by Jenny Colgan
The top of the ferry was bright and bustling, like an old airport terminal. There were shops and bars and duty free and an amusement arcade already full of children screaming and stabbing at the flashing lights and bells. I could smell fries cooking and glanced into the large lounge, full of seats, the reclining ones already taken by the frequent travelers who clearly knew what they were doing. We attracted a few curious glances, but we simply ignored them and forced our way through to as quiet a corner of the lounge as we could find, where Richard settled Claire as gently as he could, then pretended not to be out of breath.
“Why don’t I get us all a hot cup of coffee?” I said.
- - -
Alice was standing in the doorway when Laurent arrived at the large wooden door, her arms folded. Behind her he could see expensive-looking private nurses moving silently over the highly polished parquet. Fresh orchids sat in the corner.
“He’s not here,” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Laurent. “Look. He doesn’t need to talk to me. But he needs to have the choice.”
“No,” said Alice. “And he doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Fine,” said Laurent. “I’ll drive and not talk.”
“No,” said Alice.
“Yes,” said Thierry, stepping out from the anteroom, where a fire was blazing despite the warmth of the afternoon. He was wearing an enormous smoking jacket. If Laurent hadn’t been so wound up, he might have smiled.
Alice looked at them both, her fingers tightening and her high cheekbones stretching taut and pink.
“Non!” she insisted again, but Thierry was already beckoning someone to pack a bag, and Laurent had grabbed the keys to the company van and stood there. The two men wore a very similar expression and walked together to the van in an injured silence.
Alice could do nothing but stand and watch the van drive away. She swore under her breath. In English.
- - -
When I got back with the coffees, I could see they were in the middle of an argument. Claire, I noticed, still hadn’t moved. I rummaged in her medical bag for the Tiger Balm—I remembered how much she’d enjoyed it in the hospital—and quietly started to rub it in to her shoulders. There was nothing to her, I felt. Just knotted bits of muscle, struggling on when there was almost nothing left in her. Her tufts of bird hair—the scarf had slipped off again—made me want to cry.
“I’m not taking you up there,” said Richard. We could see out of the porthole windows the waves bouncing up and down; there was a slight tang of vomit in the air, as if it had already affected some of the passengers. The sea looked an odd mixture of green and black, and a mixture of spray and rain bounced against the windows. Even though this was only a tiny section of water to cross—people swam it, for goodness’ sake—it didn’t feel like that. It felt like we were out in the middle of the ocean.
“I need the fresh air,” pleaded Claire, her voice quiet now. I glanced at her medicine. She had taken a little more, but she seemed to be entirely compos mentis. I wondered how powerfully it could fight the hideous viper, the tumor growing inside her, spreading, filling her with blackness, hollowing her out. Her face was still composed, still beautiful even.
“It’s not right,” said Richard. “Don’t you want to see the boys again? And Cadence and Codie?”
Claire looked away. “Of course I do,” she said. “There are…there are a few things I want to see again, yes.” Her jaw looked stern.
“You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“I’ve had worse,” she said. “I have worse.”
Richard put his fingers on the bridge of his nose and rubbed, fiercely.
“You didn’t have to come,” she added, pressing home her advantage. “I didn’t ask you too. Me and Anna would have been all right on our own.”
I tried to appear inconspicuous and not point out the obvious, that is that Richard had made it all about a million zillion times easier than he might have done, and if it hadn’t been for him, we’d still have been at Crewe station probably or, more likely, back at home.
Richard glanced at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “When we’re coming in to shore. And not before. Okay?”
Claire nodded weakly, and Richard pulled out his phone and stormed off before we could badger him anymore.
I carefully did Claire’s elbows and wrist joints. “Is it very bad?” I asked quietly, feeling her wince.
“It isn’t important,” she said back, and I wondered if she felt as I did, fearful, regretful that we’d undertaken this at all.
Three-quarters of an hour later, after I’d taken Claire to the bathroom and we’d done what we could in the swaying room, Richard reappeared, again with food, which none of us felt like. The storm hadn’t abated, and even the happy screaming holiday children had quieted down.
“Are you still set on doing this then?” he said gruffly.
“Yes,” said Claire with dignity. “And I think I can walk now.”
Her muscles had slackened up with the drugs and the massage; very carefully and precariously, she made her way up out of her chair, and Richard and I took an arm each and we started to move, very slowly, out of the salon and toward the steps at the back of the boat.
There was a man standing there too, but we explained that we really wanted to go up top, and he looked at us and told us to be careful but wasn’t stopping anyone, just kids, he explained.
Through the swing doors at the top, the wind caught us straightaway and nearly sent us staggering right to the side. It was extremely strong, the clouds above us black. Seagulls screamed through the air, desperately searching the boat’s wake for discarded chips and other excellent human morsels. The wake churned up the already foamy waves behind us in a long line.
Then we turned around to face the front, and Richard let out a low whistle.
