Petite Anglaise Read online

  The band was a trio from Manchester fronted by John, Eve’s boyfriend. As Eve and I slotted ourselves back into position alongside James, the opening bars of an acoustic song hung delicately in the air. When John began softly to sing, his words described loving a woman, despite her many flaws, amazed by the strength of her feelings for him. I glanced at Eve, feeling like an eavesdropper listening in on a private conversation. She caught me looking, guessing my thoughts, and leaned closer.

  ‘These songs are all right, but the old ones, about other girls before me, they’re really hard to listen to,’ she hollered in my ear. James shot us a questioning glance – wondering if he was the subject of our conversation? – and our eyes locked with such force that I almost flinched. Turning back to the stage, I was glad of the dry ice billowing out, mingling with the smoke from a hundred cigarettes. In the semi-darkness my flushed cheeks would escape undetected.

  A few drinks later, the concert over, we moved back through into the bar, where I sat alone with James in a booth upholstered in worn brown leather. Eve and John were saying their goodbyes a few feet away at the bar: the band would shortly be heading off to Germany in their tour bus. I wondered aloud about how tough it must be for them both to spend so much time apart, Eve raising Maisy alone, while John spent weeks away on the road.

  ‘It can be hard, of course,’ James agreed, catching Eve’s eye over John’s shoulder and flashing her a smile. ‘I see quite a lot of her and Maisy, she gets pretty lonely. But she knew what she was getting herself into when she went back to him. They’re pretty solid these days. You can see just by looking at them how crazy they are about each other…’

  The penny suddenly dropped. ‘She’s the one you wrote about, isn’t she? The woman you were with after your wife left?’

  ‘Yes,’ James admitted, ‘she is. I didn’t want to tell you until you’d had a chance to meet her and form your own opinion. It’s all ancient history now, but she’s still a good friend.’

  I nodded, remembering her hand on his arm when I arrived, trying to stifle a twinge of jealousy. I found myself staring at James’s hands, which were resting on the table in front of me, long-fingered, elegant yet strong-looking. How would it feel if he were to cup my cheek in his palm, or run a finger lightly along my thigh? Maybe some hint of the longing I felt showed in my face, because it was that moment James chose to say the words that caused my world to tilt sideways.

  ‘I’ve been trying to keep myself in check all evening, out of decency, out of respect for the fact that you’re in a relationship,’ he said in a strangled voice, as if every word cost him dearly, ‘but I’m sorry, I can’t not say this, I just can’t.’ I looked up from his hands, which had curled into fists, and my breath snagged in my throat.

  ‘Go on,’ I half whispered, wishing I had drunk less. I needed clarity. I wanted to commit this moment to memory, so I could play the footage back over and over again. Tuning out the music, the crowds of chattering people who surrounded us, I heard only his voice.

  ‘Ever since I started reading petite anglaise, I’ve felt drawn to the girl who wrote it,’ he confessed, selecting his words with apparent care. ‘I was seeing a French girl for a while, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I couldn’t get you out of my head. Even though you were in Paris, and with someone. And even though I had no idea what you actually looked like…’ He gave a short, nervous laugh, acknowledging how far-fetched all this must sound, but I said nothing, willing him to go on. ‘And then you walked into the bar tonight,’ he continued, ‘and – well, this is going to sound corny, but to hell with that – any doubts I had just vanished when I saw you.’ He stopped speaking and looked at me, questioningly, his monologue over, his words hanging in the air between us.

  ‘I… I don’t know what to say…’ My brain struggled to process this new, unexpected information, and my eyes, unable to sustain his penetrating stare, fled, alighting on his hands once more. Had James really just said that he had started falling for petite anglaise, before we had even met? This was either utter madness, or the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. I hadn’t been alone in secretly hoping there would be sparks when we met. Our email exchanges, innocent on the surface, suddenly began to look like an elaborate mating ritual, leading us slowly, inexorably to the dangerous place in which we now found ourselves. But the fact remained: he knew far more about me – or about petite anglaise – than I knew about him.

  ‘Cat-reen?’

