Jean-Marie sighed in anticipation of the pleasure to come, and ran his eyes down the list of teas next to the urn.
‘Darjeeling? With a cloud of milk?’
Katy giggled and did her stuff with the teapot.
‘Come, we must talk,’ Jean-Marie said to me. Which sounded ominous.
As we sat facing each other over white Formica, I was reminded of our last meeting the previous May. I’d gone to his apartment and blackmailed him into letting me use the name My Tea Is Rich, which, strictly speaking, belonged to his company. To get his agreement, I’d threatened, or rather suggested that I was in a position to threaten, to reveal to the press that he’d been importing English beef when it was forbidden in France.
At the time he’d been running for office as mayor in a town where he had no chance of winning without support from two ultra-patriotic parties, so he didn’t want any rumours about illegal trade with France’s traditional enemy.
Since then, he’d rapidly become a much bigger player in the national political game.
French political parties seem to fracture and reform with incredible frequency as one ego outbids another for leadership of various factions. And according to ex-colleagues of mine, Jean-Marie’s innate self-belief and circle of influential friends had already projected him to a position where he’d only have to make a few key speeches, and he’d find himself at the head of a breakaway ‘traditional values’ type of party. Anti-crime, pro-family, vague on Europe, distrustful of America and French steak for everyone. What voter with an ounce of Gallic blood in their veins could argue with that?
So I assumed I was in for a politely delivered death threat aimed at quashing any future rumours about English beef.
‘I have watched you,’ he said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘When I came back to Paris in the summer, I saw how you were working here. In the last two weeks I saw your progress. The décor is excellent.’ He gestured towards some of the framed pictures on the tea-coloured walls. Instead of going for golf, cricket and croquet scenes, I’d opted for a collection of superbly kitsch photos by a Brit called Martin Parr. There were garish close-ups of fluorescent cakes, a queue at a chip shop, sunburnt holidaymakers with melting ice creams, and a whole bunch of similar shots affectionately taking the pee out of British food.
‘And the – how do you say façade?’
‘Facade.’
‘Really? Yes, the facade looks very good. The name – My Tea Is Rich. It looks fine, no?’
‘Yes, thanks, Jean-Marie. It was your idea, and it was a good one.’
‘Even if you said it was bad at first?’
‘Yes, I know.’ I nodded shamefully, though I had never actually said that it was a bad name. The word I’d used was ‘crap’. But that was before I realized that the French loved ‘My Tea Is Rich’, because it was a pun on what they’d always learned as a ‘typical’ English sentence – ‘my tailor is rich’. It doesn’t mean anything to us Brits, of course, but then we all go round asking ‘Où est la plume de ma tante?’, which only makes the French think that we have relatives who are careless with their writing materials.
‘And your, what do you say, slogan? Le plus British des salons de thé. I like it.’
‘Thanks.’ Here, it comes, I thought. After reminding me how much I have to lose, he’s going to tell me exactly how I could lose it.
‘We will come to your party.’
‘You will? Oh, good.’ This was our inauguration do a couple of weeks later. I preferred to get things running smoothly before I revealed officially that we were open. It would be good to have Jean-Marie at the party. A minor political star like him would do wonders for PR in the neighbourhood.
‘With my wife. And my son.’
‘Benoît? How’s he doing?’
‘Huh.’ A tiny flicker of exasperation cracked his mask for a moment. ‘After changing from medicine to biology, now he will do – how do you say? – œnologie.’
‘Œnologie?’ Wasn’t that something to do with masturbation?
‘Yes, you know, the study of wine. Franchement, il se fout de ma gueule.’ This sentence about his son taking the piss was delivered in the same growl that he’d used all those months ago when swearing at me for trying to blackmail him. ‘He is now twenty-five, bordel. He must work.’
‘Yes. And how is . . .’
I was going to ask after Élodie, his generous daughter, who had given me so much more than a room of my own when she’d sublet her apartment to me. But Jean-Marie hadn’t finished with Benoît. He held out a restraining hand and looked me square in the eyes.
‘He must work for you.’
‘What?’
‘Benoît. He must work here.’
‘Here? But I’ve got all . . .’
His hand clamped down slowly but firmly on my forearm. His voice became a soft purr.
‘We will come on Saturday. With Benoît, and with a journalist who will make a television report about me. You would wish your salon de thé to appear on TV, I think?’
‘Sure, yes.’
He released my arm.
‘Good, you will propose to Benoît to work here. With the charming Katy, perhaps?’ He turned to look over his shoulder and smile at her.
What the hell was he up to? I wondered. Benoît gets off with Katy, brings her home to meet the folks, and Dad whisks her away from inept son to some swish château for the weekend? No, surely not. He’d only just seen Katy for the first time. There had to be something else going on here apart from an old guy’s taste for young, impressionable flesh. But what?
Jean-Marie clapped his hands to conclude our meeting, and got up to leave.
‘Excellent tea,’ he said, even though he hadn’t touched it. Katy blushed. As he passed the till he lay a ten-euro note on the counter. ‘Excellent service, also,’ Katy’s blush got even redder, which didn’t seem humanly possible.
