‘No. You all run away when we tell you to stop wid da shoutink.’
‘Thank Christ for that.’
‘So you spik wid air today, den you don’t wek us up at tree o’clock no more, OK?’ Now his face was betraying his real emotions about having drunken Brits serenade him with shouts, laughs, and the splash of urine. ‘It was only Alyexa stop us, or we go and break your face.’
Leaving aside for the moment how close I’d come to having my face broken, here was positive news.
‘So she knows I was here last night, and she still wants to talk to me today?’
‘Mebbe.’
‘Does she know I’m here now?’
‘No. She knows you was here at tree o’clock. Is all. I see you arribe just now, I decide to stop you from shouting no more. Alyexa, Alyexa . . .’ He grunted his laugh again. ‘You sit, you wait, mebbe she spik wid you, mebbe not.’
‘She’s still asleep?’
‘Yeah. She’s tired. She was awake at—’
‘Tree in the morning, yes, I’m really sorry.’
My head was hurting enough now, and I didn’t like to imagine how much more it would have hurt if a tin dustbin lid, however dinky, had been rammed repeatedly against it last night.
So I sat at the table, slowly sobering up as I watched breakfast-TV presenters gabbling merrily about nothing, saw some football highlights flash across the screen, wondered vaguely again why Yuri didn’t get the same media coverage as other foreign club chairmen, and waited.
It felt like days. But it might have been decades.
Because when Alexa finally walked into the kitchen, not only was her hair now henna’d and shoulder-blade length, her whole face had aged thirty years.
What’s more, time had transformed her into a purple-robed hippy, with a faint whiff of incense about her, and the piercing look of someone who’s been wearing black make-up at the corner of her eyes every day since she was fifteen.
‘Bonjour, Paul,’ she said, not unkindly.
This, even I realized, was not Alexa. It was her mum.
If it’s true that studying your girlfriend’s mum is the best way of seeing what your girlfriend is going to look like in twenty or thirty years’ time, then Alexa’s long-term prospects weren’t bad at all. She was still slim, graceful, and showed no signs of a Madame Jean-Marie-style craving for eternal youth.
I was doubly impressed, because again, Yuri had surprised me. Not only did he live in a discreet mews cottage, he also had a real middle-aged woman for a partner instead of a surgically enhanced porn star.
‘Bonjour,’ I replied, and apologized in my best French for the previous night’s disturbance.
She nodded, acknowledging the apology without completely forgiving the crime.
‘Belle maison,’ I added.
‘Oui, it is a very tranquil street,’ she said, a barbed flash of irony in her eyes. She took a fine china cup and saucer from a cupboard and poured herself some coffee.
‘Why do you want to see Alexa?’ she asked.
She called me ‘tu’. Was this because I was, even subconsciously, part of the family? Or because I was just a young idiot who was unworthy of a ‘vous’?
‘Je l’aime.’ I made sure I didn’t add on ‘bien’ or anything superfluous.
‘Ah.’ This stopped her as she was about to put the coffee cup to her lips. She mulled over the idea for a moment, then drank. ‘Tu l’aimes?’
‘Oui.’
‘Really?’ She locked on to my eyes. I looked back unflinchingly.
‘Oui.’
‘Ah. Then you must tell me who you are.’
Who was I? Good question. I didn’t know how to give a short answer – this wasn’t ‘What’s the capital of Ukraine?’, after all. So I gave her full – or only slightly edited – highlights of the previous year, starting with the day I first met Alexa, skimming briefly through all the unconscious-sex episodes and the political disagreements, but giving her the full story of the handbag, the caviar kiss, the married-woman-in-the-bed accident and the avenging lift gods. With a little epilogue about bad Indian restaurants and too much beer on an empty stomach that is more used to good French food. No harm throwing in a little flattery of her home country, I thought.
