Petite Anglaise Read online

  I coughed to make my presence known, and when they moved aside as one, faces still pressed together, I lunged out on to the platform just before the doors slid closed. Later, describing the episode on my blog, I dwelled on the feeling of wistfulness the episode had left with me, lamenting the fact that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so wrapped up in someone that I saw only him, caring not a jot what onlookers might think. I ached with nostalgia for a younger, more responsive me, who seemed to feel things more intensely. Was this kind of passion impossible in a relationship that had lasted eight years, or could things be different? I composed the entry during the first half of my lunch break and called it ‘Half-life’, after the song I’d been listening to on my iPod at the time. It read like a coded response to James’s emails, although I only admitted this to myself much later.

  ‘I’ve been trying unsuccessfully for at least an hour to express how this post makes me feel,’ Jim in Rennes commented later that day, quick off the mark as usual. ‘It’s a bittersweet thing and no mistake.’

  A week before the concert, Joanne, a fellow Brit I’d met a couple of times with a Tadpole a few days older than my own, sent me an intriguing email, which I opened at work. ‘In my capacity of internet cross-referencer and Sherlock Holmes,’ she wrote, ‘have I solved another whodunnit? Is Expatica’s Date of the Week none other than petite anglaise’s faithful Jim in Rennes?’

  In my haste to click on the link she provided, eager to take a look for myself, I narrowly missed knocking over my plastic cup of lukewarm coffee and accidentally baptizing my keyboard. It certainly looked as though my friend – and just what was she doing looking at a dating site anyway? – had been right. The profile matched the information I had: age, marital status, profession. And there were photos. Three photos. I enlarged the first, aware that my palm, cupping the mouse, was clammy.

  The face which stared back at me was that of a man who looked as if he had lived more than me: haunted by his past, yet defiant, determined. The lighting was stark and unforgiving; he’d made no concessions to vanity. His eyes, a deep shade of blue, contemplated the camera with steady gravity, his mouth unsmiling. A shadow of stubble across his cheeks and chin made him appear rough around the edges, which I liked. He had broad shoulders, and looked muscular but lean. My gaze kept returning to his eyes though, irresistibly drawn to them, wondering what he had been thinking when the picture was taken; wondering who had taken it.

  ‘You were right!’ I replied to Joanne once I had recovered my composure. ‘It is him, I’m sure of it! We’re going to see a band together next week when he’s in Paris. Just as friends, of course. He even invited Mr Frog, although I never had any intention of taking him along and, anyway, he’ll be babysitting, for once. I don’t know why, but I have the strangest feeling that it’s a date now, as though I’m being unfaithful to Mr Frog just by looking at these pictures…’

  ‘Well,’ shot back Joanne, ‘some might say Mr Frog could do with a bit of competition. Shake things up a bit. Teach him how to appreciate you more.’

  ‘He knows I’m going to the concert,’ I replied hastily. ‘And he knows I’m going with a male reader, too, so there’s no subterfuge. He seemed mildly surprised that I was going to see a band he’d never heard of, but that was about the extent of his reaction. Mind you, I wasn’t entirely honest: I did imply that James might be bringing a girlfriend… And I’m almost certain that he isn’t.’

  I heard my boss’s footfalls on the stairs and quickly cut our conversation short, executing a deft ALT+TAB just in the nick of time. But when Tadpole was safely tucked up in bed that evening, I couldn’t resist looking at the photographs again. Joanne’s words, however carelessly chosen, echoed in my head. ‘Petite anglaise’s faithful Jim…’

  On the night of the concert, I auditioned almost every item in my wardrobe. I wanted to look attractive, but casual. It wasn’t a date, but it was a night out, and I liked to have the opportunity to make an effort, or so I told myself, a touch defensively. I agonized over lenses versus glasses; hair up or down; shoes, or my favourite Tiger trainers.

