Tea For Two

Our neighbour was blonde and blue eyed. He was also six feet tall and when he was twenty he changed his name from Steven to Sven. He did this because he thought it would give him, as he put it, more leverage with the chicks. It must have worked because Sven had a lot more new best friends than most twenty year olds in our street.

Sven was either worldly-wise or a menace to society, depending on your point of view. He introduced me to Hendrix, Yeats and Kerouac and he said that one day, once he had settled down with his woman, I would inherit his collection of Danish pornography. He had a lifestyle that I admired in every respect and which I wanted to follow slavishly without question.

For my sixteenth birthday he gave me a small square of blotting paper. He told me that if I sucked on it for five minutes, I'd be transported to a place called Nirvana, where people were fair and had stars in their hair. I'd spent enough time hanging around secondhand record shops to know that the last part of the claim was courtesy of Marc Bolan; the deification of Sven was put on hold.

I did as he suggested, sucked on the blotting paper and the next thing I knew I saw a tall fair haired woman standing over me. "Is this Nirvana?" I asked.

"No love, it's the Royal London Hospital. You had some blotting paper stuck in your windpipe."

My mother stopped me seeing Sven immediately, but I could still hear him. He would sit in his back garden playing his guitar, giving the neighbourhood the dubious pleasure of his Neil Young and Bob Dylan impersonations. He was the embodiment of the phrase "I've suffered for my art and now it's your turn." It was a sound of a different nature however that would eventually make the summer of '77 so memorable.

I was sunbathing in our garden when the sound drifted over the fence. To begin with I thought I couldn't understand the words. Then, when I realised the female voice was singing in French, I knew I couldn't understand the words. I ran to the bottom of the garden, squeezed through the gap in the hedge and ran along Sven's garden to his back door.

"The singer. What language was it? What's her name? What was she singing? Sven, please."

Sven leaned back in his chair, took a long drag on his herbal cigarette and then replied, "French. Francoise Hardy. Voila."

"Where can I get hold of a copy?"

"Try Spiral Records on the High Street, Leo sometimes springs a surprise on his unsuspecting public. Check out the easy listening section."

According to Leo Chemisky, the owner of Spiral Records, music wasn't music unless it was recorded in Memphis or Chicago or under the influence of the Californian sun. Any anyway as Leo often told anyone within earshot, music had died the day Elvis had begun his National Service. Leo had a knowledge of the music business that leaned towards the esoteric rather than the commercial. He had the Virgin Prunes but not The Jam, Tonto's Expanding Headband but not the Buzzococks. He was bound to have Francoise Hardy, probably in all available formats.

I spent half an hour flicking through old Chess 45's until the shop emptied. I then cautiously approached the Easy Listening section keeping one eye on the door and my weight on my toes so that in the event of one of my friends walking in I couls spin round like one of the Four Tops and be casually browsing through the back catalogues of The Who or Frank Zappa.

My fingers seemed to be embarrassed, flicking through the names that usually brought a snigger from anybody under fifty: Matt Monro, Shirley Bassey, Mel Torme. Names I recognised from Two-Way Family Favourites which was mandatory in our house during Sunday lunch.

Eventually I found her. The cover was a simple photograph of her with the background blurred. She was wearing a black dress, probably Chanel or some other top design house. To me the cover said "I am French, therefore I am."

I paid for the record, caught the bus to the top of our road and didn't stop running until I burst through the back door. I took the stair two at a time up to my room and put the album on the turntable of my record player and played it at every possible opportunity for the next two months.

Listening wasn't enough though. I needed to meet Francoise Hardy. The only solution was to travel to France and before I did that I needed to know where I could find her. Looking back from the safety of twenty five years or so I realise I was close to crossing the line that divides fan worship from obsession.

I visited the local library's reference section. Among its inhabitants was a woman who had an annoying cough and two girls from my school who were, like me, researching their homework. Their subject was Hardy's Wessex, mine was Hardy in Paris. I found a large book called the 'International Directory of Screen, Theatre and Music', the psychedellic cover of which suggested that the author and Sven were related by chemistry. The blurb on the back cover claimed that inside were '15,000 entries, detailing career, hobbies and, most importantly for me, 'the names of the stars agents.' My fingers ran down the surnames in the French section: Deneuve, Distel, Gainsbourg, Halliday, before coming to rest on the name of my personal holy grail. I scribbled down the address and telephone number onto a scrap of paper and left.

I wrote about two dozen letters to Miss Hardy, each one asking for an autograph and requesting a meeting during her next visit to London. I didn't receive a reply and eventually decided that enough was enough. With the money I had saved from two summers, working with an uncle at the Smithfield Market, I bought a ticket for the Dover- Calais ferry.

I called Sven and asked him if he wanted to join me. He was reclining on a bean bag with his latest best friend carly and he smiled and declined my offer. He said he'd been to Paris once and it was like a giant Petri dish. Paris was, he said spouting that middle class wank he mistook for philosophy, like life: the image was better than the reality. It's always better to travel than to arrive he said before wishing me luck and adding that maybe I'd get the chance to buy Francoise Hardy a cup of tea. Very English, he said, ask for the pour deux personnes.

I spent most of the crossing staring at the inside of the toilet bowl. When Calais did appear my initial reaction was of disappointment and anti-climax: the jibs, derricks and hoists made it look exactly like the London Docks. Where were the striped shirts. the accordion players, the tarts and the hustlers?

