‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing much.’ Before I could slam my laptop shut, Charlie was at the table, looming over my shoulder.
‘Swimming micro pigs?’
I reluctantly paused the YouTube clip I’d been watching. ‘They’re so cute,’ I said. ‘Look at their little trotters in the water!’
‘You do know those piglets grow into enormous porkers that the owners don’t want and abandon?’
‘You’re such a killjoy.’
‘I suppose it’s better than those pet adoption websites you keep looking at, even though you know you can’t have a dog.’
I discreetly closed the page of pooches I’d been browsing earlier – why couldn’t Dad be allergic to leaves or grass instead of animal fur? – and switched back to the document I was meant to be working on. ‘I suppose I could write a feature about the abandoned pigs.’
‘It’s been done.’ Charlie sat opposite, his grin as bright and sunny as the weather outside. ‘How do you think I knew about their plight?’
‘Because you’re a know-all?’
‘Unfair.’ He flapped a hand in front of his eyes as if to quell tears, then rested his elbows on the table. ‘If that were true, I’d know why you’re still working for that boring paper instead of, say, Paris Match.’
‘Paris Match is too much like Hello! magazine,’ I argued, which wasn’t really the point. ‘It’s not the right fit for me.’
The truth was, when I’d started writing for The Expats’ Guide to Living and Working in France, I hadn’t envisaged I’d still be doing it a year later. Admittedly, my contribution had proved quite popular, once I’d started injecting some personality into my column (From experience, driving at 130 mph on a French autoroute is going to get you in trouble. Remember, speed signs are in kilometres, not miles. And DON’T DRIVE ON THE LEFT!) but my real dream was to work for a famous magazine, where I’d have my own desk, attend meetings and interview A-list stars – specifically Magnifique, the country’s bestselling glossy, owned by editor-in-chief, Nicolas Juilliard, and published in several languages.
‘Hey, I’ve got a good headline.’ Charlie made popping motions with his fingers. ‘Why I while away my days in Île de Ré’s most popular café, by Natalie Bright.’
‘What’s with the hands?’
‘It’s your name in lights.’
‘That’s only for Broadway stars.’
‘You know what I mean.’ Charlie grinned. ‘Anyway, a feature like that could easily be made into a Broadway show.’
‘A show about me escaping my father’s mid-life crisis while pretending I’m not having a quarter-life one of my own?’ I managed a chuckle. ‘I don’t think so, Charlie. Plus, I’ve written about your café enough already.’
‘Not that we need the publicity,’ he said, eyeing the bustling interior, and the tables outside on the pavement. It was true that the Café Belle Vie was busy all year round, partly due to its picturesque location, but mostly because of the warm welcome and homely atmosphere, and the delicious cakes and pastries baked by Charlie’s mum, Dolly. I’d put on half a stone since arriving on the island and discovering the café, a five-minute walk away from where Dad lived.
‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ I grumbled, peering at the counter, where Dolly was stacking a display of buttery croissants while glancing surreptitiously at us from beneath her neat, blonde fringe. ‘She sent you over, didn’t she?’
‘I don’t need an excuse to come and chat to my bestie.’
‘Don’t say bestie, you’re not a fourteen-year-old girl.’
‘OK, my best friend, then.’
Despite the buzz of chat and clatter of mismatched china, Dolly seemed to freeze, as if she’d overheard, even though we were four tables away. She couldn’t understand why Charlie and I weren’t a couple and was baffled as to why it was taking us so long to realise we were perfect for each other – like the plot of a Nicholas Sparks movie.
It was true that Charlie and I had clicked the day I entered the café and blearily requested caffeine and something sugary to eat. Seeming to read my mood, he’d instructed me to sit exactly where I was now (‘It has the best view of the harbour’) before bringing over a bowl-sized mug of milky coffee and the lightest, tastiest pair of pains au chocolat to ever grace my taste buds.
‘How did you know I’d want two?’ I’d asked, making light work of them while he sat opposite – exactly where he was now – watching with smiling eyes. It should have been creepy, but felt oddly natural, which I’d put down to him being a fellow Brit, but was actually to do with him being so at ease with himself.
