The Forgotten Summer

by Carol Drinkwater

  ‘Dan’s assistant. I popped round to collect his mail. I’m Annabelle’s friend.’

  ‘Annabelle? Sorry, who is Annabelle?’

  Long pause.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I’ll pass on your message when Dan calls me.’ And the receiver was replaced.

  Winter took hold and wrapped its hoary fingers around her. The days she spent tramping the damp, chilly city; the midnight hours nursing gin and tonic in the hotel’s gloomy bar, clinking the ice back and forth in the chilled glass. Several of the national papers ran the story of Luc’s death. The reportage was discreet, minimal and professional. Jane rejected offers from Roussel to make a rendezvous with the post-accident trauma specialist. She chose to be companionless in the midst of celebrating crowds, tourists packing activity into every minute or taking their time over leisurely meals, letting the hours roll languorously by. Everyone, bar Jane, had a destination, a purpose. She had a purpose, though, she realized: she was waiting for Luc; for the release of Luc. In the interim, she pounded the streets, joints aching, in conversation with her departed husband, puzzling how this had come about when she still felt his presence so close to her, within earshot. His shoulder up against hers. Life alongside one another.

  He could not be gone. Even a week beyond his death, an insane part of her clung to optimism, to Roussel or possibly a doctor telephoning her: ‘This has all been a ghastly error. We apologize, Madame Cambon. Your husband is alive, fit and well.’

  Was she losing her senses?

  One snow-flaked late-December morning she stepped out of the lobby of the Lutetia, turned right and then right again. Not directionless, marching along the wind-blown rue Saint-Sulpice towards the boulevard Saint-Germain. From Odéon to Saint-Michel, streaming with bedraggled tourists in plastic capes and hoods, she ploughed onwards into the spinning snow, indifferent to it, trudging through squelching slush towards place Maubert. Upon arrival, the market was in full swing despite the keen weather. The indomitable stallholders had rigged up tarpaulins that sealed in the exposed sides of their stalls, protecting their goods. The canvas sheets were flapping against the downpour, making short, sharp, cracking sounds, like the muted gunshots of hunters preying in distant fields. Every stall was adorned with a necklace of coloured bulbs. All were attempting an end-of-year gaiety, the spirit of Réveillon. Two fish stalls, each displaying a prize selection of oysters: Brittany, Saint-Vaast, Marenne-Oléron, Fines de Claire, sizes 3, 4 and 5, and shoals of whole salmon, robust and pink-fleshed.

  Was tonight New Year’s Eve or was that tomorrow? Jane had lost track of the days. She pulled her phone out of her raincoat pocket to check the date. Her fingers were stinging, red and curled, like the lobster claws on the stalls in front of her. It was the twenty-ninth. Only the twenty-ninth? Still no message from Dan. One from a girlfriend, Lizzie, who had read the news in the Guardian. She should call her father, call the home, let Frances know she was still in Paris, wish her father a Happy New Year, not that he knew which year it was.

  Desolation and impotence swept through her. The roof had been blown off her world. Luc was gone. What was she doing here? Not shopping, that was for sure. She found herself drawn to a cheese counter, caught a whiff of softly ripening, creamy Brie. Luc loved Brie. Aged and runny beneath its rhino skin, dripping from a torn chunk of fresh baguette. She remembered this stall from all those years back, when she and Luc used to pop out from the studio he rented in rue Frédéric-Sauton. Together, they would buy a baguette, a selection of cheeses and a bottle of inexpensive red Bordeaux from the wine cave directly behind the market stalls. In keeping with the season, the wine-seller’s window this morning was decked out with blobs of cotton wool glued to the interior glass. Fabricated snowflakes, behind which was a display of champagne bottles. Outside, a blizzard was blowing. The shop had been bought out by the chain Nicolas, she noted now. Back then, it had been an independent enterprise.

  After selecting their purchases, before returning to Luc’s fourth-floor studio, he and she, his arm around her shoulders, would pause for a coffee at the café on the corner, which was still going strong and packed with shoppers sheltering from the snow. She stood in the sodden, muddied place, purchasers with laden bags bustling about her, frozen by the sight of her freckled, plump eighteen-year-old self in a sundress. A long-haired girl with a tortoiseshell hair-slide, laughing shyly, seated opposite the man she was so desperately, speechlessly, in love with. He was smoking, always smoking, and talking animatedly about the script of his film, lost in his ambitions, his aspirations, arms gesticulating. Leaning towards him across the table, she was entranced, intoxicated, thrilled to have found him again.

