Almost French (3 page)

‘Be quiet.’

Frédéric’s stern command when I offer to help prepare lunch wipes the polite smile off my face. Stung, I sink back into the sofa. Registering my shock, he scrambles for a better translation of ‘
reste tranquille
’.

‘Be still. Relax,’ he tries. His tone is reassuring.

While Frédéric is in the kitchen, I poke around his apartment. Bright sunlight spills through tall windows overlooking a quiet, leafy lane. Levallois, he’d said the area was called. Driving through it seemed nice, more trees than I’d expected to see in the city. My fears begin to subside: this doesn’t look like the home of a dangerous or disturbed man. It looks like the home of someone creative, someone who loves travelling and beautiful things: a collector. For a few minutes I just circle and stare. His taste is eclectic. Colourful papier-mâché masks pull faces at me from above the doorway. He picked them up in Sri Lanka, he’d told me. A contemporary nude watercolour hangs near an oil painting of cows in a field that looks like something I might have studied in art history at school.

The room’s centrepiece is an imposing wooden model of an old sailing ship, standing on a marble-topped console table. The mast is nearly a metre high. This must be the
model he was telling me about in Romania, the one he had to fight to bring back from Mauritius. At the time, Frédéric was doing his military service in the navy and the ship’s captain lambasted him for trying to sink the vessel with the oriental carpets, African masks and ancient swords he picked up at different ports.

An enormous gilt mirror leans against one wall, its glass mottled and smudgy with age. It looks like it belongs in a castle, it’s too huge to hang in the apartment. Obviously practical considerations don’t enter the equation when it comes to his treasures—he’s the buy-now-worry-later-about-how-to-get-it-home-or-where-to-put-it type. I sense a kindred spirit. In Bucharest, I’d struggled awkwardly onto the plane with kilos of Romanian ceramics and three paintings, two for me, the other for Sue, all of which is presently cluttering up Frédéric’s entrance.

When he comes back into the room I ask about the mirror and he tells me he bought it at an auction—on a hunch; from a distance he couldn’t tell whether it was authentic because the elaborate frame was covered in horrible green paint. To his delight, there was gilt underneath and not wanting to damage it, he carefully scratched off the paint with his thumbnail. It took two weeks, working every evening, he tells me. I try to picture myself doing such a task. My patience wouldn’t be up to it. I’d have attacked it with chisels and paint stripper.

‘Did you do any of these?’ I point to a grouping of watercolours.

‘My grandfather did that one, during the war.’ He indicates a lovely, wistful still life of lustrous pears and fleshy grapes. ‘And this is mine.’ He grins. ‘My Turner phase.’

It is a large painting of a port, obviously done in the late
afternoon because the shadowy blue fishing boats are wreathed in golden light. ‘Boulogne-sur-Mer, my home town,’ explains Frédéric.

‘It’s wonderful,’ I say, meaning it. ‘The colours seem pretty good for someone who’s colour-blind.’

This makes him laugh, the fact I’d remembered this quirk. ‘I’ve labelled all the colours in my paint box very precisely so I don’t make crazy mistakes,’ he reveals.

Frédéric disappears into the kitchen again and my eyes scan the bending bookshelves behind the dining table, searching for clues about their owner. Next to the handsome leather spines embossed with gold flourishes are a lot of dull-looking contemporary covers, devoid of decoration. From the look of them, in France plain egg-shell-coloured jackets must signal Serious Literature. Tea-coloured scraps of paper fan from many of the books. There are titles by Shakespeare, Hemingway and Graham Greene but mostly the authors are French and except for a few names—Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Voltaire—they are unfamiliar to me.

More shelves stretch along the hallway, only these books don’t look nearly so highbrow. Hardcover comics. Literally hundreds of them. I flip through one. It contains lots of bare bottoms and breasts. Opening another, I stumble straight into a sex scene. Pornographic comics? From the kitchen, Frédéric sees me standing, staring open-mouthed at it.

‘Do you like
bandes dessinées
?’

It sounds obscene: ‘Bond what?’

