AFTER SEVERAL MESSAGES, Nadine’s acting agent finally calls me back and says come tomorrow at noon and, whatever I do, don’t forget my paperwork. Before I can say anything else she has hung up.
I forget the paperwork. My bowels pang as I run back up the métro stairs and across the blocked intersection to the Récollets, before sprinting back to the same spot, dialling Daphné’s number.
‘Well, merde, just get ’ere,’ she barks. ‘You have wasting my time with this phone call.’
I consider not going, but can’t pass up the opportunity. Perhaps she’s nicer in the flesh.
Daphné Papps Management is the ugliest building in the prettiest street in the 9th arrondissement. The shabby door in the back of an old courtyard has DPM printed on it in faded gold. I press a buzzer. A dog yelps inside and the door is ripped open, and a woman with wild grey hair leads me through a series of rooms as she rants in French/English about lateness and lazy actors. Daphné, Nadine told me, while French, lived in England for a long time, which is why she represents zee anglophones.
She rips a chair from under her desk and bangs it in behind my knees, lighting a cigarette. ‘Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I stammer. ‘I really am sorry.’
She is scary-looking, though the distant echoes of great beauty are still there. Beyond the puckered anus mouth painted clumpy red, rotting nicotine-stained teeth and bulging glass eye, her face is perfectly proportioned and her grey hair long and thick. The office is damp, the walls also nicotine-stained, and the dusty desk is littered with filthy ashtrays. A picture of Daphné smiling with Charlotte Rampling is blu-tacked to the side of an old computer, which makes an old-fashioned hum. Charlotte smiles, reminding me of my insignificance. A fan blows stinky air onto the damp dog that comes to slobber on my knee.
‘Bisou,’ says Daphné, her face lighting up. ‘Come here, you beautiful darling of my heart, yes chérie, I love you, come to Mummy, oui, oui.’ And the dog pads over to her to receive a full-blown kiss on the mouth.
Then, like lightning, the bitch face is back on me.
‘So why the ’ell are you in Paris if you are an actor speaking English? You ’ave no brain?’
I tell her how I plan to stay and work as an actor here, in French, English, whatever. How I want to mount a theatre company and make my own solo work too.
‘And what about your papers?’
‘I’ve got a student visa for now, but that’s going to run out soon. If I get a job —’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Marry him.’
‘Yes, but I don’t need to —’
‘Marry him.’
‘There are other ways,’ I say, but Daphné bats my words away with her cigarette, bending over to kiss Bisou. The loving face she shows to him returns to bitch face as she looks back at me. She tells me again to get married, it’s the only way. I tell her I have it under control. She tells me to get out, she has another appointment. Then adds that I should get new photos – mine are disgusting.
If I enrol in the three-month French course at the Sorbonne I can extend my visa for that amount of time. That will be long enough to get a job and sort out my living situation. Adrien and I could pretend we’ve been living together and get a de-facto visa, though I don’t want to bring this up with him, it seems so unromantic. I have, however, secretly gone to the town hall and got the cold pile of paperwork.
In the end I decide on the extension, but I have no intention of turning up to the classes at the Sorbonne, and not just because they start at eight am – I don’t want to go. But I learn to my dismay that a new decree has been made, whereby you must have a near-perfect attendance rate to keep your student visa. So there’s no option but to go to class, every weekday morning for three hours.
I’m surprised to find them interesting. I like driving my professor crazy with the street French I’ve learned. When he asks if I enjoyed my weekend I say it was un truc de ouf quoi. The others in the class need to learn correct French, Monsieur Carlieu says, but I keep asking why we’re learning things that people don’t actually say. I make it my mission to convert my classmates into real French speakers, so that they don’t leave the course, as I had university, impotent in the real world.
Daphné sends me to weird auditions with briefs like unpretentious foreigner, hungry cat that wakes in a glass box (for a science fiction film) and French-speaking American journalist that interviews Édith Piaf on a beach. I get a call-back for a role in a touring production of Othello, but when they find out I don’t have a long-term visa they give the part to a friend of Nadine’s.
Papers, papers everywhere. Job applications. Attestations. Bank statements. Visa forms. Adrien sleeps soundly as I rifle through the pile, trying to make sense of them all. Two weeks until I have to leave the Récollets. No more money. I sigh and put my head in my hands, then walk naked to the window. The chestnut tree is at its fullest, fluttering with birdlife.
Adrien’s head appears over the mezzanine wall. ‘Hi you,’ he says, rubbing his eyes.
