THE DAY BEFORE the inaugural tea party I got a weird email from Alexa, wishing me luck and advising me not to work too hard.
‘Don’t forget to take some time for yourself,’ she told me. ‘Relax, get pampered.’
Did that really mean what I thought it did? Was she telling me to call Virginie for some more fruity R&R?
Not the kind of question you can ask a girl directly.
I replied that I’d got myself well and truly pampered a few days before, and thanked her for passing on my telephone number.
Then Jake called to pass on some very worrying information, in his uniquely uninformative way.
‘I don’t think your site’s branched,’ he said.
‘My what’s not what?’
‘You know, your site web. It’s not in line.’
‘On line?’
‘No. I was posting my posy . . .’
‘You were what?’
‘Posting my posy. Putting it in line. You know. I’m editing my poems en ligne, right? And, oh man, à propos, I found a super Estonian site. Like, Estonians reunited? All these women. It’s génial. You know they’re connected to the Basques?’
He rambled on about the linguistic links between Estonians, Basques, Finns and Hungarians and the chances of sleeping with their female populations, while I started to get seriously worried about my website. It ought to have been on line already. Last time I’d spoken to the designer, everything was on schedule. Maybe Jake had got the address wrong?
‘Jake . . .’
‘So Europe should be OK, but terminating with Africa is like really dur, man.’
‘Jake . . .’
‘Like, there’s no woman in Paris from Sudan, Somalie, Eritrea. Which is like, too ironic’
‘Ironic?’
‘Yeah, it’s the horn of Africa. Horn, horny, right?’
‘OK, so how about, I couldn’t find girls from the Horn, so I had to make do with porn?’
Very cruel of me, but I knew that taking the piss was the only way of stemming his flow of geo-sexual information.
‘Hey, man, I told you, you know, you’ve got to show un peu de respect for my posy.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, Jake. I do respect your posy. But I need to ask you about the web . . .’
‘Oh, damn, gotta go. Boss is arriving.’
‘You’re at work?’
‘Yeah, I’m in a course with Madame Brunerie.’
‘You’re in a lesson now?’
‘Yeah, I said it would be good for her to listen to a real English phone conversation. But my boss is arriving. At tomorrow. Ciao.’
He hung up and I wondered what his student would have learned. The interesting verb ‘to post your posy’. Oh, and that her teacher was a sex addict.
And still they didn’t fire him?
He was right, though. My website wasn’t on line. And when I called the website designer she explained why. It was very simple, really – she didn’t know how to put websites on line.
‘But you are a website designer,’ I reminded her in my calmest French.
‘Yes, I design websites. But that doesn’t mean to say I can put them on line.’
‘But that is like a train driver saying he can drive a train but he doesn’t know how to stop it.’
‘No, it is not,’ she said.
‘Well, who will put it on line, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘But I need it to be on line when I have my official opening party.’
‘Well you’d better find someone really quickly, then.’
Her logic was so dazzling, her indifference so perfect, that I had to hit myself repeatedly over the head with my phone as a kind of homage to her genius.