‘
Bandes dessinées
, comic books,’ Frédéric patiently explains. I must look horrified because he stops what he’s doing to come out. ‘In France they’re very popular. They’re considered a form of art. I drew one myself.’

I glance at the Barbie-like heroine, who on this page is
totally starkers. Fear flares again. Maybe he is weird after all. His taste isn’t eclectic: it’s schizophrenic. I mean, one room is all classics and culture and now here’s a corridor of sexist cartoons, all tits and bums, which he’s trying to pass off as art. Worse, he’s even drawn one himself!

‘Really?’ I can’t conceal the doubt in my voice. I want to ask how much nudity his comic featured but instead say, ‘What’s yours about?’

‘Sherlock Holmes. It hasn’t been published, though. It’s a hobby, I worked on it with a friend.’ The subject matter sounds harmless enough although who knows—his Sherlock Holmes might be some Casanova character who runs around in spangly G-strings. Promising to show it to me later, Frédéric pulls more
bandes dessinées
from the shelf. Far from acting embarrassed, he seems determined to flaunt his strange obsession.

‘Who reads these bond thingies?’ I ask, after a short pause.

‘Oh, all ages. Children, twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, forty-year-olds. Everyone.’

He resumes his chopping, leaving me to ponder what’s happened to literature in the country that produced Proust.

The bathroom is equipped with a bidet. I try to remember exactly when you’re supposed to use it: after you’ve been to the toilet or after sex? Right now, the low basin comes in handy for scrubbing my feet and shins. My eyes fall on the folded towel and lavender soap, which have been carefully laid out for me. Coming from a man, such attention to detail seems funny and foreign. And touchingly thoughtful.

The impression of hotel-like order snaps the second I step into the toilet, which appears to be doubling as a dishwasher. Crockery and cutlery swim in the open cistern. Plates lean against bowls, which are propped between a cup and a fork.
A stray spoon has sunk to the bottom. I search for a chain, a handle or a button—anything that looks familiar and flush-like. Bewildered, I call for instructions. ‘How do you flush the toilet?’

Frédéric shouts directions from the kitchen but I don’t understand them and in the end, he has to come in to show me. Mortified by this unscheduled intimacy, I quickly slam the toilet lid. Frédéric is apparently oblivious to my embarrassment: in fact he looks absurdly pleased with himself. The flush broke a few days ago but he managed to fix it, he explains in a way that suggests he’s not accustomed to fixing things. There is a hint of pomp in his manner as he demonstrates his remarkable invention. Flushing is a simple matter of dipping your hand into the cistern to pull the fork which levers the plates.
Et voilà!
He lifts the lid so I can admire his DIY genius. Water rushes triumphantly around the bowl.

When I come back into the living–dining area, the table is set for lunch. I stare, astonished. It looks picture-perfect, like it’s been carefully laid for a special occasion—Christmas or some fancy dinner party. Yellow and white impatiens flowers spill from a ceramic bowl in the middle. Linen napkins and silver cutlery mark our places. I struggle to picture my outdoorsy older brother knowing what to do with crystal knife rests. We have two elegant wine glasses each, one slightly bigger than the other. Formality in any form has always made me nervous and I beg Frédéric not to go to any trouble. Now it’s his turn to look astonished. And then it sinks in: by his standards this isn’t going to any trouble. The pretty soap and folded towel, the beautifully decorated lounge, it all starts to make sense. This must be how things are done in France. Everything arranged to look as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Lunch is a salad topped with fresh tarragon, walnuts and crumbly goats’ cheese, tossed in Frédéric’s own vinaigrette. I am impressed. For me, ‘homemade’ dressing means buying a bottle of Paul Newman’s special sauce. He opens a bottle of Provençal rosé and starts explaining that he has a motorbike for getting around in Paris. Much more ‘amusing’ than taking the metro, he says. I have to agree. The prospect thrills me—I’ve never been on a motorbike before. Conversation flows easily over lunch and I realise with a pang of guilt that communicating over the phone in English must have been very difficult for him—hence the awkward silences, the misunderstandings.

