Doctor's Wife

by Brian Moore

“You studied in Paris?”

  “Not really. I spent a summer here, ages ago, doing conversational French at the Alliance Française. I lived right in this quarter, as a matter of fact.”

  “Where?”

  “A little place called the Hôtel des Balcons, near the Place de l’Odéon.”

  “I know it.” he said. “Rue Casimir-Delavigne.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Crazy,” he said. “I stayed there last summer. When were you there, do you remember?”

  “Oh.” She did the sum in her head: twenty years. “Ages ago.”

  “The sixties?”

  “Early sixties,” she lied.

  “Was it run down then?”

  “It was my first time in Paris, so everything looked super to me. It was nice, though.”

  “So the quartier hasn’t really changed?”

  “Well,” she said, and as she began to speak, she went back in her mind to that time, remembering the cafés she sat in, the Old Navy and the Mabillon, telling how Le Drugstore in those days was a big brasserie called Le Royal Saint-Germain, and about the Australian girl with red hair and white clown makeup who used to wander along the rue de Buci, always with two boy friends in tow. Trying to give him the sense of that summer, the excitement of coming from Belfast and Dublin to her first great foreign city. But not telling him the end of it, the sadness when the summer was over and she returned to Queen’s for four years of study, locked up in Ulster for four more years of her life.

  And so, walking beside him, she reached the Luxembourg Gardens and went down a gravelly avenue past kiosks unchanged since the time of Proust, old-fashioned wooden structures whose licensees sold old-fashioned balloons, children’s wooden hoops, toy boats, tops, whips, and boiled sweets. From there they reached the rond-point and the octagonal basin and walked around the formal gardens and off down another avenue, in among trees and grassy lawns and the greening statues of poets she remembered from her Sundays, that summer long ago.

  Talking to him: talking with an eagerness she had forgotten. At home, these last years, conversations seemed to fail. At home, if she would try for an hour of “general” talk, it was like floating on water. The moment you thought of sinking, you sank. Kevin would turn back to the television, she to a book. Lately, she read books the way some people drank. But now, with this stranger, the talk came easy as she told of the things that had happened here that summer; she and Edna Morrissey, what innocents they were, how they had lived two days on one baguette each, because Edna’s mother had sent her allowance to the wrong address. She had been so wrong about Yanks, he was not at all like those desperate loud double knits who went around Ireland in tour buses. He was different.

  At eleven, as the clock on the Palais chimed its slow announcement, he put his hand on her sleeve. “How about that cup of coffee?” And, later, sitting with her at a sidewalk table in the Café de Tournon, just below the entrance to the Sénat, where flics in white gloves directed traffic and Gardes Républicaines stood sentry outside their red-white-and-blue-striped boxes, he leaned across the table and again put his hand on her arm, as though unconsciously he could not help touching her. “What time are you meeting your husband this evening? Is he flying direct to Nice?”

  “He’s not coming today.”

  “Oh?”

  So she explained about Kevin’s being delayed until Friday. “Even then it’s not sure. He’s terribly busy just now.”

  “So he mightn’t join you at all?”

  “Oh, he’ll probably manage it on Friday.” She was angry with herself for having started this.

  “But if he’s not coming today, why not stay longer in Paris? You could sleep over at Peg’s.”

  “Well, I’ve made arrangements with the hotel in Ville-franche and my flight is booked and everything.”

  “You could change your flight, that’s easy. And they’ll hold the hotel room.”

  “No,” she said nervously. “No, I couldn’t, we have demi-pension and I booked ahead. It’s too complicated. Besides, Peg’s busy, I wouldn’t want to impose on her.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s no problem. And I’m not busy, I’d love to show you around. First, let me buy you some lunch. Then I’ll phone the airline. And the hotel. It’s easy.”

  But it’s not easy, she, thought; easy for him, but I’m too nervous about things like that, I’m no Yank, I’ve already written to the hotel and paid my deposit and specially booked room 450, and got my tickets and left addresses and phone numbers with Mrs. Milligan. Besides, what if Kevin changes his mind and comes on to Villefranche tomorrow? “No,” she said. “I’d love to, but I can’t.”

