by Zoë Folbigg
‘I know, mad hey? My girls are almost teenagers. And my boy wasn’t interested unless I took him to see PST or something play.’
‘PSG,’ Hector corrects.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s PSG. Paris Saint-Germain.’
Hector laughs a fond laugh. The sort of laugh that shows he’s really tickled by something. That old familiar life-and-soul laugh reminds Kate that she does know him. It’s like that laugh never went away, but as it recedes, Hector swallows hard and realises he hasn’t laughed out loud in weeks.
‘Do you have kids?’
‘Negative.’
‘I’ll show you a photo of mine over lunch.’
*
Hector and Kate sit on green wrought-iron chairs under the striped awning of an open-sided creperie. A waitress with yellow hair and fuchsia lipstick puts two cans of Coke on the table with a thud.
‘So I was surprised to get your message. You wanted to… to, “make things right”,’ says Kate, as she rips the white paper case from her straw and fumbles to insert it into the can. Hector’s earthy eyes widen with humility. ‘It’s OK, Hector, as you can see I did manage to get over you.’ Kate’s cheeks flush a shade of flirty and she surprises herself.
Hector softens the tension with a joke. ‘You didn’t call your son Hector?’
‘No, sorry. He’s Jack.’
‘Jack…’ Hector ponders how it sounds. ‘I like it. Like Samurai Jack?’
Kate doesn’t get it so she just agrees with him as she sips in brown bubbles that dance in her mouth. She didn’t realise how thirsty she was. Her face becomes more serious, her eyes earnest.
‘I met George, my husband, well, at the end of that summer I suppose.’
‘Did you get my letters?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Well there was nothing to say I guess. I was a dick. Which is why I wanted to apologise for being a dick. Turns out I carried on being a bit of a dick for quite a long time, but I’m trying to put all that right. I finally grew up.’
‘I’m sure you haven’t been a dick,’ says Kate with kind eyes. ‘Very good use of English by the way.’
‘Thanks. I watch a lot of English TV. “Sits com” I think you call them.’
‘Sitcoms.’
‘OK, sitcoms,’ Hector smiles, finding the comedy of the situation he’s in quite heartening; helping him to forget the pain of Cecilie’s silence, her absence.
Kate is tickled and the lines around her eyes crease.
‘Which sitcoms?’ she asks. She can’t imagine Hyacinth Bucket or Margot Leadbetter using the word dick.
‘Oh, you know… The Young Ones. Bottom. Blackadder. I learned from the best. I can now call you a twat, a tosser, a codswalloping imbecile. And a bellend. But I won’t,’ he chuckles.
‘Thanks!’ Kate laughs. ‘Perhaps you didn’t grow up!’ She lowers her face back into the neck of her duffel coat. It’s too cold and the creperie is too open to the elements to get comfy, but she hopes melting ham and cheese will soon warm her up. ‘I always get a Christmas card from Sister Miriam – she said you got married last year.’
Hector’s sweep of thick lashes look downcast towards his can. ‘Yes, I got married.’
Kate can’t help feel a pang of disappointment, which she knows is ridiculous.
‘So where’s your wife?’
‘She’s in Spain.’
‘Gosh, a European tour for Los Herrera.’
‘Very good,’ Hector says, ‘You didn’t forget all your Spanish…’
The waitress with the yellow hair places two plates on the table with a clatter. Kate looks around for cutlery. ‘But no. No grand tour. Pilar’s Spanish. And she’s kinda my ex-wife, so she’s staying in Spain. She went back to her family.’
‘Golly. Sister Miriam didn’t say anything about that.’
‘I guess not!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK, it’s for the best. Here, let me get cubiertos…’
Hector stands, solid and strapping, looking for the waitress who’s disappeared, so he can sort out the cutlery situation. He calls out to the back of the open kitchen and the waitress reappears begrudgingly, already knowing what she’s being summonsed for, with two sets of knives and forks each wrapped in a thin white serviette.
