Petite Anglaise Read online

  I saw Yann often over the next few weeks with Claire and the other assistantes, increasingly tongue-tied in his presence as I grew more and more besotted with him. Was it wishful thinking, or did the way he continually singled me out for attention – even if it was as the butt of his jokes – mean that he was drawn to me, too? A trip to Paris with Claire, Yann and a gang of his friends finally gave me the pretext I needed to find out for sure. And from the moment he slid into the seat next to mine on the train we boarded at Rouen station, I knew my instincts had not been wrong.

  We kissed in semi-darkness, surrounded by slumbering bodies mummified in sleeping bags, on the tiled floor of a friend’s apartment. I was euphoric. A French boyfriend: sexy, exotic, mine. I loved the way he pouted as he spoke his mother tongue; his range of expressive Gallic shrugs, every twitch of his slim shoulders speaking volumes. I loved the way he could casually throw a meal together in a matter of seconds; toss a salad in a perfect, home-made vinaigrette. With every kiss, with every evening meal at his parents’ house, I inched one step closer to my goal: carving out a niche for myself in France, making it my home.

  The first time I slept over we’d contrived a flimsy excuse: a late dinner with friends, a missed curfew for my rented room. No one was fooled, but Yann’s parents played along gamely. En route to the kitchen to make coffee the following morning, clad only in a borrowed T-shirt, which Yann assured me was perfectly decent but felt quite the opposite, I slid along the walls, cringing with embarrassment, eyes downcast. Yann’s father was sitting in his favourite chair by the window, pretending to read Libération but, from the way his newspaper twitched as I passed, I knew that he had witnessed my discomfort.

  ‘Alors, c’était comment hier soir?’ he enquired, eyes twinkling above his newspaper. My cheeks flamed. How was it last night? Could he really be quizzing me about his son’s prowess in the bedroom? Surely, even in notoriously permissive France, that wasn’t a normal thing for a parent to say? ‘Le dîner, je veux dire, bien sûr,’ he added, as if to imply that, if I had jumped to the wrong conclusion, the mistake was mine entirely. But when I looked askance at Yann and saw his smirk, I knew his father’s innuendo had been intentional.

  ‘I had a very pleasant soirée, thank you,’ I replied, still gazing at Yann as I spoke. Something in his eyes spurred me on, making me forget my bashfulness for a moment. ‘A good time was most definitely had by all,’ I added, with what I hoped was a suggestive smile.

  Yann’s father snorted with suppressed laughter. ‘She gives as good as she gets, this petite anglaise,’ he said, half to himself, in an approving tone.

  I savoured the sound of my new name, and wore it, from that moment on, as a badge of pride.

  Landing a posting, a year later, to the Sorbonne Nouvelle – the real Sorbonne University’s poor relation, housed in a seventies building of dubious charm – was a piece of good fortune so unbelievable, it almost seemed fated. I’d got away with ploughing through the whole of my higher education with tunnel vision, eyes fixed on the Holy Grail – France – without pausing to give any thought to plotting an actual career path. The teaching job, which fell into my lap when no one else in my year even applied for it, was the perfect stalling mechanism. Not only would it take me to Paris, but it would buy me a whole year to consider my next move. And when my university failed to find a single willing graduate to send over the following year, a situation without precedent, my one-year contract stretched, with convenient elasticity, into two.

  A Eurolines coach deposited me early one September morning in a nondescript car park somewhere near La Fourche, north of Place de Clichy, if I remember rightly, although at the time I had only a sketchy idea of the geography of the city. I didn’t linger, hefting my rucksack on to my shoulders and diving straight into the nearest métro station, where I pored over my map. First things first: I needed to find a place to live. I had a room booked for a week in student halls near Denfert-Rochereau, but my first destination was the American Church on Quai d’Orsay, and the noticeboard filled with handwritten adverts for student accommodation I’d been told I would find there. Setting a course for Pont d’Alma, I crossed the city in a series of underground trains, seeing nothing but my own reflection in the windows, feeling a vein pulsing anxiously in my forehead. Arriving at my destination, I clambered up the concrete steps, blinking in the bright daylight.

