by Freya North
‘And how about the French ladies?’ Alice asked casually but with slyly lingering eye contact.
Paul regarded her levelly. ‘Some are pretty cool,’ he said, ‘some, however, are hot – so liberated.’ A bolt of desire struck Alice but she quickly swept all evidence behind a coquettish smile. ‘You married?’ he was asking. Alice wanted to say no. She ought to say yes. But nothing came out. ‘That's some fuck-off ring,’ Paul commented.
Alice looked down and wished she wasn't wearing it. ‘It's fake,’ she lied.
‘So you're not married?’ Paul asked.
‘I didn't say that,’ Alice said haughtily and saw how it made his pupils darken, ‘I said my ring was a fake.’ She took a consciously lingering sip at her bottle of beer. ‘The real one is in the safe at home.’
Paul held out his hand and raised an eyebrow. Without batting an eyelid, Alice took off the ring and dropped it nonchalantly into his hand. He assessed its weight and held it up to the light. He placed it back on her finger, his thumb travelling suggestively to the centre of her palm as he did so. ‘Your husband must earn a fair whack,’ Paul commented, chinking his bottle against hers.
‘I'm very lucky,’ Alice acquiesced.
‘He's the lucky one,’ Paul said, regarding her squarely and with no ambivalence.
In his terms of engagement, there's probably a rule of involvement.
Alice walks back to her room.
Some code – both contractual and moral. Like teachers and pupils. Liaisons with clients is probably forbidden. It'll be a sackable offence, no doubt. However, there's probably a fine line drawn and delineated in his job description – and his nature – when it comes to flirting. Flirt all you can and thereby boost morale. He's probably being paid to flirt. He's probably been told to pamper my self-esteem.
Somewhat unsteadily, she slips her key into the lock.
Well, I can't remember the last time I was flirted at. And it's certainly one big, long-overdue ego boost. And I liked flirting back. It's fun. I feel bright and sparky and attractive.
Momentarily, she considers going to find Jacquie or Jeanette for a gin and a gossip. But she knows this would be inappropriate, unwise even. It is late anyway. And though she gets on well with them, they aren't exactly close friends, just the closest she has out here, far from home. She looks at the key in the lock. She takes her mobile phone from her pocket. Perhaps she'll just give Thea a quick call.
And say what? Was there actually anything to say?
I haven't done anything and I have no intention of doing anything. So why do I feel precariously close to the edge of my comfort zone? I'm married after all – and that's life's greatest anchor, isn't it? I'm hardly going to lose my head to some bloody outward bounder. An outward bounder and a cad, no doubt. And I'm out of bounds.
She brought up the blank screen on her phone and wondered what to text Thea. She tapped in H. Hullo? Help? How are you? Having a great time? Having a harmless flirt? Horny bloke – what'll I do? She deleted the H and switched off her phone.
Harmless flirting can't hurt.
It depends how secure is the base you've come from, Alice. You're a married woman, not 100 per cent happy. Flirting may well be unwise.
Pont du Gard
Paul surreptitiously and adeptly fondled Alice's backside the next morning as she disembarked the coach on arrival in Nîmes. She was so surprised, all she could do was gawp.
‘Ever wondered where your jeans come from?’ he asked her.
‘Whistles,’ Alice informed him, appalled that her blush had yet to subside.
‘In the nineteenth century, they started producing a hard-wearing cloth right here in Nîmes,’ Paul said casually, ‘then Levi Strauss started importing it to California, this Serge de Nîmes.’
‘De Nîmes!’ Alice exclaimed as the penny dropped and Paul helped himself to another furtive feel. ‘Denim!’ At once, Alice justified Paul's precocious assault on her bottom. He was just trying to make a point. Quite well, actually.
Paul addressed the group, informing them to meet back at the coach in two hours to head on to the Pont du Gard. ‘You want to get a coffee?’ he asked Alice.
‘No, thanks,’ Alice said, practising what Lush preached about playing hard to get. She flounced off with Jeanette and Jacquie; an obvious wiggle to her denimed derrière for Paul's benefit.
Alice's stomach had flipped with an excited butterfly or two at Paul's lip-licking smile when she boarded the coach later; however it lurched and her spirits plummeted when she caught sight of the Pont du Gard. Was her knowledge of world-famous architectural landmarks really that poor? Had her History A level meant so little? How could she forget Agrippa's monumental aqueduct? And now, apparently in the name of character building and team bonding, they were going to have to walk its length.
