A Place for Us

by Harriet Evans

  How could he ask her questions like this? She stared at him blankly, not sure what she was about to do, and then someone took her arm gently.

  “Come on, Flo.” She looked up to find Jim standing in front of her, puffing hard, out of breath. “Let’s go and get a drink.”

  “Oh, Jim.” She wanted to throw her arms around him, and remembered just in time the journalist, still watching them.

  Jim leaned against a wall, wheezing. “I’m so unfit. I only just made it. They wouldn’t let me miss the lecture. It’s all anyone’s talking about in the common room, I can tell you.” He turned to the journalist. “Good-bye, then,” he said in his firm but awkwardly shy way, and took her arm. “Shall we go back to the Courtauld?” he asked, shepherding her across the street. “There’s a bit of a hero’s welcome there for you, if you fancy it?”

  “Oh, no, absolutely not, I’m sorry. I want some peace and quiet.”

  “Right. Want me to leave you, then?”

  “No, please don’t.” She clutched his hand so ferociously that he laughed.

  “All right, of course. Come on, we’ll go to the pub.”

  • • •

  In Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a tiny, warrenlike pub off Fleet Street, Florence found a table deep in the vaulted cellars, while Jim went to the bar. She sat waiting for him, blinking hard, clutching her handbag on her lap and wishing everything weren’t so loud in her head, the clamor of too many voices all shouting to be heard.

  Jim appeared and handed her a stiff gin and tonic. “Congratulations!” he said, clinking her glass. “How do you feel?”

  Florence gulped down her drink. “Relieved, I suppose,” she said. “Glad it’s over.”

  Jim watched her. “Are you going to call your mother? Your family?”

  “Oh. Maybe later.” She shook her head. “They won’t care. I haven’t told them much about it. Anything, really.”

  “Come on, Flo. They’ll be over the moon. We all are.”

  Florence couldn’t tell him what she wanted to, what she’d told Lucy. She couldn’t bear to say it again. They’re not my family. I don’t belong to anyone. She just shrugged.

  Jim said softly, “Flo, the way those lawyers tried to bring you down in there was horrible. You could sue Peter for defamation.”

  Florence felt her eyes twitching, with tiredness, with mortification at the memory of what they’d said. She rubbed them. She couldn’t really bear to think about the last four days of the trial, how Peter’s barrister had, in his opening statement, exposed in five short minutes the sad, pathetic nature of her outer life. “My suing days are over.” Florence downed the rest of her drink. She didn’t feel triumphant. Just reckless, and quite mad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it. I wish everything hadn’t come out like this.”

  “Come on, Flo!” Jim looked appalled. “You can’t say that.”

  “It’s mortifying.” She looked almost with surprise at her empty glass. “They made me look so—so pathetic. I haven’t had that since . . .”

  Since Daisy.

  “Let me remind you, Flo,” Jim said, “that when you took this on, you were very clear to me. You wanted to prove your point. You wanted to show them they couldn’t push you around.”

  “Yes. Yes . . . I suppose so. I can’t remember why now.” She brushed her forehead with her hand, bewildered. “Peter—he and George, they were trying to get rid of me. And I’m better than both of them. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “But you know you could have moved back here.”

  “And do what?” She looked up uneasily as the door swung open.

  “Flo, you’ve just won a plagiarism case that says you wrote the biggest-­selling book in recent memory on the Renaissance. Students come from all around the world to the Courtauld just to hear you lecture. You know that admissions to your course rose by nearly sixty percent after you joined us?” She shook her head. “You’ve written three other books. You’re—you’re about to be in demand. Get used to it. Stop thinking you’re not part of the rest of society.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Florence picked at the worn trim of the stool. “Sure. It’s just . . .”

  Jim said gently, “Just what?”

  She glanced up, and caught his kind gray eyes staring at her. She thought how well she knew him, how lucky she was that, in all this, she still had a friend, one friend.

