by Liz Byrski
It hasn’t all been work of course, and much of it has been a very good life, but right now Flora sees herself as she fears others might see her: the willing helper, the dogsbody, making someone else’s life work because she has no life of her own. There have been other times when she has glimpsed this but she’s always pushed it away. She loves this place, the small and vibrant community, the dazzling scenery, the unpredictable weather, loves living in France. And yes, although she frequently feels irritated by Suzanne, she is very fond of her, otherwise she wouldn’t still be here. But looking back over the last fifteen years Flora knows that she has been standing still while, in those same years, Suzanne has grown: recovered from her loss, made changes to the hotel, involved herself in the civic life of the town, had a couple of brief affairs, and now something is happening with Xavier, something serious that could change everything and leave Flora – where exactly?
She clears her throat, holds her hand up to shade her eyes again and in the distance, at the point where the main street turns onto the quay, she spots a glimpse of yellow. Is it? She hesitates … yes, thank god, it’s five to four, she will probably just make it in time to meet the train. Relief doesn’t assuage the complex emotions that are raging in her, but it diverts her attention. The last thing she needs now is to catastrophise her situation; she must concentrate on Connie, on the joy of spending time with her as well as the task of supporting her through her grief, and Suzanne, it seems, is not going to be much help with any of that.
‘Why is Connie coming here?’ she’d asked that morning.
Flora had put down her coffee cup. ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s coming for a rest, a holiday after years of being a full-time carer. And she’s always wanted to come back here. She says those holidays here were the best days of her childhood. She wants to see me, and of course you.’
Suzanne had taken a long final draw on her cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. ‘It’s a long time ago. So long I barely remember.’
‘Well, Connie remembers, and so do I,’ Flora had said, feeling almost indignant.
‘One thing I remember always though,’ Suzanne said, extracting another cigarette from the packet on the table, ‘is that Connie has not been a good friend to you.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Flora asked, although she knew what Suzanne was getting at. ‘Connie is my oldest friend, I’ve known her longer even than I’ve known you, and we were like sisters.’
Suzanne flicked her lighter and concentrated briefly on her cigarette. ‘An old friend, yes, but a good friend would not accept what Gerald did to you – to throw you out, to turn your parents against you. To accept this situation is not the behaviour of a good friend.’
Flora had felt herself flush; the last thing she wanted was to discuss this with Suzanne. ‘What else could she do? She was married to Gerald and had two young children. Was she supposed to walk out on her family?’
‘She can fight for you. She can be like the dog with the bone, refuse to let go of it.’
Flora gave an irritable shrug and got up from the table. Suzanne was venturing into dangerous territory, giving voice to the undercurrent of resentment that Flora has, for decades, managed to subdue within herself. ‘Look, Connie had no choice …’ she began.
‘Pouf!’ Suzanne dismissed that with a wave of her hand. ‘Of course she has a choice, there is always choice. I understand it is difficult – she does not want to leave Gerald, she has young children, of course it is difficult. But children grow up, the times change, the world changes, but Connie does not. She still does nothing. She calls you her best friend but does nothing to try to change things with Gerald. She does not even come to see you until Gerald is dead. This, I think, is a weak and selfish friend. You think I am harsh, Flora? Maybe I am but I have never understood how you can accept this without ever any criticism. I know you do not want to hear this, and of course I like Connie in all other ways, but this is not something I find easy to understand.’
‘Well, I am not asking you to understand,’ Flora had said, feeling far too vulnerable for comfort. ‘Just accept her as a friend. I don’t need you to be my champion, Suzanne. It hasn’t been easy, but when this all happened back in the seventies I decided it would be unfair to rock Connie’s boat. I’m delighted she’s coming, and I don’t want you to mess it up. And I really don’t want to talk about this anymore.’
‘Of course, if that’s how you wish it,’ Suzanne had said, getting to her feet and rinsing her cup in the sink. And she put a reassuring hand on Flora’s shoulder. ‘I don’t understand this, but I respect what you say. I will pretend that I am English and I will not speak the truth about the unspeakable.’ And she went off down to the kitchen leaving Flora to struggle with the turbulence of her own emotions.
The Renault comes to a halt alongside her now and Suzanne gets out. ‘So sorry I forgot. I stopped to have a drink with Xavier. But you still have good time to get there I think.’
Flora nods irritably, slipping into the driving seat. ‘Oh for goodness sake, Suzanne, you forgot to fill up with petrol. You said you would and now it’s almost empty.’ And clipping on the seatbelt she puts the car into reverse, turns it around and heads back down the quay.
*
‘So what do you think?’ Flora asks Connie’s reflection in the mirror as she flops onto the chair in her room later that evening.
What Connie thinks is that she feels like death. It’s really all she’s capable of thinking right now after almost thirty hours of travel during which she had only a few hours’ sleep. She peers at her face in the mirror; the journey has added at least ten years to the way she looks. ‘I think – well, I know – I’m glad to be here,’ she says.
‘I’m glad you’re here too. But what do you think about the place, Suzanne, everything?’
