‘That was so kind of you, coming round to see me.’
‘Yeah, it was difficult. There were so many don’t knows. For a start, I wasn’t sure how long you’d be.’
Helene understood about that one. ‘While you were waiting, what did you do?’
‘I didn’t want to sit down. Didn’t want you coming in and finding me loafing on your sofa. So I walked up and down. Stood there. Stared out at the rain. Wondered what you’d look like coming down the street. But I didn’t know what you looked like. And I didn’t know how you’d react to me…’
And you didn’t know, and never will, that sometimes I’d make love to your father wearing nothing more than a necklace of triple pearls. And of course you couldn’t be aware that your father tasted creamily of preserved lemons.
*
Marc offered to help with cleaning the apartment on Saturday, but she sent him out for the English papers and arranged to meet him for brunch.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘The woman upstairs hogged all the hot water for the shower. I had to wait.’
He ordered champagne and orange juice. ‘Well you smell very nice. Not surprising, mind you, considering the pharmacie you keep in the shower-room.’
‘Oh, that’s Elodie. She brings samples. You can meet her Sunday if you like. She’s coming to lunch.’
‘Great. What are we having?’
Helene laughed and put on an atrocious Irish accent, ‘Marc, can you cook at all, at all?’
‘No,’ grinned Marc. ‘Well, spag bol I suppose.’
‘Want to learn?’
‘Sure. When do we start?’
‘Tomorrow morning, first thing. At the market.’
As she suspected, not only had he never cooked a decent meal, he had never engaged in serious food shopping. And in her turn, she had never been shopping with anyone else. Not even Noel, because he had his specialist shops he would never tell her about. But it was useful having a man along, she realised, handing Marc straw baskets and loading in new potatoes, leeks, green beans, carrots, celery, onions, fresh mint, thyme and tarragon.
Progress was slow, because he kept stopping. Yes, he would like to try the honey made from the Tuileries bees and the Coreze cheese and omigod, just look, are they figs?
Men and figs. Ugh. Helene steered him towards the lettuces and seedless grapes, then to the butcher for a Landes chicken.
‘We didn’t get any flowers,’ Marc said, as they got home.
‘Don’t worry.’ Helene was rapidly unpacking the baskets. ‘Elodie will bring some.’
‘Okay. What shall I do?’
‘Read the recipe, and find some dry white wine we can cook with. Then do the veg, like it says.’
The recipe book was one Helene used often, which she’d initially bought because of its tempting title: Roast Chicken and Other Stories. Today, the chicken would be poached.
As Marc laboriously began splitting the carrots, celery and leeks into short lengths, Helene laid the table, prepared the cheese plate, then studded an onion with three cloves. She placed the chicken in her largest boiling pot, added the vegetables, peppercorns, the white wine and enough water just to cover. When the water had boiled she skimmed it, and turned down the heat, detailing her sous-chef to wash the new potatoes.
‘Right. Done that. What’s next?’
‘Answer the door,’ she said, as the buzzer sounded. ‘And introduce yourself. Elodie doesn’t know of your existence yet.’
Elodie hid her surprise behind a huge bunch of roses, as always beautifully gift-wrapped by her chosen flower girl at the market.
‘I know what to do with these,’ Marc said. ‘I’ve seen my mother.’
Elodie gave Helene a look that said, Oh sweet! And What’s Going On? Meanwhile, Marc trimmed the stems of the roses, filled a plastic bucket with water and put them out on the cool landing.
‘Hope that wretched woman upstairs doesn’t come and nick them,’ Helene said.
Marc took the Simon Hopkinson cookery book to show Elodie. Suddenly he let out a wail. ‘It says you take out the chicken and throw away the veg.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I spent hours doing them!’
At 1.30 Helene served the chicken on a large warmed plate, covered with a lemon cream sauce, and surrounded by the green beans and minted potatoes. Over the second bottle of Petit Chablis, when Elodie was talking about her need to expand her business, Marc constructed a marketing plan for her. He devised an Elodie brand. Blue glass bottles with white labels and a violet-blue flax flower.
