Фиона Гибсон – The Woman Who Met Her Match: The laugh out loud romantic comedy you need to read in 2018 (страница 2)
‘It’ll be good for you,’ Mum announced. ‘You’ll improve your French; see a whole different side of life. You don’t want to be stuck in boring old Yorkshire all summer, do you?’
She was applying her make-up at her dressing table mirror: two coats of spidery black mascara, frosted peach lips and a flash of apricot blusher across each cheek. She closed her small, tight mouth and swivelled round on the stool to face me. ‘You might even meet a nice French boy. Oh, I hope so, Lorrie! Just think – your first boyfriend.
At sixteen years old, I knew that people only said
I didn’t want a French boyfriend. I had never been out with anyone in Yorkshire – no one had even shown any interest in kissing me – and I doubted that my arrival in a foreign country would suddenly heighten my allure. I didn’t even want to go to France,
There were many other reasons why the thought of going to France scared me:
• I was to fly there, despite having never been on an aeroplane before. In fact, I had never been on
• French girls were thin and sexy – and I was neither of those things.
• French people kissed on both cheeks just to say hello, i.e. much potential for humiliation. It was all about sex.
In fact, I knew from occasional glimpses of French films that everyone was always snogging the face off each other. So what would
In my own bedroom, which smelt of the tinned meat pie Mum had heated up earlier, I dropped a selection of cheap biros into my suitcase, wishing I was at least travelling with someone. However, despite Mum’s insistence on using the term ‘French exchange’ – implying a load of British kids all singing excitedly on a coach – it was just me, being packed off to a stranger’s place, alone.
It had all started when we were allocated penpals through school and I’d ended up with a terse-sounding Valérie Rousseau. Our correspondence so far had been rather basic (‘What is your favourite sport?’ ‘Le ping pong,’ I lied, not actually having one). Next thing I knew, Mum was on the phone to Valérie’s mother, wafting her cigarette and putting on her Penelope Keith voice with the odd French word flung in: ‘Merci, Mrs Rousseau. Lorrie is très excited to come and visit chez vous!’ And that was that; the trip was arranged. ‘Well, she sounded very nice,’ Mum announced. ‘Not that she speaks much English, but you’ll be
I should also point out that my destination wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t even the CÔte d’Azur, which I’d at least heard of. I was travelling alone to somewhere called The Massif Central, which sounded like an ugly office block with an enormous road system around it. For all we knew, Valérie’s parents could have been alcoholics or child molesters – but this was the eighties and no one really worried back then.
I zipped up my suitcase and studied the instructions Mum had hammered out on her manual typewriter:
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