Hexagone
by Anthony Richardson
The French adore wit. A good gag over dinner is essential. No one is more cherished than an Englishman who jokes in French. Cockney rhyming slang -translated- is especially droll.
As he expertly mopped up his sauce au poivre with the last chunk of his roll, Howard dared to stroke her smooth glossy knee. His was a seductive gesture, typical at 21:58 in the Piano sur le Trottoir in the Marais. He had dreamt of touching her in this way since he arrived in Paris, and hoped it wouldn’t seem too rushed. Howard needn’t have feared – the gamble paid off. She gazed back at him, eyes shining, and her two-dimensional laugh tinkled like the piano that bore the restaurant’s name. When hand brushed knee ever so slightly, Howard almost forgot that she was made entirely from paper. As dates with characters from GCSE French textbooks went, this was becoming a corker. A beautiful and enlarged cardboard cut-out girl was falling for him, and Howard was laying on the charm.
Howard took himself away from her gaze for just a second to sneer at the specials board on the street outside. The specials board was a four foot cartoon pianist that grinned at all the world; his straggly hair flopped at his shoulders like a messy bohemian.
‘Spécialités,’ grinned the pianist.
Not so special for you, thought Howard. I’m taking one of yours. Humans one. Cut-outs nil. But he only thought this. He couldn’t appear smug in front of her, mustn’t spoil the moment. Not when she was so close to being his.
She was Claudine; she featured on pages 68-70, the most beautiful girl in the Hobbies, School Activities and Work Experience chapter of Hexagone 3 (Oxford University Press, 1986; reprint). These three heavenly pages had invigorated Howard’s passion for French. 68 was blushing, yet enticing – 69 wonderfully forbidden – 70 an ecstatic surge of emotions unfelt even at A-level …by page 71 she was gone. He had been moved to tears by her description of her ‘Journée Quotidienne’ (Oh, how beautifully feminine were her mute e’s!), as she recalled her desperate cries for attention with the melodic and haunting: ‘J’aime l’histoire, mais je préfère la chimie. Je déteste les mathématiques parce que mon professeur est sévère.’[1] He had followed her story like an erudite puppy for each of those heady sides of A4, from her naive direction giving in Toulouse to her first tentative steps inside a discothèque. Surely it wasn’t ten years ago now that Claudine on page 68 had altered her CV to include an industrial work placement! It was a rite of passage Howard felt only they shared, away from prying eyes at the AQA exam board.
In the book Claudine was unattached. While her work experience companion Anne-Marie had whispered dreamy speech bubbles about Jean-Luc (who liked hamsters and haricots verts, and whose hair rivalled that of a number of apes) Claudine had looked on, unenthused. Howard could not erase her dejection from his mind for at least a chapter. He would be her Jean-Luc. His interest in Claudine and her sudden disappearance left a hole in his life that nothing would fill. It was a fixation that would ruin two relationships with lesser girls: one, a mousey looking woman from an ink cartridge installation manual; the other, an intimidating older lady from a building society personal loans brochure. Both were poor substitutes. Neither satisfied him with their glossy finish, their uninspiring font, their confusing rhetoric and infuriating house style. Howard left for France, unsatisfied.
And now, here she was, in the pulp, seductively his. She swam in Howard’s eyes as the waiter filled her glass with a crayon. Howard had given the waiter the correct crayon to use beforehand – a Crayola ‘Blush’ – and Claudine had been delighted with the choice. Small talk and wit was exchanged while the waiter laid her place by drawing her entrée on a napkin. The cuisine at Le Piano was known to be superb. And the service! If anything, the waiter spent too long at their table! Not too much salt on the cross-hatched pommes frites, just as Madame likes it.
The pianist tried to grab Claudine with his smile, but he may as well have been a planning application notice for all the attention she paid him. Claudine sat upright, attentive. She hung on to Howard’s charm.
‘Desserts!’ cried the specials board. ‘A grand choice! Crème Caramèle, Ile flottante, Fondant au citron.’
No thank you, poor little man, thought Howard. These lovers won’t need such a wide range. The only dessert in Claudine’s text book was Tarte Tatin, and that was what Howard had prepared for. Girls are won and lost on pudding – but not Claudine. When she knew only one, how could he possibly lose? Howard kept her laughing. All jokes, all laughs. Social situations thrive on jokes. People like jokes.
They had met that day by chance, outside a second hand bookshop in the Latin Quarter. He sightseeing; she in rags, out of her mind, giving hysterical directions to Matabiau station, 587 kilometres away. His well-spent youth flooding back to him, Howard took her by the arm, whispered the answers to Role Play 4: Problèmes Vétérinaires into her shiny ear, and led her towards the Metro, taking care that she wouldn’t be sucked into the ventilation shafts.