Before she could give her verdict, we were interrupted by the entrance of a short fifty-something man with cropped silver hair, a Newcastle T-shirt, an Adidas tracksuit and a gold wristchain as thick as a French croissant. He nodded – icily – to me, kissed Alexa’s mum on the neck, and darted out of the house. The Mercedes engine started up as soon as the front door closed, and the sports car rolled away.
That, Alexa’s mum explained, was Yuri, off to the gym.
I was puzzled. ‘His T-shirt. It said “Newcastle Allstars”. Who are they?’
His football team, she said.
‘Not Newcastle United?’
No, she told me. Newcastle Allstars, an American football team in a town that she pronounced ‘Noocastell onder Lim’. As in Newcastle under Lyme, a small town near Stoke on Trent. Which kind of explained the lack of media interest in Yuri.
She didn’t think I ought to laugh, she said. Yuri hadn’t shown it, but he was not happy with me for waking him up. He had only refrained from sending out Viktor (the Hulk) to silence me because Alexa had said that it was partly her fault that I was shouting out there.
Her fault? This was interesting. Did it mean she was ready to forgive me?
Alexa’s mum said she wasn’t at all sure about that. She seemed to decide that the preliminary hearing was over. She finished her coffee, got up and said she was going to fetch Alexa.
And only Alexa, I hoped. I didn’t want to have my trial with Sacha as the jury.
5
THE WHOLE TIME-WARP thing started up again when Alexa walked into the kitchen ten minutes later.
She was now looking five years younger than normal, like an A-level student about to go for university interview. Her hair was fresh from the shower, and combed flat, and she was wearing a black trouser suit. She looked great, as usual, but it was as if she had dressed to mute her sexuality, to deflect any erotic signals that she might give off. And she usually gave off a lot.
Again, I had an etiquette problem. This time it was a purely English one. The morning after binge drinking, did you kiss the people you’d woken up in the night?
‘Je peux te faire la bise?’ I asked, meaning that I wanted to give her a kiss on the cheek.
She leaned forward and we did our ‘mwa’s, except that I took the daring step of actually kissing her cheek. She didn’t slap my face.
‘I’m so sorry for last night. We were drunk.’
‘I hope so,’ she said.
‘And I’m sorry for the night before that, too. I got stuck in a lift.’
‘Yes, I think I have understood some of your message. What happened?’
I told her about my two hours getting harangued by the neighbour and typecast as a sitcom plotline by my flatmates.
I was relieved when she laughed.
I handed over the letter from Nathalie, which was still in my pocket and only slightly crumpled. She didn’t make any attempt to open it, which might have been a good or bad thing.
‘You look different,’ I said. ‘Great. Not that you don’t usually . . . you know. But have you got an interview or something?’
Yes, she said, a gallery was interested in putting on her photo exhibition, and she wasn’t sure how to dress. In France, even in meetings with people like the director of Beaubourg, an artist was expected to be scruffy – ‘artistic’, unconcerned with such bourgeois problems as looking good. But in England, she said, people seemed more formal. Did I think this was the right outfit? It was like a job interview, wasn’t it?
‘Which gallery?’
‘The Saatchi.’
‘The Saatchi Gallery? Holy shit, Alexa, that’s incredible. That’s, like, brilliantly incredibly brilliant.’ My alcohol poisoning seemed to have numbed whichever lobe it is
that deals with choice of vocabulary.
‘It’s brilliant? Is that all you have to say?’ she asked.
‘All? I mean, what else is there to say? You’re a star. You’ll be famous. It’s incredibly brilliantly incredibly—’
She cut off this new attack of alcohol poisoning by starting to cry.
‘Alexa. What did I do? Didn’t I whoop loud enough? What more can I . . .?’
Shit, now I could feel my own tears sprouting up from somewhere. And it wasn’t like when you get to the end of Terminator 2 and Arnie says he’s got to have a bath in the molten metal, or in Love Actually when the guy walks into the restaurant and proposes in Portuguese, because I had no idea why we were both getting all weepy.
‘What exactly is in this letter?’ Alexa asked.
