As I was waiting for the train, browsing the WHSmith, a slim blond woman of about forty in black jeans and high heels came up beside me.
“Excuse me, but I just wanted to say you were great. I was feeling flat and you’ve made my day. So thank you.”
She gave me a smile that invited a longer conversation.
“My pleasure. Thank you.”
“Going to Paris?”
“Just for tonight. Visiting friends near Mâcon.”
“Do you know Paris well?”
“Not that well, but I’m only in transit.”
“It’s home for me. I commute to London.”
“Well, safe journey. Thanks for taking the trouble to say you liked the playing. Makes it worthwhile.”
She hesitated for a moment before walking off.
On the train, I indulged a brief fantasy about waiting for her at the Gare du Nord in Paris. It gave me a clearer idea of what I wanted. Which wasn’t a casual encounter or even a new relationship. Not a completely new one.
* * *
I dined alone in Paris at the French version of McDonald’s. I had thought about visiting the Buddha Bar at the Hotel de Crillon, but did not feel like fancy food by myself. Eating my McChicken Burger I wondered why we—Claire and I—had not done this more often. A couple of hours on the train reading or listening to music; a chance to refresh the French; expenses covered by a day or two of work that I enjoyed doing.
It had been fourteen years since we spent an impulsive weekend in a hotel on the Île St-Louis. We had been renting in London and decided to buy our own place. This was long before I downshifted to working part-time, and we were getting close to having a viable deposit. We were beginning to accept that there would not be kids, and that the romantic stage of our relationship had passed. The house gave us something else to focus on.
Then, one of the guys I had worked with in Australia got in touch about a scheme he had bought into. A mathematician had come up with a way to make a killing on the lottery—the lotto. We just had to cover all the numbers and pay a lot of entry fees.
The proposition made sense, it was legal, and the logistics appealed to my technical mind. I put in some money. We took out a U.S. state lottery outright, and after covering the overheads we put what was left of the winnings back in the kitty for the next strike.
I bought some more units and eventually lost the lot. There may have been fraud on the part of the organizers, and there was some talk of the investors suing them, but there came a point where I had to accept that I would not be seeing my contribution to the house deposit again.
I had not told Claire about the plan or the ongoing saga. I confessed over dinner at home. God knows how she must have felt: I had broken her trust as well as her dream. She just got up and walked out the front door. Did not even slam it.
An hour later she came back, wet from the rain. Her composure had not extended to taking an umbrella.
“We should go to Paris,” she said. “We haven’t been anywhere except Randall and Mandy’s because of the house. Now it’s gone, there’s nothing to stop us.”
I was lost for words. It was in character for Claire to put mistakes behind her, to forgive and look ahead, but this was almost beyond belief. I deserved at least to be berated and screamed at. But Claire didn’t do screaming and abuse.
Dining at the Buddha Bar, where Claire—Claire who didn’t like fancy food and wine—made a mistake with the conversion rate and ordered a £300 bottle of Burgundy, I began to understand. My gamble had been a bet each way. If I won, we would have been able to buy a house immediately. If I lost, our relationship would be over. I had left it up to the lottery, but Claire had taken back control.
A year later, Claire’s mother died and left her the house in Norwich.
* * *
I nearly missed my train at the Gare de Lyon, having forgotten to put my watch forward an hour, then spent the two-hour journey to Macon trying to decide what to wear. By the time I had settled on a gray T-shirt and suit jacket with my jeans, and made a dash to the bathroom to change, the train was pulling into the station.
The platform was crowded with passengers waiting to board. I caught the perfume first, the fragrance I could recognize at twenty paces, then the guy in front of me stepped aside and she was there.
She was different. Her lips were less full, her cheekbones more pronounced, and she was slimmer, more elegant. Her hair, the same dark brown, was shorter—as I’d seen in her Skype avatar. She was wearing sunglasses, a white top with an abstract design, a short jacket, light blue jeans, and high-heeled shoes. Rings with big stones on her middle and index fingers, which were wirier than I remembered.