‘Merci,’ Hector says with a roll of a Mexican tongue, as he sits back down. With one tiny gesture, Hector has managed to make Kate feel protected in a way George never has. Butterflies rise in her stomach. She smiles and unravels her cutlery from its napkin. She feels like a teenager on a date, then remembers these most curious of circumstances.
‘So… your ex-wife is in Spain and you’re in Paris. What are you doing here? I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to meet me; just to say sorry for being a “dick”, a “tosser” or a “codswalloping whatever-it-was”, about that one night twenty-something years ago.’
‘Imbecile,’ Hector says soberly.
‘I barely even remember what happened,’ Kate lies. ‘Until I got your message anyway. It was so out of the blue.’
Kate will never forget how it felt to be publicly humiliated by the teenage boy she had resisted falling for because she suspected he might be the type to break a girl’s heart. She will never forget how proud she felt to stroll under the arches of the Palacio de Gobierno with Hector Herrera’s arm around her. How it felt to be stopped in the street by everyone Hector knew, all pleased to meet Hector’s English güera. She’ll never forget that feeling of being taken for a fool. The girls laughing at her in the reflection of a ladies’ bathroom mirror; making her run out of a bar, out of a town, out of a country, because Hector was kissing their friend Dani and not the gringa güera, wherever she came from.
‘So why now? Why here?’
Kate takes another bite of her crepe.
‘I came for love.’
Kate stops. Hot cheese melts in her mouth. She was about to put down her cutlery and get the family photo out of her wallet and show it to Hector. The pride in her daughters. The cuteness of Jack. But now a bombshell. Hector Herrera has come to Europe to tell her that after all these years, he’s in love with her. Kate Wheeler. She swallows hard, knowing she can’t eat any more. Her stomach is flipping.
All this time.
‘Gosh, Hector. I don’t know what to…’
‘I know right? I’ve fallen in love with a girl I’ve never met before.’
To her surprise, Kate’s heart sinks like a stone from her ribcage to her belly.
‘I came to Europe to meet her, but she doesn’t want to meet me. She didn’t turn up.’ Hector’s strong shoulders droop.
‘Oh, how ghastly. I’m sorry.’ There are a million reasons Kate feels sorry but she can’t quite put her finger on any of them. Mostly she’s sorry for Hector. ‘So am I your Plan B?’ she asks, trying to lift the mood, her eyes involuntarily filling with water. She picks up her Coke, discarding the straw on the table, so she can use the can to obscure her face.
The past forty-eight hours have totally exhausted Kate. Two nights ago, she stood at the ironing board while George sat on the sofa, again, legs stretched out on the pouffe in front of him, again, beer in one hand, again. As Kate ironed George’s work shirts and the kids’ uniform ready for their return to school, he kept looking at his phone as he watched Horizon. Then she plucked up the courage to tell him.
‘I’m thinking I might go to Paris myself, on Thursday perhaps. Just for the day…’
‘You’ve still got this silly little Paris idea in your head?’ scoffed George as a text beeped on his phone. Water bubbled furiously beyond a clear window in the iron and steam burst through limescale-clogged holes in its base.
‘Well, the kids don’t want to go, you don’t want to go… so if you don’t mind entertaining them for the day. I’ll be leaving on the first train to Liverpool Street. My Eurostar is at 7.55 a.m.’ Something in Kate felt triumphant about being so bold. The iron stopped fizzing.
‘You’ve actually booked it then? Have you gone completely mad?
Kate finished the sleeve of George’s pale blue shirt with force and stood firm.
‘I should get back into St Pancras just before nine; home by eleven or twelve. There are pizzas in the freezer…’ she said, as she walked out of the front room with George’s shirt hanging on her finger, ready to be hung up on his side of the mirrored wardrobe.
Now she’s here, in Paris, feeling second best again: to a woman Hector Herrera’s never even met, to his ex-wife in Spain, to George’s phone, to Antonia Barrie…
‘No! I wanted to see you, Kate. I wanted to see you both, it just hasn’t gone completely to plan…’ Hector removes and replaces his cap ready for a candid confession. ‘I know I blew it with you, but you were the first. You were the girl who taught me to broaden my horizons a little. That there was this exciting world beyond the ceiling of the Villa Infantil, beyond Xalapa. The art, the music from another world. You were my first lover…’
‘I was your first?’