  The first thing I saw was the Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky, rising high above the residential buildings and offices which lined the quais. I was just as surprised as I had been the first time I’d seen it up close, with Yann by my side, never expecting it to be painted a rusty shade of brown. ‘It’s just a glorified pylon,’ I’d said then, pretending to be unimpressed, and earning myself a good-humoured poke in the ribs. But now, as I dug around in my pocket for my map and tried to get my bearings, I felt a rising tide of excitement. I had arrived. This was it! I was about to make Paris my home.

  The first number I noted down and dialled with shaking hands from a nearby payphone belonged to a woman renting a chambre de bonne a few minutes’ walk from there, a narrow garret in former servants’ quarters on the top floor of an imposing stone building with heavy double doors and a marble entrance hall. The room, accessible by a service stairwell, boasted views across the Champ de Mars to the glorified pylon itself. My enthusiasm was swiftly dampened, however, both by the prospect of shared toilet and shower facilities on the landing, and the fact that my landlady would be living on the floor below – too close for comfort – and I returned to the payphone, crestfallen, to try the next number on my list.

  A deux pièces in the eleventh arrondissement was my second port of call, a short walk from the Place de la Bastille. The apartment buildings were of the same era as the bourgeois building I’d just visited, but there the resemblance ended. This neighbourhood was resolutely working class so, instead of elaborate stonework and ornate windows, the façade of 104 rue de la Roquette was painted white and without ornament. But once I stepped inside it was love at first sight, and I darted across the road to the nearest bank, cashing in every last traveller’s cheque in my possession to pay the deposit and close the deal. There was something shifty about my landlady, a striking divorcée, chic but tousled, as if she had got out of bed seconds earlier and thrown on a designer outfit. There was no written lease, and she instructed me to pay the rent cash in hand when she dropped by at the beginning of every month. I wasn’t about to let this unconventional arrangement worry me, though. Two rooms, with a bathroom and kitchen, for the same price as the garret I’d just visited by the Eiffel Tower. It was simply too good to turn down.

  As I leaned against the back of what was now my front door and contemplated my surroundings, my landlady’s footfalls receding in the stairwell behind me, my smile was almost too wide for my face to contain. My first ever chez moi, and it was in Paris. The shy schoolgirl clutching her Tricolore textbook, the carefree eighteen-year-old who ran wild in Florence’s village, the starry-eyed student with her first French amoureux, all of my past selves looked over my shoulder now, rubbing their hands together with glee. This was the culmination of all our dreams. Let the Parisian chapter of petite anglaise begin.

  2. Parisienne

  Rue de la Roquette was a lively street, both by day and by night, lined with boutiques, bars and restaurants, leading from the overflowing bars of Bastille to the calm sanctuary of Père Lachaise cemetery and growing steadily shabbier along the way. Although I was new to living alone, I rarely felt lonely. My life was set to the music of the neighbourhood: the animated chatter of passers-by in the street below my window, the vibrations of the bass from the record shop downstairs, the drunken cries of revellers stumbling home in the early hours of the morning. And it wasn’t just the street sounds which permeated my home: the green neon sign above the pharmacie across the road infused my bedroom with an eerie phosphorescent glow when the lights were out, while the living room was tinted pale orange by the street lights at the nearby crossr
oads.

  Inside, all was quintessentially Parisian: an alcove with two electric hotplates above a mini-bar-sized refrigerator constituted the kitchen; the two main rooms were tiny; the bathtub so short that I had to draw my knees up to my chin. In one musty corner of the bedroom black mould began to advance across the cream wallpaper with its pattern of green foliage, and my bedclothes often felt damp to the touch. The apartment was inhospitable in winter: tiny electric wall heaters nestled under each draughty window, all the better for any warmth to escape into the street before it could make an impression on the room. Returning home after the Christmas break, I found a thick coating of ice on the inside of my bedroom window which took an eternity to thaw.

