by India Knight
More? Okay. I also buy a lighter with ladybirds on it; a plain black dress with a very low neck (‘Mon Dieu, comme c’est cher.’ ‘Oui, Madame. Mais c’est d’une beauté!’); a silk lantern painted with almond blossom; a small, very sweet-faced stone tortoise; six scented candles (tuberose); Tintin socks for the boys (‘Three presents?’); Fauchon biscuits for Robert’s mother; a packet of Gauloises Blondes for me; a felt cloche hat (mistake); a second-hand volume of Maupassant short stories. I am laden with bags. I shop, and shop, and shop. Yes, I know it’s nearly all for me.
And then it’s 4.55 and I hail a cab to Angélina’s. In the taxi, I put on the cloche hat, which is both unseasonal and not especially becoming, in the certain knowledge that it will make Robert laugh.
It’s a long, narrow, crowded room, Angélina’s, and not brightly lit – kind to the faces that have tea there regularly, I suppose; kind to ladies who are fading. I zigzag down the room, bashing my bags against the little gilt chairs, feeling like someone from the 1920s – except, of course, for my figure – in my new hat and new lipstick. It’s a nice feeling, in a comical kind of way.
Robert is already there.
He doesn’t laugh at my hat.
He doesn’t smile, or say hello.
He says, ‘Clara. Sit down.’
I say, ‘I wasn’t planning on standing throughout.’
‘Listen,’ he says, which is when I notice that he looks like he’s about to vomit.
‘Robert! Why are you ignoring my hat?’ I sit down. ‘Isn’t it funny? Sort of funny, but nice? Look.’ I turn my head, so he can see the hat in profile. ‘I had my make-up done, Robert. I bought tons of things. I hope you don’t mind. I wonder why Bic lighters are so sweet in France – look, ladybirds – and so dull in England. I bought the boys some things too…’
The ladybird lighter sits between us.
‘Listen,’ Robert repeats.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What?’
‘I have got a new job,’ Robert says. ‘Here. In Paris. I have just signed the contract. It becomes effective next Monday.’
I am stunned. My mouth opens, like a fish’s, and shuts again. Then I say, ‘What job?’
‘Editing men’s Vogue,’ Robert says. ‘It’s called Vogue Hommes.’
‘It’s hardly going to be called Vogue Chiens. I’ll have a hot chocolate and a religieuse,’ I say to the waitress. In French, obviously. Thank God I speak it.
‘Thank God I speak French,’ I say.
Robert says nothing. Robert ne dit rien.
I reach for my cigarettes, and for my ladybird lighter, and as I fumble I become incredibly cross.
‘You might have told me!’ I say. ‘You might have said.’
‘Nothing was certain, until now.’
‘You might have discussed it with me all the same. Christ. Fuck. I mean, where are we going to live? Where am I going to work? More to the point, where are the boys going to go to school? Oh, there’s that English school, isn’t there? But what if they’re full? Oh, Robert, really, for God’s sake. And what about our house in London? I suppose we’ll rent it out?’ My head is spinning. A voice says: well, here’s some excitement; be glad. And then another voice, a very tiny one, hisses, Oi, fuckwit, he wanted to come to Paris for a job interview. Not a sexy weekend with you, Miss Deluded. For work. See?
But I don’t see.
And so I am very, very surprised when Robert says, ‘No.’
I say, ‘No? No renting? But I love our house. I don’t want to sell it.’
Robert says, ‘I am moving by myself. They’ve got me a flat. I am coming to live in Paris without you.’
And I still don’t get it. I say, ‘But why?’ Ha! I actually say, ‘But why?’, all puzzled.
‘Because I’m leaving,’ says Robert. ‘I’m leaving, Clara.’
Nothing goes black. Nothing spins. I don’t feel dizzy, or bilious, or sick. I don’t want to cry, yet, or shout. I say, quite quietly, ‘But I thought we pottered along.’
‘It’s not what I want either,’ says Robert. ‘Pottering.’
‘Do you love me? Or rather, when did you stop?’
‘Of course I love you,’ Robert sighs.
‘like a pet,’ I say. ‘You love me like a pet.’
