Dear Evan: Red Beret Girl (Club# 2)

Dear Evan: Red Beret Girl (Club #2)

Author's note: Evan and his wife, Evangeline are old friends of ours in the lifestyle. We trade letters. This one goes back a very long way, to a December before either of us knew what we were doing. It is a story which fits into our earlier lifestyle experience when Chris and I were newly married.

The full title of this is "Dear Evan: The Girl in the Red Beret". It is a Couples Club story. Club #1 featured a club in Sydney and my meeting with a Blind Man and this story takes place in Paris when I meet and play with a girl for the first time. Let me know what you think.

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Dear Evan,

You asked me once which one I'd keep, if I could only keep one. I said I'd have to think about it.

And then you told me your fantasy. The little sex play session with a man, or a woman, or a couple, where nobody introduces themselves. One-on-one, or couple to couple, or in a group. You both thought it would be especially hot where there's no interaction to speak of and none of the couple to couple negotiation of the regular kind. Where boundaries and rules don't feature, because common sense and courtesy are self evident, and mostly because the chemistry is so self evident that you never ask their names and never give your own. And then, only afterwards, once the play is done, you have the conversation. Names come after. The getting to know you comes after.

You chalked all this up to a fantasy, because the way things happen now, it can be quite transactional, rather than romantic. Apps and such have made it something of a "meat market"; (Eve-I believe this is your terminology) rather than a meeting of minds and bodies.

Well. That has got me thinking about something that happened a very long time ago.

It isn't the best one. I want to be honest with you about that from the start. It's the one that has stayed, the sharpest thing I own, and all of it happened without a single word being exchanged. It is the clearest memory I have, in the best possible way.

I was young. Wide eyed, newly wed. I had imagined myself an ingenue and I was really still finding my way around myself, and around my married self, which turns out to be a different woman living in the same body.

The details aren't all clear. Bear with me. What I'm giving you here is impossibly, unbearably true in every way that matters, which is not always the same thing as accurate. You know the kind of moment I mean. The event is already special while it's happening, and then it goes on quietly gathering importance in the fullness of time until it's out of all proportion to its size. Something you keep in the bottom drawer and take out to examine and celebrate with nobody but yourself and your husband. A turning point of sorts.

Anyway. I digress. I always digress.

First you have to have the weather, because the weather is half of it. December, and a week out from Christmas.

Winters in Sydney are rightly described as fresh rather than truly cold. We're blessed by the sunshine and we don't know how blessed. Paris was something else altogether.

By day there was a pale golden light on the Arc de Triomphe and it was very beautiful and I have almost nothing to say about it. For that whole trip, what I remember is the nights. A sharp wet cold. Hands that needed gloves. The tips of your ears going numb because there's nothing you can do about ears. The lamps were always a strange burnt orange, throwing their reflections onto glass panes and into the big wet puddles left in the street from rain that had fallen that morning.

What was grimy by day presented as romantic by night. And the whole city was strung up for Christmas on top of it, so the wet was full of small lights that had no business being that beautiful. That was Paris, that week.

But I have to start with Armand, because without Armand there is no story at all.

We'd been writing to each other for months. Emails, back and forth, in the days when a message from the other side of the world still felt as though it had travelled to get to you. By the time we met him in the flesh I knew the shape of his mind and nothing else about him whatsoever.

A little café off Boulevard Haussmann with a view up to the Arc. A Thursday, eight days before Christmas. He was in his early thirties, much closer to Chris in age than to me. I was eight years younger than him and I felt every one of those eight years, sitting there with both hands around a coffee cup.

He cut a fine figure. I want to do this properly, because I can still see him. A camel coloured overcoat. A scarf done up just so at the neck, that particular arrangement that looks careless and takes a mirror. Brown leather shoes, laced, and the toes came to a point rather than a round, which I had never seen on a man before and found unreasonably sophisticated. A longish sharp chin. Fine hair curling around the ears. And the bluest eyes I have ever seen in my life, before or since.

