And What Do You Do? Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  And What Do You Do?

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409067764

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 2004

  5 7 9 10 8 6

  Copyright © Sarah Long 2003

  Sarah Long has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Century

  Arrow Books

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  ISBN 0 09 945718 0

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  About the Author

  Sarah Long worked for several years in publishing before giving it all up to move to Paris with her husband and three children. Following several years of the Parisian experience, they now live back in London. And What Do You Do? is her first novel.

  For Joe, and in memory of Telsche

  ‘Don’t be disappointed by overestimating happiness in marriage. Remember that nightingales only sing in spring time, but are generally silent once they’ve laid their eggs.’

  Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), The Holy State and

  The Profane State: On Marriage

  ONE

  ‘What time is it, Mum? Oh no, I know we’re going to be late. If we’re late I’m not going to school. It’s all your fault.’

  Charles-Edouard slumped back into his seat while Laura attempted to carve a route through the anarchic traffic that criss-crossed the Trocadero. It was rather depressing, she thought, that at the age of seven, Charles-Edouard had already developed some of the more disagreeable French traits: hysteria, a filthy temper and a tendency to blame.

  ‘It’s 8.42, we’ve got plenty of time, and it’s not my fault if some arsehole is blocking the road,’ she replied, honking the horn of the Renault Espace at the driver of the car in front, who had considered it quite normal to hold up rush-hour traffic for five minutes while he double-parked in front of a tabac to get his daily fix of cigarettes.

  ‘You said a rude word, Mum,’ remarked her other son, helpfully, ‘Arsehole, that’s where your poo comes out.’

  ‘It’s not that rude,’ said Laura. ‘I can think of plenty that are ruder.’

  ‘Well, it’s still not very nice to say arsehole, I don’t know any other mummies who say arsehole.’ He pronounced it daintily with a clear division between the syllables.

  Charles-Edouard saw further opportunity to fuel his tide of self-righteousness.

  ‘Yeah, you’re disgusting, Mum. Why can’t you be nice like Mary Poppins?’

  Laura screeched to a halt outside the school and, as every proper chauffeur should, leapt out of the car to open the door for her children.

  ‘Here you are my darlings, have a nice day.’

  She watched them run across the playground, Charles-Edouard leading the way, doubled up beneath the weight of his swot-sized satchel. Pierre-Louis, whose stocky figure at the age of five still carried the last traces of baby roundness, followed behind, his gloves sewn slapdash on to an overlong cord which trailed along the ground. She waited until they turned to wave as they reached the door. The headmistress, looking less like an educationalist than an investment banker in her snappy two-piece, slammed the door behind the last stragglers, leaving the parents free to turn away to pursue their busy lives. Laura climbed back into her car. Time for a coffee, she thought.

  Laura de Saint Léger, aged thirty-seven, retired executive and mother of two, took up her usual seat by the window of the café. A waiter approached the table. He had the grey skin of those who spend their entire life indoors and clearly hadn’t had any fresh air for about fifteen years.

  ‘Un grand crème et une tartine, s’il vous plaít,’ said Laura.

  She knew better than to waste a smile on him as he took her order without the slightest hint of recognition, even though she regularly wasted the first half-hour of her uneventful day there. She also knew better than to ask for a café au lait, having lived in Paris long enough to know this was terribly naff. Tourists called it café au lait; for natives it was crème.

  She glanced round at the company – old people, mostly alone, and a couple of business people poring over computer print-outs. Two American students, pretending to be Bohemian Left Bank poets, were scribbling self-consciously in notebooks. There was little conversation, and no one was smiling. An atmosphere of depressed resignation hung about the dinky tables as heavily as the cloud of tobacco smoke. The new regulations meant that every café had to have a properly ventilated no-smoking area, but this usually took the form of a small ‘non-fumeur’ sign tossed on to the least appealing table. That was the French for you. A load of legislation that everyone ignored.

  When she first came to live in Paris, Laura used to feel guilty about blowing the equivalent of £3.50 on a cup of coffee and a buttered piece of baguette every morning when she could have more cheaply gone back to the apartment for her breakfast. Now she regarded it as her right, just as her many visitors from England considered it their right to spend as little money as possible. They would come for three or four days to enjoy the free board and lodging which Laura, as homemaker, was happy to provide, but became resentful at having to
fork out for the odd refreshment. ‘How was your day?’ Laura would ask as they returned from their sightseeing trips at five o’clock and fell ravenously upon the contents of her fridge. ‘Oh, all right, but you know, we stopped at this café on the Champs Elysées, and do you know how much it was for four coffees? Ten pounds! Outrageous, isn’t it?’