  The fact that she’d kept in a special bag a tissue Peter Connolly had left at her apartment. The lists she’d kept of things they’d done, found in one of the manuscripts he still had. The stories, repeated over and over to colleagues, the notes she’d written him . . . The mug he’d used that she never washed. A piece of pink paper stuck to the fridge, a flyer advertising a joint lecture at the college: Professor Connolly and Professor Winter. Seeing their names printed together had continued to give her a thrill long after the paper grew faded and crinkled in the sun.

  Florence had always told everyone that she didn’t care what they thought of her. She had told Daisy she didn’t care about the notes left on the bed, the wasps’ nest, the constant pinches and bruises her sister gave her that no one ever seemed to notice. Only once had she cracked and told Ma, creeping into the kitchen while Daisy was out with Wilbur, silent tears running down her grubby face. And Ma had kissed her and said, “Oh, Flo. You have to learn to get on with other people, birdie, instead of telling tales. Like I say. Fight back.”

  And Florence was left with her mouth open, her tongue dry, wanting to speak but too frightened. I think she might kill me if I fight back.

  It had always been easier and safer to retreat into her own mind. And who was there who could help her, who would listen? She had burned her boats with everyone, really, except Jim. As she smiled awkwardly into his kind face, she knew she couldn’t talk to Jim about it. She liked him too much. She could feel the doors sliding shut, feel herself pulling the trapdoor in, retreating. The fact was she’d been living in her own world for so long she wasn’t sure if she could ever live anywhere else again.

  Jim interrupted her thoughts. “What will you do now?”

  Clearing her throat, Florence tried to sound businesslike. “I think I might go back to Florence next week. Get on with some work. A new paper for the I Tatti Studies Harvard journal on the relationship between Lorenzo de Medici and Gozzoli and how the latter controlled Lorenzo’s public image, you know, not only the frescoes but—” She saw that Jim was staring at her with a slightly glazed expression, and she stopped. “Anyway, I need to work. Most of the summer, I suppose.”

  “What about the TV people?”

  “Oh, they were just being nice, don’t you think?”

  “They’re not charity workers. You should call them.”

  “Listen, Jim,” she said, wanting to change the subject, “thank you. Thank you for everything the last few months. I don’t know what I’d have done without you. Gone mad, probably. Thanks for having me to stay too. It’s great that Amna doesn’t mind me clogging up the house.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think she’d be bothered one way or the other.”

  “When’s she back?” Jim had said something about Istanbul for a conference, but conferences didn’t last a month. Florence had been so wrapped up in herself lately, it only occurred to her now that this was unusual.

  “Oh. Well, she’s back. Back a couple of weeks ago, in fact. It went well.” Jim nodded, then looked into his glass.

  “Is she?” Florence didn’t understand. “Oh. Where is she, then?” She wondered if Amna had been eating breakfast with them every day, chatting about history or academic gossip in the evenings while making pasta in the kitchen, and she simply hadn’t noticed in her self-obsession.

  “Florence, we’ve split up.”

  “Who?”

  “Good grief, concentrate. Me! I mean, me and Amna.”

  She shook her head, blinds
ided. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “You should have said.” She felt embarrassed. “I wouldn’t have stayed if—”

  He laughed. “What, like a Victorian maiden? You don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be in the house alone without Amna as a chaperone?”

  “Don’t laugh at me,” she muttered, flushing.

  “I’m not, sorry.” His nice old face grew serious, and he said, “I never saw her. She was away three weeks out of four. The house is too big for one person waiting for the other person to come home. And—well, no big surprise, but there’s someone else.”

  “Oh. Oh, my goodness.” Florence impulsively put her hand on his, which was wrapped round his glass. “I had no idea, Jim. I’m so sorry. I feel I’ve been no friend to you while it’s been going on and you’ve been . . .” She could feel herself wanting to cry again, and dug her hand into her thigh. For God’s sake, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Wait till you get home. You can indulge it then. You can do what you want with your life then.

  And a seed took root in her thoughts then, a seed that sprouted and grew rapidly and that was, she realized then, really the only solution to all of this. But she didn’t say anything to Jim, who was watching her intently.

