This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘The thing is,’ he says, aware that he hasn’t consciously made this decision, aware that this is the moment in which the decision appears to be making itself, imposing itself upon him, and hasn’t he always lived his life like this, or used to? ‘The thing is,’ he says again, ‘there’s something I was thinking of following up. Just a very small something. When I get back, I mean. I’m going to see my dad now but it’s just occurred to me that I could change my flight to come back via London. I might take a day or so because there’s not much on at work and there’s something I have to see to. Maybe. I wanted to run it past you. Just two days. Maybe three. I’m not sure.’

  There is a pause.

  ‘You’re not sure?’ she repeats.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘It’s very …’ Daniel gropes for the right word, the exact term. How to communicate to Claudette the towering fear he has at letting even a molecule of what happened twenty-odd years ago leak into the life they have carved out for themselves? Because this is how he sees it, as a gaseous poison, bottled, stoppered, sealed, never to be opened. ‘It’s a bit complicated, Claude. Too complicated for me to tell you over the phone. There is someone I might need to go and find.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No one you know. Someone I was at college with.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Daniel,’ she shouts. ‘This is about a woman, isn’t it? You just swore to me on your children’s lives that—’

  ‘It’s a guy!’ Daniel yells, startling a couple drinking coffee at a table a few feet away. ‘He’s a guy called Todd, OK? I knew him when I did that year in England and I thought I might go ask him something.’

  ‘What? What do you have to ask him?’

  Daniel scans his mind, takes stock of the situation. Can he tell her over the phone? Can he give a brief enough description of things? Can he go into the minutiae of what happened, all those years ago, what might have happened? He can’t even remember if he’s ever mentioned Nicola to Claudette.

  ‘I told you,’ he says, ‘it’s very hard to explain.’

  ‘Well, try me,’ Claudette says, ‘and I will attempt to rally my meagre cerebral resources.’

  ‘Claude,’ he murmurs, ‘come on. Don’t do this. Please just trust me, OK? You know you can trust me. It’s just two or three days to go to Sussex and then I’ll be right back and—’

  ‘Sussex? Why Sussex?’

  ‘That’s where Todd lives. Did I not say?’

  ‘No, Daniel, you omitted to mention that. I can’t believe you’re—’

  ‘Look,’ he interjects, ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to do it yet. I may not, I may just come straight home but I wanted to talk it over with you first and then I’ll decide whether or not—’ He hears Marithe’s querying voice in the background, in French, and even though he doesn’t speak the language, he knows she’s asking is that Papa and can she talk to him, and Claudette is saying, Non, ce n’est pas Papa, and he thinks his heart will break, right there, right then. He doesn’t know how to survive this.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she cries. ‘Bugger off to Sussex, go and see this friend I’ve never heard of, see if I care, see if—’

  ‘You need to calm down, OK?’ he says, in as reasonable a voice as he can manage. ‘The kids can hear everything you’re saying and—’

  There is a clatter on the line, then the flat monotone of a cut connection. Claudette has hung up.

  Enough Blue to Make

  Claudette, New York, 1993

  Claudette balances in her bare feet on the edge of the bathtub. One hand grips the sill, the other pincers a near-expired cigarette. She squints up at the New York sky – a hazy, china-blue bolt of cloth, cross-stitched with white vapour trails – and a plume of smoke drifts from her mouth out of the window.

  She has been looking out at the apartment windows across the air vent. Most are obscured by blinds or drapes but there is one, directly opposite her, where some people are sitting around a dinner table: two couples, various children, a narcoleptic cat stretched out along the dresser behind them. Claudette watches their mouths opening and closing, their arms moving, the hands lifting cutlery, putting it down. It’s like watching the rushes of a film without headphones. One of the women goes to the stove, comes back, goes again. The other darts at one of the children with a cloth. One of the men has a child on his lap; he holds an arm about the boy’s ribcage. Something white flies about the boy’s face and, for a while, Claudette wonders what it is – birds, scarves, some kind of toy? By straining her eyes and leaning further out of the window, she discerns that the child is wearing gloves. A small pair of white gloves, rather like the anarchic cat in that story about the brother and sister forced to stay inside all day.