He was the first Frenchman either of us had met. Not the first we'd seen, obviously. The first one who was going to be ours. We were so nervous that I remember watching my own hands and thinking they belonged to somebody else.

We needn't have been. He was sweet and easy and funny, and we had cake and coffee and talked for a long time, and the nerves went wherever nerves go.

Then I got up to wash my hands.

This is a small thing, Eve, and I'm putting it in because it turned out to be the shape of the entire trip.

The ladies' had a long basin down one wall and a long mirror above it. Very handsome. And no tap. I stood there and looked, and then I looked properly, and there was no handle, no spout I could work out, no button anywhere. Nothing but white porcelain and my own face above it.

So I stood there. Helplessly is the honest word. Twenty something years old, in Paris for the first time, defeated by a sink. I got as far as deciding I would simply walk out with unwashed hands and be a foreigner about it.

Then a woman came out of one of the stalls. Dark hair. Very chic. She looked at me, and she didn't say anything, because why would she, and she pointed down at the floor.

I must have looked blank, because she then put on a great show of it, entirely for my benefit. She lifted her foot. She held it up there a moment for the audience. And then she pressed down on a copper ring set into the tiles, about the size of a fifty cent piece, and water came pouring into the basin.

I can describe that woman to you better than I can describe most people I've known for years, and only because of the little pantomime she put on just for me. A magnificent coat, luxurious to my unsophisticated eyes. It fell below the knee and flared out at the base. Black boots, stylish, cut low at the ankle, and the heels flared like tree roots. I have never seen heels like that since. I noticed every bit of it because she had made herself something to watch.

I washed my hands. The relief was out of all proportion to the problem.

She never spoke. She didn't need to. And I want you to hold on to that, because from that afternoon to the last minute of the following night, nobody in that city taught me a single thing with a word.

On the way out of the café, Armand made a plan to come to our hotel that evening. We were all very happy about it and all very careful about how casually we said so.

And then he said it. You're in Paris. Why not go to a couples club?

I want to be accurate about what happened in me when he said that, because it wasn't shock. It was recognition, which is far more embarrassing. I had thought about these couples clubs. Wondered about them, having read about them in books. All very hush-hush, too intimate to share with anyone. And certainly not with my new husband. On and off, I had thought about visiting one for a long time and had never once dared put it to Chris, because to say it out loud would have been to admit I'd been carrying it around. It took a Frenchman in a camel coat, over a slice of cake, to open that door, and the moment it was open it seemed absurd that it had ever been shut.

We were genuinely curious. You have to remember what Sydney was then. We honestly did not know whether such a place existed there at all. Paris had had them for decades, of course it had, there's a reason menage a trois isn't an English expression.

We asked him to come with us and he said he couldn't, and explained the rules with the patience of a man explaining the train system. Friday and Saturday, couples only, no exceptions, not for anybody. Wednesday they let singles in, men and women both, alongside the couples. We were flying out Saturday morning. Thursday night was already his. That left Friday, and Friday was the one night he could not walk through the door he had just opened for us.

He wrote the name and the address on a piece of paper so we could hand it to a taxi driver.

Then he told us to dress well, and he was quite serious about it. They can be snooty, he said, and they have been known to turn people away. The concierge has the last say. He said it just like that. "They take one look at you, and they decide right there whether they want you in."

I have thought since that he may have been enjoying himself a little.

He came to the hotel that evening and stayed a few hours.

I can't give you the choreography, Eve. I've tried. I even asked Chris, and he just shook his head, so it isn't only me. Neither of us can retrieve the details of that evening. What we have is that it was easy and it was playful, and that's not nothing, but it isn't a scene.

What stayed instead is the room.

