‘When I’m inside you,’ he says. ‘You’re imagining that I’m someone else, aren’t you?’
Viola frowns. ‘Don’t talk like that, it’s vulgar.’
‘You can’t silence me completely. I’m still a man, even if you’re using me to fulfil some other fantasy you have.’ Henri smiles. ‘Perhaps you are pretending I am a woman.’
Viola sighs. ‘Hardly. Unless she’s got a very deep voice.’
Henri raises an eyebrow. ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re into. Except that you’re not into me.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Viola asks, doing up her buttons. ‘Maybe I am.’
‘Oh, I’m not that stupid,’ he says. ‘If you were fucking me, I could tell.’
Suddenly, Viola feels a little guilty and is about to say something defensive, when she shakes it off. ‘Hey, it’s not as if you’re in love with me or anything like that, so you can stop acting so morally superior—’
‘How do you know? Perhaps I am.’
Viola rolls her eyes. ‘Oh, please. The only person you’re in love with is yourself.’
For a second, in the silence, Viola thinks she might have gone too far. Then Henri laughs. ‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘I suppose you’re right about that, but that’s only because I’m so fucking lovable.’
Viola snorts. ‘Yeah, so I might close my eyes and think of someone else, but I bet you’ve got your eyes wide open to stare into that.’ She nods up at the large gilt-edged mirror hanging above the booth.
Henri laughs again. ‘You’ve a great imagination,’ he says. ‘I like it.’ He pats the leather beside him. ‘Don’t run off. You always run off afterwards.’
‘What? You’re missing your post-coital cuddle, are you?’ Viola says. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you the type.’
Henri shrugs. ‘So, perhaps I’m not as ruthless, as heartless as you think.’
Viola looks at him. ‘Oh, I’ll bet you’re even more ruthless and heartless than I think. In fact, I don’t doubt it for a second.’
Henri sighs. ‘Then, tell me where you’re running off to.’
‘Home. Bed. It’s nearly morning as it is. Not all of us are vampires.’
Henri shrugs. ‘I suppose, if I have no heart then I have no blood either. Nor any feelings, according to you.’
‘Exactly,’ Viola says. ‘It’s all making sense now.’ She blows him a kiss. ‘Night-night.’
‘Wait,’ Henri says. ‘Are you going home to him?’
‘To who?’
‘To the one you think about when you’re … with me.’
‘Of course not.’ Viola gives a slight squawk of a laugh at the absurdity of this question. ‘If I could do that, then why would I be here with you?’
Henri’s face is still at this and he says nothing in return. And so Viola turns, with one last goodbye, and walks away. It’s only when she’s passed through the kitchens, when she’s stepping out of the back door, that Viola realises that the loss of love has made her cruel.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mathieu had given up all hope of ever seeing her again when he spots her. Or, rather, her red hat as it weaves through the shoppers and tourists winding along Trinity Street. In his surprise and delight, Mathieu almost calls out her name, but realises just in time that such exuberance might unnerve her and that’s the last thing he wants to do. He’ll have enough trouble keeping a lid on his excitement when they’re face to face. So, instead, Mathieu runs, or rather slips and slides along the street, pushing past people, casting apologies left and right but never stopping, not until he’s close enough that he knows he won’t lose her again. And then Mathieu slows, catches his breath and attempts to feign at least a modicum of nonchalance as he reaches out to tap Viola’s shoulder.
She’s frowning as she turns to see who’s stopping her, but this frown is transformed into a look of such joy as she sees him that Mathieu realises he doesn’t need to pretend to be feeling anything less than he feels, since she is so clearly feeling the same way. He is so relieved by this that it almost moves him to tears.
‘Hello,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘Hello. How—’
‘I found you,’ Mathieu says, now unable to stop grinning. ‘I’m so, so—I thought I might never see you again.’
‘Oh?’ Viola says. ‘I didn’t realise you were—’
‘I was so stupid, last time,’ Mathieu blurts. ‘I mean, the first time we met. I should have … I never should have let you go like that. I should have asked you out for another drink, I should have …’
‘You wanted—?’