  “I’m fine about it,” he said. “It’s been over for years, really, and now I can get on with life. Leave it behind me.” He cleared his throat. “Do you understand what I mean?”

  They stared at each other. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps I do.”

  “Everything’s changed,” Jim said, and he shifted a little closer to her; but Florence’s knees knocked against the stool that was between them, and she flung it away impatiently so it rolled on the floor. As Jim picked it up and set it right again, she watched him and knew that she wasn’t in any state for this, not now, probably not ever.

  Dear Jim. With a monumental effort she plastered a smile on her face and said, “Let’s change the subject. I want to know what you thought about Talitha Leafe. I heard from someone at the academy that she asked David Starkey out before she went for Peter. She’s apparently a well-known TV historian stalker. Have you come across her before?”

  Jim was silent for a moment, and then gave one of his delighted chuckling laughs and shifted his weight on the stool, and she was glad to have made him smile, to leave everything else behind, to be gossiping and talking about someone else for once. When she got back to Florence, that’s when she’d take the next step, the final one. Not today.

  Cat

  SINCE THEY HAD come back, all Luke could do was ask when they’d be seeing Southpaw again. When they would be going back to En­gland. He still cried when Cat left him at crèche, though nearly five months had passed. He was four and naughty now, when during the supposedly terrible twos and threes he had been sweet-natured and gentle. She had braced herself and contacted Olivier to ask if they could come and visit him in Marseilles. Now that she was stronger, perhaps it was time to loosen the reins a bit, let Luke get to know his father, though her every fiber screamed that this was not what she wanted for him.

  But Olivier had completely vanished. She’d e-mailed him several times, even called him, though she dreaded speaking to him. All to no avail. Cat even went back to Bar Georges and asked Didier if he’d heard from him. Didier thought he’d left Marseilles and gone to live in La Réunion. A new girlfriend who owned a jazz club on the island, in Saint-Denis, had offered Olivier a regular gig, Didier said. He had given Cat a café cortado on the house while Cat stood at the bar, shaking with rage and then relief. Pure, sweet, relief, at the idea that Olivier might just not be her problem anymore, that the guilt she felt and the worry that he might, like a bogey monster of her childhood nightmares, appear from under the bed and snatch her son away had gone, that that might all be over.

  So now it really was just her and Luke, and he was more difficult every day. He seemed to have grown nearly a foot since Christmas. He was too big for the small, intricate apartment. He was rude, and so badly behaved that Madame Poulain now refused to look after him when Cat went to the doctor about her swollen toe. She had stubbed it on a treacherous cobblestone, dodging a group of Italian schoolchildren by Notre-Dame, two weeks ago, and it had grown huge and turned an angry red, like a cartoonish injury in an Asterix book. She couldn’t sleep, and every time she moved in bed, pain shot through her like a bolt of fire. It was waking Luke up too.

  “I’m not taking care of that child. He is méchant, a horror. He is a bad child. He draws disgusting animals.”

  “I know—I apologize. . . .” The dragon in green pen on the bathroom wall still hadn’t come off, despite Cat scrubbing it twice a day for the past week.

  “And he sticks his fingers in his eyes and calls me rude names.”

  Cat, clasping her hands in the doorway, had paused. “What does he call you?”

  Madame Poulain had shaken her fist. “A troglodyte. He says”—she had cleared her throat—“that his great-grandfather taught it to him. Disgusting that he does this, puts lies in the mouth of your dear dead grand-père.”

  Cat’s shoulders had started to shake, almost involuntarily. It kept happening to her, this feeling when she didn’t know whether she was about to laugh or burst into tears. “I’m so sorry,” she had managed to say. “So sorry. Please, if you could just—”

  But Madame Poulain had refused, and Cat had had to drag Luke out with her, screaming and crying, “No! Stop trying to snatch me!” across the bridge toward the boulevard Saint-Germain and the doctor.