I told her about Nathalie’s sworn statement. I could remember almost every word.
‘There is always an explanation,’ Alexa said. ‘Why can you never do things the simple way, Paul? Like Yuri. He said to my mother, come to London, you choose where we will live, and basta. No other women, no handbags, nothing.’
‘So she chose the house?’ The pot plants and the stripped pine were a little clearer now.
Alexa laughed.
‘Oh yes, my mother chose the house. Yuri says it is much too small. He wants a bigger house, like the ones on the other side of the big road.’
‘What, in the royal estate there? But they’re palaces. Half of them are embassies.’ I guessed that she was talking about the gigantic mansions in the park round the back of Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana used to live. There were more security cameras on that estate than there were sparrows.
‘Yes, exactly. Yuri wants to buy the ex-Russian embassy – it has space for six or seven cars to park outside. When we had Sacha’s birthday party here, the neighbours called the police.’
‘Too much Ukrainian jazz?’ I knew all too well what that could do to the soul.
‘No, because of the cars. The police said they can’t do anything because it’s a private street, so now Yuri parks his car here all the time to annoy the neighbours. He thinks they’re being racist, but they’re not, they just hate cars. It’s like the city. They live in it but wish it didn’t exist.’
‘Yes, but is that where you want to live, Alexa? In the ex-Russian embassy, with space for your six or seven cars?’
‘For the moment, Paul, I want to live in London. And I want to do my work. Which is not simple with you coming in and out of my life all the time, and then shouting my name so the whole street will hate me.’
‘But if you weren’t out of my life I wouldn’t have to shout.’
‘I’m not out of your life.’
‘You’re not?’ What a great little sentence, I thought. It wasn’t exactly ‘je t’aime’, but it was a hell of a long way from ‘bugger off.
I heard a noise on the stairs. Oh no, I thought, here comes the guy who is well and truly in her life, and frequently in other parts of her I didn’t want to think about right now.
‘Is that Sacha?’ I whispered.
‘No. It must be Maman.’ She looked as if she was about to cry again. ‘Sacha spends most of his time at the studio.’
‘Ah,’ I said, clamping my fingers to the edge of the table to prevent the merest shudder of glee from showing.
I tried to look sympathetic, but it was bloody hard when all I wanted to do was dance around the kitchen. What a jerk, I thought. He could be spending every night snuggling up to Alexa, and he prefers fiddling around with tape machines. Or groupies. Or both. As long as he was missing out on the chance to fiddle with Alexa, I wasn’t complaining.
‘You see, my life is not simple. And it is less simple with you coming to London in the middle of the night to confuse me before my interview.’
I don’t know where ideas come from. Chemical impulses, aren’t they? Well, there were plenty of chemicals in my brain that morning, and I felt a sudden jolt in my head as the toxic blend distilled an idea.
‘Simple?’ I said, suddenly seeing things with breath-mint clarity. ‘You want things simple? Here’s simple.’ I grabbed her hand as I said it. ‘You have your interview this morning, for which you look wonderful, by the way. Anyway, it’s not an interview, it’s an invitation. They want to meet you. They love your photos. They know you have a show on at Beaubourg. All that’s very simple.’
I grabbed the other hand, forgot what I was about to say, and then remembered just in time to stop myself looking like a dork. ‘I’m going back to Paris now, to sort some stuff out. Then I’m coming to live in London, to be with you. There, that’s pretty damn simple, too, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ she moaned, flushing my idea away and making things a lot less simple.
6
I NEVER SUSPECTED that I might get pregnant. It’s not something you usually have to worry about when you’re a guy.
But apparently it worried the French government a lot, because they had sent me a letter informing me that I had to pay for maternity insurance for everyone working in the tea room. In the case of myself and more than half of my employees, this was like insuring a whale against injuries incurred while playing table tennis.
But there it was, a demand for a small fortune in ‘cotisations’. The word sounded like a form of medical treatment, but it meant contributions or subscriptions.
