by Helen Kitson
We covered the plates and dishes with cling film, and for once I used the car to drive to the vicarage, since there was too much for the pair of us to carry. Simon sat on the back seat to stop the plastic crates filled with food from toppling over and I drove particularly slowly.
I’d arranged to be at the vicarage for six, a good ninety minutes before the guests were due. Mr Latham had kept his Christmas decorations to a minimum. A small, tastefully decorated tree with a star at its apex had been placed in a corner of the sitting room, and on the sideboard in the dining room he had on display a wooden Nativity scene. Even that, he felt, was a little too much, but it had been a gift from the Sunday school children.
He helped us carry the food from the car into the kitchen. ‘So good of you,’ he said. ‘And how kind of young Simon to come along to lend a hand.’
I glanced back at Simon, who winked. He got a frown from me in response. In my own house, Simon was welcome to make fun of the vicar all he liked, but not here.
My fears turned out to be groundless. Simon behaved impeccably. The conversation between the guests proved a small revelation, since very little of it seemed to have much to do with religion. There was a lot of moaning about keeping parish accounts and chairing meetings, but perhaps admin is the curse of every job.
Over the washing up, Simon whispered, ‘Did I do all right? I didn’t disgrace you, did I?’
‘You were fine.’
He pouted. ‘Only fine? Is that the best you can say?’
I flicked soap suds at him, with a quick glance round to make sure Mr Latham wasn’t there. Not that he would have cared – why should he? – and I wasn’t sure why I would have minded being caught out in some frivolous action in his house.
‘The all-seeing eye of God,’ Simon murmured against my ear.
‘He’s not God.’ I snapped off my rubber gloves and started to stack the crockery in the plastic crates.
‘God’s representative, isn’t he? You’re different with him; you sort of tighten up.’
‘I hadn’t noticed. Why would I do that?’
‘Because most people are superstitious even if they’re not religious. Think about it. Would you ever swear at a vicar?’
‘I don’t go around swearing at anyone as a rule.’
‘All right, bad example. But the point is you talk to him differently from how you talk to other people, and only because he wears that dog collar.’
‘I’m the same with policemen,’ I said.
‘A policeman is someone in authority, like the man from the water board. A vicar isn’t; he’s got no earthly powers to arrest you or cut off your water.’
‘I don’t quite see—’
‘It’s just interesting, that’s all. Maybe we’re all secretly hedging our bets even if we call ourselves out-and-out atheists.’
Mr Latham poked his head around the kitchen door. ‘All right in there, you two? I must say, I think that went swimmingly. I’d rather hoped there would be some of the lemon drizzle left for me to have tomorrow, but not so much as a crumb remains.’
Did I really speak to him in a different way? But don’t we all adjust our persona depending on whom we’re addressing?
‘I’m glad it went well. We’ll be finished soon.’
‘Take your time – no hurry – though I’m sure you want to get off home.’ He beamed – yes, he beamed, and I saw that Simon was right. When I looked at Mr Latham I didn’t see a man; I saw someone who was on a higher moral as well as spiritual plane. I couldn’t imagine him ever having a dirty thought.
It was of Mr Latham I thought when I hesitated on the threshold of the café where I’d arranged to meet Michelle. How would he handle such a situation? But he would never have found himself in a dilemma similar to mine in the first place. If he’d ever hurt anyone it would have been accidental. And yet I’d never intended to hurt Michelle – had never, in truth, given her more than a passing thought.
She gave me a wan smile. I was pleased that she’d chosen a table in a secluded corner. Would she weep? Perhaps she was past that.
She already had a cappuccino, which she cupped with both hands. We didn’t speak until the waitress arrived with my coffee.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Michelle said. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would. I’m not sure I would have done in your position.’
It was an ordinary weekday morning, therefore no great surprise that the few other customers were elderly ladies treating themselves to tea and a cake. I hadn’t told Simon where I was going, since he might have insisted on tagging along.
‘I read your book,’ Michelle said. ‘It’s Russell’s copy.’