  Laura stirred her coffee and contemplated the day ahead. The children were off her hands until four-thirty, the longest school day in Europe, a dream for working women. It meant that the home help could spend all day slaving in the apartment before picking up the children and bringing them home for their goûter. You saw them at the school gates – mostly African or Philippine women, who called their employers madame and knew their place.

  There were none of those bossy English nannies that her friends at home competed to employ – spoilt girls who expected their own cars and TVs, and even then you had to get in from work and do your own housework because they were too busy with the Play-doh to give a thought to the ironing. No, French women definitely had the right idea. Sit in an office all day while your home and children are serviced by your grateful employee. No wonder there was a higher percentage of working women in France than nearly any other European country. Femmes actives, as they were known socio-demographically.

  Laura, on the other hand, was a femme inactive. Or a femme au foyer. A ménagère. Or even – and this was her preferred term – a mère de famille, which had nice dynastic overtones and sounded less depressing than Full-Time Mother. It was her choice and she was happy with it, in spite of the glazed response it provoked at dinner parties when she apologetically explained that no, she didn’t work, and yes, apart from shopping – and God knows that could fill the hours – she was pretty much her own agent until the children came home. Nine till four-thirty; it wasn’t bad. It was the kind of freedom she used to fantasise about in the days when she worked. Look at her now, for instance. She could be locked up in some dull meeting, feigning enthusiasm for another mediocre pet food campaign, instead of which she was hanging out in a Bohemian Parisian café with a copy of the Daily Mail and Libération – she was so well integrated that she read both.

  She flicked briefly through Libé. Not much to interest her there, to be honest – she only bought it for the TV guide and so as not to look like a tourist. She put it down and picked up the Mail, a paper she wouldn’t be seen dead with in England, where it was the fodder of Sloaney secretaries and suburban housewives, but here in Paris she found it a great comfort to conjure up a world of instant coffee and Danish pastries, where women trapped in dull routines were sustained by tales of other, more glittering lives.

  Laura, former career girl, now downgraded to housewife, picked over titbits of the rich and famous. Entertaining, provided you didn’t know them. But as she turned the pages she came across an unpleasant shock on the Femail pages.

  What was this? A picture of her old college friend Penny Porter, posing in the mock fairy grotto of her Surrey mansion, perfectly dressed, and holding a baby!

  Laura read the caption: ‘Not content with smashing the glass ceiling with her appointment as MD of Interfacts, Penny Porter shows you really can have it all. Little Thaddeus can be proud of his Supermum!’ Feeling nauseous, she read on: ‘“With proper back-up, it is perfectly possible to combine a career with motherhood”, says Penny. “I am very surprised that so many of my friends have chosen to throw away everything they have achieved just because they want a family. It seems such a waste.”’

  Well, well, thought Laura, bitterly acknowledging the truism that every time a friend succeeds a little something inside you dies. Good old Penny, you had to hand it to her. Practical, capable Penny, always first in with her essay. Efficient, but in Laura’s opinion not really that bright.

  You couldn’t envy her her success: she deserved it. She was single-minded and worked hard for what she wanted. You could tell that she had stepped into the top income bracket from her last Christmas card. It weighed three times as much as all the others and came in a padded envelope. Inside there was a printed message: ‘Wishing you a merry Christmas and a successful New Year from Penny Porter and Mark Townsend.’ Neither of them had taken the time to sign it – far too busy building their golden future. Laura and Jean-Laurent had had a laugh about it at the time. So now there was a baby as well. The pooling of genes would no doubt ensure that Thaddeus was born with the requisite trio of bulges – pecs, wallet and groin.

  Laura stuffed the paper into her bag, overtipped the sullen waiter, and stepped out into the avenue Mozart in a state of confused dissatisfaction. She had always enjoyed laughing at Penny Porter, with her Head-Girl demeanour and clear-eyed certainty that she knew where she was going career-wise. But that was when they were on similar paths; every year they would meet and congratulate each other on their recent promotions, on how they were succeeding in a man’s world. And when they parted, Laura would think smugly that at least she knew it was only a game, whereas poor old Penny took it all so deathly seriously.

  Then, when Laura gave birth to Charles-Edouard and was riding high on the pinnacle of new motherhood, striking the perfect work-life balance in a glorious juggling act, she could see the envy in Penny’s eyes and it had made her glad. Penny had been meticulous about taking her temperature every month and jockeying Mark into action at the propitious moment, but it had always been without result. It was early days, anyway, Penny had reasoned, she really would prefer to be at board level before taking maternity leave.