  The bar suddenly snapped back into focus and I whipped round to identify the owner of the voice, cricking my neck with the sudden movement and grimacing with pain. Benoît, a close friend of Mr Frog’s, was standing near the door, looking back as though he had been poised to leave when he caught sight of me across the room. How long had he been watching me? What had he seen? I’d told Mr Frog the truth about my whereabouts, even about the company I would be keeping, but I still felt as though Benoît had caught me red-handed, en flagrant délit. Rising to my feet, I smiled and gestured for him to come over, anxious to dispel any misunderstanding, ‘I came to watch a band,’ I explained, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘I’m here with a few English friends…’ I gestured at James, but also at the band members at the bar to emphasize that the two of us were not alone. Benoît nodded, his eyes flickering over James only for a moment.

  ‘Et est-ce que Monsieur travaille toujours autant?’ he said, enquiring after Mr Frog. ‘I don’t see him nearly as much as I’d like to these days.’

  ‘You and me both,’ I said, my voice tinged with a bitterness I was unable to conceal. ‘You know how it is… But I’ll let him know I ran into you. We should have you over for dinner some time:’

  ‘Avec grand plaisir,’ Benoît replied, kissing both my cheeks again, and taking his leave. As the door swung closed behind him, I fell back into my chair, kneading my neck with my fingertips.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said what I did, and in a public place too,’ James said ruefully. ‘I’ve just made a complete idiot of myself, and I don’t blame you if you’re angry…’

  ‘No, don’t say that,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m not angry. I just got a bit of a shock, that’s all. You really took me by surprise. I mean, what you said seemed to come out of nowhere, even if I hoped…’ I left the sentence unfinished. What had I hoped for, exactly? Did I even know? ‘But I am going to need some time to digest what you said… And I could have done without bumping into someone who knows my boyfriend, just then.’

  ‘I’ll go to the bar and give you some space.’ James’s eyes were still anxious. ‘But please understand, the last thing I want to do is casually interfere with your life. Given my history, I find it hard to believe I’m even suggesting whatever it is I’m suggesting…’

  ‘Maybe a soft drink would be a good idea?’ I suggested as he stood up and began digging in his pockets once more for coins. ‘We’ve both had a fair bit to drink, haven’t we? It might be time to slow down.’ It certainly couldn’t hurt to keep what wits I still possessed about me. I closed my eyes for a moment, so I wouldn’t be tempted to stare at the wisps of hair at the nape of James’s retreating neck. I was exhilarated. Terrified. Thrilled that he wanted me as much as I now knew I wanted him. Panic-stricken at the thought of what could lie on the horizon.

  For weeks his words had reeled me in, slowly but surely, and I had hoped, even fantasized that there would be a connection between us. But despite all that, nothing could have prepared me for the chemistry. The attraction had flared up the moment I saw him, and only intensified as the evening wore on. My whole body – from the tips of my toes to my hair follicles – was tense with anticipation; I was tightly coiled, ready to spring. The strength of those feelings unsettled me, and I sensed I was a hair’s breadth away from caving in. How could I be expected to think calmly, rationally, when all my efforts were concentrated on simply keeping my body in check?

  When I opened my eyes I found myself staring blankly at the wooden clock suspended from the ceiling, which must have gro
und to a halt years before, because there was no way it was 5 a.m. A glance at my watch revealed nonetheless that I’d missed the last métro by a good half-hour. How had it got so late?

  James returned, bearing two glasses of Coke clinking with ice cubes, and I heard my voice saying that I should really go home, persuading him to walk me to the taxi rank. ‘Of course. If that’s what you want,’ he said sadly, abandoning the untouched drinks and putting out a hand to help me to my feet.

  ‘It was lovely to meet you both,’ I said to Eve and John as we passed, ‘but I’m going to call it a night now.’ I saw a meaningful look pass between Eve and James and suddenly felt sure she’d known how he felt about me all along.

  ‘Take care,’ Eve said, kissing me on the cheek, ‘and I hope we’ll see you again some time…’

  As we walked downhill towards the nearest busy junction I slipped an arm around James’s waist, my hand creeping inside his T-shirt, his skin hot and smooth beneath my fingers. He shivered and looked at me questioningly. What could I say? I couldn’t explain what I was doing or why. Receiving no reply, he rested his own arm gently around my shoulders.

