French Kiss Read online

  “You're firing me?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought that was clear.”

  “Why are you firing me?”

  “I don't need you to be here anymore.”

  “But. The vegetable garden? The animals?”

  “As you said, these are things I could do myself. I appreciate your help, but I don't need your services anymore.”

  “None of this was real, was it?” she said. “There really wasn't any man working here before me. You made all this up to give me something to do. And now, I've done something, but you won't even tell me what it is.”

  “You've done what I asked. Now it's over..”

  “Why did you give me this job? Why go through all that effort? Making up a job posting and putting it in the mairie.”

  “I felt sorry for you,” he admitted. “I could see that you needed help. So I helped you. Like someone takes in a puppy and then finds that it is eating them out of their house and their home. Now you don't need my help anymore. You can say more than ten words of French. You can walk from here to there without being lost. You can lift a wheelbarrow without falling over. You can go, live in the real world now.”

  She was open-mouthed.

  “Is there anything else that is not clear?” he asked her.

  Her mouth snapped shut. She removed her boots and threw them at him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Goodbye.”

  She slammed the door behind her.

  Patrick started whining.

  “Not now, Patrick,” he said, picked up his pen and searched for his place. “Not now.”

  Chapter 6

  In the village, she got the sensation that everybody knew what had happened between her and Gilou. He had said that there were no secrets in a village this size. Before she even got down the hill, it seemed, the sniggers had started.

  It was true that she had felt important on discovering that she was working for the mayor and that she had access to him that nobody else did. She'd never seen anybody come to visit and he rarely left home unless he was going to the mairie or on some other official business. She was fairly sure that nobody had the relationship with him that she had had. Now that it was over, however, people seemed pleased to see that she had fallen on her face.

  She needed something to make her feel better and fast. On a whim, she entered the hairdresser, but that was not going to do it for her. She felt like a gunslinger entering a wild west saloon. On asking for a cut, the women looked at each other.

  “I've seen this before,” she said and interrupted their head-shaking to demand what she wanted, in the best French she could, but they told her that it was not possible.

  “It's curly,” she said. “Haven't you seen curly hair before?”

  One of the women began tugging at it and tutting. Charlotte excused herself and left before she slapped one of them.

  The local bar was a dismal-looking place with a patched-up pool table and dreary interior, but there were chairs and tables with parasols outside and she sat herself down to think through her options. When the owner emerged and asked her what she wanted to drink, Charlotte asked if it was too early for beer. The woman commented that Charlotte was a friend of the mayor's and that in that case it was never too early for a drink. Charlotte wasn't sure how to take that, but she ordered a beer nonetheless.

  She told the owner that she was no longer a friend of the mayor. She opened the beer, put it in front of Charlotte and said that maybe that was for the best.

  He was a good man, apparently, but broken, like a stuck record that keeps skipping at the best bit. Each time you think it's going to play through to the end, it jumps and goes back to the start.

  “Exactement,” Charlotte said, too passionately.

  “Gilou is an attractive man,” the owner said, switching to English to make sure that Charlotte understood her. “But his eyes are always elsewhere. Never on us. He exists in the past and in the future. Never here.” She tapped her heart. “I know,” she said.

  Charlotte got the impression that the café owner had attempted a love affair with Gilou and had failed. She wondered how many women he had been with and felt a flush of jealousy before reminding herself that she didn't want him for good, she just wanted him to stop being such a jerk. Right?

  Well, whatever might have been was over now. They could go back to being neighbours. She could go back to wobbling on the stones outside his house to get mobile reception and he could go back to ignoring her. He'd given her a start in a strange country. It was up to her what she did with it. All she knew was that she was not going home. There would be no more running away and certainly not to or from any man, certainly not to or from Gilou.

  “I hope you know that we are very fond of you,” the woman said. “The village, I mean.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why so surprised?”

  “At the mairie ...”

  “Ooh-la-laa,” the woman said. “They are exceptional people. You understand? They are the exception, not the rule.”

  “That's kind of you,” said Charlotte, feeling encouraged. “Thank you.”

  “Not at all,” the woman said and wiped her hands on her apron. “My husband is Pascal,” she added. “He drives the taxi. He likes you. We don't want to see you get hurt.”

  She seemed to have meant it kindly, but Charlotte couldn't help thinking that it sounded somewhat like a threat.

  As she sank her beer and then another, she hoped that some of the applications she had made would come through. She hadn't followed them up, because, in a way, she had been enjoying her time working for Gilou and the job was on her doorstep.

