Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  I shook my head.

  Half an hour later, when I looked up from the kitchen sink, I saw her reflected in the black glass of the window. I cried out, and the plate I had been holding slipped from my hands and shattered on the floor. Slowly, I turned round. She was up against the wall, where the calendar was, in a sand-colored shift and a pair of dark glasses. Her feet didn’t reach the ground. It was like looking at a coat hanging on a hook.

  I spoke without thinking, my hands blurred with soapsuds. “You can’t do this any more. You have to stop.”

  She stared at the floor, as if ashamed. This was unlike her. If I was ever critical, she always fought back, usually with a few carefully chosen and lacerating words that put me in my place. This new passivity—this obedience—felt unnatural. Wrong. What if she had come for my sake, though? What if she was worried about me, and wanted to make sure I was all right?

  “I’m sorry if I shouted,” I said. “I love you.”

  She didn’t lift her eyes to mine, but seemed to radiate a powerful new stillness.

  “You can leave now,” I said. “Really. You can rest.” I wiped my hands on my apron. “I’ll be fine.”

  AFTERLIFE

  1954–1970

  When I moved to Beaumont, I was moving to a place where no one knew me. At that time, I still had good days, when I was not in pain, and I would go for walks, sometimes along the promenade, where the railway line that linked St. Helier to Corbières used to run—it had been dismantled just before the war—or sometimes along the coast road, past the shops and the Martello tower, and on towards the little harbor at St. Aubin. I always took my camera with me, especially in winter. I photographed the wide deserted bay, the brooding cloud-filled skies. The empty sea. In truth, I no longer had a subject. My subject had been taken from me. My love had been taken from me. Or perhaps that was my subject. Perhaps I was trying to capture what was left after the justification for a photograph had been removed. Background, distance. A lack of focus. I remembered the picture I almost took in the garage at La Rocquaise, the horizon much closer suddenly, the solitude more personal, and more explicit…I wasn’t sure my photography had any merit. It was just a habit—a reflex. My heart wasn’t in it.

  Sometimes, in the quiet of the day, I stopped at the Foresters Arms for a brandy. I was terse and laconic, as I had always been in public, and my appearance, which I thought of as forbidding—glasses with thick lenses, short gray hair—tended to put people off. Since I dressed in trousers and smoked a pipe I was often mistaken for a man. I had the feeling, as I sipped my drink or knocked my pipe against the edge of the ashtray, that I wasn’t living but waiting, though if you had asked me what I was waiting for I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Or perhaps I would have told you that I was waiting for the life I had already lived. Does that make sense? My life had begun again, but it was also over. This didn’t sadden me. Instead, there was a calmness, a settling. A lessening—or removal—of expectation. I took the days as they came, and was grateful for simple gifts, like the color of the evening sky or a letter from a friend.

  Towards sunset on a raw, cloudy day—I suppose it was October or November—I was passing the Foresters Arms, on my way home from a walk, when the door in the lower ground floor opened and a young man ran up a flight of steps and out onto the pavement. On seeing me, he stopped and called out.

  “Miss Suzanne?”

  He had a good-humored face and tousled dark-blond hair, and his easy familiarity led me to think he had a few pints inside him. He had used my first name, though. Did I know him?

  “It’s me,” he said. “Alan.”

  “Alan…” The name felt slow and blurred on my tongue, like ice cream melting.

  “You really don’t remember?” He wasn’t insulted, only amused. His teeth gave off a dull white gleam.

  “My memory isn’t so good these days,” I said.

  “I knew you when you were in the big house, with your sister.” He shifted from one foot to the other. “I’m sorry she passed away.”

  “You heard about that?”

  He nodded. “Someone told me.” A car flashed by. As the headlights moved over his face, it seemed to widen. “I saw her sunbathing once—with nothing on…”

  He didn’t seem in the least inhibited, and I wasn’t sure it was just the alcohol. He was naturally carefree. It was a rare quality. Attractive too. When I first heard him call my name I’d had the urge to hurry away, but now, suddenly, I found myself wanting to prolong the encounter. I was lonely, I realized—there were whole days when I didn’t speak to anyone—and this insight cut me to the marrow like a gust of bitter wind. There was no self-pity, only a sense of isolation. That dark, damp cave again.

  “She loved the sun,” I said. “She—”

  “She wasn’t embarrassed at all.” His words tumbled over mine. “I was the one who was embarrassed. I didn’t know where to look. I was only about ten.” He grinned.

  As we stood there by the traffic lights I thought I could see him at the back door of what he called “the big house,” a boy in shorts, his hair much blonder, almost white.

  “You had a bicycle with red mudguards,” I said.

  “That’s right. I did.” He was grinning again. “I knew you’d remember.”

  “You delivered the groceries sometimes.”

  “The post too, for a while. You used to come to the door, both of you at the same time. Always the two of you, never just one. As if you did everything together.” He paused. “You would offer me a drink of something—lemonade, usually—and sometimes a biscuit, or a piece of cake. Once, at Christmas, you gave me half a crown.”

  “Was that a lot?”