Jean-Marie crossed the road, sweet-talked a traffic warden out of giving him a ticket, and drove off, giving a wave to the gallery of my staff who were gaping at him through the window.
They didn’t realize that in all likelihood he’d just cost one of them a job. Still, isn’t that the mark of a great politician? They make you unemployed and still you vote for them.
3
AFTER A QUIET first morning, trade quickly began to pick up. The place was never packed out, but from the second day on, we were rarely empty between around nine in the morning and closing time at seven, which was fantastic news.
The problem was that with days settling into a rhythm, I had time to think of other things.
Clementines, for example.
I still had a hell of a lot to learn about them.
Why, for example, when things had been looking promising with Alexa, did she have a beautifully ripe Clementine delivered to my door?
At the end of that first week, I got a call from someone who said she’d got my number from Alexa.
It was cute little Virginie, the girl from the film shoot. I mean, here was a Clementine who in several key areas showed signs of being all grapefruit. What did Alexa think I was going to do? Take her out and have a polite conversation about working conditions in the French cinema industry?
No, of course not. Alexa must have known what would happen, so I could only assume that she’d given Virginie carte blanche to go where her instincts took her.
And what instincts.
The day after she called – a Saturday – I took her to dinner at a great couscous restaurant near Bastille. It served spicy stews, thick North African wine, and gooey sweets that gave Virginie the chance to show me that she had no complexes about licking her fingers in public. With the first flick of her tongue, she made all the guys at the other tables swoon with envy.
She then took me to a dimly lit bar around the corner where the ceiling was decorated with women’s bras. This predictably encouraged a rather suggestive conversation about women’s underwear, and what kind Virginie enjoyed wearing.<
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Across the road there was another bar, with long, low sofas, where two people who were just getting to know each other could relax, lie back in the corner, and see if their limbs and lips liked being rubbed together.
It felt only natural to pop the question, ‘Your place or yours?’ and after a short taxi ride to the Twentieth arrondissement, we were playing chase the hormones up the stairs to her studio apartment.
The best Clementines are of course the ones that peel the easiest, and it took all of three seconds for Virginie to peel off and leap on to her bed.
This was where those exotic sounds came in. Every touch of my fingertips produced a new word. Some of them sounded like items on the restaurant we’d been to. Sheesh. Kiiiifff. Muuhaah. Others were real French words, an exercise in slow-motion pronunciation. C’eeest booooon. Doouuucement. And one I had heard before, but was pleased to hear again. Ooouuuiiii.
‘Wow,’ I said when we were both bizmillahed out.
‘Do you want to stay?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mind if you go home. But you can stay.’
‘I would like to stay, yes.’ Sleeping on a real mattress with a real woman would be a novelty for me. And breakfast might be fun, too.
‘I must tell you. I’m not really looking for a boyfriend.’ She was leaning up on one elbow and looking cutely guilty, as a recently shagged woman often does, even when she’s got nothing to feel guilty about.
She pulled at the cross that was still clinging on to its snug resting place in her cleavage. I didn’t blame it. The cleavage had turned out to be even better than I’d pictured. She had those wonderful breasts that meet in the middle and tempt you to play all sorts of rude games.
‘No?’
‘No, I just split up with my boyfriend. He was pissing me off, he was so boring.’ She said he’d been ‘gonfling’ her – inflating her, as the French say. From where I was lying, he’d made a good job of it, too. ‘I told my friends about you,’ she went on, ‘and they said, go on, have some fun with him.’
‘Well tell them thank you from me.’ A sudden thought struck me. ‘Did Alexa tell you that when she gave you my number?’
‘No, she’s not really a friend. I just know her from the shoot.’
‘What did she say about me?’
‘Nothing, really.’
‘Oh.’
Virginie misread my confusion, and seemed to think I was offended.
‘I could tell she likes you, though,’ she said.
‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t see at all.
‘You don’t have to stay. I won’t mind. But it could be fun, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I think.’
‘Good. Do you like it when I put my breasts here . . . and here?’
There was no need to confirm verbally that I did.
But I couldn’t help wondering. Was this really what Alexa wanted me to be doing?
4
ANOTHER THING THAT I now had time to deal with was finding somewhere to live.
It really was not practical stashing my inflatable mattress behind a curtain in the basement every morning. Any of the customers going downstairs to the loo would only have had to carry on along a little passageway to be confronted with the unfortunate truth about their genial host upstairs. He was, to all intents and purposes, homeless.
This was where Yannick, the science student, came in useful. He wasn’t yet particularly skilled at getting toasted sandwiches out of the machine, but he had some friends who were looking for a fourth person to share their apartment.
It was down in the Fifteenth, in a part of town that was mostly full of middle-class families and not particularly lively. But Yannick said his friends were fun. They were in their last year at business school, and they were all on work placements in big French companies. Paid work placements, too, which was good news. I didn’t want to be the one paying the rent every month.
I made an appointment to go and meet them one evening after closing time.
I should have guessed from the taxi driver’s reaction that things were destined to go awry.
‘Rue Eugène,’ I told him.
‘Rue Eugène?’ He didn’t know it.
