The Pretender (3 page)

I don’t know why I aimed for such verisimilitude in my Hemingway pastiche. I’m not claiming that it was terribly good. I’d include a passage to demonstrate its mediocrity, but I’m unable to, for reasons that will appear in due course.

My New Year’s resolution was to get another job. It didn’t have to be a better one — I still had my university place lined up and was living pretty cheaply — but it had to be one where I met new people. If I couldn’t teach, perhaps I could use my written French, at which I’d always excelled.

I went to a translation agency on Rue Saint-Lazare. The proprietor, a stylish, forty something brunette called Madame Blanc, told me I fell down on three scores: no degree, no computer, no experience. However, it was a very quiet day, so she offered me coffee. I pressed my luck and asked whether I could take the agency’s translation test. Madame Blanc shrugged and said
bien sur
, then watched, amused, as I did it in ten minutes. She looked it over for thirty seconds before telling me I’d passed with flying colours.

‘At least let me give you my address and phone number,’ I said to Madame Blanc.‘Maybe something will come up.’

She could hardly refuse that. As I was writing it, Madame took a phone call. She spoke in English.

‘No, we don’t do that. I could give you a number, but most places are closed until next week. Wait, what exactly is it you want? Hold on.’ She covered the receiver and spoke to me. ‘Can you do French tuition? Teach somebody to speak French?’

‘
Certainement
.’

It was the wrong way round, even I knew that. You want to learn French, you go to a Frenchman. But none of the people who’d taught me French at school were French. So why not?

‘We have a young Englishman here,’ she said. ‘His French is very good.Would you like me to put him on?’

I found myself speaking to Paul Mercer.

‘We’re in.’ there was a pause as he coughed and yelled for somebody called Helen. ‘What’s the name of this place? And your name is...? Well, Mark, would you be prepared to come to us for an interview?’

I asked Madame Blanc how much I should charge if I was successful and she suggested an hourly sum between four and five times as much as I was being paid at WHS. It seemed ridiculous but turned out to be more than reasonable.

‘I’ll owe you a commission,’ I said.

‘No need for that,’ she said, flirtatiously, putting on an American accent, ‘but you can come and see me sometime.’

Her smile made me blush. I assumed she was teasing me. It was years before I realised I was the kind of young man who attracted older women much more readily than those his own age.

The Mercers were staying in an ancient hotel in St. Germain. Paul Mercer greeted me at the door of their spacious suite. He was fiftyish, wearing blue jeans and a plain T-shirt, with a full head of brown hair and warm, laughing eyes. To my mind, he dressed at least ten years younger than a man his age could get away with. His every sentence seemed to end with an exclamation mark.

‘Mark! Why, you’re so young! Come in, sit down, let me get you a drink!’

Paul poured on the charm. It would have been churlish to take a dislike to him. He was sipping brandy, though it wasn’t yet midday, and added cognac to my coffee. Helen, he told me in his big, overfamiliar voice, was the daughter from his second marriage. He had just come out of his fifth.

‘She can’t stand her mother so I seem to have ended up with her. Helen!’ he yelled at the bathroom door. ‘Come and meet Mr Trace.’ He turned back to me, draining his brandy in a single gulp. ‘Done much of this kind of thing?’

Before I was forced to lie, Helen came into the room. From the way that Paul had been talking about her, I’d expected a sullen adolescent. Instead I found a beautiful gazelle, with long dark hair — I wasn’t sure of the colour at first because her hair was wet. She wore only the towelling gown the hotel provided, which was noticeably too small for her. Helen looked me up and down. Her expression was disguised disdain at best, yet, smitten with her charms, I barely registered this.When Paul asked my rates, I quoted him the lowest end of the fee range suggested by Madame Blanc.

‘Do you speak much French?’ I asked Helen, who was brushing back her hair.

‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘I’m an English Literature major.’

‘I love literature,’ I said, getting ready to warm to a theme. ‘That’s what I plan to study, in London.’

‘Really?’ she said, as though I were trying to catch her out, rather than chat her up. Within an hour, I discovered that Helen wasn’t majoring in anything. She’d dropped out of two different universities. Paul said that he was trying to get her into the Sorbonne, but they wouldn’t touch her unless she spoke fluent French.Which was where I came in.