And the maternity-leave demand wasn’t the only official letter I’d received. I also had several organizations demanding ‘cotisations’ for various other types of social-security schemes, pension funds and complementary medical insurance. All the people I’d paid off in the summer were back again, wanting more.
For some reason, I seemed to be paying into three different medical schemes. All I’d need was a week off with flu and I could retire on the proceeds.
Then there was the nice letter – a personally signed one for once – reminding me that I had to get my menus translated, and adding that the name of the tea room was also illegal. ‘Mon thé est riche’ had to be written somewhere on the shopfront.
Yes, like there’s a translation of ‘Pizza Napoli’ on the front of Italian restaurants, I wanted to reply. This was just anti-English discrimination. I put the letter on my ‘call Brussels’ pile.
Worse than this, there was a letter that I’d left unopened for almost a month which informed me that the council was thinking of widening the pavement in our street (good) and creating a motorbike and scooter park outside the tea room (bad). Very bad. These bike and scooter parks worked on the dog-merde principle. Once one scooter came and parked there, every other two-wheeled vehicle in the neighbourhood thought it was OK to flock round and smother the pavement. There might be official space for ten two-wheelers, but we’d soon have fifty of them blocking our doorway and stopping people queuing up.
The letter said I had a month to object. Which left me about twenty minutes to do so.
Oh God.
I was trying – and failing – to ‘sort my stuff out’ before going back to London.
Alexa had told me not to bother.
‘I cannot have this responsibility,’ she’d said. ‘You cannot make me responsible for stopping your business. It is too much.’
‘I always take full responsibility for all my actions,’ I assured her, ‘however stupid they are.’ Which didn’t reassure her very much.
In any case, I said, I wasn’t going to ‘stop the business’. I was just going to delegate for a while. Simple.
Simple as peeing into a test tube from the top of a ladder.
But then, as anyone who has ever tried it will testify, the secret is to stay up the ladder and keep on peeing until you hit the test tube. I’d just have to sit there tearing my hair out over the admin for as long as it took to sort the genuinely threatening stuff out from the merely infuriating.
But if I really was going to leave Paris for a while, the most important thing to sort out was Benoît, the babysitter who would be looking after my little offspring of a tea roo
m. I knew he could heat up the baby food, and I just needed to be sure that he wasn’t the type who would freak out and hide under the settee if he had to change a nappy. Like, for example, if people started leaving their motorbikes in the middle of the tea room.
It turned out he’d heard about the scooter-park plan.
‘How come?’ I asked him.
‘It was Papa who told me. You know he is very implicated in the politics of the arrondissement.’
Of course. Nathalie had told me about Jean-Marie moving in on the local MP. But remembering this only added a new level of complication to my admin headaches. Was Jean-Marie capable of having a scooter park parked outside my tea room? And if so, why? To force me to sell the business to him? No, surely not.
After all, I was employing his son. More than employing him, I was educating him in the facts of life. OK, so he mistook hot-water heaters for sexual partners, but lots of mammals did similar things. Dogs and chair legs, for example. I’d even seen one of those home-video shows where a hippo tried to get it on with a tractor.
All in all, Jean-Marie had no cause to piss me off with petty municipal manoeuvrings.
I hoped.
This was one thing I’d have to make completely sure of before I could get back to Alexa.
7
‘NEVER TRUST A philosopher. Especially an existentialist.’
Jean-Marie was in a garrulous mood and leading me suspiciously far away from the supposed subject of our meeting.
‘It is true,’ he said. ‘You know Simone de Beauvoir? The wife of Sartre? During her, how do you say, obsèques?’ I shrugged ignorance. ‘The ceremony when you are dead?’
‘Funeral.’
‘Yes. During her funeral at the cimetière Montparnasse, someone fell in the, how do you say, the hole where they put the dead person?’
‘Grave.’
‘Yes, someone fell in the grave, and broke his arm.
And I can imagine all the other existentialists looking down, leaving him there, and saying, Oui, oui, c’est la vie.’