Straight ahead of us where the beaches and cliffs of Calais spread out in front of us, the little old section of the town on top of the hill, the weather had cleared. It was as if someone had drawn a line down the middle of the sky between the UK and France. Calais had hardly any cloud and the late afternoon sun was piercing down to illuminate it.
“You did this on purpose,” muttered Richard, but Claire wasn’t listening. She was walking forward, on her own, hand on the railing but otherwise steadily. The deck was deserted. She skirted around the lifeboats and buoys until she was right up at the prow.
“Ma belle France,” she muttered under her breath as I ran to keep up with her.
And we both stood as far front as we could, as the wind gradually slowed and the rain died off, and gradually things came into focus and we saw the ferry port closer and closer, and, right at the very tip of the farthest dock, we saw two figures, one standing, one slouched in his own wheelchair. My better eyesight caught them first.
“Look,” I said to Claire, taking her hand to point in the same direction as if she were a child. “Look over there.”
Richard stayed at the entrance to the basement, and as the loudspeaker came alive again, instructing everyone to return to their cars and buses, he held the door open for us.
“You go this way,” he said, indicating a line of foot passengers lining up with bicycles and rucksacks.
“What do you mean?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve come…I’ve come as far as I possibly can.”
I realized then he’d seen the figures on the dock.
“I booked this when I got the tickets,” he said, seeing my face. “It’s all right, they know I’m coming straight back.”
The boat was sloshing about, maneuvering itself up to the jetty.
“What do you mean?”
In such a short space of time, I realized, I’d come to rely on him as being the grown-up.
“I’ll get the chair and your bags,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”
His face was grave and full of sadness as he disappeared down the stairs. I watched as a long ramp, to let pedestrian passengers off, extended to the quay side. There was a passport box with a hot, grumpy-looking man in it—I still couldn’t believe the change in the weather. It was like a great dotted line, like on a map, had separated the UK from the rest of the continent. People were blinking in the sunlight. The smell of fried breakfasts and sprayed perfume and damp carpet from the ferry receded as we breathed in the fresh air.
“Oh,” said Claire. “I think I need to sit down.”
- - -
Claire still couldn’t believe Richard had done all this for her, even when he set the chair down, as if he’d been handling wheelchairs all his life instead of filing actuarial tables.
“Thank you,” she said, feeling both weak and terribly nervous. She hadn’t been able to eat a thing, which she knew wasn’t good for her, but she dreaded vomiting and being unable to clean herself up; she couldn’t face it. Cancer was such a disgusting disease on top of everything else. Sometimes she wished she had something at least a bit romantic, like typhus, maybe, like in La Bohème, where she could lie on a sofa, cough into a handkerchief for a bit, then die in an elegant fashion, without the vomit and the diarrhea and the baldness and the bollocks of it all.
Her heart, she thought, fluttered. Her eyesight wasn’t what it once was, and she hadn’t recognized the figures on the pier at all, even though Anna had jumped and shouted and clapped her hands in excitement. She would just have to take her word for it. Maybe Thierry was half-blind too. That might be useful. She tried to stare out of the ferry, now rapidly emptying, but it was hard to focus in the bright sunshine.
Richard was crouching next to her suddenly. He made a slight noise getting down there.
Richard was face to face with her now. That was one good thing about her eyesight, she thought. He didn’t look massively different to her now than he had at school, his tufty hair, his thick glasses. She smiled. He didn’t smile back. He took her hand.
“This is as far as I go,” he said quietly.
She nodded her head. She understood. “Thank you,” she said from the bottom of her heart.
He shook his head. “Oh, it was nothing.”
She was cross he didn’t understand what she was saying.
“No,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for making me go to teacher’s college, and for taking me away from the Reverend, and for marrying me even though you knew I didn’t really…and for the wonderful boys, and for making me secure.”
“I’d rather have made you happy,” said Richard, tears glistening in his eyes suddenly. She hadn’t seen him cry since that awful night so long ago when he’d confessed his affair.
She shook her head.
“I don’t…I think I was too stupid to realize it. But I think I was happy. Silly, daft, head full of nonsense…”
They both looked out on the French shoreline and smiled quickly at each other, a smile of long understanding. Seeing the beach, she had a sudden memory…the boys must have been very little and they were on a huge beach, first thing, almost no one else around except some dog-walkers, but Ian had always been up at the crack of dawn, even on holiday. The boys had been in their bathing costumes already and they had charged headlong into the water, then squealed like tiny baby pigs when they realized how freezing the surf was. And instead of laughing at them or ignoring them, Richard had seen their predicament and gone tearing in too, straight into the perishing ocean waters, picking up a boy under each arm and throwing them all around until they’d gotten used to the water and could splash at each other and laugh and laugh and laugh, till they came out, blue and chattering, and she had wrapped them all in towels and poured Richard hot coffee out of their Thermos, and he had declared it the best drink of his life.
How could she have forgotten all of that?
“But it has been a happy life. Full of happy things. It has. I just wish I had appreciated it more at the time…”
Richard pulled her tufted head into his shoulder, and she smelled a scent she hadn’t smelled in years.