  Claudette is wondering why a child might choose to wear white gloves when something her father used to say about the sky tugs at the edge of her memory. She frowns, her hand poised in mid-air. What was it? She almost has it. Enough blue to make – something. A pair of trousers? A sailor’s trousers? It was said in the tone of buoyancy and optimism. It could be lashing with rain but he would point through the windscreen of the car and say it: look, enough blue to make – whatever it was. But what was it?

  Claudette allows the ash to fall from her cigarette into the waiting toilet bowl below. She will ask Lucas next time she speaks to him. He will remember, she is sure. He’s the kind of person who—

  The bathroom door opens and, just as it always does, crashes against the tiled wall, dislodging the towel rail hooked over it, making a startling, metallic clang.

  Timou, in practised fashion, leaps sideways, catches the falling towels and rail in one hand and, with the other, pushes the door shut behind him.

  ‘Nicely done,’ Claudette says, from her position on the edge of their bath.

  Timou regards her, half amused, one eyebrow raised. ‘So,’ he says, ‘you are hiding in the bathroom? Like a truant?’

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘And you’re smoking?’

  She takes a drag of her cigarette. ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘It looks,’ he says, replacing the towel rail, ‘very much like smoking to me.’

  Claudette exhales. ‘I don’t smoke. I never smoke. You must be imagining it.’

  Timou comes towards her. He wraps his arms around her legs and buries his face in her midriff. ‘Those things will kill you,’ he mutters, his voice muffled.

  ‘Really?’ Claudette stubs out the cigarette and hurls it from the window. ‘I never heard that before.’

  ‘I don’t want you to die of cancer.’

  She runs her fingertips over his shorn hair, sleek as the flank of a cat. ‘What do you want me to die of?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, into her abdomen. ‘You are never to die. It is simply not allowed. Never ever. At least, not until I do.’

  ‘How come you get to die first?’

  ‘Because I said so. I – how do you say it? – booked it first.’

  ‘Bagged,’ she murmurs. ‘Bagged it first. But I’m not sure you can bag the order in which we die. Surely it’s the kind of thing we need to discuss and agree on. We might have to draw up a contract. You can’t just—’

  ‘Cloud,’ he interrupts gently, ‘you know there’s a journalist in our living room, right?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘He’s there, waiting for us.’

  She stretches her hand into the air beyond the window. It is heavy, balmy, stirring, filled with noises. Air-conditioning units hum, car horns, a siren, music from a stereo or perhaps the bar on the next block, the clatter of an engine somewhere. The soundscape of a city going about its Wednesday-afternoon business.

  ‘Do you ever wish,’ she says, almost to herself, ‘that we could just make films? Just make them and send them out into the world to fend for themselves, without talking about them, without explaining, without anyone ever seeing us, without—’

  ‘I’ve given him coffee,’ Timou says, ignoring
this speech, ‘but there’s a limit to how long we can expect him to wait.’

  Claudette rakes her outstretched fingers back and forth through the air. The diners opposite are all on their feet, lifting dishes, milling about the kitchen, their backs to the window.

  ‘Cloudy?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘What does “mmm” mean? “Yes, Timou, I’m coming right now”? Or “I’m going to pretend this isn’t happening and maybe walk out halfway through, like last time”?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she says again.

  ‘You know, they gave you a nickname in that article.’

  ‘Which article?’

  ‘The one you walked out on.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t remember … It was to do with running but it sounded like rivets or metalwork. Bolting? Something like that.’

  She thinks for a moment. ‘The Bolter?’

  ‘Yes, that was it.’

  She laughs and pulls in her hand, surprised. ‘Like Nancy Mitford?’

  ‘Eh?’ Timou tilts his face back to look at her. ‘You’ve given yourself a reputation for bolting. You know that?’

  She puts her arms around his shoulders and lowers herself down off the bath, until she is face to face with him, his features blurringly close, his stubble sharp against her cheek. They are pretty much the same height, which often surprises her. He is so much stronger than her, so much more of a physical presence: that he should reach the same point as her on a height chart seems ridiculous.

