Living with Strangers (14 page)

In no way do I plan what happens. It seems doomed to follow the same inexorable pattern as so much else in my life has done. And it is a long time in the making.

After the evening that follows our return from Provence, when I sit in my grubby clothes whilst Simone sparkles at the table, Jean-Luc becomes a regular visitor. Always alone, I assume he has no partner, or at least that he prefers to socialise separately. I notice how others round the table listen closely when he speaks, Simone in particular. Later I remember how her entire manner changes whenever he’s around, the emphatic comments when she has his attention, more jangling of the jewellery, the tilt of her head. I watch for some reaction from Bernard, some hint that he might be sensitive to this, but there is none. He gazes at his wife with fondness, half-smiling, caught up in whatever it is they’re playing. I may not follow the conversations, but I grow skilled at observation – the tics and tells of this sophisticated game.

My role on these occasions being clearly defined, I’m cast firmly as paid help – essential, but not quite equal. I clear the table after each course, only bringing in the less spectacular dishes. The highlights, Simone delivers with a flourish amid expected murmurings of delight. Sometimes I’m aware of eyes upon me, watching my retreat to the kitchen as I back out through the door with an armful of plates. The eyes are still there when I return to take up my place next to Simone. I know she doesn’t put me there for convenience or proximity to the kitchen, but simply to heighten her aura, to contrast her glittering presence with my singular dowdiness. After dessert, it’s a relief to be excused. Simone lays a patronising hand on my arm, quietly suggesting I might like to leave, smiling sweetly as if I were a small child allowed up past her bedtime. To his credit, Bernard thanks me with genuine warmth as I slide away to the sanctuary of my room, or outside to wander for an hour or so by the river.

Those early encounters with Jean-Luc register little at the time, he’s simply one among the many that dine at Simone and Bernard’s table. I find I’ve begun to miss the company of people my own age, sandwiched as I am there between two generations. The French classes I’m attending in town address this to a certain extent. After the lesson I may spend a couple of hours in a bar or café with other students, practising language in a mixture of English and French. On occasions I go into town on a Sunday and drift pleasantly through an afternoon or evening. The problem arises when I need to return to the house; there’s only one bus an hour and the last one leaves at nine. If I miss it, I have to phone Bernard for a lift, or risk life and limb in a small rusty box driven at speed. There are times when I take up the offer of a floor, or a bed and catch the early bus back in the morning. But the first time this happens, I arrive home before Simone leaves for work and she’s clearly displeased. Pointed silence greets me as she bangs around in the kitchen, making a big display of setting out the bowls and plates for breakfast. Then comes the inquisition.

‘Where have you been? It’s gone seven – I’m late for work.’

‘I’ve been in town. I’m sorry, I missed the bus.’

‘This can’t happen, Madeleine, not on a weekday. How can I rely on you if you’re not here?’

‘Well, I’m here now and the children aren’t up yet, so I can take over.’

‘I need to know you take this job seriously – I’ve given you a home here and now you treat it like a hotel. Is this how you repay me?’

I’m not aware of having run up a debt. I say nothing, my performance in French falling short of a sturdy self-defence. Instead, I go to wake the children and by the time we’re all downstairs again, Simone has gone.

At the risk of similar episodes, I continue to stay in town on occasions, ignoring, as far as possible, the attack on my return. But early the following year, I have to accept that it’s time to leave. I say nothing of my intentions to Simone; if she knows I’m restless, she may well fire me, even though it will leave her stranded without help.

Faced yet again with the prospect of looking for a job, I go through the
petites anonces
in the local papers, check shop windows in town for offers of work and even try a few bars and restaurants. These are out of the question. Such experience as I have doesn’t count for much here – bar work and waiting at table are a firm male preserve, nor are they tasks for the unskilled. Antoine breaks all the rules when he later takes me on.

Then one afternoon after my French class at the language school, Sylvie calls me from the reception desk. ‘Madeleine, do you have a minute? Something’s come up – I wondered if you might be interested.’ She comes round the desk and hands me a sheet of paper.
Cherche à l’emploi
is written in large letters at the top. ‘We’re looking for a tutor – an English tutor, preferably a native speaker, so you’d be ideal. Business language and so on. What do you think?’