All I had to do, Madame Blanc had assured me, was talk to Helen in French. But this wasn’t going to be easy, for Helen had no French whatsoever. At my suggestion, while Helen dressed, Mr Mercer accompanied me to WH Smith, where I chose a French/English dictionary, a book on French Grammar and two copies of a textbook that looked similar to something I’d used in school aged thirteen. Mercer (‘call me Paul’) paid cash without looking at the books, being far more interested in eyeing up the female customers browsing in the store. Maybe he had come to Paris to find wife number six.

On our way back to the hotel, he asked if I was free for three hours every afternoon, five days a week. I did a quick calculation: I would earn twice as much as WH Smith paid me for half the work.

‘It’s a deal.’

When we got back to the hotel, Helen was dressed in jeans and a cashmere sweater. It had just gone two. Paul announced that he and I had come to an arrangement and I would be coming at this hour every day for three hours. He then paid me three days in advance and said that he had to go out.

‘
Bon chance
,’ he added, at the door, leaving Helen and me alone.

‘Three hours is a long time,’ she said.

I agreed. ‘We can allow ourselves a break in the middle.’

‘Paul won’t know what we’ve been up to anyway. Teach me to say something.’

We went through
hello, how are you
and
what’s your name
. Soon we were calling each other
tu
. Then we went on to age. When Helen asked me
quelle age as-tu
? I decided to go with the oldest age I thought I could get away with, and told her I was nineteen.Then I asked her her age. She told me she was twenty. I claimed that I turned twenty in March (I would actually be eighteen) and she seemed to believe me. We were more or less the same age — and we were to be in each other’s company five days a week. What better chance would I get?

Our conversation soon faltered. At school, I realised, I had paid no attention to teaching methods. French relied largely on responding to tapes in language laboratories. I had no cassettes, and could see that Helen wouldn’t have the patience to use them. Not that Helen wouldn’t talk. Once Helen had decided she liked me, it was hard to get a word in edgeways. It was only when I mentioned the Sorbonne, that Helen got irritated.

‘I’m not really going to get into the Sorbonne. That’s Paul’s excuse to have me here while he spends the afternoons drinking, doing deals with his buddies.’

‘What does Paul do?’

‘He’s an... Art dealer, I guess you’d call it.’

Next day, with the advance Paul had given me, I bought a new shirt and wore it to the Mercers’ hotel suite. It was two in the afternoon but Helen still gave the impression of having only just got up. She ordered a large pot of coffee from room service, occupying the time before it arrived by brushing her luxuriant hair. I watched the back of her head, tongue-tied. The coffee, when it came, was so lethally strong, I couldn’t get through a cup. While she tied back her hair, I began talking in simple French. Helen drank cup after cup of the strong coffee. With each gulp, she seemed to thaw, responding to my questions in monosyllables at first, then muttered phrases. After a while, I managed to drag whole sentences out of her. As the coffee kicked in, her eyes lit and she talked in paragraphs, then pages — though, unfortunately, few of them were in French. She told me about bands she’d seen, drugs she’d taken, even boys she’d slept with, making me feel terribly
naïf
.

I can still picture Helen during those early afternoons together. She was waspish one minute, gossipy and flirtatious the next. In the hotel room, after that first meeting when she’d come from the shower, she always dressed simply and kept her hair tied back, making her profile more angular. She had high cheekbones, but her nose was roman and her brown eyes were a little too close together, a detail that stopped her from being a classic beauty. Yet this fault only made me the more obsessed with her. I decided I could only love flawed things.

Weeks passed. I made little headway as a potential boyfriend. When I enquired of Helen what she did in the evenings, she was vague to the point of becoming irritating. I don’t want to give the impression that she was stupid. The opposite. Helen picked up French quickly and had opinions about most things she’d read, heard or seen. I lent her books and we’d talk about them. I couldn’t converse with her about TV shows, but she was keen on movies, so, after a fortnight, I suggested that we go to one together. ‘It’s a good way to pick up more French,’ I added. ‘All the Hollywood films are dubbed into French.’

