
‘Jack. I don’t care if it’s cooked or raw. You’re stewed.’
‘Connie, you’re a cruel girl. Anyone ever tell you that?’
He is infuriating, but I do love him. I’ve left a message for Mother to ring me back. Urgently.
The very clean living room, 6 p.m.
We’ve just been allowed out for a walk. Madame Blanc, who was putting on her mac and leaving the house herself, looked at our glum faces and relented. I suppose that means we’re no longer technically grounded.
I had an idea. I said we should ring Julie, which we did, and she said we could go over. She’s only one stop on the RER and a short walk. It’s funny, but I’d thought of her as miles away, back in London or the other side of the universe, unapproachable. But she’s really quite close.
Madame Leboeuf, the mother of her French exchange, answered the door, and I have to say she’s very nice for a poisoner. Dyed hair, jolly face, plump on top, skinny legs (one of those women who look like they might be pregnant but they can’t be because they’re too old). She seemed to know Pascale already and kissed her on both cheeks. Then she SCREAMED in my ear so loudly I almost crashed into the wall. I thought she’d gone mad but she was just shouting for Virginie and Julie, who came running down the stairs. Virginie and Pascale kissed on both cheeks, and Julie and I gave each other a hug. Then we went back upstairs to a sort of playroom/den where there were three children about the same ages as Cyril and Marie doing puzzles, and a big TV and a PlayStation, which were both on.
We didn’t stay long. Julie seemed OK. She and Virginie are getting on fine. Secret dark side or no secret dark side, Virginie seemed a bit dull (ironic that Julie, who’s always trying to lose her virginity, should be saddled with another one). Madame Leboeuf brought us a drink of something called grenadine – like fruit cordial, but gross – and a slice of cake that tasted of potpourri. When I bit into it Julie winced and shook her head at me. She might be right. It wasn’t poison, but it was close.
Ooh La La! Connie Pickles Page 5