It was tiny. Crisp white cotton sheets tucked in hard over a good mattress, and a duvet over the top, soft and puffed and far too warm for three. The pillows were feather, the slightly collapsed sort you sink into, and we sank into them. There was a sprig of rosemary on the sideboard, which I have never been able to account for and have never forgotten. One lamp, dim, and that same burnt orange as the street lamps outside, throwing our shadows around the walls so that the whole thing looked like something being remembered while it was still going on.

I was in the middle, between my husband and this beautiful nervous Frenchman who turned out not to be nervous at all. I enjoyed the two of them and they enjoyed me, and at some point all three of us were laughing.

Outside it was bitterly cold. Inside it was not.

What Chris and I both remember, and it's the only thing either of us can put a hand on, is the door he opened to another world. And that he would not walk through it himself.

Our last day. We did a few more touristy things and then some last minute Christmas shopping along Boulevard Haussmann, which at that time of year is not a street so much as a slow river of people. The big stores had their Christmas windows going, the mechanical ones, with children pressed up against the glass three deep and their parents behind them holding bags. It was genuinely lovely and I would have stood there all afternoon. Chris endured it the way he endures all shopping, with the face of a man doing community service. By the afternoon he was flat out tired. We packed the big bags, got into bed and slept.

I set the alarm for ten, because the club didn't open until eleven.

When it went off, Chris groaned. I know that groan. "It's too cold," he said. "Are you sure you really want to do this? We can go another time."

"Chris. It's the last night of our holiday. We're leaving Paris tomorrow. There won't be another time."

He tried the next one. "I've got nothing to wear." And then the real one, because Chris's objections always arrive in ascending order of honesty. "What happens if we get turned away at the door? We'd have paid the taxi fare for nothing."

"It's fine. I'm sure they won't turn me down."

I wasn't being vain. I was doing arithmetic out loud. I had the boots, and I had the black lace thing he likes, and the dress goes over the top of all of it. "You can wear your black shirt and your dress pants and that black military overcoat that makes you look good. And if you really want to save money, we can take the subway."

He groaned again. But that's a different groan. That one means yes.

So we got up and brushed our teeth and put our street clothes on, and I'll tell you exactly what we looked like, because it matters later.

Black leather boots, above the knee. The lace bodysuit underneath, which seems almost demure to me now and which made me feel faintly criminal standing in that hotel bathroom at half past ten at night. A little mini dress over the top of it. The mini wasn't especially mini, not by the standards of anything you'd see today, but worn with those boots it left about two inches of white flesh between the hem of the skirt and the top of the leather. Two inches. That was the entire argument I was making, and I stood in front of the mirror a long time making sure of it. And over all of it my overcoat. Long black wool, military cut, square padded shoulders, five big buttons down the front. Chris in his. The pair of us in black wool with our shoulders squared off, on our way to be inspected by a Frenchman.

We did not take the subway. After all that talk about the taxi fare, we took the taxi.

Bitterly cold, and the streets still wet from the morning, the lamps doing that burnt orange thing in the puddles. Chris handed the driver Armand's piece of paper. Neither of us said much after that, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have made it worse. I sat with my hands in my lap thinking, we don't know what to do. We genuinely don't. Nobody has told us the rules and we're about to walk into a room where everybody else knows them.

And Armand's line went round and round in me the whole way. The concierge has the last say. They take one look at you and they decide right there.

Then we got out, and went into the wrong building.

It looked like a small hotel reception. Carpet, a desk, a lamp with a shade on it. And a man behind the desk dressed exactly like a concierge.

Evan, I want you to understand what that man was to us in that moment. That was the gate. That was the one look Armand had warned us about, and we had done our hair for it.

We stood in front of him, two Australians in black overcoats, and asked for Overside.

He sniffed. An actual sniff, down the nose, the full instrument. Then he gave us a look so filthy that I felt about fourteen years old. Then he pointed at the door, and then he pointed downstairs.

We were all the way back out in the street before either of us worked out that we hadn't been rejected. We'd been given directions. He hadn't said a word to us either. I've decided since that he was probably asked the same question nine times a night and had run clean out of ways to be pleasant about it.

