And What Do You Do?

by Sarah Long

  They could front a new travel series on TV, the camera would just love Jean-Laurent with his razor-sharp cheekbones and sleek floppy hair. Laura might stay behind the camera. She would take the year as a sabbatical from the agency, but if the TV idea worked out, they could go into business together: she would produce, he would present – that sexy French accent would be perfect for a travel programme.

  She had wrapped both her arms around him then, leaning awkwardly across the arm rest, kissing the soft skin behind his ear. ‘I love you, Jean-Laurent. I just really, really love you.’

  Back in London, their dizzy plans were diffused by the grey British winter and they settled back into routine: the account director and the MBA student, two career people on the right track.

  They had secretly already given up on the ‘year-off-let’s-travel-and-possibly-become-famous-documentary-makers’ fantasy by the time Laura discovered she was pregnant. There was a brief moment of mourning for the exciting new lifestyle challenge that now had to be laid to rest. Then they got enthusiastic about the baby. After all, what could be more creative than forging a gorgeous little new life? Especially when it was conceived with the real passion of a relationship in its early stages, rather than the dutiful in-and-out of those who waited until parenthood was supposed to be the next logical step.

  They didn’t entirely write off exotic adventures abroad. As soon as the baby was old enough to be left behind, they promised themselves they would return to Bangkok. Only this time it would not be in some scumbag hotel on the Khao San road, but rather a piece of five-star luxury, possibly the Oriental. If it was good enough for Somerset Maugham, it would be good enough for them.

  And eight years on, here she was, just as they had predicted. Just two details were different: the Oriental hotel had been supplanted by the Sukhothai, and instead of Jean-Laurent she had Dr Antoine Bouchard. Where once she had had her hot young boyfriend, strong and ardent in his creased Indian shirt, she now had Antoine, creamed and coiffed in his luxury hotel dressing gown, climbing into a bed she and Jean-Laurent would have killed for all those years ago. It went some way to redressing the balance, usually weighted in favour of the young, that beds most conducive to love-making could only be afforded by those least troubled by the desires of the flesh.

  Except that you could not accuse Antoine of loss of libido, whatever his age was. Unfortunately, Laura had read so much about hormone replacement in his book that she could think only of how many testosterone supplements must be fuelling his performance. Not to mention selenium and all those other elixirs that surely he must be taking. It was like going to bed with a bag of pharmaceuticals. She closed her eyes and surrendered herself to physical pleasure, while weeping inside for her husband.

  Breakfast was the whole point of hotels. Instead of grilling a bit of stale bread or pouring milk over a Weetabix, you could really go to town. Especially at the Sukhothai, where the buffet was as rich in smoked salmon and tropical fruit as it was in the usual international ‘full English’. Laura was holding a large plate and hovering around the silver tureens in that indecisive way of hotel guests who can’t decide whether to be reasonable and go continental with a bit of muesli, or say to hell with it and pile on the sausages and fried bread. In the end she exercised restraint, thinking about her bikini, but she did allow herself a croissant alongside the lychees and mango.

  She carried her plate back to their table where Antoine was sitting in his tropical leisurewear. Pale trousers with sharply ironed creases and one of those short-sleeved polo shirts that made her think of sales reps dressing down for the informal evening coach excursion. On his feet he was wearing a pair of dandyish cream shoes that made her long for Jean-Laurent’s scruffy trainers. He was drinking a large glass of carrot juice, and Laura wondered whether this might be the secret of his rather orange complexion, or whether that was due to the generous platter of salmon that was his personal breakfast choice.

  ‘Urrgh, raw fish in the morning, I don’t know how you can!’ she said, sitting down opposite him with a shudder that was brought on partly by the salmon, but also by the sight of her lover in his neat, unattractive clothes. Mornings could be very cruel. Breakfast should be taken alone and without conversation, yet here she was obliged to make small talk with a man she felt she barely knew, who happened to be sharing her bed.

  ‘Rich in unsaturated oils,’ replied Antoine. ‘The Japanese have the lowest rate of heart disease in the world on account of their diet of raw fish.’

