The Woman Who Met Her Match: The laugh out loud romantic comedy you need to read in 2018. Fiona Gibson
stuff?’
‘Mum, I hardly speak any French!’
‘You must do. You’re studying it at school, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but that’s school French, not proper French like people speak in France …’
Mum tapped at her hair as if to ensure it was sufficiently crispy. ‘Don’t be so defeatist. You must’ve picked up a bit of vocabulary over the years. Now come on, Lorrie – we need to get going. Your coach leaves at ten and you don’t want to miss it, do you?’
What would French teenagers make of me, Lorrie Foster, I wondered, with my jeans from the market and chubby little chipmunk face? I still hadn’t believed that Mum would really send me off to a foreign country on my own. Now the moment was here, I wished I’d packed earlier – and more carefully – as she had been urging me to do, instead of being in denial and leaving it until the very last minute. But it was too late now to try and dress Frenchly. It was too late for anything because I was dragging my suitcase downstairs whilst trying to shake off the feeling that Mum simply wanted me out of the way for a month so she could have boyfriends over, or whatever it was she planned to get up to. My parents had divorced six years earlier. With her make-up and hair freshly done, she was clearly planning a night out after she’d shovelled me onto the overnight coach to London.
‘I wish I’d had the opportunities you have,’ she announced as she drove me, rather speedily, to the bus station. What, the opportunity for a trip she didn’t want to go on? I sat in gloomy silence and stared out of the passenger window until she pulled up in the car park. Then, with a powdery cheek held briefly against mine, she bade me goodbye and warned me against the perils of drinking during the day. ‘They love their wine, Lorrie, with all meals – even breakfast. Try to fit in with their ways but don’t embarrass yourself, will you?’ I promised I wouldn’t, and as I climbed onto the coach, I turned to give her another wave. She had already gone.
On the journey to London, I pressed myself against the coach’s greasy window as the man beside me slurped noisily from a can of beer. Clutching Mum’s typed sheet of paper, as if it were instructions for saving a life, I braved the short but turbulent flight. Whilst I had no need for the waxed paper sick bag I found in the seat-back pouch, I was still relieved to know it was there. As reminded by Mum, I dragged my case off the luggage carousel and made my way across Paris, becoming tearful only when I found myself unable to operate a French public telephone. With my ropey vocabulary and lots of miming, I managed to explain my predicament to an elderly lady who obligingly helped me to call Valérie’s mum. From there I sped south, the train hurtling between endless rolling fields and towns with all kinds of exotic accents sprinkled like confetti over the letters, until finally I was greeted with two cheek kisses by Jeanne – who had a reassuring plump face – and Valérie, with her stern gaze and long black centre-parted hair, who looked as undelighted by my arrival as I was.
They lived in a sparsely furnished apartment above a bakery: Valérie, her kindly but permanently harassed mother (no dad was mentioned and I didn’t like to ask), plus a mysterious older brother, Antoine, whom I had yet to meet. He was away camping with friends, I was told: le camping. Hey, I was picking up this French malarkey! In fact, I soon discovered I could cobble entire, rather wobbly sentences together – simply because, reasonably enough, no one spoke much English in a sleepy village in the middle of nowhere. Valérie certainly didn’t – or at least, she didn’t seem willing to make much effort. I gathered that, as in my situation, her mum had been the one who had been keen for me to visit: ‘I’m happy Valérie has English friend,’ she explained falteringly, while her daughter glared at me over the rim of her mug of chocolat chaud.
By the end of week one, my French was severely put to the test with the arrival of my period. Having left it so late to pack, I had forgotten to bring sanitary towels. I’d spotted a box of Lil-Lets on Valérie’s dressing table. However, as I feared tampons – and Valérie – I decided instead to approach her mother: ‘Er, je suis beaucoup désolé, mais j’ai mon …’ No, no, period would surely be feminine. ‘Ma, er …’ Menstrual cycle? My bicyclette menstruelle? I stared as she slung three horse – horse! – steaks into a frying pan. ‘Er, avez-vous une serviette, s’il vous plaît?’ I blustered, sweating profusely now.
‘Une serviette?’ Jeanne frowned.
I nodded and smiled. ‘Oui, s’il vous plaît.’
‘Mais il y’a une sur ton lit …’
‘Non, non, c’est, uh …’ Try as I might, I couldn’t scrabble together the vocabulary to explain that I didn’t mean that kind of towel.
‘Tu as besoin d’une autre?’ Jeanne asked.
(Almost fainting with relief). ‘Oui!’
She flipped the sizzling meat and took herself off to the airing cupboard, returning with a bath towel with an anchor embroidered on it: ‘Voilà.’
I thanked her warmly and slipped out of the flat, managing to find what seemed to be the sole shop in the village that stocked des serviettes hygiéniques.
In a weird way, this incident boosted my confidence. Faced with having to fashion my own sanitary towels out of the virtually non-absorbent loo paper favoured by the Rousseau family – or the belligerent corgi who lived across the road – I had used my initiative and managed to avert disaster. Now, I felt determined to get to know the languid girls who hung around Valérie’s apartment. Still too shy to join in properly, I remained on the fringes, trying to follow their conversations whilst affecting a bored – rather than panic-stricken – expression. When they were debating what exactly a British pop star might be singing about, I tentatively suggested that I might be able to help by writing out the lyrics. Valérie shrugged and said okay, if I wanted to – and so it began.
While Valérie still seemed to regard me as a particularly unpleasant smell, her friends seemed thrilled by this new service. Soon, I was filling my days by stressfully putting back the needle on Tears for Fears and Duran Duran singles while a clutch of honey-limbed girls fidgeted impatiently on the edge of Valérie’s bed.
Culture Club. Paul Young. The Commodores. Phil Collins (a low point). I realised I could get away with a bit of guesswork – thus completing my lyric sheets faster – and no one would cotton on. In fact, by the end of my second week in France, whilst not exactly popular, I was verging on being accepted by the teenage population of the village.
Perhaps regarding me as a sort of project, Valérie’s best friend Nicole had taken it upon herself to teach me how to apply make-up. Not a frosting of gaudiness, as favoured by my mother, but something altogether more subtle and incredibly flattering. So those gorgeous French girls did wear make-up after all. They just applied it properly, with a light hand. Under Nicole’s stern eye, I learnt that a smudge of pinkish rouge and biscuit-coloured eye shadow, plus a little lip gloss, had a remarkably enhancing effect.
With her baby blue eyes and a fondness for a white vest and no bra, Nicole was breathtakingly beautiful. I watched with rapt attention as she demonstrated how to curl lashes, and gushed thanks when she allowed me to use her make-up. I loved the smell, the packaging, the enticing shade names: Bleu nuit. Bois de rose. She gave me a couple of products she no longer used, and I topped up from the meagre selection at the village pharmacy. Life felt brighter. I took to ‘putting on my face’ and offering to run errands for Jeanne, feeling proud of being able to ask for things and trot back to the flat with everything on the list.
And then …
Antoine returned from le camping: a vision of messy blond hair, a smattering of stubble (manly!) and caramel limbs in battered old khaki shorts and a sun-bleached Depeche Mode T-shirt. Long, sweeping lashes grazed his chocolatey eyes. He smelt of grass and coconut. ‘Hi,’ he said with a smile, dumping a rucksack on the living room rug and kissing my cheeks (ooh!).
I’d been focusing hard on Duran Duran’s ‘A View to a Kill’ but from that moment on, a fortnight