  At the corner of rue Oberkampf and avenue Parmentier we paused and he pulled me close. My hands inside his T-shirt gripped his back, and I clung to him as though I were drowning. Partly because I didn’t want to let go, but also because I was using our proximity as a shield, pressing my face into his chest so that I could hide it from his.

  ‘You’re so lovely, there’s something so vulnerable about you,’ he said, his voice muffled by my hair. ‘I want to protect you, look after you…’

  ‘I have a feeling that’s not all you’d like to do,’ I replied, half jokingly, conscious of a telltale stiffening in his jeans.

  ‘Can I kiss you?’ He released me suddenly, tilting my chin upwards, forcing me to meet his eyes.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ I protested. ‘I’m too drunk, too confused…’ My mouth was bone dry, my head spinning. I was suddenly afraid I’d forgotten how to kiss and be kissed.

  Stepping back, I hailed a passing taxi and watched as it screeched to a halt on the opposite side of the road. For a few seconds I honestly didn’t know whether I planned to clamber into it alone, or drag James inside with me. I didn’t stop to ask myself whether James would go along with this, or how I would justify my absence to Mr Frog the next day. These were mere details, wholly irrelevant: at that moment I was incapable of thinking beyond what I wanted.

  The taxi driver sounded his horn, signalling his impatience, and I darted across the road. I tumbled into the back seat alone, pulling the door closed with a dull thud before I could possibly change my mind. Not like this, I remember thinking. Whatever this thing was between us, it could only be tainted and cheapened by a semi-drunken encounter on the night of our first meeting. As the car pulled away, I stared back at James’s shadowy figure on the street corner, still standing where I’d left him, one hand raised in a silent wave. The thought that I might never see him again, that I might never know what it would feel like to be kissed by him, seemed unbearably cruel.

  At the crossroads, I had been faced with a choice: two possible versions of my future mapped out ahead of me. But by jumping into the waiting taxi, I didn’t feel like I had made any sort of decision. All I had done was run away, taking flight like a frightened child.

  9. Guilt

  I was in no state to work the next day, laid low by a potent cocktail of beer washed down with a guilt chaser. As Mr Frog crashed resentfully around the apartment, forfeiting his usual morning bath in order to feed Tadpole breakfast and ready her for the trip to Tata’s, I buried my treacherous face into the cool fabric of my pillowcase, praying that the bewildering mixture of terror and elation which had overwhelmed me from the moment I had awoken would be mistaken for nothing more than a common hangover.

  When Mr Frog finally slammed the front door closed behind him and Tadpole, I tossed and turned for a few minutes, exhausted, but too wired to sleep. Before long, I was in front of my computer composing an email to James, letting some of the words which thrashed about in my head bleed out across the screen. I couldn’t write them on my blog, but they needed an outlet.

  ‘I have writer’s block,’ I wrote. ‘The only things I want to write about are off limits. And today I just can’t do frivolous. I have this horrible feeling that I am going to regret bundling myself into that taxi for the longest time. Anything has to be better than “‘what if…’” Despite having behaved like a paragon of virtue, I felt like a monster when Tadpole stroked my cheek and pressed her face up close to mine this morning.’

  Shortly after I pressed ‘send’, a text message arrived on my phone, announcing that James’s car had broken down. He would be leaving it with a garage in Paris, then catching a train home to Rennes with Eve. His mobile-phone battery was dying. He was sorry, but he’d be incommunicado for many hours to come.

  I paced the apartment in a state of nervous excitement, my body held hostage by adrenalin, although fight or flight were not solutions I could consider right now. My thoughts were splintered and incomplete, my hands twitched, my heartbeat was rapid and arrhythmic. It felt as though my whole body was locked on fast forward.

  With nothing to do but wait, I re-read his emails, and my replies, and studied his photographs, over and over again. I ran through the conversations we’d had the previous night. Closing my eyes, I conjured up the smell of his aftershave, the feeling of his body pressed against mine, the warm smoothness of his back under my palm. I wrote a short post about the concert, leaving out all mention of meeting James, and focusing instead on my exchange with Eve about her being the subject of John’s song.

