‘But I can’t just dump him and—’
He looked offended. ‘I wasn’t suggesting that you dump him anywhere, Lu. I simply suggested it might not be outside the bounds of possibility for him to stay at Del’s for one night. That’s all.’
‘Yes, but that’s not the point. It’s not really fair to—’
He put down the pen again and rolled his eyes. ‘Lu, why don’t you just call her and ask her?’
Where my car being officially dead had lent the morning an air of melancholy, the prospect of being asked to drive my boss all the way to France and back replaced it with one of complete unreality. It had never occurred to me that he might ask me to do such a thing. Which was patently silly. He zipped back and forth across the Channel all the time, so it was hardly a completely outlandish request. But I so hated putting upon Del. She did so much for me as it was.
‘Oh, but that’ll be absolutely fine!’ she chirruped, when I telephoned to outline the unexpected French development for her. ‘I’m happy to have Leo for you any time, you know that. And how exciting! Goodness me, your life’s getting very jet-setty all of a sudden! And about time too, I say. Ooh, Lu, I’d give my eye teeth for a chance to - hey! And there’s a thought! Perfect!’
‘Perfect what?’
‘Perfect timing! You can get me some stuff for my party! Of course! You’ll have time to stop at a hypermarket, won’t you? Of course you will. So you can get me some cheese and some wine and - tell you what, I shall sit down and make you a list. Thursday, you say? Perfect, Lu. Perfect!’
So that was all right, then.
‘Oh, and by the way, trust you and Stefan are still OK for Saturday? I’ve decided on St Trinian’s. OK?’
‘Pardon?’
‘My theme. I’m going for St Trinian’s. You know - white socks, gym knickers, pigtails and so on. Sure you can rustle something up. Anyway, must dash.’
Oh, God.
9
Thursday 3 May
Well. Here we are, then.
So, we drove the two hundred-odd miles to Folkestone and we went through the tunnel, and then we were in France, and it was actually quite all right. Which was an unexpected but pleasing turn of events. After feeling so ambivalent about the whole thing, I was surprised to find myself both enjoying driving the beastie car, and enjoying the prospect of a night in France too. I had not been to France since my grandmother’s funeral. And I hadn’t been away on my own since Leo was born. And though this was work (and though work was boilers), the thought of an overnight stay in a foreign hotel was not without its appeal. We arrived at the Luxotel mid-afternoon, and though I was a little tired from the driving, I was also in a rather pleasant end-of-term-start-of-the-holidays frame of mind.
Of course, it had been helped enormously by the fact that Joe refrained from grousing, griping and generally being a pain for the entire journey. But, then, he did spend it in the back seat, engaged, for the most part, in tapping quietly but industriously on his new laptop. His infrequent contributions therefore consisted mainly of tuts, ahs!, ri-ights and of courses, most of which were addressed to himself. There was the occasional explosive pah! - this was not a perfect world and we still had to have the radio tuned to Five Live until Folkestone - but as I was no more expected to voice opinions in response to these than to pass judgement on the latest innovations in gas-burner technology, I was able to filter them out and enjoy the view.
The view of Monsieur Deschamp, legs akimbo on a bar stool just off Reception, was a much less pleasing sight. He slithered off it as we came through the entrance and welcomed us (me, specifically) as if we were much-cherished relatives just returned from a lengthy expedition round a salt flat or canyon.
‘We are arrived!’ he announced, with a smile and a clap and a roll of his Rs, topped off by three mwah-mwah kisses. Fortunately for me, however, there was a serious boiler discussion to be got down to, which meant I could skulk off and lollop around on my own for a couple of hours.
‘But later,’ Joe suggested, ‘you might like to join us. I’ll be taking Jean Paul and Claude out for dinner - we generally head into town when I’m here. Up for that?’
Monsieur Deschamp lifted an encouraging brow.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, my own knitting slightly in response. ‘It’s been a long drive. I’m—’
‘But I absolutely insist,’ the slimy Frenchman added. ‘We cannot possibly pass up the opportunity of showing Mademoiselle Fisher a good time, as you put it.’
‘Whatever,’ said Joe, obviously noting my scowl. ‘It’s entirely up to you.’