But everyone loved Hector, and Hector so loved to be surrounded by friends, by women. Kate had assumed the twinkle of his eye and the agility of his body came from experience.
‘Yes. You changed the course of my life – and I was just an asshole to you. So, all these years later, here I am, saying sorry to you for being such a… a… codswalloping imbecile.’
Kate giggles.
‘And that I hope you can find it in your sweet heart to forgive me.’
Kate’s mouth purses and she looks flattered.
‘I forgive you, Hector,’ Kate says with fondness. How could she not? He’d travelled halfway across the world and sought her out just so he could say sorry. ‘And doesn’t every encounter we have change the course of our life? Big or small, every relationship can have a profound effect.’ Kate thinks back to the autumn she got together with George: the aftermath of her humiliation and heartbreak; leaving the shame behind across an ocean; a nice reliable English boy on the graduate trainee programme; his very beige family in the West Country; a wedding and three children without stopping to question if that’s what they actually wanted…
She looks from her empty can up to Hector and feels a familiar tingle of excitement, unleashing a wash of clarity as she realises something: she never felt the butterflies or excitement in half a lifetime spent with George as those she felt in a few short weeks decorating the orphanage with Hector Herrera.
‘Thank you,’ he replies, with brooding brown eyes. ‘I felt so terrible for so many years, when really I wanted to say sorry, and thank you – I have nothing but gratitude to you, and I guess I wanted to tell you that.’
‘OK, well you’re welcome. Thanks for toughening me up in the ways of men!’ Kate counters with a self-conscious laugh. She doesn’t feel entirely grateful but knows that without Hector there wouldn’t be Chloe, Izzy or Jack.
All these confessions make Kate feel a bit uncomfortable. George would never tell her how he was actually feeling. This is all so strange. So Kate goes into mother mode, to help herself as much as Hector.
‘So. Where is the girl you fell in love with and why didn’t she come to meet you? I made the effort to come all the way from England! I hope you appreciate that.’
‘I do,’ Hector laughs. ‘But she lives in the Arctic Circle.’
Kate laughs, thinking it’s a joke, then realises it isn’t.
‘Gosh. That beats England. Where in the Arctic Circle?’
‘Norway.’
‘Arctic Norway isn’t very near Paris, you know that right?’
‘Siiiiiiiiii, I know! We had spoken about meeting in Paris before. She once said that if I ever made it to Europe, she would come find me. Meet me halfway, so to speak. Entendido?’
Kate, sitting in a creperie cafe on the Champs de Mars, understands.
‘So why didn’t she come? Does she not feel the same way?’ Kate asks nervously.
‘I thought she did… but I let her down, so she’s pissed at me. Sorry, pissed off.’
‘Hector!’ Kate groans.
Hector knows his story is going to take a while, so he orders two beers from the waitress and over the course of an hour he tells Kate about Pilar. How their marriage crumbled. How he fell in love with someone he’s never met before. And his eyes are so full of love and passion and conviction and warmth that Kate forgets she’s in another country with a man she doesn’t truly know. She forgets how out of character it was of her to go to Paris on a whim, to drink beer at two in the afternoon. She gets lost in his story, his eyes. Kate’s never heard a man talk more openly and purely, about love or anything else for that matter.
Hector shows Kate a photo of Cecilie on his phone. She is struck by her beauty and hit by a feeling of inadequacy.
‘Goodness, Hector, she’s beautiful.’
‘I know.’
‘Right then,’ she says, warmed by the beer, taking off her duffel coat and rolling up the sleeves of her jumper. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t have one. I sent her message after message, telling her I’d be under the Eiffel Tower yesterday. She got them, but she didn’t reply. And she didn’t come. I blew it. I don’t know what to do. What can I do?’
Kate studies the despair on Hector’s face. It’s so different from the youthful confidence he exuded when they were together in Mexico, it doesn’t feel right. She is compelled to find a solution, and she finds one quickly.
‘Hector it’s so obvious.’
