French Kissing Read online

  The memory was a barbed one: Nico had upbraided me in the taxi home afterwards. My English sarcasm wasn’t funny, he’d said, just rude and unnecessarily cruel. It was ironic, when I thought about it. One of the things he’d loved about me, ten years earlier, had slowly morphed into one of his pet hates.

  Delphine’s office at Rivoire headquarters was on the top floor of a flawless sandstone building sandwiched between two high-fashion boutiques on avenue Montaigne, only three or four stops away by métro. If I’d followed Kate’s lead and taken public transport, I’d have been there by now but, with time to spare, I felt like taking advantage of the pale September sunshine instead. The stretch of the Champs-Elysées running from Concorde to the Grand Palais was the most pleasant: bordered by greenery on both sides, lined with majestic trees and devoid of any buildings which could be converted into MacDonald’s or down-market chain stores. Okay, it wasn’t exactly fields, as the name suggested – the lawns were like golfing greens and the roar of traffic thundering along in both directions left me in no doubt I was in the centre of the city. But I enjoyed striding along with the breeze buffeting my hair and with wide open space all around me. It was the perfect antidote to all those evenings I spent cooped up indoors while Lila slept.

  My telephone throbbed in my jacket pocket – I always set it to vibrate on weekdays, out of courtesy to my pupils – and I whipped it out to inspect the caller ID without adjusting my pace. ‘Nico,’ it read. The name still lived on in my head and in my mobile phone, even if, since our separation in March, I’d reverted to calling him Nicolas whenever we spoke. It was a demotion of sorts: a fitting way to underscore the fact that everything between us had changed.

  ‘Sally? Je te dérange pas là?’ Nico was calling from his office and I could hear other voices in the background: female voices. Maybe one of them belonged to Albane, the stagiaire he’d been seeing since about five minutes after we parted. I’d never seen his young trainee in the flesh but in the picture I carried in my mind a forked tail protruded from the bottom of her pencil skirt.

  ‘Nicolas. No, I’m not busy. You caught me between lessons.’ I spoke evenly, in keeping with the civility pact we’d struck in the interests of Lila’s wellbeing. We’d always conducted our conversations this way: he addressed me in French, I replied in English. Neither of us liked being at a disadvantage and this method evened up the balance of power between us. ‘What’s up?’ I continued. ‘Please don’t tell me there’s a problem with next weekend?’

  ‘Sophie called earlier,’ Nico replied, ignoring my question, ‘and she asked for your number. Do you mind if I pass it on? I thought I’d better call you straight away, before I forgot…’ Sophie was Lila’s aunt, and my ex-not-quite-sister-in-law. Three years younger than Nico, she had the same dark hair and Mediterranean colouring. She also had a son, Lucas, who was only a year older than Lila. I liked Sophie – her presence had been one of the few redeeming features at Canet family gatherings – but I hadn’t seen her since before the break-up, and things were bound to be awkward. What, I had to wonder, had prompted her to contact me now?

  ‘Sophie… Right…’ I hoped the growl of traffic in the background masked the reticence in my voice. ‘Well, yes, by all means, give her my mobile number. It’s best if she calls me in the evening some time.’

  ‘Good. I’ll see you this weekend, then. I’ll come for Lila on Saturday morning, around ten. Friday’s going to be a late finish at work.’

  ‘Weekends are supposed to start on Fridays,’ I said, bristling, convinced the Sophie question had been a pretext to deliver this, rather less palatable news. ‘But if that’s the best you can do, I’ll explain the situation to Lila.’ My tone made it quite clear I thought his best was far from good enough.

  I was nearing the Grand Palais as I slipped the phone back into my pocket, conscious of a familiar tightness in my chest. I didn’t believe the work excuse, not for a moment, and suspected I was being played for a fool.

  If I were to call Nico’s bluff on Friday night by phoning him at the office, I was willing to bet he’d be nowhere to be found.

  2

  My footfalls echoed as I crossed the vast lobby of Rivoire headquarters to the reception desk where two young women in pristine navy-blue uniforms, their dark hair pulled back into sleek ponytails, were conversing in low voices. The security guard manning the nearby turnstiles looked thoroughly uncomfortable. It was as though he suspected he was the subject of the girls’ gossip but, try as he might, couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.