I looked again at my slip of paper and realized I’d forgotten to tell him the end of the name. After I read it out, he cackled for most of the fifteen-minute journey. I had no idea why.
The building itself wasn’t especially amusing. It was one of those typical six-floor French apartment houses that all seem to have been put up in the same two weeks in the 1890s. Or should I say six weeks, to take the builders’ delays into account.
A digicode takes you into a hallway with tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor. There’s a rack of letterboxes, a couple of which are always bulging with junk mail. Then a glass door with a frame painted to look as if it’s made of natural wood. Next to this, on the wall, a bare aluminium entryphone, with a double row of buzzers. Here you choose a name on the list and press the relevant button. The door buzzes, you push and you’re in a small stairwell that, if you’re unlucky, will have a tiny one-person lift that’s been installed to push up the value of the apartments on the top floors. I say unlucky, because if like me you’re going up to the fifth floor, you’re tempted to use it, and as soon as the concertina door shuts you in there, you start wondering whether there’s enough oxygen to last the trip.
There are thousands of these buildings in Paris, and I didn’t notice the subtle variations until Jake explained them to me.
You have to check whether the mailboxes have been broken into (in this case there were no obvious signs of forced locks), and whether the stairs are unvarnished and dirty (no concierge, or a bad one), covered in red stair carpet (posh residents and snooty concierge) or polished so brightly that you need crampons to stay on them (houseproud concierge who might be up for some extra cleaning work in your apartment).
The lift in this building was new and slid upwards pretty smoothly, though I had plenty of time to read the notice telling me that it was forbidden to use the lift if the building was on fire. Only thing was, you wouldn’t have seen the notice till you got in and the door closed behind you.
And these buildings never have fire escapes. What are you supposed to do if you live on the fifth floor and a fire breaks out in the staircase, I wondered, douse yourself in Perrier water?
‘You are Pool?’ A breathless girl with short mousy hair, red cheeks and a slightly insane grin opened the door and waved me in before I had a chance to say yes or no. ‘I am Marie-Christine,’ she said.
Two guys were hovering in the entrance hall, staring at me with unnerving anticipation. It felt like a film in which someone gets invited to dinner and they’re dinner.
The three of them shook my hand and welcomed me in English of sorts. There was Théodore – small, black-haired, with a dark five o’clock shadow. Matthieu – even taller than me, with blond hair and freckles. And the breathless Marie-Christine, who was conscious of being slightly overweight and seemed to jiggle around permanently so you could never get a good look at her. They told me I could call them ‘Théo’, ‘Matt’ and ‘Marie Hee’, though I was pretty certain that ‘Hee’ was a nervous tic rather than part of her name.
‘Come into ear.’ Fortunately, I was used to French accents and knew that Marie was inviting me into the living room rather than suggesting aural sex.
I sat in one of the four battered leather armchairs facing a tiny TV. The bare floorboards were looking suspiciously clean for a shared house, I thought. No wine stains, and not even a stray magazine, joke plastic vomit stain or charred wig lurking under any of the chairs. (Yes, I have lived in some bizarre shared houses in my time.)
Both the living room and the hallway, which had been lined with neatly arranged shoes and tidily hung coats, smelled suspiciously of housework. Frantic cleaning after a blood-splashed cannibal party, perhaps?
‘You on drink?’ I guessed that Théo was offering me refreshment and not inquiring about possible alcoholism.<
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‘Yes, please.’ I accepted a bottle of beer and sat there being stared at by these three people who wanted to eat me.
‘So, you’re looking for a fourth person to share?’ I said to break the silence.
They squinted back at me.
‘Footh?’ Marie asked.
‘You want another person to live here with you?’
‘Ah yes, we want an udder.’
‘You Hinglish or Hamerican?’ Matt asked.
‘English.’
‘Good, I like earring Hinglish.’
‘But you like free ends?’
I didn’t know how to answer Marie’s question. She seemed to be back in her ‘come into my ear’ territory.
‘Free ends?’
‘Yes, you know. Hoss, shorn lair.’
A horse with a shorn what? This was getting weirder by the minute.
‘I don’t know much about it,’ I confessed.
They almost fell out of their armchairs in shock.
‘You done no free ends?’ Théo gasped.
‘No, never.’
‘You wash.’ Marie jumped up and ran out of the room.
Now I was scared. If she came back in with a sponge, soap and a pair of shears, I was out of there, inflatable mattress or no inflatable mattress.
The other two sat smiling at me while we waited. I heard Marie’s small feet padding back down the corridor, and braced myself to run.
But she returned with nothing more sinister than a portable DVD player. And when the first pictures flashed up on the screen, I relaxed.
Guitars jangled out, actors with bouffant nineties haircuts leaped around in a fountain.
‘Friends,’ I said. ‘Ross, Chandler.’
‘Yes!’ They all cheered. ‘Fibby, Ha-shell, Showy.’
‘You no diss, yes?’ Théo asked me.
‘Of course.’
‘Oof,’ he said as if I’d just punched him. But this, I knew, was the French way of saying a phew of relief.
After this early misunderstanding, we all got on fine. I taught them how to say ‘Chandler’, and they plied me with beer. A fair exchange.
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