The Price of Love

by Deanna Maclaren

  ‘I don’t any more. But I can still make love.’

  She kissed him. ‘Tell me. Do you ever do that thing of counting something to stop yourself coming?’

  ‘Not any more. But when I was younger, yes. Every young man does it.’

  ‘What used to be in your mind?’

  ‘Well when I was courting Madame she had a car. What I think you would call an old banger. It was always going wrong. So when we were making love I used to think how to take the engine to bits and put it all back again.’

  *

  The following day they met at the Hotel Crillon for a pre-lunch drink. Helene could see why Harry’s Bar appealed to both men and women. The quiet opulence. The pampering. It was just so seductive.

  From the Crillon they walked across the Alexandre III bridge, Helene marvelling at all the gold adorning it. If the sun was out, it would be dazzling. But the sky was overcast. As they neared the restaurant, it started to rain. Neither she nor Jean-Paul had brought an umbrella, so she took his arm. ‘Come on. We’ll have to run.’

  It wasn’t far, but he was badly out of breath when they reached the restaurant. He drank a glass of water and then, to Helene’s relief, enjoyed a hearty lunch. They both chose the plat du jour, six oleron oysters followed by a tagine that sent Helene into raptures.

  ‘This is divine,’she raved. ‘I’ve often tried to make tagine, but I can never get the right taste.’

  He laughed. ‘Chérie. I have never seen you so greedy!’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  He took her hand. ‘No, it’s adorable. All passion in a woman is always exciting to a man.’

  Their light, romantic mood rapidly evaporated as, later, they stood at the door of the restaurant and observed the sheeting rain. The restaurant manager hastened towards them. He would call a taxi, he said. It might take some time, but meanwhile, would they accept a digestif with his compliments?

  Oh good, thought Helene. This was turning into a party.

  Three quarters of an hour later, they were still there, finishing their second marc. The waiters were laying the tables for dinner. Outside, it continued to bucket down.

  The manager appeared. He was wearing his raincoat. There were, he said, no taxis. There was an international conference at the Crillon and the delegates had taken all the cars. However, it would be his pleasure and privilege to drive Madame and Monsieur to their destination…

  Helene was impressed, until she got into his car. A beaten up Peugot that appeared to have no suspension. Still, it was very much any port in a storm and because it was now five o’clock and she could see Jean-Paul was anxious about the waiting Madame, she suggested they drop him first near the Place des Vosges.

  Paris. The rush hour. Everyone manic, even in blinding rain. Crossing to the Left Bank the restaurant manager flogged the jolting car down a series of back doubles and finally reversed heroically into Helene’s street.

  At last, she was home, inside, dry. And, she realised, she was shortly going to be very ill.

  She threw up all the rest of that day, and all night. At one point she thought she’d never leave the shower room again. She’d just live in here, she could manage with a kettle and a toaster, new curtains maybe, there were worse places and it was an oyster, of course. A dodgy oyster.

  Just thinking about it sent her head down the loo again. And what about her job? She’d got to go to work. Angeline had made it quite clear from the outset that she wasn’t interested in cleaners who didn’t turn up.

  Helene showered and pulled on some clothes. At least in this job she didn’t have to wear power suits and knock her brains out doing intricate things with spread-sheets. What was a spread-sheet, anyway? In a lighter mood, having lunch with a girlfriend, Helene would have had some fun with this. But this morning, levity was definitely not on the agenda.

  She still felt very queasy en route for Angeline’s, so she dropped in a note at Jean-Paul’s galerie saying she was ill and would he forgive her if she didn’t see him tonight. Then she stopped off at Valerie Laverie to collect Angeline’s laundry.

  It was unfortunate that Nanette, the dog, was tucking into a bowl of sludgy breakfast. The smell sent Helene lurching out into fresh air. Then she reeled back into the shop, needing to sit down.

  ‘You are ill!’ exclaimed Valerie. ‘What is it?’

  Helene didn’t know the French for sick as a dog so she mimed it. At once, Valerie ran into the back and returned with a bottle of yellowish-greenish liquid. It was called Hepatoum.

  ‘You put a spoonful in a glass of water and you sip,’ Valerie instructed. ‘You will feel better.’

