Love Rules (22 page)

‘Gosh, three coat-hangers between us,’ Anita Farrell remarked as if it were a scandal. ‘Luckily for you two, I only brought casual clothing so you can share my hanger.’

Alice smiled fleetingly at Anita, who was placing well-worn slippers by the side of her bed. Then she glanced at Rochelle who was arranging framed photos of her horse on the chest of drawers.

Christ and Double Christ.

Alice was in a sulk.

Why wasn't she sharing with Jeanette and Jacquie? How on earth would sharing rickety wardrobe space with a fifty-year-old equestrienne and a slipper-wearing spinster editorial director of the business periodicals augment her career? In what way was any of this going to affirm her affection and fidelity for the company? And how were
Adam
and
Lush
and the rest of her titles to benefit from their publisher spending a week in a ghastly hut with two of the dullest women in the company?

‘My church is holding a forum on how the media corrupt our youth,’ Anita was saying as she stacked a pile of increasingly khaki clothing on a plastic chair, ‘teen mags, lads' mags and the like. Would you be interested in speaking, Alice? Defend
Lush
and the like?’

Christ, Christ and Triple Christ.

‘You see,’ Rochelle sighed, loading an excessive amount of thick socks into a drawer, ‘that's where ponies come in. Did either of you read the research conducted for our Christmas issue of
100% Horse
? It established that youngsters who ride are far less likely to play truant or misbehave. To love a sport at an impressionable age, to embrace the responsibility of caring for an animal – is proven to keep them out of trouble. The readership of
Pony World
is now over 75,000 – so encouraging, don't you think?’

Good God Almighty.

‘Rochelle,’ Anita fizzed, ‘you could be on the panel too! You and Alice could go head to head!’

Sweetest Jesus H Christ.

‘When I was a kid,’ Alice said to the middle of the room while she attempted to load two Whistles skirts, a Nicole Farhi shirt and a Brora cardigan onto a single hanger, ‘I used to ride regularly. I was madly in love with a pony called Percy but for me the main point of it all was snogging Nathan Jones behind the tack room and smoking John Player fags on the muck heap with my best mate Thea.’

Supper, eaten at long refectory tables, preceded something called ‘Orientation’, according to the printed itinerary handed out with the hors d'oeuvres. Alice sat at one end with Jeanette and Jacquie in a conspiratorial huddle, planning the best time to convene for gin and cigarettes. Their spirits rose with the arrival and constant replenishing of ceramic pitchers of quite palatable rosé table wine throughout the meal.

‘What's Orientation, do we think?’ Jacquie asked.

‘Probably some character-building mountain hike,’ groaned Alice.

‘In the dark,’ Jeanette added.

‘But it's in Conference Room B,’ Jacquie pointed out.

‘Perhaps it's an emotional workshop to scale the metaphorical mountains we've encountered in our working lives,’ Alice said.

‘Well, we'd better prepare our mind-set then,’ said Jeanette, sloshing more rosé into their glasses. They drank to each other, they drank to workshops and mind-sets, they drank to orienteering and orientation. By the time they headed for Conference Room B, they were incapable of walking a straight line, unable to follow arrows and thus couldn't find Conference Room B at all.

It must be here somewhere.

If only they'd taught us orientationeering before supper.

We could always just nip back to mine and have a tiny sip of duty free.

Yes, that is a good idea.

After all, when they realize we are lost, that's where the search party will first look.

Exactly – so we probably won't miss too much orientaling anyway.

Exactly.

Good plan.

Cool.

As the three of them staggered off in the vague direction of Jacquie's cabin, Alice thought how this wasn't too far off a school trip after all. St Trinian's for big girls. Mallory Towers with booze. Just then, she had to concede it might just be a bit of a giggle.

Paul Brusseque

Alice was the last one on the coach the next morning. She didn't dare take off her sunglasses though the day was quite dull. She mumbled an apology to a pair of male feet clad in high-performance hiking boots. She noted Jacquie curled almost foetally in one seat, a decidedly pale Jeanette staring vacantly ahead in another. She saw Anita and Rochelle sitting together, lowering their eyes to their laps as she passed. She found an empty row towards the back, slumped down, closed her eyes and prayed for the Nurofen to kick in. A twangy Australian voice disrupted her need for absolute silence. She assumed it belonged to the hiking-boot man but there was no way she was going to open her eyes to verify this.

‘Right guys, we're off to Mont Saint Victoire this morning – immortalized in the paintings of Cézanne. But we're not going to sit there with our watercolours, we're going to climb the fucker.’

‘Just you try and make me,’ Alice muttered under her breath.