  To be so high on the energy of the other, of the only man she had ever loved.

  1984.

  Luc’s studies were behind him, a first-class master’s from the Sorbonne in arts, humanities and social sciences, and he had written his first film. ‘The Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly – remember, Jane, when I took you to see the newly formed butterflies hill-topping, their mating antics?’

  Yes, she remembered that summer, that warm extraordinary day with dozens, hundreds of black-and-white beauties fluttering all around them.

  ‘It’s the subject of my film. And the dangers that lie in store for such species if we continue to abuse the earth.’

  A host of opportunities was opening up for Luc, and he, with his utopian dreams, was intent on grabbing them, on changing the world. While she … she had been shambling forwards. What had she dreamed of besides a life alongside Luc? To be his future wife, his partner, to bear his children. Hers had been unremarkable dreams, commonplace. Her horizons were not boundless as were his. She believed herself ordinary, not born to change the world, but she loved him deeply and would have crossed the great white plains to be at his side, to participate in his vision. She had aspired to be Luc’s wife and his loyal helping hand. Her gift was for languages and that was the direction she had finally opted for.

  One summer only – the summer of 1984, a few months before her nineteenth birthday – she had spent with him in the City of Lights before she had returned to England to begin her own university education.

  Luc could never have known how, that summer, when he had telephoned Jane out of the blue and invited her to Paris, he had swept her out of one of the most ghastly periods of her teenage life. The year before, when she had been seventeen, her mother had passed away while her father was absent from home. Peter had been travelling in the South of France, buying stock for his wine business. By then, he had picked up several impressive accounts and was finally earning a decent living for his family. Les Cigales paled beside them; in any case, he no longer paid visits to the Cambon estate. Even so, he was on the road more than he was in Kent, which left Jane alone with her mother to witness the silent passage from skeletal life to expiration.

  A mobile phone was an unheard-of device in the early eighties and Jane was unable to make contact with her father. He had rung home, left messages, but Jane had been at her mother’s hospice bedside. She had no way of notifying him, of signalling to him how close Vivienne was to the end. Their only child, Jane, bore the burden of the decision-making for the funeral arrangements. Vivienne Sanderson was buried to the strains of prayers recited by her daughter and a clutch of parishioners from their local congregation.

  When Peter eventually stepped through the door, Jane blurted out the news to him. ‘I hate you,’ she had yelled, running at him, ramming her head in his chest, coughing tears, beating at his V-necked pullover. She had blamed him, blamed her father, for his wife’s death, for his absences, for his tanned, easy-going manner, for her mother’s anguish and disillusionment.

  It was the following year Luc learned the news, eleven months after Vivienne’s death. As soon as he heard, he had telephoned Jane in Kent.

  ‘I am so sorry about your mother.’

  Jane had been tongue-tied. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Luc for four years, not since the summer when she was
fourteen and Clarisse had banished her from Les Cigales.

  Had Clarisse told her son about the showdown? Jane doubted it.

  ‘How are you, Jane?’

  The tenderness in his low-pitched voice, rich and resonant, thrilled her. She held the receiver tight against her face, pressing it deep into her cheekbone. Luc had never telephoned her before. During those lonely four years she had dreamed of him and their childhood days together on the estate, wondering what he was up to, how his student life was panning out, how he might have changed. No contact during all that time, and now he was at the other end of the line, inviting her to Paris.

  She couldn’t think what to answer, other than ‘Yes.’

  YES.

  A week later, she arrived at Charles de Gaulle. Luc met her off the RER train that delivered her to Châtelet from the airport. She had gained weight. ‘Puppy fat’, her teachers and father called it, but it was depression, big-time. Luc saw it. Her demeanour, her awkwardness. Clothes too tight, puckered around her thickened midrift. She knew she looked a sad sight with her tan skirt and kitten-heeled sandals, her gold-blonde hair pinned up in a scraggly bun in an attempt at bouffant.

