by Claire King
She looked at me then for a long while, her expression inscrutable. When finally she replied, she spoke quietly, as though she expected the wind to carry her words. ‘I’m fine,’ she said.
Despite what I told her, by the time most people came to me they were already in despair. People leave this kind of thing so late, until it has got out of hand and become overwhelming. Amandine was different. She didn’t look lost. She didn’t look like someone searching for something. Why, then, had she come? It was altogether puzzling. ‘And are you hoping to improve on fine?’ I said.
Amandine looked amused. ‘Are you going to try and cure me?’
I took a deep breath. ‘We’re just talking,’ I said.
‘Hmm.’ She looked down at the ball of her thumb then raised it to her mouth, the sun flashing on the silver ring as she bit gently into the skin. ‘So how long have you been a therapist?’
‘Years. It’s all I’ve ever done.’
‘Don’t you find it hard, spending your whole life thinking about other people’s happiness?’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could do that.’
‘Plenty of people do it and don’t get paid for it. At least I can expect to be paid at the end, assuming my clients are satisfied.’
‘That’s quite a guarantee. Has anyone ever refused to pay?’
I shook my head. ‘We all want to be happy, whether we do anything about it or not. To be here means you have already taken a first step. After that it’s just a matter of time.’ Amandine was still distracted, frowning down at her thumb, worrying it with the nail of her ring finger. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, it’s just a splinter. It’s only tiny, but I’m left-handed and I can’t get the thing out.’
‘Here, let me?’
‘With pleasure.’ Amandine smiled and held her left hand forwards, her palm open. Life line, I thought, love line, heart line, head line. Something jumped in my chest. I blinked. ‘Let me get the tweezers.’
I pinched the skin below the dark speck, my fingers too large and fumbling. The splinter was deeply embedded. ‘Tell me if it hurts.’
‘I’m a doctor,’ she said. ‘I’m not squeamish.’
‘And you say my job is hard?’ I looked up at her again, changed in my eyes already, the way people do as we come to know more about them. ‘What kind of doctor?’
‘A generalist.’
I reached for my glasses. ‘It’s tiny.’
‘It still hurts.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘The tiniest splinters can be the worst.’ At last I had found purchase on the sliver of wood and eased it out. ‘There.’ I rubbed the ball of my thumb gently over the place where it had been. ‘Is it all gone?’
‘Thank you.’ Amandine sat back and pushed away the hair that had fallen in front of her eyes, tucking it behind her ears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I must come across as quite cynical about what you do, and I’m not, honestly. It’s just that the world these days is greedy for happiness, yet people only make themselves miserable by chasing it. And we say that all we really want is for our children to be happy, which is true enough’ –she threw open her hands – ‘but how can a parent show their child the way if they’re lost themselves?’ I watched as she scanned the cabin again, the patchwork of furniture, the scant belongings. ‘You don’t have children,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Never wanted them, or never met the right person?’
‘Amandine,’ I said, ready to turn back the conversation, to insist we kept the focus on her, but then I realised the question was probably more about her than me. ‘It’s not something I’ve gone looking for, and it’s never found me,’ I said. ‘How about you?’
Amandine nodded and drank the remains of her coffee. ‘You’re not one to do the chasing. You’d rather wait for things to come to you?’
‘As you said, we only make ourselves miserable when we’re too greedy.’ I took my place back on the couch, moving the notebook and pencil I had left there on to the old chest between us, which doubled as a coffee table. The pencil rolled slowly towards her. Before it reached the edge she stopped it with a finger and picked it up. ‘So I don’t listen to what others tell me would make me happy, I trust myself to know. But what about you, Amandine? What are you looking for?’
Her eyes dropped as she turned the pencil in her hands. I let my gaze drift out to the sunlit canal, where a flotilla of young mallards glided by. Who had sent this woman to me, I wondered. Candice gave the slightest of shrugs, just the wash of a boat but perfectly timed. I smiled and looked up again to find myself meeting Amandine’s eyes directly. Cool and considered, her face tilted, her gaze intense. ‘Well, Baptiste, what I want is something that makes me feel alive. Joy, passion, despair, something to remember or something to regret. I want to have my breath taken away, or knocked out of me altogether. Perhaps after all this time what I really want,’ she said, ‘is to fall in love.’
I kept my expression neutral, but it belied my disappointment in her. She had seemed so much more considered than that. ‘Do you think love will make you happy?’ I asked.