  Although I’d been coming here every other Monday for the best part of a year, I’d rarely encountered the same hôtesse d’accueil twice. My guess was that an agency somewhere in Paris specialized in supplying these flawlessly groomed and fully interchangeable receptionist clones. As I drew closer, it became clear that Receptionist 1, who was buffing her fingernails under cover of a tall vase of white lilies, wasn’t planning to acknowledge my presence. Instead, Receptionist 2 inclined her head and uttered a haughty ‘Bonjour, Madame’.

  ‘Bonjour. Je viens pour le cours d’anglais de Delphine Andrieu.’ I fished in my satchel for the embossed ID card bearing an unusually flattering photo of a rather younger Sally – I’d persuaded Kate to re-use it every time she issued new cards – below the name of Kate’s language school: ‘Tailor-Made’. Kate, whose maiden name was Taylor, had dreamed up the name, as well as the French subtitle, ‘Cours d’Anglais sur mesure’, at the end of a long, vodka-fuelled brainstorming session to which I’d been invited five years earlier. Once she’d jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops which make France the last place on earth where anyone in their right mind would choose to set up a small business, she’d poached me from the Berlitz language school and I’d become her first full-time employee.

  As the name suggested, Tailor-Made’s main selling point was that our lessons never followed a ‘one size fits all’ approach. After an in-depth interview with each pupil to establish their level and the type of spoken and written English they needed for work, we devised personalized lesson programmes. With Delphine, for example, my main task had been to work on drastically improving her pronunciation. Her overall level wasn’t half bad and, somewhere along the line, she had carefully memorized her ultra-polite ‘you’re welcome’s and a whole host of other set phrases. But, to Delphine’s eternal chagrin, her strong accent sabotaged her efforts, making her difficult to comprehend over the phone.

  Once through the turnstile I summoned the lift, tapping the heel of my boot against the marble floor while I waited, enjoying the pleasing sound it made. The doors slid open to reveal a mercifully empty mirrored capsule. I touched my index finger to the sensor beside the number 8, recalling how awestruck I’d been on my first day when one of Rivoire’s bodyguards had scanned my fingerprint into the security system. Only a privileged few had access to the inner sanctum of the eighth floor, and it was surreal to think that I, of all people, numbered among them.

  When I arrived at my destination, however, Delphine was nowhere to be seen. That was odd. One of the receptionists must have called ahead to announce my arrival, and I was usually greeted, if not by Delphine herself, then at the very least by one of her anxious-looking understudies. I took a seat on the cream leather sofa opposite the lift doors and resolved to wait until someone materialized, pretending to look over the day’s lesson plan. I’d been cautioned to approach Delphine’s office, which interconnected with Rivoire’s, under no circumstances. The mere sight of an unfamiliar face drove ‘Monsieur’ to distraction, or so I was told, and I had no desire to be held responsible for provoking one of his legendary rages.

  I’d often thought how much I’d hate to work in a position like Delphine’s. Her surroundings might be luxurious – an original Picasso hung in the meeting room where our lessons were held – but there was something stifling about the atmosphere. Conversations in the corridors were conducted in hushed tones and often I sensed a palpable undercurrent of panic, which made t
he hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My head bent over my notebook now, I failed to hear Delphine approach: the deep pile of the beige carpet muffled her footfalls.

  ‘Good hafternoon, Sally. Sorry about ze delay…’ I rose to my feet, and Delphine stretched out a long-fingered hand to shake mine. She wore a slim-fitting trouser suit and shoes with vertiginous heels. Delphine would have towered over me even in her stockinged feet. I had to crane my neck to make eye contact and admire her freshly highlighted blonde bob.

