Petite Anglaise Read online

  Petite Anglaise

  CATHERINE SANDERSON

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published in 2008

  1

  Copyright © Catherine Sanderson, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Some names have been changed to protect the characters’ identities.

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  978-0-14-191935-5

  for Mr Frog, and Tadpole

  Prologue

  I snap awake after three, maybe four hours of alcohol-saturated sleep. The events of the previous night swim into stark, shameful focus and I find myself unable to move; paralysed by guilt.

  Tadpole, our daughter, is chanting. A low, plaintive murmur of ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…’ travels along the corridor from her bedroom to ours. Left unanswered, her sounds will grow louder and more insistent, the volume rising in a hairpin crescendo. Someone will have to go to her and lift her warm, sleep-scented body from her bed into ours. A task I would relish on any other day.

  My groan – and the protesting arm I heave across my face to blot out the daylight which infiltrates our room through slatted shutters – has the desired effect. The bed creaks as Mr Frog hoists himself upright and stumbles wordlessly in the direction of Tadpole’s room. His silence conveys many layers of disapproval. That I’d stayed out into the small hours. That I’d returned so obviously tipsy, key fumbling ineptly in the lock. That I would doubtless not be in any fit state to drag myself to work.

  I hear returning footfalls and moments later anxious fingers prise my arm from my face; a pair of grey-blue eyes gaze questioningly into mine.

  ‘Maman?’

  A wave of visceral love engulfs me, but I fight the urge to clutch my daughter to me, to bury my face in the back of her neck and inhale her milky, innocent scent.

  ‘Mummy’s got a bad, bad headache,’ I mumble feebly, turning on to my side and burying my feverish face into the cool pillow instead.

  But there is no pain, at least not in a physical sense. I am, quite simply, stricken with horror; aghast at the thought of the upheaval I am poised to inflict on our little family. Terrified that what I am contemplating can somehow be read in my face: a scarlet letter freshly branded on my forehead.

  And yet, at the same time, every cell in my body vibrates at a higher frequency. I feel the blood thundering through my veins; the hair on my arms standing on end. My fear – fear of hurling myself headlong into the unknown – is shot through with giddy exhilaration. Never have I felt so guilty, nor so intoxicatingly alive.

  I lie immobile while Mr Frog moves resentfully around the apartment, making no move to help as I hear him dress first Tadpole, then himself; pour breakfast cereal into her bowl.

  Even before the front door slams accusingly closed behind them, I am itching to power up the computer. Spinning a web of words in my mind, I’m impatient to commit them to my blog while they are fresh and raw and new.

  1. Snapshots

  The day I created my anonymous internet diary, the nom de plume ‘petite anglaise’ instinctively sprang to mind, and felt so very right, so very natural, that I considered no other.

  Ask any English girl who has ever lived in France, and I’m sure she’ll tell you she has been called a petite anglaise at some time or another. It is a name loaded with meaning: an affectionate tone implies that the anglaise in question is not just English, but cute and English; a hint of lasciviousness makes her sound sexy, but also taps into a commonly held view that English girls are rather easy.

  But there is another layer of meaning I’ve always found appealing: those two words summed up neatly everything I ever wanted my life to be. Petite anglaise: an English girl who has been translated into French; her life transposed into a French key.

  For my pen name, or perhaps that should read mouse name, I took a liberty, dropping the ‘la’ which should, by rights, precede it: Petite became my first name, Anglaise my surname. In a few whimsical clicks, an alter ego was born.

  It’s simple enough to identify what made these words such a perfect, obvious pseudonym. But I struggle to divine the source of my deep-seated desire to become a petite anglaise in the first place. What on earth could compel a girl to uproot her whole existence when she had never so much as tasted a genuine croissant? When her childhood holidays seldom took her beyond British shores, and her family tree was firmly rooted in Yorkshire? What was it that caused me to fall in love with the idea of immersing myself in a language and culture which were not my own? And why set my sights on France, in particular?

  When Tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realized I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become. Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today: from French, to France, to Paris and to petite anglaise.

  My recurring daydream, as a child, had long been one of escape. As our Vauxhall Cavalier tore along the motorway, my legs wedged at an uncomfortable angle in the narrow space behind my father’s seat, my stomach lurching with motion sickness, an image played across my shuttered eyelids. Closing my ears to the sound of my younger sisters bickering beside me on the back seat, I saw myself running. I parted fronds of wheat as I cut through fields, I sliced across people’s gardens, leaped over dry-stone walls and streams.

  It was as if there was somewhere else I wanted to go, but I didn’t know, then, where this somewhere was. In the daydream, my course ran parallel to that of our car. My running self had no inkling of her destination.