‘No one can just eat one,’ he’d said, with great authority. ‘And you looked like you hadn’t had breakfast.’
It was true, I hadn’t, and once introductions had been made, I’d found myself telling him about how I’d lost my job in London when the magazine I’d worked for had folded, and that my long-term relationship had crumbled not long afterwards, so I’d decided to come to Chamillon on the Île de Ré to live with my dad while I worked out what to do next.
It turned out that Charlie and I had grown up not far from each other in Buckinghamshire; that we both had birthdays in January (at thirty-three, he was two years older) and parents who were no longer together, and we’d come to France with broken hearts, looking for a change – Charlie to help his mum run the café she’d bought six years earlier, and me to… well, I was still figuring that out.
Since that day, we’d had many conversations at this table. We’d played card games during Charlie’s breaks (I told myself I was entitled to a break even though I was barely working), had dinner at each other’s homes and had even travelled to England together the previous Christmas to visit family and friends. I’d seen him sleeping, purse-lipped and double-chinned; he’d seen me snotty with a cold. He knew that Matt, my boyfriend of four years, had traded me in for an ex-girlfriend he’d ‘reconnected’ with and was due to marry her, and I knew that Charlie’s long-term girlfriend Emma had cheated on him with his cousin Ben, causing a family rift – though the relationship hadn’t lasted. But whatever mysterious alchemy made two people fall in love, it hadn’t happened for us. On paper, Charlie was perfect; tall and broad-shouldered, with lively brown eyes and wavy, blond hair just the right side of messy, and I apparently fitted his preferred aesthetic: short and curvy, with naturally curly hair the colour of a pint of bitter (‘the reddish-brown type’) and blue eyes that sometimes looked grey. We enjoyed cycling along the many paths that connected all ten villages and hamlets on the Île de Ré and knew each other’s deepest, darkest fears (Charlie: swallowing his own tongue, and being swept away by a hurricane, me: being chased through a forest by a clown; falling out of an aeroplane; dying alone and being eaten by rats. ‘At least if you’re dead, you won’t know you’re being eaten by rats,’ Charlie had reasoned.)
We’d tried a kiss once, last New Year’s Eve, at my best friend Jools’s party, which I’d dragged him to back home – to prove I actually had a friend – carried away by the countdown to midnight, too much alcohol and the snogging couples around us – but after a few open-eyed, close-lipped seconds (I was drunkenly aware it should have been the other way round) we’d sprung apart, struck by the wrongness of it.
‘No offence, but nothing’s happening.’ Charlie’s hand had circled the air around his groin and he’d looked so baffled, I’d burst into helpless laughter.
‘Me neither,’ I replied and we’d hugged, relieved to have got it out of the way, before reverting to our usual state – much to Dolly’s disappointment. I was certain she’d been expecting a ring on my finger by the time we returned to France.
She was currently pouring an espresso for Gérard, an elderly man with a shock of white hair, who came in every day with his stripy-sweater-wearing Scottie dog, Hamish. Gérard had been married to a Scotswoman, hence the breed of dog and Scottish name, and his eyes lit up whenever Dolly stopped to chat with him.
The locals were treated like extended family at the Café Belle Vie, and for the last three years, Dolly had opened on Christmas Day and cooked enough food for anyone who wanted to drop by, which had inspired me to write a column for Expats about the importance of community spaces for bringing people together and helping to alleviate loneliness.
Charlie was trying to peer at my screen while I resisted the urge to pick Hamish up and run away with him. Sometimes, he came over and lay by my feet while I was pretending to work, and I pretended he was mine. ‘What are you writing?’
‘I was trying to think of something interesting for this week’s column for Expats but, honestly? Writing about French tax laws isn’t exactly firing my creative juices.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ He gave me a supportive smile, which I appreciated, considering he must be fed up of hearing me moaning. If it wasn’t my dad’s current dating disasters, it was my stalled career, or the fact that my skin wouldn’t tan. He swivelled my laptop around and narrowed his eyes at the screen. ‘If you want to know the tax laws in France, why don’t you Google it?’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Really?’
