Living with Strangers (15 page)

Jean-Luc could trace his ancestry back beyond the
Ancien Régime
. The de Baugier family have owned land in the Sologne for centuries, but after the revolution of 1789, much of it was appropriated. Several members of the family lost their heads or fled to other shores for a decade or so until they could return and lay claim to their reduced estates.

Inside the entrance hall of his home, I stand before a gilt-framed text of his family tree. Most of it is unreadable – minute, spidery names clustered together like blackcurrants at the end of long thin branches. Much later, I wonder vaguely whether Chloé’s name will ever be added, albeit in different lettering, and whether she will trace her heritage in all its complexity. But that would mean contact with Jean-Luc and by then, I don’t want that.

We only go his house once, an unplanned detour from the walk we’ve taken under cover of the dense evergreens that make up the Sologne.

‘Is this wise?’ I ask him, ‘Is there no-one here?’

He looks at me, amused, as he often seems to be in my presence. ‘It’s not a problem. Whoever’s here has no eyes or ears.’

Thus, deep runs his sense of privilege.
Droit de seigneur
. Except I’m not a hapless virgin bride, just hopelessly besotted. We make love on a four poster bed, in a room somewhere on the first floor. The counterpane is heavy gold brocade, my twentieth-century clothes lie strewn across it like discarded rags. Afterwards he leads me through the house – room after room of high ornate ceilings and priceless furniture.

‘Is it always empty?’ I ask, swamped by the scale of it all. ‘Do you never live here?’

Jean-Luc casts an indifferent eye around him. ‘From time to time, but not that often. Alice is in Paris most of the time. She runs the business – she’s happy.’

And you, I want to ask, are you?

*

This becomes our pattern. Sometimes for days in a row; sometimes I don’t see him from one week to the next, one lesson to the next. I never know when, and have no knowledge of his whereabouts in between. Occasionally he calls the school and leaves a cryptic message:
The documents aren’t ready, I can’t bring them down today.
But he never writes. I hang in suspension, constantly waiting. I stop going out, or leave it until very late, when I know he will not be coming. Friends give up including me in their plans – I can never give them a definite answer.

I wander around in the dark winter days, detached, spun off at a tangent. It brings to mind the weeks after Josef left; I’m disorientated, filled with longing, unable to function. How come this is so akin to grief? The brief hours we catch, play and replay after he’s gone; the gentle soft bruising of him all over me. Before, with others, there was no aftermath, nothing worth staying for – a hasty retreat. This is new ground, a foreign field. Lying together, another glass of wine, another cigarette. We never talk of love; I doubt this obsession that governs my every waking minute, can be anything as desirable as love. We run the gamut of French movie clichés, I learn a whole new vocabulary and I cannot bear him to leave. But leave he always does and I pull on my clothes again thinking with half a mind that soon, very soon, I will come to my senses.

*

One evening, some months after it begins, entombed as usual in the flat, I hear the street bell ring. I dash down the stairs, but to my astonishment, when I open the door it’s Simone who stands there.

‘Simone?’

She doesn’t look at me. ‘Can I come in?’ she says, stepping into the doorway .

I’m too shocked to refuse, ‘Yes, please come in.’

We cross the courtyard to the stairs. She follows me up and I let her in to the flat. I offer her a drink, ask after the children.

She looks around dismissively. ‘This isn’t a social visit. I’m not here to talk about the children.’

‘Then…?’

‘Jean-Luc,’ she says, spitting his name, ‘what are you doing – are you mad? How could you be so stupid!’

‘I’m not sure…?’

‘You realise he’s done this sort of thing before – many times,’ she adds bitterly.

I know then why she is here. How she found out is of little consequence, but it’s clearly not my welfare that concerns her. She wrestles with something unresolved; such anger can only have one root cause and this time it has nothing to do with leaving Paris.

‘If you’ve come to warn me, then thank you, but I’m not a child. It’s my – it’s our business.’

‘Well, don’t think it will lead anywhere. It never does. He always goes back to Alice, you know, in the end. In fact, he’s probably with her now. Did you think of that?’