‘Of course I wanted to!’ He exclaims. ‘I was just scared. Stupid and scared and … I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t need to—’
‘But I do, I do,’ Mathieu says. ‘I … Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m not letting you say anything am I? I’ll shut up now.’
‘Please, don’t.’ Viola smiles. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been greeted with such enthusiasm in my entire life.’
Mathieu smiles weakly. ‘Such verbal diarrhoea, you mean.’
‘Well, that too.’
They stand in silence, though they don’t look away.
‘So …’
‘So …?’
‘How about another cup of cocaine?’
For a second, Viola is thrown, then she realises what he means and grins. ‘Yes, please, that’d be lovely.’
‘You’re so lucky, this is such a beautiful room.’
Mathieu nods. ‘I am, I know. It’s far more splendid than my office at the Sorbonne, though admittedly the pay was better.’
Viola stands and walks to the window, looking down to the courtyard below. ‘You must be a bit of a brainbox to have achieved all this.’
Mathieu laughs. ‘Hardly. I’ve just worked very hard. I wasn’t one of those kids who got As without effort. Not like some of them here.’
‘Me neither,’ Viola says, watching students scurrying across the quad, along the paths. ‘I went to Trinity College for a term, then I left.’
‘You did? Why?’
Viola presses her hand to the glass. ‘My father died.’
Mathieu is silent for a moment. ‘I’m sorry.’
His voice, though soft, carries across the room and touches her, as if he’d settled his hand lightly on her shoulder; comfort and warmth.
‘Thank you,’ Viola says. She wants to say something else, to show that she understands that losing a father is not so bad as losing a wife, but she doesn’t know how without seeming to trivialise both their losses. She turns and catches sight of their empty paper cups side by side on Mathieu’s desk.
‘Sometimes I’ve considered going back for a second cup,’ Viola says, ‘wearing a fake beard or something …’
‘I bet you wouldn’t be the first. It’s a great marketing trick, ensuring the exclusivity of your product so people only want it all the more.’
‘I suppose,’ Viola says as she turns away from the window and walks back across the room to sit beside Mathieu again. To her inordinate relief, she hadn’t needed to admit to forgetting his name because it had been painted on a plaque beside his office door. ‘But I don’t think that’s why she does it.’
‘No?’
Mathieu regards her curiously, and Viola is suddenly aware of how rare this is, true curiosity, a person really wanting to know what she thinks about a thing, no matter how mundane it might be.
‘Well …’ Viola says, slightly knocked off-centre. ‘I don’t know, but I’ve always imagined she does it because she … because she wants to balance her work and her life.’
‘How?’ Mathieu asks. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I think she just makes a certain amount of her … concoction every day and when she sells it all she goes home, or does whatever else she wants to do with her day.’
‘Sounds good,’ Mathieu says. ‘But why the one-cup-only policy? Surely she could finish faster if she let the addicts buy as much as they wanted?’
&nbs
p; Viola considers this. ‘True. But I think that’s because she really wants everyone, given that she doesn’t make so much, to have a chance to have the taste of something delicious every day. And I don’t think … It’s not like she doesn’t enjoy her job and wants to escape, it’s just that, if that was all she did then she wouldn’t have such a rich life as otherwise.’
Mathieu smiles. ‘You’ve given this a lot of thought.’
‘I didn’t realise I had, until you asked me.’ Viola looks up to see Mathieu gazing at her. She thinks, suddenly, of Henri.
‘I was looking for you too. After that morning, I looked for you too.’
Mathieu grins. ‘I’m glad it’s wasn’t just me. At some point I did start to feel a little like a stalker. I think, after a few days, the mulled wine lady might very well have thought I was stalking her.’
Viola laughs. ‘Well, I was stalking you too – I walked past St Catharine’s more than was strictly necessary – so we’re both as crazy as each other.’
‘The perfect match.’ Mathieu says. Then he leans forward and kisses her.