  “Have lunch, at least. You can always take a later flight this afternoon.”

  But that would mean phoning British Airways and changing the flight, maybe being wait-listed on a later one, getting into Villefranche after dark, and besides, I wrote the hotel I’d be there early this afternoon. “No,” she said. “I think I’ll just stroll back to Peg’s place and get my suitcase and make my way to the Invalides.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I suppose I’m a real stick-in-the-mud.”

  He laughed. “Look, I’ll come along with you and carry your bag. I’ll ride out to the airport with you.”

  “What for? It’s a long way out and back.”

  “What for?” he said, laughing again. “Does there have to be a reason?”

  It was not very funny. Then what was she laughing at; what were they laughing at? She did not know. But there, sitting laughing in the Café de Tournon, she felt again as though she were a deserter from home. Again, she saw that woman in the Queen’s Arcade after the Abercorn Café explosion, the dirt-matted blond hair, the blood on the woman’s cheek, the priest kneeling on the pavement saying an act of contrition over a dying old man, Mrs. Redden standing beside the priest, holding the priest’s hat for him, and, when the woman ran out and saw this, her face became all hate and she lifted her arm and struck the priest’s hat out of Mrs. Redden’s grasp and hit Mrs. Redden in the face, shouting, “Fucking Fenian gets!” as if Mrs. Redden and the priest and the dying old man had set the bomb off and were not victims like herself.

  She looked up at the clock on the Palais, then at the flic in dark-blue uniform directing traffic, signaling with his white-gloved hand, then wheeling like a robot to beckon the opposing stream of cars. What about those men you read about in newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from again? This is Paris. I am here. What if I never go back?

  Chapter 3

  • Her flight had been called twice and now it was definitely the last call. There was no delaying it any longer, there was nothing to do but say goodbye, turn her back on him, and walk through the security check and onto the aircraft. An anxiety, the unreasoning anxiety of departure, came into her voice as she said, “Well, I must go this time.”

  He stared, his dark eyes all question, as though he waited for her to give him some sign.

  “Goodbye, then,” she said.

  He did not speak.

  “If you ever come back to Ireland you must look us up.”

  He moved toward her. She was sure he was going to kiss her, but, instead, he stopped and awkwardly held out his hand. For a moment she thought of kissing him on both cheeks in the French manner and making a joke of it, but her courage left her, and instead she shook his hand, then went up to the security people. A man and his wife were ahead of her in the check line, loaded down with cartons of gifts. She turned to look back. He was still standing there. She waved, he smiled and waved back. And then she entered the security checkpoint and, once through it, could no longer see the departure lounge. When she entered the aircraft, the seat-belt sign was already on, and as she sat down in her allotted seat, a stewardess offered her a choice of magazines. She took the first magazine off the pile, hurriedly, because she wanted the stewardess to move so that she could look across
the aisle at the window facing the terminal. But saw only the terminal wall. No sign of him. The aircraft door shut and the plane taxied out for takeoff. She sat, staring numbly at the magazine cover.

  L’EXPRESS

  ---------

  L’APRÈS

  POMPIDOU

  There was a photograph of the deceased President and, under it, the caption:

  GEORGES POMPIDOU

  ”L’avenir n’est interdit à personne.” Gambetta

  As thé plane moved forward in the takeoff queue, the quotation repeated itself in her head: L’avenir n’est interdit à personne—the future is forbidden to no one. The engines increased their thrust, the plane rushed down the runway and lifted into the air. Outside the window, great canyons of cloud opened and closed like the corridors of heaven as the plane climbed up into a bright-blue void. The seat-belt sign went off. On the intercom, a female voice announced that drinks would be offered and that luncheon would be served. She remembered the fuss she had made in the British Airways office in Belfast, two months ago, when the clerk told her this luncheon flight was fully booked, but that there was space on the later flight at three o’clock. She had wait-listed herself on this flight because she didn’t want to miss lunch. And if I hadn’t done that, at this moment I would be having lunch with Tom Lowry in Paris. Why didn’t I change my reservations this morning, why did I worry about the stupid old hotel? How did I get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn’t do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it to ourselves.

