Weekend in Paris Read online

  So when Malcolm waved her into his office later that afternoon, expelled a gust of beery breath into the air and announced that he’d got hold of two tickets for the Crazy Horse Saloon tomorrow night, Molly was polite but firm. (She knew from the guidebooks that the Crazy Horse was a Paris nightclub where beautiful girls danced naked—“tastefully,” her book said, but Molly suspected there was more to it than just dancing, and any fool could guess where such an entertainment might lead.) “Thank you very much for the offer, Malcolm, but I suspect our notions of cultural attractions are somewhat different.”

  “Oh, do you?” He glowered at her for a long moment, then swiveled his chair round, picked up something from his desk, and dropped it again with a thump. Molly saw that it was one of the folders she’d prepared for the conference, which he must have taken from her desk. “Sections three and four are the wrong way round,” he announced flatly.

  “What?” Molly was so horrified by the idea she could have made a mistake that she forgot about everything else. She picked up the folder, leafed through it quickly, and to her relief found everything in order. “Look,” she showed him the pages, “it’s just the way you wanted it. You gave it a final check yesterday, remember?”

  He didn’t blink, didn’t even glance at the report she was holding out. “Today,” he said, drawing out the word in a nasal slur, “I want it the other way round.”

  “But there isn’t time! Everything’s been collated and bound. Besides, it doesn’t make sense. Section three has to come first because—”

  “Are you questioning my judgement?”

  “Well . . .” Molly could feel her temper rising and tried to damp it down. I love Paris in the springtime . . . “I mean, surely you can see—”

  “What I see is one of my staff disagreeing with me. I don’t care for that.”

  I love Paris in the fall . . .

  “I don’t mean to disagree, I’m just trying to point out—”

  “I’m the boss, Molly. What I say goes. Frankly, I haven’t got time to sit around arguing with some stupid secretary.”

  “I’m not stupid!”

  I love Paris in the winter, when it drizzles . . .

  “You’re a stupid, inexperienced, uptight little virgin.”

  “I’m not a virgin!”

  I love Paris in the summer . . .

  “And unless you do what I ask, you’re not coming to Paris. Got it?”

  . . . when it sizzles.

  There was a loud snap! as the folder slammed shut between Molly’s hands. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she marched back to her desk, and flung herself into the chair at her computer. An electric storm flashed and sparked in her head. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. Was this why she had gone to university—to be patronized by a dur-brain like Malcolm? Was this really her best hope—to be Marketing Officer for some dreary company making money out of other people’s suffering? Her chest rose and fell under the buttoned shirt. She grabbed the computer mouse and swept it into position with a trembling hand. Her fingernails skittered across the keyboard. She began to type . . .

  “Stand well clear of the doors, please.” The pushing and shoving began again as the train stopped at Embankment. Molly realized she had been glaring furiously at the diamond pattern of someone’s tie, and felt abashed when she saw the poor man shoot her a nervous look, then check his tie for embarrassing stains.

  She’d caught Malcolm’s eye one final time, when she’d looked up from her typing and found him staring at her through the glass wall of his office, arms folded, lips set in a tight little grimace of triumph. He thought she was retyping his stupid report. But she wasn’t. The words had erupted out of her like red-hot lava. Every phrase, every nuance, every comma was still branded into her brain tissue.

  Dear Mr. Figg,

  Conscious as I am of the honor of working for Phipps Lauzer Bergman, the time has come for me to move on to a position where my talents will be more fully appreciated and deployed. I accepted this job under the misapprehension that its demands would be concomitant with my educational qualifications. Thank you for opening my eyes. I apologize for wasting your valuable time with my suggestions for improving the efficiency (not to mention the literacy) of the department. For my part, the time has not been entirely unprofitable, as I have been able to gather much useful raw material for my first novel.

  As of today I am formally resigning as so-called “Marketing Officer” and taking the holiday owed to me in lieu of notice. It will therefore not be possible for me to attend the Paris conference as planned, but no doubt you will manage perfectly well without the help of someone who is just “a stupid secretary.”

