An Unexpected Affair (4 page)

Chapter
5: Memories of France

Sunday was bright and sunny, which Eleanor hoped would bring a few book-hungry day-trippers into town. She put her board out on the pavement and checked the window display before settling down behind the counter for a quick read of the papers. The shop had been open for about a quarter of an hour when Connie came in, accompanied by Harold.

“Good morning,” said Connie, kissing Eleanor on the cheek.

“What are you doing in town so early on a Sunday morning?” she asked, knowing exactly what her mother’s motives were but deciding to string her along a little.

“Oh, we were just passing, weren’t we Harold?”

“That’s right, just passing.” Harold nodded then slunk off to the back of the shop, officially to check out the latest history titles as Connie pretended to peruse the poetry shelves.

“So,” she said, sidling up to her daughter. “Did you have a lovely evening with Jim?”

“It was very nice, thank you.”

Eleanor was nursing a teensy hangover and didn’t feel like giving her mother a full exposition of her night out just them.

“Was there anything you needed, mum?”

Connie smiled sweetly. “Just browsing, as they say.”

Eleanor looked at the book that her mother was pretending to study. “I didn’t know you were keen on Persian love poetry. Shall I wrap that for you?”

Connie laughed and replaced the volume she had pulled at random from the shelf.

“Actually, I just wanted to see how you were after your
date
,” she said, flashing her best smile and putting the emphasis on the last word.

“I’m just fine, as you can see,” said Eleanor, refusing to play ball and moving out from behind the cash desk to greet a customer. “And busy.”

“Good. As long as you’re well.” Realising that there wasn’t going to be any gossip that morning, Connie disappeared into the back room and reappeared with Harold.

“We’ll be off then, love,” she said.

Eleanor waved as the pair left the shop and walked, hand-in-hand, across the road to the tea rooms.

Erika had Sunday mornings off so Eleanor had to manage a steady stream of visitors buying postcards and maps, and even the occasional hardback book. Despite her love for paper and ink, Eleanor was no Luddite, and had recently started offering e-readers to entice new customers into the shop. She had soon discovered that the keenest buyers of those sleek devices were often middle-aged women, just like herself.

“You know what they’re doing, don’t you mum?” her daughter Phoebe had said, pursing her lips. “They’re using them to read dirty books.” Eleanor smiled at the recollection. The young were so prim these days. As she had told her daughter, “I don’t care what people read, so long as they buy it from me.”

There was no such excitement that Sunday morning, but Eleanor was kept on her feet until lunchtime serving customers. It wasn’t until the afternoon when the shop was closed that she managed to settle down in the office with her hoard from Malcolm Pearce’s house.

She had a mug of tea, Radio 3 playing in the background and Bella snoring gently on her bed. Bliss! Sitting on the floor, Eleanor began opening the boxes and cataloguing the books, which she and Malcolm had packed together by subject. It was slow work, as she had to stop and read a little bit of each one. A couple of boxes contained travel guides that Malcolm had used when he was living overseas. He had been a civil engineer in his younger days, working in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Some of the older volumes were leather bound and contained beautiful prints and illustrations that she drooled over.

Eleanor lifted out two early Baedeker’s guides to Northern and Southern France, and carefully turned the pages, admiring the maps. She was a true Francophile and just reading the place names gave her a thrill. Connie and Jack had taken their daughters to northern France on lots of bracing camping and walking holidays when they were young. Despite the sometimes unpredictable weather, those trips had given her a taste for the country and left her with a desire to see more. At university she had studied French, planning to become a teacher like her sister, but in the end had decided that teaching was not for her. Without a plan she had felt unsettled and been unwilling to go straight into any old job. After a few months of what Jenna had described as ‘moping’ she had persuaded her parents to let her go to France. She bought
The
Lady
magazine for weeks and scoured it for exciting job opportunities, but all it offered were positions as au pairs, so that is what she became.

Her friends were immensely jealous when she told them she had got a job in France, imagining no doubt the warm sun and sandy beaches of the south. In fact, she had ended up in a small town just across the Channel where the clouds were as low and the sky was as grey as they had been in England.

She lived with the Junot family: Monsieur was a doctor while Madame entertained herself by running a shop selling ‘bric à brac’ to Belgians who came across the border for a bargain and the few enterprising Brits who ventured beyond Calais.

In between looking after the children, Eleanor practised her French and learnt to smoke Gitanes in what she hoped was a seductive manner.

After six months, she quit her job – much to Madame’s annoyance – and headed south with another au pair, Marie from Switzerland. She and Marie had a blissful few weeks on the south coast flirting, visiting the sights and sunbathing. In the sun Eleanor’s dark-brown hair developed a reddish tone and her skin tanned, making her hazel eyes stand out in a way that surprised her. She was amazed to discover that, for the first time in her young life, she was turning heads. In the grey north she had been just an anonymous as at home, but here – glory be! – she was seen as exciting and different.

The girls hung around the beach until their money ran out. At the railway station they pooled their cash, caught a train as far north as their francs would take them and found themselves in a small town in the Rhône-Alpes called Chevandier. Speaking French and English, Eleanor managed to blag her way into a job in a shop that sold locally made pottery and gifts to tourists who made it inland from the coast. Marie got a job in a cafe run by another Swiss woman. How easy it had been, thought Eleanor, and how fearless they were back then. The girls had moved in with another escapee from the north, a skinny German blonde called Rosanne who made a living teaching English to local businessmen. She was older than the other two and intended to stay in France, whereas Marie and Eleanor had no plans and were happy to take every day as it came. All the girls worked hard, but had a lot of fun, too.

