Don't You Want Me? (13 page)

‘Belt up,’ Tim says as I park my behind in the front seat. His seat belt is already fastened, and as I glance over it seems unusually taut and neat, sitting across his proud chest like a sash. Tim was probably the kind of boy whose school uniform trousers were slightly too short, and too tight over the copious expanse of his buttocks (because he was a fat-arsed child, I can just tell). He probably tucked his regulation V-neck in tightly too, and had horrible sandwiches that stank of unrefrigerated egg, and ignored his contemporaries’ mean comments by applying himself to elaborate fantasies about trolls or Tolkien. I suddenly feel sorry for him.

‘So,’ I say cheerily. ‘You don’t work on Fridays, then?’

‘Not at the moment, no,’ he says, not elaborating.

‘That must be nice. Longer sort of weekend, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

‘More time with the kids.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Tim says.

‘They look nice boys.’

‘That they are, mam’zelle, that they are.’

We drive in silence for a while, up to Swiss Cottage. The Swiss cottage itself, an Alpine wooden chalet in the middle of a busy junction, has always struck me as especially incongruous, but the minute we catch sight of it Tim grabs
my knee and says, ‘Yodel-ei-hee-ho,’ very, very loudly, causing me to jump.

‘Gosh,’ I say.

Tim is holding the steering wheel with one hand and rotating the other encouragingly at me.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Come on, then.’

I smile at him blankly. What is it he wants me to do?

Tim sighs deeply. ‘Yodel-ei-hee-ho,’ he repeats. And then, helpfully, he whispers, ‘You reply, “Yodel-ei-hee-
hee
.” ’ He raises his eyebrows expectantly.

‘Oh, haha, yes,’ I stammer. ‘The
Swiss
cottage. I get it. Yodelling. Yes. Ha ha.’

‘Yodel-ei-HEE-HO,’ Tim bellows, po-faced. ‘Join in, for God’s sake. Join in, woman.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Yodel-ei-hee, yodel-ei-hee,’ he sings furiously, his voice rising all the while. ‘Yodel-ei-heehee, yodel-ei-hee-ho, yodel-edle-yodle-edle-yodel-E I.’

Bloody hell. I don’t know what to do, so I stare out of the window.

Tim doesn’t speak again until we’re halfway down the Finchley Road.

‘Look,’ he then says. ‘I’ll be straight with you.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Straight about what?’

‘My needs,’ Tim says simply. ‘I have needs.’

‘Oh,’ I say, flummoxed. ‘What kinds of needs?’

‘Very real needs,’ he says. ‘And you strike me as a woman of the world.’

‘Oh,’ I repeat. I wish I could remember the bit in the Worst Case Scenario handbook about jumping out of moving cars.

‘Being foreign and all that,’ he continues.

‘Quite. Though possibly you attribute too much exoticism to me, Tim. I’m half English, you know.’

‘Weren’t raised here though, were you? I can tell.’

I concede that no, I was in the main raised Abroad. Tim nods knowingly and parks the car. We jump out and head for the trolley rank.

‘What’s your point, Tim?’

‘My point is this,’ Tim says. He takes me by the hand and leads me to a little concrete bench, usually frequented by drunks. ‘Sit yourself down,’ he says magnificently. ‘My point,’ he repeats – he is standing, and doing the thing with his pockets again – ‘is this. I know about you single women.’

‘Right,’ I say, glancing at my watch. ‘I don’t really have that much time, Tim, so …’

‘Precisely. You’re, what, thirty-five?’

‘Thirty-eight, actually.’

‘And time is running out,’ Tim says, looking very pleased at the idea.

‘What for? Time is running out for what?’

‘For the likes of you. I mean, look at you. You’re divorced, single, not getting any younger …’

‘That’s right,’ I say pleasantly. He is annoying me now. The ’Allo ’Allo French stuff is bad enough, but this really takes the biscuit.

‘And you’re gagging for a man. You all are.’

‘There’s only one of me. Actually.’

‘I mean all of you … you women. You types.’

‘Gagging for a man?’

‘Of course,’ says Tim. ‘Let’s go in, shall we? They always run out of rhubarb yoghurt.’

Tim’s idea, in a nutshell (because it takes him three aisles
– pasta, crisps and snacks, dairy – to articulate it), is as follows: he and I have an affair. Nothing heavy. Janice, it seems, is going through some kind of early menopause thing which is affecting her sex drive. Only temporary, probably. But meanwhile Tim has very real needs and I – well, I am old and single and gagging for it. True, there isn’t much in it for me in the long run, but in the short run I get all the sex I want. With Tim. In the afternoons. I’ll love this, because a) I am French and thus gagging for it even more than my English sisters and b) it would give me a chance to air my mother tongue, which Tim says he would find very erotic when used ‘in a bedroom situation’.