‘What?’
‘Go to Norway.’
‘What?’
‘Go to Norway. Go find her.’
‘But clearly she doesn’t want to see me. She won’t answer my messages, my calls… she might not even be there,’ he says, knowing that this is unlikely.
‘Go see her. I’ll help you book a flight or do whatever it takes. I’ve been her, Hector. The truth is, if you would have come to me, explained that you were foolish, looked at me with the same conviction in your eyes as you just showed then, I would have embraced you. All our lives might have been different.’
‘I couldn’t come to England, I had no money.’
‘Hector, you didn’t come to England because you didn’t feel like this about me. That’s fine! What I’m saying is, go to her. Turn up. If she feels half what I felt about you, she will look in your eyes and it will all be OK. I promise.’ Kate’s cheeks turn red and blotchy like a cox’s orange pippin.
Hector’s eyes widen. ‘You think?’
‘I know. You’ve come this far. Don’t blow it now.’
Hector shivers and wraps his arms around his ribcage.
‘Get your phone out again. Find an airline. Arctic Norway, you say? What’s the town called?’
‘Tromsø.’
Kate taps furiously into her own phone. ‘T-r-o…?’
‘M-s-o. Si, Tromsø.’
‘Right, it has an airport. Look, Norwegian fly there, via Oslo. Book yourself one of those. And then let’s get you some thermals. You think Paris is cold…’
Fifty-Three
Kate’s doughy bottom sinks and splays onto a small cubed seat in the departures lounge at Gare Du Nord. A quiet couple wearing his-and-hers Karrimor coats look at her disgruntledly while she doesn’t notice. She places a plastic bag from the gift shop on the floor between her tired feet and checks the boxes are sitting horizontally within. Eight Fauchon macarons for each daughter, a weighty Paris Saint-Germain keyring for Jack.
I hope they like them.
She smiles to herself, but her smile soon fades. The black pleather cubes remind Kate of where her children sit in the shop where they try on school shoes, and she remembers the drudgery of the week ahead: back to school, back to the routine, back to the PTA and the WI.
I never want to see her again.
She thinks how different this one day in her life has been.
<
br /> What a day.
This morning, Kate breathed a nervous but invigorated sigh as she left the house and got into a taxi even before George woke up. He’d taken two whole weeks off work over Christmas, as some kind of marriage-saving, dedicated-dad gesture, although Kate found his skulking about the house, watching Bond films or looking at football results or whatever it was he was looking at on his phone, actually more of a hindrance than a help to their marriage. Christmas felt like forced fun, and she’d so been looking forward to it. But when the day came, and the table was laid with all the trimmings, Kate realised that the most exciting thing about Christmas was the message she had received out of the blue from Hector Herrera. The kids weren’t grateful for their presents. George wasn’t even interested in the idea of an impromptu trip to Paris.
Kate takes the copy of Hello! magazine from her handbag and looks at the beauty guru’s Swiss chalet retreat, but all she can think of is Hector Herrera. His warmth. His forlorn face. How protective his arm felt around her. What a day they had had. After crepes, Cokes and beers in the Champ de Mars, Hector and Kate walked along the Seine and crossed over a bridge so they could marvel at the wrap of water lilies in the Musée de l’Orangerie. Then they ambled to Galeries Lafayette to buy long johns (a new English phrase for Hector, which tickled him) and eat steak frites in the cramped cafe before Hector saw Kate off in the chaos of the train terminal.
‘Go find her,’ Kate said as she clasped the artist’s soft hands.
Hector nodded and planted a kiss on Kate’s left cheek before wrapping his arms around her.
Kate can feel Hector’s kiss lingering as she looks up at the departures board and doesn’t touch her face. Such a perfect day. She feels a burst of pride. For being the adventurous girl she once was again. For coming all the way to Paris on her own. For meeting Hector. For finding her own strength and power. For telling Hector what to do, and how, in turn, Hector made her realise what she had to do.
As Kate looked deep into Hector’s impassioned eyes in the creperie, and saw how much he loved a woman he’d never met – she realised the power of love and that empowered her.