  None of this mattered to me. Mostly I was to be found outdoors, roaming the city on foot, armed only with my Plan de Paris or a guidebook, a lone petite anglaise in her elegant adoptive city, soaking up every last drop of Frenchness like a sponge, marvelling at every detail. I breathed in the distinctive scents of Paris: baking dough from the boulangeries I passed every few hundred metres or so; the stench of ripe goat’s cheese announcing the presence of a fromagerie ten paces ahead; sulphurous métro smells wafting up through metal grids to street level; the tang of urine in underground corridors. Paris on a shoestring was the taste of a bitter espresso as I discreetly warmed my toes by a café radiator in winter; the acidic sting of cheap red wine on my tongue; a buttery pain au chocolat melting in my mouth.

  As an assistante I had a special teacher’s pass which granted me free access to almost every museum in the city, and I visited each one in turn: the Pompidou – or Beaubourg, as true Parisians seemed to call it – where I rode the escalators to the top level and enjoyed the free view; the Picasso museum in the heart of the Marais with its tranquil walled garden; the Musée Rodin in the shadow of Les Invalides. I traipsed around the Louvre, starting with the Egyptian relics, but never made it as far as the Mona Lisa, treating myself to a coffee in the Café Marly instead, so I could rest my weary feet and admire the glass pyramid which guarded the main entrance.

  My favourite places were further off the beaten track. I loved ducking off the university campus at Censier to drink mint tea in the mosaic-tiled courtyard of the Mosquée de Paris, or taking a snack to the Arènes de Lutèce in the springtime. In the gaps between lessons I killed time in the tiny cinemas on the rue des Ecoles where I watched countless vintage Hollywood films in black and white.

  But – as in Rouen – I found it frustrating that my circle of friends consisted mostly of expats like myself, fellow teachers from the university, or Brits and Americans met in bars. We would spend long evenings comparing notes about our experiences and, while it was undoubtedly fun, I hungered for something more. I had pinned my hopes on making friends with my students, but was bitterly disappointed to find that many of them lived with their parents and returned home to distant suburbs on the RER as soon as lectures were over.

  A vital part of the experience I craved eluded me: I was living alongside the French, not among them. Observing French life, but never truly living it. A hair’s breadth away from fulfilling my dreams. And yet sometimes this tiny gap seemed so unbridgeable.

  With my second Parisian winter behind me – a freezing winter of discontent punctuated by general strikes which brought lessons to a standstill for weeks on end – I also began to fret about my future in France. There could be no further extension to my teaching contract, but that wasn’t what I wanted, anyhow. Teaching would never be my vocation, it had simply been a convenient means to a French end. I’d have to find an alternative way of making a living as a matter of urgency, something more permanent which would equip me for the long haul. A chance meeting with a friend of a friend, an admin assistant for an American law firm, gave me the answer I had been seeking: I would take a bilingual secretarial course. Demand was high for English mother tongue assistants who were fluent in French. Here was the perfect job for this petite anglaise.

  My plan had one drawback: the only diploma worth its salt was taught in England. The French have a neat little phrase for the situation in which I found myself: devoir reculer pour mieux sauter. I’d have to grit my teeth and take a few steps back before I could take a leap forward. Despite my misgivings, I had no choice but to return to England for a few months before I could kickstart the next phase of my Paris life.

  A tight ball of dread formed in my stomach every time my thoughts turned to leaving Paris. Meandering through the fruit and vegetable market on boulevard Richard Lenoir, buffeted by the crowds, feet at the mercy of the wheels of the shopping trolleys to which Parisians of all ages seem so attached, I felt a lump in my throat. Alone at a showing of Chacun Cherche Son Chat playing at the Majestic Bastille, I watched, spellbound, as the events unfolded in my beloved neighbourhood: my red and white laundrette, my favourite café, the record shop where I collected flyers for nightclubs. The audience burst into enthusiastic applause as the final credits rolled – a phenomenon I have only ever witnessed in France – and my tears flowed freely in the semi-darkness. England seemed flat and two-dimensional to me now, compared with the richness, the texture of my Paris life, where I was constantly challenged by having to manipulate a language which was not my own, where every hurdle overcome represented a small private victory.

  I became friendly with Sarah, a fellow lectrice at the university, around that time. A Scottish girl with a mop of dark curls and a penchant for sex with strangers, Sarah’s behaviour both fascinated and repelled me. It certainly did nothing to dispel the preconceived ideas held by the French about petites anglaises and their loose morals, although it would be unfair to hold Sarah single-handedly responsible for the perpetuation of this myth, especially as, being Scottish, she was, strictly speaking, a petite écossaise.