Amandine gave a wry smile. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
After she left I took my notebook and placed it beside me at the piano. The perfect, altered state of consciousness that comes when playing music I know by heart would always leave my mind clear to reflect on a session. A space for ideas to grow. Beethoven, Satie, Bach. As I played I would let the thoughts come, let them form and spin and settle until eventually I would know what was important and stop playing to make notes that roamed untamed across the page, blossoming into doodles and back again to words. But that morning I played on and on. Bach. Only Bach. You can’t argue with the logic of Bach, the musical antidote to the perplexing thirty minutes I had just spent with Amandine Rousseau, a woman who had come to me looking for happiness yet was reticent to discuss why, and who had left declaring she was looking for love. What clues had she given me? What was I missing? Nothing was coming to me. And this is how it started.
3
Nobody ever starts at the beginning. It wouldn’t make sense. Instead we start with what matters most to us at the time, or what we think matters to whoever is listening.
You walked up and down the room as you spoke, the boards creaking under your feet. You trailed your long fingers over the piano lid and over the contrasting fabrics of each of the chairs. When you reached the end of your story you paused for a moment and then turned down the corridor, opening and closing doors to bedrooms and bathrooms as you went, as though you were looking for something misplaced. I waited for you by the galley.
‘Come outside,’ you said when you returned, reaching for my hand. I let you lead me up and out into the chill morning air, over the icy gangplank and along the frosted towpath to the water’s edge. ‘Here,’ you said.
I crouched beside you on the bank, my heart pounding as we stared down at the water, terrified that you would lose your balance and not know how to swim. Or worse, that you would see something in the water that shocked you. But you were calm, seemingly reassured by what you saw there.
‘Baptiste?’
‘Just checking,’ you said with a smile.
The winter waters were so clear that our likeness was almost without distortion. When was the last time I had seen us together this way? Then, as I looked closer at the mirror of your eyes I saw how their focus went deeper. You weren’t looking at our faces at all, but at the crisp reflection of the banks, the naked branches of the vertiginous plane trees that reached down into the cold flow like roots below the surface.
Was the way you recounted that first meeting with Amandine how it always seemed to you, I wondered, or have you reshaped this piece of the jigsaw to make it fit? Either way, this is your story and that is how it must be told. Whatever the truth, you must recognise these memories as your own. If I were to change your words you would lose your trust in all of it.
4
My parents were either side
of sixty by the time I learned the truth. I was twelve. My mother came into my room without knocking and found me sitting on the edge of the bed by the window. I sat there often. My room had flimsy curtains the colour of persimmons and on bright days I liked to close my eyes against the soft light that filtered through them, letting it bathe my face. There was something in the quality of that light that felt like home. But that day, as I had been sitting there, thick cloud had swept north from the mountains and there had been a sudden downpour. Dark shadows had flooded the room and I’d become distracted by my reflection in the long mirror on the far wall. It was telling me something I should already know. I was staring at it trying to work out what it was when my mother burst in, her arms full of rain-spattered clothes from the washing line, raindrops glistening on her cheeks. When she saw me she laid the laundry down on the bed without folding it and came to sit beside me. ‘Baptiste, what is it?’ she said.
Her reflection joined my own in the mirror, and it clicked. Realisation swelled in my stomach, sour-tasting and dense. ‘We’re not the same at all,’ I said, ‘are we?’
She didn’t need to answer. Our reflection was almost comical. A soft, round, fair-skinned mother and her darker, bony, crane-legged son, so ungainly even when sitting that my spine curled in embarrassment. On the school fields when obliged by the masters to run they said I looked like a deckchair being blown along a beach. My father was cut from the same mould as my mother; just as short and born fair, although he was lithe and tanned from working out in the fields. They were both shrinking under the weight of their years whereas I was at the age where it seemed as though I would never stop growing. Not even a teenager, and I towered over them like a cuckoo in the nest.
My mother put a trembling hand on my knee with a sigh. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘there’s something I need to tell you.’ I turned away from the mirror, looked down into her eyes. ‘A long time ago, when I wasn’t much older than you …’ she began.
Her anxiety was palpable. I put my arm around her, tried to reassure her that whatever she had to say, it would be all right, but she remained tense within my tentative embrace. She was afraid. This kind of news can change everything, it can break families. I have often wondered, how did it change me? Would my life have been different if I had never known? You can never predict the effect such a revelation will have on a person.