Connie smiles, remembering her first visit to Flora’s home in Tunbridge Wells when they were eight. The house, set in a walled garden, was in one of the best and leafiest streets in the town and to Connie it seemed enormous and like something from a history lesson. Victorian, Flora had said, ‘That means it was built in the time of Queen Victoria who was also the Queen of Tasmania, where we come from.’ Not that this meant anything much to either of them. There was a greenhouse at the side of the house and beside it a peach tree with real peaches growing on it, and as they walked around to the front Connie spotted huge dark red berries, like giant raspberries, growing up a trellis.
‘What are they?’ she’d asked, as Flora dragged her up the steps to the front door.
‘Loganberries, dummy. Come on, I want to show you my room.’
Connie had never heard of loganberries, let alone seen them.
Flora raced up the steps and through the open door into a vast flagstoned entrance hall. ‘Do hurry, Connie,’ she’d cried, throwing her school hat onto a huge hallstand. And she raced up the wide, curving staircase and stopped halfway, looking back for Connie, who was still standing just inside the front door, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.
‘It’s all right, dear,’ Mrs Hawkins had said, ‘you can go up. Give me your hat and blazer,’ and she smiled and picked up Flora’s hat, which had slipped to the floor, and reached her hand out to take Connie’s. ‘Flora’s so pleased that you’ve come.’
‘So what do you think?’ Flora had asked when she had shown Connie the Queen Anne style dressing table with the triple mirror, the patchwork quilt that her grandmother in Australia had sent for her birthday, and practically everything else she owned. The room was flooded with light, and Connie walked over to the window, peering past the perfect lawn, and the white roses in full bloom.
‘What’s that?’
Flora came over to her side. ‘It’s a swing hammock,’ she said. ‘We can have tea out there. But what do you think of my room?’
‘I think it’s the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen,’ Connie had said wistfully, thinking of her own narrow and rather dark little room in the semi-deta
ched house in a far less desirable area. ‘It’s like a princess’s room.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Flora had said, ‘princesses have much better rooms than this. But I’m glad you like it. Now that we’re best friends you can come and stay here whenever you want.’
It really didn’t seem that long ago … the memory was still vivid.
‘Come on, Con,’ Flora says now, shifting her position in the chair and edging Connie’s suitcase out of the way with her foot. ‘Tell me – what you think?’
‘The town seems to have grown and smartened up and I’ve hardly seen anything yet, but as we drove through it seemed so familiar – the pharmacy, the patisserie, the old Café Centrale in the square, the church. So much the same, and here on the quay, a few more shops and cafés, but still a lovely little fishing port. And this …’ she gestures around the room. ‘The hotel looks much the same outside but so much nicer inside. This room is lovely, and the way they’ve opened up the café – Suzanne and Jacques did a great job, it’s all so light and welcoming. Lovely, I’m so thrilled to be here.’
Flora nods in satisfaction. ‘And Suzanne?’
Connie laughs. ‘She’s still Suzanne, rather cool and superior, and so elegant. How do French women do that and make it look so easy?’ She leans over and grasps Flora’s hand. ‘I was thinking back to the first time I came to your house. Do you remember? Your mum made fairy cakes with pink icing, and we had tea in the garden sitting on that big swing hammock.’
‘I do remember,’ Flora says. ‘And I doubt Mum made the cakes, it was probably Mrs Peacock.’ She stops for a moment, looking hard at Connie. ‘More than half a century, Con, it’s a long time.’ She glances at her watch and pulls a face. ‘We’d better go down, or we’ll be in trouble with madam downstairs. She’s held the best table for us and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
It’s an unseasonably warm evening for March and the tables are filling rapidly with locals and tourists. Suzanne pours them large glasses of red wine and joins them as they sit near the doors that open onto the outside tables. Connie feels herself beginning to unwind. Suzanne has organised a meal of local shellfish, a huge salad and a mouth-watering bowl of pommes frites, the pungent scent of Gauloises floats in through the doors along with the faint strains of an accordion being played nearby. It really does feel like a step back in time.
‘Do you still have the Bastille Day dances?’ she asks, the images suddenly clear as yesterday: the crowded square, a swaying mass of couples dancing to the music of a local band, the smell of cigarettes and warm bodies, an arm around her waist that kept creeping down to her buttocks, a pelvis thrust firmly against her own, garlic on his breath, and then another partner and another.
‘We still have them,’ Suzanne says. ‘Just now we are organising. It’s a pity you are not here in July, Connie, we could go dancing with the boys again.’ She nods to a nearby table where five ageing men are talking animatedly. ‘You’ve danced with some of them.’ She waves to the group and the men raise their glasses and Suzanne raises hers and tosses her head and Connie glimpses the teenage Suzanne, the flirt who was prone to play with fire when it came to men.
Flora leaves the table and slips behind the bar, returning a moment later with a remote control in her hand.
‘Remember this, Connie?’ she asks, clicking the remote, and a familiar melody fills the bar.
Connie gasps, her hand flies to her mouth. ‘Richard Anthony! Of course, J’entends siffler le train, of course I remember.’
‘You played it so often on the jukebox the year Jean-Claude took off for Paris. You were heartbroken.’
