“Life is too short to learn German”-Mark Twain

Author’s Note: Have a little short story to celebrate the new year! In this story, which was cut in its entirety from the Terrace At Night Job, we find Ophelia and Eliot in a small outdoor cafe in Monaco, having an excellent lunch while not talking about her parents.  Eliot is not willing to let his questions about how her French accent got so, so terribly bad go unanswered.

“Nobody’s French is that bad,” he continued. “It takes real effort.”

“You know I had two years of boarding school in England?” she asked. It was a courtesy reminder; he had been so outraged when she first mentioned it that she doubted he had forgotten. Had she asked, right this minute he would have been less mad about the time she spent away from her mother.

He nodded. “Go on.”

“Mine had a policy that boarding students could travel on the weekends, but we could only travel with another student whose parents would act as chaperones. We couldn’t just leave and promise there would be adults with us.”

Already he knew where this was headed.

“My best friend Aggie invited me to go with her to Paris one weekend,” she said, smiling at the memory. “And a couple of our other friends. So there were four of us and two parents, and the school didn’t think to question anything about that.”

“Aggie’s parents didn’t go?”

“Of course they did! They wouldn’t have lied! What a suggestion!”

He wished he had ordered a larger drink.

“One Friday afternoon, they sprang us all from school early and took us down to the Chunnel station and showed us how to buy tickets. Then we all bought tickets and figured out how to find the train.”

“They…how old were you?”

“Thirteen,” she said promptly. “And if you’re about to guess they set us loose on the train and went on their merry way, you’re still not right.”

“Go ahead,” he said with a sigh. Had she asked him to describe her friend’s parents, she would have found his description to be uncannily accurate. Thanks to Sophie, he had met more than his fair share of the lower English nobility.

“The first time we went, they spent the entire weekend with us, showing us how to get around. They showed us how to buy Metro tickets, then how to hop the turnstiles and not buy Metro tickets.”

“Aggie’s parents were the cool parents?”

“They lived in some enormous castle,” she recalled, her face flushing at the idea. “And had a ton of money and acted like it. They were the only people I knew who owned a Bentley and hired a chauffeur for it. And it was an old one. Not the new ones that look like either bricks or orcas.”

He had never considered Bentleys in that light, but now it would be all he ever saw.

“But anyway, they showed us where all the museums were, and how to get to them. We spent a whole day at the Louvre, then they took us to a really fancy place for dinner that they probably shouldn’t have, then let us go out by ourselves on Sunday.”

“Her parents were French?” he guessed.

“Nope. Utterly English. When we got back to England Sunday evening, after they showed us how to buy tickets to get back, they sat us all down in the lobby of our dorm. They said they’d be glad to check us out whenever we wanted, but they weren’t going to, in their words, ‘keep racketing off to Paris’. But they did give Aggie a credit card so we could get a room if we wanted.”

“Oh my god,” Eliot groaned. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve heard worse ideas, but not a lot.”

“But then they told us how to handle it if we got into trouble with the French police. They taught Aggie and our friend Catherine to say “I thought this was the way to DeGaulle! Please help me I’m very lost!” in French. But poorly. So we wouldn’t immediately get outed for being boarding school girls who had at least some money and more than likely knew better.”

The waiter brought out their salads and waited for Eliot’s approving nod before discretely moving away.

“Our other friend was from Saudi Arabia, and it’s entirely possible she was a princess. They told her to just ask like a Saudi Arabian princess, declare that they were all beneath her, and demand to be taken to the embassy or the airport straightaway.”

“Did…did she usually do that?”

“Oh, no. Qadira was the nicest girl you could have ever hoped to meet. Neither of us could play field hockey to save our lives, so finally the games mistress just gave up and sent us to the library to research great figures in sports. But Qadira had to research American athletes and I had to research Saudi Arabian ones.”

“I don’t see why that helped?”

“It didn’t. We just wrote each other’s papers,” Ophelia chuckled. “But it worked and we didn’t have to play field hockey.”

“I can’t see you in a field hockey uniform,” he admitted.

“I don’t understand why they give you a stick to play a game if they don’t want you to hit people with it, so apparently I didn’t understand the rules either. But I’m fine with it.” She ate her salad for a few minutes. “What’s in this? It’s fantastic!”

“Your accent?” he prompted.

“You didn’t order me something with octopus in it, did you? You know I give a lot to octopus conservation societies.”

“I know, Princess. No octopus, and nothing with its face still attached.” She was not exactly a picky eater, but she definitely had opinions about the consumption of things that had recently been alive. Mainly, she didn’t want to look at her entree and see an identifiable part of an animal on her plate. Generally, he found it easy to work around this stipulation. Although there had been some confusion over some seafood pasta where he learned she could go from seated demurely at a table to standing behind the waiter shrieking in a very, very short amount of time.

“But: I asked Aggie’s parents what did I need to do if we got caught by the police. And Aggie’s mom said, ‘my dear, you’re American. Nobody expects you to speak French. Just start sounding like an hysterical American teenager. You’ll be fine.’ So if I had to speak French at all, I copied Aggie’s terrible accent. And it was apparently really terrible.”