All the way home, Viola replays the kiss. She places her fingers to her lips, brushing them lightly over her skin, remembering his touch, his tenderness. How different two mouths can be, she thinks. Henri, so rough, Mathieu so soft. But then, Mathieu has experienced such depths of feeling – true love, great loss, fatherhood – that Henri has never known. And Viola knows all too well how impossible it is to leap through life any more once you’ve been brought to your knees. It’s why adults so rarely possess the unbridled passion of small children, since virtually everyone loses their innocence, their eternal optimism at some point. For Viola it was when her father died, three months after being diagnosed with acute lymphoma. And she learnt, for the first time, that most wishes don’t come true.
As she walks, Viola wonders how Mathieu’s wife died. She wonders how he was afterwards, how he managed to hold himself together and still take care of Hugo. Imagine that, not being allowed to fall head first into grief, not having permission to be weak and broken, not having time to slowly mend, but instead needing to keep a tight grip on life, be strong, to keep taking care of another. What must that have been like? As a teenager, Viola had been allowed to surrender completely to her loss, to feel it as fully and completely as she could, to stay in bed for days, to stop eating, stop talking, stop working, until she was ready to start living again. And it’d taken months – a full year – until she started feeling normal. Although, she was never really that, not fully, not entirely. She stepped back into living, but her step was cautious now, aware of what might be lurking around the next bend. She no longer leapt into life, with eyes closed and arms spread, expecting to fly, expecting to be caught, not any more.
And yet, the kiss. The kiss has done something. It has, as it lingers, brought Viola back to childhood again, to innocence, to optimism, to unbridled joy. Her entire body, every molecule sparks and sizzles like crêpe batter dropped onto a hot griddle. And the scent of joy wafts up, like melted sugar, and the taste settles on her tongue.
Mathieu walks along Silver Street in a daze. He’s so distracted, in fact, that he misses the left turn onto Ridley Hall Road and is already halfway down Sidgwick Avenue before he realises he’s going in entirely the wrong direction. Now he’ll be late for the school pickup. At least the other parents won’t be there to censure him; he’ll only have to deal with the wrath of Miss Titchener, something he’d rather avoid. She’s half his age yet she possesses a withering look of disapprobation that makes Mathieu feel half hers. If he was Hugo, he’d do anything to avoid evoking that glare.
Mathieu picks up his pace. He starts to jog, in the right direction this time. The kiss, that kiss. My, God. How he managed to stop himself, to hold back from anything else, from everything else, Mathieu can only imagine. He must have superhuman reserves of will power that he never suspected before. But perhaps it was because so very much was contained in that kiss. Not only that moment but, or so it felt, every moment to come. As their lips touched he was already laying in her arms, as he would be afterwards, naked, his cheek pressed to the space between her breasts as she stroked her fingers through his hair. Mathieu felt her hand in his as they walked together through the meadows, Hugo running on ahead, on their way to tea at The Orchard. He felt her standing behind him, looking over his shoulder as she read whatever he was writing, her presence, the warmth of her enough to reassure him that it was good enough, that it was worth carrying on.
‘Am I crazy, V? Am I losing my mind?’
Mathieu hurries on. Sometimes, it seems that his wife replies, once in a while, to the endless stream of chatter he so often directs at her. This time he’s slightly hesitant, since he doesn’t want to trouble his lost love with thoughts, questions about his new love – though surely it’s far too early to be thinking in such terms – but he just can’t help it. He waits. Silence.
‘Sorry, V,’ Mathieu whispers. ‘Is it too soon? I don’t want you to think—you know I’ll always … and I never thought, I never … and then, then I met her.’
Still, his wife doesn’t respond. With Hugo’s school now in sight, Mathieu starts to run. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ll stop now. I don’t want to …’
Is he losing his marbles? Talking to his dead wife might have been permissible for the first few months, the first full year, perhaps, after she died. But more than three years on might denote a loosening of the mental cogs. He certainly wouldn’t admit it to anyone. Except perhaps Hugo, though Mathieu wouldn’t want to worry him.
Fifteen minutes later, as they’re walking home, Hugo looks up at him.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
Mathieu looks down. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re not asking me all those stupid questions.’