‘So,’ he says, standing by the cheese counter and actually rubbing his hands together. ‘What do you say?’

I say nothing. I stare at a Stilton with blueberries and wonder why the English, with so many fabulous and underrated native cheeses at their disposal, insist on buggering about with them. Blueberries in Stilton. Imagine. What next? Sultanas in Brie? Jelly Tots in Chèvre?

‘That’s a disgrace,’ I tell Tim, gesturing in the direction of the counter. ‘A disgrace to cheesehood.’

‘I like a bit of Jarlsberg myself,’ he says.

‘I can’t have an affair with you, Tim,’ I snap. ‘But thanks for asking.’

‘Why ever not?’ he asks, looking genuinely astonished. ‘Why not, woman?’ He isn’t in the least sorry for himself at being turned down: he is indignant, just as he was when I wouldn’t yodel.

‘Your taste in cheese offends me,’ I tell him truthfully.

‘I suppose you like those stinky French numbers that taste like old socks,’ he sniffs, not remotely conciliatory.

‘I do, as a matter of fact. Though I am also devoted to Laughing Cow.’

‘Very unattractive in a woman,’ Tim continues, flinching away from me as though I were about to lick his face with Chaumes-scented breath.

‘Well, then,’ I say.

‘Well, then, what?’

‘Well, then, we couldn’t possibly have an affair, because I eat stinky cheese all day long. For breakfast. For elevenses. Lunch and dinner. Snacks in the night.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Yes. That’s how French I am. Cheese all day, walking around in basques all night.’

‘Basques, eh? Basques. Braun do an excellent electric toothbrush. The Plaque 3-D. Most efficient. Janice has got one.’

‘No doubt.’

‘You could use that, before coming over. And Listerine.’

I’ve had enough of this by now. Oddly, though, I can’t get quite as cross with Tim, or feel as amply insulted, as the occasion warrants. There’s something about him that makes me feel protective: he’s so pitiful and weird and throwbackishly
English
. He is beyond gauche. He is a social cripple. He thinks you ask your next-door neighbour for sex because she’s foreign and so, in some weird way, it doesn’t count. He yodels. He wears slacks and puts on funny voices; he probably goes to pubs, ‘takes a pew’ and addresses the landlord as ‘mine host’. He also hates women, I suspect, and has overly macho, robust relationships with his male friends, give or take a little bare-bottomed towel-flicking after the weekly game of squash.

‘I won’t be coming over,’ I tell him, stuffing basmati rice
and two jars of chutney into my already bulging trolley, ‘because we won’t be having an affair.’

‘I don’t mind about the cheese. Not with modern mouthwash.’

‘I don’t fancy you,’ I tell him bluntly, loading up on claret.

‘House guests alcoholics, are they?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I fancy you, even though you’re quite old.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Oh dear,’ says Tim, now standing in line at the till, stretching out his pockets again. ‘Oh, Lord. What will I do instead?’

‘You could always just
wait
until Janice gets HRT. Or masturbate,’ I tell him loudly as I unload my trolley on to the conveyor belt. The latter suggestion seems to thrill him, because he squirms slightly and goes red and smiley before throwing me a disgusted look.

We drive home in silence, avoiding Swiss Cottage. So you see, the thing about single women over the age of twenty-five never getting any offers is a complete crock, and so’s the thing about desperation. Some of us may be desperate, but there’s desperation and there’s Weedy Neighbour Sex, and never the twain shall meet.

Tim helps me unload my shopping bags and then goes home, throwing a cross-sounding, ‘
When
you change your mind …’ in my direction. I spend the next couple of hours cooking and cleaning – we do actually have a cleaning lady, but I can never tell whether she’s been or not, a state of affairs I must remedy at some point – and generally making things attractive.

My father arrives just before four, while Honey, clearly exhausted from a morning spent at her weekly Music and Movement session, is still napping.

‘Estelle!’ he bellows from the front doorstep, not bothering to use the knocker. ‘I have arrived. Help me.’ I am fiddling about with the fire in the living room and can hear him through two sets of walls.

‘Hello,’ I say, opening the door and embracing him. ‘It’s so nice to see you. Did you have a good journey?’