‘I agree it needs some work.’
‘I thought you were still pitching ideas to Magnifique.’ He said it with an exaggerated accent, though we both spoke passable French. I’d had a gift for it at school and would practise on holidays with my parents, while Charlie had picked up the language since moving to the island, nearly four years ago.
‘I keep trying, but it’s disheartening when Monsieur Juilliard rejects everything.’
‘I don’t know why, it’s not as if you’re not experienced,’ Charlie said, loyally.
‘Yes, but not at writing the sort of stuff he’s interested in. He doesn’t want to read about a woman who had an affair with the undertaker who buried her mother, and that they liked to do it in the morgue.’
Chatter, the magazine I’d worked for in London, had specialised in the kind of readers’ true-life stories that were designed to mildly horrify. My job had involved interviewing said reader with a photographer in tow, then writing down and fleshing out the (often scanty) details. The story would then have to be verified and the ‘other person’ offered the chance to tell their side – which they usually declined. It hadn’t exactly been thought-provoking, but I liked to think I’d handled the stories sensitively. Jackie, my editor, had liked me and would sometimes let me write a piece about the latest talking points making (minor) news – Should toddlers be allowed a mobile phone? or Why are so many young women opting for Botox?
The trouble was, more people were getting their gossip and news online and sales of weekly magazines had drastically dropped, so it wasn’t exactly a shock when Chatter finally went under. Subsequent attempts to find work in an overcrowded yet diminishing market had failed and I was far from ready to retire and write my memoirs – unlike my dad, who was making notes for a book about his time in the police force called It’s Not Like CSI!, which I’d rashly promised to help find a publisher for.
‘He didn’t like your idea of interviewing stars alongside their closest friend or a family member for a more honest portrayal?’ said Charlie, referring to my latest proposal for Magnifique.
I shook my head. ‘Even when I explained it wouldn’t be like the writing I’ve done in the past. No my boyfriend asked me to move in with him and his wife, or my dog was possessed, so we had him exorcised.’
Charlie smirked. ‘They took him for a walk?’
‘You know what I meant.’
‘Did you make that last one up?’
‘No! The owner really believed her Labradoodle was inhabited by an evil spirit. She showed us before-and-after videos and I had to admit, he did seem like a different dog.’
Charlie shook his head in mock despair. ‘Well, I can see why Nicolas Juilliard wouldn’t want his upmarket magazine sullied by tales like that.’
‘I’m not offering tales like that, that’s the point, but he won’t even give me a chance.’ I peered hopefully into my empty mug, as if it might have magically refilled itself. ‘And why would he, when he has Fleur Dupont writing all the best stuff?’
‘Ah, the gorgeous Fleur.’ Charlie pressed a hand to his heart, as if he knew her well, though all he’d seen were the photos I’d shown him online. She was stunning though, with smouldering eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, full lips and sleek black hair. Since writing an award-winning interview with a famous but reclusive novelist, she’d appeared on television culture shows, and even been interviewed herself in Grazia and Elle. I deeply admired that she’d worked her way up from an unpaid internship to becoming Nicolas Juilliard’s second-in-command with single-minded determination (‘Yes, I have amazing talent, but so do lots of people. Persistence is key to success.’) and was sure I could learn a lot from her, if I could only get my foot in the door.
‘Maybe you need to set your sights a bit lower,’ Charlie suggested, but it was an old conversation, and Magnifique was the only magazine worth writing for, in my opinion. With its mix of global news, politics, intelligent opinion pieces, star interviews and sprinkling of high-end fashion, it was bucking the trend and raking in good sales. The key factor (I’d done my research) was not making its content available online right away, as some of its competitors did, which removed the incentive to buy the magazine. ‘You could try for an internship at the magazine.’
‘I don’t want to work for nothing, Charlie.’
‘How about staying freelance? Surely there are more opportunities?’
‘Too much competition, not paid enough, plus, I want a regular job in an actual office, with colleagues and a salary,’ I said, stabbing the table with my finger to make my point.