I did not. I try hard to keep that very real scenario out of my head altogether. ‘I understand it’s…’ words are failing. ‘I think you should go. I’m sorry you felt you needed to come – to warn me.’

Simone shrugs impatiently. ‘Pah! You’re a silly girl, Madeleine. I’ve no idea why you came here in the first place.’

My anger too is beginning to build, her presence contaminating my home.
You needed me to do a job, remember? I looked after your children for eighteen months; your husband was kind to me when all you did was find fault. Constantly. And what’s more, for all your unsubtle body language, Jean-Luc was no longer impressed, though once he may have been. It was me he watched as I struggled with your plates and your guests and your washing up. Did you know that? Me with my dull clothes and scruffy hair and faulty French.

‘I’ll see you out.’ I say.

‘Don’t bother,’ she says. ‘I can find the way,’ and she leaves, a miasma of Givenchy clouding the room like bad cooking, so that I have to open the window to let it out.

I say nothing of the visit to Jean-Luc. If Simone sought to warn me off, she’s failed dismally. I cling to the fragile network of meetings, events and illusions that make up this relationship, his sparse and priceless leavings. He’s caught me up in his certainty, his security, dishing out favours he has no right to share, but which I lap up anyway, hungry for the morsels that drop as I once craved attention from Josef. And from Gil.

*

Another summer comes, the heat glaring, and even my flat becomes unbearable. Though I risk missing Jean-Luc, I go down to the river in the late afternoon. Sometimes I return to a note pushed under the door –
Missed you. A bientôt
. Nothing more, no name. Had he missed me, or had we simply failed to meet? At other times, he will risk coming to find me and we stop at a bar on the quayside, an innocent drink with a friend. Then later we return to the flat, lying in the airless room until it grows dark and he needs to be gone. These times, precious in their rarity, when we risk normality and surface together into the outside world, make the confinement bearable. I expect little and content myself with even less.

At the flat one evening in September, Jean-Luc is on the point of leaving. ‘Are you free this weekend?’ he says, ‘I have to visit a supplier in Limoges.’

‘You mean come with you? How?’

‘By getting in the car.’

‘But what about…?’

‘It’s September, France is back at work, you’re my teacher – interpreter if you like. The suppliers are English – I need you.’

He looks at me intently, his amused supplication as potent as ever. I can only be grateful – this is a gift; weekends are the longest time alone. I seldom see him; he stays in Paris or elsewhere – I really have no idea where and I try so hard not to mind.

‘I don’t know.’ I try to be casual, as if I might have other things to be doing, but he’s not fooled.

‘Friday, then. I’ll pick you up.’

It’s the nearest we’ve ever come to a plan.

We travel south on Friday night, ahead of the Paris traffic, stopping briefly for food at a service station. The road is clear most of the way and by nine we arrive at a small village a few miles from the centre of Limoges. Apart from one or two pale street lamps, the place is in darkness. Jean-Luc pulls up outside an old auberge; he gets out and goes to the door. I sit and watch as he disappears inside, reappearing minutes later with a large bunch of keys. Our room is at the back of the auberge, across a small garden, little more than a scantily converted outhouse. A single overhead bulb flickers doubtfully, but there are candles and a hurricane lamp next to the bed. In one corner, there’s a washstand with a large china bowl and pitcher on top. On a chest of drawers are two bottles of water.

I sit on the bed and pull my feet up onto the quilt. It’s soft, pale blue, a floral design meanders across the surface. Damp warmth in the room brings a flash of home, of the shed in summer. How close it all is still, when caught as now with my guard down, my better side abandoned in an attic classroom.

I want to ask Jean-Luc how he knows this place – has he been here before – but then I think of Simone’s diatribe and fear the answer. In the darkness I begin to take off my clothes while Jean-Luc turns briefly to lock the door.

*

The supplier’s office is a new building in the centre of Limoges, just off the main square. When Jean-Luc introduces me to his contact, do I imagine the knowing flash across his face as we shake hands?

‘Intérprète?’ he says, nodding slowly.
That’s a new one,
he might have added.