  A few days shy of my t
welfth birthday, dressed in the navy uniform of Mill Mount Grammar School for Girls, my nylon, knee-length skirt crackling with static, I expectantly took my seat in an attic classroom. The wooden desk, scarred with many generations of graffiti, was at an unfamiliar gradient and I had to place my pen with care, just so, to prevent it rolling to the floor. Mrs Barker arrived and wrote her name on the blackboard, her resolutely English surname momentarily dampening my enthusiasm. ‘Bonjour tout le monde!’ she said brightly, and with that, my very first French lesson began. I opened the well-thumbed Tricolore textbook which was to be my guide for many years to come, pushed my wayward glasses back up to the bridge of my nose, and bent my head studiously over page one.

  France. Here was a destination to bend my running steps towards; a hook to hang my daydreams on; so alluring, so exotic, so tantalizingly close. No matter that school French lessons consisted of little more than endlessly rehearsed role plays and verb conjugations. No matter that my first extended stay on French soil would not take place for another six agonizing years. As I sat in a numbered booth in the school language lab, cumbersome headphones blocking out the English sounds of the world around me, I closed my eyes and pretended I was actually there. I yearned to taste the 200 grams of pâté I was instructed to buy in the grocer’s shop; to visit the church or the town hall after quizzing a passer-by – invariably an elderly man wearing a beret – for directions.

  ‘Ecoutez, puis répétez!’ said the voice on the crackling tape at the start of every exercise. ‘Listen, then dream’ would have been more apt. I’d fallen hopelessly, irrationally, in love with the French language and, by extension, with France. And I’m at a loss to explain why, even now.

  It wasn’t until the summer before my eighteenth birthday that I finally boarded a coach at York railway station bound for Heathrow Airport, from where I would fly to France. As I waved goodbye to my anxious mother, I took a series of deep breaths, trying to still the butterflies beating frantic wings against the walls of my stomach. It was hard to believe this was it, I was really going. Unzipping my rucksack with trembling fingers, I checked for the twentieth time that my passport was where it should be, wrapped around the tickets I had bought with money from my Saturday job serving cream teas to heavily perfumed old ladies. For years I’d argued bitterly with my parents every time the thorny subject of French exchanges was broached, indignant at their refusal to smooth my way. It was no good; they were unable to overcome their misgivings about welcoming a stranger into their home. But now, at last, I was of an age to take matters into my own hands. This trip to Lyons was to be my baptism.

  For a whole fortnight I would stay with Florence and her family. I would sleep in a bed made up with French sheets. I would eat French food at their table, mopping my plate with a chunk of crusty baguette, just like the characters in the Pagnol books I devoured, or the actors in the handful of subtitled films I’d found in the local video shop. I would speak French, and only French, every single day for two weeks. For eighteen months I’d written Florence – whose details I’d stumbled upon by chance in the ‘penpals’ section of a Cartable magazine I’d found lying around in a classroom – long, painstakingly crafted letters, praying that one day an invitation would come. Florence always replied to my letters in French. She shared my obsession with The Cure, and in the photo she’d sent me her hazel eyes were circled with lashings of dark eyeliner, just like Robert Smith’s. The dimples in her cheeks, the dusting of freckles across her nose, at odds with the moody image she was trying to project, were oddly endearing. Now we would finally meet. I was determined to love her in the flesh.

  As I wheeled my suitcase out into the arrivals hall, suddenly overtaken by an echo of the shyness which had been the scourge of my early teens, a girl in dungaree shorts hurtled towards me.

  ‘Cat-reen!’ she exclaimed. ‘C’est bien toi?’ I nodded, tongue-tied, savouring the sound of my name, in its French incarnation. How much prettier ‘Catherine’ sounded on her lips!

  Florence was shorter than I had imagined, and her hair, as she leaned close to my cheek to administer my first ever French bise, smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. Her accent was like nothing I’d heard in any listening comprehension exercise in the language lab, and for days I had to beg her to repeat everything slowly, several times. My secret hope was that she would teach me local slang so authentic that my teachers back home would be flummoxed; my classmates mute with envy.

  The welcoming committee Florence brought to the airport told me everything I needed to know about her happy-go-lucky existence: it consisted of an ex-boyfriend and two younger brothers, but no actual means of transportation. The plan, from what I could gather, was to take a bus to where her elder brother worked, in a nearby village post office. If he was around, he’d give us a lift; if not, we’d hitch a ride to her village. Her father, a widower, was working the late shift at the local sausage factory and wouldn’t be home until dinner-time.

