The Folly of French Kissing Read online

  ‘But Miss Hay?’ Tim persisted. Carinthia looked doubtful. ‘I really don’t know why she’s gone,’ she said. ‘There’s been rumours that she got too close to the Head and wrote romantic stuff to her but I find that hard to believe. Of all of them, she was probably the most normal. A bit quiet and shy but really nice when you got to know her. And she was a good English teacher. I’m quite sorry she’s gone actually.’

  This was most definitely not what Tim wanted to hear. He decided to come clean with Carinthia – she was clearly the kind of girl who could take it. ‘Look Carinthia,’ he said. ‘To be honest, my paper wants me to write an article, based on this story of Miss Hay which is in the papers today, about lesbianism in girls boarding schools – the more the merrier as far as they’re concerned. Couldn’t you just embellish some stories for me with authentic detail so that it sounds right about what you all get up to in the showers and so on? I’ll even pay you for it.’

  An hour later, Tim had enough material for his feature and Carinthia had a fresh packet of cigarettes and a tenner. It was well worth it. She even posed for a photograph for Ron on condition that it was made clear that she was not one of the Sapphic sisters that the newspaper had somehow got to hear about.

  Her vanity was, of course, to be her downfall when Tim’s piece appeared two days later (‘Not so Chaste at The Chase’). In the mayhem that followed with the parents and governors up in arms and a Spanish Inquisition in the school as to who was the ‘mole’, Carinthia confessed. She had been the obvious suspect after all with her picture in the paper (she was pleased about that).

  The school made a formal complaint to the Tribune and the Press Complaints Commission. Their case was clear-cut. A reporter had bribed a schoolgirl to give him an entirely false account of events at The Chase. The newspaper was forced to apologise on its front page the following day. Tim was told to clear his desk and was actually escorted from the building by Cyril the security guard. ‘Seems a shame,’ Cyril said companionably, as they went down in the lift together. ‘You wos only doing your job. That’s what this game is about, innit? Making up stories.’

  Tim agreed it was a pity. ‘Best piece I ever did, Cyril’, he said. Really, he had to laugh. Gisella had actually shaken her fist at him through her glass partition as he packed up to go. He supposed her head was on the line now too. She had been crazy about the piece. ‘None of the others seem to have got a sniff of this,’ she said. ‘Well done, Tim, I always thought you could do it.’

  At about the time Tim was ruefully handing in his office car keys to the reception desk downstairs, Carinthia was insouciantly clambering into her parents’ BMW with her trunk on the roof rack for what should have been a shamefaced journey home for the final time.

  In fact, neither she nor Tim, it has to be said, much minded leaving their respective institutions in disgrace. Both felt that they probably faced a brighter future because of it.

  3

  As usual, Judith crash-landed into consciousness, her heart hammering, her sheet twisted. She lay there deep-breathing for a few more minutes, willing her clenched muscles to relax, trying to drive off the butterflies that seemed to nest perpetually in her stomach.

  I’m here now; I’m safe, she told herself. I’m not there. I’m here, in France and I’ve got to stop thinking about it. Physical pain would have been easier; it would have been over by now and forgotten about. Shame, it seemed, lingered longer. It might never leave her.

  In the crippling aftermath of her ignominious ‘retirement’ from The Chase, she had lain low in London for a while, paralysed by misery and indecision. But even London wasn’t far enough away. Like so many others whose lives have taken a wrong turn, she had opted to start again in a new country, thinking it would make all the difference.

  Now, here in rural France – only a few days after the news reports but seemingly a lifetime away – the sun streamed in through a chink in the shutters; it was that which had awoken her. It’s strange, she mused, how I longed for this sun. I thought it would heal me and bring me some peace, but it’s not so. Back in England, it’s all anybody thinks about – it’s absence anyway. In all the ‘olive n’ vine’ books and holiday programmes featuring farmhouses, swimming pools and lavender, the sun is the facilitator of a happy and blessed existence. But, sadly, you finally learn that you can move all you like, but you take your baggage with you. All those lifestyle programmes at home with titles like ‘No Turning Back’ now seemed apocalyptic and threatening.

