Anonymous - Belle do jour:Diary of an unlikely call girl

Ahem. I think I deserve a little better here. Sure, Valentine’s may be the lifestyle economy’s equivalent of Christmas, but how about lending some sugar to the peeps who keep you afloat the rest of the year?

I brought up the subject with the woman lately charged with waxing my bush. She wasn’t impressed by the logic. dimanche, le 15 fevrier

Having very little else to do of a weekend, I went to visit N’s mum. She’s an excellent woman, robust of mind and body, and lately widowed. It seemed appropriate to spend Valentine’s Day with someone whose attitude toward men runs approximately, “Don’t worry dear-by the time you find a good one they just up and die on you anyway.”

She has been thinking of selling the family house now that all her children are grown and she is alone.

“It must seem quite empty now,” I said carefully. One never knows just how far and how quickly your foot can enter your mouth when conversing with the elderly.

“Not at all,” she said. “I have the little ghosts, you see.”

“Of course you do,” I said. Dappy old bird. I thought nothing more of it.

Later we went for a walk round her block. It’s in a neglected village north of London that has never been fashionable, where there is still a local butcher (and not selling organic free-range cilantro-and-Tamworth-pork sausage to the gourmands-come-lately, either), where the pubs are still locals and not jockeying for the attention of Michelin and Egon Ronay restaurant reviews, and the residents drive normal-sized cars and not Land Rover behemoths, or more shocking still, use public transport.

In short-the sticks. And quite lovely for it.

We wittered around in the corner shop and bought a paper and sandwiches. I insisted we get two cupcakes from the bakery with pink icing and a little plastic heart pressed in the tops. We went further, down to a cemetery. The weather wasn’t great, a bit gray and blowy, but there was a touch of blue making its way through the sky. N’s mum sat heavily on a stone bench next to a memorial.

“Go on, read it.”

I did. A family-the father, mother, and four girls-their names and dates of birth inscribed in the curly lettering of the early Victorian. “Do you notice anything?” she said.

“They all died on the same day. Some sort of accident?”

“A fire,” she said. “In the house where I live now.” A white-haired lady walking a terrier paused nearby. She waved at N’s mum while her doggie soiled the eternal memory of some decorated officer. “They were asleep the whole time.”

“You’re having me on,” I said. But I couldn’t help imagining a bed of little girls, their blankets and pajamas catching fire. A fate we have eliminated, presumably, with central heating and flameproof furniture. The sort of thing that only happens now when a near-bankrupt father goes off the rails and does his whole family in.

“When you wake up tomorrow, come down to the kitchen and see if it doesn’t smell of smoke.”

“How do I know that’s not just you burning the toast?” I said with a smile.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s four little ghosts, who never even woke up.” We walked home and read the paper and ate our sandwiches. I texted N to say I was having a nice time with his mother and secretly wondered whether I’d be able to sleep the night. Every crack of a twig and whip of wind outside sounded like a growing flame; every few minutes I sat up in bed, convinced the air smelt of fire.

Woke to a smoke-free kitchen and text:

Enjoy the weekend. Don’t let her start telling ghost stories. N lundi, le 16 fevrier

A knock on the door this morning as I was drying my hair. It was one of the builders, holding a single pink rose.

“Er, um,” he said, charmingly.

“Is that for me?” I asked. The builders were meant to be finished by now, but there have been problems with the new dishwasher that they are either loath to describe to a delicate constitution such as mine or are incapable of putting into words. Their morning requirement of tea and their vague assurances that it will all be finished soon are becoming permanent features of my home life. If one decided to cement our union, I’m not sure I would be able to discourage him, except by engineering a tea shortage. “How very sweet.”

“It’s not from me,” he insisted. “I mean, I mean… it’s not from me, someone said to give it to you.”

“Lovely. And is there a note?”

“Didn’t see one.”

“Whom did you say this was from again?”

“Dunno.” He thought a moment, scratching his chin with the tube of plastic wrapped round the rosebud. “Some bloke?”

“And what did he look like?”

“Average size?”

It’s good to know their general vagueness is not just an act to secure tea privileges. I suspected plumping for more detail, such as whether the suitor came on foot or by car, would be met with similarly useless information. “Well, thank you for delivering it,” I said, taking charge of the flower. The builder turned and trundled off to his van. I noticed the plastic bore a sticker from the florist and fruiterer around the corner-so no clues there. Given the turnover of customers they must have this week, I can’t imagine the staff would remember who purchased the rose, either.

I have queried all reasonable candidates but no one will claim responsibility for the gesture. It therefore follows that I must have a stalker, but as it is a good time of year for stalkers, I’ll let it go for now. Who said romance was dead? mardi, le 17 fevrier

By 1992 I had been studying French for six years. I was never much good at it. We never read anything interesting at school. I had a Canadian friend, Francoise, who told me Marguerite Duras is “sexy.” So I bought a copy of the shortest of her books I could find, because my French is rather poor and I had long stopped enjoying translating. The book was L’Amant.

Translations are a lot like pasta. At first, because you don’t know anything, you’ll buy whatever’s on offer. Audiobook of Keith Harris reading Gunter Grass? Sure. Comic-book version of The Iliad? Hit me. But the more of a taste you get for the originals, the more demanding you become. You try your hand at a simple translation, armed with only the basic kitchen essentials, and the result is not bad. Your friends are impressed. To be honest, so are you. You invest a little more time and effort, and the returns are positive. Finally you go all out on the pasta maker-dash-Oxford Classical Grammar and turn into a one-woman translation-dash-noodle machine. You buy the supplementary books, join the appreciation societies, and watch the right programs. Then you realize how time-consuming your interest is and, worse, how much of a bore your friends think you are, going on about 00 graded semolina/Hesse in the original German like it mattered. You let it slide. Those who don’t either end up doing it professionally or soon find themselves the social equivalent of a hand grenade at any party.

But even when you give up on making your own pasta/translating from the original, you have just enough knowledge to ruin the thing you enjoyed in the first place. You’ll never enjoy “just” a bowl of pasta. “Just” a nice book to read. Neither of them tastes very good when it’s bland, cardboardy, off-the-shelf, sanitized-for-Western-Europe rubbish. So I bought L’Amant in French to see if I could read it. Also, it was the only version that did not advertise the film on the book cover. Nothing turns me off a paperback quite as quickly as the dreaded words “Now a Major Motion Picture.”

So I start reading it. I don’t like the book. It is not sexy. For a dozen or more pages, she writes about the heat in Asia, a silk dress, a hat. She is describing a girl who is like me-small for her age, burdened with a heavy mass of hair, delicate and odd. Francoise must have been lying. No one who is like me can be sexy. Perhaps in some passages I can see what is meant, though having to constantly refer to a French grammar to puzzle out the author’s finely crafted lines breaks up the meaning too much.