‘OK, guys,’ Paul held the coach's microphone like a rock singer, ‘here she is! 275 metres long, almost 50 metres high and built to transport 20,000 cubic metres of water daily into Nîmes – the Pont du Gard! Watch your step – we're walking right on the top – there are slabs over the channel where the water once flowed, but there are no railings. My advice? Don't look down!’
‘I don't do heights!’ Alice hissed at Jeanette and Jacquie. ‘I'm not walking across that – I can't. Seriously. I feel sick just looking at it.’
The previous day, Alice hadn't felt like traipsing up the lower slopes of Mont Saint Victoire because she'd had a cracking hangover and had yet to spy the aesthetic merits of Paul Brusseque. Today, she had been actively looking forward to the day's activities, to banter and eye contact with Paul. However, she was now genuinely alarmed. She didn't want to walk this bridge at all. She did not have a head or the guts for heights.
She had presumed the day would be spent doing things that made her happy, that she could do well at, that would enable her to show off. Like rounders, or being the life and soul. However, now she was faced with a dilemma. If she admitted to her terror and therefore saved herself the trauma of walking across the bridge, she'd thereby deny herself the company of Paul Brusseque. And possibly jeopardize her standing in his affection. But, if she opted for his company and walked the sodding bridge, she'd be a gibbering wreck – which was not a feeling she wanted to feel, nor an image she wanted to project.
‘I'm not doing it,’ Anita announced, happily decisive, ‘no way, José! I had an operation on my knee a couple of months ago.’
‘I'll keep you company, I don't mind,’ said Alice with hastily deployed altruism. ‘I'm staying with Anita,’ she told Paul, mouthing that her colleague was scared.
‘Anita, do you need Alice to stay with you?’ Paul asked because he'd already sensed Alice's anxiety.
‘Crumbs, no,’ Anita said, ‘I'll be fine!’
‘Are you sure?’ Paul asked.
‘Absolutely,’ said Anita, ‘I have my book to read.’
‘Come on, Alice,’ Paul said nonchalantly.
With her mind working overtime yet unable to hatch an escape route, Alice followed Paul, feeling sick but desperate to hide the fact.
‘See up there?’ Paul stopped and came close behind her, pointing ahead so that his inner forearm lightly brushed her cheek. ‘Can you see the phallus? Look between those two arches. See it?’ Alice looked but her nerves were such that she couldn't make out anything other than the horrible height of it all. ‘The Romans carved it as a symbol against bad luck,’ Paul told her. Alice made a strange noise in her throat and turned it into a laugh she intended to sound breezy and not too fake.
Alice is 50 metres above the river. And there are no railings. And there are regular, large gaps in the stone. And everyone else apart from Anita is walking across – albeit some more gingerly than others. But they're all making that journey. Alice can't. She simply can't. And now Paul is coming back with an outstretched hand and a sympathetic but strong voice urging her to make that first step. Come on, lady, you can do it, you can.
Alice takes a step and freezes. She's going to faint. No, she's n
ot. First, she's going to throw up. No, she's not. She's not going to hold his hand. She doesn't want to hold his hand and she doesn't want to be on this bridge no matter how famous and iconic it is. She's scared, really terrified.
‘Face your fear,’ Paul implores her, ‘come on, hon. Face your fear – and trust me. I'll take you there. You'll feel so fucking great. Let's do it. Go!’
‘No, I can't.’
‘Oh, you can – you're a strong woman. You can do it.’
‘I don't want to.’
‘I want you to.’
‘I don't care what you want!’ Alice declares, suddenly absolutely sure of what she wants. ‘I can't and I don't want to and I'm not going to do it. All right?’
Cautiously, she turns away, tears of fear, humiliation and relief catching in her throat. She's shuffling away gingerly; hating herself, hating Paul and his stupid motivational speak, hating herself for wanting to impress him, hating herself for being too weak to. Face her fears? Why the hell should she do that? Just so she can impress some brawny Australian tour guide? Perhaps owning up to one's fears, admitting to one's limitations, is a strength, not a weakness anyway. She's afraid of heights, everybody. Compris? She's happy to be afraid of heights. She loves her vertigo, OK?
‘Don't give up, Alice,’ Paul has come after her again, ‘you're made of stronger stuff than that.’
