French Kissing

by Catherine Sanderson

  Rendez-vous came with no guarantees. I could invest an hour of my precious time chatting with beau_ténébreux, only to find he’d dropped off the face of the earth the next day. Had he met someone he liked, or let his subscription lapse? I’d probably never know. Similarly, there was nothing to prevent clair2lune from standing me up, or sending an apologetic text message minutes before we were due to meet, calling everything off. Online dating reminded me of the HBO crime series I’d spent so many hours watching. Every available lead had to be examined, and many trails would, no doubt, go cold. But one day my perseverance would pay off. That was the way these things worked.

  A lazy Saturday morning in late October found me surfing Rendez-vous in my pyjamas, as raindrops pitter-pattered against the living-room window. I’d stuck half a dozen Post-it notes around the edges of the screen: penses-bêtes, each one bearing a pseudonym, along with a few salient, memory-jogging details so I could remember who was who among the handful of members I was currently targeting. Nico’s mother, Catherine, would be collecting Lila that afternoon to take her to their house in Chantilly for the first half of the ten-day Toussaint school holiday, and my mission was to pepper the coming Lila-free week with after-work rendezvous.

  Lila, who had been engrossed in the construction of an elaborate pink and white Lego castle since breakfast time, hopped up on to the sofa to nestle in the crook of my arm, curious to see what was monopolizing my attention. When the screen darkened for a moment, shifting down a gear into power-save mode, her hand shot out, quick as lightning, to stroke the mouse pad and restore the brightness. I chuckled. Ryan had once told me his cat Clyde did exactly the same thing.

  ‘Is it a shop, Mummy?’ Lila asked, staring at the Rendezvous homepage. ‘Like the Ooshop, where you buy things for our dinner?’ I smiled and shook my head. I could appreciate why Rendez-vous reminded her of the online supermarket: the fonts were identical, the colour schemes similar. The only real difference: in place of pack shots of cereal there were headshots of men.

  ‘No, darling, it’s not a shop.’ I was reluctant to elaborate further, anxious to minimize the chances of her repeating something compromising to Nico. ‘It’s a place where Mummy can talk to people with her computer.’ If only things were that simple. If only I could select a man, pop him into my virtual shopping basket, then press ‘Proceed to checkout’. Mind you, some sort of ‘Try before you buy’ or ‘Satisfaction or your money back’ guarantee would be necessary. You couldn’t trust Rendez-vous packaging to be entirely accurate about its contents, as I’d already learned to my cost.

  My first proper date had taken place the previous weekend. After a few lengthy chat conversations with an English accountant, pseudonym Rosbif, I’d decided that, if I was going to meet someone in the flesh, at last, he’d be good for a trial run. Chatting in my mother tongue had made the first moves refreshingly easy, lulling me into a false sense of security, perhaps. There had been none of the agonizing over genders and verb conjugations which tended to slow me down when typing my retorts in French. Nor did I have to wince at his horrendous grammar or wait an eternity for him to riposte, as I often did with those Frenchmen who insisted on practising their faltering English. So when Rosbif – real name Marcus – suggested meeting for a Saturday-afternoon drink in an English bar in the Marais, I accepted. I had fond memories of Stolly’s, his suggested venue, off rue Saint Antoine. I’d spent many a night there with Kate back in our El Paso days.

  Alighting from the métro at Hôtel de Ville, I caught sight of my nervous reflection in the windows of the shops I passed as I walked briskly towards my destination. I’d kept things simple: jeans, trainers, a favourite T-shirt with a bow detail on the neckline, a lightweight coat. It was Saturday afternoon and I wanted to look casual, as though I’d taken a break from a shopping trip to meet Marcus for an hour. My heart drummed in my chest nonetheless, and my breaths came short and shallow. This was a big deal. I’d been a member of Rendez-vous for a little over a month now, and Marcus – although I hadn’t told him as much – was about to be my first offline contact.

  It was only when I pushed open the door and stepped inside the bar that I realized somewhere so small – and so quiet during the day – wasn’t going to be the most discreet place to pop my blind-date cherry. It was daunting enough, the prospect of having to make small talk with a complete stranger, let alone having to do so with half the bar listening in.

