Méfiez-Vous de Paris
Who: Una Persson, O'Brien, Bertie Wooster, and anyone else who wants to encounter Ms P. in Paris.
What: What to do with O'Brien, an accidental proposal, and open threads.
Where: A student café, somewhere in Montparnasse, and other places.
When: Day 1 of the port, an evening, and other times.
Warnings: Unlikely, honestly.
[I'm putting in a couple ( Read more... )
What: What to do with O'Brien, an accidental proposal, and open threads.
Where: A student café, somewhere in Montparnasse, and other places.
When: Day 1 of the port, an evening, and other times.
Warnings: Unlikely, honestly.
[I'm putting in a couple ( Read more... )
It wasn't going well.
By now, they'd reached a neighbourhood rich with bookstores, student cafés, and all the other sorts of things one finds near an urban university, and Una was beginning to wonder if there was anything O'Brien could find halfway amusing in Paris. Tired of Paris, tired of life? Or was it London? She couldn't remember.
"Look, let's stop for some coffee at least, all right? I'm hungry."
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"Except so long as the left remains crippled by internecine conflicts over intersectional social justice-"
Argument broke out amongst the students, in several different directions, and only a few things could be heard amidst it all.
"What does that have to do with-"
"Everything! You want to effect change, you organise, you don't stand there screaming at each other about-"
"But without equality, you end up back where you started, one way or another," snapped the girl. "Am I right, or no?" she said to O'Brien.
Una thought with some amusement that the girl was probably thinking about a somewhat different sort of equality than O'Brien would mean. Better to let them find out for themselves. "Back in a minute," she said to no one in particular, rising to her feet. If she came back and no one had been tossed out, then maybe this would work out after all, in a strange sort of way.
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"He is," chimed in one of the girls, jerking her thumb at one of the boys, who responded by tossing a balled-up paper napkin at her head. This was apparently an old routine between the two of them that slipped into a not-entirely-serious argument, mostly in French, about male and female interactions in public spaces.
Una could see all this from where she was quietly instructing the waiter to put all of her, O'Brien's, and the students' charges on her credit card. Just outside the café was the latest version of a cashpoint machine; from there, she would collect enough cash to get O'Brien through the rest of the day without her.
Yes, she was planning to abandon him to the tender mercies of some politics students from Paris 1. Yes, that might be one of the worst ideas she'd ever had. But damn it, he actually seemed increasingly cheerful now. She couldn't let that go.
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She's good, Una thought, amused, as she returned to the table. They barely seemed to have noticed her comings and goings, and that was perfectly fine. She'd managed to acquire an envelope, in to which she'd put what she privately referred to as O'Brien's allowance, and she slid that envelope across the table, near his elbow, as she picked up her coffee cup and took a sip.
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Una was quietly edging her chair away.
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Oh my, she's well in to it now, thought Una. This should keep O'Brien busy for the rest of the afternoon, if not the next twenty-four hours. "See you later at the hotel?" she murmured.
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