French Kiss (14 page)

            The woman turned to admire the garden and then she spotted Charlotte. Charlotte felt what her school biology teacher had referred to as a fight or flight response.

             Deer.

            Headlights.

            “Ah!” the woman said. “Come.” She beckoned her with great, expansive movements of her arms, as if to say: join the party, we're all friends.

            Charlotte drifted forward, sensing trouble.

            Gilou who was looking sullen, standing to one side.

            “This must be your maid,” the woman said and he winced.

            “Maid!?” Charlotte yelled.

            “More of a manual labourer,” Gilou said.

            “More of a nothing,” Charlotte said and wished she hadn't. “He sacked me.”

            “I know,” said the woman with mock-kindness, as though talking to a child.

            Charlotte left the woman's hand extended in mid-air, waiting to be shook. She was beautiful, yes, but she could see from her hands and the lines about her neck that she worked hard at being youthful. It was not a natural occurrence, but something that required several hundred Euros a month and several hundred hours a year.

            “And who are you?” Charlotte asked. “Gilou's mum?”

            “No,” said Gilou, wiping his face with his hat. “This is Jean. Your landlady.”

            Charlotte hoped that if she waited long enough, Gilou would tell her that he was joking.

            As Charlotte was wondering if this introduction could have gone any worse, Jean added:

            “I'm also his wife. Don't forget that you're married, Gilou.”

~~~

Charlotte sat seething in the kitchen while Jean busied herself making tea, clattering the kettle against the stove and clinking the cups together. There'd never been so much noise in Gilou's kitchen, even the night before. Jean was a whirlwind of noise and colour, making Charlotte feel drab by comparison.

            Gilou sat uncomfortably at the table, looking from one woman to the other.

            “Those three guys gave me an envelope for you,” Charlotte said to explain that she hadn't been stalking him, but rather, she'd had a legitimate reason for her return. “I left it in the postbox.”

            “Sign it,” Jean said to Gilou.

            “Jamais,” said Gilou. Never.

            “If you don't sign it, they'll pay someone who will. Since it's going to happen anyway, it makes sense to make some money in the process. Don't you think, Charlotte?”

            “I don't know,” Charlotte said, thinking of their conversation the night before, when it had seemed that there might be something between them. Now there was nothing between them but that damned, oversized table. Oh, and his wife. “If you believe in something,” Charlotte continued, “then maybe it's worth fighting for.”

            “Oh, not you too. You've been listening to his nonsense. What you said makes perfect sense over here.” She made a gesture that suggested something floating in mid-air on her left. Then she gestured to her right-hand side, adding: “In the real world, however, we realise how the world works and we make it work for us. Either that, or we get left behind. Right, Gilou?”

            “The world didn't leave me behind,” Gilou grumbled.

            “Yes it did,” said Jean. “And so did I. I know that.”

            She poured hot water into a pristine, white pot.

            “When were you thinking of moving in?” she said.

            Charlotte flushed, but it turned out that she was talking to Gilou, making a quip about the sterile atmosphere of the house.

            “I'm happy here,” he said.

            “But you're not here,” Jean said. “Is he, Charlotte?”

            “I don't know what you mean,” said Charlotte.

            “I don't see anything of you here, Gilou. The old Gilou has gone. This house hasn't seen life since you built it. It's a shrine.”

            “To who?” Gilou demanded to know.

            Charlotte thought that it was obvious. It was a shrine to Jean. That was why he didn't allow anyone to walk any further than the main room and bathroom. To allow anyone beyond those boundaries was to allow them to walk on his memories. That was why she hadn't been allowed into the bedroom.

            She glanced at him in an attempt to see if his eyes still contained love for Jean, but he kept his head low. She'd only seen him like this once before, on the porch of the house with a freshly-opened wine bottle beside him. She'd been afraid then. Now she was terrified.

            “It's a shrine to yourself,” Jean answered. “To your ideals and your beliefs. To your arrested future.”

            “Did you really come all this way to lecture me?” he said.

            “Yes,” she said. “It's so much better in person.”

            “Don't you have something for me to sign too?”

            “Yes,” she said, “but torturing you is much more fun.”

            “Jean,” he said, “give me what you need signed and I'll sign it and you can go.”

            “What about your ideals?” she smirked. “There was a time when you said that marriage was -”

            “Give me the damned papers!” he said. “And go!”

            “I should leave,” Charlotte said.

            “Yes,” Gilou agreed. “You should certainly go.”

            “Let's both go next door,” Jean told Charlotte, “and give him a few minutes to calm down.”

            Charlotte suspected it would take longer than a few minutes. Although she didn't want to be with Jean, Gilou's wife of all people, it was marginally preferable to being in a room with the two of them, so she opened the door and they left while Gilou looked around for something to smash.