It was still way too warm to sit in my hotel room, even by late evening, so after the surprisingly agreeable novelty of a solitary à la carte dinner in the half-empty restaurant, I fetched my book - a newly purchased volume about twentieth-century art - then went back down to sit on the terrace. But not before ordering a large brandy, which, with my reliably ill-advised half-litre-of-wine-on-board-already variety of logic, I thought might help me to sleep.
The hotel, situated close to the A6 for the convenience of weary commercial travellers, was in a complex of business and industrial units out on the low hills that circled the town. As ambience went, it would not win any prizes, but in darkness - the sun had finally dipped below the horizon - the vast skyscape dwarfed all the surface-based eyesores, and bathed the fields of young sunflowers and low, stubbly brassicas in a slow-moving gauze of peppermint light. I sipped at my Cognac and opened my book and was soon away somewhere between Post-minimalism and Fluxus. If, admittedly, not much the wiser about either.
Aha! And what are we reading, Lucienne?’
I had been so absorbed in my book that, half an hour or so later, the voice behind me made me jump. It was speaking in French, so I assumed it was the waiter. But the waft of pungent aftershave (testosterone base with a note of old ashtray) should have alerted me. I turned to find that it was Monsieur Deschamp, obviously back from their beano in town and, judging by his expression, still in full party mood. Joe and Monsieur Dumas were inside, ordering drinks. He puffed on his cigarette and pulled out a chair beside me.
‘Oh,’ I said, turning down the corner and closing it. ‘It’s an art book. It’s about the—’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nodding, but not bothering to glance at it. ‘And clearly very good as it has kept you from us all evening. I was most disappointed.’ He puffed a bit more, engulfing us both in his fetid emissions, then crushed out the stub in a nearby ashtray. ‘So. Why didn’t you join us?’
He sat down. I stood up. ‘It’s been a long drive. I was tired. In fact—’
‘But, nevertheless, not yet in bed, I see.’ He glanced towards Joe, who was backing through the glass door with a brandy balloon. And leered. Leered, the creep. ‘And you haven’t drunk your Cognac yet, so you must stay for a while. Joe!’ he called, switching back to English. ‘Here is your assistant. I have found her. Come, persuade her to stay a while longer. We poor men need a little distraction from our drab and charmless world, do we not?’
Monsieur Dumas arrived also, and said something I didn’t quite catch, but the word ‘python’ was certainly there somewhere. The three of them then exchanged a blokey titter, so I assumed it related to the distraction element in their evening’s entertainment thus far. I put on my cardigan and did up all the buttons.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and drained the brandy in one swallow, ‘but I really am tired. I’ll see you all in the morning.’
I didn’t go up to bed. Once I had left the restaurant (and finished coughing, hacking, fanning my face, wiping my eyes and recalling, albeit hazily, that it took only one teaspoonful of neat alcohol to kill a perfectly healthy laboratory rat), I decided, as you do, that what I most needed was not to lie supine and misplace my head, but to stride about purposefully for a while in the fresh air. I wandered around outside the lobby for a few minutes, then found a narrow pathway, which wound between clusters of back-lit and aggressively burgeoning green shrub life, and eve
ntually brought me to the large garden at the back of the hotel. From down here, I could hear muffled voices coming from the restaurant terrace above, but I was far enough beneath them that if I didn’t venture out on to the lawn, they wouldn’t see me.
The hotel pool, which was flanked on one side by gaily striped yellow and white awnings, looked invitingly cool and inky, its surface glossy and fluid, like molten blue chocolate. Slipping off my cardigan - it was still very close - I wove carefully through the huddle of abandoned chairs and loungers (presumably clustered here in case of rain) then slipped off a sandal and poked a toe through the surface of the water. It was cold enough to make me gasp. I shook off the other shoe and sat down on the stone, hitched up my dress and slipped both legs in almost up to the knee. Ripples moved eel-like across the pool, glinting metallically as they peaked and dipped. I picked up my book, but it was too dark to read, so instead I just sat there and thought about Stefan. Which had become quite a thing with me lately, as these things generally do. Since we had slept together, the memory of his torso had an alarming tendency to pop into my mind all the time. That and the way his hair fell in such thick fluid commas on his shoulders, and how the touch of his rough painter’s hands made my skin gasp. In an agreeable haze, and caressed by the moonlight, I was, I realized, with no small degree of surprise, rather enjoying myself.