  It wasn’t that she wanted to be back in England particularly; she appreciated all kinds of things about France. It was just that her move here hadn’t really solved anything or, as yet, brought her any lasting contentment. She wondered how many others in the growing expatriate community out here felt the same. God knows, there were enough of them who were finding life pretty challenging. It was probably why they all stuck together like glue.

  Thinking of this, she suddenly realised that it was Saturday, which meant two things: the first, market day in Vevey, an enjoyable outing important for socialising and linguistic skills as well as procuring anything from groceries to an ironing board cover. The second was far less inviting. In the evening, and there was no escaping this, there was the dreaded barbeque.

  The Saturday barbeque had become an institution among the expatriate community, always held at one of their houses in the area by prearrangement. When Judith had first come to La Prairie, a medieval village close to the sizeable market town of Vevey, she had marvelled at how many other British people had migrated to the region. There must have been a shifting population of about three hundred of them in her village and a few of the neighbouring ones. Naturally they gravitated towards each other and formed a loose alliance. Many of them didn’t speak French, nor even made an effort to do so, but even those who did found it difficult to integrate locally and would have been lost without their fellow countrymen.

  Any newcomer was fallen upon with a degree of delight and there was little chance of avoiding them. One could have gone out every night to drinks, to supper or to the local bridge club even, and many did. Many of these invitations in the early days, Judith wisely declined, but it was impossible not to show up sometimes at the Saturday event.

  A solitary person, by inclination and temperament, Judith had at first been horrified by such enforced intimacy with people, most of whom she would certainly have avoided knowing at home. A year on, the horror had largely given way to boredom, but even she had to acknowledge that the ex-pats represented a useful support system and she knew she should be more grateful for their overtures of friendship.

  And, she had to admit, some of them were perfectly OK. She hadn’t really made a proper friend yet nor felt there were any kindred spirits to whom she could really relate, but she wasn’t overly concerned. There were those, however, whom she positively didn’t want to know. With a shudder she thought now of Lance Campion, the unofficial and self-elected ‘leader’ in his late forties of the Britpack as he called it.

  After apparently making bundles of money in advertising, Lance had taken early retirement to the South of France and had written one of the early books on the good life in the sun which had bought him modest celebrity. The fact that he was so pleased with himself took the edge off his leonine good looks, and Judith thought him calculating and opportunist rather than clever. He was one of those people who invaded your space, both physically and mentally. He made her very nervous, and like a dog which shies away from certain people, she knew that she couldn’t conceal her dislike. And he sensed it.

  The last time she had seen him at a dinner party, he had fixed her with his oddly pale eyes towards the end of the evening: ‘What are you running away from Judith?’ he asked in a conspiratorial voice, low enough not to be overheard. She felt herself go cold and after a beat too long had forced herself to answer in what she hoped was a light-hearted manner. ‘Do I look as though I’m running away, Lance? ‘You do’, he replied and turned away. He didn’t need to say, �
��And I intend to find out.’ Lance didn’t like secrets – other people’s at any rate. Please god let him not be there tonight.

  Vevey was heaving. The entire length of the town’s longest street culminating in the Place de la République gave way to the market. It was difficult to move. Judith joined the hordes of perambulating people in much the same way as a car from a sliproad finally forces its way into a gap on the Autoroute. Hundreds of determined French housewives, most carrying the obligatory baguette under their arm which usefully doubled as a crowd control weapon, shouted up at stallholders for cheese, for fruit, for Toulouse sausages, for flowers, or just shouted at each other. Shouting, Judith noted, was the norm here. God knows what they did when they were angry. At first, she, like all the more reticent British, mumbled her requests at the vendors but it was useless. She could speak French more or less fluently, but in the Midi, the South of France, it was ineffectual as a tool of communication unless it was delivered at mega decibels. Other English residents seemed to have caught on to this too. Quite often – disturbingly often in fact – Judith could hear her fellow countrymen bellowing for oysters or ordering a coffee in voices that used to be reserved for running the empire.

