A Clean Pair of Hands (3 page)

Apart from a few glitches, the wheel of fortune turned around very well for Michel over the next few years. Anybody looking in on the Bodin family would conclude that Michel was the epitome of a happy family man, with a beautiful and adoring wife, three children growing up, and a successful business. He could afford to be generous with those around him who suffered set-backs from time to time and for example, he could hand out cheques and advice to his wife’s sisters when they experienced on-going marital or financial difficulties, or he would comfort them when they needed a shoulder to cry on.

One of those to benefit from Michel’s generosity was Charlotte’s sister Catherine, who was married to Aldo, a handsome and charming Italian marine broker specialising in luxury yachts. The couple led a jet-set life style following the very wealthy wherever their yachts took them. They had lived successively in Italy, Monte Carlo, and then Florida, where it all came unstuck.

Aldo had taken a big gamble by acquiring a motor
yacht for which he paid $4 million and expected to sell it after some renovation work for around $8 million. His calculations were not unreasonable. He knew the business well and probably had some prospective buyers lined up before he bought the boat. If successful, it would have been quite a coup. What Aldo didn’t anticipate was that while the refitting was taking place, the bottom would fall out of the luxury yachts market. That is what happened, and he couldn’t offload the yacht at any price. He was left to continue paying the marine mortgage and settle repair bills that proved to be more costly than budgeted. Catherine and Aldo’s living collapsed. They had no money to pay off their debts, including the mortgage, so had to sell their home in the United States at a time when resale prices were low. Although Aldo did manage to sell the yacht two years later, he could barely cover his costs.

By then, Catherine was suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) though they didn’t know it at the time. Aldo brought Catherine back to France and Michel and Charlotte took charge of her when Aldo had to return to the US. They installed Catherine in a small apartment that Michel bought for her and for months she did very little. But eventually, though still mainly confined to her bedroom, she began to experience short periods of self-reliance, and despite her continuing weakness, Michel’s visits made her smile, the only time she did so.

Before long, Michel was visiting her frequently and becoming more and more interested in his sister-in-law. As Charlotte was busy with her daughters and managing business operations and accounts, Catherine saw Michel more and more. The relationship reached a point where Michel was planning to make love to her as soon as she recovered sufficiently.

Michel was always driven by sentiments and impulses, even beyond those he imagined. He was sure these weeks of intimacy close to this defenceless stretched-out body had ignited desire in both of them. Michel didn’t admit this openly to Catherine. He wanted to provoke her into making the first move, and Catherine proved to be just as vulnerable to Michel’s humour and compliments as his other women contacts. She realised that her marriage to Aldo was over. When he last phoned her from Florida, she found out that he was staying with a friend whom Catherine knew, a woman who was kept by a very wealthy American media owner, but who was free to pursue any part-time relationships so long as she was available for him. Aldo fitted in perfectly with this configuration, and from his point of view the temporary accommodation at the friend’s private apartment was welcome.

As the months went by, the rest of the family began to dismiss Catherine’s illness as either psychosomatic or a caprice. Michel on the other hand was increasing the number of his visits, and he found her more attractive each day. She was able to sit up and they were hugging each other ferociously. Michel’s head was spinning. He had dreamed so much of these moments that sometimes he had almost lost hope, but he never gave up completely. Now he felt freed from the heavy burden of uncertainty. He needed all his faculties to think about his incredible liaison with the two sisters. He realised it was a transgression and he had never imagined he could commit such treachery against Charlotte. But there could be no doubt that the sexual frénésie he felt for Catherine was mutual and it was putting life back into her tortured body and mind.

As Catherine recovered and started making her own way in life again, she still turned to Michel for advice and
comfort and made every effort to thank him for the help and support he had given when she needed it most. He continued to be generous financially. His rationale for this heated liaison and erotic fling was that if Charlotte loved her sisters, why should he not do the same in his own way?

Thérèse Milton put it this way: “French men like the role of godfather and don’t take kindly to anything they see as a challenge to their position.”

Anyone who has watched French television will be aware that eroticism and, in particular, naked women are used routinely in advertisements.

French radio applies a similarly liberal policy; for example, local radio stations carry advertising for sex shops – ‘Sexy Centres’, and more generally you can hear women with baby voices singing sexually explicit songs on the radio at any hour of the day. At a time when UK BBC4 listeners are hearing yet another repeat of ‘The Archers’, one French state radio station runs a series on erotic literature where no detail is spared, including such advice as ‘How to Contemplate a Virgin’ and an episode in a
revered series on psychology is entitled ‘The Psychology of the Penis – A Life of Anguish’.

Whether the media culture leads or follows what happens in the field, many French men consider it normal to stimulate their ego by freely and systematically exploiting women in the home, the workplace and beyond. It is widely understood that for women to scale political or industrial career ‘ladders’ they will have to handle a few ‘snakes’.