Correction. Had been.
‘Hello, you.’ The voice this time was soft, barely a whisper. And it was Joe’s. He had the brandy balloon clasped in the hand with the plaster. It was almost half full. ‘Shh, or they’ll hear us.’ He put a finger to his mouth. ‘What are you doing?’
My carnal reveries interrupted, I raised a foot from the water. Droplets streamed from my toes and danced on the surface. ‘What does it look like?’
‘I mean, I thought you said you were going to bed.’ He held out the glass for me to take then lowered himself carefully on to the ground beside me, and began to unlace his right shoe. I stopped wiggling my legs back and forth and wondered if this might be the moment to do just that. He had obviously decided to join me, and I wasn’t altogether sure I wanted him to. Quite apart from the fact that I was quite happy on my own, I wasn’t terrifically keen on the idea of being in such an up-close-and-personal proximity to my boss, particularly sans his footwear. Stefan’s stunningly brown and sculpted feet sprang to mind. Joe’s, no doubt, would be pallid and crusty, covered in barnacles and smelly to boot. And not only that: I wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t part of some elaborate and secretly promulgated burlesque they had planned - that Jean Paul Deschamp would soon enter stage left, and start prancing around in a leatherette thong. But, no. It was all right. I could still hear the other two talking above. So I continued to sit. I was cool. I was relaxed. I didn’t feel like moving. I supposed he could sit with me if he wanted.
‘It’s too hot to go to bed,’ I told him. ‘And I’m not tired enough anyway. I’m not used to having so little to do.’
He continued to fiddle with his shoes. ‘You could have come with us. I’m sure you would have enjoyed yourself.’
‘Oh, pur-lease.’ I rolled my eyes and nodded upwards to the terrace.
‘Jean Paul? Oh, take no notice. I’ve known him for years. He’s married with five kids, you know.’
‘Oh, that’s supposed to make a difference, is it? He’s a complete lech.’
‘You know what I mean. He definitely has the hots for you, I’ll grant you that. But he’s harmless enough. Look, could you give me a hand here?’
He had removed both shoes and socks (the latter being festooned with little Homer Simpsons - a present from Angharad?), and was trying, one-handed, to roll up his trousers. But struggling a little. Slightly reluctantly, I put down the glass then leaned across and began to do it for him. The hair on his legs was dense and dark. His feet were pale, of course (his, unlike Stefan’s, being a generally trousered occupation), but surprisingly smooth and undisgusting. I paused mid-roll, concerned for his creases. ‘How far do you want me to go with this?’
He grinned at me, teeth very white in the moonlight. ‘Oh, ho! Is this my lucky night? But I’m a helpless wounded man, remember. So just be gentle with me, OK?’
‘Oh, ho bloody ho,’ I muttered, stopping abruptly just short of his shins. He took no notice, and dipped his feet carefully into the water. My own looked tiny and pink beside them. And, though paradoxically, a little bit mer-like, on account of my newly varnished green nails.
‘Thank you. Oh, yes, that does feel good,’ he said. ‘Should have brought our bathers, eh?’
I leaned my arms out behind me and resumed my feet-flapping activities. But the brandy was making my head swim. I sat up straight again.
‘You can’t go swimming anyway,’ I said. ‘Not with that thing on your arm.’ He weighed the plaster in his free hand.
‘You’re right.’ He sighed. ‘I’d sink. God, but it’s warm for May, isn’t it? Couldn’t you just slip into that water right now?’
I could. My face was beginning to feel hot. Should have left the brandy. I dipped a hand in the pool then wiped it across my brow. ‘I think I will go to bed, actually,’ I said. ‘Early start in the morning.’
He frowned. His scar, now free of its neat row of stitches, curved in a shiny red line down his cheek. I wondered how much it would fade. ‘Oh, don’t go up yet,’ he urged. ‘It’s not even eleven. Here,’ he fished in his shirt pocket, ‘have a nicotine chewing-gum, why don’t you?’
He looked so earnest and keen that I felt suddenly churlish. For all its manifest feminine diversions, his must, I supposed, be an essentially solitary life. Just him and his boilers and his once-a-week access. I shook my head and pulled my feet from the water to let them dry a little, but I didn’t get up. ‘How’s it going? Must be hard with those two puffing Gitanes smoke in your face all the time.’