It suddenly occurs to me that during our last awful telephone conversation he’d suggested I stay a fortnight and I’d replied emphatically, ‘No, really, I’m just coming for a week.’ Back then, seven days with a virtual stranger seemed interminably long. But sitting opposite Frédéric in this room full of books and art (I’ve conveniently forgotten about the dubious comics), my feelings have done another U-turn. Incredible, really, how capricious emotions can be, how quickly fear and doubt can switch to excitement. Now, a different, far more intriguing possibility crosses my mind. A week might not be long enough.

‘You can’t come to Paris without visiting the Louvre.’ Frédéric is adamant. So am I.

‘It’s too big. I hate crowds.’ For someone who studied Fine Art at university, my lack of enthusiasm for the world-famous museum is shameful. But queues and colossal attractions have always put me off. Just thinking about all there is to see at the Louvre makes me feel tired.

‘We’ll keep the visit short, no more than two hours, okay?’ He sounds like a frustrated parent trying to strike a deal with a recalcitrant child. A couple of hours. That sounds survivable.

‘Okay.’

We begin in the sculpture galleries, among mythical men with bunched muscles and graceful maidens in draping robes. You have to stop yourself from reaching out and touching their smooth hands, the supple folds in their clothes, so skilfully have they been rendered. Light pours abundantly through glass ceilings, dancing on the marble figures. The rooms burst with lyrical beauty and brightness. I love it here. I want to stay.

But Frédéric hustles me up an escalator, along some corridors and in an instant we’re surrounded by crowded canvases of alarming dimensions. Chariots charge through the air, cherubs somersault from skies, young kings dress for
war, breasts burst randomly from tight bodices. There is too much melodrama in the Rubens room to take it all in.

But there is no relief in sight. From here we enter an interminable stretch of galleries devoted to death and devastation. Mary sobs at the feet of Christ. Foaming seas capsize boats. Men are impaled on lances, corpses rot, battle scenes and severed heads swim in blood. Catastrophes blur before my eyes. I start to feel tired.

Frédéric, on the other hand, is becoming more and more engrossed. Entering a room of Flemish paintings, his expression elevates to rapt elation. To me these bleak landscapes are only marginally less depressing than what we’ve just seen. But to Frédéric—who grew up in northern France right next to Flanders—they represent his roots. He calls me over to a painting of thundery skies and foggy fields.

‘Look, Sarah,’ he raves. ‘Can’t you see the poetry in the damp, dark earth?’

I need air. I need to sit down. My stamina has been heroic but you have to recognise your limits (one hour, twenty-seven minutes). We take a break at Café Marly overlooking I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid. An apathetic, handsome waiter in a smart suit eventually brings us two glasses of
kir
. The terrace has a glamorous, exclusive feel—partly because the staff treat you as though you’re incredibly lucky to be here. I certainly feel lucky to be here. For me, the visit has been salvaged. I perk up enormously, knowing all that exhausting art is somewhere safely beneath my feet.

‘That was great,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘The Louvre. I really enjoyed it.’

Frédéric stares at me, baffled. ‘You mean it’s finished—you don’t want to go back in?’

I’m baffled too. ‘You mean you do?’

Until now, everything has been going very smoothly during our first few days together. Sure, we’ve had a few minor misunderstandings but nothing that has led to conflict. Just the sort of incidents that deepen complicity and quickly become sources of jokes and teasing. For example yesterday, when I’d complimented Frédéric on his ‘olive’ skin he’d looked confused but didn’t say anything. This morning, after stewing over it all night, he demanded an explanation. ‘Why did you say I was green?’ he asked, his tone slightly indignant. I burst out laughing.

After I’d explained it was actually a compliment we started talking about the vagaries of the English language. Frédéric finds it difficult, full of exceptions to rules and words that sound confusingly similar. He made up sentences to illustrate his point. ‘The
poodle
stepped in a
puddle
.’ ‘I
hunt ants
with my
aunt
.’ Peeved by the thoughtlessness of the language, he kept repeating the suspect words. ‘Hunt. Aunt. Ant. They sound exactly the same!’ For the next half hour I tried to teach him the aspirated ‘h’ and the subtle phonetic difference between ‘poodle’ and ‘puddle’. In vain. The English lesson ended in peals of laughter.