The business takes no more than an hour. I read through the documents carefully, though the content is obscure. I can only judge the accuracy and register of the language; I’ve no idea whether or not it’s a good deal. I sit uncomfortably as the shoptalk flows, rather as I did at Simone’s – a child brought here under sufferance and given something to play with.

Later we have lunch in a small Moroccan restaurant, the patron greeting Jean-Luc with a warm handshake and much backslapping. To my growing unease, is added the notion that I’m on show, an auction lot being led around for inspection. How often
does
he do this? But later, locked in our room at the auberge with late summer filling the garden outside, I shut away the unease, lost again in the heady, toxic immediacy of what we are doing. He’s here now. With me. That’s all there is.

On the Sunday he drops me back at the flat. ‘Thank you,’ he says, ‘I’ll see you soon.’

It’s dark. I hang reluctantly by his car window, biting my lip – hurting it so the clinging, needy words will not tumble out to shame me, to give myself away. ‘Bye,’ I say, and fumble around for my keys.

I don’t see him again for some time. He leaves a message at the school that he’s in England, presumably following up the deal in Limoges. The days and weeks hang long and heavy – not even eased by our official Tuesday afternoons.

It slowly dawns that maybe Limoges is our swan song, that he’s drunk his fill and moved on. Have I betrayed myself? Have I indicated at some level, by some minute gesture, any of the fragile uncertainty he has invoked? In bed, could I have been more eager? Maybe Alice has found out – or finally had enough.
It won’t lead anywhere. He always goes back to Alice, you know, in the end.

I mope around the flat, deliver my lessons with a scant enthusiasm that doesn’t go unnoticed by the students. Sylvie too is not immune to my mood.

‘Is everything alright?’ she asks.

By
everything
I know well what she means. ‘It’s fine thank you, I’m just tired – a cold I think.’

She looks at me, unconvinced, but says nothing more.

Then one evening, about a month later, Jean-Luc turns up again. He leans against the green gate in the dark street holding a bottle of champagne.

‘The deal,’ he says. ‘We closed it today. Here’s to Limoges.’

And just like that, I’m back in his thrall and he’s back in my bed. He takes up the lessons again and I’m blessed with evenings or afternoons whenever he can or wishes to bestow his company. He offers no explanation and I know better than to ask.

*

As Christmas approaches I begin to wonder how I will spend the time – the weeks with no work when the school is closed and the world retreats to the family foyer. Jean-Luc, I assume, will be in Paris or involved in some illustrious house party in the Sologne.

As in previous years, it crosses my mind to return to England, but I can no longer place myself in that context, cannot even picture being there. At times, I wonder who I am now and what I’ve become these past twelve months. Who is this abject, needy person I now appear to be? Little about me impressed Molly before I left England; what I’ve been up to recently would do little to change that.

I send cards and a letter, trying to indicate how full life is – a hectic round of commitments. I make no mention of going home, but suggest instead that Sophie might like to visit for a few days. I know that if she comes, I won’t be able to keep the truth from her, she’ll see how limited I’ve let my life become, the permanent distraction that is Jean-Luc. But if I want to spend time with her, it’s a risk I’ll have to take.

In the event, Sophie doesn’t come, citing a round of rehearsals, concerts and pending mock O-levels. I bite back disappointment at not seeing her; whatever she thinks of me is immaterial, but I’ve missed a chance to share a little of what is happening, to give some of it away.

Joy does not offset the weight of what I’m doing. I’ve spent a year distracted, obstructed by its power, losing more than my heart. I run in circles around my own integrity, not because it’s wrong to have this affair but because I so dislike the person I’ve become in doing so. I read Sophie’s letters, full of school and home and the simple issues that that make up her life. How paltry is mine by comparison; dressed as a great adventure, it has simply left me to deal with being someone I no longer want to be.

*

Christmas that year, however, takes an unexpected turn. I would not have been much company for Sophie had she come, since most of it is spent on the bathroom floor with my head in the toilet or shivering in bed, quite alone. I could blame the mussels, I could blame Jean-Luc for taking me to a restaurant that is so discreet no health inspector has ever managed to find it. In the end, there is no blame to lay; what happens as a result being simply the conspiracy of events that brings Chloé into my life.