‘Natural, clean, fresh,’ he said. ‘And you’d do the complete range, shower gel, shaving balm, shampoo –‘
‘It’s not called shampoo any more,’ Elodie laughed. ‘In the posh salons it’s hair bath.’
Even so, Helene could see Elodie was impressed with him. Helene fetched the cheese and salad. She’d found some Carr’s water biscuits which was fortunate as she and Marc had forgotten to buy bread.
‘Did you do marketing at university?’ Elodie asked.
‘No. International politics. Except all that equips you for is to be prime minister or a spy. But I had a vac job in a store and got interested in what sells and why.’ He opened a bottle of Côte Rotie.
‘Didn’t want to work in a store because beyond the staff door, conditions are dingy. So I got my present job and my boss has taught me everything.’
‘You are lucky, you two,’ Helene said. ‘I wish I could find something I could really get stuck into. I mean, I know I’m not the type to win a place in the executive car park, or pole position at the water cooler. But there must be something I could be good at.’
She knew, she told them, what she didn’t want. A windowless environment. Staring at a screen. Endless, mindless typing. Having to be nice to people all the time (forget hotels, restaurants, training as Elodie’s assistant.)
‘All these negatives,’ commented Marc.
‘Exactly,’ said Elodie. ‘Join the real world, Helene.’
*
Elodie and Marc washed up and Helene settled at the table to catch up on yesterday’s papers. When Elodie had gone, Marc rescued the roses and switched on the TV to some golf.
Apart from tennis at Wimbledon, Helene only found sport interesting when she watched it with someone else. You learned a lot. As Noel slavered over impressively muscled black guys, Helene marvelled at the stamina of the long distance athletes, and the apparently impassive way the 100 yard runners recovered from a faulty starting gun.
Now, with Marc, it was golf. A player was putting and Marc was shouting, ‘Nuni, nuni!’ He laughed at Helene’s puzzled look. ‘It means you have to hit the ball hard enough to get in the hole. So, Never Up, Never In.’
Never up, never in. It sounded to Helene like an adolescent boy. And why didn’t golfers wear sexier pants?
‘Look at the way the camera-work has improved,’ enthused Marc. ‘When I used to watch as a kid, the ball was always disappearing into the wide blue yonder.’
Helene found the phrase stirring. Wide blue yonder. Of all colours, blue seemed to her the most evocative. Blue Remembered Hills. Singing the Blues (was that Tommy Steele?), My Blue Heaven, Blue Velvet –
‘Oh God, he’s sliced it!’
Helene’s thoughts wandered. Many nationalities represented on the links and despite the unappetising rear lines, she couldn’t help wondering what they’d be like in bed. Well, she had her Life of Crime to assist her here. The faces may be a half-forgotten blur but the international sexual differences remained with her.
The French favoured a subtle approach but were not afraid to move in at exactly the right time. And Parisian men always noticed your shoes.
Italians were surprising. She had imagined it would be all Mama and posing in expensive sunglasses. Wrong. Italian men possessed not just surface charm, but real stamina.
Spanish. Well, there was Spain and Spain. Andalucians, though lazy, were basically moody. Catalonians were intelligently
interesting over dinner and then tender in bed.
Englishmen, in Helene’s experience, had the most receptive, sensitive cocks. It didn’t matter what size. (Why did Englishmen go ON about the size of their equipment? With a bit of work from me, Helene thought, any cock will come good.)
Germans. Another revelation. Caring, witty, unlike the S –‘
‘That must have been boring for you,’ Marc switched off the TV.
‘You said yesterday to get the Telegraph. But I could only get the Mail and the Guardian.’
‘That’s okay. I’m sure I can learn to love the Guardian.’
‘Do you want the sofa?’
‘No thanks. I can spread the papers out at the table.’
He stretched along the sofa, legs dangling over the padded arm, his head propped on her pillow at the other end. ‘That was a fantastic lunch, Helene. What are we going to do next week?’
She hesitated. ‘Well, we can see what you’d like. But you don’t have to hang around me. What about your own friends?’
‘Oh, they’re mainly work mates. I see enough of them. Even so I will be very late back Friday. I’m meeting up with the guys from the band I was in.’