  James’s reply didn’t come until later, much later, when Tadpole was in bed, at long last. Seeming to sense my weakened state, she had exploited it relentlessly: every well-rehearsed gesture of our evening routine had become a bitter battle of wills. Her bath seemed to have a calming effect, however, and she snuggled up to me for her bedtime story, running gentle fingers through my hair. This show of affection was even harder to deal with. Tears welled up and I blinked them back, not wanting to alarm my little girl.

  Willing James to get in touch felt like betraying Tadpole. This fire I seemed intent on playing with had the potential not just to sear Mr Frog, but to torch my daughter’s world completely, reducing our family life to a heap of ash. By even contemplating such a thing I had become an impostor in our home; I was unfit to be her mother.

  ‘I have enough things to say to you to last from here to the third Wednesday in October (give or take),’ James wrote, late that night. ‘But a lot of these are things you have to want to hear, and I need you to tell me that you do want to hear them… Regretting “what ifs…” is what they are all about. In this instance, there’s a way of re-running time and seeing what if… But it needs a password to work. You are no monster. Life has a habit of making the easy desperately difficult, and the hardest choices so easy as to be no choice at all. You have asked yourself a question, that’s all. Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  What was I thinking? Simply that it couldn’t end here. All synapses led to James. If I could have dropped everything then and there and leaped on the next train bound for Brittany, I would have done. I needed to know whether this was infatuation, whether I was being swept away by James himself, or simply enticed by the idea of letting romance back into my life. James’s car breaking down, sentencing him to an imminent return visit, felt unnervingly like fate. I would get my second chance: to re-run the scene from last night, to resist the urge to take flight, to explore ‘what if…’ And I knew that when I did, I would take it.

  In the meantime, there was nothing I could do but go through the motions. And wait.

  ‘There’s something different about you today… I can’t put my finger on quite what it is,’ my boss remarked, standing over my desk with a pile of papers in his hand. I looked up at him, eyes narrowed, trying to gauge whether he meant good different, or bad dif
ferent. I was a few kilos lighter already, thirty-six hours after meeting James. My cheeks were flushed, my whole body was burning up and my palms felt so damp that every so often I was obliged to wipe them discreetly on my trousers under cover of my desk. As for the quality of my work, my concentration span was hopelessly short. I kept starting one task, getting distracted midway through, beginning another, never finishing the first. Which of this array of symptoms had he noticed, I wondered?

  ‘I think I may have a bit of a temperature, actually.’ I hedged my bets, hoping to deflect any potential criticism by playing for sympathy. ‘Not quite recovered from that, er, tummy bug I had yesterday. If you don’t mind, I might just go and pop the kettle on. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, why not,’ he replied, glancing at his watch. ‘Ah, but first, would you mind setting up George’s video-conference in the upstairs meeting room? We have no IT support today, and his secretary is out, so he’ll be a bit lost…’ On my blog, I called George ‘Old School Boss’. A few years older than the partner I worked for, he belonged to a world of public schools and gentlemen’s clubs and wasn’t terribly comfortable with modern technology. The fact that he persisted in referring even to graduate secretaries as ‘typists’ summed him up pretty well, as far as I was concerned.

  I made my way to the meeting room, heaved the monitor and webcam from the sideboard on to the table, taking care not to trip over the trailing wires, and dialled the extension of the IT desk in London using the speakerphone in the middle of the table. The equipment was fairly new, and I’d never set it up on my own before.

  ‘Hi Pete, it’s Catherine in Paris. Would you mind talking me through getting a video-conference link up and running? Everything seems to be plugged in and switched on, but my screen is blank.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, I’ll just pop through to the boardroom at this end, and we can test the connection,’ Pete replied. I drummed my fingers on the table, itching to get back to my computer and see if there was anything new waiting in my inbox. ‘Right,’ he said, a couple of minutes later, sounding out of breath, ‘let’s get started. First of all, can you press the middle button on the front of the monitor, then find the remote control…’