  Marcus, who’d been pictured looking tanned and rugged against an Alpine background on his profile, had put on some weight since the photo was taken, and his natural skin tone was as pale as my own. He’d arrived at the bar before me and commandeered one of the few tables to the left of the entrance – a blessing, as I couldn’t imagine perching side by side on one of the high bar stools lining the other walls. Before him sat a half-empty pint of stout and a copy of the Guardian, which was folded and unread. He glanced over as I crossed the threshold and flashed me a welcoming smile. Faced with the reality of him, my first impression was that he looked a little too English for my liking.

  Comparing every man I met to Nico would get me nowhere, I knew that, but breaking the habit of the last decade was easier said than done. The thing that had always set Nico apart from all the other men I’d been out with was that he’d seemed exotic. He was a foreign, alien territory I’d set out to conquer; a person whose thought patterns would never cease to astonish me, so different were they to my own. Marcus, on the other hand, looked almost familiar, as though he were a composite of half a dozen people I’d studied with at university. There was nothing exotic about him, or at least nothing immediately obvious.

  ‘You must be Sally,’ Marcus said, standing for a moment and shaking my slightly clammy hand. His plummy, public-school voice sounded too high-pitched for his frame, and I realized that, when we’d chatted online, I’d imagined it sounding deeper and more virile. ‘What’ll you have to drink?’ Marcus gestured towards the tiny bar behind me. I caught sight of a poster on the exposed stone wall behind him advertising the in-house brew – ‘cheap blonde’ – and decided half a lager would do just fine. Then I slid into the seat opposite Marcus, wondering whether the disappointment I’d felt when I’d first laid eyes on him had been writ large across my face.

  ‘Don’t you wish you could buy the proper version of the Guardian in Paris, instead of this pithy little export edition?’ I said, casting around for something to say and taking my cue from his prop. ‘I always feel a bit short-changed when I buy it.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not all that bothered, to be honest…’ Marcus’s tone was dismissive. ‘I only tend to read the sports pages…’ If things coasted downhill from thereon in, it wasn’t solely because Marcus’s social life seemed mostly to consist of propping up the bars of various English pubs while he watched the football or the rugby on their widescreen TVs, with the occasional pub quiz or curry night with ‘the lads’ from his firm thrown in. It was also because his level of French, as he admitted without apparent embarrassment, was poor, even though he was taking weekly lessons. There wasn’t much incentive to improve, he explained, because the official language of his office was English.

  As for meeting women, he’d been out with a few ‘French birds’ – as he so charmingly put it – but qualified them as ‘excessively high maintenance’. ‘My last girlfriend, Diane, a secretary from work, was a full-time job in herself,’ he complained. He took a long sip of his stout and I wondered whether to point out the creamy moustache it had left on his top lip, before deciding against it. ‘I couldn’t go anywhere on my own without her sulking,’ he elaborated. ‘What a nightmare that was! I swore off French birds after that. I unticked the “French” nationality box on Rendez-vous.’

  I flinched at his last two words and looked around, wondering whether anyone in the bar had overheard, uncomfortable with the idea of people knowing how and where we’d met. But the handful of customers appeared to be either engrossed in their own conversations or reading their newspapers. I’d have t
o stop being so paranoid.

  Although I’d been quick to judge Marcus, when I’d first arrived in Paris, ten years earlier, I’d lived much as he seemed to now. Kate and I had been regular fixtures at a number of well-known Anglo-haunts: the Lizard Lounge, the Auld Alliance, even the Frog and Rosbif pub. When Marcus asked me what had brought me to Paris in the first place, I launched into the well-worn story of how I’d become friendly with a French girl called Elodie, an ERASMUS exchange student, in my final year at Manchester university. She planned to be away all summer, on holiday with her family, and was looking for a summer tenant for the tiny maid’s room she rented in the Latin Quarter. When I split up with Gavin, my boyfriend of three years, days before our finals, our plans to go travelling together for a few months had bitten the dust. I couldn’t face going alone, but the idea of moving back in with Mum and Dad for the summer depressed me, so I begged Elodie to rent her garret to me. My French was pretty ropey back then – I’d studied it to A-Level, then dropped languages in favour of history – but it was good enough to get by in a waitressing job. Once the summer season was over, I’d return to England to study for a PGCE. I planned to teach history in a secondary school.