  There was a brisk trade in overalls, the kind French housewives don in order to scrub their front steps. An awful lot of them were actually wearing the things, along with their slippers. Funny how the French had a reputation for chic clothes, Judith mused. It certainly wasn’t in evidence round here. But then, until recently nobody had really heard of the Languedoc and both the region and its inhabitants seemed largely untouched by contemporary life.

  This huge sleepy area to the west of Provence – every inch of it covered with vines and three times the size of the celebrated Bordeaux region – was the source, she had read, of one in 11 bottles of the world’s wine. It had lain undiscovered, basking in the sun, by the French and foreigners alike, until about 30 years previously when a few resourceful vineyard owners recognising the terrain’s potential for producing world class wines, brought in young, enthusiastic winemakers, largely from the New World, to replant the vines and apply new production methods. The startlingly good results had taken everybody by surprise and seen a huge influx in recent years of refugees from northern France as well as Britain, Germany and Holland attracted to the region by its space, climate and renewed commercial opportunities. Many of them now seemed to be in Vevey market, she reflected ruefully.

  It was past midday when, feeling particularly sticky, she wandered off the main drag and into the historic heart of the town thinking she would find a café in the shade away from all the bustle. Her mind in neutral, she found herself dawdling in a part of town she didn’t know very well. Here the alleyways were darker and narrower and there were no shops, just houses either side and washing hanging out on lines above her. Off the alleyway in which she found herself were several impasses – small cul-de-sacs – and glancing to her left down one of these as she strolled, she froze for a split second as she took in two people she knew rather well in a passionate clinch. Recognition gave way to shock at the scene she had witnessed. Rapidly and as noiselessly as she could, she half sprinted down the alley and rounded the corner into a small square at the top. There she paused to catch her breath before hurrying back to the main thoroughfare another way, unable to compute in her mind the meaning of what she’d seen until she was safe amongst the crowd.

  Once there, she took a table in the nearest café and ordered an espresso which she drained with shaky hands. Could she have been mistaken? No, she didn’t think she could. Could she have misinterpreted what she saw? No, again. In which case, she thought, her brain firing like a scattergun, what shall I do about it? Shall I tell someone, or shall I keep quiet? Then something even worse occurred to her: supposing she herself had been seen? Now suddenly she knew with absolute icy certainty that this was the case. Small wonder she was so upset. Upset, though, wasn’t the word. She had to admit it, it was something more akin to fear that she felt.

  Later, after a feverish siesta – a laudable French tradition – from which she awoke unrefreshed and unresolved, she lay in bed reading her new Margaret Atwood novel. Reading was usually balm to jangling nerves but this latest Atwood was a highly disturbing glimpse into the future. Generally Judith, for whom reading was as necessary as breathing, welcomed any chance to break out of the confines of her own limited experience into another world, whether it was eighteenth century rural England or twentieth century Chicago mean streets. This time, though, the empathetic alarm she felt for Atwood’s protagonist, Jimmy, stranded alone in an alien future, dovetailed with her own sense of panic and served only to enhance it.

  I too am alone, she thought a touch melodramatically. Not, it’s true, in an alien future, but in an alien land to some extent. For all its proximity to Britain, France, especially here in the south, was very foreign indeed. And even in England, she had always somehow felt an onlooker, never part of the crowd. Glumly, she reviewed her life so far: the only child of rather elderly, timid parents who lived extremely quietly in a run-down terrace in Wimbledon, her childhood had been dull and conformist. Her schooling, at a local selective high school was traditional and unexceptional. An intelligent, sensitive girl, she had cruised through academically, always doing what was expected of her and never drawing attention to herself. Friends weren’t encouraged at home; nor would Judith have wished to bring anyone back to the stifling atmosphere of her house where nothing, especially not her parents, had changed in forty years.