‘Yes,’ says Robert, not unkindly. ‘I suppose I do.’
‘And it’s not enough?’
‘Not after last night. It made my mind up. It confirmed everything I’ve been thinking for months. Years, if I’m honest. Well, a couple.’
‘I was hysterical,’ I say hysterically, for which I could slap myself. ‘Don’t leave me because I was hysterical.’
‘You weren’t. You were right. I don’t care about you enough. Not in the way you want.’ He licks some crème patissière off his index finger.
‘I don’t want you to leave me,’ I say.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Robert. And he gives a little comedy shrug.
‘My babies,’ I say. ‘You’re leaving your children.’ I start crying now, properly. ‘You’re leaving your children,’ I repeat. ‘Like a cunt.’
Robert pushes his hands together, as if he were praying. Perhaps he is. What do I know?
‘I know, Clara,’ Robert says. ‘But I’ll see them every weekend. It’s only a train ride away. They’ll barely notice.’
Actually, this is true. But it doesn’t help.
‘You are a fucking pig, Robert,’ I say. ‘You are a fucking pig of fuck. Your head is so far up your arse you don’t know you’re born.’
Robert lights a cigarette. ‘Oink,’ he says, sadly.
Obviously, I try and leave the tea-room as swiftly and imperiously as possible, but am hampered by my large number of bags. As dramatic exits go, it’s flawed.
My husband is leaving me. My husband of eight years. My shifty, secretive, sneaky husband is leaving me. I wonder whether he’s having an affair. I will set fire to his clothes. I will ruin his life.
I am sobbing, and sobbing, and producing extraordinary quantities of mucus. I sob on the honeymoon bed; I howl on the loo. I feel ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated. My husband doesn’t love me – doesn’t even fancy me – and he’s dumped me. What a cunt. What a cunt.
‘You mustn’t worry about money,’ says Robert, a couple of hours later. He has let himself in and is taking off his suit jacket. ‘Or the house. We’ll put it in your name.’
‘I wasn’t worried about fucking money.’
‘What, then?’
‘Me. I was worried about me.’
‘Quelle surprise,’ says Robert.
Which I don’t think is a particularly helpful remark. I mean, it is my life that seems to be collapsing around me. If I’m not allowed to wallow hippopotamically in self-pity at this precise moment, then I would like to know why. I should wallow more, in fact. I would be quite within my rights (marital) to slash my wrists in a warm bath, or pop my head into an oven for a while, if there were one, which, this not being a self-catering apartment, there isn’t. All things considered, I don’t think this river-of-mucus effect is de trop in any way. I think it’s pretty self contained, in the circs.
‘Why?’ I ask Robert, blowing my nose and, for once, not caring that I am incapable of doing so without sounding like a bassoon player. ‘Why do you keep telling me how selfish I am?’
‘You are selfish,’ says Robert.
‘In what ways, exactly? I mean, right now I am worried about a) the boys, b) my emotional well-being, c) what people are going to say –’
‘Don’t be so provincial,’ says Robert. ‘Who cares what people are going to say?’
‘I do, arsehole,’ I shout. ‘I’m the one who’s going to have to tell everyone – you, of course, being so fucking wet that you conveniently find yourself in another country.’ Robert winces. ‘I’m the one who’s going to have to put up with the pitying looks and the speculation.’ I’d stood up and started pacing, but the very thought of the forthcoming flood of pity – I really find pity exceptionally hard to
take – makes me sit down again. ‘I’m the one of whom people are going to say, “Well, of course, I’ve been thinking there was something wrong for a while now.” I’m the one people are going to feel sorry for, and they’ll say wanky things to me like “Be strong”… But that’s okay, I suppose,’ I sneer, ‘because I am in fact so strong. Because I’m such a survivor. Because,’ I sob, ‘I never cry.’
‘Clara, do stop,’ Robert says gently. ‘You’ll be perfectly fine. And so will the boys.’
‘It’s like a bad dream, or a bad film. “Boys, Daddy and I love each other very much, but we can’t be together any more.” It’s mad. They’ve never even heard us fighting. They’ll think it’s a joke. And so will our friends. They’ll think I’m one of those women who can’t function without a crisis – that I’m one of those sad bints who invent dramas out of nothing so they can feel their life is exciting and worth living.’
