This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Then she sees they aren’t holding hands, after all. His father has his hand pushed towards Claudette but Claudette’s fingers are curled around the purse on the table in front of her.

  Claudette looks at Marithe and Marithe looks back, and the sense that her mother knows it all floods through her. She knows what Marithe was just thinking; she knows that Marithe knows about everything. Relief and fear compete within her but her mother blinks, then smiles at her. She raises her hand in a gesture that might be an indication to come forward and might be a sign to say, all will be well; everything is going to be all right.

  For Dear Life

  Daniel, Donegal, 2016

  You know what’s strange about having kids over the age of ten?

  They don’t go to bed.

  Time was, you could put them in the bath at seven p.m., stick them in their pyjamas, read them a story and by eight o’clock they’d be asleep: job done. You and your spouse could lift your heads and look at each other for the first time all day. You’d have two or three clear hours in which to do whatever you liked. Talk to each other, read a book, something a little more horizontal, or just revel in the idea that no one would tug on your sleeve and make strange demands of you. (I once wrote down my favourite of these: ‘Daddy, while you’re cooking dinner, can you make me a puppet theatre?’ Marithe, aged four.)

  But the over-tens, now, that’s a whole other matter. They hang around. They refuse to be compliant about bathing. They wolf down their dinner, then require further sustenance. They want entertainment, conversation, help with suddenly remembered projects, debates over pocket money, holiday destinations, choice of available beverages. You might try to slope off somewhere, to some armchair in a quiet corner of a house, to open a book, when in bursts a teenager, incandescent with rage because the laces have broken on a particular pair of sneakers.

  It is, in some ways, harder than all the cajoling and soothing and settling you have to do with the under-fives and I thought, at the time, it couldn’t get harder than that.

  So, anyway, here I am, having inveigled my way into the house of my ex-wife, formerly my house, where I lived for almost ten years. It looks remarkably like it always did, except that she’s repainted everything, but that doesn’t in the least bit surprise me. Claudette has an internal engine that moves at a speed faster than that of any other human I have ever known. She cannot stand still, cannot sit, of an evening, on a sofa and just contemplate her house, her rooms, her home, the way it is. No, she must get on, she must work, she must change things, always. It’s nothing short of a compulsion. She doesn’t see a room, an alcove, a wall, a piece of flooring: she sees a work-in-progress, a project just waiting to be embarked upon.

  The sitting room is still smoky blue, however, I’m happy to see, and the gold stars are still in place and I am, for the first time, pleased to look at them. Whenever I caught sight of them, in the time I used to live here, all I could think about was how Claudette had scaled a ladder while six months pregnant to stick them up. My fury about that used to kind of take the edge off my appreciation. But now? Now I can see their appeal, their idiosyncratic genius.

  I am sitting in one of the leather armchairs by the stove, trying to stop myself wondering who might have advised her about that mud-spattered four-wheel-drive vehicle parked in front of the house. Claudette has less than zero interest in cars so somebody must have helped her buy it. Of course, my mind is galloping ahead, whisking me towards disaster: another man, another marriage, has my place been taken so soon?

  It’s past ten o’clock. Ari has put Zoë to bed, and has shut himself away upstairs to catch up on some work, or so he said. Calvin is in bed, although not asleep, judging by the plaintive requests for drinks from his room, and Marithe is slumped on the couch, like a felled tree.

  Claudette is moving around the house, clattering dishes in the kitchen, flitting past the door with armfuls of laundry, picking dead leaves out of a plant, straightening the books on the shelf. This is silent Claudette-speak for ‘Time to leave, Daniel.’ I know this, she knows this, but I’m not ready, not quite.

  On the sofa, my daughter, my only living daughter, yawns, her mouth opening pink, like a cat.

  ‘Sleepy, honey?’ I say, ever hopeful.

  ‘Nnnn,’ Marithe says, through another yawn. She turns over onto her side, rubbing her eye and her face is soft and blurry, like it was when she was a baby. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are we still coming to New York next month? Me and Calvin?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Even though you came to Ireland?’