‘Passable,’ Papa says, thrusting luggage at me. ‘Although one feels most
oppressed
by the ocean when actually under its mighty weight.’

‘Yes, it’s an odd idea, isn’t it? Come in, come in. Coffee? Something to eat?’

Oddly, counter-intuitively, this conversation is not conducted in French: my father loves speaking English.

‘A glass of wine, I think. And perhaps one of your exquisite British sandwiches. Aaah,’ he says, looking happily around the living room. ‘It’s much prettier than when I was last here. More aesthetic. Less hideous.’

‘I redid it after Dom. White or red?’ I call from the kitchen.

‘Red, darling. Red like the corpuscle.’

I walk back through. ‘Here you go,’ I say. ‘And here are some cucumber sandwiches I made especially for you. Chin-chin.’

My father taught me to say ‘chin-chin’ when I was a child, believing this to be charmingly and authentically English. I’ve never met another person under sixty who actually says it, unless they’re French.

‘
Santé!
’ he smiles, taking a huge gulp. ‘
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South
,’ he continues, waving his arms about like
a third-rate actor – I’m sparing you the phonetic spelling: suffice it to say that his accent is cartoonishly, comically French and that he speaks very fast. ‘
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene
.’ That’s another thing he taught me. Until I was about sixteen, I believed the done thing was to quote this particular bit of Keats whenever presented with a glass of wine: according to my father, it was what
le tout Londres
always did. My mother just smiled vaguely (smiling vaguely is my mother’s forte), and never disabused either of us.

My father, who is seventy, is enormously tall and occupies a space like no one else. Already, he seems to have taken over the whole room. He doesn’t just sit down, he
inhabits
the sofa, and his crossed ankles commandeer the carpet. He is somewhat corpulent – he has the stomach of a
bon viveur
or professional ball-swallower – but leggy with it, like a tree with a knot in its middle. His once-black hair is now salt and pepper; his small, crinkly blue eyes – they’re almost turquoise – bore into one like lasers and fizz like sparklers.

Today my father is wearing a pink shirt – he has about a hundred, though he also favours violet and primrose yellow – and a loose, but beautifully cut, toffee-coloured corduroy suit. He smells of Mouchoir de Monsieur and his socks are pea green. There’s something camp about his hands: long thin fingers, too expressive, and frequently bejewelled. I love him very dearly.

‘Where is Honey?’ he demands, devouring each sandwich in one bite.

‘Asleep. She’ll wake up in a minute, I should think. So, Papa, how long are you here for, and what will you do?’

‘The weekend only, I think. I shall roam,’ he says. ‘I shall revisit some haunts. Scenes of the crimes. Above all,
I shall revisit my tailor. Only the English still know how to dress. In Paris, men dress like Arab pimps.’

‘All of them?’

‘Evidently.’

‘Let me know if you want company.’

‘You could maybe meet me in the Ritz bar at six tomorrow.’

‘Yes, maybe.’

‘Where is this Frank?’

‘On his way back, I expect.’

‘Do you sleep with him?’

‘No.’

‘Hmm,’ my father says, throwing me a beady look. ‘It is very unhealthy to deprive oneself of sexual intercourse. On top of that, it is very
ageing
.’

‘Mm. Frank’s lovely, but I don’t think sleeping with him would be a good idea.’

‘Very bad for the nerves, that deprivation,’ my father persists. ‘Are you seeing anybody?’

‘My nerves are fine, Papa. No, not really, but there are … offers. There was one only this morning, in fact.’

‘Excellent. As it should be. May I have another wine?’

‘Of course.’ I go into the kitchen and come back with the rest of the bottle, pouring myself a glass too.

We gossip companionably for a while and then I go and get Honey, worried that her extended nap means she won’t sleep a wink tonight. Papa makes squeaking noises at her, pronounces her ‘a beauty’ and immediately starts playing peek-a-boo with a cushion, much to Honey’s delight, even though he gets bored after a couple of minutes. Honey, nevertheless, gazes lovingly up at him and amuses herself by his feet with her toy puppy.

‘I’ve left you a tomato tart and salad,’ I tell Papa. ‘And a pavlova for pudding. By the way – ’ I glance at my watch – ‘Rupert will be arriving later. With a girl called Cressida.’

‘The husband?’

‘Yes, the husband.’

‘Very good,’ says my father, smiling. He loves frightening Rupert: that sort of blethery, chinless (as Papa sees it) Englishness amuses him no end.

‘And I’m going out, remember? With Frank.’

‘Whom you do not sleep with.’