  As I followed her into the meeting room, my eyes were irresistibly drawn, as always, to the panoramic view it afforded across the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings. I pulled out a chair and set down my work satchel and notebook on the smoked-glass tabletop. ‘Did you get a chance to draft the emails we discussed last time?’ I enquired, slipping into the BBC English accent I affected during lessons, without raising my eyes from the lesson plan. ‘I thought we could maybe start by checking those over?’ But when I glanced up, I saw Delphine standing immobile, her back pressed to the closed door, her eyelids shut. For the first time I noticed how chalkypale she looked under the layers of make-up; how bloodshot her eyes were. ‘Are you okay?’ I dropped my businesslike teaching voice and used the tone I’d adopt when talking to a friend. Rounding the table, I took a hesitant step towards her. ‘Delphine? What on earth’s the matter?’

  ‘Je suis tellement épuisée.’ Delphine’s voice was little more than a whisper. Slipping back into her native French was against the rules, but I didn’t have the heart to reprimand her. ‘I was up half the night,’ she continued in her mother tongue. ‘Suzanne, my daughter, is sick. And there was an art auction in New York, so I was bidding on the telephone for paintings Monsieur wanted all evening and trying to look after her at the same time… Then at 3 a.m., Madame called to scream at me because she was leaving her charity gala and couldn’t see her driver anywhere. Even though it was her usual driver, and she has his number programmed into her telephone, because I put it there myself…’ Delphine crossed the room and sagged into a chair. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, putting her hands on the table to still their shaking, ‘I dream about walking out of this office and never coming back.’

  ‘Is Suzanne better now?’ I seized on the safest subject. ‘Who’s looking after her today?’ Kate had always cautioned me against joining in employer-bashing sessions. It wasn’t rare for pupils to use their English lessons as a place to vent, but when they did, it was wise to do no more than listen. I’d answered Delphine in French, a line I’d never hitherto crossed. But I was still reeling from the unexpectedness of it all. Delphine was one pupil whose soft centre I never thought I’d see.

  ‘My babysitter’s with her,’ Delphine mumbled, her cheeks colouring. I sympathized. There was nothing I hated more than being separated from Lila when she was ill; nothing that made me feel guiltier for choosing to be a working mum. I’d only had to get external help once – when Lila caught chickenpox at the age of two and needed to be quarantined for a whole week – but I’d hated every minute of it. ‘I’m on my own, you see,’ Delphine added, a hint of defensiveness creeping into her voice. ‘Her father, well, he’s never really been in the picture.’

  ‘My daughter’s father would never have volunteered to stay home if she was sick, even when he was around,’ I said, my wry tone eliciting a lukewarm smile from Delphine. ‘And he’s not living with us any more, either,’ I confided. ‘So, you see, I do know what it’s like…’

  It was the first time either of us had strayed from the script of my painstakingly planned lessons on to more personal territory, and we lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, unsure where to go from there. Delphine regained her composure before I did. I watched as she slipped on her perfect personal-assistant mask, straightening her back and squaring her shoulders. Taking my cue from her, I switched back into teaching mode, nudging the conversation into English.

  ‘Shall we start with a listening comprehension, today, for a change?’ I suggested, thinking the exercise would give us both some breathing space. Delphine nodded, and I took out my hand-held digital audio player and set it on the table between us.

  When Delphine accompanied me back to the lift an hour and a half later – where I was mortified to catch sight of the lingering imprint of my bottom, plainly visible on the leather sofa – she let her guard down once more, for a few seconds. ‘Would you like to have lunch with me some time when Monsieur is away on business?’ she asked me, her eyes mutely imploring me to accept her invitation. ‘If you could come an hour before my lesson, the chef would cook us something nice. I’m not permitted to leave the office, you see…’

  ‘I’d love to!’ I was relieved that Delphine didn’t seem to have misgivings about confiding in me. It wasn’t unheard of for a client to call Kate and request a change of teacher after confusing an English lesson with a therapy session and feeling uncomfortable about it later. But Delphine flashed me an unmistakably genuine smile before she disappeared in the direction of her office. She seemed to harbour no regrets.

  As the mirrored cabin plummeted downwards, I realized I now envied this princess in her thickly carpeted ivory tower even less than I had before. How on earth did she cope with all the stress and responsibility of her job alone, with no one but her young daughter to turn to? For a parent isolé, the parenting wasn’t always the hardest part, in my opinion. After all, millions of women in relationships do the bulk of the childrearing work with minimal help from their partners. The isolation – the ‘lone’ in ‘lone parenting’ – was another matter. When the going got tough, who could Delphine lean on?