  •

  Ninety minutes later, the plane began its approach to Nice, flying along the coastline over Saint-Raphaël and Cannes. Through the window she saw villas on cliffsides, emerald swimming pools, white feathers of yacht sails scattered in the bays. When she had first looked down on this coast long ago on her honeymoon, she had turned in excitement, saying: “Oh, Kevin, wouldn’t it be marvelous to be able to live here all the time?” only to have him take her literally and answer, “I suppose it would, if all I wanted to do was water-ski the rest of my life.” She remembered that now, as the plane wheeled, pointing down toward land. Below her, cars moved, slow as treacle on the ribbon of seafront road. The plane skimmed the tops of a row of palm trees, came in over a cluster of white rectangular hangars to land with a jolt of its undercarriage and a sickening rear jet thrust.

  The jitney bus which took her into Nice went along the Promenade des Anglais, then out on the Corniche road to Villefranche, under layer-cake terraces of luxury hotels, past villas set in high cliffs, hanging bougainvillea in walled gardens, a great sweep of bay curving out from smaller arcs of private beach. Again, she thought of herself and Kevin on that honeymoon flight, coming here to the direct opposite of the cold, rainy strands and bleak, limestone-fronted promenade boardinghouses of the seaside towns at home. And now, when the bus let her off at the top of the road above Villefranche and she took up her suitcase to walk down to the seafront, Villefranche was just as she remembered it. In those sixteen years, it was Ireland that had changed. Belfast bombed and barricaded, while in Dublin new flats and American banks had spoiled the Georgian calm around Saint Stephen’s Green. And all over the country, in the smaller towns and villages, new housing estates and motor hotels. Cars everywhere: every farmer had his own car now, horses and donkeys were becoming a thing of the past; even in the villages of the west, the arrival of the morning bus was no longer the big moment of the day. Yet, paradoxically, here on the Riviera nothing had changed. It was as though, long ago, when this part of the coast had been built, house on house, terrace on terrace, winding street on winding street, nothing further could be added. Belfast, with its ruined houses and rubbled streets, was now, to her, the alien place. Here, as she came down into this small French town, she came home to the past, the remembered narrow, winding streets, the fountains and souvenir shops, the dusty orange customs building, the fishing boats lining the quay.

  The Hôtel Welcome, too, was just as she recalled it, its rust-colored façade exactly as it had been in the vue du port paintings of Villefranche one hundred years ago. But when Mrs. Redden entered the hotel lobby and the porter came to take her suitcase, she saw that something had changed. Surely the residents’ dining room was on this floor? She remembered those evenings when Monsieur Guy, the florid, courteous proprietor, would walk among the guests’ tables at dinnertime, smiling, pointing to the pastel sky outside the windows, explaining to the new tourists that it was l’heure bleu, the twilight hour, for which, he said, “la Côte est connue dans tous les pays du monde.”

  “What happened to the dining room?” were her first words to the young girl at the desk. The girl looked surprised. “The restaurant is downstairs, Madame. On the quay,” the girl said. “Do you wish a room?”

  “My name is Redden and I’ve booked.” And then she recognized the proprietor’s wife, a sallow-skinned woman sitting in the little front office, going over bills. She spoke, in French, to the proprietress, asking about the missing dining room. “Ah, that was a long time ago, Madame,” the proprietress said. “Now we have only one dining room for residents and non-residents alike. That’s the restaurant below, on the quay. The dining room which was on this floor, the residents’ dining room that you remember, is now the television room. What can you do? The clients want television, they have to have it. And I tell you, it is not at all good for business. Our bar is not what it used to be in the evening time. When were you last here, Madame?”

  “Oh, years ago,” Mrs. Redden said, thanking her, following the porter up to room 450, which had been reserved in advance. In the lift, she asked about Monsieur Guy and was told that he had died. It was on a Sunday, the porter said, in the height of the season, it was very awkward, the direction had decided not to mention it to the guests, people were on vacation after all, a death in the house is not gay. So Madame and the family just carried on and the funeral took place in private.