I was relieved I hadn’t written a message in it. I hadn’t even signed it. ‘He never read it.’
‘No. It’s very good. You should write another.’
‘You don’t really want to talk about my book, do you?’
‘I hoped it would tell me something about you – about what you’re like. But I think it’s too clever for me. You’d probably despise the kind of books I generally read.’
She wore a little discreet make-up and her medium-length dark hair was shiny and well-cut. The pale grey pearl studs in her ears and her delicate silver necklace suggested a woman who cared about her appearance. She hadn’t yet abandoned her wedding ring, a thin gold band.
‘When did you last see my husband?’ she said. We both smiled, for the phrasing sounded so music-hall.
‘Not since you moved away. He – well, he did phone me a couple of times, you may as well know that.’
She nodded. ‘I suspected. What did he want?’
‘To meet me, to talk about – about what he’d done; what had happened.’
‘Me finding out, you mean? I gave him hell.’
She lifted her cup to her lips with both hands, then carefully dabbed her mouth before replacing both hands around the cup. Her calmness surprised me, but I got the feeling she was struggling to keep her emotions in check. Every movement she made was careful, deliberate.
‘He’s a shit,’ she said, her mouth turning down at the corners. I couldn’t disagree, but he was still her husband. Running him down wouldn’t help her to come to terms with what he’d done. I assumed the fact that she still wore her wedding ring indicated her intention to remain married, but what did I know about marriage or the complicated business of negotiating one’s way through the marital minefield?
‘What will you do?’
A small sigh expressing great weariness escaped from her lips. ‘He wants us to try again, to make another go of it, all the usual clichés. But really I think it’s just the hassle and expense of divorce that stops either of us doing anything about it.’
‘You do know I meant very little to him, don’t you?’
‘It doesn’t help. He says the kids and I have always come first in his mind, but that doesn’t help either. He says it’s not my fault, but that sounds like a cop-out. If he was happy with me he wouldn’t go after other women, would he?’
The cri de cœur of every neglected wife.
‘Do you work?’ I asked.
She laughed softly. ‘You think I need to develop more interests outside the home? That’s exactly what Russell said.’
‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to sound patronising.’
‘I work part-time in a charity book shop. It’s only voluntary. He didn’t want me to work when the kids were little, so he’s only got himself to blame that I can’t find anything much now.’ She leaned back, hands still not letting go of her cup. ‘It’s odd, don’t you think, that I can sit here talking to you as one sensible woman to another? I was a bit hysterical when I phoned you. I didn’t want to leave you thinking of me as an unhinged harpy.’
‘I don’t have that impression at all. And if I’m honest, one of the reasons I agreed to meet you was that I didn’t want you to run away with the idea of me as a home-wrecking scarlet woman.’
‘Scarlet woman – there’s an old-fashioned phrase. But if I really lo
ved Russell, wouldn’t I want to scream at you and tear your hair out? I don’t understand why I don’t.’
‘Maybe you do. It would be reasonable, I think. Not that I’m any threat to your marriage, but still, these things aren’t logical, are they?’
‘I think I just feel that if I start screaming at you, the bastard will have won.’
This didn’t seem like a great basis for the rest of her marriage, but neither was it my place to tell her what she ought to think about Russell. I’d told him that his marriage was not my concern. The same applied to Michelle. I felt she had a right to confront me, but not to solicit my opinions. Not that she had. But she might.
‘It might be easier to hate you,’ she said, ‘but I’m fairly sure I don’t. He might have already started cosying up to someone new for all I know. I don’t have the energy to hate every woman he’s screwed.’
It might have been easier for me, too, if she’d hated me; then I might not have felt such pointless sympathy towards her.
‘We shan’t meet again,’ she said. ‘I got what I came for.’
‘Which was?’
‘To find out what kind of person you are. We might have been friends, in another life.’