  Her escape, her salvation, was her imagination to which she was able to give full rein in books, in the magical universe of the unreal – or at least other people’s ‘real’. How can other people not read, she had always thought? How can they learn anything from their own necessarily limited experience? How can they not want to escape from the here and now of their own lives, the dreary predictability and banality of it all?

  Amongst her new acquaintances here reading as a pastime – as a lifeline – was largely dismissed: responses ranged from puzzled – ‘how do you find the time?’ to witty chat up lines like ‘why read about it when you can do it?’ or ‘what’s a lovely lady like you doing burrowing in books when you could be out enjoying yourself?’ to that of her engaging odd job man Pete: ‘Books? They do my head in.’

  A degree in English Literature at University College, London, had followed school as both she and her teachers had known it would. There was no spare money for university accommodation or sharing a flat with other students (what forbidden careless rapture that would have been!) so Judith continued to live at home and life changed not a whit. What a good thing, she thought now, she had also become interested in French literature at university and had mastered the language too. That stood her in good stead here.

  Also at university, Judith had become seriously interested in poetry. She responded to its haunting rhythms, its ability to convey a universal truth in a phrase, its melancholic or joyful beauty. In her spare time she tried to write it herself and found that she had a gift for it. A suitable pastime for a solitary spinster she told herself wryly. But it was more than a hobby. After successfully contributing to specialist magazines, Judith was now a published poet with three collections out and a respectful following. Being Judith though, it was only her editor and a couple of friends who realised that she wrote under the pseudonym Howard Hill, known to be a mysterious recluse who would never agree to public readings of his work.

  After graduating, she had applied for and got the first post she had seen advertised: a teacher at a big girls’ independent boarding school in the Midlands. The job was attractive because it came with a small flat at the school and by this time Judith thought she would surely implode if she had to spend any more time in Wimbledon.

  Shortly after she left home, both her parents died, one soon after the other, tidily and without fuss. Judith was sad, but not unduly distressed. If anything, she felt liberated. The house, she sold for a useful though not considerable s
um which she lodged in a building society and almost forgot about. Her requirements were pretty modest, but it did mean she could afford leisurely holidays mostly in France when The Chase broke up for the summer. The Chase, she thought now, as the butterflies returned to swarm in her stomach. No, she would not go there in her head. There was enough going on here.

  4

  ‘Early evening in the south of France in late May when the real heat has gone out of the day but the sun lingers to bathe in a golden glow the rows upon rows of young vines in leaf bordered by banks of wild iris or oleander bushes is my favourite time…’, – from Love at First Sight: A Year in the Languedoc by Lance Campion.

  It is very beautiful thought Judith as she drove along the narrow lanes between vineyards stretching as far as the eye could see, but a recent reading of Lance’s mushy book had somehow taken the edge off its charm for her. What he failed to say was that early evening was also the time when he and his cronies start pouring themselves gin and tonics or tumbler-sized glasses of the seductively cheap local wine and congratulate each other on being clever enough to wind up down here for their retirement instead of putrefying in Purley.

  Oh hell, she really must stop being so churlish. Just lately, everything seemed to have got on top of her. She supposed it was partly because she didn’t really have enough to occupy herself, in spite of taking on some freelance teaching, and partly because she had yet to meet any kindred spirits. Just one would do. Even so, she was irritated by her own negativity. Grow up, she told herself sternly. I’m really very lucky to have any friends at all, and it doesn’t bear thinking about what I’d be doing now if I were back in England.

  After all, what do I miss? The weather? I think not. The people? Well, only a handful. Jane, in particular, a friend from university who had surprised everybody by marrying a rather glitzy banker shortly afterwards and living between London and New York. Jane had been brilliant last year when everything had gone so wrong and Judith had taken refuge with her whilst planning her escape to France. She hadn’t asked Judith for details about what happened. She just accepted that Judith didn’t want to discuss it and just needed somewhere to hide away until she decided upon a plan of action. Yes, she missed Jane enormously, and it was true that there was a close friend-shaped hole in her life right now, one unlikely to be filled tonight. Oh god, there I go again.