The kind of treatment of women that quite openly permeates French business and public life starts, for example, with the civil servant at the French Consulate in London who was an inveterate bottom pincher. His interpretation of personal service was to approach women customers in a queue and feel them covertly from behind, literally helping himself. When Thérèse Milton was standing in an endless queue to renew her passport, she became aware that a hand was passing around her hips and another reaching around her waist. She straightened up and froze, then thought it must be a joke by a friend. She turned to confront the groper and found a short, untidily dressed man smiling at her. Seeing her disdainful reaction, he removed his hands but continued smiling,

“Would you like me to help you with your application?”

“No, thanks, and keep your hands to yourself. You can call the manager so I can report what just happened.”

The man then announced, “I am the manager.”

More serious had been Charlotte Bodin’s experience long ago, soon after she was married. After six months with a marketing company in Paris (her dream job after months of searching) she was called to her boss’s office for an interview just as the office was closing. He told her she was doing well and that he had good reports of her potential, so he had decided to take a more personal interest in her career development. As a start, he invited her to join
him on his next business trip to London to meet some important contacts. There was no shortage of innuendo as to the role he expected her to fulfil during the trip, and he made it clear that they would be sharing a hotel room. He asked her to give it serious thought and confirm next day.

Charlotte politely declined the offer, welcoming his interest in her career, but insisting that it be kept on a purely professional track. The man repeated the proposition in more detail, this time balancing the offer that if all went well she could be managing the UK account, with the threat that if she did not comply she would be considered incompatible with the team and should therefore expect to look elsewhere for employment, starting by joining the ranks of the unemployed, with a bad reference. Again she declined, expressing disgust that he should try this approach.

Within a week she received a dismissal letter, giving her pay in lieu of notice. She was told to clear her desk and go immediately. Charlotte was too ashamed to tell Michel, partly fearing what he might do to the manager. Instead she consulted an employment adviser who warned that if she took action against the company, whether she won or lost the case, she would find it difficult to get another job. She felt she had nothing to lose, so pursued a claim for sexual harassment and unfair dismissal, subsequently winning her claim and receiving compensation.

The action she took was publicised and remained available to employers checking references, so she found it impossible to find another job. Fortunately, soon after these events she was invited to join the family firm, a proposition she accepted with alacrity.

In 1988, one week before the French general election, an article appeared in the German newspaper Der Spiegel:

‘It is reported from Switzerland that an embarrassing high-level French government fraud has been exposed. There have been many important leaks of capital from France since François Mitterrand came to power, and this one has all the character of others which have already been reported. Several French financial intermediaries were invited to arrange a loan from Saudi Arabia of more than twenty-two million dollars. The only reason this came to light was that when the commissions became due, the French government reneged on the deal. In November and December 1985 the French Finance Minister and the President were showered with claims from Swiss lawyers. The investigations that followed revealed that there was an intricate network of organisations, which led from senior ministers and the President to accounts and trusts in Jersey and in Luxembourg. The findings were that senior members of the French government were fraudulently authorising the borrowing of money on behalf of the state and shifting it into their own offshore accounts. They had infringed numerous financial standards and defrauded their own population. American and British financial institutions were vociferous in condemning the actions and the evidence 
was made public, but to this day no official complaint has been made or legal action taken in France.’

Source: Der Speigel

The Bodins and the Miltons often exchanged confidences about money in general, though Michel was always discreet about his sources of revenue. Once, when discussing financial matters, Michel revealed a wish to move a large sum of money out of France urgently before an anticipated government ban, so Thérèse offered to set up accounts in Jersey and the Isle of Man that he could use. Subsequently Michel transferred the maximum possible sums to those havens. That arrangement remained in place for several years and by the time Michel moved his reserves again, this time to Switzerland, he had made a handsome tax-free profit.

In 1985, fearing an imminent imposition of a wealth tax on large residential properties, the Bodins sold the huge house at St Cloud, which the Miltons referred to as ‘The Folly’, and once again built their own home, this time in a contemporary style and on a more modest scale, in the nearby smart neighbourhood of Maisons-Lafitte. The house was one of four built in the grounds of a recently demolished manor, so the park with its mature trees and old stone walls provided a backdrop similar to their previous residence, but on a smaller, more human scale. The previous house had been sold, yielding an excellent profit on the cost of land and building.

It was while the Miltons were staying with the Bodins at the new house that they first noticed signs and symbols of an evolution in the owners’ quest for more broad-minded and modern family values, a shift towards tastes that were more ‘edgy’ and more overtly risqué. The signs
that Thérèse and George noticed now were of more overt manifestations of eroticism.