Mathieu frowns. ‘What questions?’
Hugo shrugs. ‘What did I eat for lunch? Who did I play with? What did I learn? Blah, blah, blah.’
Mathieu smiles. ‘Those aren’t stupid questions. I’m just curious about your day. I don’t see you for six hours a day. You might be getting up to all sorts of crazy things for all I know.’
Hugo rolls his eyes. ‘With Miss Titchener watching?’
‘Hmm, no, good point,’ Mathieu concedes. ‘Still, I only want to know how you are. That’s what parents do, interrogate their kids, it’s a sign of love.’
Hugo nods towards the Newnham Deli as they walk past. ‘What about an ice cream? I think that’s an even better sign of love than questions. Don’t you?’
‘Ice cream?’ Mathieu can hardly believe it. Food – if ice cream could rightly be called food – his son is requesting food. It’s a miracle. An actual, certifiable Christmas miracle. With great effort, Mathieu suppresses the urge to run to the shop and purchase every ice cream in the place. He must remain calm, nonchalant. He can’t afford to scare Hugo off with enthusiasm. With the pre-teen, Mathieu is learning, nonchalance, along with reverse-psychology, is the key to everything. ‘Ice cream,’ he says again. ‘But it’s freezing, it’s hardly the right weather for ice cream.’
‘Oh, Papa, you’re so silly.’ Hugo sighs. ‘It’s always the right weather for ice cream.’
‘Oh, really? Is it?’ Mathieu laughs. He reaches out to rub Hugo’s head. ‘Oh, Go-Go, what would I do without you?’
Hugo rolls his eyes again. ‘Don’t call me that, I’m not three any more.’
‘Sorry,’ Mathieu says, now wondering what on earth happened at school today. ‘OK, got it. No more baby nicknames. So, what should I call you?’
Hugo looks up at his father as if he’s just asked the most stupid question in all the world. ‘My name, of course. Now, what about the ice cream?’
‘Oh, of course, the ice cream,’ Mathieu says, as if he’d entirely forgotten about such an inconsequential fact. ‘Right, let’s go. I think I’d rather like one too.’
Five minutes later, as Mathieu walks along the pavement with his son, both their lips ne
arly blue as they suck on chocolate-enrobed ice cream, he looks at Hugo and marvels at the nature of parental love, at how such inexpressible joy can come from the seemingly simplest of things.
Chapter Thirty
Perhaps it’s in the space created by this shift that the insight, the moment of inspiration, occurs. It happens the next morning as Jude is walking downstairs. She’s still shaking – the tips of her fingers twitching uncontrollably – at the sight of her sister the night before. She still can’t believe it truly was her spirit but, at the same time, though Jude had never met her, she’s in absolutely no doubt at all that, whether ghost or imagination, it was Frances.
The inspiration happens as she’s setting her foot on the final step: an idea for Gertie, a notion of what might begin to lift her gently from the pit of grief into which she’s fallen.
‘Gertie,’ Jude says, as she finds her niece sitting at the table not eating a piece of toast. ‘I have an idea.’
Jude and Gertie stand behind the counter. They’ve been standing there for an hour and no one has come into the shop.
‘I don’t think anyone will come in today,’ Gertie says. ‘Everyone’s buying cheap Christmas rubbish and—’
‘Maybe,’ Jude says, ‘though you never know.’ She can hear – she’s getting to know her niece quite quickly, she realises – that the objection is only half-hearted, that it’s also tinged with hope.
Gertie shrugs and Jude wonders if she’ll always see Frances in those shrugs from now on. Gertie props her elbows up on the glass counter, head in hands. She’s kneeling on a chair – Edwardian oak – her thin, bare legs sticking out behind her. Having raided the enormous Victorian mahogany wardrobe on the second floor – stuffed to bursting with vintage dresses – Gertie wears a cream silk camisole, which comes down to her knees, topped by a T-shirt of ivory lace that skims the hem of the camisole. Her long dark curls are tied back behind her face with a strip of scarlet silk.
The Patron Saint of Lost Souls Page 10