Alice turns and regards his beautiful, tanned face. ‘Will you just fuck off!’ she growls. ‘Just leave me alone.’
She takes refuge by a crop of pine trees nowhere near Anita. It is quiet and the air is warm and fragrant. Her back is turned towards the aqueduct. If she's so relieved not to be walking the Pont du Gard, why does she feel so wretched?
Flamingos look peculiar when they fly; crooked and too rigid to be aerodynamic, surely. In fact, until Alice had seen them fly, she had assumed the birds to be flightless. Like emus and boobies and dodos. She'd always thought of flamingos as comedy birds with their clonking great beaks, one-legged stance and synthetic colouring. Actually, she hadn't thought about them much at all, until just then, sitting on her own by a Camargue lagoon just outside the hotel's perimeter; the glasswort and tamarisk of the whispering marshland providing a protective screen behind which she could indulge in her bruised mood. Flamingos flew purposefully overhead, animating a dusk sky streaked with a colour identical to their plumage.
‘Artemia.’
It was Paul's voice and she felt his breath on the back of her neck. He sat down behind her. She hugged her knees close to her chest while he stretched his tanned, shapely legs either side of her.
‘Artemia,’ he said again, ‘they're flamingos' favourite snack – a mollusc that gives them their awesome colour. Do those birds look like crazy fuckers or what!’
I think I'm on the verge of being a crazy fucker quite literally, Alice remarked to herself, though the balance just then tipped a little more towards foreboding than excitement. But her gaze was drawn magnetically to the athletic splendour of Paul's legs and her stomach somersaulted as she recalled the sensation of his grope through her jeans to her bottom and beyond. In an instant, she theorized that she was miles from home, no one need know, and it wouldn't mean anything anyway. The notion of sex with this man shot her adrenal glands into overdrive and her scales of morality and reason tipped suddenly again. Caution and misgivings were now outweighed by pure and reckless desire. Rapidly, she justified that a rampant one-night stand with this stereotypical sex god might even be a rather good thing, a necessary elixir. Mightn't it restore the self-confidence she'd lost over recent months? Couldn't it redress the sexual imbalance that had gone untended at home? Wouldn't it put the spring back in her step? She'd be a nicer person for it. Absolutely everyone would benefit.
So Alice turned a blind eye to Mark smiling sweetly in her mind's eye and replaced it instead with an image of him in Marbella, with his sunburnt forehead and his legs paler and half the size of Paul's. She glanced down again at Paul's legs, regarded his hands with their shapely fingers, his bangle of Mexican silver, the provenance of which most probably involved some daring adventure or other.
Alice turned deaf ears to the clangorous warning bells. Her memory failed her when it came to her marriage vows. Instead, she leant back against Paul and while he gabbled on about molluscs and tamarisk or whatever, she wondered just when they would fuck.
Not that night, it transpired, though their verbal foreplay had been such that if Paul had suggested a shag in the corner of the bar Alice would have complied. Instead, people and particulars provided obstacles. Alice was sure if she'd told Jeanette and Jacquie that she wanted to bed Paul and could they please leave, they'd have done so. But there was absolutely no way she was going to tell a soul. And so Jeanette and Jacquie flirted with Paul themselves, apparently oblivious to the frisson reverberating between him and Alice. Furthermore, the bar was full of her colleagues and his; the pair of them could hardly leave without being noticed. And where would they go anyway? Back to Alice's chalet where no doubt Anita was saying her prayers and Rochelle was text-messaging her bloody horse? Or back to his which he shared with the weirdy-beardy Belgian psychologist who'd have a field day analysing their ravenous coupling? Instead, they had to settle for eye contact of burning intensity, sign language of moistened parted lips, secret signs of fingers touching fleetingly as beer bottles were reached for. Their gaze lingered for dangerous but thrilling seconds. They synchronized their trips to the toilet so that they could brush past each other. Alice stared at herself in the mirror after one such rendezvous, looked hard at her reflection. She glowed. The proximity, the inevitability, of sex with Paul was intoxicating, made all the more so by the hassles and logistics blocking their way.