I skim through the job description. ‘It’s quite a high level. I’m not a teacher. Speaking’s one thing but teaching… I don’t know.’

‘We’re pretty desperate, this is a new contract and there’s no-one to take it.’

I’ve never remotely thought of teaching, but then I’d never planned to be a barmaid or an office worker or an au pair either. I’ve never really planned anything at all. I look at the paper again – there’s no mention of salary. ‘And the money? Sorry to ask, but I’d need to know before I could make a decision.’

Sylvie’s unconcerned. ‘Of course. It’s the same for all the tutors.’ She quotes a figure just above the national minimum wage, then adds hopefully, ‘It’s quite a bit more if you’re doing one-to-one. It’s good hours.’

‘Can I think about it, let you know tomorrow?’

‘Of course, but don’t leave it too long. We need to sort this soon. You’d be doing me a huge favour.’

It doesn’t take long to reach a decision. On the bus back to Simone’s, as the slate roofs of town recede and rain falls, Sylvie’s offer seems too good to pass up. Financially, it won’t be easy. The money is more than I earn at Simone’s but is still not a lot to live on independently. I may have to share a house again, but this is France and rented accommodation is the norm. Living in town, I could walk to work, see people, have a life. Next day, after taking the children to the bus, I go to the post office and phone Sylvie.

There’s little reaction from Simone. I was prepared for a long wrangle, an inevitable compromise, but apart from a token huff, to demonstrate how inconvenient it is, there’s nothing. Perhaps she just wants to let me go, perhaps it’s even a relief – a slackening of tension between us now that an end is in sight.

The day before I’m due to leave, the children hold a party for me, dragging Bernard to the patisserie for cakes and insisting he open champagne to wash them down. I leave the next day, not without some regret, filling in another line of my eclectic CV, and closing yet another chapter of my life.

With Bernard’s help I have found somewhere to live in town, close to the centre, a short walk from the language school and the river. The entrance, through a green wooden door, opens onto a courtyard. My room on the second floor overlooks the street, which is no more than a quiet alleyway, dark and peaceful. Even when the bars and restaurants close in the late evening, there is little noise here, so unlike my room in Finsbury Park, where the flow of traffic and humanity rumbled constantly night and day beneath my window.

The room, furnished to a degree, has a small kitchenette at one end. A double gas burner is balanced on a table with a butane cylinder beneath it. Next to this is a sink with a wooden drainer that also serves as a work surface. One small indulgence is the ancient fridge I managed to buy from the previous tenant; it transforms the room from just adequate to beyond comfort. This is a haven, somewhere entirely mine. Only later does it all founder and my room become a cloying constraint, a room of waiting and wanting and being unable to have.

I settle quickly, moving in and unpacking a simple process. I’ve gathered few belongings since leaving England; my wardrobe, to Simone’s continual dismay, has remained unreplenished. I can neither afford, nor wish to afford, the beautiful clothes that hang in shop windows here. I keep it simple – and cheap. Sylvie drives me to the nearest hypermarket where I stock up on things for my room – linen, a small set of crockery, some cooking pots. I force away memories of London, of starting out there so full of hope. I’ve learned much in the years since then. This is another new beginning, I cannot afford any more mistakes.

Summer comes, the heat in the streets trapped by tall buildings on either side. My room remains blissfully cool since the only window faces north. At work too, the classrooms where I teach overlook the river and a welcome flow of air keeps the students awake.

I gather a series of classes, some one-to-one, some in small groups. The town has expanded rapidly in recent years, regional policies enhancing both industry and commerce. My students need English to take advantage of widening horizons. Though I’ve no idea where to start, I keep one step ahead in the textbook, rummaging through mental archives to recall grammar I learnt many years before. At times we decamp to a café, or walk by the river, a welcome change from blackboard and tables. I get to know my students well this way, as they gradually open up, finding other ways to speak. Evenings too are often spent working. The novelty of no food to prepare or children to supervise far outweighs the lengthy hours I’m now working. A meal in a restaurant, watching an English or American film, sharing the poetry of Auden or Keats, turns my life completely. I begin to taste, just now and again, some element of true engagement. I spend hours preparing lessons, sending off for English magazines, newspapers, holiday brochures, cutting out adverts for anything from beer to shampoo to life insurance. I take my students to local places of interest, getting them to explain it all in English.