  He swallowed a mouthful of salmon and raised a folded napkin to dab at his mouth. For some reason this fastidious gesture irritated Laura. It was funny how once you had gone off someone, everything they did started to get on your nerves.

  Antoine failed to pick up on her disenchantment and looked to see what she had on her plate.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough there?’

  He leaned towards her and added in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I would have thought you needed to replace your lost energy. After last night.’

  She raised a weary smile. She was little versed in the etiquette of extra-marital affairs, but guessed that basic good manners obliged both partners to congratulate each other on their sterling performance.

  ‘Yes. Very good, thank you,’ she said.

  Antoine moved the conversation briskly on: time for him to cast more priceless nuggets of information in the direction of his charming young mistress.

  ‘I see you are remaining loyal to your adopted home country.’

  Laura looked confused. What was he on about now?

  He gestured towards her plate.

  ‘The croissant, a symbol of France. But did you know that in fact they come from Austria?’ He was wagging his finger at her in that infuriating French way.

  ‘I do now,’ she replied.

  ‘Siege of Vienna. They couldn’t get bread, so the Poles fashioned croissants in the crescent emblem of the Turks they were fighting. Fascinating, isn’t it?’

  She shrugged, fighting off the image of him as a middle-aged history teacher, parading his knowledge before her, a sulky sixteen-year-old.

  ‘I think perhaps you are right,’ she said as she slipped down the last piece of mango. ‘I think I could manage a bit more to eat.’ She returned to the buffet and loaded her plate high with creamy eggs and crunchy strips of bacon, backed up with French toast and maple syrup.

  He smiled at her as she returned.

  ‘Good girl, get your strength up. We have a full weekend ahead of us after all! And tonight we shall be at Amanpuri. We will have cocktails on the terrace, then after dinner I will lead you down the steep stairs to the beach and we will walk barefoot along the shore beneath the moonlight.’

  Laura imagined him taking off those cream shoes and socks and carefully rolling up his trousers. Like an indulgent, lascivious uncle. What the hell did she think she was doing? It was unfair to say that she had gone off him. It was just that what appeared sexy and sophisticated and elegant in two-hour bursts just didn’t when you had it all the time. It would be like eating chocolate truffles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You’d get sick of them.

  THIRTEEN

  Beneath the drizzle of a grey Parisian sky, Jean-Laurent glanced at his watch and found, to his weary surprise, that it was only ten-thirty. He was sitting on a bench in the Ranelagh Gardens, huddled into his raincoat while Charles-Edouard and Pierre-Louis were astride wooden horses on a belle époque merry-go-round. Armed with wooden batons, they were competing to see who could collect the largest number of metal rings that hung from a wooden panel masterminded by a patient man with kind eyes.

  How he could remain so good-humoured was a mystery to Jean-Laurent. Day in, day out, he slotted in those damned rings, one at a time, and at the end of each session counted out every child’s takings to see who would win the extra free go. It would drive Jean-Laurent nuts after half a morning, but this guy knew no other way – it was his entire working life.

  Charles-Edouard was clea
rly his father’s son, standing up in the stirrups, eyes narrowed, as he approached the target, his first raised triumphantly each time he succeeded. Pierre-Louis was less successful; he had scored only the two rings that the kind man had put on to his baton so he didn’t feel like a complete loser. Jean-Laurent changed the expression on his face as each of his sons turned to him for approval; a smug, good-on-you-my-boy for the elder, and a baleful, never-mind-old-chap for little Pierre-Louis.

  He hoped his second son wouldn’t grow up with an inferiority complex. He knew only too well how that felt, having suffered from a brilliant elder brother who took his bac at sixteen and graduated fifth in his year from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. That was why Jean-Laurent had decided to finish his studies in England – nobody in his family could judge his performance there; and he had come back with a successful, refreshingly natural English wife who knocked his brother’s boring bourgeois blonde into a cocked hat.