  Now she found herself hoping that she might get a letter from the print shop at which she had applied to work long ago, not least of all so she could go and make a banner, demanding that the village stand up to shady developers and say no to the destruction of beauty and no to making yet another road.

  In her fantasy, she put the sign up in front of the mairie. Gilou made a speech, privately thanked her and then she said that she didn't do it for him.

  She was grinning to herself in satisfaction, when the three men in black suits arrived at the café. One of them, the big, fat one who had broken Gilou's fence, winked at her. She scowled, but that only seemed to amuse him and it certainly didn't put him off, because once he had ordered his drinks and schmoozed with the owner he came back outside and put his hand on the back of the chair opposite her.

  “Puis-je?” he said.

  “I'm sorry, I don't speak French,” she said. “Remember?”

  “Yes you do speak French,” he said matter-of-factly, and sat down opposite her. “I know who you are. You're Gilou's pet. His little dog. Not Patrick. The other one.”

  She would have thrown her beer in his face, but she had drank it all.

  “There is always one,” he said. “He is attracted to strays, but eventually they bite him and he lets them go.”

  “You're a pig,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but I tell the truth. Unlike him. I'm right, no?”

  She looked away in disgust. She wished that she had been in that version of her life where Gilou turned out to have been in the café all along and he told the man to get lost. Even better, he could ride down the hill on Gitane and pull up right beside the table.

  “That seat's taken,” he would say. It would sound great in his accent. “Even better if he meant it.”

  She was not living in either of those worlds, however, and so she would have to do it herself. She threw some loose change on the table and stood.

  “Not leaving because of me I hope,” he said.

  “I'm finished,” she replied.

  “Yes, I heard,” he said. “Here.” He was holding out an envelope, but of course she didn't take it. She'd had more than enough of envelopes for one day. “Please,” he said.

  It didn't contain money. Just papers to be signed.

  “Why do you want me to
deliver this?”

  “I forgot to leave them last time,” he said, “and after my coffee I must leave the village.”

  She took it.

  “Oh, and because if he doesn't sign it, he won't be mayor any more. We'll get our own mayor.”

  Charlotte left the envelope on the table.

  “I know what you're thinking,” the man said. “You're thinking that Gilou doesn't even want to be mayor. That he'd like to be free. You're wrong. Being a big shot is everything to him. Without his mayoral privileges, he's nothing; a love-lost little boy who got left behind. You don't want to be responsible for doing that to him do you?”

  “She put the envelope in her bag.”

  “Pretty isn't it,” he said, gesturing to nothing in particular.

  “What do you care?”