We found the right door. We pressed the bell, and we were buzzed in.

And then we were nowhere. A small dark holding room, the two of us standing in it uncertainly with the street door shut behind us and no other door open in front of us. There was a little window set into the wall, the sort with a shutter that pulls up.

The shutter went up. And there she was. The concierge.

All that time I'd spent being frightened of a man behind a desk, and the last say belonged to a woman behind a hatch.

I squared my shoulders, which was easy enough to do in that coat, and with Armand's warning going round and round in my ears I walked over to the window.

She made some remarks I did not understand, not one word of them. Then she used her hands.

She wanted me to open my coat.

So I unbuttoned the coat, all five buttons, and I held it open for her.

I have turned that moment over more times than any other part of the night, and I still cannot tell you what she saw through that little hatch. A mini dress. A pair of boots. Two inches of white leg. A girl from Sydney holding her coat open in a dark room to be judged by a stranger, and doing it without being asked twice.

But I passed. I passed the test.

She came out and took our money, and then she took our coats off us and put them away somewhere, and then nothing happened at all for what felt like an extraordinarily long time. The two of us standing in that little dark room with no coats, no explanation, and no idea whether we were in, or waiting, or being reconsidered.

Then another woman came out. She didn't speak either. She gestured us towards a heavy dark curtain, and we walked into the room.

Red and black. Chandeliers, curtains the colour of a good burgundy. A long bar down one side, a dance floor, music playing. Down the other end the salons, the little rooms, which is where everything happens and where nobody watches you deciding whether you're going.

And almost nobody there. That's what I hadn't braced for. All that red velvet and the music going and hardly a soul we could see. A Friday a week before Christmas, in a city where everybody sensible was at a work party or at home wrapping things. I'd prepared myself for a crowd and got an empty room, and it was worse, because in a crowd you can stand still.

Where was everyone? The few people we saw, at low tables or at the bar - they were very few indeed - were engaged in quiet conversations. There was no sexual activity of any kind that I could see.

No English was spoken. None. Not at the window, not behind the bar, not by anybody. Chris has schoolboy French, enough for a train ticket and an apology, and mine was worse. So we did what you do. We smiled too much and only at each other, drank too fast, and communicated entirely by eyebrow.

We spotted them fairly early. A couple, because it was Friday and there was nothing else to spot. And I had a target, which is the honest word for it. He was dark, not tall, mid-thirties perhaps, with the sort of open and friendly face that makes you feel comfortable even in the awkwardness of standing and dancing a little on an empty dance floor.

I spent a long time trying to catch his eye. I caught it more than once. And then I did absolutely nothing about it, because I had no idea how you approach a stranger in a place like that. Do you speak? What do you say if you can't speak? Armand had explained the door and the dress code and had not explained this. So I stood near the bar arranging myself in the man's line of sight and waited for the universe to organise itself on my behalf, which is what a woman of that age calls a plan.

She was with him, obviously. I registered her the way you register a piece of furniture between you and the door.

Chris went to the toilet.

That's the hinge of the whole thing. Chris went to the toilet, and she came over.

She didn't say anything, because there was nothing she could have said that I'd have understood. She stood in front of me a moment, close enough that I could smell her, something green and cold and expensive. She looked at me with her head slightly tipped, the way you look at a dress on a rack when you have already decided. Then she took my wrist.

Not my hand. My wrist. I have thought about that difference for more than twenty years.

She walked me away and I went. That's the part I want you to sit with, because it's the part I have never been able to explain away. I went. I wasn't drunk. I wasn't cornered. There was a room behind me and my husband about to walk back into it, and I could have made any one of a hundred small ordinary sounds and all of it would have stopped. I made no sound at all. I let a stranger take me by the wrist and lead me away from my own plan.

And from the wrist onwards I lose the film. What I have after that is stills.