  He had been so proud of Laura when he took her home to France to meet the family. His parents hadn’t been too pleased to hear that their son had shacked up with his landlady. He was supposed to be concentrating on his studies, not wasting his time with a non-Catholic Englishwoman who was approaching the age of thirty and should have known better than to set her sights on an impressionable young boy.

  ‘You’ll understand when you meet her,’ Jean-Laurent had reassured them on the phone. ‘You will love her like I do.’

  And they did. In their heads they had conjured up a middle-aged concierge wearing an old dressing gown and hair rollers and jangling a big bunch of room keys, eyeing up her tenants lasciviously before deciding which one should service her tonight. So when Jean-Laurent stepped off the train at Saint-Germain-en-Laye with a pretty young brunette in a camel cashmere coat and expensive-looking boots, they were mightily reassured. Particularly when they realised how well she spoke French, and how successful she was at her job.

  His brother Vincent had been jealous of him for the first time in his life: his own wife had never worked, having married him straight out of college to start a family, and Vincent couldn’t fail to appreciate the charm of this petite anglaise who was a bit of a babe and brought home the bacon.

  Jean-Laurent’s supremacy in the wife stakes was short-lived, however, Vincent’s boring bourgeois wife had retrained after the children and now had a thriving career in the bourse, while Laura had never really got herself back together after the birth of Pierre-Louis. It was once she had stopped work that the rot really set in.

  If only Laura had remained as she was then, when he first knew her. He wouldn’t have dreamed of taking up with Flavia or anyone else. Nobody could touch Laura in those days – she was entirely perfect. He remembered coming out of the tube at Stockwell, looking round fearfully; for a boy raised in Saint Germain-en-Laye it was rather terrifying.

  He had looked at the map and cut through a housing estate to get to Laura’s street, keeping his head down, expecting a hooded killer to knife him at every step. He had already decided against taking the room by the time he reached her house; he wasn’t going to risk that every night. But then she had opened the door and it was too late.

  She was wearing an Agnès B two-piece, with a short skirt that he had followed up the stairs and into the bedroom she was offering for rent. Afterwards he couldn’t remember a thing about the room, only the way she looked, the way her legs joined on to her body, the way she had spoken, so seriously, about how he might not like living there, how he should think about it and call her back. And him panicking that she might give the room to someone else and he might never see her again.

  When he moved in with her they maintained a pretence of him having his own room, but they both knew it wouldn’t be for long and soon he used it only as a study. In those early, magical days, he would go off to his classes every morning and think about Laura, imagining her at work chairing the kinds of meetings he was looking forward to holding himself as soon as he got that MBA under his belt. And every evening they spent together, sometimes alone, sometimes with Laura’s friends, who helped him with his English and flattered him with their attention.

  And then they had the boys, the fruit of their love, the boys he adored unconditionally but who seemed somehow to have transformed Laura into someone he wasn’t sure he knew. Everyone evolved all the time, of course, but when he looked back he found it hard to equate the Laura he loved then with the Laura she was today.

  The roundabout was stopping now; the patient man’s assistant was turning the handle more slowly. It was mechanically operated: there were no vulgar electric motors in the Ranelagh Gardens, which replicated the nineteenth century right down to the mid-calf corduroy trousers favoured by most of the children who played there. Les enfants du seizième, with the side partings for boys, Alice bands for girls, sensible children in burgundy and olive-green clothes purchased by their head-banded mothers so they could grow up looking exactly like their dull-as-ditchwater parents. It wasn’t like that in Montmartre – but Jean-Laurent didn’t want to think about Montmartre and lovers and a different way of life.

  As the antique roundabout drew to a standstill, Charles-Edouard was already petitioning for another go, pointing to his overloaded baton to show that only the underachieving Pierre-Louis would have to be paid for, he the super-hero would once again be awarded the free turn. Jean-Laurent shook his head.

  ‘No, come on Charles-Edouard, it’s raining, keep it for another time. Let’s go to the museum now – that’s what we agreed.’

