French Kiss (5 page)

“Do you know the guy who is renting me Le Pech Noir?” Charlotte asked.

            “What?”

            “Whenever I mention that I'm staying at Le Pech Noir, there's a lot of murmuring and raised eyebrows. And I don't think it's down to my pronunciation this time. Who was he? Whys it such a big deal that I'm there? Who died?”

            “Not who,” Gilou said. “What.”

            “Did you know Jean? Who is he?”

            “Jean is a woman,” Gilou said.

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yes.”

            “Oh?” she said, dominoes toppling in her mind. “There was no way of knowing that from the emails.”

            “Jean decided to let the cottage. You decided to rent it. There's no mystery.”

            “At the mairie, those women seemed to think it was a big deal. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but they were getting quite heated about it.”

            “Jean was a very well-respected woman,” he said. “Everybody around here knew her and you rented her cottage. In a small village like this, everyone knows everyone's business. There are no secrets. That's all.”

            “And she was English, like me?”

            “She was English, yes.”

            He turned his 4x4 roughly into her driveway and rolled down the long path to the cottage. She felt sad, knowing that she would be all alone once more. She had the birds for company, but that was all. She couldn't even text a friend without wobbling around at the end of the drive and then it cost her a fortune.

            “You like the cottage?” Gilou asked. “Any problems?”

            “It's great,” she said. “Although ...”

            “What?”

            “Well, it isn't very feminine. The rooms are sparse. Cold. I thought that it needed a woman's touch, but now you're telling me that it did have a woman's touch and I'm wondering what she was really like. I'm not complaining. She gave me a good deal and I couldn't have been here without her, but, you know ...”

            “The woman who lived here was a very beautiful woman,” he said in the manner of a reproach. “If the room's are not to your liking, you should let her know.”

            “... Oka-ay,” she said and slipped out the car.

            He didn't offer to help her with her bags and she certainly wasn't going to ask him. She opened up the boot herself, pushed aside a stray log and hauled two shopping bags to the front step.

            Although the sun was bright and warm, the main room looked dark through the front door.

            “Er. Would you like a coffee?” she suggested.

            He put the 4x4 into reverse, performing a neat turn at the bottom of the drive, and wheel-spinning up the path with a spray of dirt and stones.

            “Fine!” she yelled.

            She sat at the kitchen table and unpacked two items: a bottle of wine and a slice of gateaux. She took a 'beautiful' silver fork and a 'beautiful' wine opener from the drawer, then set about stabbing forkfuls of cream into her mouth.

            Well, he had said that she was pretty, which was pleasant enough – it was the first time anyone had remarked positively on her looks in months – but then he had gone and said that the woman who lived here before was beautiful. He may have dressed like a yokel, but she could tell that he was smart. He wouldn't have said that without knowing that he had drawn a comparison.

            Despite herself, she wished that she was beautiful too. She wished that he had left her with something positive to think about.

            “This,” she said, forking cream into her mouth, “is beautiful,” but when it was gone, washed down with a glass of wine, she felt fat, bloated and awful.

            From her emails with the landlady, Charlotte had reason to believe that she was the first person to ever rent the place and so she began searching the house for signs of the landlady herself. There were paintings on the walls - pastoral scenes and birds - but no photographs of people. She went through drawers and cabinets. She even looked under the beds for plastic storage boxes. She wanted to see her. Who was this woman that Gilou thought was so beautiful.

