Finding Monsieur Right Read online

  Jules was currently ‘between jobs’. Before that she had worked in a pub, in a video store and in a clothes shop, but none of these suited her. She was looking for something cooler and more atmospheric. This was all to do with Jules being something called a goth, a bit of information Chrissie had volunteered. It was vital that goths wear black at all times, he had said, or they might spontaneously combust. This didn’t particularly impress Isabelle, who found Jules’ usual get-up – the clumpy motorcycle boots, sinister clothes (usually including strange outgrowths made of net and lace) and dramatic make-up that made her look like a raccoon – disconcerting and, above all, dreadfully unfeminine. Hideous black nail polish, too, Isabelle noticed out of the corner of her eye. Quelle horreur!

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Jules said in her usual monotone, ‘I’ve been offered a really plum job.’

  ‘Darling, that’s wonderful! Where?’

  ‘A fetish shop in Soho.’

  Forgetting that she hadn’t been paying any attention, Isabelle looked up, astonished. ‘You mean … a sex shop?’

  Jules stared at her impassively. ‘Exactly. That’s what I like about it. It sounds like the perfect place to meet Mr Right.’

  Chrissie gave a snort of laughter. Jules stood up, picked up her empty bowl and mug and walked slowly towards the sink. It was never exactly easy, Isabelle thought, to decide whether her new housemate was being serious or not. It was a question of semiotics. Perhaps there was an article in it. She finished her coffee and tapped her notes into a neat little pile.

  ‘All dressed up and ready to go, darling,’ Chrissie commented. ‘Are we off to the library again?’

  Isabelle nodded. She had been in London over a month and had managed to get into a good rhythm. Every morning she joined the small crowd of enthusiasts waiting for the doors of the British Library to open, then she walked to her preferred seat with a lot of overhead space and close to the catalogues. On arrival Isabelle checked the other regulars off an imaginary list. The Wolfman, so nicknamed by her because of his Dickensian bushy side-whiskers and very hairy hands. The Extremely Skinny Woman with the Enormous Beehive and Beads, who seemed to pile her hair up higher and wear more necklaces every day and muttered little mantras – ‘Yeah yeah, sure sure’ – like the lyrics of a Beatles song. Isabelle usually sat almost opposite ‘Miss Marple’, a severe-looking old lady in a stiff tweed suit adorned with a cameo brooch. The mysterious Meredith Quince had probably looked something like this, Isabelle thought wonderingly whenever she saw her.

  ‘It’s beautiful out,’ Jules said tonelessly from the sink where she was washing up.

  Isabelle glanced at her watch and noticed with mild irritation that she was already running a little late. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

  ‘Honeybunch,’ Chrissie said, looking at her gravely through his green mask, ‘has it escaped your notice that today is Saturday?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s all right. The library is open all morning.’

  ‘I see,’ Chrissie said severely. He stood up. ‘I for one am going back to bed. Somebody in this house has to look through Italian Vogue properly. See you later, chickens.’ Isabelle listened to him bounding up the stairs and then, looking up, was surprised to see Jules standing at her elbow.

  Jules stared at her own feet for a moment, then spoke very fast without looking at her: ‘I think it might be nice to go to the coast. To Brighton, for example. Do you want to come?’

  Isabelle was taken by surprise. She didn’t know Jules had been planning to go away for the weekend. ‘Oh, you have reservations on the train? You’ve booked a hotel?’

  Jules looked at her oddly. ‘Er, no … I was just going to get in the car and go. Just for the day.’

  Get in the car and go? Just like that? But Brighton was so far away! It simply was not feasible. Isabelle panicked.

  ‘But normally, I work on Saturdays. And tomorrow …’

  ‘Well, yes, tomorrow is another day. We may be dead by then for all we know.’

  They looked at each other. Jules pushed her spectacles up her nose. Though expressionless, her face was still free of make-up so that she looked less frightening than usual. Isabelle thought for a while. It was a very beautiful day, crisp and sunny, and she loved the seaside. Perhaps she could, just this once, not go to the library. Besides, there were often good second-hand bookshops in seaside towns. So that in fact the trip would be a way of pursuing her research, not a holiday at all.