We stood still, silently appraising each other. Neither of us spoke. The crowd dispersed and the train pulled out, leaving us alone, and I knew, absolutely knew, two things. The first was that, whatever the cost and whatever might happen, I had made the right decision in seeing her again. I was back in Shanksy’s bar, the night I played “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” and saw her waiting for me, holding a Fallen Angel and trying to hide her nervousness.
The second thing I knew, without anything to justify it except whatever was wordlessly passing between us, was that she felt the same way—and had not expected to.
“Say something,” she said.
It took me a few moments. “You are so beautiful. Still.”
It sounded just as sappy as when I had sung it for her to get a message past Tina.
She smiled broadly, then kissed me on each cheek. Her hands were on my shoulders and mine lightly on her back, and suddenly we pulled ourselves into each other, as though it was Melbourne airport in 1989 and she rather than Jacinta had come running to make it right. I held her for a few seconds, then we both let go, not awkward or embarrassed, just accepting that we had to rejoin the real world, where she lived with her husband who was waiting in the car for us.
As she stepped back, I registered what she was wearing around her neck. It was the locket I had given her for Christmas in 1989. Did it still have our photo in it?
“Are you okay, I mean with what’s happened with Claire?” she said as we walked the length of the platform to the exit.
“It’s been coming for a while. I think we’ll stay friends. Which was the problem, in some ways.”
“What about our being in touch?”
“There were other things.”
Charlie was waiting in the drop zone, arms crossed on the roof of a little Renault. He was a big guy, about six foot five, mid-fifties, brown hair turning gray, neatly trimmed beard, carrying quite a bit of weight over a well-muscled frame.
He shook my hand and was friendly in that instant Australian way.
“You okay in the backseat? We don’t have far to go.”
He squeezed himself into the driver’s seat and I was reminded of Mr. Incredible, the cartoon superhero, in his too-small car. I got in behind Angelina.
“Sorry about the smell,” said Charlie. “It’s our caretaker’s car—he smokes like a chimney. Still raining in England? You didn’t tell me, any food preferences?”
“Happy to go with the flow,” I said. “If you’re planning steak tartare, I might give it a turn in the pan.”
“You okay with offal?”
“Lamb’s fry and kidneys for breakfast.”
In line with my healthy-eating program, I had been starting my day with muesli and yogurt until the breakup with Claire, but my mother was not for turning from the full English catastrophe.
“Oh yuck,” said Angelina. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Good man,” said Charlie. “We’re going to eat well.”
It was apparent he was a keen chef, and it was equally apparent that he saw me as an audience for his cooking. There were worse ways for my ex-lover’s husband to see me.
We stopped at a bar in Cluny and sat at a table on the street, Angelina beside me and Charlie opposite. It was a sunny day, I had a salade niçoise, we shared some fries, a double line of little kids walked by hand in hand, and that is about all I can recall. The town is, by all accounts, quaint and full of history.
Charlie was studiedly relaxed, leaning back in his chair, ordering a small carafe of red wine, a salad for Angelina, and a steak for himself in bad but confident French. He was wearing a dark blue sports jacket, blue open-neck shirt, neutral slacks, and a plain but large-faced gold watch.
There was something familiar about him, though I had not seen any images when I Googled him. Possibly he just resembled someone I had worked with or a public figure: a touch of Peter Ustinov, perhaps.
And Angelina. I was trying to join the dots between the young woman who had said “I love you,” the older, sophisticated woman next to me sipping wine and delivering a history lesson on the abbey, and the disembodied source of flirtatious e-mails.
She did not stop talking.
“It’s warm, isn’t it? I don’t want to drink too much. Charlie will have a bottle open as soon as we’re in the door.…”
She picked at her salad, made a trip to the bar for a soda water, then excused herself to go to the bathroom.
Charlie smiled a smile that said: She isn’t always like this. As we both know.
It suited me. Shut up and listen would be a good principle until I worked out what was going on.
“How’s the red?” said Charlie.
“Good, ta.”
“Local plonk. Gamay.”
He mopped up the last of the pepper sauce that had accompanied his steak and washed it down with the remains of the red. As Angelina walked back to the table, he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. It was the look of approval that Stuart would give if a fetching young woman passed our table at the pub—a look that I would endeavor to ignore.