Alice was the last one off the coach. A surreptitious glance around revealed that most of her colleagues – in fact everyone but her, Jeanette and Jacquie, were dressed appropriately for a walk up Cézanne's mountain. Alice, though, was wearing a denim skirt, a velour hooded top the colour of bubblegum and a pair of beige Hogan trainers with no socks.

‘OK guys, let's go!’ enthused the bloody Australian.

‘I'm not a guy,’ Alice said to herself, pinching the bridge of her nose to see if that alleviated the throb in her skull, ‘so I'm not going.’ She turned to face the coach and saw the driver tucking into a hunk of baguette, with slices of ham the size and texture of chamois leather draped over his knees. Her stomach lurched.

‘Excuse me?’

Christ. The jolly Antipodean.

Alice turned. ‘I'm not going to walk up your mountain,’ she said politely to his feet, ‘I'm feeling a little fragile. And anyway, none of my mags have anything to do with hiking.’ The hiking boots gave one irritated tap. She travelled her eyes up over the laces to ribbed socks rolled down. Above those, tanned shapely lower legs with a masculine smattering of coarse hairs.

‘What's your name?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Alice balked, looking up a little further and seeing a pair of knees, one of which was grazed.

‘Well, Ibegyourpardon, I always find that a stroll in the fresh air clears a hangover far more thoroughly than sun-glasses and a sulk.’

Alice's eyes travelled over a pair of thighs so shapely they'd be termed ‘thighs to die for’ in
Lush
magazine. She stopped for a moment at the jagged fringe of frayed denim shorts.
Then looked upwards; over a lean torso clad in a faded T-shirt lauding some obscure rock band, skimmed over tanned forearms, on up to broad shoulders and a strong neck.

‘Come on,’ he urged quietly, ‘it's more of a stroll up an easy incline. And if it
is
too much for you, we'll do some team bonding and make a stretcher from twigs for you, hey? Deal?’

‘Oh fucking hell, deal deal deal,’ she muttered. Finally, she established eye contact and found herself ensnared by a pair of eyes the colour of cypress trees. She flashed a lascivious smile in automatic response. Miraculously, her hangover was lifting already.

‘Who are
you
?’ she asked.

‘I'm Paul Brusseque,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I'm your group's guide.’

Alice was very tempted to remark to Anita, whom she overtook as she strode on to contrive a position closer to Paul for the hike, that there is a God after all.

‘Teacher's pet,’ Jacquie hisses at Alice with a wink.

‘Thought you were married!’ Jeanette remarks with an arched eyebrow.

‘Fuck off!’ Alice retorts, blushing a little.

The afternoon's session, back at the hotel, was a crashing disappointment. Alice had turned up early with a careful slick of mascara and a subtle change of clothes only to discover that the workshop was being taken by a large Belgian psychologist with a peculiar moustache-less beard and an annoying habit of interspersing ‘
non?
’ throughout his sentences. She skimmed through the itinerary and wondered if Paul would be umpiring the pre-supper rounders match.

He was.

Alice had always been good at rounders at school. She and her team were delighted to discover that almost fifteen
years later she could still bat magnificently and field like a dream. She was the centre of attention, a place she knew she thrived in. It seemed to her a while since she'd been there and, as she sat at the refectory table talking left, right and centre, she thought how much she loved it. It suited her: she became wittier and more energized. Her words were hung upon, her anecdotes were laughed at, she had something to say about everything and everyone wanted to hear it. She felt popular and attractive and she simply didn't have time to listen all the way through Mark's chatty message on her phone. Everyone was meeting at the bar for the evening. Including the Bearded Belgian and including that Paul bloke.

It was as if cogs of concupiscence, recently dormant, started slowly to turn again in Alice; oiled by bottles of Kronenbourg beer and lubricated by frequent eye contact from Paul Brusseque. She'd absorbed the information that her colleagues' polite chat revealed about him. He worked there each spring and summer and then did the ski season. This was his third year. No, he hadn't been to England but he'd like to. His mum was Australian, his father was French. Originally he was from Cairns and this year would be his first trip home since he left for Europe at the age of twenty-six, three years ago. He was the ‘outward-bound bloke’ – Fritz the Belgian shrink conducted the formal workshops. And yes, he had a heap of physical activities in store for them. Pont du Gard the next day. A cathedral at Les Baux the following day. Yeah, he lived on site – in a chalet just like the ones guests had, but painted just white. The pay was pretty cool. The region was pretty cool. Hiking the petticoats of Mont Saint Victoire on a weekly basis was pretty cool. Arles and Nîmes were pretty cool towns. Carcassonne was awesome, Montpellier a bit of a dump. The French in general were a pretty cool nation. France on the whole was
awesome. French food was fantastic. And French beer was just the best.

‘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.
H
ullo?
H
elp?
H
ow are you?
H
aving a great time?
H
aving a harmless flirt?
H
orny 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.