Being young and foreign, the trio were irresistible to the local male population and Eleanor soon found herself a boyfriend. Christophe Vauban was tanned, strong and wiry with dark curly hair and what her Gran would have referred to as ‘bedroom eyes’. When, back in England, Eleanor had shown her best friends his photo they were gratifyingly impressed.

“Oh my God, El. He is divine,” said Lesley, who was already engaged to the boyfriend she had had since her first term at uni. “I knew I should have done French instead of Geography,” she sighed. Her mate Carole, who was still single, had initially just stared open-mouthed at Christophe’s photo, lost for words. “You are one lucky mare.”

It was true, she thought smugly – she was. Christophe was gorgeous and being with him had made Eleanor feel special, like she was in her own romantic film. The months they spent together also did wonders for her French and left her with a pretty good accent.

Rosanne’s
apartment was away jammed with people so they spent lots of time in the park by the river, talking in whispers and kissing. Of course, being locked out occasionally only added to the excitement and they had lots of sex, often in peculiar places. Christophe had a thing about furniture, and one weekend when her flat mates were away they had done it on the kitchen table and in her wardrobe. For years after she had been unable to look at French country furniture without an amused
frisson
.

In the evenings, Christophe was often working. His parents ran a traditional auberge in a shady street behind the Cathedral and he helped out there, either waiting at tables or in the kitchen. During the day when Eleanor was in the shop he spent a lot of time hanging about with his friends in the square outside, smoking and looking cool on his Vespa, much to her boss’s annoyance.

Eleanor loved him despite their having very little in common. And she adored looking at him: he was so perfect compared to the pale spotty boys she had grown up with. Her bedroom was high up at the back of the house and the moon would shine straight in through the window. After making love, when he had fallen asleep by her side, she would lie awake gently stroking his toned body, his skin silvery in the moonlight. As day broke, the sun would turn the fine hair on his bronzed arms golden.

They were quite captivated by each other, amazed and seduced by the love that enveloped them like a blessing. When Eleanor awoke she often found Christophe with his head propped up on one hand, smiling down at her.

“
Pourquoi
tu
me
regards
comme
ça
?” she asked, with her best pout.

“Because you are so beautiful.”

“No, it is you who are beautiful!”

“I am a man! I cannot be ‘beautiful’,” he said, climbing on top of her. “I am – how do you say – ‘handsome’.”

“And so very modest!” she laughed, rolling into his embrace.

What would have happened if they had stayed together? It was she who had ended the relationship, although she had not intended to at the time. Marie had gone back to Lucerne to continue her studies and Rosanne needed to find another girl to share the flat with them. The replacement was incredibly loud and untidy and drove the other two mad. When the summer season came to an end, so did Eleanor’s job. With the gift shop closed, it seemed like the perfect time for a break so she decided to return to London for a couple of months. She had every intention of going back as soon as she had earned enough money for her and Christophe to rent a place together. To begin with they had written to each other daily on crispy sheets of blue airmail paper, and had even managed to speak on the telephone – a huge extravagance at the time that her father had frowned at. But gradually the love she had experienced felt more and more like a dream. Thinking about it later she wondered if she had wanted it to end then, when it was most perfect. Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he killed off Romeo and his Juliet in their mid-teens: there’s nothing sexy about middle-aged lovers.

The sound of Bella snoring broke her reverie as she sat there on the floor of her office with piles of books around her. “I wonder what he looks like now? Probably bald with a pot belly,” she sighed. Or maybe not. Maybe he had turned into one of those incredibly attractive older men you sometimes see in French films. She closed the pages of the Baedeker and tidied away her lists. That was enough for one afternoon.

“Come, Bella. Walkies.” The dog yawned then trotted over, her head down in readiness for Eleanor to slip the leash over her neck. “I think we’ll have a wander along the big beach tonight, what do you reckon?” Bella wagged her tail in response. “After Easter you’ll be
persona
non
grata
on the beach. Well,
doggy
non
grata
, actually.” She chuckled at her own joke as she opened the creaky front door and went down the steps by the side of the shop that formed a handy cut through to the next street and eventually the sea front.

At the beach, she slipped the rope from Bella’s neck and let her run free. She smiled as the dog careered off across the shingle towards the sea, which was a good quarter of a mile out at that time of day. It meant there was a large expanse of sand to walk on, making it easy to avoid other dog-walkers if you weren’t feeling particularly sociable. Which she wasn’t. Eleanor’s head was full of her own thoughts that evening – the what ifs? What if she hadn’t come back to London, met Alan and had the twins? Would she and Christophe have survived as a couple? They had had what people now call ‘chemistry’, but did they really have much else in common? Thinking back, she couldn’t remember what they’d talked about other than their own intense feelings for each other.

She quickened her pace as she approached the water than stood there, watching the foam dampen the toes of her shoes. Looking out to sea she wondered whether Christophe ever thought about her. Unlikely, she decided, bending to pick up a piece of driftwood that Bella had deposited at her feet.

She threw the stick and watched the dog race after it as it span through the air and dropped into the sea. Bella retrieved it and shook herself vigorously.

Eleanor ducked as fat globules of wet sand flew off in every direction. “Home time,” she said, turning and walking back towards her cottage.

Back from the walk, she towelled Bella down and fed her then made herself some supper. Afterwards, she sat down on the sofa with a glass of wine and opened her laptop. As the machine buzzed and bleeped into life she told herself she was just going to have a quick look to see what Malcolm’s collection of early Baedekers was worth. She carefully checked the books’ value (not bad) and jotted them down in her notebook.