  His arms lock, just as they always do, around her ribcage so that she can barely draw breath. ‘Just don’t bolt from me,’ he whispers, ‘OK?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise.’

  She smiles into his face. ‘I promise.’

  He kisses her and she closes her eyes. His mouth is hot, his body pressed against hers. He is like an anatomy figure, each of his muscle groups standing out beneath his skin. She has never known anyone else with Timou’s focus, his drive. Whatever he sets his sights on, he will work towards with a singular determination, letting nothing and no one distract him, an oil tanker on course.

  When she feels him pulling at the waistband of her skirt, she opens her eyes. ‘Timou,’ she says, ‘the journalist.’

  He is unzipping his trousers and pushing them down with the same intense urgency he does everything. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘so now you’re worried about the journalist?’

  ‘Listen,’ she starts to laugh, ‘this is ridiculous, we can’t, we have to—’

  ‘Come on,’ he says, divesting her of her knickers with a deft downward movement, ‘you have to strike while the eye is hot.’

  ‘The eye?’

  ‘It’s not correct?’ Timou’s breath scalds her ear.

  ‘No, it’s …’ She’s half smiling, while trying to think straight, which is hard when Timou is lifting up her shirt, unhooking her bra. There is a slight buzzing in Claudette’s head, distant, disconcerting. She feels as though she has heard this colloquial misstep before somewhere; it feels important that she remember it, remember this. ‘Iron,’ she gets out. ‘While the iron is hot.’

  ‘OK.’ He is lifting her, pressing her up against the cool tiles of the wall. ‘Whatever.’

  Claudette tries to clear her mind, to navigate her way to the source of this unease. The eye is hot. But then it slips away, bobbing out of reach. She forgets all about it, her legs stretching out so that her feet may once more find the rim of the bath.

  The air-conditioning in the living room must be faulty. It appears to be churning away, the long white curtains lifting in the movement of air, but the atmosphere feels weighty and moist, like that of a greenhouse.

  Claudette shifts in her seat, tucking her still bare feet beneath her. Her hand separates a length of hair and she smooths it, twirls it, loops it, twists it between two fingers, feeling its roots tug gently at the side of her scalp.

  She tunes in briefly to the conversation going on around her.

  ‘So, When the Rain Didn’t Fall is your third film, Timou. Are you pleased with it? Is it what you wanted it to be?’

  ‘The finished film is never what you envisioned at the start,’ Timou says, leaning forward, elbows on knees, and she thinks, not for the first time, how good he is at this part of things. The chat, the sell, the promotion. He turns into someone she doesn’t know, someone edgeless, amenable, open. ‘The process is a dialogue between self and vision. As a film-maker you are constantly battling against your own personality, your own set of values, your own aspirations. You have to trust the film. You have to let it find its shape. I spent three months in the editing suite with this one –’

  I? thinks Claudette.

  ‘– and it felt more like excavation than creation. More a sense of digging for what is already there …’

  Claudette allows her attention to recede, to take wing. She looks around the apartment, their apartment, where they have lived now for almost a year, and she wonders what the journalist sees, what he will take from it. The coffee cups stacked on the shelves, the marble-topped table, the postcards tacked to a corkboard above the phone. Two of Paris, one of Stockholm, one of Sydney, one of a Cumbrian lake, several from the Modernist exhibition she and Timou went to the other week. The sea-green alcove and desk where, until recently, their assistant, a film student from Québec, sat. The abstract-design bag Claudette bought in Sweden suspended from a hook, Timou’s collection of scarab beetles trapped in resin, the paperweight with a dandelion clock inside.

  What would people think of them, looking at all these things, these possessions? What do they tell of—

  Timou is touching her arm. Claudette starts. They are both looking at her, Timou and the journalist, whose name, she now realises, she hadn’t quite caught. Justin or Gavin or Josh – something like that. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘What did you say?’

  The journalist puts his head on one side, spectacles flashing. She has forgotten, too, whom he writes for. Is it a film magazine, a niche publication that preaches passionately to a small readership of the converted? Or is it a broadsheet that will detail what she is wearing, what wallpaper she has, what kind of nail polish she favours?