  ‘How are you bearing up?’ He smiled. ‘You’re looking … fighting fit.’

  Her gaze remained downcast. She couldn’t bear to see the lie in his piercing green eyes. He lifted her bag from her shoulder, took the weight of it, and side by side they rode the Métro, silences broken by polite conversation, to place Maubert. He regrets inviting me, her mind yelled over and over. I look fat and boring and he’s so grown-up and handsome. So sexy.

  He presented her with a key to his studio on the fourth floor of a seventeenth-century stone haute maison at 20 rue Frédéric-Sauton. ‘Your very own key to Paris. Shall I write both our names in the hallway?’ he asked. Surely teasing.

  She shook her head. It was unnecessary. Who would be dropping by to visit her? With his usual attention to detail and facts, he pointed out to her that the building had been constructed, along with several others, in the narrow rue before the Revolution. Number six had been inhabited by Charles Le Brun. The name meant nothing to Jane.

  ‘Painter to the king, Louis XIV, possibly the most highly regarded artist of the seventeenth century.’ Luc winked. ‘By the way, our President Mittérrand lives two streets away. You’ve heard of him?’

  They ascended the four flights together in the cramped, iron-grilled lift. His proximity, the scent of him, the fall of his hair, grown longer than she remembered, made her catch her breath; she longed for him so, she thought she might faint.

  The narrow bed – narrow even by single standards – was a mattress within a wooden fold-down frame hooked into the wall of the studio. Everything was built into the walls. Bookshelves packed tight with heavy tomes on film-making, nature, philosophy, Algeria – his birth land – and Provence, his adopted one. It was a book-lined studio, perfectly tidy, with a minuscule kitchenette squeezed into a corner, two steps beyond the foot of the bed. It consisted of two electric rings, a metal sink and, beneath, a mini-sized fridge that shimmied and hummed relentlessly. The shower, washbasin and loo were closed off by a partition wall, so compact you had to hold your breath to shut the door. And that was it, aside from one square metre of corridor, with a hook to hang a coat, that led to the studio’s front door. The entire apartment comprised twenty-one square metres.

  And Jane loved it.

  ‘You’ll be fine here.’

  ‘It’s fabulous, Luc.’

  ‘I’m staying with a friend. I’ll be back to take you for dinner, if I may?’

  She nodded, placing her bag on the bed.

  Jane never met ‘the friend’. Luc returned later with a bottle of Moët. They drank the bubbly, hacked at triangles of cheese, talked incessantly into the late night, by which point they had kissed and he stayed in the studio with her, squeezing onto the mattress alongside her, wrapping his limbs about her to stop her slipping to the floor. Luc had taken her virginity. She had given it joyously, energetically, if a little awkwardly in that narrow, springless bed.

  They made love again and then again, and they giggled. She ecstatic, tipsy. A laughter that ripped out of her, surfing on rollers of happiness, of unleashed joy. He was reawakening in her the sap of life that coursed through her veins; she had forgotten ever having possessed such a potent energy.

  She had been euphoric, slipping discreetly into his studio, his tiny capital-city kingdom, sharing his bed and the few hours of his daily life that were available to her and not dedicated to his career, his future as a film-maker. When she woke in the mornings, he was gone. Off about his day. Fundraising for his film. Making contacts, meeting commissioning editors at the various television stations.

  During the hours he was away from her, she rose late, luxuriating in sheets perfumed by their bodies, their lovemaking, drank mugs of coffee, read, mooched about the streets, staring into the windows of the boutiques, spent her afternoons at the Louvre, pressed by crowds speaking in a confusion of tongues all of which she longed to learn, or the cinema – The Shining (no, they had seen that film together, she remembered; Luc had hated it), The Last Metro, Atlantic City, Amadeus. Buried in small art-houses where she would be one of an audience of two or three, Wajda’s Danton incarnated by a slender charismatic Gérard Depardieu. Confidentially Yours: how she had longed for the poise of Fanny Ardant. Her first encounters with the comedies of Eric Rohmer.