  He shrugged, tipped an imaginary hat and went back inside.

  ~~~

  She was in two minds whether or not to leave the envelope in the post box or knock on the door and talk personally to Gilou. They seemed important, about the proposed road that would destroy much of the property in the village, and so she felt that she should at least ensure that she saw them.

  She wasn't looking forward to seeing Gilou again, however, particularly as the developer had set her up to be the bearer of bad news.

  They were destroyers, Gilou had said, and that certainly seemed to be true. Not only were they aiming to wreck the village, but for some reason they wanted to take Gilou down with it, using her to deliver one of the killing blows. She too was expendable in their eyes. They saw her as just another means of exerting pressure.

  The differences between herself and Gilou, she decided, could be set aside for five minutes for the sake of the village and to demonstrate to men like those down the hill that they couldn't walk into the village and walk straight out again with its self-respect. She would talk to Gilou and if she could get him to listen, she'd encourage him not to sign.

  He might not need encouragement in that respect, she knew. He was recalcitrant by nature. How he had got to the position of mayor with such an attitude, she had little idea, but she supposed that his father being a mayor before him had something to do with it.

  On arrival at La Gaillarde she saw that there was a large 4x4 in Gilou's driveway. She heard voices and decided that she didn't want to be evicted from his property yet again, so she started for the postbox, intending to dump the papers inside and slip away instead.

  The 4x4, she couldn't help noticing, made Gilou's 4x4 look like a homemade vehicle by comparison. It had enormous tyres with deep treads and gleamed silver in the sun. The plates looked strange, so it belonged to someone from 'out of town'. She hadn't seen a car like this since she'd been in the village and it looked distinctly out of place on Gilou's dirt path.

  Perhaps, Charlotte thought, it belonged to one of those imaginary tourists and she was about to get her cleaning job after all. Or maybe it was the car of another mayor; the kind that took bribes and bought cars and looked the other way, then encouraged other mayors to do the same.

  Whoever it was, Charlotte didn't need the presence of an expensive car in the drive to give her the impression that she wasn't welcome. Gilou had made that clear enough.

  Thinking about it now, she was surprised that she'd even bothered carrying the envelope, but then another part of her admitted that she'd known that the contents would hurt him and being part of that was some strange comfort to her.

  As she headed away towards Le Pech Noir, she heard female laughter, shrill like a bird of the forest.

  The woman was tall. Beautiful. Even from this distance. She was wearing a long, black skirt that flowed out in a spiral as she spun and a white vest, loose about her waist and shoulders. Jewellery flashed and her teeth too as she was giving someone – Gilou, of course - an enormous smile.

  “It is good to see you,” she was saying. “Really it is.” Her English was good. She was a native, with an accent belonging to some part of London, Charlotte thought. She'd never been to university, but this was the voice she imagined that lecturers used when they were discussing students.

  The woman approached Gilou and gave him a kiss on the neck. Charlotte hadn't seen anyone do that before. It seemed so intimate. She immediately put her own hand to her neck, as if she had been stung. Gilou let the woman do it. For a moment, his hands had settled on her waist.

  The woman turned to admire the garden and then she spotted Charlotte. Charlotte felt what her school biology teacher had referred to as a fight or flight response.

  Deer.

  Headlights.

  “Ah!” the woman said. “Come.” She beckoned her with great, expansive movements of her arms, as if to say: join the party, we're all friends.

  Charlotte drifted forward, sensing trouble.

  Gilou who was looking sullen, standing to one side.

  “This must be your maid,” the woman said and he winced.

  “Maid!?” Charlotte yelled.

  “More of a manual labourer,” Gilou said.

  “More of a nothing,” Charlotte said and wished she hadn't. “He sacked me.”

  “I know,” said the woman with mock-kindness, as though talking to a child.

  Charlotte left the woman's hand extended in mid-air, waiting to be shook. She was beautiful, yes, but she could see from her hands and the lines about her neck that she worked hard at being youthful. It was not a natural occurrence, but something that required several hundred Euros a month and several hundred hours a year.

  “And who are you?” Charlotte asked. “Gilou's mum?”

  “No,” said Gilou, wiping his face with his hat. “This is Jean. Your landlady.”

  Charlotte hoped that if she waited long enough, Gilou would tell her that he was joking.

  As Charlotte was wondering if this introduction could have gone any worse, Jean added:

  “I'm also his wife. Don't forget that you're married, Gilou.”

  ~~~

  Charlotte sat seething in the kitchen while Jean busied herself making tea, clattering the kettle against the stove and clinking the cups together. There'd never been so much noise in Gilou's kitchen, even the night before. Jean was a whirlwind of noise and colour, making Charlotte feel drab by comparison.

  Gilou sat uncomfortably at the table, looking from one woman to the other.

  “Those three guys gave me an envelope for you,” Charlotte said to explain that she hadn't been stalking him, but rather, she'd had a legitimate reason for her return. “I left it in the postbox.”

  “Sign it,” Jean said to Gilou.

  “Jamais,” said Gilou. Never.

  “If you don't sign it, they'll pay someone who will. Since it's going to happen anyway, it makes sense to make some money in the process. Don't you think, Charlotte?”

  “I don't know,” Charlotte said, thinking of their conversation the night before, when it had seemed that there might be something between them. Now there was nothing between them but that damned, oversized table. Oh, and his wife. “If you believe in something,” Charlotte continued, “then maybe it's worth fighting for.”

  “Oh, not you too. You've been listening to his nonsense. What you said makes perfect sense over here.” She made a gesture that suggested something floating in mid-air on her left. Then she gestured to her right-hand side, adding: “In the real world, however, we realise how the world works and we make it work for us. Either that, or we get left behind. Right, Gilou?”

  “The world didn't leave me behind,” Gilou grumbled.

  “Yes it did,” said Jean. “And so did I. I know that.”

  She poured hot water into a pristine, white pot.

  “When were you thinking of moving in?” she said.

  Charlotte flushed, but it turned out that she was talking to Gilou, making a quip about the sterile atmosphere of the house.

  “I'm happy here,” he said.

  “But you're not here,” Jean said. “Is he, Charlotte?”

  “I don't know
what you mean,” said Charlotte.

  “I don't see anything of you here, Gilou. The old Gilou has gone. This house hasn't seen life since you built it. It's a shrine.”

  “To who?” Gilou demanded to know.

  Charlotte thought that it was obvious. It was a shrine to Jean. That was why he didn't allow anyone to walk any further than the main room and bathroom. To allow anyone beyond those boundaries was to allow them to walk on his memories. That was why she hadn't been allowed into the bedroom.