I learn a lot that first year. I even think of Saul and his years of teaching – the only thing, he said, he’d ever really wanted to do. Little wonder he found my vacillation exasperating, my dribbling back and forth from one failed project to another.

With this in mind, I write home – at length to Sophie and briefly to Molly and Saul. Paul I include vaguely in both versions; I doubt he would sit still long enough to read a letter, even if I sent him one. My enthusiasm must register at home because a few weeks after the move, at my busiest time over the summer, I have a letter from Saul. I cannot remember when, or if, he’s ever written to me before, yet his handwriting on the envelope is so familiar, his neat Germanic script.

July 10
^th
1974

I love that Saul has written, his gentle entreaty moves me greatly, but I also know that I have no wish to go back – going back would simply restore the person I used to be, would slot me again into the mess.

As it turns out, my commitments at work don’t ease after the summer and the dilemma of whether or not to go home does not arise. The longer I stay away, the easier it becomes and I begin, at long last, to have some idea of why Josef has kept silent for so long. Such bitter-sweet moments of contact simply fall like drops of acid into the wound. It’s better not to think about it any more.

Jean-Luc is the only person ever to tell me I’m beautiful. In French, the word does not perhaps carry the same significance, or I’m astute enough to know that his opinion is flawed or he specialises in irony. When later I inadvertently see his wife, crossing a busy boulevard in Paris, I realise it’s probably both and that I am for him a singular diversion, an aberration, his bit of English rough.

*

About two years after our first meeting at Simone’s, when I’ve settled to my life in town, Jean-Luc appears in my class one afternoon. It’s a small group, mainly women, to whom I endeavour to teach the basics of business English. He says he needs to work with a company in London; his wife’s business is expanding and he might be based there for a while. I don’t ask in what capacity, though I later learn that this is a last resort, an exasperated attempt at finding him something useful to do. Business, it seems, is not his forte, nor is anything else that requires consistency and application, his air of settled maturity being just that, an affectation, a sham. But it’s a long time before I find that out.

His presence in the classroom adds a new dynamic to the group – heightened enthusiasm, participation from students who have hitherto made little contribution. As at the dinner table, so too in the classroom, a fresh clanking of jewellery, a new tilt of the head. For some time he comes and goes once a week just as the others do and I think no more about him, except to worry that his accent is atrocious and that he seems unable to master the simple past tense. I set him exercises that might help, which he faithfully completes, but they make no difference at all.

One week, the class is almost empty, ten students have dwindled to three and Jean-Luc is not among them. I question Sylvie after the lesson.

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘I was going to let you know. He’s changed. He’s now one-to-one, on a Tuesday.

Today is Monday. ‘Is he starting tomorrow? It’s a bit short notice – I haven’t prepared anything.’

‘I can put him off till next week if you like, but I’d rather not. The money’s too good.’

Individual courses are the most coveted sessions, putting him off is not really an option. ‘Ok. I’ll do it. Thanks Sylvie.’

‘You can take the top room. It’s free then.’

And so it begins. Week after week we climb the stone staircase to the top room – the
grenier
as it had been. In some ways it resembles a prison cell – a little larger but sparsely furnished with bars at the window. Looking down, the grey, slate rooftops below wink in the sunlight.

Something floods into the room each time we meet. Jean-Luc sits opposite me. He’s not tall, but his legs, stretched out beneath the table, encroach into my space and I have to sit neatly propped in my chair, to avoid contact. He smiles a lot, leaning back, hands behind his head, catching my eye as I sift through notes or a textbook for the next part of the lesson. I find out a lot about him, contrived conversation makes this easy. He was a student in Paris with Bernard. After graduating from their prestigious business school, they went on to work together for some time afterwards.

‘But you don’t work together now?’

‘Now, no. Bernard is helping Simone – you know this. And I…’ he hesitates, flicking his pen up and down on the table, ‘I also work with my wife. She has a business in Paris too. Clothes. She sells clothes.’