  Yours sincerely,

  Molly Clearwater (BA Hons)

  It was a magnificent letter, if she said so herself. Even Malcolm Figg would feel chastened when he read it. She had been right to stand up for herself. Definitely. To wait until Malcolm was temporarily out of his office, then gather her belongings, press “Send” and sweep out of the office for good was positively heroic. In a film, there would have been “go, girl” music and the whole staff would have stood to cheer her exit.

  But this wasn’t a film: it was her life. Molly felt the first icy trickle of reality. She had no job. Malcolm was unlikely to give her a reference. Without a salary she couldn’t afford to stay in London. She was back to square one. It was so unfair! Why should she have to pay the penalty for someone else’s character flaws? And she had failed—she who’d got top A levels and everything, and just knew she could be brilliant at something if she could only discover what it was. She gazed down the carriage, scrutinizing the shuttered faces. All these people had jobs; they knew where they were headed; they had friends and boyfriends, wives and lovers; they belonged. She wondered if there was anyone like her in the whole of London, or even in the world. Her glance fell on the advertisements pasted along the sides of the carriage, practically all of them offering late-season holidays in Mallorca, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice. There were seductive pictures of beaches, cathedrals, a couple in a gondola leaning close. That’s right, she thought, rub it in.

  For that was the worst of it: she was not going to Paris. Molly squeezed her eyes shut against piercing disappointment. Everyone else had been to Paris—why not her? She knew just how it would be. The Eiffel Tower, boats on the Seine, old women selling flowers, old men playing accordions on cobbled street corners. Lovers kissing on bridges. Restaurants with art-nouveau mirrors, and waiters in long white aprons. The women were all whippet-thin with names like Chantal and Séverine; they spoke in voices high and delicate as chiming bells and carried small clipped poodles. The men were called Jean-something and pouted soulfully through the smoke of their Gauloises. Everyone smoked and drank and argued and made love with passion and style. They were serious about art and literature. They wanted to live beautiful lives.

  So do I! thought Molly. She’d been practicing her French for weeks, pursing and stretching her lips to achieve the correct pronunciation. Arrondissement (ah-rohn-dees-mahn). Tuileries (tweelur-ee). Pompidou (pohm-pee-doo). Wasted. All wasted. Molly felt a prickle of tears and swallowed hard. Apart from university she had spent her entire life in a cottage in deepest Yokelshire, just her and her mother, their dog Alleluia, Chanticleer and his hens, and those wretched plants—sheds and polytunnels and windowsills full of them—which dominated their lives from Easter to August bank holiday in return for the most meager of incomes. I have measured out my life with hanging baskets . . .

  Of course, she loved them all to bits—but it would have been wonderful, just for once, to escape. She was sick of working hard, behaving nicely, helping her mother, being grateful. She was sick of herself, or the “responsible” person everyone thought she was—as if there was any other way to be when you had to help out at home or go broke, when you had to pass exams however much you wanted to party, when you had a terrifying student loan to repay, when you had no nice daddy to bail you out of trouble—in fact, no daddy
at all. What no one understood was that she wasn’t like that. Inside, she was a free, adventurous spirit, witty and capricious, passionate and lovable. She burned to do something magnificent.

  “Next stop Waterloo,” announced a disembodied female voice. How exotic. Molly glanced at her watch: twenty-five to six. She should have been on her way to the airport by now. Everything was in the bag at her feet: her passport, the new clothes she had bought specially, the guidebooks she knew almost by heart, her plastic envelope of euros.

  But, oh, no, instead it was back to Fat Sal and the poky flat they shared in Wandsworth. Molly wished she hadn’t made quite such a song and dance about this weekend. Sal was such a party girl that Molly sometimes felt dull by comparison and had perhaps overcompensated. She’d feel a total prat when she walked in at the front door this evening—if, that is, Fat Sal even remembered that Molly wasn’t supposed to be there. For Fat Sal, who wasn’t really fat, merely opulent of flesh and given to squeezing herself into eye-poppingly small garments, was the vaguest and most easygoing person Molly had ever encountered. She’d found her through a flatshare ad in the Evening Standard and liked her on sight, confident that with this large, lazy girl there would be no nonsense about cleaning rotas and dustbin days. Notionally Sal had a job in a public library (hurrah, a literary soul-mate, Molly had thought). Mostly she sprawled on her bed in a litter of glossy magazines, nail-varnish bottles, nibbled chocolates and scraps of garishly colored underwear, planning her social life over the phone, while Molly grazed from her pack of supermarket sushi, watched TV and went to bed with a book. Probably that would be the scenario tonight. Molly’s shoulders sagged. No leafy boulevards, no cafés, no Latin Quarter, no “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.” There was no adventure in her life, and there never would be.