  Standing back to survey the results in the mirror, I took a long, critical look at myself. I’d twisted my hair into an approximation of a chignon, which thinned my face and left my long neck exposed, and allowed a few tendrils to escape, so that the overall effect was soft, rather than severe. My make-up I’d applied with caution, mindful that these days foundation had a tendency to highlight flaws rather than hide them, collecting in the laughter lines around my mouth, or the tiny crinkles which fanned out from the edges of my eyes. Dressed in jeans and a favourite tailored jacket over a scoop-neck T-shirt in a sheer beige fabric, I felt sexy, but hopefully it didn’t look like I was trying too hard.

  Grabbing my bag and keys, I took one last look at myself, sighed, and plunged down the stairs, too impatient to wait for the lift. Mr Frog would soon be home with Tadpole, and although I’d made no secret of where I was going, or with whom, I wasn’t sure why, but I had no desire to cross his path on my way out.

  8. Crossroads

  Striding along avenue Simon Bolivar I made a swift set of calculations. My destination could be reached far more quickly on foot than by métro, I decided, as I’d have to change from line 11 to line 2. My route led me downhill, at first, and as I made my way along the rue de Belleville, pulse racing, I marvelled, as always, at the unexpected view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

  At the bottom of the hill I hurried along boulevard de Belleville, where several continents rubbed up against one another in the space of a few hundred metres. At first the signs were written in Mandarin, with French translations underneath. I passed Chinese restaurants, supermarkets, hair-dressing salons and bazaars selling cheap plastic tat. But walking briskly in the direction of Couronnes, glancing at my watch impatiently at regular intervals, these quickly gave way to Tunisian restaurants serving tajines and couscous, épiceries orientales with window displays of fragrant, sticky pyramids of dates and figs, and bakeries selling Jewish breads and pastries. The air was filled with a Babel-like chatter: it seemed as though I could hear every language but French.

  I hadn’t eaten – there had been no time, and even if there had been, nerves had chased away my appetite – but nonetheless my stomach gave an involuntary growl as I smelled kebab meat grilling slowly on a spit, glistening with fat. Further on, the scent was overtaken by a dozen roasting chickens in a metal rôtissoire outside a halal butcher’s, their skins crisped and browned to perfection.

  The streets were littered and dirty, hosed down less frequently than those in the beaux quartiers and no doubt treated with less respect by the residents. Unwanted items lay abandoned on street corners: the carcass of a slatted bed, several of its ribs broken, a stained mattress with protruding springs, a cheap sofa without its cushions. But I felt more at ease here than I ever would in one of the chic but sterile neighbourhoods in the Western arrondissements. I liked my Paris worn and grimy. Rough and ragged. Working class. Teeming with life.

  Drawing level with the McDonald’s on the corner of rue Oberkampf, I ground to a halt for a moment, pulling out my phone and a wrinkled piece of notepaper with trembling fingers. Opposite was Ménilmontant métro station, where pockets of people loitered, waiting for friends, before they hit the bars of rue Oberkampf. This was ‘bobo’ territory, home to the expensively dishevelled, where dressing down was an art form.

  A car screeched to a standstill in front of me and, when I looked up, startled, the man in the passenger seat, his teeth astonishingly white against the mocha brown of his skin, shouted something at me through his open window. His words were drowned out by the impatient horn of the car behind, but his gesture was abundantly clear. Did I want to go for a ride? I shook my head and smiled, remembering the description on Expatica of James’s ideal date: ‘a girl with dazzling wit, a romantic heart, a keen sense of irony, and looks to stop traffic.’

  James’s phone rang and rang, but just as I was beginnin
g to despair, I heard an unfamiliar voice over a loud backing track of music and chatter. ‘Hello? Catherine? Where are you? We’ll be going through to the back in a minute, I think.’

  I liked the sound of his voice: self-assured, warm and unmistakably English, although his accent wasn’t strong enough to be identifiable. The image which had slowly ripened in my head, built first on words, then fleshed out with photographs, now had sound: I was discovering James gradually, from the inside out. How had he known it was me? A lucky guess? Or had he already programmed my number into his phone? And, if so, did the name on the display read ‘Catherine’, or ‘petite’?