  I glossed over meeting Nico – saying only that I’d met a Frenchman and decided to stay on when the summer came to an end – but falling for Nico and falling for Paris were two things I found difficult to distinguish between, so tightly were they bound together. As I began to spend more and more time in Nico’s company, I’d deserted my English haunts, moving on to pastures French. Kate met Yves not long afterwards, and her life had followed a similar trajectory.

  The changes had been subtle at first. Back in England, I’d eaten all meat well done but, with Nico’s guidance, I was soon ordering my steaks à point, then saignant. I graduated from Emmental and Comté cheese to Roquefort, Camembert and St Marcellin, although I still had a problem with anything that looked too mouldy and alive, as though it might crawl off the plate if left unattended. My French had improved to the point where I was often mistaken for a native. Ten years later, I was no Parisienne, but I’d come a long way – far enough to find the prospect of taking a step backwards, by getting involved with someone like Marcus, unattractive. For an Englishman to appeal to me now, I realized, he’d have to be a committed Francophile, not someone who, by his own admission, wasn’t even interested in scratching the surface.

  When I’d drained the bitter dregs of my rather flat lager, I decided to make my excuses and leave. ‘I’m afraid I have to get across town to meet a friend,’ I apologized, glancing at my watch. ‘I’m sorry. I should have set aside more time. I’m new at all this…’

  ‘Don’t worry, I get it. I can tell the sparks aren’t flying today, if you can forgive me for being blunt,’ said Marcus, surprising me by showing he was far more perceptive than I’d have given him credit for. ‘But if you wanted to tag along and meet the lads sometime, for a pub quiz or a drink… They’re a nice crowd.’

  ‘The thing is,’ I said carefully, ‘being a mother and all, I have so few nights free… I’m not really in the market for new friends.’ I certainly didn’t sign up so I could be co-opted into an Anglo pub-quiz team, or cast in the role of honorary bird on some lads’ nights out.

  ‘Fair enough.’ Marcus stood up, rolling his newspaper into a cylinder and stuffing it into his jacket pocket. ‘But I should probably mention that I’m also available for no-strings sex,’ he added, his expression deadpan. I gave a nervous laugh, temporarily lost for words. The answer was no – I had no desire whatsoever to see the pale, freckled torso which surely lay under Marcus’s rugby shirt – but I couldn’t work out for the life of me whether he was making a joke or a serious proposition. I decided to consider it the former and thanked him mock-graciously for his ‘kind offer’. Seconds later, I beat a hasty retreat.

  ‘I’d definitely rather be alone than with someone like Marcus,’ I mumbled to myself, shuddering at the memory. After tutting over his misleading profile picture one last time, I deleted Marcus from my Rendez-vous ‘favourites’. Lila, who’d tired of watching me ‘manshopping’, had returned to her Lego castle and didn’t even look up. ‘Back to the drawing board,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I have to be able to do better than this…’

  Catherine rang the doorbell at two on the dot, as punctual as always. When she’d finished hugging, kissing and cooing over her granddaughter, she pulled herself upright, one hand clutching the kitchen counter to steady herself, and turned her attention to me. After the briefest of hesitations, she deposited a resounding kiss on both my cheeks. I took this as a sign: Catherine was determined to behave as though nothing had changed between us.

  Surveying the living room, she gave an almost imperceptible nod of approval. Last time she’d seen it, back in April, the parquet was covered with plastic sheeting and I’d greeted her wearing my oldest jeans, a paint-splattered bandana shielding my hair. Catherine was dressed as she was now, in a pencil skirt and cashmere twin-set, her brown bob glossy, fresh from a brushing at her local branch of Jacques Dessange.

  Her appraisal of my apartment complete, she turned back to me, addressing me in French, as always. I happened to know her English wasn’t half bad but, like Nico, she preferred to address me in French, so as not to put herself at a disadvantage. ‘Vous avez bonne mine, en tout cas,’ she remarked, looking me up and down with narrowed eyes.