Angelina would have earned the nod from Stuart, but Charlie was her husband. On my part, the frisson I had felt on the platform was morphing into desire. The glass of wine hadn’t helped.
Whatever the marital or political correctness of drawing attention to his wife’s attractiveness, Charlie was no Richard. He may have been a lawyer, but that was all they seemed to have in common. Physically he was the antithesis: Richard had been neat and compact. Charlie exuded bonhomie, whereas my impressions of Richard had been of meanness and a controlling, sniping possessiveness. He would have either ordered with a Parisian accent or expected the waiter to understand English.
Angelina may have been precipitous in jumping from one marriage to another, but she had not married the same man twice. Charlie was punching his PIN into the waiter’s machine before I had a chance to offer.
“Since you didn’t tell me what you eat,” said Charlie, as we drove home, “I thought I’d wait till I had the picture.”
The village was small, but it had the basics: post office, hairdresser, a huge pharmacy with a condom dispenser outside, a couple of bars, and a tourist office that Charlie informed me was closed on weekends, in line with French traditions of service.
He stopped at the small supermarket, jumped out of the car, and signaled for Angelina to take his place behind the wheel.
“I’ll walk home,” he said.
* * *
It was about half a mile up a hill to the stone house, far enough from the centre commercial to be pretty much in the countryside. I had joined Angelina in the front of the car.
“Is this how you imagined me when we were e-mailing?” she said. “Or were you thinking about big breasts and flawless skin?”
“I was imagining Jessica Rabbit. While I was eating my lunch at work. Where were you?”
“In bed.”
“So what were you imagining? A twenty-six-year-old with a beard?”
“How was the Lake District?”
She had not had to imagine. She had only to search for my image on the Web, where one of the walking group must have posted photos. The fit outdoorsman, impeccably kitted out, surrounded by friends. Not a bad image.
“Stalker,” I said.
“Alcoholic. You looked plastered. I preferred the accordion player.” She laughed. “I didn’t have to imagine anything. I heard your accent.”
I gave her a sample. “Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith. They wrote it together. It’s about two ex-lovers left alone in a French cottage, with the husband only half a mile away.”
“That’s not helping.”
The house stood some distance from its neighbors, with a garage, a long balcony, and a garden of flowers and fruit trees. The courtyard between the garage and main building was dominated by a blue spruce, with rosebushes in flower, a substantial herb garden, and wisteria climbing the walls. Angelina’s e-mail had implied that they owned the place. Charlie’s lawyering—or whatever Angelina was now doing—must pay well. Or they didn’t invest in lotto syndicates.
I did not get a chance to explore the interior of the house. The moment we were through the front door, Angelina tossed her bag and sunglasses onto a side table and put her arms around my neck. I had just a few moments to study her face at close quarters, to notice that the makeup covered some fine lines around her eyes, before touch took over from sight.
I don’t think either of us intended more than a kiss, but things escalated. I slid my hands down and she pushed into me. It was the scenario that had fueled a hundred fantasies, but none of them had featured skin-tight jeans and strappy shoes.
“I’ll get them,” she said as I bent down to undo the buckles.
“It’s okay, I’ve got this one.”
“No, it’s easier for me. Just steady me.”
“Try the chair.”
“I know how to take my shoes off.”
Then the jeans: Angelina sitting in the middle of the floor, pulling on one leg, until my efforts with the other leg unbalanced her so she fell back with both legs in the air and jeans around her knees. Finally, walking backward, and ignoring her protestations, I managed to get them off—and burst out laughing.
It was not so much the physical comedy as the sense of familiarity. I could see the same scene playing out twenty-two years earlier, with Angelina behaving exactly the same way. Against all reasonable expectations, I had her back.
She sat up, still wearing her top. “What are you laughing at?”
It might have been a circuit breaker, but the buildup to this moment had gone on half the afternoon, or for three months. It was not the smoothest segue, but neither of us cared. I kissed her, and a few seconds later was backing her against the front door.
She broke our kiss to let out something between a moan and a scream, surely as much a release of tension as anything. In response, there was a loud knock at the door, which was being held closed by our bodies.