Ripping Velcro. ‘Tell me, the one with the shaved head. Does he really play the guitar with his teeth?’
‘Yeah. Nicked the idea from Jimi Hendrix. Took him ages to get it right.’
‘Why did you jack it in – the band?’
He shrugged. ‘They wanted to do the bad boy thing and I didn’t. All that aggression. I couldn’t take it seriously.’
‘But Marc, Ripping Velcro, they’re not just a uni band any more. They’re world famous. We’re talking mega-bucks. How d’you feel, missing out on all that?’
He regarded her steadily. ‘What are you going to believe, Helene? That I don’t give a toss about the dosh? Press One. That I never wanted to tour, get shagged by frantic fans? Press Two. Or – look, I played keyboard. I can read music. My mother made me learn. But in a pop band, that’s not a priority. What the kids want to see is head-banging, blood all over the keys stuff. And I just wasn’t good enough.’
‘For heaven’s sake, it’s not Beethoven, it’s rock, it’s pop.’ Helene didn’t say, ‘it’s nonsense,’ but he responded,
‘Okay. What it comes down to is that in any job, what you really want is to be admired, respected by the people you admire. Who you know are good. Your peers. I don’t give a fuck about the girls. They know nothing, except how to throw their knickers at the stage. Big deal. What I wanted was one of the great players coming up to me and saying, hey, we’ve been listening to you, how about sitting in on our session? That would have been the ultimate accolade. And it never happened. And I knew it never would.’
So you got out, Helene thought, before you were levered out or found out. You don’t realise this yet, Marc, but you and I, we’ve got more in common than just a relationship with Jean-Paul.
Helene went back to the papers, and suddenly, she was looking at an item in yesterday’s Guardian that she just couldn’t believe. Well, in fact she could believe it, because it was all extraordinarily familiar.
‘I mean, in my day, you had to do one and a half pages every week,’ said the man in Raincoats. ‘Proper sentences. Proper paragraphs. And any demands for more pocket money got the blue pencil from matron.’
Rapidly, she read on, ‘Just a continual whine for more batteries, more cash …fridges in the dorm …in my day the dorm was so cold the windows iced up on the inside.’
It was headlined, The Honeymoon Hotel, a billet-doux from Odette.
She threw the page at Marc. ‘Look at that! Look! It’s Odile. She must have written that.’
‘Who’s Odile?’
‘She runs the hotel round the corner. Above VTR. She’s disguising herself as Odette and getting her own back in print. And getting paid for it.’
Marc laughed. ‘Clever, though. Odette-Odile.’ He saw Helene’s blank look. ‘It’s a ballet. Probably involves swans. Ballets often do.’
He finished reading the article. ‘Look, she’s probably making this up. No-one –‘
‘I was there,’ Helene cut in. ‘I heard him say all that. Only he wasn’t in Raincoats, he was in Luggage.’
‘Think I prefer Raincoats. She’s clever, your friend Odile.’ Marc sat up. ‘Hey, get your laptop. Let’s look up the Guardian website.’
And there they were. Previous Billets-Doux from Odette. The story was that she and her husband were running a hotel called the Mermaid on the south coast of England, which catered for honeymooners, respectable married couples and businessmen. Backpackers, children and pets were not welcome.
Odette’s previous column had featured the trial of the new arrivals:
‘The women are straight up to the room, checking the sheets are clean. The husbands patrol the grounds, sniffing the air, marking out their new territory. You half expect them to pee up against a tree.
‘Vernon and the husband then get the luggage upstairs. Vernon says you can tell at once who’s going to be trouble. If they say oh, how lovely, thank you very much thank you, we’re safe for a few days until the champagne breakfasts go to the girls’ heads and if you don’t slap them down, Vernon says, they act like Lady Muck.
‘On our own, Vernon and I call the guests by the name of the suite they’re in. The Silver Sand couple were a pain right from the start. He was what I call a strutter, and she had an affected, faux aristo way of rhyming Perrier with furrier.