  ‘I was wondering how you found your first stab at directing?’

  ‘Me?’ Claudette says.

  ‘Yes. The on-set gossip …’ he puts the pen to his mouth, bites it with his small, pointed teeth and sits forward in his chair ‘… was that you spent as much time behind the camera as in front of it. I heard this from a reliable source. I was just wondering how you found it. Did you enjoy it? Is it something you’d want to do again, maybe on your own next time?’

  ‘Um …’ She casts a look at Timou, whose expression is unreadable, opaque. He is looking sideways but not quite at her; he appears to be transfixed by the edge of the table. His right ankle is making a small repeated motion – up, down, up, down, up.

  They are, she sees, waiting for her to speak; the journalist is looking from her to Timou and back again, eyebrows raised, pen poised above pad.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’ve always enjoyed every … every aspect of film-making from … from … The thing is, Timou and I, we … we talk everything through and … and being with Timou has … well, I’ve learnt a lot from him and—’

  ‘This is a joint project,’ Timou says over her. He takes her hand in his, moves it so that it is caught between his palm and his thigh. ‘Claudette and me. The film will have a joint credit, both for direction and writing.’

  Claudette blinks. She keeps her hand very still. The air-conditioning unit lets out a slight wheeze, a sigh. The journalist sits up in his chair and starts to write furiously on his pad, nodding as he goes.

  ‘What fascinates me,’ Timou continues, ‘about collaborating with Claudette is that it is impossible to tell where her vision ends and mine begins. It is a truly symbiotic, sympathetic partnership. Why should, we thought, the roles of actor, director, writer be so defined? Why not loosen things up a
nd see what happens? Blur the boundaries, turn received hierarchies and structures on their heads. The only way to forge something new is to—’

  Into Claudette’s mind comes a sudden incursion: the sight of the back of the Québécoise film student’s head and shoulders as she sat at her desk in the alcove. Claudette had painted it for her, in sea-green emulsion, so that she, the assistant, would have her own space, would feel that she had some territory, however small, in the apartment, which belonged to them. It had seemed important to Claudette, as she rollered on the paint, as she fixed the shelves to the wall, as she laid out a holder for pens, a wrist-rest for typing, a headset, so the girl wouldn’t have to cradle the phone between shoulder and ear thereby giving herself neck strain. The girl had been their first assistant – she and Timou hadn’t needed one before – and Claudette had wanted to make her feel welcome, taken care of, valued. But something – what could it have been? – must have been missing, something off-key, because after only two months, she had left, without giving notice, without saying why. There was just a note left stuck to the computer screen one morning: I won’t be coming back. No signature, no explanation, nothing. Claudette had peeled it off and stared at it for some minutes, baffled, surprised, because she thought she had been good to the girl, thought she had been kind, generous, a good employer. She had given her money for cabs, if the girl had worked late; she had never minded when the girl took a long lunch. If she, Claudette, was out of the apartment all day, scouting locations, at fittings or shoots or casting meetings, she had always made sure the fridge was stocked, that the heating was on. What could it have been?

  Claudette feels the urge unfurl within her to stand, to move, to walk about, perhaps to leave. It rises from her heels, up her legs and snakes its tendrils around her middle, reaching up her back to her neck, her head. Timou seems to sense this change. Maybe her hand, beneath his, has twitched or trembled, because he grips it with a firm, steady pressure. Without looking at her and unseen by the journalist, he is giving her a message: hold tight, stay put, I know you hate this but it will soon be over. She finds the impulse to move hard to resist, always has done. Claudette cannot sit still, her school reports used to say. Assieds-toi! her mother would admonish at the dinner table. She is thinking how good it would be to walk down 86th Street, to stroll through the light spring air, to watch the people passing her, to feel the city roll beneath her soles, to glide past shop windows, diner tables, scaffolding, ice-cream parlours, deli counters, to let her bones be shaken by the rumble of subway trains, far beneath her feet, to let this conversation, this interview, this encounter spool out of her so that a small space can open inside her head and she can start to think.