  The train slowed. Molly folded her book shut, ready to tuck it into the pocket of her suitcase. Its cover caught her eye—a grainy photograph of an unsmiling girl not much younger than herself and the words of the title: Bonjour Tristesse. Hello, sadness.

  And here was the same old platform, the same old posters, the same old scrum to get out of the tube and change on to the regional line to—no, not the Champs-Élysées, actually, but Earlsfield. Molly hitched up her shoulder-bag, gripped the handle of her suitcase and trudged toward the exit tunnel. As she approached the ticket barrier, her mobile phone bleeped. Someone must have rung her while she’d been deep underground. She fished for her phone, fiddled with the buttons and listened to the message with an expression veering between affection and exasperation.

  “Hello, Mollypops, it’s me. I expect you’re at the airport now and they’ve made you switch off your phone. Otherwise the planes crash or something. Anyway. Just to say I love you and have a wonderful time. And don’t wander about alone late at night, darling, will you? And do remember to put on a cardigan if it’s cold. October can be very deceptive. All right, I’ll shut up. Lots of love. Ring and tell me how you’re getting on. Alleluia says, ‘woof-woof.’ ’Bye, darling! . . . Oh. It’s Mummy, by the way. ’Bye!”

  Molly gave a resigned sigh and deleted the message. She couldn’t face ringing her mother just yet: all the questions, righteous indignation, murmurs of pity; the warm reassurance that there would be another time for Paris; the real anxiety that Molly had lost her job. Cotton wool was soft and cozy, but it could suffocate you. She was twenty-one, for God’s sake. She must be allowed to grow up. By the time they were her age, most of the heroines of literature had lived, loved and even died (and not because of their failure to wear cardigans, either).

  She dropped the phone back into her bag, fed her tube ticket into the machine at the barrier, and headed for the escalator. At the top she turned right on autopilot and strode into the main-line station, craning her neck to check the information board for the platform and departure time of the next train for Earlsfield. She wasn’t looking where she was going, and suddenly found she had collided hard with something. Her impressions were fleeting but acute—a clash of suitcases, the sharp tang of cologne, a graceful gesture of apology, a man’s voice saying, “Désolé, Mademoiselle.”

  “No, no. My fault. Sorry.”

  Molly walked on about ten paces before it hit her. He’d been speaking French. He was carrying a suitcase. That meant he’d just arrived from France. From Paris.

  She stopped dead, and looked back. Normally when she came into the station she turned right. But to the left there was a sign: a logo of three wavy lines with a bright yellow star, and a single word, “Eurostar.” She saw people squeezing into a sleek glass lift that descended into the booking hall—two girls hunched under backpacks, a businessman with his laptop, a middle-aged couple coddling expensive luggage. The lift disappeared slowly from view while Molly stood still in the criss-cross commuter traffic, transfixed by a terrifying and wonderful thought. Her heart began to flutter, to quicken and swell until she could hardly breathe.

  She had a passport. She had her euros and a credit card. No one expected her back until Sunday evening.

  Freedom. A whole weekend of freedom. If she dared.

  But she didn’t know anyone. She had nowhere to stay. What if she got lost?

  Her spine stiffened. Was she going to lie down under the tractor wheels of fate? Was she always going to do what other people expected, not what she wanted? Did she have a mind of her own, or was she truly just “a stupid secretary”?

  No way! If she wanted to be a heroine, it was time to start behaving like one.

  Her hand tightened around the handle of her suitcase. She walked toward the elevator. Words formed in her head and she repeated them silently, gaining confidence and conviction, so that by the time she reached the ticket booth they tripped off her tongue with absolute assurance.

  “Next train to Paris, please.”