  As soon as she arrived at Angeline’s, Helene sat down with the diluted Hepatoum. It didn’t taste too bad. And it worked, well enough to get her through the morning. A relief, though, to get home and crash, fully clothed, into bed.

  Helene was awoken around 4.45 by a ring at her doorbell. Normally she wouldn’t answer without checking who it was, but today she felt tired and disorientated.

  She opened the door, and there was Jean-Paul.

  Confused, she said, ‘But why ring? You have a key.’

  ‘I thought if you were asleep, you might hear someone and be afraid.’

  Actually Helene felt more of a fright than afraid. She was still in her tatty cleaning jeans and shirt. Her hair needed washing. She saw that Jean-Paul was carrying a wicker basket. He placed it on her table.

  ‘I couldn’t not see you,’ he said. ‘I had to make sure you were all right.’

  He noticed the bottle of Hepatoum and the water glass on the table. ‘Ah, the magic remedy.’

  ‘I feel a lot better,’ said Helene.

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Come and see what we can tempt you with.’

  In the basket she found some fruit, wholemeal bread and runny honey. There was also a small, velvet lined box. A brooch. A sparkly linnet in a golden cage.

  Helene’s eyes were hot with tears. ‘You’re so good to me, Jean-Paul.’

  He passed her his handkerchief. ‘But chérie, for me the pleasure is all in the giving.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Looks a right Jack-the Lad,’ Alexis said, and Helene agreed. Harry’s new bar-boy had the all-too-ready smile and darting eyes of someone geared up to seize the main chance.

  ‘Takes one to know one, Alexis.’

  He grinned, as if she’d paid him a compliment, and she had to laugh with him. It was good to see Alexis. He was unpredictable, of course, but she didn’t mind that in small doses.

  Lounging on the VTR banquette, Alexis was talking about Corbières. ‘The house. It’s finished. My mate’s done a fantastic job. Six bedrooms, open fires, huge terrace, next year we’ll put in a pool. And the countryside! Fields. Animals. I mean, when I lived in London the only countryside I ever saw was grass verges from the car. And I never saw animals, just people’s pets. But this is fabulous, vines and pines and later there’ll be sunflowers. You ought to come, Helene, have a look.’

  I’d like that, she reflected. I can go walking, collect pine cones for the fire …

  ‘This is a cunning ploy, isn’t it Alexis? You just want me to come and do the cooking.’

  ‘Oh, you guessed! No, actually, Jane’s a great cook. She’s my mate’s wife.’

  ‘How did she get on with Malveen?’

  ‘Not very well. Got the frost because Malveen hit it off with my mate. They went on giggly bike rides together.’

  Alexis pushed himself up from the banquette. ‘If Malveen shows, can you tell her I’m at the lapdance place. The girls have got a new act. Want my opinion.’

  Malveen arrived ten minutes later as Helene was ordering a glass of wine at the bar. Alexis’s sister was dressed in her customary Goth style, silver chains, studs and a silver shoulder bag that looked like a market cheapie but which Helene had seen in Angeline’s Vogue at over 1000 euro.

  Malveen rubbed her bare, tattooed arms and said accusingly, ‘Where
the fuck’s Alexis?’

  Oh, and good-evening to you too, thought Helene.

  ‘No idea,’ said Harry.

  ‘He’s at the lapdance club,’ said Helene.

  Suddenly, Malveen turned terrifyingly wild. ‘But he’s supposed to be with me! Me! ME!’

  ‘I think we’ve got the message,’ said Harry.

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ spat Malveen. And she made off to the ladies’.

  Slowly, Helene finished her drink and was preparing to call it a night when Harry leaned across the zinc bar. ‘Do me a favour. Keep an eye on her, will you?’

  With a very bad grace Helene marched across and flung open the door of the ladies’. Malveen was standing at a handbasin. She was cutting herself.

  She was devoting fierce concentration to slashing at the heads of the tattoo cobras snaking up her arm. Helene was sickened by the sight of the mutilation, the blood and the filthy knife that threatened septic poisoning. But she had typed enough legal depositions from vindictive divorcees to know that when someone is deranged and hysterical, a calm approach is vital.

  Disguising her disgust, and swallowing her nausea, she forced herself to comment, almost chattily: ‘I hear you’ve been biking.’