‘Or you could write a novel.’
But Charlie knew I wasn’t interested in fiction. Even as a child, I used to ‘interview’ my parents and grandparents, my friends and teachers at school, painstakingly recording their answers in little notebooks. Later, I’d write down my thoughts and opinions about anything and everything – snippets I’d read or heard on the news, or the plight of old people in care after visiting my grandma in her nursing home and being shocked by how fast her mental health had declined. That piece had been published in our local paper and I’d caught the bug after that. Real life had proved more fascinating than anything I could make up, and somehow getting my thoughts down in words had helped make sense of it all. Although, it wasn’t remotely helping with my current predicament. It wasn’t so much that I needed a big salary, thanks to money from the sale of the house I’d shared with Matt sitting in my account – which was just as well, as my column didn’t pay a lot – but I was desperate to move my writing up to the next level. The next few levels, actually. I wanted to have my own byline like Fleur Dupont. Then I’d know I’d made it. And maybe I would get my own place if I had regular money coming in. It wasn’t much fun living with Dad in his current incarnation as a would-be Romeo.
As if on cue, my phone whistled, alerting me to a text.
‘I expect that’ll be Marty,’ said Charlie, pushing his chair back as old Madame Bisset entered the café with a twinkle in her faded blue eyes. She lived in the village with her daughter and came in most days to show us the latest photos of Delphine, her spoilt and extremely fluffy Persian cat. ‘Another dating emergency?’
It was. I groaned as I read Dad’s message.
Think I’ve nailed my new image. What do you think?
With great reluctance, I opened the attached photo, my eyes widening so far they were in danger of popping out. ‘It’s definitely an emergency.’ I flashed the picture at Charlie and watched him recoil.
‘Christ.’ His voice sounded strangulated. ‘I think you’d better go.’
Despite fleeing from the café, I found myself walking slowly back to the house, reluctant to face the vision of Dad now gracing the gallery of pictures on my phone, reflecting instead on how well I’d settled somewhere so different from where I’d been raised. It still made me smile, recalling the sense of excitement and new beginnings I’d felt on the drive from La Rochelle airport with Dad, across the curving two-mile bridge to the Île de Ré. I’d been lucky enough to spend several summers here growing up, thanks to a colleague of Dad’s owning a property he’d rented out cheaply to family and friends. We’d never have afforded it otherwise. The island – situated on the south-west coast of France – had long been a go-to destination for rich Parisians and A-listers (we’d once spotted Audrey Tautou buying morning baguettes at the market) and we’d fallen in love with the island and its villages, with their narrow streets and cycle paths, pretty harbours and long, white sandy beaches. Now I was back, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, though it was good to know I could visit Mum any time I wanted, at my childhood home in England.
As I entered the whitewashed house on the rue des Forages, the living room sprang warmly into focus. It wasn’t so different to the one back home, perhaps due to a lack of imagination on Dad’s part, with two deep armchairs in front of the fireplace and a sofa in soft blue fabric, lined with bouncy cushions. Deep shelves supported Dad’s books – mostly Stephen King and tomes about World War II – as well as framed family photos, including one of me aged seven, dangling from the branch of an oak tree in our garden like a capuchin monkey. A collection of pens bequeathed by my grandfather were neatly arranged on the oak mantelpiece, above which hung Dad’s favourite painting: a couple on the Orient Express, drinking champagne in a velvet-upholstered bar. He’d planned to take Mum to Verona on the replica train, and it made me sad to think this would never happen now.
I closed the door and turned at the sound of footsteps on the stairs, my mouth falling open at the sight that appeared in front of me. It was so much worse than the photo. ‘Dad, what the… what are you wearing?’
He jumped the last two steps and did a slow twirl as I stared, torn between hiccupping laughter and waves of affectionate despair. ‘What do you think?’ he said, as I fought to keep a straight face. ‘I’ve been looking for tips online. I hadn’t realised my style was what they call “dad dressing”.” He scraped quote marks with his fingertips. ‘Thought it was time to ring the changes and see what happens.’