  My three-thirty lesson with Marc de Pourtalès – Rivoire’s human resources director – on the third floor of the same building, was much less eventful. He asked if I wouldn’t mind casting an eye over a PowerPoint presentation he was preparing for the board of directors, a task which easily filled half our session together. His English was flawless, as usual, and I could find little to criticize, aside from the fact that he manoeuvred his chair a little too close to mine for comfort and appeared to have rounded off his lunch with a particularly ripe goat’s cheese.

  Now I was hurrying back to the Champs-Elysées to catch the métro, my teaching day over, and it was time to snap back into the role of mother for a few hours before Lila’s bedtime. I was looking forward to turning my attention back to my partially completed Rendez-vous profile once she was tucked up in bed. Kate’s reticence and Delphine’s loneliness had made me doubly determined to take the plunge.

  The ligne 1 – represented on métro maps as a horizontal yellow line slicing Paris neatly in two just north of the river Seine – was jam-packed, as always. On the train, I brushed past a herd of Japanese tourists clutching the day’s purchases from Louis Vuitton to the section where two carriages fused together. The floor, walls and ceiling were made of overlapping metal plates, built to slide over one another, allowing the train to bend and flex as the tracks curved to the left or right. It took a certain amount of practice to stand here without toppling over, especially when the driver jabbed at the brakes, but at least there was room to breathe in this unpopular spot. Stowing my satchel between my feet, I fished out my copy of Libération, the left-leaning newspaper I bought every morning, and hooked my arm through the nearest metal hand rail to stabilize myself.

  Nestling between Météo-Jeux (sudoku, chess, weather maps) and Culture (devoted to Vanessa Paradis’ latest album) was my favourite part of the newspaper: the small ads. The job vacancies and apartments to let held little interest for me. It was the personals in the Entre Nous section I found fascinating and, in particular, those filed under the heading ‘Transports amoureux’. That day, there was only one, but it was a classic example of the genre. Puzzling over how best to translate these ads into English was a favourite pastime of mine, and one I often used to help me get my brain into gear in the mornings.

  ‘Monday 5 September, RER B between Luxembourg and Gare du Nord, 11.30 a.m.,’ I translated. ‘We co
ntemplated one another in silence. You: long black hair, melancholy eyes. Me: captivated. Dare I hope to see you again?’

  Cupid seemed rather partial to French public transport. Almost every day Libération published tales of eyes meeting fleetingly in the métro, tentative smiles exchanged across crowded buses, trains or even aeroplanes. The messages were heavy with regret – ‘I wish I’d dared speak to you’; ‘If only we’d exchanged numbers’ – but they were also filled with a childlike hope. Realistically, the odds of a declaration reaching its intended were slim: the sender might as well have placed a handwritten message in a bottle and dropped it into the River Seine. And supposing it did? If Cupid had let only one arrow fly, the whole enterprise would still be futile.

  The ads were invariably couched in poetic French, which was the reason I found translating them into English such an interesting challenge. And while I was no hopeless romantic – I was far too cynical for that – every time I scanned Transports amoureux, it was fun to entertain the surreal idea that one day, while I’d been busy compiling a mental shopping list, staring through the man opposite with unseeing eyes, he might have been composing rhyming couplets about me in his head.

  When the métro pulled into Châtelet station – the point on the map where the highest number of coloured lines converge – the majority of my fellow travellers spilled out on to the platform. Following the flow of people along a series of concrete staircases and white-tiled corridors, including one so long that it contained an airport-style travelator, I arrived at my correspondence, ligne 11, colour-coded a deep chocolate-brown. I’d made the journey so many times that my feet instinctively knew the way, and I could have managed it blindfolded. Reaching the platform, I continued to its furthest end and collapsed into an empty seat in the last carriage of the waiting train. Belleville was only six stops away, along tunnels which twisted and turned far more than the stylized Plan du Métro let on. Ten minutes later, I was through the exit barriers and riding an escalator up to street level. Belleville_girl was home.