She heaved a sigh, her turquoise bust rising and falling.
It was the last night of the course, she said, and there was a drinks reception to mark the occasion. It was summer and the party was held in the gardens of the building, which was near the river beside the Place Saint-Michel. The gardens were very beautiful in the dusk and there was champagne to drink, because the course sponsors were a company of champagne manufacturers. She wore a beautiful white dress she had bought the day before in the Rue des Fougères, having taken the trouble to go back to the hotel and change, despite the fact that her ex-partner had taunted her over the phone earlier that day when she’d spoken to him, saying that she cared only about her appearance and her ability to attract men. The photojournalist was there, drinking champagne in the elegant fragrant gardens where the noise of traffic along the Boulevard Saint-Michel could be faintly heard, but so too – unexpectedly – was someone she disliked, a man from home, from England, a fellow photographer who had insulted her and undermined her on a job where they’d worked together. She didn’t know what he was doing here, but he was stuck to the famous photojournalist like glue. All the same the threads of attraction, carefully woven between herself and the photojournalist over the previous days, remained intact: they glanced at one another frequently and caught one another’s eyes; and then at other times they didn’t look at one another at all and allowed their bodies to radiate awareness. She felt elated, filled with certainty, like a bride in her white dress: several students approached her to praise her for her work, telling her how much she had helped them. An hour or more passed; the party started to thin out. She had been waiting for the photojournalist to come and speak to her, but he didn’t, and as more time passed the knowledge began to creep coldly over her that he would not. In order to evade this knowledge, she decided to seek him out herself: the feeling of elation, and her determination to remain in that state, was more powerful than finicky, disappointing reality. He was still locked in conversation with her adversary – the Englishman – a middle-aged dissolute-looking character she’d always found physically repellent with his slack, pot-bellied body and his big yellow uneven teeth. He bared them like a horse, his lips rolled back, laughing at everything the photojournalist said.
The three of them – the Englishman had no intention of being dislodged – decided to go to a restaurant, and they left the party and walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel to a bistro the photojournalist knew. It was a noisy, harshly lit place, full of mirrors and metallic surfaces. She sat at a table with the two men and engaged in an outright battle with the Englishman for the photojournalist’s attention, a battle she knew she had won when after two long hours he had leaned towards her and laid his hand lightly on her wrist, remarking concernedly that she hadn’t eaten anything. It was true – her food remained more or less untouched on its plate. The bistro was the unromantic, old-fashioned kind of place where the dishes looked like photographs out of 1970s cookbooks, the kind of cookbooks women of her mother’s generation used to own and of which in fact there had been a memorable example in her own childhood home, her father at a certain point having taken out a subscription for her mother to a series of bound volumes entitled Cordon Bleu Cookery.
He must have been desperate, she said with a smile.
They arrived every month in big embossed hardback folders, and he would place each one next to its unread predecessor until the set occupied a whole bookshelf. Her mother, to Jane’s knowledge, had never opened one of these folders: the only person who looked at them was Jane herself, sitting alone in the kitchen in the afternoons after school, when her mother was in her painting studio and her father, having left and remarried and moved away, was no longer there. For a long time she had wondered why he hadn’t taken the handsome and prestigious volumes – whose arrival and interment he had treated as a matter of great ceremony – with him when he went. In those days she hadn’t been allowed to touch them, but now they stood dusty and forlorn on their shelf in the filthy kitchen: she understood they had been abandoned. She would sit and turn the pages, studying the lurid pictures of flan and Beef Wellington and potatoes dauphinoise, the colours alarming and bewilderingly unreal, the graininess of the photographs suggestive of some history that had either never occurred or that she somehow had missed, she wasn’t sure which. Sometimes a hand was visible in the photographs, appearing to execute a culinary manoeuvre: it was a white hand, small and clean and sexless, with scrubbed, well-clipped nails. It touched things without leaving a mark on them, or being marked in return: it remained clean, unbesmirched, even as it gutted a fish or skinned a tomato. When he touched her wrist the photojournalist’s hand, strangely, had reminded her of it.
The Englishman had observed that suggestive gesture, and after another half an hour or so got up to leave.
I’m getting the feeling you two don’t want any more chaperoning, he said nastily, baring his yellow teeth. He edged out from around the table, jostling it so that the cutlery clattered and the wine sloshed in its glasses. He looked her directly in the eye. Good luck, he said.
After that the photojournalist had paid the bill and the two of them had gone out into the dark, warm city. He suggested they try to find a bar. It was so late by now that this search proved fruitless – neither of them knew Paris well enough – and became, instead, a directionless walk. They walked close together, their arms sometimes touching. She felt his immanence, the fullness of his attention: they seemed to be walking towards some agreement, something inevitable, without ever quite reaching it. At one point he stopped, grasping her elbow and halting her in the darkness of a side street, but it was only so that he could retie his shoelace. She began to gain awareness, self-consciousness: she wondered how the seduction, which earlier had seemed a certainty, would occur. She realised, suddenly, that he was quite old, probably twice her age; at one point she noticed him slip a small mint in his mouth, as though he feared being found off-putting. His excitement was palpable yet beneath it there was something fixed and immovable, some barrier she wasn’t sure how to penetrate. Finally, after two hours of walking and talking, they found that they were standing outside their hotel. He talked in a bumbling way for another ten minutes or so in the lobby; then he drily kissed her cheek, said goodnight, and went to bed.
She had gone to her room and lain staring at the ceiling in a state of high, thrumming alertness. Then, as she had already told me, she got up in the dawn and walked through the city again alone.