The Woman Who Met Her Match: The laugh out loud romantic comedy you need to read in 2018. Fiona Gibson
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to want to know everything about me. Or rather, he wanted to discuss the novels he’d read in English which, to my mind, marked him out as a genius (I had difficulty enough interpreting texts in my own language). His obvious eye-pleasing qualities aside, it was a relief to be able to communicate in my own language instead of forever worrying about using a wrong word.
Appalled by how much time I’d spent holed up in the gloomy apartment, Antoine appointed himself as my tour guide, and we soon became inseparable. Valérie seemed faintly relieved that I had been taken off her hands, and by now I could pick up enough from her conversations with her friends to know they were having a giggle about her brother and me. I didn’t care. Those timely make-up lessons had boosted my fragile confidence, and the village, which had so far failed to make much of an impression on me, suddenly blossomed into the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Antoine and I sat on the riverbank, chatting whilst dipping our bare toes into the cool water. We lay in a field, looking up at the turquoise sky whilst feasting on bread and cheese. I could hardly believe that such ordinary things could be so delicious.
The sun beamed down on us as Antoine took my hand on a walk through the forest. We were on our way to visit his friend Jacques, whose family kept goats and made cheese from their milk. As we picnicked in their untended garden, Antoine kissed me properly for the first time. It was like an electric current shooting through me. For days, we had just been friends hanging out, and now we were lying in each other’s arms, snogging fervently in the long grass while his friend – thank you, Jacques! – wandered off to help his father with the goats. No one had kissed me that way, ever. It felt as if my hormones, which had been lying dormant like a pan of cold soup, had been turned up to a rapid boil.
When Antoine took me deeper in the woods, I was a little nervous; he was eighteen, he’d have kissed hundreds of girls not to mention having done it – of course he had, you could just tell. But I felt safe with him. We kept stopping to kiss some more, and he whispered that he couldn’t believe I didn’t have a boyfriend back home. I could have floated then, like dandelion fluff. I still couldn’t believe that a boy like Antoine wanted to be with me in this way, when I suspected all of Valérie’s friends fancied him.
We reached a lake, deserted and glittering with a wooded island in the middle, and stripped off to our underwear and swam. Me, Lorrie Foster from Yorkshire with a body the colour of rice pudding, swimming in my bra and knickers with a boy! ‘You’re so beautiful,’ Antoine said afterwards, gallantly offering his T-shirt for me to dry myself. He praised my skin (‘like cream’), my eyes (‘dark, mysterious’) and even my mouth (‘so pretty, like a flower’). If he even noticed my chubby thighs or wobbly bottom, he didn’t seem to view them as faults – and soon, neither did I. It was as if I was seeing myself differently, like the way you adjust the settings on a TV. Finally, I was seeing myself in full brightness.
My cheeks glowed and my badly highlighted hair seemed to acquire a new sheen that had never been apparent under drab Yorkshire skies. Every cell in my body seemed to shimmer from all the kissing we were doing. Because, of course, following that afternoon at the lake, we spent every possible moment in each other’s arms, swiftly graduating onto the kind of ‘petting’ the sign at the swimming baths warned you not to do. Oh, we petted all right, but there was no pressure to ‘go all the way’ (as it was quaintly known back home), even when we were alone in the apartment, because the unspoken message seemed to say: this is perfect.
Every night, as I drifted off to sleep on the pull-out bed in Valérie’s room, I could still feel Antoine’s kisses hovering on my lips. I was madly in love, changed forever. The ‘View to a Kill’ lyrics remained untranscribed.
My last day in France loomed like a darkening cloud. We could hardly bear to talk about it. ‘You’ll come back,’ Antoine kept saying, as if to reassure himself as much as me. ‘Or I could visit you. I need to find a job anyway – anything’ll do. I’ll save up and come to Yorkshire!’ Try as I might, I couldn’t picture him in our chintzy living room back home, being fussed over by Mum.
On the day I was leaving, we all squished into Jeanne’s tiny car and drove to the railway station, where she and Valérie hung back awkwardly as Antoine and I hugged goodbye. I love you, he mouthed as the train pulled away. On the plane, I was crying so much the lady in the next seat gave me her embroidered hankie and said I could keep it.
Back home, I’d expected Mum to notice a difference in me immediately – to comment on my new, more sophisticated appearance and demeanour. I was certain she’d say something about the understated make-up I’d started to wear. However, she seemed more eager to tell me about Sue down the road who’d been coughing up bile, and how we’d have to cut back for the rest of the summer due to the exorbitant cost of my trip (I didn’t notice any cutting back where Mum’s make-up purchases were concerned). Only when I told her about Antoine did she sit up and take notice. ‘He can come here for a holiday!’ she enthused, and I wondered if it might actually be possible.
We wrote to each other, declaring our love, and then from a couple of letters a week, his airmailed missives dwindled to perhaps one a fortnight, then monthly, followed by a gaping void, during which I felt hollow and tried to tell myself the postmen must be on strike. However, the rest of our mail – the endless bills and Freeman’s catalogues – seemed to be arriving without any problem. Maybe the French postmen were striking?
They weren’t, of course. Antoine’s life was simply continuing without me; I had faded to him, like a newsagent’s neglected window display. The occasional letter read more like an exercise in rudimentary English: We played good at football on Saturday. Our apartment is painted outside. How is the weather in Yorkshire?
Even at sixteen, I knew that asking about the weather suggested he was no longer obsessed with my creamy skin or mysterious eyes. Valérie had stopped writing too – my visit had been the death knoll to our ‘friendship’ – apart from to dash off a hasty note, informing me that Antoine was now ‘madly in love’ with Nicole, my make-up tutor. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I stared at her last flippant sentence (‘I just thought you should know!’). Well, of course he’d end up with her; she was stunning. Yet I’d believed him when he’d said he loved me, and convinced myself that he was oblivious to the charms of his sister’s friends. I could almost hear Valérie’s cruel laughter as I screwed up her letter and threw it into my bin.
As autumn slid into a cold, wet winter, another letter arrived from France. ‘Ooh, is it from that boy at long last?’ Mum cooed, as I charged upstairs to my room to read it in private.
Dear Lorrie,
I hope you are well.
Valérie learns karate but broke shoulder.
Quite busy next few weeks.
Antoine
And that was the last I ever heard from the beautiful boy from the Massif Central.
30 Years Later
He’s done that thing.
That thing of using a really old photo on his dating profile. How long ago was it taken? Ten years? Fifteen? This could be a fun guessing game. As if I wouldn’t notice that his hair isn’t in fact a lush chestnut brown as it appears in his picture but actually silver.
‘Lorrie? Hi!’
‘Ralph, hi!’ Force a smile. Don’t look shocked. Don’t stare at the hair.
‘Lovely to meet you.’
‘You too …’
‘Shall we go in then?’ he asks brightly.
‘Yes, of course!’
As the two of us stride into the Nutmeg Gallery, I try to reconcile the fact that the man I’ve had lodged in my head