  ‘Yeah,’ slash, slice. ‘Harry laughed at me. Wanted to know what I wore, so I said the usual and he said Christ, the werewolf on wheels.’

  ‘He can talk,’ Helene said, wishing she didn’t have to observe this mad girl attempting serious surgery on a hissing serpent. ‘He’s Romanian, you know. Probably spends Sundays dressed as Dracula.’

  Malveen sniggered. Helene pressed on, ‘And that face of his. You could strike a match on it.’

  Malveen screamed with laughter, the noise echoing round the tiling. She had stopped cutting herself. Rapidly, Helene assessed whether this was the moment when she could seize the repellent knife - but too late. It was being returned to Malveen’s expensive bag.

  Helene regarded the girl’s bleeding arm and said casually, ‘Back in a mo.’ Then she ran across the club room to Harry. ‘Got any antiseptic?’

  As he reached below the bar for the first aid box, she filled him in on the scene. He gave her the spray antiseptic and they both skidded into the ladies’. Malveen was not to be seen, but her silver bag was on the blood-stained sink.

  Harry hammered on a cubicle door. ‘Mustang! What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m having a pee, Harry.’

  ‘Well exercise your pelvic floor and get yourself out. You’ve got ten seconds.’

  Even Malveen had the sense to realise that Harry was the type who really would break the door down. She emerged, looking defiant, and Helene sprayed her arm with Steripan.

  Helene said to Harry, ‘Shall I go and get Alexis?’

  ‘No. I’ll send the boy. You get yourself home.’

  Helene felt like getting herself to a convalescent home. A tranquil, pretty room, a lilac tree. White lilac. A kindly nurse, murmuring that she must rest now. They always said that, didn’t they? ‘You must get plenty of rest.’

  Next best thing would be a cognac with Odile. But when she got to the hotel, to her annoyance, Mr Luggage was back, informing a glazed Odile, ‘Driven Toyotas for the past ten years. Never had a moment’s trouble.’

  *

  ‘Sunday morning. Before church.

  ‘Oh, oh! Olly has fallen out with the old girl, but it serves him right for laughing when I told him about her and the carrots. Some diet freak in the Mail said if you eat a carrot before every meal you won’t put on weight. Being in the wheelchair, bootcamp Bessie has piled on the pounds so I was detailed to keep her supplied with said carrots. The first time I returned from the shops it was, ‘Oh how wonderful, you are so kind.’

  ‘One week later, she sighs, ‘Oh. You got the large carrots.’

  ‘Yesterday, I staggered back in an icy wind (Olly had the car) and she moaned, ‘It’s too bad. These carrots are so cold.’

  ‘Anyway, when she’d chomped her way through the carrot, Megan wheeled her over for Saturday lunch. Sausages, chips, baked beans and while I got it ready, Megan set the table and Olly unpacked the bulk groceries he’d bought.

  ‘More complaints from you-know-who. Wrong toilet rolls. Wrong thickness, wrong colour, was Oliver stupid, why should he imagine primrose toilet rolls would go in her honeysuckle bathroom?

  ‘Well. Olly just lost it. He said, when my grandmother was alive, she lived down a country lane miles from the shops, didn’t she. So who got her loo paper? Did you? Did you go trekking forth to the village shop so you could lug it all to her cottage and get abused?

  ‘And the dragon said, with impressive dignity I must admit, ‘Your grandmother, Oliver, was a very tiny woman. She didn’t use much toilet paper.’

  ‘Well Olly and I rarely argue, as you know, so he’s not used to being put down. But by now she’d got the bit between her teeth and the whole Ercol debate started all over again. Usual thing –

  ‘Q (Dragon to Olly and me) Why do we have to eat in the kitchen? (Actually, Megan isn’t. Megan has taken a heap of chips to her room and is building an air-raid shelter with them.)

  ‘A. Because the dining table is dominated by Olly’s computer and Megan’s schoolbooks. Olly brings work home deliberately so he can sit with her and make sure she does her homework.

  ‘Q Why do we keep that scratched dining room table when her beautiful Ercol table is doing nothing in the garage?

  ‘A. We don’t want her Ercol table. I would only have to polish it and view my double chin.