  I’d often meant to ask Nico whether the French equivalent of ‘You’re looking well’ was intended as a backhanded compliment. In Yorkshire, coming from my mother or one of her friends, it passed as a not-so-secret code for ‘You’ve put on weight.’ But today the second half of Catherine’s sentence fascinated me even more. What did she mean by ‘in any case’? Was she unpleasantly surprised that my new life as a single mum seemed to agree with me? Maybe I was being oversensitive, but I felt certain there must be a mild rebuke lurking in there somewhere.

  ‘Can I get you a coffee?’ I said, knowing full well that Catherine, whose capsule espresso machine was her pride and joy, would consider my lowly Carte Noire filter coffee little better than dishwater, but offering for the sake of form. I didn’t expect Catherine would want to stay and chat. Seeing her without Nico was even more surreal than seeing Sophie had been.

  ‘Merci Sally, je ne dirais pas non,’ Catherine replied, to my amazement, lowering herself gingerly into the sofa. ‘My back’s playing up today,’ she explained. ‘I find Philippe’s new car even more uncomfortable than the last. I wish he would let me test the seats for comfort before he buys them…’ Philippe, Nico’s father, seemed to be forever trading in and upgrading his cars and was often to be found with his nose inside the Argus de l’Automobile. After parking at Nico’s, he’d taken a métro down to Hôtel de Ville to spend an hour or two in the basement of the BHV department store. Ever since he’d retired from his job as a tax inspector a couple of years earlier, Philippe had become almost as obsessed with home improvements as he was with cars, and no trip to Paris was now complete without a pilgrimage to BHV’s cavernous ‘rayon bricolage’.

  Spooning coffee grounds into the conical paper filter, I made a mental note to casually move the open laptop, which lay on the sofa, centimetres from Catherine, at the very first opportunity. There were some things my ex-almost-mother-in-law didn’t need to know about me, and the fact that I’d joined Rendez-vous was top of that list.

  ‘Are you meeting Philippe chez Nicolas?’ I enquired, pointedly using Nico’s full name, my back to Catherine as I hunted for the sugar bowl in the crockery cupboard. Mission accomplished, I set two miniature coffee cups and saucers on a small tray, added hastily polished teaspoons, then rounded the kitchen counter and tidied away the laptop. The coffee machine was doing a great deal of hissing and bubbling but, so far, there wasn’t much to show for its labours. ‘Lila’s suitcase is all packed…’ I gestured towards the garish pink Hello Kitty suitcase which stood by the coffee table. Packing for the week’s holiday with her grandparents had been a fas
tidious chore. Sorting through Lila’s clothes, I’d carefully checked for stains which hadn’t washed out, frayed hems or missing buttons, before giving everything a quick once-over with the iron. Folding her T-shirts and laying them carefully in the suitcase, I’d chastised myself inwardly. Why was I still pulling out all the stops to impress Catherine? Why crave her Chanel No. 5-scented approval now, when I would never officially be a part of the Canet family? I supposed it was a question of pride: I didn’t want to give Catherine any excuse to think I wasn’t managing fine on my own.

  Nico’s mother had always been terrifyingly meticulous. She could afford to be: a cleaning lady looked after her house, ironing her bedlinen and waxing her floors, leaving her free to obsess about the finer details, like plumping the sofa cushions just so, or laying the table with the kind of precision you’d expect in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The first time I’d dined at the Canet house, on the outskirts of Chantilly, I’d been assigned my own cloth napkin, complete with silver napkin ring. Six months later, when we made our second visit, I’d discovered my name engraved upon it. It was a gesture I’d found both touching and unnerving, because of the permanence it implied. Had my name now been removed, I wondered, leaving a blank canvas for my successor? Or was the napkin ring languishing in the back of a drawer, in case I came to my senses, as Sophie seemed to think I should?

  I’d been right about one thing: Catherine hardly touched her coffee when I set it down in front of her. Staying for a drink had indeed been nothing but a pretext for a ‘little chat’. Luckily, after rapturously greeting her beloved mamie, Lila had returned to the episode of Charlotte aux Fraises she’d been watching before Catherine arrived, sitting cross-legged on the floor – a little close to the screen for my liking – and adopting her habitual trance-like TV-watching expression. ‘I wouldn’t normally allow Lila to watch television when there’s a guest in the house,’ I said, helping myself to sugar and settling into the sofa by Catherine’s side, ‘but if there’s something you want to talk to me about, I can leave it on for a while, if you like?’