Helen thought this was a good idea. However, instead of going in the evenings, as I suggested, she insisted that we go during our lesson times. ‘Paul will be fine with it. Don’t worry’. I never checked whether Paul was ‘fine with it’, as I only saw him on Mondays now. This was when he paid me, a week in advance. Helen gave the impression she could wrap her father around her little finger, so we started going to matinees: first once, then twice a week.

In the cinema, our legs didn’t brush close together. We didn’t hold hands. Even in scary or suspense filled scenes, there was no physical contact. Helen was unshockable. Sometimes, though, she would hook her arm through mine as we walked back to the hotel.

‘I try to get Paul to go to the movies,’ she told me, as we left the engrossing
Monsieur Hire
, one of the few French movies I persuaded her to see, ‘but he says his French isn’t up to it. I tell him, it’s all about the images anyway. I mean, he takes me to the opera, though neither of us speaks a word of Italian.’

‘Maybe I should teach him too,’ I said.

‘Yeah, like he’d allow anyone to teach him anything. Listen, you want to go see the Rolling Stones? Paul was going to take me but he’s got some thing in Milan. I don’t want to go on my own. It’s at the Parc des Princes.’

I’d seen the posters and knew the date.

‘It’s on my birthday,’ I told her.

‘Oh, then I guess you have plans.’

‘No, I’d love to.’

While I had a crush on Helen, a fourteen year old called Francine had a crush on me. I’d picked up some more tuition work from my connection with Mme Blanc. I spent an hour two lunchtimes a week with her friend, Philippe, a travel agent. We met in a cafe not far from Helen’s hotel, so I could go straight from one job to another. It was Philippe who put me on to Francine’s parents, both of whom had jobs in the government. Their daughter needed to catch up on her English because she’d lost six months of school after a scare with meningitis. ‘She’s a pretty girl,’ Philippe warned me, ‘An only child, so they’re overprotective. But don’t worry, I’ve told the father you’re homosexual.’

I blushed and he added, ‘you are, aren’t you?’

I shook my head. Was this why I had so little luck with girls? Did they see my long hair, my fresh, innocent face, and, like Philippe, assume that I was gay?

‘Don’t tell them that,’ Philippe warned, ‘or you’ll lose the job.’

I went to Francine’s every Tuesday and Thursday evening, from seven to nine. Having three jobs meant I was now earning enough money to put some aside for university. Francine was pretty, in a tomboyish way. She was tall and thin, with long brown hair. Faint freckles and the last remnants of puppy fat were fast disappearing from her face. She wasn’t what I thought of as my type, even if I hadn’t already been hung up on Helen. I went for women who were mysterious and Francine was frighteningly straightforward. But she had admirers. Boys often showed up when I was round there, though they were never allowed through the door. Before long, I was sure, they would be knocking it down.

Francine was shy at first. Working with her was less fulfilling than working with Helen, whose French improved in leaps and bounds, making our conversations more of a challenge for me. At first, Francine’s English was hard to stretch beyond simple grammar and phrases she’d picked up from TV and films.

Initially Francine’s parents would be in the next room, looking in now and then. As the weeks went by, however, their busy social and professional lives meant that they often went out shortly after my arrival. When we were alone in the house, Francine became giggly and — as her English improved — flirtatious. Her main interests were getting me to do her homework for her and ‘curing’ me of my homosexuality, which her parents had told her about. She would ‘accidentally’ brush against me or lean over me to look at a passage, making sure that her small breasts pressed against my upper arm. As a teacher, I should have stopped her, but I didn’t know how to. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

Philippe told me that Francine had a crush on me.

‘Her parents have noticed and they are worried. I had to — assure? reassure? — them that you are not bisexuel. You haven’t done anything with her, have you?’

‘Certainly not.’

But I could have, if I’d wanted to. Francine became more worldly by the week. She asked about my other students. When I mentioned Philippe, she told me he was having an affair with her mother. ‘I’ve heard Mum and Dad arguing about him.’

‘I thought the French were meant to be liberal about that kind of thing?’

‘That’s a — what was the word you taught me? Stereotype. My mother is relaxed about sex, but my father’s parents were Jesuits. He wants me to stay a virgin until I am married.’