‘But you are a dad.’ I held melodramatic fingers to my forehead. ‘Dads are supposed to dress like dads.’
‘You have to admit, I’ve been stuck in a rut, style-wise.’ He nodded to where his usual ‘Dad’ attire of short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and leather jacket was strewn across the sofa, though I was touched to see his black boots – similar to the ones he’d worn in the police force – stood neatly side by side, the leather gleaming softly. Retired five years, he still hadn’t lost the habit of polishing his outdoor footwear. ‘I thought I’d go for a younger vibe,’ he said.
I frowned. Dad had never said ‘vibe’ before. Or taken much notice of what he was wearing, beyond asking if I thought he looked presentable before setting forth on another of his doomed dates. ‘Is… is this why you’ve trimmed your beard?’ I decided to focus on the least shocking part of his appearance.
‘Do you like it?’ He fondled the layer of grey-speckled bristle on his chin, which on its own was an improvement on his previous untamed fuzz. ‘I found a blog that gives style advice,’ he said. ‘The look I’m going for is: beard, quiff, slogan T-shirt, statement jacket and designer trainers.’ He was clearly quoting whichever terrible style blog he’d stumbled across.
‘And did this advice include dyeing your, er, quiff?’
‘Well, not specifically.’ Looking a little uncertain, he gingerly fingered the mud-coloured pelt on his head. Instead of sweeping back from his forehead as usual, his hair was gelled to a swirly heap at the front, horribly reminiscent of the poo emoji on my phone. ‘I thought it added a youthful touch, but I’ve left my beard grey so it doesn’t look as if I’m trying too hard.’
‘R-i-i-i-ight,’ I said, edging further into the room, half-wishing I’d stayed in the café so I didn’t have to deal with whatever was happening. ‘But your grey hair suited you, Dad. It was quite, you know, distinguished.’ I plundered my brain, searching for the right words. ‘That shade of brown looks a tiny bit harsh, even with your tan.’
‘It’ll wash out, it’s not permanent.’ Thank God. ‘I just thought I’d be adventurous and give it a go.’ He struck a pose as he flapped the edges of a silky gold bomber jacket lavishly embroidered with peacocks that Mum would have loved. It was closer to her size too, straining around Dad’s arms, and I wondered what she would say if she could see him now. Probably, Are you going to a fancy-dress party? ‘What do you think of the T-shirt?’
Blinking, I dragged my gaze away from the beady-eyed birds. ‘It’s very pink,’ I said, though I was more perturbed by the words emblazoned across the front: Lady wanted enquire within. ‘Do you think that’s the right message to be putting out?’ I placed my laptop bag on the dining table, noticing that its surface was cluttered with crumpled packages from various clothing outlets. He’d obviously had an online shopping spree – and possibly some sort of breakdown.
‘It’s vintage,’ Dad said, as if that excused the slogan. ‘And, let’s face it, I’m doing all this to attract a lady, so the message couldn’t be better.’
‘Oh, Dad.’ My gaze dropped lower, to a pair of indecently tight leather trousers. I desperately hoped he hadn’t stepped outside the house in them.
‘They’re really comfy,’ he said, doing a jig to demonstrate ease of movement.
My vision dissolved. ‘I don’t think the ladies want to see the outline of your, er…’ Unable to conjure a suitable word I let the sentence die, spotting the leopard-print trainers encasing his feet.
‘They’re designer.’ He hoisted a foot in the air, as if a closer look might convince me he hadn’t taken leave of his senses. ‘Apparently, that rapper wore them, the one married to the singer with lots of hair.’
‘Beyoncé?’
‘Maybe,’ he said, vaguely. Dad’s musical tastes were firmly stuck in the seventies – The Clash and Roxy Music were particular favourites, and he had a soft spot for Cher. Particularly that song where she’s on a battleship in her stockings, I’d overheard him say to Uncle Steven one Christmas, and they’d fallen into a brief but reverent silence.
‘But, Dad, you always said people should only wear trainers if they’re going running.’
‘Don’t you like them?’ He stood,. . .
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