  ‘The thing is,’ Jules added, ‘we should leave as soon as possible because of traffic. I’ll see you outside in twenty minutes, all right?’

  ‘Heu, yes, all right.’

  Isabelle had only seen Jules’ car, a battered maroon Mini, from the outside. Climbing into the passenger seat for the first time, she noticed that the seats were upholstered in leopard print. It looked suspiciously like Jules had done the job herself with a stapler. Jules got in, wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Evil likes candy too’. The plastic clip was still in her hair, presumably to allow for safer driving. She started the car and they drove out of the street in silence. After a while she said, ‘That Frenchman who leaves extraordinary messages on our machine, is he your significant other?’

  ‘Clothaire is my boyfriend, yes.’

  ‘Presumably he’s more at ease in his own language.’

  That sort of comment, Isabelle thought, was really uncalled for. ‘His English is not so bad as that. He is not a modern linguist.’

  ‘Ah, but is he a cunning one, that is the question,’ Jules muttered – incomprehensibly.

  ‘He is a very brilliant economist.’

  Jules nodded. Then, after a short pause, she asked, ‘Is he coming to see you?’

  ‘Yes, in a few weeks. He is very busy in Paris.’

  Isabelle did miss Clothaire, especially his conclusive opinions about things and people: ‘Nul,’ he would pronounce, or, more rarely, ‘Pas mal.’ Then you knew where you stood.

  Jules, perhaps judging that Isabelle did not wish to be drawn any more on that subject, moved on: ‘You know, I still don’t really understand what your book is about.’

  ‘My thesis.’

  ‘Whatever. Was it about some woman who’d forgotten something?’

  ‘Er, no. The title is: “The Forgotten Modernist: Strategies of Obfuscation and Deceit”.’

  ‘Yikes.’

  ‘It’s about Meredith Quince, an author from the 1930s.’

  ‘OK. So what do you like so much about her?’

  ‘She’s completely unknown.’

  ‘And that’s a good thing?’

  ‘Yes, because … Some of my friends, for example, are working on very famous authors like Jane Austen, and then you have to read everything that was written about them before you.’

  ‘But with this woman, you can make it all up?’

  ‘Well, I can find some things,’ Isabelle said, bristling slightly. ‘It’s research.’

  ‘So what did she write?’

  ‘A wonderful experimental work called The Splodge.’

  ‘Cool. What’s it about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t read it.’

  ‘What?’

  Isabelle took a deep breath. She’d had this conversation several times before, not least with her supervisor, Professeur Sureau, the renowned specialist of early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon literature.

  ‘Actually, it was never published. And nobody knows where the manuscript is.’

  Jules nodded to herself. ‘So … you’re writing a book about a book you’ve never read.’

  ‘No, I mean … She also wrote other books. I’ve read those.’

  ‘And what are they?’

  ‘Well, in fact they are, er … detective novels. You know, like Agatha Christie.’

  That was when Professeur Sureau had seemed about to fall over backwards frothing at the mouth. His faculty was a conservative one and, on the face of it, Quince’s novels, which included Death of a Lady Ventriloquist, Murder in Kid Gloves a
nd Pink Gin Six Feet Under, all featuring the same amateur sleuth, a young aristocrat called Lady Violet Culpeper, lacked academic credibility. Jules reacted differently. She seemed unusually animated.

  ‘Really. Are they spooky?’

  Isabelle was stumped. Surely Jules could see that this wasn’t the point. The point was, of course, The Splodge, Quince’s lost work, which, according to a footnote in Quince’s literary agent’s memoirs, she had written in 1932. She ploughed on: ‘In reality I am interested in the other book, the missing one. I’m trying to work out what it was like by reading the others.’

