French Leave

As they walked past her table, one of them, the oldest and most obnoxious, bumped into her table and then steadied himself against it.

Calmly Livvy went on with her meal. Common sense told her that the wisest and most sensible thing to do was not to make a fuss but simply to pretend he wasn’t there.

She had forgotten, though, that he was not the same age as her pupils, and that she was not dressed in her normal authoritative way, and, as he straightened up and made a drunken apology, to her fury she also heard him make a comment about her breasts that was both over-familiar and exceedingly coarse.

It was only the discipline of three years of teaching that prevented her from reacting, not just by furiously objecting to what he had said, but from allowing the hot stinging surge of mortified feminine colour to burn up under her skin.

Like all women, she had experienced unwanted male comments about her body before, but this was different; for one thing what he had said was a good deal more crude than the normal joking and sometimes funny remarks called out by van drivers and building site workers, and for another…

For another, she was unpleasantly aware of the man’s leering enjoyment of her defencelessness, his awareness not just of her inability to physically punish him for his rudeness, but of the fact that the manager appeared too afraid to challenge him either.

The temptation to stand up and demand the auberge owner call the gendarmerie was almost too strong for Livvy to resist, but then she reminded herself that she was on holiday and inevitably any kind of formal charge made now would result in delay to her resuming her journey in the morning.

Much as it irked her, she decided that on this occasion she would simply have to do nothing, other than finish her meal as quickly as she could and leave the dining-room.

Ten minutes later she realised that was not going to be so easy, and wished a little bitterly that she had demanded that something was done earlier, when the hotel owner had still been there for her to make demands on.

The little waiter who had been serving her was plainly terrified of the quartet; the other diners, like her, had obviously decided to finish their meals just as quickly as they could, and as the dining-room rapidly emptied Livvy felt disconcertingly conscious of the fact that she was soon going to be the only other occupant of the room.

The leader of the quartet was still making comments about her to his companions. She tried to comfort herself by reminding herself that he would only feel free to say things that were so vulgar and crass because he did not know she spoke French herself.

As a teacher, she was used to adolescent male aggression and thought she had learned to cope with it, but this was something different, she recognised. He was not an adolescent—here she had no authority…here, as his lewd, disgusting comments were making so plainly obvious, she was just another vulnerable, available woman.

She pushed her plate away, her appetite gone. Much as it went against the grain to be seen to be running away from them, she knew she had to go. The restaurant no longer felt safe; in fact it had become an alien, hostile place. All her feminine instincts warned her to leave. She got up as quietly and calmly as she could, ignoring the comments being shouted at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her tormentor stand up, but she refused either to turn her head or to be betrayed into showing any fear.

Her room key was in her handbag, but as she heard the restaurant door open behind her she still walked over to the reception desk and asked the clerk behind it,

‘Are there any messages for me? It’s room number twenty-four.’

She knew of course that there would not be any messages, but standing at the desk gave her a legitimate reason for turning round and checking that she wasn’t being followed.

And if she was and he overheard her asking for messages, hopefully it might make him think that she was not, after all, alone.

‘No, there is none,’ the clerk told her, having checked the slot.

The leader of the quartet had left the restaurant after her and now he was standing several feet away, grinning insolently at her, but to her relief, although he paused with deliberate mockery as he drew level with her, he didn’t make any further attempt to speak to her or touch her, simply moving on.

Thanking the clerk, Livvy hurried towards the stairs. Her bedroom had a good, firm lock on it and she intended to make sure she used it.

As luck would have it, her room was the last one along the corridor, right opposite the fire escape. Later she told herself that if she had been more alert she would have remembered that fact and acted accordingly, but as it was, when she finally reached her door, she simply gave a small pent-up sigh of relief, turned her back to the fire escape and opened her bag for her key, while keeping a strategic eye on the corridor to make sure that she hadn’t been followed.

Because of this, it came as even more of a shock when she was grabbed from behind, her attacker laughing triumphantly as he swung her round to face him, pressing her body up against the wall with the weight of his while he taunted her with having tricked her…

He looked even less appealing close up than he had done in the restaurant, Livvy acknowledged as she fought down her panic and tried not to wince as he breathed garlic-and onion-laced fumes into her face.

His hands were round her forearms, exerting a pressure which would leave her with bruises, the weight of his body imprisoning her against the wall.

She didn’t make the mistake of trying to fight him, sensing that that was just what he wanted, that he would relish the opportunity physically to subdue her. He was talking to her, laughing at her as he told her in explicit detail what he intended to do to her. Fear flickered inside her, spreading a numbing, dangerous paralysis through her body, and yet at the same time she felt oddly distanced from what was happening, apart from it, the enormity of it such that a part of her brain simply refused to accept it was happening.