‘You, of all people, should be able to work out a way of telling them. Ask Kate for advice, why don’t you? And the thing is, Clara, that I never see the boys during the week anyway.’
‘Unusually, for a father.’
‘No. Quite normally.’
‘Very unusually indeed, unless you’re a night watchman. Most men manage a quick kiss before breakfast. Most men actually quite like the idea of coming home a bit early to give their children their bath once in a blue moon.’
‘I’m not most men,’ Robert says, which would be insufferable were it not for the heartbroken expression on his otherwise calm, white face. ‘The point is, they only ever see me at weekends as it is, and that’s not going to change.’
‘They’ll know you’re not physically in the house, which is very unsettling, and which anyone could see if they weren’t a self-obsessed arse. They’re happy now because they may not see you, but they know you are there and that makes them feel safe. And now they won’t feel safe any more. And I tried so hard’ – the tears are coming again, oddly copiously – ‘to make them feel safe. That was all I ever wanted for them. I didn’t care about anything else, about school reports or… or anything. I wanted them to feel safe. I wanted them to feel things were constant and unchanging and solid. Solid, Robert. And you’ – I turn, screaming in rather a mad way, and stick my face right into his – ‘have fucked it up. You have fucked up the only thing I wanted for them.’
‘I never made them feel safe,’ says Robert quietly. ‘Not them, not you.’
‘They’re little boys, Robert,’ I shout. ‘They’re not aware of nuances. They felt safe because they had a mummy and a daddy and a nice house and some hamsters.’
‘You’re simplifying everything,’ Robert sighs, walking off to find our suitcase. ‘You make them feel safe. And you’re not leaving.’
‘As if I could! It’s such a fucking luxury, Robert. And only you have it.’
‘As if you’d want to, Clara, in a million years.’
I am lying down on the bed as Robert moves from the wardrobe to the suitcase, packing. He is packing very neatly. He is not chucking things in, but folding, smoothing, rolling up, inserting shoes into shoe-bags – he’s like some, American millionaire’s Mexican maid, looking annoyed and swearing in Spanish because there’s no monogrammed tissue paper to separate the layers of clothes.
I feel so sorry for myself that I think I might die. There is a terrible pain at the front of my head. I am curled on the bed like a creepy giant foetus, not actually rocking back and forth, but close. Robert is silent.
And then, suddenly, implausibly, I don’t feel like I might die at all.
Yes, I know I’m supposed to be distraught for a good few weeks – months? years? – more, and lose a pleasing amount of weight as a result of being tormented, rendered sleepless, hungerless, broken, by agonies of pain. I’m supposed to find myself during these months or years, as if I’d been mislaid. I’m supposed to realize the importance of female friendship, and think all men are shits until, one golden dawn, I meet some sensitive little flower with a manly chest who proves to me that maybe, just maybe, there are exceptions. I’m supposed to join a gym. I’m supposed to buy a dog.
Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think so. There are, after all, limits.
I don’t mean that, from lying there looking foetal and drowning in snot, I suddenly leap up, sing a song, dance a jig and race a lap of honour around the room. But a little light goes on. It says: oh, do stop whingeing. This is what you wanted. Okay, maybe you could have done without the humiliation angle – I agree, that sucks. But this is the natural culmination of everything, and the humiliation is the price you pay for trying to pretend. So stop pretending; don’t pretend it came out of the blue, the idea of separating. Because you know perfectly well it didn’t. You know perfectly well – yes, you do, liar – that it had occurred to you too. So come on, get up. Wash your face. Kate’s voice pipes in at this stage: ‘Darling, grim, I do see, but there’s never any need to look quite so plain.’ It’s going to be okay. Of course it is. How could it not be? No one’s died. It’s going to be fine. Things could be worse, remember? Things could always be worse.