  Isabelle’s theory was this: the failure of The Splodge had haunted Quince for the rest of her writing career. In her later, successful novels she had managed to import and conceal some elements of her spurned experiment. The Lady Violet books did have plenty of flashy surface sensationalism. This was unfortunate, and Isabelle fully recognised it. In Death Under the Mistletoe, for example, Lady Violet had to pass herself off as a chimney-sweep urchin, then narrowly escaped being crushed under a booby-trapped Christmas tree and finally unmasked the murderer over cocktails at the Savoy. (Jules, who’d been slumping in her seat, visibly perked up at this.) But the books were really about something quite other: shifting structure, ambiguous narrative voices, a Cubist aesthetics that created an alternative, prismatic sense of space and time. (Jules had fallen completely silent. No wonder, as that was the clever bit, the one that had won over Professeur Sureau.) Quince’s potboilers contained all the traces of some mind-blowing literary experimentation at work. These hinted tantalisingly at what The Splodge might be like.

  ‘No doubt something that Virginia Woolf or James Joyce would have been proud to call their own,’ Isabelle concluded, her cheeks pink with excitement. Speaking any amount of English still felt like singing a difficult song.

  ‘Crikey,’ Jules said tersely, staring at the road.

  They drove in silence for quite a while.

  Later, as they walked down the pier side by side, Isabelle thought they must present an unlikely sight as she, in her white shirt, cream linen trousers and pastel plimsolls, struggled to keep up with Jules, who clumped slowly on in her chunky-heeled boots, her upper body completely motionless, her full-length black leather coat swinging in the breeze. She had pulled this unlikely summer garment out of the boot when they parked the car and put it on without comment. It was like taking Frankenstein’s creature for a walk, Isabelle thought, and all the more incongruous for the carefree and rather cheesy pop tunes that were being played by an unseen tannoy. She and Jules bought ice creams with an unexpected stick of chocolate and sat on a bench, next to two giggling old ladies. Isabelle breathed in the tang of the sea air.

  ‘You’re not missing the library?’

  Isabelle looked at Jules and smiled. ‘No. It’s lovely to be here.’

  ‘Yes, the sea makes you feel free, somehow.’

  ‘The library also makes me feel free.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘It’s difficult to explain.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I’m sitting in the reading room, I feel like … a passenger in a very big spaceship travelling through the galaxies. And there’s this black tower filled with precious old books, behind glass. It’s so beautiful. I eat my lunch sitting at the foot of it. It is like being part of a big mission – gathering all the books, the sum of all culture, and carrying it to another planet.’ Isabelle went pink again. ‘You must think it’s stupid.’

  ‘Actually I think it’s quite cool. Dusty old tomes full of secret lore. It must be lots of fun.’

  They had finished their ice creams. The two ladies, who appeared to be very old friends, were talking about a dance they had both been to during the war. That was where one of them had met a boy called Ernie, who was just ‘… lovely,’ she sighed. Her friend poked her in the ribs with her handbag. They fell about laughing, then relapsed into contented silence.

  ‘By the way,’ Isabelle began, ‘do you know if there are second-hand bookshops here?’

  ‘Yes, tons. Hey, shall we go and look for The Clot?’

  ‘The Splodge.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Isabelle said calmly. ‘It was never published, remember? But there may be other interesting things.’

  Isabelle was surprised and rather touched to discover, as they explored the bookshops of North Lanes, that in her impassive way, Jules was keen to help. She even managed, triumphantly, to root out a dog-eared copy of The Renegade Emerald by Meredith Quince.

  ‘Thank you,’ Isabelle said.

  ‘Is this one you haven’t got? A rare one?’

  ‘I have got it already.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jules made as if to return the book to its shelf.

  Isabelle had a sudden impulse. ‘No, I will buy it anyway.’

  At the cash till, Isabelle handed the book, in its brown paper bag, to Jules. ‘For you.’

  ‘But you don’t have to give me a present. I don’t need a present.’

  Isabelle laughed a little. Everything seemed to embarrass the British.

  ‘Please take it. It’s …’ What was it Jules had said? ‘It’s spooky. I hope you will like it.’