As he ground his hips against her body she tensed in rejection. The door opposite her own opened and the hand that had been groping for her breast stilled.

Livvy was just about to call out thankfully for help to the man emerging from the room to place his breakfast menu on the door-handle when she recognised him.

It was the man from the car park, the one who had arrogantly let her see how insignificant he had thought her.

He was wearing a towelling robe open to the waist, revealing hard, tanned skin roughened by silky, dark hair.

A tiny frisson of unfamiliar sensation ran through her. The man holding her bent his head and tried to kiss her, muttering loudly, ‘You know you want it. Downstairs you were showing it. Well, it won’t be long now, chérie, and I promise you I’ll show you what it’s like to have a real man, a Frenchman.’

Across the few feet separating them, Livvy could see the disgust in the other man’s eyes, the contempt. The man holding her was still talking, pouring out a stream of sexual obscenities which he appeared to deem suitable seduction talk.

The disgust on their observer’s face deepened. He had the most extraordinarily powerful, harsh bone-structure, Livvy recognised, and such an air of cold austerity about him that the look he was giving her actually made her feel as though the temperature had physically dropped.

As he turned his back on them and returned to his room, closing the door behind him, her awareness that he had dared to assume that she wanted the Frenchman’s obnoxious caresses made Livvy so angry that she was actually physically able to take him off guard and push him off her.

She wasn’t sure which of them was the more surprised by her show of strength, she or he. He stared at her and then shook his head, cursing her under his breath as he came towards her.

Livvy was not going to be taken off guard a second time. She bunched her fists as aggressively as she could, facing him down, speaking to him in French as she told him that she was going to report him to the police.

He was obviously shocked to hear her speaking perfect French, but Livvy doubted if that would have been enough to give her time to escape from him if the hotel manager and one of the waiters hadn’t suddenly emerged from the fire escape to take hold of him and forcibly march him away.

The manager returned later to apologise. He would not blame her if she went ahead and pressed charges, he told Livvy.

‘By rights I ought to do so,’ she returned crisply, ‘if only to ensure that some other woman doesn’t suffer the same fate, but since I can’t afford to delay my journey I shall have to leave it to monsieur to see that he is fittingly punished. He seems a rather old companion for your son,’ she added pointedly.

A long discussion about the problems of bringing up teenagers followed, leaving Livvy wishing she had simply closed her door and wished le patron a goodnight. The incident had shaken her more than she realised, she admitted as she prepared for bed. She was jumping at every tiny, unfamiliar sound and had been twice to check that the door was securely locked.

Additionally, for the first time in her life, she was going to sleep in a room with the windows closed. She might be on the second floor, but there was no point in taking any more risks, not after what had already happened. After all, as she had already discovered, she could scarcely rely on anyone to come to her rescue, could she?

She was still seething with bitter resentment over the reaction of the Englishman. How dared he assume that she had actually encouraged, never mind wanted, that lout’s attack on her? Surely he could see that she had been struggling against him, not abandoning herself to the mindless passion he seemed to think she had been experiencing, if the disgust in his eyes had been anything to go by.

What kind of women was he used to, for heaven’s sake, to have thought that?

The more she thought about the way he had behaved, the more angry Livvy became. She could have been raped and it would virtually have been his fault.

Much he would have cared what might have happened to her. Look at the way he had behaved in the car park—that should have warned her what kind of man he was. Arrogant pig. Thank goodness she had never been the type to be susceptible to that kind of darkly powerful male sexuality. It was personality that mattered to her, not looks. Uncomfortably, she suddenly remembered that odd and unwanted frisson of sensation she had experienced when he’d looked at her.

It had been caused by shock…fear…everyone knew that very strong emotions could have the most disconcerting effect on people. Her reaction had had nothing to do with the man himself. How could it have done? There had been nothing…nothing about him that she had found remotely attractive…nothing about him as a human being that could have caused that sharp, jagged lightning flash of sexual awareness.

She had probably imagined the whole thing…exaggerated the force of it. In her heightened emotional state it would have been strange if she had not done so, she comforted herself as she climbed back into bed.

She needed a good night’s sleep if she was to be fresh for her journey in the morning. Resolutely she told herself to put the evening and its entire events firmly out of her mind.

An hour later she had to repeat this admonition more severely to herself; she reminded herself that she was a teacher, and a firm fan of self-discipline, someone who prided herself on her logical, calm approach to life’s problems.

So what was going wrong? Why were the arrogant, contemptuous features of a certain man coming between her and her attempts to go to sleep? If the thought of anyone was keeping her awake, it should have been the man who had tried to attack her, but disconcertingly she could barely remember his features, while the other…the Englishman’s were so firmly etched on her memory that she might have known him for years, not merely glimpsed him for a handful of seconds.

No doubt, after closing his door on her, he had not even given her a second thought.