  ‘You bet. I booked all the tickets. Your mom’s got them. I’ll be there to fetch you from the airport, like always.’

  ‘Can we go to that place again?’

  ‘Which place?’

  ‘The one with the train tracks and the ice lollies.’

  I’m mystified by this description. ‘Train tracks? You mean the subway?’

  Marithe shakes her head and strands of hair fall over her eyes. ‘Nah.’ She raises her arm above her head. ‘Up high. Like, a park.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the High Line.’

  She smiles, under her hair. ‘The High Line,’ she whispers, half to herself.

  ‘You want to go there? Sure, we can go there.’

  ‘Can Niall come, like last time?’

  ‘We can ask him. I’m sure he’ll come if he’s not busy.’ I go over to the sofa and take her by the hand. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Time for bed, I think.’

  Marithe stumbles to a standing position, leaning on my arm as we move up the stairs. ‘Does Niall still live with you?’ she asks.

  ‘No, not any more. He has his own place now.’

  ‘Have I been there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  At the bathroom door, she turns to look at me. ‘Is he still sad?’ she asks.

  I reach out my hand to brush the hair off her face. ‘Niall is a lot better. You mustn’t worry about him. It’s nice that you do but Niall is OK.’

  My daughter looks me in the eye and says, devastatingly, ‘Are you still sad?’

  I swallow. ‘Am I still sad … about … Phoebe?’

  She frowns, concerned, and nods. And I look at her, this perfect being, her skin so vital, so pale that you can see the life-blood coursing beneath it. I am beset by twin sensations: that I am lucky, the luckiest man in the world, to have this daughter, these children, and that I would kill, maim, destroy any person who tried to harm them.

  ‘I will always be sad about Phoebe,’ I say, with an effort to keep my voice even, ‘and so will Niall. But what happens is that, after a few years, you slowly realise it’s OK to be happy too.’

  She looks at me for a moment longer, as if checking the veracity of this idea. Then she turns and goes into the bathroom.

  ‘I’ll come tuck you in,’ I say, as I walk away.

  I go back along the corridor, down the stairs, across the hallway and into the sitting room, where the heat from the wood-burner hits me in the face as soon as I open the door. There is no one there.

  I move back into the hallway. ‘Claude?’ I say, softly.

  No reply. I try the front room – where I discover the addition of a somewhat dilapidated chandelier since my time – and the scullery, where all the laundry is done, in a soap-and-steam-scented haze. She’s not there either. Just some piles of clothing, in varying states of cleanliness, and some bottles of something labelled as plant-based, detergent-free laundry liquid.

  I ascend the stairs, halfway. ‘Claudette?’ I call again, louder this time, tilting my head, straining my ears.

  I hear an answering ‘Yes?’ coming from somewhere, a muffled, indistinct noise. Was it upstairs or down?

  ‘Claude?’ I try again.

  ‘I’m here,’ she replies.

  ‘Where?’ I ask, baffled. I’m wandering now, down the corridor, into the sitting room, out again, seeking the
source of her voice, a person engaged on a treasure hunt, desperate for clues.

  ‘Here,’ she says again.

  ‘I’m going to need a little more detail on that.’

  ‘In the—’ and she says something incomprehensible.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Time Capsule,’ she replies.

  I stand for a moment, my hand on the newel post where, a long time ago, Marithe, sent out here for throwing her dinner at the wall, carved several nicks in the wood with a penknife left carelessly on the stairs.

  I had forgotten all about the Time Capsule. That was what Claudette always called a small wedge-shaped space leading off the front room. None of us quite knew what it was for, awkwardly and inexplicably attached to the main room, shelved in marble, with a miniature fireplace set into the wall, where you could have burnt – at most – one or two twigs at a time. She never did anything with it: she kept it exactly as it had been when she’d found the house, so the walls were streaked with verdure and the fireplace was eaten by rust. Hence the name: the Time Capsule.