  Afterwards out into the clear, light summer evenings, birds chirruping in the plane and chestnut trees along the narrow streets, to the food stalls of the sixth arrondissement, close to Odéon, where she shopped for wine and provisions for a supper à deux that could be prepared on two electric rings. There was no telephone in the studio. She never knew when he would arrive back, but she was always there waiting, with the tiny, crooked-legged table laid. Candlelit. Wine chilled. She, cross-legged on the bed, devouring his books – she had found Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro – or listening to his music: Miles Davis, Lift to the Scaffold, Bill Evans, especially Bill Evans. Some days she played the Time Remembered LP over and over, ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ Other days she washed up, showered, made coffee, hummed, danced, spun about the studio to tracks by Jackson Browne, King Sunny Adé, Stan Getz: all unfamiliar names to her. Her horizons were widening. She was in a state of rapture, giddy from good sex. And it hit her one morning, suddenly, just like that, that she was in love. The warmth of the emotion rose up from within her, like a flower opening.

  She was creeping out of her shell, shedding her grief, getting slimmer and splashing out on lacy underwear. This chrysalis state would have been pure euphoria had she not been bothered by doubt and fear. Fear because she loved this man so deeply and was afraid of losing him again. Doubt that her love could ever be reciprocated.

  Her exaltation was crushed one evening when he told her that he would soon be driving south to spend a few weeks of the summer at the estate with his mother and aunt. ‘Come with me?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Why not? You don’t start university till October. We can swim and read and take a tent and a camera and go hiking up in the Mercantour, make love on top of the mountains. Let’s flush the city out of our hair.’

  She longed to say yes. ‘I couldn’t.’

  He furrowed his brow. ‘They’ll be pleased to see you again.’

  ‘No, no, they … She won’t. Your mother won’t welcome me.’

  ‘Why ever not? You and your father were always welcome in our home. My mother looked forward to your visits. Both she and Aunt Isa regarded your father highly. He has an acute understanding of wine commerce.’

  Jane bit her lip. ‘Luc, your mother and I had an argument. She kicked me out, never to return.’ Dare she confide the whole truth?

  ‘That sounds like my hot-tempered mother.’ He laughed. ‘You mustn’t take her seriously.’

  ‘It’s better I don’t come …’

  ‘I don’t know why you woul
d hurt yourself with such nonsense, but if I cannot persuade you, then I must go alone.’

  Almost three decades later, Jane Cambon, freshly widowed, stood in the snow in place Maubert and gazed along the street to the building where she and Luc had first become lovers. What if she had accompanied Luc on that youthful trip south? Might she and Clarisse have made their peace, ended the feud that had caused so much heartache over the years? But no apology from Clarisse could have erased the loss that young Jane had carried silently in her heart.

  11

  Slowly, careful not to slip on the settling snow, Jane crossed the boulevard Saint-Germain, drawn one step at a time towards 20 rue Frédéric-Sauton. The door from the street needed no code to access the interior during the day, or that had been the system back in the eighties. She pressed the exterior buzzer and the door swung open, as if by magic. The tiny hallway was barely bigger than a floor mat. It used to be, and still was, where the letterboxes were situated alongside the call buttons for each of the studios and apartments.

  Nothing has changed, she thought. He might still be here leaning over me, checking for post, nuzzling my hair, or upstairs working at the table, waiting for me.

  Luc’s studio had been on the fourth floor. CAMBON had been written in his hand in black ink next to the button. A locked glass door gave access to the lift or stairs alongside it. She tried to recall the entry code from all those years earlier, but she could not. In any case, it would have been changed on numerous occasions since.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her head against the bank of mailboxes. A melting snowflake slipped from her sodden hair, licking her face, as she evoked those blissful days of innocence. Days she had lived four floors above where she was now standing. The warmth of her memories wrapped themselves around her, threatening to squeeze too tight …

  During that long-ago midsummer, as they had lain in bed, the windows were always wide open to alleviate the heat and city clamminess. The clatter of cutlery and buzz of conversations rose up from the pavement restaurants and the roar of traffic from along the boulevard Saint-Germain, while above them were half a dozen poutres, the dark wooden beams that ran the length of the ceiling. A candle guttered on the table that doubled as Luc’s desk, causing elongated shadows to hover and dance on the white walls. Some nights when he was sleeping and she was awake, staring at those black shadows, she had tried not to dwell on who else might have shared this intimate space with him.