Panic and farce: Angelina on the floor again pulling her jeans back on and me trying to perform the same maneuver while leaning hard against the door. When I stepped back, decent but mentally disheveled, the door stayed closed but the knock was repeated.
Angelina pushed past me and opened the door. It was not Charlie but Gilles, the caretaker, who had seen us arrive. He was about sixty-five, short, with a neat gray mustache and a smile that suggested he had worked out the reason for the delay. Angelina’s shoes were on their sides, several feet apart.
She did introductions and listened while he explained, slowly in French, that he was sorry to disturb us but wanted to check that the heating had been working the previous night and that it was not too warm, but cooler weather was forecast and a number of steps were necessary to activate the system, and it was better to be prepared but with the thermostat—did Angelina understand “thermostat”?—set to a low temperature until such time as the weather actually cooled.
By the time Angelina had sent him on his way, the moment had gone. We were in no state to seize it anyway.
Angelina looked around the room. “Oh my God. Are you okay? Do you think Gilles…?”
“Probably. Will he say anything?”
“I don’t think so. Not in his interests to cause trouble. I’ll see if the woman at the supermarket looks at me differently next time I see her.”
She was talking herself through it, but she looked shaken.
“Your room’s at the end of the hall. Are you okay if I go upstairs? Tell Charlie I’m having a shower if he asks.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Oh. My. God.”
Then she picked up her shoes and headed upstairs.
The hallway passed the kitchen and bathroom before leading into a large and bright bedroom. It had a double bed and simple wooden furniture, including a bookcase stocked with contemporary fiction and popular science. The floor was tiled, with a modern rug, and Georgian-style windows looked onto the garden on one side and the courtyard on the other. There was a vanity unit, but no shower.
I sat on the bed and tried to compose myself. Everything was okay. We had just had a close shave. Gilles hadn’t seen anything.
It seemed that the reality of our reunion—the intensity of it—had caught Angelina by surprise, as it had me. The encounter against the door might have been a one-off, an unconsidered moment of recklessness in response to that feeling. If not, was she looking for an affair, if only for a week? Or was I witnessing the end of a marriage, possibly unbeknownst to Charlie?
And what about Charlie, my host, who had been shopping for my dinner while I was tearing his wife’s clothes off?
There was not much I could do now, beyond being an appreciative guest and going with the flow. Anything out of order would raise suspicions, which would have greater consequences for Angelina than for me.
I gave myself a quick splash and a blast of deodorant, composed myself in the mirror, and walked back to the living room. This time I had a chance to look around.
Two sofas, a couple of armchairs, dining table and eight chairs, sideboard, a fireplace, and framed menus on the wall. A stereo but no television. No family pictures, perhaps because they rented it out. At one end was an upright piano, a Yamaha that I had not noticed while I was busy with other things. I remembered Shanksy telling me that Angelina had accompanied herself when she sang “I Will Survive” on that last night.
Charlie came in carrying two full shopping bags.
“Need a hand?” I asked.
“Help me unpack, if you like,” he said, and I followed him to the kitchen.
“Nice place,” I said.
It had a good dose of rustic charm, in keeping with the age of the building, but things seemed square and solid, and the kitchen was kitted out with the sort of appliances that Randall and Mandy might have bought in their California foodie heyday.
“Somewhere back in time there were plans to run it as a bed-and-breakfast,” said Charlie. “The bedrooms have vanity units, but there’s only one shower, upstairs, so we’ll be a bit chummy.”
I had surely exceeded the bounds of chumminess with the hostess already.
* * *
Around 6:30 P.M., bag unpacked, Internet connection established, and mind as straight as it could be under the circumstances, I emerged from my room to find Charlie still at work in the kitchen.
“What do you drink?” he asked.
“Not fussy.”
“Beer?”
“Sounds perfect.”
“Happy to have it cold?”
“However it comes.”
Charlie opened two bottles of Heineken—little European quarter-liters. He raised his and we clinked them in a toast. We could have drunk to all sorts of things, but not many that were in our mutual interest.
“Santé. Good health,” he said, then put his beer down and began zesting lemons.