  She liked to throw open the door sometimes and gleefully declare to whoever was listening – me, the kids, her mother, the dogs – this was how the house was when I found it. It was her testament, her monument, to her and the house, how far they had come together.

  I find my way there now, through the front room, which, by the looks of it, is still used pretty much by Calvin and Marithe for knocking about on days too wet and cold to go out.

  The Time Capsule door always was a little stiff so I put my whole weight behind it but it seems it must have been planed or rehung because it opens easily and I fly through it, arriving in the cramped space more precipitously than planned.

  My ex-wife is crouched on the floor, her ass towards me. I land almost on her – I have to grip a marble shelf so as not to fall right on top of her.

  ‘Jesus, Daniel,’ she is saying, putting up her hands to protect herself, at the same time as I am saying, ‘Oh’ and ‘Sorry’ and ‘My goodness’.

  It takes us a moment to recover from this. We need to avoid eye contact, brush down our clothes, resettle our nerves.

  She has changed into overalls and appears to be in the middle of peeling up the carpet, ripping it from the tacks that hold it in place. The walls have been scrubbed clean, the fireplace scoured and some tiles decorated with butterflies have emerged from the decay.

  ‘So,’ I say, after a moment, ‘you decided to fix this place up.’

  ‘I did,’ she says, turning back to her work. ‘I just thought, you know, why not?’

  ‘Why not indeed?’ I say, and wonder why I’m being so agreeable, so fucking hearty. What is going on with me? I need to find the right tone for what I’m hoping I’ll find the guts to say; I need to locate the proper register.

  Claudette wrestles a claw-hammer into place by the skirting-board and pulls down on it. ‘I met a woman in the village,’ she says, as she strains against the handle, ‘whose mother used to work up here as a housemaid. So I asked her about this room.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘You know what she said? She said,’ Claudette waggles the hammer back and forth, her bottom lip held between her teeth, ‘that this was the flower-arranging room.’

  ‘The what?’ I say, and look around the walls, the shelves. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. They had a room just to arrange their flowers in?’

  Claudette gives a wry grimace. ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Because everyone needs one, right? A dedicated flower space. I can’t believe I don’t have one. I’m going straight back to New York to put that right.’

  ‘Well, good luck with that.’

  ‘I hope that’s what you’re going to be doing in here. I can see you now, with your vases and your secateurs and the world’s smallest fire roaring away in the world’s smallest grate.’

  Claudette smiles and rips up a section of carpet.

  I lean against the door jamb (in itself a work-in-progress, I notice, with half the paint scored off and several test strips of colour painted on its edge), fold my arms and watch her, this woman I was married to for almost ten years.

  What can I say about the end of our marriage? That I lost my way and she her patience. That it was, without doubt, the most ill-judged misstep I ever took. That I still wake, four years on, stunned that I ever let her slip out of reach.

  That at my lowest ebb, she dispatched my son, Niall, to my flat in London. That this saved my life. He was fresh from Donegal, from this house. I could almost smell it on him when I opened the door and found him standing there: the air of this place, the valley, the trees, these rooms. He told me in his perspicuous and unadorned way that I had the choice between an early death or getting myself together. So he and I moved back to the States, two lame ducks together, and I checked myself into rehab and my son looked after me, cooked my meals, did my laundry, housed me and basically did the things that I should have done for him all those years ago when he was growing up.

  So here I am. Still alive, by the skin of my teeth.

  Claudette yanks at the carpet and a section comes away with a violent ripping sound.

  ‘If I had to place a bet,’ I say behind her, ‘you or the carpet, my money would be on you. That hairy old thing doesn’t stand a chance.’

  She turns and I see that her mouth is filled with tacks.

  ‘Have you thought about seeing a dentist?’ I say.

  Claudette rocks back on her heels and takes the tacks from her mouth, one by one, and lays them carefully on the shelf above her.

  ‘You look …’ She stops, considering me, her head on one side.

  ‘I look what?’

  ‘Different. Healthy.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I was hoping for “manly” or “incredible”.’

  She rolls her eyes, passing her claw-hammer from one hand to the other.