  One March evening, two or three months short of my impending departure, we sat cross-legged on the single bed that served as my sofa. As usual, the first-floor room with its paper-thin windows was under siege: an icy draught sliced under the ill-fitting front door and the grumble of traffic grew so loud at times, as motorbikes with sawn-off exhausts turned over their engines at the traffic lights, that we might as well have been sitting on the pavement outdoors. Senses dulled by the cheap Bordeaux in our tumblers, we were oblivious to the discomfort, our attention focused on the pile of letters Sarah had pulled from her leather satchel and strewn across the eiderdown.

  A couple of weeks earlier Sarah had placed a personal ad in an Anglo-French classifieds magazine. ‘Jeune fille anglaise ouverte cherche amis français,’ it read. She had been overwhelmed by the volume of enthusiastic responses, ranging from the filthiest of indecent proposals to earnest letters from men claiming they sought only to practise their English. Together we flicked idly through the applications Sarah had consigned to her B list, meaning she had no intention of taking things any further. Open-minded she might be, but there simply wasn’t enough of her to go round.

  ‘I can’t believe how many people have replied!’ I said incredulously. ‘You’ve really got your money’s worth here…’

  ‘Absolutely,’ replied Sarah, pouring another glass of wine. ‘Especially given that the six I’ve met so far all bought me dinner…’

  I dreaded to think what the sort of guy who replied to a personal ad would expect in return for dinner. Even though I was single myself, after a recent fling with an English guy – a fellow expat – had ended in tears, I couldn’t imagine ever going on a blind date. There was something rather seedy about the whole enterprise, to my mind, and I was glad to remain a detached observer, living vicariously through Sarah.

  One B-listed letter caught my attention, however. The exact text I have long forgotten, but what made it stand out from all the others was its playful tone and perfectly dosed irony. The author had taken the trouble to snip sublimely ridiculous pictures out of magazines to illustrate his words: a man with a Tom Selleck moustache wearing Speedos, white socks and plastic sandals was pasted above a handwritten caption which read ‘I
prefer casual footwear.’

  ‘This guy seems really quite funny, for a Frenchman,’ I exclaimed, waving the letter under Sarah’s nose, wondering why this candidate had not made it to the A list. A sense of humour certainly scored highly on my list of desirable attributes. ‘And look, he likes clubbing, electronic music, he used to work on a magazine… It might be cool to meet him…’

  ‘Gimme the phone then.’ Sarah grinned slyly. ‘No time like the present, eh?’

  ‘No, wait! You can’t!’ I protested, suddenly shy. ‘What on earth will we say?’ But it was too late. Sarah had reached across and grabbed the phone; she was already dialling.

  Seated at a round table sipping unladylike glasses of bière blanche, Sarah and I were deep in conversation when he made his entrance. Somehow, despite our fits of giggles and Sarah’s wine-slurred speech, she’d managed to persuade the bemused B list guy to meet us at one of my favourite haunts. We’d told him to bring a friend, male or female, if he wanted; this was emphatically not a date. I was busy marvelling at how the waitresses in the Café Charbon, as in so many ‘in’ places in Paris, always conformed to a particular type: wiry, effortlessly stunning and vaguely disdainful of their edgy, bohemian clientele. The acoustics of the high-ceilinged bar – which was either painted the exact shade of nicotine or had once been white and now bore the collective stain of a thousand cigarettes – reduced the animated conversations around us to an unobtrusive background hum.

  My friend’s posture changed, her eyes narrowing in a predatory fashion, and I wheeled around to see exactly who, or what, she had in her sights. A blue-eyed boy, swaddled in an oversized duffle coat, had just pushed open the heavy swing door and was clearly looking for someone. The description fitted: this was our guest. Slim-built, with short, dark-blond hair, he paused to unbutton his coat in the doorway, revealing a snugly fitting black jumper with a rainbow motif which made me wonder, initially, whether he might not be gay. Sarah caught his eye and waved. Mr B list looked relieved to see us. Maybe he shared my horror of entering crowded bars alone.