  ‘Anyway the stubborn woman wouldn’t let up so finally Olly really went for her, shouting that we don’t want the bloody Ercol, either you like Ercol or you don’t and we don’t. Can you see that? CAN you?

  ‘And do you know what she said? She said, ‘What I see, Oliver, is that to the young, old furniture is like old memories and old people. No one wants to know.’

  ‘Oh God. Of course I felt so guilty I offered to go across and clean all her windows. And you know how long that takes round here.’

  Sea, salt and sand, thought Helene. Wish you were here.

  *

  On Monday, Helene had the day off for V.E Day, May 8. Angeline had left a note to say it was a holiday and the services of her cleaner would not be required.

  Helene enjoyed a lie-in, then cleared up the debris of her apartment. Alexis had come to Sunday lunch. He was alone. He was randy as hell and before she could get the roast out of the oven, he was behind her, with his hand up her skirt.

  What was it, Helene wondered, about men and kitchens? That always seemed to be where they got most turned on. She had lost count of the number of fridge handles she’d had, jutting into her back.

  She’d rescued the rib of beef and they had a frantic twenty minute session on the sofa. After lunch, he wanted to do it again but Helene resisted. She was annoyed with him. He’d spent most of the meal defending Malveen. Also, she suspected that his amorous intent was simply a ploy to get out of helping with the washing up.

  He persisted. As often happens when you think you don’t want sex, Helene found herself suddenly as frenzied as he was, and as ingenious.

  On Monday afternoon she went for a walk. It was a glorious day, summer-warm but not dusty, with fresh spring-green leaves just appearing on the trees.

  She did the easy walk, down one side of the Seine and back along the other. It was one of the things she liked about Paris, the way if you did this walk you couldn’t get lost. You could just think.

  Now the sun had finally put in an appearance after weeks of appalling weather, Helene was considering what she most liked about Paris. The café society, the zinc bars, the markets. Ingres at the Louvre, and the Musee d’Orsay with that splendid painting of Whistler and his cronies. Bad boys, no question, and Helene thought, she’d like to have been on come-hither terms with every one of them.

  The shops. Not so much the smart shops, you got Chanel, Dior and all the rest in London, everywhere. Helene preferred the smaller,
specialist places like Mimi La Sardine in the rue de Seine. Elodie had sent her there when she was looking for a T-shirt with a square neck. ‘Mimi is the only place that sells them. You will pay, but it will be worth it.’

  Elodie was right. It wasn’t cheap, but Helene had been so pleased with the shop she had bought two Mimi La Sardine beach towels, for Hilly and Megan.

  Helene began her walk back along the Left Bank. She was glad Jean-Paul had encouraged her to feel at home on either the right or left of the Seine.

  ‘Some people, you know, they feel completely alien on the other side of the river. They get lost, they are afraid they cannot find their way home.’

  Inconceivable, of course, ever to criticise Madame, but Helene knew this was a veiled reference to her famous refusal ever to cross the river. The benefit was that on the Rive Gauche, she and Jean-Paul felt free to hold hands, to kiss in the street. It was what Paris was about, after all, and on this serenely sunlit day by the Seine it seemed as if all Paris was there, and in love.

  Smiling, Helene strolled past the embracing couples, wondering if she should avert her gaze from a girl with improbable red hair sitting astride her boyfriend having full-on sex. And then Helene did a double-take. She stopped, staring in disbelief.

  It was Malveen, with her hair dyed parrot red, her arm scabbed from her cuts, her skirt – what there was of it – pulled right up. And the man she was kneeling over, on the bench, and screwing most energetically, was Alexis.

  The force of Helene’s reaction astounded her. She grabbed Malveen by the shoulders, pulled her back and flung her on the ground. Helene was smaller than Malveen, but Helene had the advantage of surprise. Or thought she had.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Helene shouted. She blazed at Alexis. ‘She’s your sister. Your sister. You don’t fuck your sister!’

  She screamed, as Malveen sunk her teeth into her flesh, just above the ankle. She toppled over. Her blood was up. You want a fight, Malveen? You got it.

  Helene knew from playground scraps that girls fought differently from boys. Boys punched and kicked. Girls scratched, bit and pulled hair.