  “How long have you worked here?” Mrs. Redden asked as the porter drew the shutters open, showing the familiar view of la rade.

  “Ah,” he said. “I am old in the service. Ten years, at least.”

  When she had tipped him and he had handed over the key and bowed his way out, Mrs. Redden walked about in the room. She had reserved it specially; it was the one they had had on their honeymoon and commanded the best view of any room in the hotel. The furniture was much as she remembered it; the bed would be different, but was no bigger than the one Kevin had fallen out of with such a thump that first afternoon, when they came back from the beach and made love. And there was the same sort of dressing table, and imitation green leather armchair and, out on the narrow balcony, the same little table and two iron café chairs where, their second morning, they had breakfasted en terrasse, taking their tray outside to find the couple from the room next door doing the same thing. Stiff with embarrassment in their honeymoon dressing gowns, they sat down in silence, aware that their neighbors were British. Then, on an inspiration, she spoke to Kevin in French and he grunted a reply, and the Brits nodded to them politely and left them alone. Afterward, in the bathroom, the door shut, she and Kevin shrieked with silly laughter. We laughed in those days: the fun we had.

  Well, times change. She began to unpack her suitcase, first taking her toilet case into the bathroom, laying out her toilet things, making sure she had not forgotten to pack her diaphragm. Then she hung up her dresses in the bedroom, leaving plenty of closet space for Kevin’s clothes. After Paris, she felt a bit lonely. She had brought some paperbacks, and unpacking them, she thought of taking a book and going down to the terrace to sit and read and watch the people stroll past on the quays.

  When she finished unpacking, she lay, face down, on the bed. The hot sun came in at the open window; she could smell the sea and hear the slow stammer of a small boat’s engine as a fisherman went out around the rade. Kevin was the one, whenever we’d come up to this room to change, the wine
in us, the minute I’d take my dress off, he’d be pulling down my knickers, with a big cockstand on him, always wanting. We did more in this very room, and more often, than ever again. After Danny, it changed. As Kevin says, people are not really married until they have a child. I was lazy. The only job I was offered was teaching at Saint Mary’s and that would have meant going on living at home with Kitty. Daddy dead, Eily married, Owen away doing an assistantship, my mother and I alone at home and always at each other. I married to get away, God forgive me.

  It’s true. I haven’t had such a bad life, though. Nor such a great one, either. This morning, it was great. This morning I walked in the Luxembourg Gardens with someone I wanted to be with, and we laughed and it was exciting, he’s someone I could have fallen for. But that’s silly, it’s over.

  She got up, changed her dress, and did her face. I could send him a postcard from here. I could ring up Peg to thank her and offhandedly get his address.

  There was no writing paper in the drawer by the bed table, no envelope either. I could go downstairs and buy a postcard, just to pass the time.

  •

  Later, wearing the good linen dress she had picked out the year before last at Donald Davies in Dublin, she came back slowly along the quay, past the four restaurants which faced on the port, having read the printed menus outside each and gone into all the shops at the end of the quay, having sat on the sea wall looking across to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, having inspected the yachts and small craft tied up along the lower quays, having selected four postcards and bought a tube of Nivea Solaire, Crème Bronzante, and even taking all that time, when she looked at her watch, not more than two hours had passed. If you were alone in a place, the time was very long.

  She decided to sit outside the Welcome, have a coffee, and look at that novel by Muriel Spark. She would write the postcards later. She had read a good review of this book, but after a few pages she put it aside: these new novels were strange, not like the early ones, and besides, her mind went back to Tom Lowry walking her to the Atrium last night, and then this morning, in the Luxembourg Gardens, and at the airport, riding out on the bus with her. What an odd chance it had been, meeting him. If you lived in Belfast you never met anyone really new. She must phone Peg and get the address, then think of something funny to say on the card. Or say, in some subtle way, how she’d enjoyed their meeting. How she missed him. But could she say that without making a fool of herself? She decided to have her bath and think about it, then write the card here on the terrace while she had a leisurely drink before dinner.