“You didn’t have to take a foreign language?” he asked. She was right; the salad was delicious.

“I did, but I took Latin. Qadira and Aggie took French. I think Qadira made all A’s, and Aggie made the best she could by copying Qadira’s homework. And I think Catherine took German.”

“None of the rest of you took it with her?”

“Life’s too short to learn German,” she said seriously. “Mark Twain was right. Oh! Lunch is here! Doesn’t that look pretty!”

They finished their excellent lunch and continued their walk around Monte Carlo, Eliot carefully steering her away from where the cruise ships boarded. Just in case.

“What did you think of Paris?” he was legitimately curious, since she’d never mentioned it. “Did you like it? Hate it?”

“It’s a culture that revolves around bread, cheese, and art,” she grinned. “What do you think? I loved it. We went back several times. I remember one weekend we spent there and all we did was go around to different cafes drinking coffee and eating desserts. And then almost got in trouble when we got back to school because none of us could sleep for a week. All the caffeine and sugar, you know.”

He laughed in disbelief, mostly at the idea that a pack of 13 year olds were turned loose on Paris and nobody warned Paris.

“And when we studied Fitzgerald, we went to all the places Scott and Zelda had been known to go. That’s when I started buying blank journals,” she added.

“That was it?”

“It’s just they have the most marvelous antique stores, Jones. So: antique journals! Leather ones! Ones with weird clasps!”

“Do you all just pass the unused journals around?” he asked. “For centuries?”

“Some of them,” she conceded. “I have no regrets.”

“Neither do all the journal sellers,” he accurately guessed. “Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

They found a café with outdoor seating and a tempting dessert menu. After obtaining seats and ordering a variety of desserts to share, he had more questions.

“Would you ever go back?”

“To Paris?” she asked. “I would. I liked it, and it would be fun to see it as an adult.”

“You’ve never mentioned it,” he pointed out.

“It’s hard to be female and talk about Paris without someone thinking you’re just some silly woman waxing rhapsodic about Paris in the rain,” she said. He had no productive comment about that. “I enjoy it for the art and the food, but for the history too. There’s just layers of fascinating there, and that’s before you even open the subject of whether or not there are vampires in the catacombs.”

“I can promise you there aren’t vampires in the catacombs,” he said. “Not a single one.”

“Are you a vampire slayer too?”

“No comment,” he grinned. “But if you decide you want to go back, just say the word.”

“You like Paris?”

“Do not start talking about rain to me,” he warned, jabbing his fork into a fruit tart. “But I do. A lot, in fact.”

“Did you ever steal anything from the Louvre?” She asked, excited and slightly scandalized.

“Personally?” He winked, not sure what she wanted the answer to be. To be fair, he wasn’t entirely sure what answer he wanted to give her.

“Maybe we’ll save that question for later?”

“Solid plan,” he agreed.

“What happened to your friends?” he asked. “Or do you know?”

“It was school, Jones. Not war time. We email all the time. Catherine married a man who became a Tower Yeoman after he got out of the service. So she lives in the Tower village and sends us emails all the time about what she’s not allowed to do with their place. Apparently living inside history comes with a marked lack of closet space.”

If Catherine was anything at all like Ophelia, Eliot wondered whose closet she was renting on the sly to store the clothes she couldn’t jam into their cottage.

“And Qadira married an oil magnate whose grandfather was a sheik. She has her own helicopter, and I think one of her sons is going to be on the Saudi Arabian Olympic soccer team. He’s apparently really good. Her older son is already a VP in her husband’s oil company, and her daughter runs a tech firm in Berlin.”

“What about Aggie?”

“Aggie married a Duke and does nothing but spend money all day. A little like Qadira, but louder. She has three daughters she spends all her time trying to marry into royal families.”

“Is that likely?”

“If none of them do, it won’t be for lack of trying. But it could be because their mother spent her early 20s leaping into scandals like they were mud puddles,” she mused. “She saw Qadira one time on a state visit and nearly caused a scandal there. She sent me the articles about it. And I think they gave up whatever post her husband had after that to ‘spend more time with their family’, which didn’t surprise any of us.”

“You don’t think they spent more time with their family?” he asked. “Because that’s really a thing, and you said they had three daughters.”

“All three of their daughters are in boarding school,” she explained. “But not the one we went to, because apparently no amount of donation would make up for whatever she did the last years she was there. Her parents still have their castle and their lifestyle, and his parents stepped down to let her husband have the title because they couldn’t keep up the place anymore. So she spends a lot of time badgering the BBC into coming to their house to film an episode or two of Antiques Roadshow. And that’s when she’s not pimping her daughters out to Continental royalty. She had really hoped her middle daughter might marry Prince Harry, but I don’t know that she ever really got near him.”

“I didn’t expect any of this,” Eliot remarked. “This is…do you have any more of these stories?”

“Do you want to hear about the time we almost got arrested for taking a wrong turn and ending up at Windsor?”

He looked around for their waiter, signaling for two more drinks to their table.

“I do now.”