  ‘Hi,’ I said, my voice sounding far calmer than I actually felt. ‘I’m about two minutes away. Can you wait a bit longer? I’d rather meet you in the bar first. It can be pretty dark and smoky once you go through into the concert venue out the back. Not to mention loud.’

  ‘We’ll wait, no problem.’

  ‘See you in a minute, then. Watch out for me, okay? I hate walking into places like that on my own…’

  I strode along the road, and the sound of my heart pounding in my ears was louder than my footfalls on the pavement. The Café Charbon, which now had a concert venue called the Nouveau Casino tacked on to the back, where the band would be playing, wasn’t exactly where I’d expected it to be, and I stopped and fretted for a moment. Surely it wasn’t this far along the road? Could I have overshot it in my haste? Copycat bars had sprung up all along this stretch of rue Oberkampf, which didn’t help, and I was more accustomed to arriving from Parmentier, at the other end of the street, as I had on the night of my first meeting with Mr Frog. But a few steps further I caught sight of a familiar claret-red awning ahead.

  Self-conscious, I stalled in front of the shop next door, inspecting my face, mussing up my hair. My breaths came fast and shallow. I was poised to step out of my blog and into James’s life, and it was time to face facts, to be honest with myself. This wasn’t anything like my lunch with Coquette, or the bloggers’ soirée, where all I’d hoped for was to make some new friends. This thing with James was different. For the past few weeks I had been entertaining the faintest glimmer of possibility that something might happen between us, if I liked him as much in the real world as I had warmed to him online. Was it just a harmless fantasy? A way of testing what was left of my feelings for Mr Frog; exploring my own boundaries? Or was there more to it than that? There was only one way to find out. I took a deep, ragged breath and brought my weight to bear on the heavy door.

  The round, wooden table, second from the window, where Mr Frog and I had met eight years before, still occupied exactly the same spot. A couple in their twenties slouched on the chairs where we once sat, drinking wine and playing footsie under the table. I watched them for a second, my head filled with ghosts. We had left an imprint on this place that only I could see: an echo of Sarah, a younger me and Mr Frog, who had been standing where I stood now when I first looked up and made eye contact. With a shy smile he had approached our table, kissed us both on the cheek – did I imagine it, or did he linger on mine? – then hung his duffle coat on the back of his chair, where it trailed on the floor, almost tripping up our hipster waitress when she arrived with the next round of drinks.

  But tonight was not supposed to be about nostalgia, so I tugged myself back into the here and now and wove purposefully through the crowds lining the long, copper-coloured bar. Straining to hear English spoken, I let my ears be my guide. The group of people at the far end, by the waiters’ station, sounded promising. A broad-shouldered man stood with his back to me, and when the willowy blonde he was deep in conversation with caught sight of my hesitant approach she put a hand on his arm, smiling and saying something I could not hear.

  James was tall – much taller than I expected – and his hair was shorter than on the pictures I had seen, but I felt sure it was him. He wore indigo jeans, a brown corduroy jacket, cut as though it were denim, and I caught a faint but pleasant hint of aftershave. When he turned to meet my questioning gaze with grave blue eyes and a cautious half-smile, I knew I had found him. He was every bit as attractive as the photographs had led me to believe, and as our eyes met, the air between us seemed to crackle. I stopped in my tracks, petrified, like a deer caught in the headlights of a car.

  ‘You… Your hair is shorter than in the picture,’ I blurted out, once I’d found my tongue, immediately regretting my clumsy words, wishing I could press ‘stop’ and ‘rewind’ then start again. In one short sentence I’d managed to refer to his dating profile and imply I’d spent hours poring over it. But James brushed aside my comment with a grin and took command of the situation.