~~~

“What's got into him?” Jean asked as they walked toward the cottage. “You?”

            “I'm just the maid,” Charlotte grumbled.

            “Sorry about that,” she said, though Charlotte could see that she wasn't sorry at all. Rather, she was glad that her comment had not only hit the mark, but stuck. “It was tactless of me.”

            “Yes, it was tactless.”

            When they reached the cottage, Charlotte stepped aside to let Jean go first, but she refused.

            “It's your home now,” she said and gave Charlotte's elbow a nudge.

            Not for the first time, Charlotte felt trapped.

            Once again, Jean did the thing where she spun around and her skirt fanned out around her. She appeared to be looking for something.

            “Something wrong?” Charlotte enquired.

            “He's done it here too,” Jean said. “He's taken all the life out of it. It's pretty, yes. But it's not the way I left it. It has no soul. Where are all my things? He's taken down my paintings.” She looked at the book shelf and looked as if she was flipping through a mental photograph album. “The vase,” she said and then began striding from room to room. “I hope he didn't throw away the vase. Have you seen it? It's blue, with yellow and white flowers. Japanese.”

            “I'm sure it was very beautiful,” Charlotte said. She  followed Jean about the cottage, hoping that she didn't look in the bin. “I thought that you had decorated this place before you left,” she added in an attempt to distract Jean from her search.

            “I left in a hurry.” she said. “He really hasn't told you anything about me, has he?”

            “No,” Charlotte admitted, embarrassed.

            “That makes me feel sad.” She didn't look sad. She looked angry about the vase, but that was all. “Do you think he's happy?” she said.

            “How should I know?” Charlotte said.

            “You love him don't you?” said Jean.

            “Why does everyone keep saying that?”

            They stood opposite each other, uncomfortably close in the doorway to the bedroom, as if having a competing to see who could fold their arms the tightest.

            “Then it's true,” Jean said.

            “You're mistaken,” said Charlotte.

            And so is everybody else.

            “I can see why you love him,” Jean said.

            Charlotte wished that she would stop saying that.

            “He's handsome,” Jean said. “Boy, is he handsome. He's smart. He has country-boy wisdom. He's modest.” At this, Charlotte laughed. “And he has ideals. But mark my words, he'll never leave for you. Lillac could flood ...”

            “...We're on a hill ...”

            “.... It's an analogy. Lillac could flood and he'd go down like the captain of a sinking ship. I'll be waving goodbye from the raft. You might choose to drown with him, of course, but that would be a waste of your ...” Jean looked Charlotte over. “That would be a waste.”

            “I'm not doing anything with him,” Charlotte said. “He fired me.”

            “I know,” Jean said. “It's for the best. Now, where is that vase?”

            “I'd like you to leave now, Jean.”

            “I'm sure you would,” Jean said, unphased, “but I own this house and you had better remember that, unless you want to be sleeping in Gilou's shed for the winter.”

            “I do understand that,” Charlotte said, “but I'd still like you to leave. Now.”

            “Are you going to smash something too?”

            “Perhaps,” Charlotte said.

            “Go ahead,” Jean said, heading to the door. “Enjoy yourself. I'll send you the bill. Let's hope it's not more than you can afford.” She looked Charlotte over one more time and smiled a satisfied smile.

            Charlotte hoped that Jean would trip, but she didn't. She had perfect poise, even in her tall, black shoes. She trailed away along the path and up the drive, letting her bejewelled fingers pass through the long grass, stopping momentarily to smell flowers, not looking back.

            Now Charlotte knew why she had felt that the cottage was haunted. It was. No wonder she had felt ill at ease. Gilou had decorated, but Jean was in the walls, like sweat in the pores. If there was such a thing as an aura, and Charlotte thought there was, then every part of Jean's aura would have been yelling at Charlotte to get out.

            As Jean had walked up and down the cottage, the rooms had made sense. Now that she was gone, the cottage seemed empty again, even with Charlotte in it, especially with Charlotte in it.

            If the vase hadn't already been broken, Charlotte would have shattered it.

            For the next few days, Charlotte found herself in an unsettling limbo state between wanting to escape the cottage – Jean's home – and wanting to avoid La Gaillarde. She sat on the swing chair for a few minutes, but this no longer held its appeal, because it was Jean's chair and she imagined Jean sharing it with Gilou, her long, lustrous hair on his shoulder, laughing that shrill, bird-laugh of hers while he muttered meaningless pleasantries in English and French.

            So that explained why his English was so good. He'd been practising on Jean. Ultimately, however, she'd left him to become a big shot in the city and he was still sulking about it.