After the disappointment the excitement kicked in. Actually it was as much fear as excitement. I was in a strange country where the only sentence I could string together with any confidence would enable me to buy a stick of bread for my sister who had a small dog and lived near the cinema. CSE grade B French wasn't going to get me very far.

I caught the first available train to the Gare Du Nord, unfortunately I had chosen the stopping service which took nearly five hours and left me travel sick. At least it helped me grasp the enormity and stupidity or what I was doing. I was sixteen travelling to Paris to look for a French singer who didn't do live gigs anymore and who hadn't replied to a sackful of letters from her English Fan Club. On a scale of one to ten, the level of my sanity was flickering somewhere between 2 and 3, which put this trip on a par with supporting Leyton Orient or being a vegetarian.

I took the Metro from the Gare Du Nord to Belleville which was where the office of Miss Hardy's agent was located. Emerging from the permanight of the Metro into the bright sunshine of a Parisian summer I discovered that Belleville had been assembled from the pick n mix counter at the United Nations. All my senses were assailed at once: African music blared out of cafes and hit the streets in shards of exotic rhythms, the smell of lamb and chicken cooking drifted on the breeze. There were Kosher shops, Arab markets and women in the traditional clothes of Mali, Senegal and the Cote Du Ivorie. The ambience was so tangible, so real, so overwhelming, I fully expected a camel train to emerge from one of the side streets that led off the main boulevard.

The Agent's offices were closed and as I gazed in wonderment at the array of products on offer in the delicatessen's window that was beneath the offices, rain began to fall. The clour of the pavements changed from dull grey to an Impressionists palette of reds, greens and yellows as the neon signs were reflected in the glistening surface beneath my feet. I dived for cover and found myself in a seedy cinema. I removed my anorak and settled back to watch Bogart and Lupino outwit the Nevada police in badly dubbed version of High Sierra.

Two hours later I was back on the streets. The lead grey sky had been replaced by one the colour of Bishop's robes and Paris looked a distinctly warmer and friendlier place to be. I stuffed my now dry anorak into my sports bag and looked across the street to where there was now a light on in the office of Miss Hardy's agent. I walked up two flights of stairs to the Mirabelle Agency, knocked on the door and, without waiting for an invitation to do so, entered the office.

The walls were lined with photographs of people I assumed to be clients of the agency, a gallery of strangers as far as I was concerned with two exceptions: about half a dozen photographs in was one of Sandie Shaw and then two photographs along was Francoise Hardy. There was the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by a door opening and a young woman, not much older than myself entered the room. She looked me up and down and, in that offhand manner the French have practised into an artform said simply, "Bonjour."

I was completely fazed. I thought about bread, cinemas. dogs and my sister. "My name is Grant and I've travelled from London to see Miss Francoise Hardy," I said in my best Franglais.

"That's the worst French accent since the last Pink Panther film," she replied, her accent more Ramsgate than Rimbaud. "Did you say Grant? Are you Miss Hardy's famous letter writer?"

I nodded.

She smiled, "You look normal enough. I expected some weirdo in an anorak."

"You're English then," I said whilst trying to kick my sports bag under one of the seats and wishing I had Sven's charm.

"Dix point," she replied sarcastically. "Becky's the name, PR's my game. Francoise is doing a radio interview at the moment. To be honest she's not that keen on meeting her fans, that's why she didn't reply to any of your letters. Didn't want to encourage anything. I can give you a signed photograph if you like."

"Somebody warned me it would be like this," I said looking down at my damp trainers and replied with a distinct lack of gratitude, "Okay."

She disappeared into another office and emerged twenty seconds llater with a black and white photograph, a still wet signature scrawled illegibly across it.

"Listen I'm stopping for a bite to eat," she said combing her hair, "fancy a baguette and coke?"

Suddenly the gloom lifted, I nodded and we walked down the stairs and across the street to a small cafe I had sort of half noticed earlier in the afternoon.

"Is this your first trip to France?" Becky asked opening a packet of cigarettes.

"First time I've been anywhere I couldn't get home from by tube," I replied, placing the autographed picture on the table between us. "I had this weird idea about tea for two."

She smiled and lit the cigarette. "It's amazing this place, you think London's special and then you come here. I've been trying to persuade Francoise to visit London but she won't."

"What's she like?" I asked, "as a person I mean."

Becky stared at me, or rather she appeared to be staring over my shoulder as she spoke. "Tall, elegant, beautiful, vulnerable. You'll find out soon enough though."

"I doubt it," I replied. "I'm only stopping tonight."

Before she could reply a waiter appeared at our table, he looked at me and Becky and then they both began to address a thrid person who was tsnading behind me. After a brief convesration in French Becky stood up. "Sorry, I've got to go. I've just remembered something, light in the office. I won't be long."

As she moved away another woman took her place. I reacted like a character in a cartoon, looking at her, the photograph and then back at her again.

The waiter coughed and Miss Hardy ordered, "The pour deux personnes, sil vous plait." The waiter nodded and moved away, Miss Hardy looked at me and smiled: "I've heard it's an old English custom," she said, "like moaning about the weather."

For the first time since leaving home I smiled, "Don't always believe what you hear," I replied, "somebody told me it's always better to travel than to arrive. And look how wrong he was."