I should have been happy with the way our meeting had gone, but it left me oddly dissatisfied. Her attitude had been exemplary and maybe that was the problem. I would have been upset, embarrassed, if she’d shouted and made a scene, if she’d cried, but that might have been more cathartic for both of us. I felt the problem of Russell had merely been shelved, not solved – for her as much as for me. Certainly if he rang me again I could tell him he had a wife who was too good for him and mean it, but wasn’t that too glib? Too easy to align myself with the injured wife when I must shoulder my own share of the blame for her injury.
Russell’s marriage, his problem, but I’d known he was married and had given very little thought to Michelle. Clever of her, really, to present herself to me in the guise of a reasonable and likeable human being. If she had struggled to keep her composure, doing so effectively had ensured I was troubled by a searing sense of guilt not even Mr Latham could have assisted me in shaking off.
Chapter Twelve
As Christmas Day was fast approaching, I again asked Simon if he had any intention of going home to spend Christmas with his family.
‘I can’t face them,’ he said. ‘I can’t face the hell of a family Christmas. I know I’ll have to go home sometime, but later rather than sooner. I’ve got used to being your lodger. Unless, of course, you’ve got other plans.’
I had no plans. Christmas meant nothing to me. Generally I popped in to the vicarage over the break, simply to give some structure to my days. I envied Mr Latham who had services to plan, parishioners to visit, bonhomie to dispense.
‘No, I’ve nothing planned,’ I told Simon. It was just another day, wasn’t it? If he hadn’t been there, I might have cracked open a box of mince pies and sipped a Baileys while half-watching whichever blockbuster movie the BBC decided to show, but otherwise I would have carried on as normal.
Neither Simon nor I could muster the necessary festive cheer to make a special day of it. We had no tree, no presents, no tinsel or crackers. On New Year’s Eve, we drank a bottle of prosecco and watched one of those depressing review of the year shows on the telly and, as Big Ben chimed, Simon rooted around in his rucksack and pulled out two Eurostar tickets. At first I thought he was letting me know he’d decided to leave after all; I didn’t realise one of the tickets was for me.
‘But why?’ I said.
‘Spur of the moment thing,’ he said. ‘It’s cheaper this time of year. I remembered you telling me about Russell taking you to Paris and the lousy time you had there.’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘I’ve never been to Paris. Wouldn’t it be nice to go and not have a lousy time?’
Nice! Could he possibly be as naïve as he appeared? He was offering himself as a substitute for Russell, wasn’t he? Or was I over-analysing? Had he simply fancied a trip to Paris and felt there was no time like the present? Didn’t everyone make an impulsive decision from time to time?
We checked into a hotel conveniently near the Gare du Nord in a shabby back street, all takeaway espressos and shisha bars, too down-at-heel to be hip. While we were on the train, I’d half hoped he’d booked one room; a double bed. But of course he would never have done such a thing.
Two small rooms, each with a single bed. Simon lying on his, testing the springs, I suppose; me slowly unscrewing the cap from a bottle of warm Evian, gazing out of the window on to a deserted patio scattered with wooden tables and chairs where hotel guests were required to go if they wanted to smoke.
Après moi, le déluge. But no flood, however cataclysmic, could have been worse than this sense of being dragged along by something I couldn’t control; some force that would leave me battered, bruised, half-dead. Because it was only after I said goodbye to Michelle that I understood the reason for my dissatisfaction. I was free of Russell, of whatever ties had bound me to him, only because my heart belonged to someone else. The poignancy of watching Michelle walk away was far surpassed by the pangs I felt when I imagined a future scene in which I was the watcher and the person walking out of my life for ever was Simon.
I’d tried so hard to muffle my feelings; told myself it was ridiculous, that if I ever expressed those feelings I would make a fool of myself. Too bad. The damage had been done, the shadow firmly fixed on the x-ray. He could never be mine, but I was his. Disgusting, obscene, oh yes! Instinctively I knew his lip would curl if I told him how I felt. That kiss he’d given me had been nothing; a little experiment, a dare. Well, he’d done it: he’d kissed the hag, and there, as far as he was concerned, the matter ended.