            It was an hour before she gave up the search, having found not a single photo, nor a letter, nor a receipt, only an envelope containing tips on how to enjoy living at the cottage, including a note to say that everything but the mairie would be shut all day every Monday.

~~~

            “So how is everything going?” Charlotte's mother asked.

            Charlotte glanced at the unmade bed, the unwashed plates and her unkempt appearance in the reflection of the kitchen cabinet.

            “Great,” she said. “Perfect. Couldn't be better.”

            “Well, I'm glad you're having a nice break,” she said, “but don't forget that you have responsibilities here.”

            “Like what?”

            “Well … Your savings aren't going to last forever. You need to start looking for a job. Go back to that temping agency and get yourself a little desk job to tide you over.”

            “I hate that temping agency,” Charlotte said. She almost performed her trick of pretending that it was a bad line, but if she did it too often her mother would start to see through it. Instead, she added: “And you don't need to worry about my money. I am already looking for work.”

            “Oh? Where?”

            “In France,” Charlotte said.

            Her mother laughed.

            “Darling,” she said, “you can't possibly be thinking of moving to France full-time.”

            Full-time. Like a country was a job.

            “I am,” Charlotte said. “And I can. And I will.”

            And that was how she talked herself into living in France for good. She realised, too late, that her style of achieving independence meant saying and doing the opposite of what her mother demanded she do, which would be dangerous if her mother ever caught on.

            When Charlotte finally put the phone down, she was shaking from head to toe, but was able to recognise her fear as another step into the future of her new life.

            Before she could change her mind, she took a taxi – actually, it was THE taxi and fortunately he wasn't busy - into town to find out what she needed in order to work legally in France. It turned out that the main requirement was patience and a thick skin. She pretended she had both, but ultimately returned from the relevant offices with an armful of paperwork, new blisters on her feet and not much hope.

            Almost every job posted in the 'Pole Emploi' seemed to require a French speaker and those that didn't required a level of technical expertise that she had never had. She had effectively been a housewife since living college, the feminist revolution having passed her by. Between her mother and Mark, life had been comfortable, at least physically. It had all been too comfortable and now she wasn't really able to do anything but type. In English.

            “I must be able to do something,” she thought. “There must be something I can do other than type.”

            On the way back to Lillac, she happened to pass the supermarket she had visited with Gilou and thought of him waiting patiently for her in the car park. She was conflicted about him. On the one hand, he had turned out to be extraordinarily gallant, driving far out of his way to make sure that she had food in the fridge, but on the other hand he had been consistently rude to her, as if that had been the agreed trade-off.

            She determined that he had felt sorry for her, but couldn't help twisting the knife. Sadist. Perhaps he and her mother would get along. Maybe a toy-boy would mellow her out.

            Still, there had been a genuine warmth to his smile when he saw her return from the shop with two bags full of groceries. He'd leapt out of the car to help her, taking them in his strong hands and setting them in the back as if they weighed nothing. At that moment, and several times since, she had imagined that he had lifted her by the waist and set her down in the back of the 4x4 too. In her imagination, she was weightless in his arms. She hated herself for it.

            “I don't need him,” she told herself. “I don't need anyone.”

            She asked the taxi driver to drop her off outside the mairie, checking that it was really open before paying him and waving him on his way. She asked him not to wait, because she had to watch her spending until she found work. At the current rate, having to take a taxi every time she went into town, she'd have to eat bread for the next two weeks and go home early. She'd have to ask her mother to give her the money for a flight, because she'd only booked one way. That prospect, more than any other, gave her motivation to cling to her new life abroad.

            “Be positive,” she thought and, bracing herself, marched into the mairie with her head held high.

            Being back in that white-walled foyer with the President on the wall and the French flag high above the desk was a humbling experience. Both women were in reception once again today, reminding her of her past experience. They stared at her as if they had thought she would have swam the channel home by now.

            “Oui?” one of the women said, incredulous.

            In her best, schoolgirl French, Charlotte proceeded to ask if there were any jobs available in the local area.

            The first woman shook her head so vehemently that her glasses almost flew from her nose. The other woman looked Charlotte up and down and made her mouth tight and small while frowning furiously.

            “Non,” she said, as if Charlotte had not understood well enough. Before Charlotte could structure a reply, the woman said again: “Non.”

            Deflated, she turned to go with her unintelligible papers under one arm, prepared to tackle the hill, but perhaps not prepared to tackle France after all. It was possible, just possible, that her mother had been right after all about living abroad being at best a childish dream and at worst an irresponsible self-indulgence. In effect, that meant that Mark was right too. She couldn't survive without him.

            The first woman adjusted her glasses and said that she should try the 'pole emploi'.           

            Again, Charlotte kept her head high as she went to the door, determined not to show them any weakness, though she could feel her lip quivering and was tempted to slap herself right there in the mairie. As she turned the handle to face the sun's assault, the second woman said:

            “Attend.”

            She was holding out a sheet of white paper and making a point of looking the other way, as if doing her some kind of secret favour.

            Charlotte knew that she would have to be wary. Gilou, pain that he was, had said that there were no secrets in Lillac and she couldn't help thinking that he was right.

            “Regard,” the woman said, not prepared to dangle the paper at her all day.

            Reluctantly, Charlotte went back across the room and took it from her. As she did so, she glanced up, as if a net were about to fall on her from the ceiling.

            The paper appeared to be a job-posting. Enunciating painfully slowly, the woman in the glasses said that it was something that had arrived that very morning. At exactly the same time, the other woman said that it was something they had been holding back. The two of them argued while Charlotte read the advertisement's wording and wondered if there was something that she could do after all.

            She pointed to one word that she was particularly confused about and interrupted the argument to ask what it meant.

            “The mayor,” the second woman said.

            Wow. She'd be working for the mayor himself. If that didn't improve her standing within the community then nothing would. She skim-read the rest of the page, but there was one more important word that threw her, over and over again. She pointed again and demanded a translation.