‘This dirty old town isn’t for GCSE higher tier minor characters like you,’ he sighed.
‘Follow the road until the roundabout, then turn right after the hospital,’ she mumbled, letting fall a slippery tear.
Claudine’s few words were former speech bubbles, yet Howard knew what she meant, what she was desperate to say, but couldn’t. Hers was a life story glossed over by the original text. Yes, she had enjoyed chemistry at school but after page 70 she was discarded in favour of a talking cat that announced its morning routine, and she never recovered from the shame. Claudine couldn’t form the words, the rejection too painful to conjugate. All she had uttered of her melancholy was the phrase ‘‘I get up at seven in order to take my brother to the pharmacy; he receives medicine for his ears,’ before staring down desolately at a picture of a soufflé. Howard could see that she resented her lot, that in her heart she was saying ‘Yes, I enjoyed chemistry at school, but let my studies slip. Heartbroken, I moved to Paris, where my advice on tourist attractions around Midi-Pyrénées became irrelevant.’ Howard could imagine the kind of life that followed. After months of misery she would have been befriended by a wealthy businessman. He would have had her laminated, a gift without which she would never survive the harsh Parisian winters. But at what cost, Howard wondered, to her independence, her soul?
It was laughter that poor Claudine needed, the beautiful fulfilling laughter that only an Englishman translating his quirky sense of humour into French could bring. And until this point, Howard had provided that laughter in abundance. Her eyes widened as he showed off his fluent French (Would she ever realise how she had inspired him to learn?) and exchanged his wit with the waiter. No cockney rhyming slang yet, but that would come. All in good time.
‘Did you enjoy your steak, sir?’ asked the waiter, who often came over to their table to chat with Howard with that half-smirk of his. This waiter certainly smiled a lot when he came to their table, so much so that sometimes he had to cover his mouth with his hand.
‘More than the steak did,’ chuckled Howard.
The waiter snorted and slapped his thigh. Claudine reddened joyfully. They were easily pleased around here. It was a tenuous joke, but he had got away with it.
‘Would you like dessert?’
‘Of course. After all, my companion puts nothing on her hips.’
The waiter howled. Claudine’s white teeth gleamed as she folded back her head.
Brilliant. The old my girlfriend is a piece of laminated A1 paper, enlarged from the original publication.
‘Magnifique! You, sir, you are something else! When I get home, I tell everyone about you and your special lady! My wife, my friends, everyone!’
The warmth of Parisian waiters is truly exemplary. The French get a bad press, but if you crack a few jokes here and there…
‘I’ll fetch the dessert menus, sir.’ The waiter was wiping tears from his cheeks.
‘Ah, no. We know what we’d like.’
This would be Howard’s final joke, a cockney rhyming pun translated into French. One more exhibition of linguistic flair, and Claudine would be his forever.
‘For her, a pencil drawing of a cappuccino. And for me…’
Howard cleared his throat. A smile formed at the corners of the waiter’s mouth in anticipation. Claudine sat still in her chair.
‘A slice of Jean-Pierre Raffarin…’
Howard allowed a two second pause.
‘…Tarte Tatin.’
Silence from the waiter. The agonising silence of incomprehension. Howard’s grin congealed. He tried to explain.
‘You see, it’s… Jean-Pierre Raffarin rhymes with Tarte…’
‘Yes sir,’ replied the waiter, and wrote down Howard’s order. His brow furrowed by this sudden language barrier, the waiter strode to the kitchen, leaving Howard with nothing but eyes stinging with humiliation. In some places they just didn’t get translated cockney rhyming slang.
And Claudine had changed. It might have been nothing. It might have been an accident, but Howard could have sworn that she and the specials board exchanged a tiny look, and when Howard tried to smile at her, her eyes had glazed over. There would be no more laughter, no more glossy knees. It had happened again.
And tinkling in Howard’s ears was the cackle of the specials board pianist, who would no doubt be gloating at the fate of a silly human fool that thought he could mix with the cut-outs: ‘C’est un happy-end! Je suis le héros! Claudine et moi, nous mangeons les haricots verts![2]’ Claudine’s weakness wasn’t humour, but the aspirated H.
Howard wouldn’t look at Claudine again. He stared at her plate, untouched, piled with drawn on chips that were soaking up his spilt wine. That great wedge driven between him and others when he said the wrong thing wasn’t limited to humans. Ladies, real or paper, can turn away from you with one faux pas.
Howard pressed his hands against the cold window until they throbbed white. Still three-dimensional. Still so awkwardly human. That old chestnut.
Hexagone was shortlisted for the Franco-British Council Short Story Prize.
[1] I like history, but I prefer chemistry. I hate maths because my teacher is too strict.
[2] It’s a happy ending! I am the hero! Claudine and I eat green beans!