  “Oh yes. Yes, it was. Even rich people only gave me a shilling.”

  I smiled.

  “You know what people called you, here on the island?” he said. “ ‘The French Ladies.’ ”

  “I expect they had other names for us as well.”

  He laughed. “They weren’t being unpleasant. It was just that you were different. Not what they were used to.” He looked past me, up the street.

  Not wanting to lose him just yet, I thought of a question. “What do you do now, for a living?”

  “I work as a plumber. I do a bit of gardening and decorating too.” He produced a card and handed it to me. “If you ever need any work done, or even odd jobs around the house—anything at all. My rates are very reasonable.”

  I looked down at the card, which was dog-eared and creased. Alan Seznec. Plumber & Handyman.

  “I should be going,” he said. “Nice to see you, Miss Suzanne.”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  He hurried off along the street, his shirt untucked, his hair glinting in the dim light of the streetlamps.

  One bright spring morning I caught the bus into St. Helier, thinking I would buy fresh fish and courgettes for supper. I was in the middle of town, just round the corner from the market, when I saw a woman walking towards me. I had seen her last on the day I was released from prison. Back then, she had fled. This time, though, the sun was in her eyes, and she didn’t notice me until it was too late—or perhaps it was only when I was standing right in front of her, not moving, that she realized who I was. After all, many years had passed, and I had changed. So, too, had she. Her hair, once black, was whitish yellow, like the coat on a zoo-kept polar bear, and there were patches of dry skin on her face.

  She looked at me, then looked away, teeth gritted. “Oh God…”

  It was as if she thought I had engineered the encounter. As if I were the guilty party. The tormentor. I let out a soft yet bitter laugh. I had always found it savagely ironic that Claude and I, both passionate smokers, had been betrayed by a tobacconist.

  “I feel awful,” the woman said. “I should never have—”

  “Should never have what?” I said.

  Sh
e glanced at a man who had just emerged from a nearby café. Was she hoping to be rescued, or worried about being overheard?

  “I had no choice,” she said. “It was the Germans. They came into my shop—”

  She took a step closer, one hand gripping the other, and began to talk about the brands of cigarettes and rolling papers we used to buy, and how the Germans wanted to know who the customers were for those particular items. They kept asking the same questions, she said. They threatened to close down her business. I shook my head. It wasn’t good enough. She could have claimed that the items the Germans were asking about were popular. She could have claimed that almost every smoker on the island had bought them at one time or another. But she had been too stupid, or too frightened. Or perhaps, still smarting from Claude’s insults, she had seen it as an opportunity to take revenge on us. To put us in our place.

  “They already knew who you were,” she was saying. “Someone told them. All I had to do was point you out…”

  I stared at her. “You pointed us out?”

  She nodded.

  “Like this?” I stepped back and aimed a finger at her.

  “Yes.”

  A gust of wind swept in off the sea and circled us, muscular and questing, like a shark drawn by the stink of blood.

  “Do you know what happened,” I asked the woman, “when my sister and I were arrested by the Nazis?” I said.

  “What happened?” the woman asked in a faint voice, almost a whisper.

  “We tried to kill ourselves.”

  She attempted to push past me, but I caught hold of her arm.

  “We took pills,” I went on, “but there weren’t enough. I tried to cut my wrist. I didn’t have a knife, though. All I had was a piece of broken tile.” I rolled up my left sleeve and showed her the scar. “I made a mess of it, as you can see.”

  The woman stared at my wrist, her head lowered, her center parting white as bacon fat.

  I rolled down my sleeve again, then looked past her, up the street. A man was lifting a cardboard box from the back of a red car. A cat sunned itself on a low brick wall.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head again, this time at the absurdity of it all. “Maybe we were reckless,” I said, “or arrogant. Maybe we brought it on ourselves—”

  “No, no,” the woman said, talking over me. “I should never have done what I did. It was terrible. I’m sorry.”

  “All right.” There was nothing left to say.

  I let go of her arm.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She looked at me quickly, then hurried past me and was gone.

  I often thought of Alan Seznec, but it was only when my kitchen sink became blocked that it occurred to me to call him. He arrived on the same day, in a white van. As he lay on the floor, beneath the sink, I asked him about his life. He had grown up on a potato farm in St. Brelade, he said, a mile or two inland from the bay. He was the youngest of three, the only boy. I asked if he knew the Raymond brothers. He nodded. One of them broke his father’s nose. In books they say that when someone hits you you see stars, his father had told him, but when one of the Raymond brothers hits you it’s not stars you see, it’s a whole bloody galaxy. He grinned. His father had died when he was twelve, he went on, and his mother’s brother took over the running of the farm. His uncle wasn’t suited to the work. There were arguments. His mother sold up, and they moved to a house on the edge of St. Helier. He didn’t like being in town, and did poorly at school. He left when he was fifteen and joined the merchant navy. It was a tradition on Jersey, he said, to go to sea. These days, he rented a flat on the east side of St. Helier. It wasn’t much, only three rooms, but he was happy enough.

  “What about relationships?” I said. “Are you in love with someone?”

  He looked at me quickly from the shadows beneath the sink. He had a girlfriend, he told me. Her name was Leslie. She worked as a receptionist in one of the big hotels. They had been together for seven years.

  “It’s good you’ve lasted so long,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  “I was with Claude for more than forty years, and she could still surprise me, even towards the end.”

  “So you weren’t just sisters, then?”

  “No.”

  He nodded to himself. “That’s what I heard.”

  I had thought he might be shocked by what I had told him. Instead, I was the one who was shocked. “Did everybody know?”

  “Not everybody. Just a few people in St. Brelade.”

  We were sisters by marriage, I said, not by blood. There was nothing incestuous about it. That would have been scandalous.

  “It’s not as rare as you might think,” he said. “Not round here.”

  We smiled at each other and then fell quiet.

  I moved to the cooker. “It’s a mistake to think that a long relationship is boring. The longer you’re with someone, the more mysterious they become.” I lit the gas. Blue flames licked round the burnt base of the coffeepot. “We went through a lot, Claude and I, but sometimes I felt I didn’t know her at all. Sometimes I felt I knew her best right at the beginning, when we first met…”

  Claude.

  A leaking around my heart. Was it really ten years since she had gone? My throat tightened. I lifted two mugs down from the cupboard. One of them said I LOVE JERSEY. A present from Lucille.

  Alan was on his feet again, and running cold water into the sink to test the flow.

  “Is it true that you were sentenced to death by the Nazis?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “What was that like?”

  I thought back to my cell—the black iron door, the bitter cold, the lack of light, the fleas…

  “I was always frightened of the dawn,” I said. “That was when the executions happened. Sometimes I heard the shooting from where I lay. It sounded like fireworks.” I carried the mugs and the coffeepot over to the table. “If you were given breakfast, you knew you weren’t going to be shot. Not that day, anyway. They wouldn’t waste a bowl of turnip scrapings on people they were going to execute. Some mornings I was so frightened I couldn’t eat, even though I was starving. I just sat on my bed and trembled. Other mornings I thought, Kill me, just kill me. Get it over with. The fear attaches itself to all your thoughts. If you try and remove the fear, it can take part of you with it, the way the skin on an orange sometimes clings so tightly to the fruit that some of the flesh comes away when it’s peeled.” I looked at Alan, who was staring at the floor, his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. “Even now, I wake up scared. Then I feel the blankets over me, and I hear the sea outside, and I realize everything’s all right—though Claude’s no longer here, of course…”

  “Did you receive any kind of honor for what you did?”

  “They gave us something called a Silver Medal,” I said. “Since Jersey was outside French territory, we weren’t eligible for anything else.”

  This had irritated Claude intensely. During the course of her life she had, at one time or another, rebelled against almost everything she had been given—her family, her race, her gender, her body, even her name—and she tended to resist all forms of recognition, viewing them as attempts to co-opt or label her, but she thought that if we had been awarded a more prestigious accolade—the Legion of Honor, for example—at least it would have come in useful in the political arena, since her name would have carried more weight when she signed left-wing declarations and petitions. The Silver Medal, though? That wasn’t any use at all.

  “Can I see it?” Alan said.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” I said. “If you want the actual medal, you have to go to a special shop in Paris and buy it. We never bothered to do that.” I paused, then smiled. “Claude was always rather rude about it—until she found out Picasso had got one too…”

 
; “My life’s so ordinary.” Alan sounded wistful.

  “No one’s life is ordinary.” I looked past him, at the sink. “Have you finished?”

  He nodded. “Yes. All done.”

  “Have a seat.”

  I poured him a cup of coffee. As we sat in silence at the kitchen table, I had the strange but vivid feeling that we had lived together for a long time. It wasn’t a feeling I could explain. A fly bounced against the window. The clock ticked on the wall.

  “I think you and Claude should be celebrated,” Alan said after a while. “There should be a statue—some kind of monument…”

  “What would we be doing? Sunbathing with no clothes on?”

  “I’m serious,” he said, though he was laughing.

  Producing a packet of tobacco and some rolling papers, he asked if he could smoke.

  “Only if I can have one too,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  I fetched a saucer.

  He rolled two cigarettes and passed one to me, then struck a match. I bent into the flame. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in years.

  “During the war,” I said, “when we couldn’t get hold of cigarettes, Claude used to make them herself.”

  “Really? Out of what?”

  “Rose petals, fennel. Leaves from our cherry tree.” I drew the smoke deep into my lungs. “She would dry the ingredients in the sun—roast them, if you like—then season them with cloves or mint or the juice from poppies.”

  “How did they taste?”

  “Not entirely pleasant. Bitter. Our tongues would turn black.” I inhaled again. “Not as good as this.”

  “And the effect?”

  “Rather strange. Dreamy. We would drift.”

  “It was the poppies, maybe…”

  “Maybe.”

  Smiling, he sat back. “You’re quite something, Miss Suzanne. You really are.”

  “To look at me, you’d never know.”

  He watched me across the table, his head at a slight angle. He hadn’t understood.