BY THE TIME I got back to my mansion that night I was bushed.
No, I wasn’t living in the ex-Russian embassy. But it was a real mansion – a beaten-up, white-washed and grey-stained block called Boscombe Mansions that had been converted from family apartments into a hundred bedsits for immigrant Londoners like myself.
The flats were above a parade of shops – Burger King, Starbucks, Kodak Express, a newsagent and a betting shop. This being the French ghetto, there was also a crêperie.
In the street there was a permanent smell of fast food in the air. Inside my building it was lemon disinfectant.
But the bedsit was only mind-numbingly expensive, as opposed to bank-breakingly expensive, and it was excellently located. You had to hand it to the French, I decided. If you’ve got to pick a place for a ghetto, South Kensington is not a bad spot. Just down the road from Harrods in one of the city’s smartest neighbourhoods.
When I’d arrived there at the weekend, the first French tilings I’d seen were the consulate and the school, which was called, of course, the lycée Charles de Gaulle. Both were right opposite the Victoria & Albert and Natural History museums, a location that just about summed up France, I thought – style and science.
The consulate was typically provocative. Not only was it flying a tricolor, there was also a huge European flag hanging out over the road. I was sure that a few London cabbies would have crashed in fury on seeing that.
There was a whole street of French cafés, with a deli and a rôtisserie, and round the corner was a wonderful French patisserie with a window full of gateaux. One of these cakes had me drooling – a fluffy, creamy chocolate gateau with a wafer-thin collar of chocolate shavings. They don’t know how to make gooey cakes, I thought, but you can’t beat them at tarts and gateaux. It was like a mirror image of my tea room. The patisserie was bringing chocolate shavings to Londoners, while my tea room was taking goo to the French. I’d have to call Benoît and ask how the goo was going.
Something else reminded me of the tea room, too. There were French restaurants dotted all over South Kensington, and none of them had been forced to translate their menus.
The crêperie offered a ‘crème de marron’ pancake, which was defined as ‘purée of sweetened marron glacé’ – what the hell was that? I’d lived in France and even I didn’t know.
Another place had ‘œuf de canard en meurette’, which seemed to mean something like ‘dying duck’s egg’. Not a speciality I’d ever tried.
And at the bottom of that menu there was ‘potage paysanne’, which I ought to have reported to the police. Stew of peasant girl? Were London’s Frenchies really cannibals?
They hadn’t seemed that way on the Internet.
There was, I’d discovered, a lively community of French expats living in London and chatting to each other on the Web. Sharing the good news that French freezer-food shops were opening up here, so they’d be able to get frozen foie gras for Christmas. Telling each other which bars to visit if they wanted to meet some of France’s famous London-based footballers. And advertising accommodation to rent.
I’d had enough of sharing with French Friends fans, so I opted for the bedsit, which was in this ‘mansion’ building owned and run by a Parisian management company. My new home was decorated with unstainable dark colours and indestructible materials, with a ‘kitchen’ that consisted of a fridge with a microwave on top. It was as charming as a motorway service station, but it felt kind of monastic, which was the idea.
That evening, I sat down with a takeaway ratatouille (that hadn’t been translated on the menu, either) from the French deli, and phoned Alexa.
She emailed me a photo while we were talking. It was another of her light-saturated colour shots of me, taken when I was leaving Yuri’s house on the morning I got kidnapped by the Hulk. All you could see was my back. My hands were in my pockets, my legs looked as if I was about to kick out at a stone.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked. ‘That you were glad to see the back of me?’
She didn’t quite understand the idiom. I had to explain it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought you looked like a man who is just leaving the building after having sex.’
‘Oh. Was that a bad thing?’
‘No. It was flattering.’
‘Oh. Great. Brilliant.’ Though if she meant that our future sexual encounters would be limited to me getting shoved around by a Ukrainian bodyguard and then having coffee with her mum, I wasn’t sure how keen I was. ‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘Well, you come to London, you find my house, and afterwards you look like you have – how do you say? – achieved something. Like having sex.’
‘Right. Though what I mainly achieved was making you cry.’
She laughed.
‘Why did you cry, Alexa?’
She laughed again. ‘One day I will tell you. But for now it is best that you do not know.’
So she was going to play la femme mystérieuse, was she? I didn’t know how much of that I could take. There was a distinct danger that London would rub off on me and that I’d get used to half-naked women whose idea of mystery was shouting ‘Guess whether I’ve got any knickers on!’