  This afternoon, two days later, it was still pouring with rain. As Cat hobbled along uncertainly, one bandaged toe now encased in a cartoonlike plastic boot, she slipped on the cobblestones again, and nearly knocked over a smartly dressed old man. She clutched him by the shoulders. “Excusez-moi, Monsieur.”

  He turned to her. “It’s quite all right,” he said, in a voice so like Southpaw’s it made her heart stop. “Don’t apologize. It’s treacherous out here.”

  She went on her way, trying not to cry, though as it rained harder and harder she gave in to it. How did he know she was English? That she didn’t belong here, more so than ever?

  • • •

  “Luke, please will you clear away your pens and help me set the table?”

  “I can’t, not yet,” Luke answered. “I have to finish . . . this . . . Gruffalo . . . very carefully. It’s very impotent.”

  “Important. No, you can finish it later. After supper.”

  “He is a monster,” said Madame Poulain into her vermouth.

  “That’s right,” Cat said absently. The rain dripped through the tiny crack in the steamed-up kitchen window. The stench of drains and rubbish from the tiny galley kitchen hung in her nostrils. Her broken toe ached more than ever—she was sure now that going to the doctor had been a mistake. They’d strapped it so tightly to her second toe that now all of her foot, rather than just the big toe, throbbed with pain.

  Suddenly Madame Poulain screeched at Luke. “Put these things away. Away! It is my house, my rules, you dirty, naughty boy.”

  “Madame Poulain—” Cat said wearily.

  “No!” shouted Luke. He picked up the felt-tip pens, like candy-­colored plastic sticks, and threw them, all of them, at Madame Poulain. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate being here! You are horrible, you keep us here like a witch, you should let Maman go! I hate you! I hope that you turn into a bird and fly away into an electricity pylon and zzzzzzzap! You get fried and you die and it’s really horrible!”

  As Cat watched, frozen in horror, Luke picked up the nearest pen, a bright acid green, and ran over to the white wall. Her phone rang, buzzing loudly on the table beside her and jerking her into action. She ran over to him and scooped him up from behind, swinging him around away from the wall.

  “Luke! No! You don’t, you don’t do that! ” She plucked the pen out of his h
and and slapped his wrist—she felt it was a pathetic action, and he gave her a strange, almost humorous look, and that half-sob, half-laugh wave of emotion swept over her again. She swallowed it down. Her phone rang again and she knocked it off the table in fury.

  “Take the child upstairs and leave him there. And then . . .” Madame Poulain hesitated, and Cat saw that she didn’t know what to do next, and neither did she, Cat. They had no formal arrangement, no ties that bound them together. They were not family.

  As Cat stood there panting, holding a screaming Luke, her phone rang again, on the floor. She released him too suddenly, and he jumped onto her foot, stamping on her strapped-up toe. Cat screamed too, a great big howl of pain, and Luke looked up at her, his dark eyes huge. She stroked his hair. “Sorry. It’s my toe. I’m—I’m fine.”

  Madame Poulain did not move, so Cat very slowly hobbled over to the dining table, reached down, and picked the phone off the floor. She put her arm around Luke’s shoulders. “Please, Luke. Say sorry.” Ignoring the searing pain in her foot, she answered. “Allô? ”

  “Is someone being murdered in there?” came a clear voice. “It sounds like it.”

  “Who’s—who is this?” Cat said slowly. “Is that you?”

  “It is, darling.”

  “Gran?” Cat whispered into the phone. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m downstairs,” said Martha.

  “Where? ” Cat swallowed.

  “I’m downstairs. Waiting outside. You said I should come and visit. Well, I’m here. Is now a good time? I heard the most awful sounds. Even with the rain.”

  “Now . . . now’s a very good time,” said Cat, laughing. She didn’t know what else to do. “I’ll buzz you up.”

  She looked around the crowded, bright apartment, like an antiques shop. At Madame Poulain’s cold, furious face. At Luke, scared and cross, arms folded, looking at the floor. “No. Stay there. I’ll come down. I don’t want you to come up here.”