  2

  It smelled different. That was the first thing Molly noticed when she jumped down onto the platform at the Gare du Nord and lifted out her suitcase: not the cindery fug of London stations but something sharper, more spicy and aromatic, foreign in a way that was both delicious and scary.

  The clock on the platform stood at five minutes to eleven. She’d forgotten that France was an hour ahead of England until an official had announced their time of arrival over the loudspeaker system—in English first, then French. At the end he said, “Merci pour votre fidélité,” which had made Molly break into a smile: much more charming than “Thank you for traveling with Southwest Trains.” France was different. Now that she was here, she would be different, too.

  She spun right round to look about her, feeling the tug of her suitcase on her arm. Above her head glimmered a high vault of glass and iron, with the night sky beyond. The train she’d arrived on lay sleekly at rest beside a spanking-clean platform, which seemed to curve forever toward a cavernous station that exuded an air of slightly dingy imperial stateliness. Near her a couple of train drivers, jackets unbuttoned, were chatting companionably in French, enjoying a smoke. They looked different, too, dark-haired and dark-eyed, at ease with their bodies. A straggle of passengers was making the long trek to the station, and Molly joined them, anxious not to be left behind.

  The transition from England to France had seemed eerily simple. It had been twilight in bosky Kent when the train sank gently into the tunnel; half an hour later, without fanfare, she was in France and night had fallen. Nose pressed against the window, hands cupped against her temples to block out the brightness of the compartment, Molly had just been able to make out a vast, flat landscape of hedgeless fields, across which pylons marched like giant black robots. Occasionally a cluster of lights flashed by, marking distant villages—French villages, she reminded herself, with a kick of excitement, full of French people eating things like ragoût and horsemeat. (Poor horses!) Once, she caught sight of a spotlit church steeple ringed by bleached trees, and sighed with melancholy, remembering Wilfred Owen’s “passing bells” for the First World War soldiers who had “died like cattle” in this part of France. (She’d
done the war poets for A level.)

  Her biggest worry was finding a room for tonight. She had banked on there being some kind of tourist office where a nice English-speaking person would direct her to somewhere cheap and safe. As soon as she was inside the main building she looked around for signs. Surely there was bound to be such a service in a big international station like this?

  There was, but the office had closed two hours ago. Blinds were drawn down behind glass windows. A sign on the door read “Fermé.” Slowly Molly retraced her steps into the center of the station, put down her case and stood wondering what to do. The other passengers were dispersing with frightening speed. Some had already been greeted by friends or relatives in a babble of French, and hustled away into the night; others were trundling their luggage outside to catch buses and taxis. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going. Suddenly the station seemed very big and gloomy, and Molly felt very small. Soon she’d be left alone with the winos and weirdos lolling against pillars and skulking under arches. She couldn’t help thinking of lucky, lucky Linda in The Pursuit of Love, who was rescued in this very station, penniless and in tears, by a heavenly French duke. (“I can see you’re a woman who needs a lot of concentrating on”: she loved that line.) No dukes here, by the look of it—though a dubious trio of bottle-blondes, lightly dressed and heavily made up, was eyeing her with interest. Crikey! Molly picked up her case and gave the jacket of her business suit a prim tug. She’d better get a move on before she was mistaken for a prostitute!

  She fled outside and, despite her anxiety, experienced a flood of pure joy as the lights of Paris leapt out at her from the darkness. She was standing on the edge of a great sweep of cobblestones that rippled like waves on a lake. Car tires emitted a bass drum-roll as they passed over them—a lovely sound. There were high, ornate lampposts that cast a candlelight glow on to the station façade, a grandiose affair of columns and arches and classical statues in togas, with the word Nord embossed in swanky capitals. The air smelled of sweet tobacco and frying potatoes. Along the far side of the forecourt ran a wide boulevard gaudy with signs—Café, Brasserie, Tabac. One or two places were still lit up and their awnings open. Even from this distance Molly could sense the bustle and enjoyment. The blood in her own veins seemed to flow faster, and she was filled with a fierce, almost painful expectancy. It was the oddest sensation, a kind of nostalgia in reverse, as if she was already feeling the emotional reverberations of something that hadn’t yet happened. But it was waiting for her here, she just knew it.