  ‘But I’ll settle for “healthy”,’ I say, crossing the room, fetching a chair and settling myself in the doorway.

  She looks at me; she looks at the chair. ‘You’re leaving tonight?’ she says – somewhat pointedly, I feel.

  ‘I am. I gave a paper at the conference this morning and now I’m done.’

  ‘What time is your flight?’

  I shrug. ‘I still have a couple of hours. I thought I’d take a look through those boxes in the barn, sort out the things I want to keep from the things I can chuck, then I’ll arrange for them to be sent to the States. If that’s OK with you.’

  She nods and turns her head away, back to her carpet. ‘I think Marithe is waiting for you to say goodbye,’ she says indistinctly, as she bends back over her work.

  I kiss Marithe, who is already mostly asleep. I straighten the comforter over Calvin. I look in on Ari and Zoë, who are both fast asleep. I visit the bathroom, I put my briefcase and overcoat by the front door. I do all the things one is meant to do before departing for the airport.

  Then I come back into the Time Capsule, or the Flower Room, as it should now perhaps be called. Claudette has half the carpet up. She is surrounded by rolls of old matting and underlay. She has her hair tied back and her sweater off. I look at her bare arms, her shoulders, the nape of her neck, and I am struck by how the familiar can sometimes look so ineffably strange. I think about the four women I’ve slept with since her and how none of them came anywhere near her. But, then, how could they?

  ‘Wasn’t it Cleopatra who rolled herself up in a carpet so she could visit Mark Antony?’ I say, as I get hold of another, smaller, claw-hammer from the heap of tools on the shelf.

  Claudette fixes me with a stare that I recognise the way I recognise my own reflection in the mirror: assessing, evaluating, not fooled by anything.

  ‘Caesar,’ she says eventually. ‘Julius.’

  I kneel, my left knee complaining only a little. I catch the edge of the carpet tucked in around the fireplace with the spikes of the hammer. We are, her and I, wedged into this wedge-shaped room, like cats in a basket. />
  ‘As opposed to?’ I say as I tug.

  ‘Octavius or Augustus.’ She points to my hand, to the hammer. ‘You need to waggle it back and forth.’

  I do just that, as I say, ‘I never knew you were such an expert on Ancient Rome.’

  She shrugs. ‘I did the play.’

  ‘And you were Caesar, Julius?’

  She turns to give me a look. ‘No, I bloody wasn’t. I was Cleopatra.’

  ‘Of course you were.’ I turn to face her and we regard each other at our new proximity. ‘Now that’s what I call typecasting.’

  She narrows her eyes at me and is just about to utter a riposte when the nails suddenly give way, the underlay tears, and we stagger backwards holding a large section of old carpet between us.

  ‘Want to be rolled up in this,’ I say, when we’ve regained our balance, ‘for old times’ sake?’

  She lets go of her end, pulling her best hoydenish face. ‘No, thanks. And that bit doesn’t appear in the play,’ she says, ‘actually.’

  ‘Well,’ I say, tossing aside the carpet, ‘it should. Shakespeare missed a dramatic trick there.’

  She kicks some underlay into a rough pile, picks up a saw, puts it down. ‘So,’ she says abruptly, without looking at me, ‘how is life with you, these days? I hear you have a new apartment.’

  She is making a great show of examining the window frame, running her fingers along the sash mechanism, picking at the peeling paint, the crumbling putty.

  I think about her, as she is in front of me, in her weird overalls and woollen socks and fancy leather slippers. I wonder if she still wears that Indian shawl around the house, if she still drinks hot water with a spoonful of some honey that she claims has miraculous, anti-viral, immortality-giving properties, whether she still plays the piano late at night and insists on cooking pasta in not-quite-boiling water because she’s too impatient to wait. I wonder whether she still crashes the gears on the car as she’s driving but denies all knowledge of this. I wonder if there is anything of mine that she’s kept, any shirts, any books, any letters. I wonder if she still walks in her sleep and whether there is anybody there to get up, follow her and lead her back to bed.