Alice strolls back to her cabin, alternately whistling and humming, a comely but conscious wiggle to her walk. She looks over her shoulder once or twice to see if Paul is following. He isn't. It's simultaneously frustrating yet thrilling. She is drunk on this cocktail of anticipation and desire. She closes the door to her cabin after a long loiter and a last look down the path for Paul. The bedroom lights are off and she tiptoes around, giggling to herself. She tries to locate her mobile phone, fumbling around her possessions in the dark. She finds it and gets into bed, switching it on under the pillow so as not to waken Anita or Rochelle. Two text messages flash up. She replies to Mark's with a brief goodnight. She opens Thea's.
omigod! acceptd offer on my flat !!!! u ok???? Txxxxxx
Alice sends one back replete with congratulations and kisses. Then she lies in the dark and tunes into how high she feels. She and Thea were often at their happiest at the same times. Thank God, though, that their crises never collided.
Good for Thea. Moving on. It's the right time. She's found her Mr Perfect – someone she can both be madly in love with and deeply lust for and Saul feels the same.
Alice's phone vibrates through another text. It's Thea.
thanx! am taping ER 4 u … !! xxxx
Shall I creep out and phone her? How can I text across all that's happening? But God I'd love to share the thrill of it all with her.
Another text message buzzes its arrival. Thea again.
howz u? bored of brie & team-bonding bollox? don't despair – home v soon!!
It struck Alice like a bolt of lead. The next day was the last.
And we're off to some bloody cathedral. It's now not only a case of when I'll screw Paul, but where?
Les Baux
‘I can think of better ways of spending my last day than traipsing around some stuffy old cathedral,’ Alice murmured to Paul, consciously perking out her breasts and licking her lips lasciviously as she brushed against him on leaving break-fast.
‘Get on the coach, wench,’ he all but growled, hooking his finger in the back of her skirt as she passed, affording himself a tantalizing glimpse of her underwear.
The coach trundled the party into the heart of the Alpilles, to the Val d'Enfer and the eerily beautiful village of Les Baux. As the group se
t off on foot, Paul discoursed on how this area, this Hell's Valley, was the inspiration for Dante's Divine Comedy. Alice looked around her, captivated by the stunning natural forms, some eroded into strange tortured shapes by the wind, others carved and hacked into stark angularity by the quarrying of dark red bauxite rock and creamy lime-stone.
Paul stopped. ‘No doubt many of you guys reckoned there were better ways of spending your last day than traipsing around some dull old cathedral.’ He looked around the group, skipped over an offended Anita to linger his gaze on Alice. ‘Well, I'm telling you this is like no cathedral you'll ever have seen but it's a religious experience you won't forget. Welcome, guys, to the Cathédrale d'Images.’
It had been a quarry. But now it was more than a quarry. It had been used as a filmset by Jean Cocteau but it was so much more than a stage. The Val d'Enfer had inspired Dante but it was so much more than a backdrop. Cathédrale d'Images was like a vast gallery, a huge exhibition space, yet the pictures were transitory and did not actually exist at all. The group walked through and down, deep under the mountain, into a gigantic hall sectioned by megalithic columns left by the quarrying as structural support. Every surface had now become a natural screen for the projection of constantly changing images up to 20 metres in size, above, below, side to side, over there, over here, over everyone – 3,000 images. This wasn't an exhibition, this wasn't son et lumière, this made IMAX seem singularly unimpressive.
Underfoot, the limestone had been long since ground into a silt-soft powder as fine as flour, as light as goose down, as deep as a beach. Instinctively, many of the group took off their shoes and shrugged off preconceptions and inhibitions. Alice included. All around, images of Africa burst out against the bare rock face, whilst African music both melodic and intensely rhythmic drowned any other sound or the need to talk. The effect was mesmeric, hallucinatory almost. If the purpose of a cathedral is to suck a visitor deep into its very message, then this disused, re-cycled quarry was a cathedral indeed. Where was Alice? In Africa? In France? Was she hearing with her eyes and seeing with her ears? Why hadn't she been anywhere like this in her thirty-three years? Her body began to sway to the hypnotic drum-heavy soundtrack and she sashayed her way, trancelike, through the halls. Sometimes, she was completely alone, images drenching her. Sometimes, she found herself amongst people – her colleagues, strangers, all sharing the space and the experience and moving to the rhythms instinctively. Savannah and fabric and faces and dried river beds and wildlife and blood-red skies enveloped her. She caught sight of Rochelle, dancing quite bizarrely all by herself, but Alice had no inclination to laugh or cringe. Paul was right. This was a cathedral in so much as it was an awe-inspiring space where all who entered experienced an intense and spiritual headiness. Paul was right. Where was he?