‘Ten days now.’ He pulled out the packet of gum, then seemed to think better of it and picked up his Cognac instead. ‘On this attempt, anyway. I’ll get there. May commit murder in the meantime, but I’ll get there.’ He laughed. ‘Or get murdered. I know I’m a little difficult to live with at the moment. So if not by you,’ he glanced at me as he said this, ‘then by Iona, probably.’
He drank a little then passed the glass back to me. My mouth plunged in and took a slurp without doing my brain the courtesy of consulting it first. I shook my head. ‘She’s too nice.’
‘Nice? She’s a tyrant. She bullies me relentlessly.’
‘Bullies you?’
‘To keep me in line. I think she thinks I need a firm hand.’ He smiled. ‘In the absence of having a dragon at home to do it any more.’
I concurred silently. ‘How long have you been divorced?’
‘Nowhere near long enough. Five years. You?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Oh. But what about Leo?’
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t marry Leo’s father. I found out he’d been seeing someone else just before I found out I was pregnant. So I … Well, telling him didn’t seem the best thing to do.’
‘Oh. So you dumped him?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Without telling him?’
‘Exactly.’ A hint of a pregnant (boom-boom, I don’t think) pause, which I could have filled with what occurred to me during it: that I’d sensibly dumped him before what had happened to Rhiannon and Angharad could happen to Leo and me. But I didn’t, because I had no fight in me about it any more. Instead I just said, ‘Do you have a problem with that?’
‘No,’ he said levelly. ‘I don’t have a problem with that.’ I wasn’t sure I believed him. He swivelled his head to face me. ‘So what about Leo? What does he know about his father?’ His tone, I realized, was entirely neutral for once.
‘Apart from the fact that he’s a bastard?’ He looked at me sharply. I waved a dismissive hand. ‘No. He doesn’t know that, obviously. But not everything,’ I said. ‘Not yet. I’m kind of hoping that when the time comes I’ll have wor
ked out what to say and how to say it. You know?’ He nodded, but didn’t comment. I swirled the brandy around in the glass and found myself slipping my feet back into the water. ‘Not that any of it matters, really. All that’s ever going to matter to Leo is that he doesn’t have a dad. And there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?’
He was silent for a moment, feet moving smoothly back and forth through the water. Then he laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Well, not funny really, I suppose. But what you said about Leo not having a father - it just made me think.’
‘What?’
‘Rhiannon has the opposite problem. For her the real difficulty is that Angharad does.’
‘Surely not.’
‘Not from a financial perspective. Oh, no. But I think it would suit her far better if I wasn’t around. I get in the way, you see. Spoil her carefully orchestrated victim image. Pah! As if! Anyway,’ he tipped his head back and looked up into the night sky, ‘you know what? Bollocks to her. That’s what I say.’
I looked up also. There were zillions of stars. Such a big sky. And how tiny we were. The man in the moon seemed to nod his assent. ‘Yes,’ I heard myself lustily agreeing. ‘Me too. Bollocks to both of them!’
The words, which had felt so nice while still on my tongue, boomed from my lips like a salvo of sucked gobstoppers, where they lingered malevolently in the still warm air. Horribly embarrassed, I glanced sideways to find him now staring straight at me. I swallowed some more brandy.
‘Um, I mean, when I say, “bollocks to both of them,” I don’t mean it personally - about your ex-wife, about Rhiannon, of course. I mean, I do mean it about Patri - about Leo’s father. Oh, yes. But not about her. I don’t know her, do I? She’s probably perfectly nice, and it’s not for me to make any assumptions about her or you and her or your marriage or - or - or, well, anything, really. I was just speaking, you know, generally, globally - in a spirit of solidarity and so on. You know?’
I wasn’t sure quite why a spirit of solidarity had gripped me. After all, it was Rhiannon I should be empathizing with, wasn’t it? But in any event, I was waving the brandy around somewhat theatrically by now. He grinned and held out his hand for the glass. ‘No, no,’ he said, taking it from me. ‘You go right ahead.’ He swallowed the contents. ‘Feel free.’
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