One morning before breakfast, George sat on the comfortable settee in the salon, where the morning sun streamed in through the French doors, and to occupy his time before someone else came downstairs, poured himself a coffee and reached for a pile of magazines on the nearby table. He thought it unusual that his hosts should keep a copy of Playboy so visible when there were three young girls in the house, but having quickly riffled through the pages, admired the photos and read a story about a competition between two women to see how many men they could seduce in one day, he put it down thinking that Thérèse might arrive soon and he didn’t want to embarrass her or have to justify his interest. The next publication he selected was smaller, A5 size, and much more explicit. The banner title on the cover read: ‘We Take on the Hottest Mothers in Your Neighbourhood and Pump Fuck Out of Them.’ Below was a picture of a naked woman, bound and gagged, being worked over by at least three men. George quickly put the magazine back under Playboy, which now seemed on a par with a parish magazine.

The stairs leading to the bedrooms went up in two flights. The first, of only three or four steps, reached a small landing with the next longer flight to the right. The whole staircase was in light oak with a modern hand rail and base rail with a decorative black-painted metal balustrade. Above and overlooking the landing was a plain wall upon which hung an oil painting. It was about one and a half metres high and about a metre wide. It was modern, though it resembled some darker medieval works, but this was not a portrait of an ancestor. It depicted a naked man hanging by his arms with a black hood covering his head.
The centre of the canvas showed his genitals in impressive detail. George had passed the painting several times during his visit, but at no time did he stop and examine it. No doubt propelled by a concern that Thérèse or Charlotte could be in the vicinity, George moved on with the impression that the subject was probably a small man with an unrealistically large penis, or the artist’s sense of perspective was defective.

You can tell a lot about a man by what he reads, and one day that is exactly what George Milton was doing by looking at the books on display in Michel’s beautifully appointed study. It was a spacious room occupying part of a mezzanine next to the salon. The wooden panelling and built-in bookshelves covering the longest wall were in light oak and together with a deep red and blue oriental carpet, which deadened sound, they created a light but pleasantly cosy atmosphere. The large desk carried a digital telephone, and computer that Michel didn’t use. It was Charlotte who managed that. A couple of comfortable, soft, cream leather armchairs provided perfect perches for book browsing.

Michel and Charlotte were avid readers; a pastime shared by George and Thérèse, who could spend hours immersed in the pleasure of just browsing books, and that is what George was doing now. The books chosen by his autodidact nephew consisted of a large proportion of reference books and travelogues, with politics, history, art and architecture much in evidence. These were accompanied by a carnival of erotica filling a whole section and with several piles of homeless books spread along the front of the deep shelves. A quick glance at the titles revealed ‘A Guide to Female Psychology and Seductibility’. The back
cover synopsis described the contents as ‘…metropolitan, knowing, street-smart, very funny, and unrelieved by any notion of romantic love’.

One afternoon after an excellent lunch, an example of the quality that the local traiteur could provide, Michel was sitting chatting with Thérèse about family history when he volunteered a comment indicating that he wasn’t happy spending his life in suburban normality, living in a tree-lined road in a quiet area where the only tragedies were purely domestic.

“People around here live very conventional lives. They go to work, eat, sleep, and go on holiday twice a year, and they don’t want to change because they don’t know what they would be getting into. I’m not like that. I do all those things but I have to take a holiday from being myself to survive.”

Thérèse was not sure what had provoked this outburst, which self he wanted to escape from, or where his thoughts might be leading, but as it seemed as though Michel was happy to confide in her she nodded encouragingly, adding, “Well I can see there are more important things in life than having two or three cars.”

“Yes I know, you see Thérèse, I have done all those normal things, and now I just feel that I have broken up the conventional jig-saw and scattered the pieces, but I can’t see a picture coming together again in the way that I used to do. You might think I have everything, but there are some important pieces missing. One of them is freedom, not necessarily the kind of freedom I had when I was young, but something else, something different. That’s what I need. It’s not something material. It’s not about ownership or address.”

“Is it freedom from responsibility?” questioned Thérèse.

“Some kinds of responsibility, yes,” agreed Michel, “that’s why I plan to simplify the business. There are some kinds of work I am just not cut out for, so why should I do them if I can earn as much without?”

“What about family and domestic responsibilities?” asked Thérèse.

“I accept those and I think I carry them out well. The family all benefit from the money I earn.”

“That doesn’t sound very romantic or loving.”

Michel seemed to be lost in his own words and thoughts. He pursed his lips and frowned deeply for several seconds, before producing his habitual jovial smile.

Thérèse thought this conversation left her with an enigma. It wasn’t a particularly important enigma on its own, but it was part of a whole collection of unimportant enigmas which individually she had put out of her mind because she understood that she would never understand everything about Michel. However, if the facts didn’t fit together, her intuition could fill in the gaps quite effectively and the picture she compiled was sadly pessimistic for Michel and Charlotte.