21

H2 greeted me at the top of the stone steps, champagne flute in hand. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and had on a pair of new-looking blue jeans, but his shirt was either the same or identical to the shirt he had worn in New York, and he was wearing polished wingtips. He looked like a French bourgeois trying too hard to dress down.

Welcome, welcome, please come in! he said, handing me the champagne and relieving me of my rucksack, which he set on a chair in a room just to the left of the entrance, where I saw a grand piano, a sofa and a few easy chairs. There were bookshelves, but (curiously, given one of his putative professions) not many books. A ficus plant in a brass pot.

I’m so glad to see you, he said, beaming, skin creasing at the corners of his eyes. Let me show you around.

I allowed myself to be led through a succession of uninspiring rooms, some of which were, e.g., painted pale blue with ivory wainscoting, furnitured by wan seventies-era chairs and tables and globe lamps. More pots with more plants: moth orchid, anthurium, African violets, an improbable palm. The floors were cherrywood brown throughout and polished to a gloss.

We arrived eventually at double doors leading to the back garden, or more properly to a concrete deck rimmed by a nondescript balustrade leading down on both the left and right sides to the back garden, which was itself encircled by the boles of immature trees, mostly fir with some lime trees and oaks. The showpiece of the garden was a life-size bronze bull in full gallop at the far end. I hated it. I hated everything about the mock François 1er architecture, the turfy, close-cropped lawn, the tennis court tucked behind the house. A hard court. In France, the land of red clay, a hard court. The ignominy of it.

But I hated it most of all because I recognised it. Growing up, I spent many afternoons in houses like this one, at friends of my parents who thought it either irresponsible or too expensive to bring up their children in the great wen of Paris. Angelica and I were often dropped off without warning after school at one or another of our ostensible friends’ residences, our own desires unconsulted and our subsequent complaints ignored. We spent hours performing elaborate apotropaic rites over our play dates’ corpses after we had killed them with the compact hatchets we always carried for that purpose. Or we played hide-and-seek until dusk, when we were called inside to eat dinner, or to play card games until one of our parents or a hireling deputised to the task came in our sleek black Volvo to pick us up.

Isn’t it wonderful? asked H2, gesturing from the balcony. You would never know you’re minutes away from the city centre.

When do we eat? I said.

Here’s a picture taken from the window of a crumbling chateau in the Val-d’Oise: