Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “When you’re old,” I said, “no one can ever imagine what you were like when you were young. It’s as though you’ve always been old—or as though you’ve lived two different lives, one of which seems made up and overblown, hard to believe. It will happen to you as well, of course, in time. But you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  He was still watching me. His smile was calm, affectionate.

  I put my cigarette butt on the saucer and reached for my purse. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Alan, really—”

  “Not a thing. I was in the area anyway, and it was just a simple blockage.” Leaning forwards, he stubbed out his rollup. “If you’re ever stuck, or you need someone to run an errand, you can always call me.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

  I looked down at the table, hoping he hadn’t noticed the tears in my eyes. I didn’t want to embarrass him.

  At the end of the sixties I received a telegram from Charles-Henri Barbier. He had business in Jersey, he said, and he was wondering if we might meet. Charles-Henri had left for Australia in 1928, returning to his native Switzerland not long before the war, but Claude and I had kept in touch with him by letter. Once, he sent us photographs of Andratx, a tiny seaside town on the island of Majorca. You should go there, he told us, before the rest of the world discovers it. After Claude’s death, I began to receive postcards from wherever he happened to be—Oslo, New York, Lagos, Bombay, Interlaken. It seemed I was often in his thoughts, and I wasn’t sure what I had done to warrant that.

  When the day came, he picked me up from my house and took me to his hotel for tea. As we sat across from each other, he looked at me with a halting, almost wounded expression.

  “You look the same,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “And nor do you.”

  He smiled.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “That was a bit abrupt. I’m no longer used to company.”

  “You always were abrupt, actually. Forthright, anyway. It’s something I remember about you.” He reached for his cup of tea. “I used to admire you for it.”

  “People thought I was rude.”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “Now we’re the age we are, though, and time is limited, it seems like a considerate approach, if that doesn’t sound too paradoxical.”

  The thought that I might, over the years, have grown into myself had never occurred to me before. I liked the idea of directness as a response to aging. It upended the usual wisdoms, that engagement with old people was a long-winded, repetitive affair.

  “Where’s Gertrude?” I asked.

  Gertrude Agelasto was his wife. They had married in Australia, only a year after he arrived.

  “She’s out buying presents for the children,” he said. “She’ll join us later.”

  He had four children, I remembered, one of whom he had named Lucette, as a kind of homage to Claude.

  “Will you be in Jersey long?” I asked.

  “We leave tomorrow.”

  He had lost some of his hair, and his eyelids drooped at the outer edges, which gave him an air of disappointment and fatigue that was probably misleading. He liked to take his time, even with something as mundane as stirring a spoonful of sugar into a cup of tea. I felt a smile ease onto my face. He had always been attentive.

  “Claude wrote to me,” he said.

  In the early fifties, especially, he had received several letters from her. He remembered being struck by how long and detailed they were.

  I nodded. “I think she knew she was dying.”

  “I wish I could have come to the funeral. I was at a conference that week, in Africa.”

  I told him he hadn’t missed much. It had been an understated affair—a few local people, a distant relation of Claude’s from France. Our old housekeeper, Edna, got drunk at the wake. The weather had been cold and wet.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone,” Charles-Henri said. “She was still so young.”

  “Sixty,” I said.

  “Was it suicide?” He too, it seemed, could be direct. “When I first knew her, I felt she wasn’t long for this world. A cliché, I know, but I’m not sure how else to phrase it.” He took a sip of tea. “It’s as if what was level ground for most of us was a steep slope for her.”

  “Yes, that’s how it was,” I said. “But she didn’t kill herself. It was her lungs. An embolism, then heart failure. She had all kinds of health problems towards the end.”

  “Her path was very singular. She didn’t like to expose herself to the approval of others.”

  “That’s well put—and true. Even my approval wasn’t always welcome.” I paused, thinking back. “She had a great capacity for admiration, though. She loved nothing better than admiring people.”

  His careful, wounded look returned. “It must have been difficult for you, the last fifteen years.”

  “I live quietly. I see almost no one.”

  “You have no friends?”

  “There’s Lucille, who comes to clean—she’s been with me for years—and then there’s Alan. He’s a plumber by trade, but sometimes he does my shopping for me, or fetches my prescriptions.”

  “A cleaner and a plumber…” Charles-Henri gave me a look that was quizzical, incredulous. I suppose he expected me to have befriended intellectuals.

  “They’re good people,” I said.

  “I’m sure.”

  He stared out of the window. In the hotel car park, a man was loading a suitcase into a car, his wife looking on, and I felt a sudden, overwhelming melancholy. Time taken up with menial tasks, things coming to an end. I shifted in my chair.

  “What about you?” I said. “Have you been happy?”

  He smiled. “Always the easy questions.”

  “Well?”

  “I have been fortunate.”

  His marriage had lasted, he said, unlike the marriages of so many people he knew, and he had four daughters, all wonderful in different ways.

  “And your work?”

  In his work he had also been lucky, he said. His job at Coop Suisse had been stimulating; he had traveled all over the world. More recently, he had been given a position at UNESCO. Everything he had studied as a young man had come in useful—law, philosophy, linguistics…

  “I read something about you,” I said, “in a newspaper.”

  “Really?” He looked at me indulgently.

  “The journalist said he had spent years looking for defects in your character. He hadn’t been able to find a single one.”

  “It’s true. I’m perfect.” Charles-Henri smiled and shook his head.

  “I hope he’s not boring you, Suzanne…”

  We hadn’t noticed Gertrude approaching, but there she was, with her lopsided smile, laden down with shopping bags.

  Later, she took a photograph of us, Charles-Henri with his arm around my shoulders, and when they sent me the picture I was surprised at how accurately it captured us both. Though Charles-Henri was looking into the lens, he seemed aware of me. He was full of affection and solicitude. As for me, I faced the camera in my plaid shirt and my swagger coat, uncompromising, resolute. I could have been standing in that conservatory on my own.

  Afterwards, he walked me out onto the street. I said I would catch a bus back to Beaumont, but he told me I would do nothing of the sort. I would take a taxi, he said. He would pay.

  “Are you all right for money?” His collapsing eyelids added to the impression of concern.

  “Yes. Thanks to you.”

  Not long after Claude’s death, I had written to Charles-Henri, asking if he could intervene on my behalf with the Office des Changes, since they wouldn’t allow me access to my funds. He had spoken to his son-in-law, who was a banker in Paris. Things had become
easier after that.

  Charles-Henri took my arm. “There’s really nothing you need?”

  “My needs are dwindling,” I said. “Soon they will be nonexistent.”

  He gave me a quick, sharp look. “You’re not thinking of doing something rash, I hope.”

  “Rash? Since when have I been rash?”

  I hadn’t answered the question, and he knew it, but he didn’t press me further. Instead, he waved down a passing taxi.

  “Did you ever go to Andratx,” he asked, “you and Claude?”

  “We talked about it a lot, but we never quite got round to it. Our health always got in the way.”

  “That’s a pity.” He leaned down and kissed me on both cheeks. “Goodbye, Suzanne. Be well.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He helped me into the taxi, then stood on the pavement, with one hand raised, until I turned the corner.

  On a wet, windswept day in the spring of 1970, I received an invitation to Alan’s wedding, which was taking place in August. I propped the card against a vase of flowers in the hall. The silver bells above the names of Leslie’s parents glinted in the bleak March light. August, I thought. How carelessly young people treat the future, as though it were an infinite resource!

  The last time I had seen Alan, in September, he had done my weekly shopping for me. Once we had put the groceries away, I offered him a beer. I always kept a few bottles in the door of the fridge, in case he called round. It was a warm evening, and we took our drinks out onto the balcony.

  “Did you ever love a man?” he asked.

  “Goodness,” I said. “Where did that come from?”

  He grinned. “You don’t have to answer, not if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s all right. You surprised me, that’s all.” I considered his question. “Actually, Claude was the one who tended to fall in love with men—though I’m not sure ‘fall in love’ is the right verb.”

  “Were you jealous?”

  “Sometimes.” I shifted on my chair. The arthritis in my knees was troubling me. “It was my own fault, though, in a way.”

  “Really?”

  When Claude and I fell for each other, I told him, it was the first time that she felt acknowledged. It was as if I was the first person ever to have seen her. In one of the many paradoxes and ironies that characterized our life together, my love for her freed her to pursue other more conventional entanglements, the very entanglements that might endanger it.

  I talked about Bob Steel, and about Breton.

  “You couldn’t imagine two men who were more different,” I said, “but Bob was more of a threat.”

  Alan wanted to know why.

  Claude was young when they met, I explained, only twenty-one, and he was even younger. They quickly became close. I didn’t think they ever slept together, but he satisfied something in her. It had to do with how he looked at her. Who he allowed her to be. It lasted for a long time.

  “What upset me most,” I went on, “was the fact that she was flirting with the kind of life that she had persuaded me to turn my back on. It seemed perverse. Almost cruel.”

  “How did it end?” Alan asked.

  “I ended it. I did something I’m not proud of.” I sipped my beer, thinking back to the morning when I sat with Mrs. Steel, shelling peas. “I don’t think it would have worked, anyway—not in the long run…”

  “Not like it did with you.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then I nodded and said, “Not like it did with me.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “The answer’s no.”

  I told him that what had happened to me when I met Claude had been so powerful that nothing that came afterwards could match up to it.

  “You’re lucky if that happens once in your life. You don’t expect it to happen twice.” I looked at Alan, the last of the sun on his face. “How was it with Leslie?”

  He picked at the peeling label on his beer bottle. He seemed younger than thirty-two. “It wasn’t as dramatic as that.”

  “Perhaps one day I will meet her,” I said.

  He smiled. “I’m sure you will.”

  Six months had gone by since that evening.

  I reached for the telephone and dialed his number. As always, he answered almost immediately. I thanked him for the invitation, and said I was very happy for him.

  “And you’ll come?” He sounded apprehensive. He knew I hardly ever went out.

  “Of course. It was so thoughtful of you to ask me.”

  “Well, we’re old friends, aren’t we. It wouldn’t be the same without you there.”

  “No, there’d be one less person.”

  He laughed.

  On the day of the wedding, I spent all morning trying to think of good excuses not to go. Apart from anything else, I had no decent clothes; I had given them away when I moved to Beaumont. I remembered how Charles-Henri’s eye had lingered on the shabby coat I had worn when I met him, though he was too much of a gentleman to mention it. Perhaps if I sat at the back no one would notice me, and when the service was over I would be able to leave without drawing attention to myself. As I approached the church, however, a young man walked up to me. He was an usher, he said. Taking my arm, he led me down the aisle to the second pew from the front.

  “There must be some mistake,” I said. “I’m not a member of the family.”

  “You’re Madame Malherbe?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no mistake. It was Alan’s wish.”

  The last time I had set foot in a church, for Claude’s funeral, I had almost been sick, and the spillage of lurid green and yellow light through the stained-glass windows and the stuffy, ornate smell of incense brought the nausea back again. I lowered my head, hoping that people would think I was praying. Finally, I was able to look up, and Alan, who was already waiting by the altar, glanced over his shoulder and gave me a smile.

  When Leslie walked up the aisle on her father’s arm a few moments later, she also smiled at me. I don’t think she knew who I was; she was merely including me in her happiness. She had brown eyes and long brown hair, and her teeth were slightly crooked. She looked like somebody who found pleasure in simple things. If my intuition was correct, this was a great gift, one from which Alan could only benefit.

  After the service, as I was about to slip away, another young man came up to me and introduced himself. He was Alan’s cousin, Edward. Most of the guests were walking to the wedding reception, he said, but the hotel was more than a mile away and he was wondering if I might like a lift. I could hardly say no.

  At the reception I drank two glasses of champagne, and when the music began and the bride and groom took to the floor for the first dance I found myself thinking of a dinner Claude and I had given at our apartment on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Youki had married Foujita not long before, and Robert was desolate, his pale eyes paler than usual, as though he had been crying. She should have married me, he kept saying. It should have been me. You don’t need to be married, Claude told him, just as we don’t need to be married. We’re above all that. Beyond it. She had been speaking for both of us—for all of us, perhaps—but there had been a part of me that was unconvinced, and hadn’t wanted to be included…Later that evening, Youki arrived. She was drunk, and on her own. I sat on the sofa with her, and she began to tell me about Foujita. She had fallen for him the moment she saw him. His black hair cut in a straight line above his eyebrows, his horn-rimmed spectacles. His funny little voice. He came from a samurai family. Did I know that? I nodded. He had almost no hair on his body, she said. His chest was smooth as a boy’s. The first time they made love she felt she was lying on a flat roof with a hot wind blowing over her. He had a presence, and yet somehow he wasn’t there. Robert appeared and sat on the arm of the sofa. He wanted to know what we wer
e talking about. Youki smiled up at him. You, of course, she said. And he believed her. Two years later, Foujita left for Japan without even saying goodbye to Youki—he had met another woman—and all Robert’s dreams came true.

  As Alan swept Leslie across the dance floor—other couples were beginning to join them—I regretted that Claude and I had never had a simple, sentimental day, a day when we were celebrated by all the people who were closest to us. Instead, we had made a virtue of being unique and hidden. Since we were excluded, we became exclusive.

  “You look sad.”

  Alan stood in front of me in his black tailcoat and his striped gray trousers.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come,” I said. “I spend so much time on my own these days. I have forgotten how to behave in public.”

  “You’re doing fine. I was just worried you might be lonely.”

  “You can’t worry about me, Alan, not today.” I gestured at his clothes. “Look at you, though. You look wonderful.”

  He grinned. “Do you think it fits? I hired it from that place near Royal Square.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “I would have liked to dance with you, Miss Suzanne, but I don’t suppose that’s possible.”

  “I would have liked that too.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “It’s not too bad. But I don’t think I’ll be dancing.”

  “Well.” He looked at his feet, then at me again. “Thanks so much for coming, anyway.”

  “It wouldn’t have been the same without me.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “There would have been one less person.”

  We smiled at each other.

  When I returned to Beaumont that evening I stood in the hall, my coat still buttoned. I felt none of the relief I usually felt when I got home. The silence in the house seemed unnatural, forlorn. It took me a long time to adjust.

  About a fortnight after the wedding, Alan appeared unexpectedly. I had taken tablets for my arthritis, but they had had almost no effect, and I wasn’t able to climb the stairs. Once I had showed him into my ground-floor bedroom, and we were standing by the window, he held out the check I had sent him in the post. “I can’t accept this.”