  ‘Petite anglaise. Catherine. I’m so glad you could make it –it’s lovely finally to meet the girl behind the blog. Now, first things first, can I get you a drink?’ After introducing me briefly to his friends – band members and their entourage whose names I instantly forgot – we broke away from the crowd to take up an ordering position at the bar. James dug deep into his jeans pocket and removed a handful of coins. ‘What’s your poison?’

  ‘Oh, a beer would be great,’ I said thankfully, ‘it’ll take the edge off my nerves. I find meeting strangers a whole lot easier with a drink in my hand.’ I was trying to cover my tracks, to make him think my nervousness had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the context in which we found ourselves.

  ‘It’s funny,’ James said slowly, ‘but I don’t really feel like I am meeting a stranger tonight, not after everything I’ve read. It’s only your face which isn’t familiar.’ I dipped my head, unable to bear the weight of his stare. I wanted desperately to know whether I lived up to whatever he’d imagined. But once the barman had taken our order, James shifted down a gear, back to small talk. ‘Cool bar this. Amazing frescoes on the walls.’

  ‘Frescoes?’ I looked up to where he was pointing, high up on the wall opposite the bar. Above the immense mirrors and the oversized Anglepoise lamps which zigzagged out from the walls to overhang the tables, there were indeed frescoes. Painted men in top hats courted women with crinolines under their full skirts. ‘Do you know,’ I exclaimed incredulously, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever noticed those before! And I must have been here a dozen times or more…’

  We talked about his drive to Paris, my day at work, and the band we were about to see, and I studiously avoided all mention of Mr Frog. While my mouth opened and closed mechanically, my body savoured the long-forgotten feeling of being physically drawn to someone. It was as if all my senses were amplified: the beer tasted crisper and colder on my tongue, and when the sleeve of James’s corduroy jacket brushed my forearm, it gave me goosebumps, the tiny blonde hairs on my forearms standing to attention, straining to close the distance between us. I had no idea whether my excitement was reciprocated, but it was thrilling enough just then to be faced with concrete proof that I still had some capacity to feel so powerfully attracted to someone. This emotion had been lying dormant all along, bubbling unseen beneath the surface, ready to erupt when the time was ripe.

  Drinks in hand, we drifted through to the Nouveau Casino, its entrance approximately where the Turkish toilet used to be. The room – a rectangular, warehouse-like space with a stage, a second bar and a mezzanine level accessible via a narrow spiral staircase – was slowly filling up. Eve, the blonde from earlier, was already standing near the right-hand wall, not far from the stage, and we weaved through the crowd to take up a position by her side. I put my glass to my lips, but was surprised to find it almost empty. In my nervousness, I’d polished off my drink too quickly. Draining the dregs of her own beer, Eve suggested we head back to the bar to fetch another round while James saved our spot. I nodded, and held out my hand to take James’s glass, my fingers grazing his. As we walked away, my hand tingling, I wondered whether I was only imagining his eyes following me, burning into the back of my head.

  ‘He was very excited about meeting you,’ said Eve, confidentially, while we waited to be served, immed
iately establishing herself as an ally, whereas any new French female acquaintance would most likely have held herself aloof, eyeing me suspiciously until she had assessed whether or not I posed some sort of threat. ‘It’s funny this internet stuff, getting to know people back to front, writing to someone before you’ve even met. I don’t think I could do it…’

  ‘I suppose it is odd,’ I agreed, ‘but so far I’ve only met nice people, no one weird. And I felt sure me and James would get on. You just know sometimes, I think.’

  She smiled slyly, and something told me she knew more than she was letting on. Had James said something about meeting me beforehand? I was burning to ask, but held myself in check, not wanting to sound like a fawning teenager.

  ‘James tells me you have a daughter too?’ said Eve, changing the subject. ‘About the same age as mine?’ Eve’s daughter, Maisy, it transpired, was just a few months younger than Tadpole. We made mummy small talk for a few minutes, although all the while I longed to steer the conversation back on to the subject of James. But before I could do so, the lights were dimmed and the band slouched onstage to enthusiastic cheering. We took this as our cue to grab our drinks and hurry back to base camp.