  Thumbs outstretched, Florence and I stood on the grass verge while the boys hung well back with my unwieldy suitcase so as not to jeopardize our chances. Thank goodness my parents can’t see me now, I thought, preparing to clamber into a French stranger’s car, poised to become the subject of a cautionary tale used to deter future generations of exchange students. Remember that English girl? You know, the one who ended up dismembered and used as sausage filling?

  But if there was any danger, I was past caring at that precise moment. Every sense amplified, I was too busy feasting on my surroundings: the cars with strange number plates which rumbled by on the wrong side of the road; the way in which Florence’s brothers seemed to gesticulate with their hands, their arms, even their shoulders, when they spoke; the unfamiliar cadence of their sentences; the strumming of a thousand cigales, invisible in the scrubby vegetation around us. So caught up was I in the moment that when a car finally slowed to a standstill on the dusty road, it didn’t register at first.

  ‘Cat-reen, réveille-toi!’ Florence cried, putting her hand on my arm and startling me out of my reverie. ‘He is stopping, it is time to go!’ She dropped her half-smoked Gauloise, scrunching it in a practised movement between the rubber sole of her tennis shoe and the dusty road, and bent her head to speak to the driver through his half-open window. After lengthy negotiations, we heaved my suitcase into the boot and clambered into the back seat with one of her brothers.

  ‘Et les autres?’ I asked, in my pidgin French.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ said Florence with a dismissive shrug. ‘They’ll hitch a ride of their own.’

  As the car sped along, my eyes devoured every street sign, every yellow letterbox, every shopfront we passed. It was as if I had stepped inside the pages of Tricolore. Everything felt as alien and exotic as I had so desperately wanted it to. And yet, in spite of the unmistakable Frenchness of everything around me, there was a part of me that felt I belonged here. I wanted to hug myself with glee: I really did thrive on being out of context, just as I’d dreamed I would.

  ∗

  Three years later, when the ‘year abroad’ became the hottest topic of conversation towards the end of my second year of university, I never called it by that name. It was to be my ‘year in France’, with a couple of months in Germany tacked on at the end, to pay lip service to course requirements. I filled in an application to work as an English assistante, not caring which region of France I wound up in, although I did rule out Paris. With my small-town background, the sheer scale and intensity of the capital intimidated me. I would visit, and I suspected my path would lead me there eventually, but I wasn’t quite ready for the City of Light, not just yet. I was assigned to a lycée in Yvetôt, a drab, uninspiring market town in austere Normandy, where my task was to ‘teach’ English conversation to groups of nonchalant denim-clad teens for a few hours a week. But the job – which I didn’t particularly enjoy – was simply a means to an end. All that mattered to me was that I would spend nine whole months in France.

  Home was a tin
y attic room in a townhouse in nearby Rouen, rented from a school teacher and her piano-tuner husband whom I rarely saw. Much of my time, in those first weeks and months, was spent with other English assistantes, warming our hands on steaming cups of hot chocolate in smoky cafés, pining for absent boyfriends and mimicking our students’ – and sometimes their teachers’ – comical English accents. The experience fell short of my expectations at first: instead of total immersion in the language and culture, here I was speaking my mother tongue all day long to pupils, then hanging out with a crowd of fellow anglaises after hours.

  One autumn Saturday, I was walking gingerly around the pedestrianized town centre with Claire, an English girlfriend, on cobbles made treacherous by their coating of damp, coppery leaves. Pausing at a street vendor’s cart by the Gros Horloge, we bought scalding-hot, chocolate-filled crêpes, their buttery slickness soaking through thin paper wrappers. As I took my first bite, Claire gave me a conspiratorial nudge, pointing out a tall boy striding towards us with a large Alsatian on a leash, flanked by a couple of shorter friends.

  ‘You know that English teacher who invited me over for dinner with his family last week?’ she said, pausing to swallow a mouthful of pancake. ‘That’s his son, Yann, over there. He’s not bad, is he?’

  As he drew closer I stared at the slim boy – obviously a student – with pronounced cheekbones, a Roman nose and moody smudges beneath his blue-green eyes. He wore a long dark-grey coat which emphasized his height over pale jeans and a pull camionneur, the zip-necked jumper which seemed to be compulsory wear for all Frenchmen that year. Suddenly self-conscious, I prayed I didn’t have chocolate smeared around my lips. Yann wasn’t just good-looking, he was gorgeous. Tall and dark-haired with an air of melancholy about him and, in some way I struggled to put my finger on, unmistakably French. In that single electric instant I knew that if Yann would have me, my university boyfriend, out of sight and mind back home, was history. Here, right before my eyes, was a compelling reason to upgrade to a French model; a passport to the French life I craved.