A short flight of stairs at the back. Narrow corridors. A few turns, more turns than I would have thought that building had in it. And no time at all, Eve. None. I could not tell you whether what followed took four minutes or the better part of an hour, because the clock went out along with the words. Seconds and minutes and hours all folded into one another somewhere on those stairs and I have never managed to get them apart since.

Then a room, and a low sofa set against the wall. Not a sofa, really. Backless, and hard, more chaise longue than anything, or an ottoman with ambitions. Vintage green, with big buttons sunk deep into the middle of the fabric. Not cold leather. Warm fabric. I can still feel those buttons under my shoulder blades. Isn't that ridiculous. Twenty odd years, and the thing that has survived entirely intact is the upholstery.

She sat me down, and we were both still in our dresses. Both black, both of us, which I noticed at the time and thought was funny. We must have got out of them, obviously, because the next still I have is of her skin. But I have no memory whatsoever of undressing, hers or mine, and I have gone looking for it more than once.

She was cute. I'll give her that. Small, dark haired, that Parisian thing where the bones do all the work. Deep hazel eyes and a black pixie crop, and a pale that Australian girls simply are not, none of us, not even the ones who stay indoors. Creamy pale breasts, small, neat, perfectly made. Tiny dusky pink nipples. Pebbled like small diamonds, only without the hardness unlike mine which are the size of a small grape. Everything about her scaled down a size from me and somehow more finished for it.

And I don't particularly like women. I want to be clear about that, because I know how this reads from outside, and I've had enough letters from people who decide a story like this means I was secretly waiting my whole life to be shown something. I wasn't. I've never wanted a woman before it or much since. It wasn't that.

It was that nobody asked me anything I had to answer.

That's as close as I can get, Eve, and I think it's also why your fantasy landed the way it did when you described it to me. There was no urgency in our movements - Not in mine, not in hers. Every other time in my life that I have gone somewhere with somebody, there's been a conversation first. The establishing of terms. The part where you're charming, and the part where you're reassuring, and the part where you are quietly managing three separate feelings at once, his and yours and the one you're performing. It's work. I had not noticed it was work until the night somebody took it away from me.

She didn't ask. She couldn't ask. The language wasn't there to ask with. So she took what she'd come over for, and I found out something about myself in the dark on a hard green sofa in the sixth arrondissement, which is that when there's nothing to negotiate there is also nothing of me left holding the thing up. I put my hands down. I stopped arranging my face. I let her.

She took the lead and I followed, which was just as well, because it was my first time with a woman and I would not have known where to begin. She did. And there was no urgency in any of it, which is the part that surprised me most. I had assumed that a thing done without words would be a fast thing, a snatched thing. It wasn't. It was unhurried the way a good long lunch is unhurried.

There were kisses, a gentle touch of hips on hips. Pale smooth skin in the darkness.

I was on my back and she came up over me, and I let her. I recall that our faces were close together, she on top, and myself below, my bare bottom on the cold leather ottoman that had now been warmed by our bodies. Her breath was on mine as we whispered and giggled a little. The movie may have been lost in time but the still shot I have kept the longest is not a still at all but a whole living thing, and it is the taste of her.

This part was very vivid - the taste of her on my tongue. Her flavour was perfectly neutral, like tongue on any other part of a woman's skin. Feathery light wispy hair on the fringes, there was no hair on her mound. Her gentle softness became wet as I put my tongue on her and pressed on her hooded clit. I tongued her with no thoughts - acting purely on instinct and a certain desire to act on a fantasy I didn't even know I had.

It was exciting and strange, but I was enveloped in a certain still calmness - like a freeze frame moment. No one else existed in that space. There was only me and her. I also felt no particular emotion about it at the time, Eve, and I have never dressed that up since. Not shame. Not triumph. Nothing with a name on it. It was a gift from one young woman to another and I was glad she had chosen me to be the one to take it. She ground her pussy on my lips and I didn't hesitate, I lapped her without stopping and she shuddered, and she came, not loudly but as though her body as releasing a sign, and I lay under her in the dark thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

The room narrowed to almost nothing, to warmth and the bass coming up through the floor, and I remember thinking, with great clarity and no alarm whatsoever: oh. I have no idea who I am when I'm not talking.