  He lifted Pierre-Louis off his horse and led them across the road to the musée Marmottan. The trip to the park had been negotiated alongside a more adult-interest visit to see Monet’s paintings, which were displayed in the basement of an agreeable townhouse. They joined a modest queue of visitors – the museum was sufficiently small and obscure to keep away the hordes – and Jean-Laurent enjoyed feeling virtuous as he introduced his small sons to the treasures of their country’s patrimoine.

  ‘Claude Monet,’ Pierre-Louis piped up unprompted as he pointed at one large canvas of water lilies, now the stuff of place mats and greetings cards the world over.

  ‘Well done, good boy,’ said his father, enjoying the approving glances of an attractive leggy American girl whose bottom he had been admiring on the way in.

  ‘We did it at school, with the bridge,’ explained Pierre-Louis.

  ‘So you did!’

  Jean-Laurent remembered the school open afternoon, a wall covered with four-year-old interpretations of the garden at Giverny. The French idea of artistic creativity was to look backwards and offer faithful reproductions of past glories. It was the same at the Louvre school of art: adults were taught not to produce their own work, but rather to see how precisely they could imitate masterpieces of the seventeenth century.

  ‘They all look the same,’ complained Charles-Edouard as they moved on to another room with more swirling blues and lilacs and green. ‘Can we go back to the roundabout now?’

  ‘No, the sandpit, pleeasse!’ begged Pierre-Louis.

  How does Laura do it, thought Jean-Laurent as he sat on another damp park bench and watched Pierre-Louis climbing up the slide for the umpteenth time. How does she do this stuff every day and not turn into a total cabbage-head? It was true that she wasn’t as sharp as she used to be – that was part of their problem – but if he had to do this every day he would become a total zombie. Small children were deeply boring, that was the unspoken truth, and should be left strictly to those who were ill educated enough not to care.

  He glanced over to the nanny corner, where a happy crowd of Filipinos were chatting to each other while their charges dug sand into buckets and raked tracks for their plastic cars. A bloody nanny, that was what they should have had, instead of that pain-in-the-arse Asa. Then Laura could have worked and remained in the land of the professional-thinking person and he wouldn’t have been obliged to look elsewhere.

  Charles-Edouard sat beside him. He was too grand for
the sandpit now and kept an aloof distance, engrossed in his GameBoy. At least, thought Jean-Laurent, his boys were now entering the age of reason. The sandpit could soon become a distant memory – there would be more museums now, and football matches and computer game arcades, the proper fields of recreation for functional human beings.

  Except, of course, that he was to become a father again. More years in the sandpit. The buggy, the car seat, the whole damn paraphernalia. And if he were to leave Laura and go with Flavia, he wouldn’t be allowed the nonchalance of those who have done it all before. Flavia would be the starry-eyed new mother, he could just see it. For her it would be the mircale it had been for Laura, and for him, too – the feeling that no one had ever done this before, brought such a precious being into the world.

  They had neither of them slept a wink that first night at home with Charles-Edouard. They had taken turns to sit by his carrycot and make sure he was still breathing. Jean-Laurent had put his finger by his mouth to try to feel the tiny breath, had watched the little chest rise and fall beneath the white blanket. And when the baby lay there too still, not moving at all, he would quickly touch his forehead, making sure he was still warm. He couldn’t believe a living thing could stay so still.

  Then when he started walking, he took his first steps on Clapham Common. Jean-Laurent had taken him there one Saturday morning when Laura had some work to catch up on. An old lady had been sitting next to him on the bench as he coaxed Charles-Edouard towards him. Eight tottering steps in his tiny doll-like shoes. Jean-Laurent had turned to the old lady in excitement and told her, ‘That’s the first time he’s walked,’ and she had been excited, too, for this charming young Frenchman so proud of his son.

  And now Flavia would want him to go through all that again, all that angst and wonder and emotional draining. She didn’t seem to appreciate that he had already been there. Twice. It had all been just as wonderful and bewildering with Pierre-Louis. He didn’t want it all over again. He wouldn’t have it. He had been abused and taken advantage of. She would have to go it alone.