“J’espère…J’espère…” I said, appearing to be full of hope but painfully aware that I was without hope.
“Tu espères?,” asked the gorgeous French doctor called Guy (pronounced Ghee).
“Oui, j’espère…. I hope…” I said, slipping into my native tongue.
“En Français,” Guy urged.
He was so handsome and he looked at me so encouragingly that I didn’t want to let him down. Unfortunately, neither my French phrase book nor my English/French dictionary were of any use at all; the first being inappropriate because I had no wish to talk about the weather or the direction of the railway station, and the latter because the print was too small, and besides, it couldn’t help me with sentence construction. Quite early on at the party held by my brother-in-law Glyn and his wife Roly who live in Le Conquet, Brittany, I had realised that the French contingent would not be enthralled by my conversation in school-girl French for I remember little more than the nouns concerning ceilings, floors, crockery, cutlery, tables, windows; and the verbs “to be”, “to put”, “to play” and “to go” (and I’m not even too sure about those).
“J’espère… tu ne pense pas que je suis la fou,” I said.
“Tu,” Guy corrected my pronunciation (apparently I said “two” not “tu”, which is altogether different).
“J’espère… tu ne pense pas que je suis la fou,” I said again, this time attempting the correct pronunciation.
“La fou?” the good-looking doctor’s brow furrowed in bafflement.
“Oui, la fou – you know, mad,” I said, making a circle with my index finger in the air beside my head.
“Ah, la fou – mad – yes,” Guy recognised the words but seemed not to understand my meaning (by which time I had forgotten what I was trying to say anyway).
A silence followed.
“Tu es tres beau,” I resorted to the first thing that came into my mind.
“Moi?” he smiled and kissed me on both cheeks for about the tenth time.
“Sally, ca va?” another Guy (this time Portuguese rather than French) came up beside me and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Ah, Guy-two (ghee-two, to distinguish between the two Guys),” I said delightedly, “Tres bien.”
Guy-one slipped off to slip his arm around another waist while Guy-two slipped an arm around me.
“Parle moi en Francais (speak to me in French),” handsome Guy-two said, looking dreamily into my eyes.
“Il est le plafond et le plancher,” I laughed pointing to the ceiling, then the floor.
Guy-two seemed inordinately pleased at my prowess in speaking French. Meanwhile my husband Chris beguiled the doctor’s wife Gael, and Clementine and Laurence, with his schoolboy French to similar effect. We had a lovely weekend in beautiful Brittany.