Meanwhile, downstairs, my husband came out of the toilet and could not find his wife.

He tells me better than I do. He stood there for a moment thinking I'd gone back to the bar. Then he looked around properly. The room was small enough that you could see most of it from where he was standing, but I wasn't in any of the obvious places. He did a lap. Then another. He checked the bar, the little seating areas, the entrance. Nothing.

Eventually he started looking into the salons.

Chris says the first room stopped him.

It was tiny, really only big enough for one bed, and the door was closed. But there was a little window in it, and the curtains had been thrown wide open. A small lamp somewhere inside cast that same burnt-orange light onto the walls, the sort of light that made everything look older and softer than it really was.

There were three women on the bed.

He says they looked to be in their early thirties, and that the whole scene looked like something from an Impressionist painting. Not because he could see much, he says, but because of the light and the colours and the way the bodies seemed to merge into the room. The women were stylish and stylised, as only Parisien women can be. Garter belts. Stylish corsets. Skin catching the orange light. Three women who seemed entirely at ease and in fact even enjoying the fact that they were being looked at and watched.

Because there were two men standing outside the little window watching them.

Chris stopped too, just for a moment.

He said it took him about three seconds to work out that this wasn't an accident. The curtains were open for a reason. The women knew the men were there. The men knew they were allowed to watch. Everybody appeared to understand the arrangement except him.

So he moved on.

A little farther down was another room with its door standing open. This one was bigger. He caught only a glimpse as he passed: two couples on a bed, arms and legs everywhere, an indistinguishable tangle of bodies and white sheets. Musky perfume from a candle. He said he couldn't have told me afterwards who belonged to whom. What he was sure of was that there were four people, two men, two women and one bed and an open door. There were some moans, first low and then louder and more urgent. The unmistakable - thump, thump, thump; of flesh slapping upon flesh. It sounds dramatic because to Chris it really was that. He was nearly tempted to stay and watch, but he had to find his wife.

He kept looking.

Which, when I think about it, must have been quite an education for a man whose immediate concern was simply finding his missing wife.

He did one lap, then another lap, and ended up standing in front of the very man I'd spent the entire evening aiming at.

And the man, who had presumably watched the whole thing happen, smiled at my husband. Then he shook his head. Then he shrugged both shoulders, and pointed upstairs. They exchanged sympathetic nods.

More than twenty years of marriage and I don't think anything has ever made me laugh harder than that sequence. The smile, the head shake, the shrug. Not unkind at any point of it. It's a complete sentence in a language neither of them had. My friend. Your wife. Upstairs. What can anybody do.

Back upstairs, in the meantime, my new friend and I had paused, our breathing came down to normal, and out of the corner of my eye I understood that we had gained an audience.

Two people, perhaps three, standing back where the light gave out. Men, I think, at least mostly, and perhaps a woman among them. Not close. Not doing anything. Not making any sort of production of it. Just standing there in the dark, watching.

And here is the thing I cannot answer and never will. I have no idea how long they had been there. They may have come in at the end. They may have been there from the moment she walked me up those stairs, the whole time, from the buttons and the green fabric onwards. For all of it I had been focused on nothing in the world but my new friend, and so an entire small crowd assembled itself around me in the dark and I did not notice. Me. A woman who has never in her life walked into a room without counting it first.

I've done the arithmetic since, and I can at least tell you who they weren't. They weren't my man from the bar. My man from the bar was downstairs at that precise moment, explaining my marriage to my husband.

They said nothing either, naturally. Nobody in that entire city said anything to me all week.