Robert has commandeered the suitcase. It is to be his suitcase, it turns out. We are a two-suitcase family. He was doing his packing; and then he ran down to the street to buy a new suitcase, an empty, brand-new suitcase, for me. And I packed it. He’s not coming back to London with me – he ‘can’t face it, not right now’. He’s booked himself into a smaller, cheaper hotel for a few nights. His apartment will be ready in a few days; I will send his things on. He has the Vogue Hommes Fed Ex number written neatly on a piece of Smythson card in his top pocket and he hands it to me. He will see us soon; not next weekend – he starts work the following Monday – but the weekend after that. He will phone tonight and speak to the boys.
*
The smell of airports always nauseates me slightly – diesel and plastic and rubber – but there’s a smell of baking at Orly, a croissant smell, at 8.30 p.m. We sit and have coffee. I’m hungry.
‘I’m sorry, you know,’ says Robert. ‘I’m so really and truly sorry.’
‘Was there anybody else?’
‘No, Clara. There was only ever you,’ Robert says, and I believe him. The crotches of his suits are safe from my scissors. ‘But it wasn’t working any more, Clara, was it?’
‘I don’t know. No. I don’t suppose it was. But I don’t know what we’re comparing ourselves against.’
‘I want to be happy,’ says Robert. ‘And I want you to be happy, all the time.’
‘Buy me a croissant, then,’ I say, and Robert smiles the biggest smile of the last two days and does. He buys me two: one plain, one almond, wrapped in a napkin for the plane.
We say goodbye by Customs.
‘I’m sorry,’ Robert says again.
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘For… whatever it was. For everything. Or nothing.’ I laugh nervously heeheehee, like in a comic.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ says Robert. ‘And kiss the boys for me,’ he whispers, ‘on their soft little heads.’ He strokes my cheek with his hand and hugs me very tightly. ‘Goodbye, Clara.’
‘Goodbye, Robert.’
I’ve never seen my husband cry before. There’s always a first time. And a last, I reflect, as he turns and walks away, and waves, and waves again, his fingers uncurling palely, slowly, strengthlessly. He does not turn around.
EPILOGUE
Three months later
‘Why am I dressed like a girl?’ asks Charlie.
‘You’re not dressed like a girl, darling. You’re dressed like a pageboy. It’s different. It’s very special.’
‘I’m full of flowers,’ says Charlie, not entirely convinced. ‘Flowers are girly.’
‘Not always, Charlie,’ I say. ‘Anyway, it could be worse. You could be covered in Barbie-patterned pink fabric.’
‘Aargh!’ shouts Charlie, dizzy with horror.
‘I look so so smart,’ states Jack. ‘I look so so smart. I love flowers. I love sniffin’.’
‘Sniffing, Jack. Not sniffin’. You both look extremely smart,’ I agree.
Kate has, wisely, desisted from picking the dress-the-children-as-dwarfs option so often favoured at weddings, when the bride appears followed by a retinue of sinister Oompa-Loompas in replica miniature-adult suits, like micro-publicans in burgundy nylon. The boys are wearing cream silk waistcoats, hand-embroidered with flowers, floppy, untailored silk jackets and loose matching trousers. (Jack nearly peed laughing when Max, Kate’s intended, referred to these as ‘pants’. Less impressively, so did I.)
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘We’re going to be late. Does anyone need to go to the loo?’
‘No,’ they both shout.
‘Sure?’
‘No,’ says Jack. ‘I am thinking.’
‘Shoes on,’ I say to Charlie.
‘I’ve thought,’ says Jack. ‘I am going for a wee-wee. I will do the wee-wee standing up,’ he announces, much as one might announce sawing a person in half for one’s next trick.
‘Hurry up,’ I tell him, impressed by this new development. ‘We’re cutting it fine.’
‘Is he meeting us at the church?’ says Charlie.
‘Yes, darling, he is.’
‘Yay!’ says Charlie. ‘Can I sit next to him?’
‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘We’ll see.’
Jack comes haring out of the downstairs loo. He likes peeing with the door open and so has overheard.
‘Did you shake-shake?’ asks Charlie concernedly. ‘Remember, Jack, you have to shake afterwards.’
‘I shaked,’ says Jack. ‘Mummy? I want to sit next to him,’ he yelps, sounding grief-stricken. ‘I want to sit on him. On the lap of him.’