Being besotted with someone makes you see them in a strange light. Every small thing they do seems miraculous, every quirk is endearing, every smile, every movement, every sweep of their eyelashes. There he sat on his bed, toes pointing up, the soles of his feet grubby, the prominent bones of his wrists and fingers giving him the look of a gangly teenager. He was not a teenager, it wasn’t criminal for me to want him, but if my love wasn’t immoral, it was certainly unwise.
Where else should we find love except in Paris? What else should we find in Paris except love? And pain. And the lonely cries of the soul Jean Rhys described so well in her novels – stories that made sense to me only when I reached an age when I understood what it meant when a woman grows older and wearier but still wants to be loved, desired.
Oh, God…
‘Hm?’
‘What? I didn’t say anything.’
‘Sorry. Thought you did. So where do you want to go tomorrow? Eiffel Tower? Sacré-Cœur? Notre-Dame?’
Simon was young enough to find delight in the smallest of things, even something as mundane as an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast: a feast of croissants, brioche and petit pains spread thickly with Nutella. We stuffed our pockets with what we couldn’t eat (even sachets of jam) so that we wouldn’t have to bother finding somewhere to buy lunch.
The Eiffel Tower, Sacré-Cœur, Notre-Dame…
My fingers surreptitiously pressed against a marble statuette of the Virgin Mary, a furtive prayer.
If you grant me this, I will believe.
Wet flagstones and bare branches in the Place du Tertre under the cold winter sun. A black cat, its tail forming a question mark shadow on the wall behind it. A window opening above us, a lace curtain whisked by the breeze; a girl calling down to her lover, a young man astride a shiny red motorbike. Simon’s hand loosely catching hold of mine, fingertips against fingertips. And later, in the evening, drinks in a fashionable bar. A French guy with all the ooze of a practised Lothario, asking me if Simon and I were married. Engaged?
Just good friends.
He laughed, disbelieving, Simon and I dropping our gazes, blushing; but did we blush for the same reason?
Lothario quoted a passage about lost love, which he then helpfull
y translated from the French.
‘Colette.’ My voice without colour. I recognised the quotation, taken from The Last of Cheri. Poor Cheri, discovering that the sexy, fascinating older woman he’d loved had become fat and jolly, sexless. If Simon understood, he didn’t say. And Lothario, how did he know? Was it – was I – so obvious? Surely it couldn’t be that the French have a special radar that picks up the subtleties of love – of desire – in strangers?
‘Ah, you know Colette,’ Lothario said. ‘That is good.’
‘Why good?’
A suave Gallic shrug. ‘I am French. We’re proud of our writers. The English use their best writers to teach schoolchildren to hate literature for ever. We celebrate ours. We live them.’
I’d spotted a young woman reading Rimbaud on the Métro and I’d enjoyed the moment, but there was nothing to say you couldn’t hop on the London Underground and find someone reading William Blake. Maybe it wasn’t the same thing. There is no British equivalent of poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Edith Sitwell, perhaps, but who reads her?
‘The French think they have a monopoly on literature and romance,’ Simon said. He looked very much at home sprawled in a velvet-upholstered chair, forefinger brushing against his lower lip, a glass of Pernod and water on the zinc table in front of him.
Lothario had an entourage of several young women, brunettes dressed in black, all mascara and red lipstick like the three terrible women who attempt to seduce Jonathan Harker at Castle Dracula. Their ravenous gazes shifted between Simon and Lothario (I wish I’d known his name so that I could refer to him in a more sensible fashion). Occasionally they bent their heads and whispered to one another. Simon paid them no heed, but neither did he take my hand as he’d done when we strolled around Montmartre.
He might not be mine, I wanted to shout at them, but he’ll never be yours, either. And I’m the one who’s going home with him tonight. You don’t need to know about the separate rooms. Imagine us (as I will) squeezed into one of the small beds, blankets on the floor, his body curved around mine, our fingers laced together.