Then it was over. It was over very quietly, whenever it was that it ended, and she went back to her man, and I came down the stairs feeling as though I had been somewhere rather than as though I had done anything.

Downstairs was as quiet as it had been all night. Whatever I had imagined a place like that would be, it was not a nearly empty room with the music still going for nobody.

We had a look into one of the salons on the way out. That was my first proper look, ever, at a room full of people doing what people do at such clubs, and Evan, I have to tell you, my first thought was not a sexy thought. It was: so that's what the backsides of everybody look like.

Rows of white bums going in the dark. Their women hidden in a tangle of limbs and sheer curtains. I had never had that view in my life, because in everything I'd ever done the man was on top and the man was in the way. All my imagining had been faces. It turns out it's mostly bums, and they aren't doing a thing for anybody.

There's a lesson in there about the distance between what you build in your head and the mechanics of the actual article, and I've written enough of these letters by now that I don't have to spell it out for either of you.

So we collected our coats and buttoned them up to go out into the cold. Well past midnight by then. A plane to Sydney in the morning and the sort of hangover you can already feel the shape of.

And on the way up and out, who do we bump into but our little friends.

She had her coat on now. Rounder in the shape than mine, softer. Black gloves. And a red beret.

A red beret, Eve. In the middle of all that black wool and all that Paris, this girl had put on a red beret, and she looked about nineteen, and she looked like every postcard of the city you have ever seen in your life. I stood there in my great square military coat with my five buttons done up again, feeling suddenly and completely like a woman from a colder, more serious country.

She gave me a small warm smile. Just small. Not a wink. Nothing shared, nothing conspiratorial. Polite, kind, happy. The kind of smile you'd give somebody on a train who has made a space for you to stand on.

Her man nodded, and his nod was a good deal more enthusiastic than her smile, and I would still love to know what he thought his part in the evening had been, I have given him a good deal more than that since, in my menage a trois day-dreams, the three of us play together with Chris watching from the wings.

Chris and I gave them a little bow.

I don't know why we bowed. We're Australians, we had no vocabulary for the moment, and a bow is what came out. Two couples on a dim staircase in the sixth, bowing at one another, having said nothing whatsoever from beginning to end.

Then we walked off in different directions into the wet burnt orange street, and I never saw either of them again.

So that's the one I'd keep. Not the best night, not by a long way. Armand was the better night, and Armand had the bluer eyes, and Armand is the one I could describe to you shoe by shoe. But Armand and I talked.

Here is what I actually want to say to you both, and it's taken me four pages to get to it.

Your fantasy has an epilogue. That's the part I keep coming back to. In your version the play finishes and then you sit down together and swap names and find out who everybody is, and the whole delicious wordless business gets redeemed at the end by a conversation.

We didn't get the epilogue. Nobody in that entire city gave us one. A chic woman showed me a tap with her foot. A concierge sent us downstairs with two fingers. A woman behind a small window looked at me through my open coat and decided I'd do. A stranger took me by the wrist and led me up a flight of stairs and never once told me her name. Two or three people stood in the dark and watched us and didn't introduce themselves either. A man I'd wanted all night explained my marriage to my husband with his shoulders. And a girl in a red beret said goodbye to me with a smile you'd give someone on a train.

Not one name. Not then, not afterwards, not ever.

And I've never been able to decide whether that makes it less than your fantasy or more. What I do know is that I was a newly wed girl who thought she was an ingenue, and I walked into that place with a plan, and I walked out of it knowing that I am a different woman when the words are taken away. Twenty odd years in the bottom drawer and it hasn't faded once.

We flew out the next morning and were home in Sydney four days before Christmas, into thirty degrees and prawns and my mother wanting to know whether we'd seen the Louvre. We had. I told her about the Louvre.

Chris still does the shrug. Usually at dinner parties, usually just as I'm about to be interesting about something else.

All my love to the both of you, and tell Eve she still owes me the hotel story,

Jayne