‘And what is your job, your position in the company?’

‘I send things away – export. Is that the right word?’

I nod.

‘We will start to send to London soon. Alice will open a shop there.’

I have an image of Alice – another version of Simone, but fair. He tells me this in the lesson on families.

‘My wife is thirty-two,’ he says. ‘She is small, she has blonde hair. I have no children. I have two dogs and a horse.’

Does he?

‘My house is very big. In the Sologne. In winter we do hunting for the
sanglier
. It is good to eat, like the pork.’ Then he adds, ‘I think the whole world will need English soon. The French don’t like it.’

‘And you – what do you think?’

‘I think you should smile more,’ he says in French.

Each time the hour is over, I have a sense of being completely out of my depth.

*

Work comes and goes, other classes or evenings out with friends take up my time, but at home in the flat, I grow restless, unable to settle. Reading helps, as if this is the antidote to some disease – immunisation against the infection of my better judgement. I try immersing myself in French literature, dusting off old copies of Flaubert, Colette, de Beauvoir – it’s more comprehensible now than in the past. Yet, in spite of my efforts, I begin, quite simply, to long for Tuesdays. They cannot come soon enough. I wash my hair, choose my clothes with unfamiliar care, irritated by this ludicrous behaviour, excited by the headiness of it all. Jean-Luc is often late for the lesson and I wait in reception watching the fish, reading notes or chatting to Sylvie, anxiety clawing its way gently into my day.

‘You look nice,’ Sylvie says one week as I come into reception. ‘He’s here, you know – he’s gone up.’ Then she says, ‘Be careful Madeleine. Just be careful.’

I do try, but French literature holds no sway over what’s happening. All I can do is conceal the turmoil, and I’m practised at that, in covering over what really matters. I’ve done it for years – only this is different. I haven’t reckoned with the forces of persuasion, the drawn out ritual of premeditated seduction. Jean-Luc, I know, is playing a game. I’m supposed to join in, just as Simone and the others have done at dinner, in class. I realise later his attraction comes, not from his manner, or his looks but from his long-held and much vaunted view that he cannot ultimately be resisted. I don’t know this version of the game, it’s a foreign version, the rules are different; Scrabble letters that make no words I can understand.

Resistance is futile, though I try. Avoiding his legs under the table is easy enough, keeping the lessons impersonal, the discussions political or geographical, I can manage. But the room is full of him. And of us. Four months after our first one-to-one, he grabs my hands across the table and holds them still.

‘Stop,’ he says in French.
Arrête
. The familiar form. Teacher student protocol has flown, with my better judgement, out of the barred window and onto the slate roofs below.

*

The day he takes my hands, I know it’s only been a matter of time. Perhaps my caution, my denial, has heightened his interest. Perhaps I’ve underestimated the appeal of the novel, the exotic, the mismatch we can only ever be. But I also know that once tapped, I cannot withdraw from this unscathed. For the rest of that lesson we continue to sit, still on opposite sides of the table, a prison visit, my hands in his. English reverts to French; he talks about Simone, of how he warned Bernard against her if he wanted an easy life.

‘So you knew Simone too, before she married Bernard?’

‘She was a friend, shall we say?’

Oh, more than that, I think. Simone thinks so too. Still.

‘I watched you there,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t easy for you, was it?’

‘I managed.’

‘L’étrangère, l’Anglaise perdue.’

‘I wasn’t lost, just looking for something. That’s why I came here, to France.’

‘And did you find it?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘not yet.’

We leave the school separately that day. I follow him after a few minutes, pretending to clear up and shuffle papers. Perhaps it would look more innocent if we left together as usual, engaged in casual conversation, a continuation of the lesson. But propriety governs when there’s something to hide and I’m already trapped in its confines.

Later he comes to the flat. He asked for my address some weeks before, needing to send some translations – extra work for his company, which pays well. I’m not surprised to see him there in the dark street, leaning against the green wooden doorpost, as he will do so many times over the next year. He follows me upstairs.

I offer him some wine. ‘Or beer if you prefer.’

But drinking is not on his mind, so I lift my arms obligingly as he slowly takes off my jumper.