“Shhh, my love. Shhh,” he said, stroking her scalp, and she realized then what he was really saying, and that it was good-bye, and she pressed her cheek against his, already marked with five o’clock shadow, and they stayed that way until the crewmen started to come up with apologetic looks on their faces. Anna was staring at them, she realized, with a worried look on her face too, but that didn’t really matter now, and she clasped Richard’s hand very tightly and said she would see him soon, and he grimaced and didn’t reply. And one of the nice young sailors helped push out the chair down the ramp, and Anna pulled the wheely suitcase behind them. She tried to turn her head but her neck was so stiff, and the sun was so bright she didn’t think she could have looked into the dark of the great ship at any rate, and she knew Richard. He wouldn’t have waited; he wasn’t that kind of man. And then they were being whisked through passport control, and Anna had taken control of the wheelchair, and there were two figures waiting, right at the edge of the dock house, and her heart started to pound faster than she knew her oncologist would have liked.
- - -
Claire was quite wrong about Richard. He stayed watching until they were two invisible dots disappearing behind the barbed wire gates of the ferry terminal. He watched as all the happy, burned holidaymakers filed back onto the ferry. He watched as they cast the lines and the great ship revved itself up again, and he stayed watching up on deck as the coast of France retreated farther and farther behind him into the darkness of the oncoming night.
Then he drove home through the rainy night, arrived in at two o’clock in the morning, smiled when he saw the roast beef and mustard sandwiches Anne-Marie had made and left out for him, then sat in his front room and got drunk for one of the very few times in his life.
At first, Claire thought with a terrible start that Thierry was standing right in front of her. He was exactly the same; the thick curly hair, the twinkling eyes. No mustache though, but…
Then she realized that this must be Laurent, whom Anna had told her about. He was incredibly attractive. She wanted to look at Anna and see her face, but she knew, she knew…she must look at the person sitting straight opposite her. She focused.
She tried not to wince. It was Thierry, of course it was, but he looked…he looked so unwell. She knew this was ironic under the circumstances, but even so. His face was gray. He had an oxygen cylinder set up nearby. His skin looked rumpled and ill-fitting, a result of massive recent weight loss.
But the mustache was still there, and under the heavy brows, his black eyes were the same…
He gazed and gazed at her for a long time, equally, Claire realized with a sinking heart, horrified at what they had both become. Was forty years really so much? Reaching out, she clasped Anna’s hand, hard.
All of a sudden, Thierry burst out laughing. In that instant, Claire saw immediately the flashing eyes, the infectious noise of it, and smiled too. It was impossible not to.
“Look at us!” he shouted. “Look at us! We are the very last donkeys in the knacker yard, Claire! The worst!”
With great difficulty, and his son giving him his arm with a dubious-looking expression, he stood up on slightly wobbly legs. He was wearing, Claire noticed, smart pale linen trousers and a light pink shirt. Always stylish.
Not to be outdone, she gave Anna her arm and wobbled to her feet. She went to him, and he took her in his arms.
“My little bird,” he exclaimed, “you are even smaller than you were!”
“You aren’t,” said Claire, her voice muffled in his shirt. He started to feel a bit wobbly so they drew back a little. Suddenly Claire felt the pressure on her arm relieved a little. She turned to see Anna rush toward Laurent, throw her arms around his neck, and kiss him.
Thierry looked
at her, raising the eyebrow she knew so well.
“Aha, life goes on,” he said in his booming voice, and Claire was so startled and pleased she laughed and sat down in her chair with a thump.
- - -
I couldn’t help it. Not when I saw him. I thought he was being petulant with his father, difficult. I had underestimated him, not understanding that of course he would do it, could change and shift all his plans, deal with Alice—God, Alice, I would worry about her later—and the fearsome French doctors. And his father. It was basically a kidnap. I was truly overwhelmed. And emotional too, I told myself afterward. I couldn’t even believe Richard and Claire had bothered getting divorced. If I had a nice-looking decent man who looked after me like that…well, I didn’t, so there was no point in thinking like that.
Apart from that, Laurent’s handsome face, that full, biteable mouth, that mop of curly hair; I had to own up to myself. He wasn’t Sami’s little concept of a fling. He wasn’t a holiday romance, a story to laugh about with Cath down at Faces. He gave me a look, a half-smile that said, as clear as a letter would have done, that he was sorry, and that this was his make-up offering…and in that instant, in the sunshine, I forgot all about Claire and Thierry, forgot all about anything except how much I wanted to kiss him.
When I finally came to my senses and stood back, pink and a little breathless, he gave me that broad smile.
“Well,” he said, “I am pleased to see you too.”
Then I cuddled Thierry and told him to cover his neck in the sun and asked him how it was to see Claire again, and he beamed and said she is still beautiful. Claire blushed like a girl and said no, she wasn’t, and Thierry said well, she was doing better than him, and Claire laughed and said, yes, yes she was. I asked Thierry if Laurent had kidnapped him, and he sniffed and said yes and that we must stay out of the way of the police, and Laurent looked a bit awkward.