  On the way back to London, the atmosphere in the car was more relaxed, at least until Jules reached over and put on a CD. It was very loud electric-guitar music of the kind Isabelle hated. ‘What is this?’ Isabelle asked after a while.

  Jules cleared her throat, then said: ‘It’s a band called The Coven.’

  The sound was absolutely terrible: a huge relentless metallic banging mixed with a low, screechy sort of singing. Isabelle sat in polite silence for a few minutes. Eventually she cracked. ‘I’m sorry but it sounds like that horrible film … L’Exorciste?’

  ‘The Exorcist,’ Jules said. Then she grinned broadly, something Isabelle had never seen her do before. ‘Cheers. The guys will be so thrilled.’

  ‘What guys?’

  ‘The guys in the band.’ Jules cleared her throat again. ‘It’s my band. That’s me playing bass.’

  ‘Oh.’ Isabelle made a considerable effort to listen more closely. ‘Ah, yes.’ It must be Jules making that repetitive dull thudding sound. ‘What is the name of this song?’

  ‘“Eviscerate Me”.’ She paused, then smiled at Isabelle. ‘It’s a love song.’

  4 Daisy

  ‘HI DAZE. SO HOW WAS PARTEE?’

  ‘OK,’ Daisy punched in after some deliberation.

  ‘I SENSE A TRAGIC HANGOVER. DID U GET OFF UR TROLLEY AND STREAK AGAIN U DIRTY GIRL?’

  Daisy smiled. It was really like having Chrissie in the room with her.

  ‘HOW DARE U? HORRID GIT,’ she sent back affectionately.

  It would take a very long text message to convey to Chrissie to what extent last night really hadn’t been that kind of party. There was a lot of champagne, but inexplicably – and, in Daisy’s opinion, unnaturally – nobody appeared to get drunk. Actually, there had been one drunk person, a girl who had passed out in one of the bedrooms. People had talked about this in whispers as of a great and freakish novelty. Daisy had been taken, along with Agathe and some other guests, to stare at the drunken girl’s prone figure on the bed. They had all stood in a group, softly exclaiming and laughing behind cupped hands. Daisy had been on the point of blurting out that she and Jules had once fallen asleep face down in the garden in their nighties after eating a whole lot of hash brownies, but a small voice in her head had whispered that it was best not to.

  ‘BUT U HAD FUN?’

  Well yes, she had, at least some of the time. Agathe had picked her up from Isabelle’s flat. It had been exciting to watch her new friend navigate with awesome confidence through the terrifying traffic whirling around the Arc de Triomphe. They had stopped at a large and glamorous café on one of the avenues to collect three boys, who at first seemed so alike – dark-haired, languid and slouchy – that Daisy assumed they must be brothers. They all stood to be introduced
to her and kissed her on both cheeks with such practised ease and lightness of touch that she – seasoned air-kissing fashionista that she was! – felt like a clumsy bumpkin. They introduced themselves in turn, in almost identical low drawls. ‘Bonsoir. Octave.’ ‘Bonsoir. Bertrand.’ ‘Bonsoir. Stanislas.’

  Later, walking into the party, Daisy had felt glad to be part of a group. It would have been damned intimidating otherwise. Octave, Bertrand and Stanislas melted into another room full of people and she followed Agathe into a bedroom where they dropped off their bags and checked their faces. Agathe, whose long hair was down, looked lovely in a black dress with tiny white polka dots. Daisy recognised the shape from the iconic picture of Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grating, but on Agathe’s narrow and delicate figure it looked subtle rather than outrageously sexy.

  Her friend smiled at Daisy in the mirror. ‘Bon, on y va?’

  ‘Er, d’accord.’

  The dimly lit apartment seemed enormous, and Daisy followed Agathe through endless stretches of corridor all crowded with lounging boys and girls engaged in earnest conversation until they emerged into the brighter kitchen. ‘Salut,’ said Agathe repeatedly, offering her cheek to various kissers. Someone proffered two glasses of champagne. In the trawl through one of the main rooms, where clusters of guests sat on sofas and on the floor talking, Daisy was introduced to dozens of people. Soon a pattern began to emerge.