‘The first culprit was the morning sun in Blue Grotto. His wife (they always blame the wife) preferred a room with evening sun. So Vernon whisked them to Pearly Dawn. I should like to make it clear at this point that the names of the suites and all the décor were chosen by Vernon’s first wife.
‘Two minutes into Pearly Dawn and the husband was on what Vernon calls the blower, criticising the bathroom, especially the sculpted carpet that continues up the sides of the sanitary suite.
‘This polo-necked toilet,’ he said. ‘My wife says it’s unhygenic.’
‘Since the last move, to Silver Sand, his wife alleges to have detected corked wine, is allergic to the bathroom soap, ordered a light supper of roast partridge to be sent up and then got her hubbie on the blower again, demanding to know if the birds were English or French.
‘Vraiment, I thought longingly of old-fashioned seaside boarding houses, where guests were locked out at 9.30 am. and not allowed back in until five.’
‘What if Mr Luggage reads it?’ Helene asked Odile as they relaxed in the snug.
‘Nonsense. He drives a Toyota. People who drive Toyotas do not read the Guardian.’
‘All right, what about Vernon? Your husband.’
Odile shrugged. ‘He’s probably in prison. They don’t have the Guardian in prisons, do they?’
‘I don’t know how you find the time,’ Helene said.
‘You always find time for what you really want to do. And these days, the email makes everything so much easier.’ Odile poured two cognacs. ‘Now, ma petite. What about you? What’s been happening in your life?’
Helene told her about Jean-Paul. But not about Marc.
‘Ah, pauvre petite, that is hard for you. To lose your lover. Terrible. But there is one thing you should remember about grief. One important thing. Grief is not linear. Grief is spiral. So just when you think you’re getting over it, it all comes whacking back. But you can’t avoid it. That’s unwise. You face it, embrace it – and you learn.’
*
Marc was still out with his Ripping Velcro friends when she got home. He had said he’d be late. She put on a nightshirt and fetched a bottle of his excellent red wine, a box of liqueur chocolates and two peaches. Then she lay on the sofa and read, at last, Jean-Paul’s final letter to her:
‘Chérie,
‘Difficult this, isn’t it?
‘I have asked Marc to make sure you get this and give you the news. Forgive me for giving you such a shock but I thought, if I try to pr
epare you, it might never happen…
‘I wanted you to know how much I have appreciated knowing you. You are a generous lover, a delightful companion and it has been such a pleasure having such an engaging and entertaining woman on my arm in Paris.
‘I hope you will be happy. I hope you will think of me sometimes.
‘I never called you La Belle Helene. Too much of a cliché. But to me, you have always been Ma Belle Helene.
‘With love,
Jean-Paul.’
She reached for the wine and the tissues. ‘I hope you will think of me sometimes.’ That broke her.
Jean-Paul I think of you every time I cross our bridge, and walk on the Right Bank, and go past Flotte, where we had so many happy times. I think of you, with your elegant walk, coming through the door, taking me in your arms, and asking me everything about my day, always attentive, always interested, as if my trivial goings on were in any way important. And of course, I think of you every day, when I look at your son. He’s given me a photo of the two of you. I’ve put it in a frame but I can’t bear to look at it. It all hurts too much.
She couldn’t see the photo now for the storm of tears that wracked her. She had never before understood what it meant to sob your heart out.
*
Helene awoke – when? Sun bright. Must be midmorning.
Where? Where am I?
Oh God. I’m in bed. My bed. With Marc.
He was lying peacefully beside her, in his pale blue pyjamas, his face turned towards her.
Helene kept very still. A necessity, actually, as any movement made her head experience the drilling of the M4 being dug up. She’d drunk a bottle of red wine on top of two cognacs with Odile. Not a good idea.
And what happened? What happened? Can’t remember a thing.
Marc must have come in and sat down with me and oh hell, please don’t let me have made a pass at him. Don’t tell me I clung to him, begging for comfort, for him to take me to bed and cuddle me and then I seduced him.
Not that I’d mind, except I wouldn’t want it to be like that. Where I couldn’t remember. Where I’d embarrassed him.
Marc was stirring. She wondered what on earth to say.
The Price of Love Page 15