‘My father told you to stop playing it because it was annoying the customers,’ Suzanne adds.
Connie nods, puts her hand on her heart. ‘I remember. Oh god he was so gorgeous and, yes, I was heartbroken. We’d been writing to each other, so I came back here thinking he’d be waiting for me. But he was leaving to go to medical school, and said he was in love with the hairdresser’s daughter. I was devastated. What year was that?’
‘It was the year before we left school,’ Flora says, ‘a lifetime ago. You cried for days. Remember, we went to church so that you could light a candle and pray that one day you would see him again?’
Suzanne puts her hand on Connie’s arm and nods in the direction of the five men. ‘Your prayer is finally answered,’ she says mischievously. ‘The one on the right with the beard,’ she says.
Connie gasps, ‘That’s Jean-Claude? But he’s so old.’
‘Only a few years older than us,’ Suzanne says, ‘but we are better preserved, I think.’
Connie stares at the men who are singing along with Richard Anthony – in fact the whole café seems to be singing. Jean-Claude is wearing a black t-shirt with long sleeves, his hair and beard gleaming silver under the café lights – a good-looking man in his seventies. Connie peers at him, searching for the young man, the Adonis with glorious golden skin and full lips, the blonde hair that curled moist and warm at the nape of his neck and muscles that rippled as he hurled himself into the waves. She is back in the dense haze of cigarette smoke in the local cinema – little more than a tin hut in those days – his arm around her shoulders, his thigh pressed against hers, and later, her arms wrapped around his waist as she rode pillion on the back of his Vespa. ‘I would never have recognised him,’ she says, ‘nor him me, that’s for sure.’
‘He’s the local doctor now,’ Flora says. ‘He’s had two wives, five children and now he’s single again. You could book a consultation.’
And as they laugh a wave of nostalgia for her youth, for lost opportunities, lost loves, and paths not taken surges up inside her. Her long-forgotten self taunts her, and the old men raise their glasses and cheer as the song ends.
‘Encore, encore,’ they shout, and Flora flicks the remote and the song begins again, and Connie knows that the melody will haunt her for days and nights to come.
*
Hours later Connie wakes suddenly from a deep sleep and, sitting bolt upright, tries to remember where she is. The display on the alarm clock says it’s two-thirty – just four hours since she came to bed. She flops back onto the pillows and closes her eyes, waiting for sleep to reclaim her, counting sheep, counting breaths and trying to ignore the creeping sense of panic that is slowly taking hold of her. She longs now for home, for her own bed, for the safety and familiarity of her own room, for the steady sound of Scooter’s breathing from his basket in the corner, and for the feel of the sharp spring breeze off the Derwent filtering through the slats of the blind.
Back at home, coming here had seemed essential. There were many things she knew she wanted to do: reconnect with her children, learn to know her grandchildren better, build her friendship with Farah and her daughters, maybe find a way to sing again. But she had felt incapable of doing any of that without first connecting with herself. How ridiculous it sounds now; psycho-babble Gerald would have called it. And she had so nearly told the family about it, at lunch that day, but their interference and the tension she felt in it had made her hold back.
She throws off the bedclothes, gets up and opens the doors to the balcony. The night air is chilly but clear, the lights of the yachts bob gently in the harbour, and the beam of the lighthouse casts its luminous shaft in steady rotation between the town and the open sea. Beyond the quay, the glow of the street lamps curves around the bay bordering the sleeping town. Beautiful. A peaceful fishing port so very much as she remembered it, but what is she doing here? How can it possibly help?
She has run from her fear but brought it with her, tainting a place filled with the magic of childhood, of love and friendship; an unreal world that has evaporated with the passing of time, a place of memories. But reality is different. There have been so many times in her long marriage to Gerald when she has longed to be free, and never more so than during the last ten years. But what will she do with this freedom? Most of her adult life has been focused on Gerald, being his wife, support
ing him in his work, responding to his decisions, living the life he had chosen for them both. But how is she supposed to live this freedom, overhung as it is with grief and guilt?
‘Sometimes,’ she remembers saying to Farah, ‘I feel it’s a privilege to look after someone I love, to do for him the things he can’t do for himself. But a lot of the time I also feel it as a terrible burden, a curse that’s poisoning me, slowly killing the love and replacing it with resentment.’
There had been times when she had simply longed for things to be normal again; to lie beside him and let their past envelop them, recharge the batteries of what had kept them together all those years. And there were the dark days when she had felt the urge to exact revenge for those times in the past when he had hurt or betrayed her. Theirs was, for the most part, she supposed, like so many other marriages, a mix of good and bad times. But the difference in their ages had, she thought, made more difference than she had ever anticipated. Gerald had been born in the early years of the war, while she, and Flora, were among the first of the baby boomers. By the time the sixties really started to swing they had been in their late teens but Gerald was already in his twenties, raised by conservative parents and educated at an elite private school in which traditional ideas about the status of men and women were constantly reinforced. He never questioned his own authority and just assumed that things would be done his way, his needs given priority. He had resisted the changes wrought by the women’s movement and clung stubbornly to an earlier era. And Tasmania had proved more comfortable for him than England in that respect.