‘Hi.’ I turn around, enjoying the sun on my back. ‘Want a coffee?’
He smiles. ‘Want to get married?’
‘Ha!’ I say, disappearing into the kitchen. I bring him up his coffee and flop on the bed.
‘I’m serious,’ he says, putting the coffee to one side.
In French you say se marier avec. You marry yourself with someone. Squash yourself together with them. Yes, I want to squash myself together with Adrien. But do I want to marry him? It would solve a lot of problems. Also, I love him. If I marry him we can stay together.
‘I want to marry myself with you,’ he says. His face is soft. His eyes are clear. ‘I want you to be my wife.’
I put my hand on his cheek. ‘I want to marry myself with you too!’
We stay in bed all morning, trying the idea on our lips and in our bodies.
‘My wife,’ he says. In French, femme – the same word as for ‘woman’. Perhaps I am becoming a woman after all. A madame. Madame Masson.
‘My husband.’ Mon mari. The words resound, deep and mature.
I say he should call my dad. He looks sheepish but puts on clothes.
I dial the number and Dad picks up and says, ‘Can it wait? It’s the last half-hour of 24.’ I say no, it’s important, and pass Adrien the phone. He goes downstairs and I hear the words ‘I love yer dotter en I would like to merry her, if that is okay wiz you, and I promise I will be good to her and I won’t take her away from you.’
I will marry him at La Grange in springtime in long grass with wildflowers and an outdoor lunch table with côte de bœuf and I Need You. It will be warm and breezy and my dress will move gently. I will have bare feet and hardly any makeup on. Kiki and Dad and Kate and the boys will come.
We talk dates, send ‘save the date’ messages, call our friends and family, get excited. Kiki says she’ll come, and adds, ‘Wow, you really are going to have baby croissants.’ Kate says, ‘I can’t believe I don’t know him.’ My brothers both say, ‘Congrats.’ Dad says Adrien sounds very nice and that he guesses he’d better book himself a ticket.
Adrien takes me to the Brasserie Julien, the jewel of the Faubourg-Saint-Denis with its sensual curved doors and mysterious dusty hats in the windows belying an Art Nouveau treasure trove: carved mahogany chairs, polished bar with crêpe suzettes burning in silver dishes, red velvet banquettes, and tall, meticulously painted women curling up the walls. We order foie gras and champagne and steaks and wine and chocolate fondant and dessert wine, compliments of Dad. My stomach and soul burst with joy and a little apprehension about how we are going to do it all in our current financial situation. But I try to forget that. We talk about rings and let ourselves be wrapped in the opulence of old Paris.
On a hot morning in early July I hand my keys in to Chantal at the Récollets desk. She hugs me like I’m her child. Then, feeling like one, I take the train to Asnières, with my enormous suitcase and too many loose bags. In his apartment Adrien wraps his arms around me tight. Now we are a family.
There is not enough space for us both. I won’t settle in too far – I have put notices up at the Sorbonne and in the English bookshops and the American Church, where I found my au pair job years ago, advertising English tuition, so I’m bound to get some work soon, then we’ll be able to afford a bigger place, dans Paris. In the meantime, small pockets of space have been made for my shoes and my clothers. Adrien hangs my Special Dress under one of his heavy suit jackets. A few other dresses fit in the wardrobe, the doodoona on the back of the door, and the rest of my clothes in tight piles in the drawers he has emptied for me.
Everything must be put back in its place after use – I can’t throw my jacket over the sofa when I come in, or leave my sandals in the entranceway. It is essential that the bed is made and returned to its sofa alter-ego every morning upon waking, or life will crumble. Bathroom time is structured and we are still discreet about pooping, and I get used to cold showers as the hot water is off again. Fragments of me slowly migrate to bookshelves, walls, drawers – hair ties and pins and long strands of blond hair.
There’s just one thing that won’t find its place, the orange A4 envelope with Al’s photos of Kiki and me in the Dordogne. I don’t know what to do with them. I’m afraid of what Adrien will do if he finds them, and yet I can’t throw them out. They are precious, not only because they were taken by such a famous photographer, but because I love them. They’re awful, and impossible to look at – I haven’t so much as glanced at them since the day I showed them to Kiki – but they’re a tiny piece of us. I’d give them to Harry to hold onto, but what if he looked? Nadine might lose them. Marie-France too. I have to keep them near. Though I may never look at them again, they will forevermore go everywhere with me.
To hide something from my future husband makes me feel uneasy. But I can’t see any way around it. I put the envelope in a pocket in my suitcase.