  Laura remembered precisely the moment when she had told Penny that she had decided to jack in her career in order to follow her husband to Paris. It was over lunch at a wholefood café in Covent Garden. Penny was drinking Perrier and eating only green vegetables to improve her chances of conceiving a male child. Laura had delivered her news in a rush of reckless excitement and looked eagerly at Penny, wanting to see some more of that envy, waiting for her to say ‘You lucky cow, I wish it was me’. Instead of which, Penny had put down her forkful of broccoli and looked concerned.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve thought this through, Laura?’ she had said. ‘You know, I think you’re really going to miss working.’

  Laura had been decidedly put out.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she had sneered, ‘like I’m really going to miss those lovely calls from clients insisting on slapping a pack shot of their crappy cleaning product at the end of every ad. I’m really going to miss dealing with invoice queries. I’m really going to miss having lunch at the Caprice with that pitiful brand manager wetting himself because Trevor Eve’s sitting at the next table, then humiliating me by getting up and asking for his autograph! Come on, Penny, it’s going to be fantastic. You can’t say you’re not jealous!’

  Penny had pushed the broccoli round her plate.

  ‘Of course I’m happy for you, Laura, if that’s your decision. But I can’t help wondering what you’ll do all day.’

  ‘Penny, I’m not going to live on some dreary old Welsh mountain, I’m going to Paris, for God’s sake. Think about it: soirées and salons, afternoons in the jardin de Luxembourg, and I finally get to spend proper quality time with the kids. I can’t wait!’

  She had mentally written off Penny Porter after that conversation. If Penny was so wrapped up in her delusions of professional fulfilment that she couldn’t imagine the potential of a different way of life, then frankly she didn’t deserve her entry in Laura’s Palm Pilot. And apart from the routine exchange of Christmas cards (she had responded to the quarter-pounder quilted number with the cheapest and nastiest she could find), they hadn’t been in touch for three years. So why was it that Laura now felt so aggrieved to read about Penny’s baby?

  A generous friend – albeit now a distant one – would be glad for her, and happy to see that she was scoring another goal for the sisterhood by managing to combine career and motherhood, striking the same balance that Laura had once successfully achieved before she decided to give it all up. A generous friend would go rushing off to B
onpoint now to buy a layette for little Thaddeus, or, more sensibly, a pair of age two dungarees that he could look forward to growing into.

  By the time she had reached the rue de Passy, Laura had cooled down. Jealous of Penny Porter: was she mad? Here she was with her fantastic life, a husband who adored her, two gorgeous boys, plenty of money, the intellectual excitement of living in the most sophisticated of cities and the freedom to spend her days as she chose. Speaking of which, she had promised herself that she would call in at Kenzo to see what they had.

  She sidestepped a West Highland terrier crouched in fouling position bang in the middle of the pavement. Holding his lead was a sour-looking fur-coated woman of the type known in Paris as a seizième – belonging to the sixteenth arrondissement: well heeled, conventional, reader of Madame Figaro, chilly, of indeterminate age, disapproving of most things except for smart clothes and an elegantly laid table. Give me a few more years and that’ll be me, thought Laura.

  It took a suit in Kenzo, a couple of silky ‘bodies’ in Franck et Fils and three pairs of shoes from Carel to help restore her equilibrium, after which there was barely time to pop into Cyrillus for a half-price set of vests for Thaddeus before she had to rush off and fetch the children. Really, she didn’t know where the time went.

  Laura and her family lived in a fifth-floor apartment in a quiet street behind the Trocadero in the type of building that French estate agents described with Napoleonic puff as grand standing, a terminology that reflected the importance of social status. Little people might live in scabby little buildings with scruffy entrance halls and no lifts, but those who stood tall in society would consider it horribly vulgar to live in something that wasn’t pierre de taille – constructed from noble blocks of stone to reflect the gravitas of the venerable occupants.

  The status of the residents was further determined by how high up they were in the apartment block. The ground floor was of no interest to anyone, since this was the territory of the concierge, now more respectfully spoken of as the gardien. The top floor was also disregarded since it was made up of a warren of tiny maids’ rooms, occupied these days by immigrant cleaning ladies or unhappy au pair girls, or teenagers escaping the rigorous bourgeois life of their parents living below. Apart from that, the higher up you were the better since you got more light, but in older buildings the second and third floors were often the grandest, with high ceilings and elaborate mouldings, since this was where the richest occupants of the building lived before lifts were introduced.