My mother had nothing to fear. By that point I was already hers. A birth mother doesn’t have the power to erase the one that raised you from an infant. And I wasn’t angry at her for keeping it secret so long. We all do our best. Above all I remember being excited to discover that I wasn’t who I thought I was, because I hadn’t completely decided anyway. As the rain hammered against the window I had the thrilling sensation that we had taken to an ark, leaving behind dry land and striking out until the storm had passed. We sat together on my bed in the dark room for what seemed like hours, tossed on the waves of her justifications.
My mother told me first about herself as a young woman, and of the illness that had left her chances of conceiving slim at best. It was hard to picture her so young. ‘I was beautiful back then,’ she said. She hadn’t thought much of having children before the illness took the possibility from her. It had been taken for granted that one day she would, and in any case there was a war on. What kind of world would it be to bring a child into? But the idea of never having children buried itself into her like a seed and grew and grew until it was all she could think about. Pregnant women seemed to be everywhere, and mothers with wide-eyed babies and chubby-legged toddlers were now transformed from a normal part of life into members of a club that denied my mother entry. She became resentful of them, and the resentment bred anger and the anger bred a black despair. When she sought counsel from the priest one Sunday at confession, he told her to find a way to engage with them, to understand and empathise, so my mother who had never been one to do things in half measures trained as a midwife. ‘The priest was right, you know,’ she said. ‘Every time I delivered a baby I just knew this was what God had always meant me to be.’
She had known my father since they were children, but fell in love with him only when he returned transformed from the war. He’d always been the best-looking boy in the village, she told me, but he knew it well and had been a strutting cock before he went away. But the young soldier who returned was more interested in talking about other people than himself. He had hidden the war away, pinned it to his heart, the real heart that beat under his ribs, the pin sinking deeper with every contraction. Yet the pain had changed him in the strangest of ways, for on the outside he had become the kindest man she had ever met, always cheerful, always putting others before himself. He showed no interest in starting a family, indeed her barrenness had seemed to encourage him, but she ached to bear his child. Creating new life with him might bring light to the darkness in his soul and, despite the odds, she thought that perhaps God would grant this to her, to them. A small miracle was all she prayed for. Her desires were not selfish, but pure.
‘But God sees far beyond our horizon,’ she told me. (She knew already by then that I didn’t really believe, but she blamed my age and was sure that eventually I would see sense again.) After they married they tried to conceive for years. Every month the coming of her blood was an immutable tide, eroding her hopes and revealing her deepening despair until one day a sadness settled upon her which could not be lifted. ‘I wasn’t strong enough for the cross God asked me to bear, you see?’ This cross grew heavier every day and with every child she delivered until she came to the conclusion that her lot was not to ease her husband’s suffering, but to know it for herself. And so she accepted her burden as my father did his, with a smile. Years passed.
My mother paused. She took my hands in hers, turned me towards her. ‘So you see, son, I waited for you for so long. I wanted you so much. And I love you more than anything in this world,’ she said. ‘But it’s time you knew how you came to be. As much as we know.’ And then at last she told me about my mother. My other mother. In remembering, her face became radiant, her breathing more rapid, and we were joined in my room by the dark-haired woman, the rattle of the tracks, the slick of blood on the floor of the train and the green springtime coat.
That story was alive like no other. It grew and transformed year by year. Every spring the urge would rise in my mother to tell me once again how it happened, and every year she embellished it a little more. With each new recollection her account became more spiritual. It began with a faint glow around the woman in the carriage, her expressions during labour becoming more and more beatific until finally you would think it was Mary herself who bore me. I myself became rosier and more angelic in every iteration and any presence of blood became the slightest stain. But no matter how much that story evolved, I have never forgotten how in that first telling of my birth the blood poured from that woman just as the story spilled from my mother’s lips, like an absolution.
5
Back home my parents had a drawer stuffed with old photographs. This was before everyone had digital cameras, when you would get back a paper envelope of twenty-four photos from the printers. My parents took plenty of snaps, but they never put them in albums and over the years the envelopes split and spilled and the photos jumbled together. In amongst them were hundreds so blurred or overexposed that the content was barely recognisable, but my mother couldn’t bear to throw them away. There was a memory in there somewhere, she said, a sliver of our lives. Sometimes, when my mother felt melancholic, she would have us sit cross-legged on the floor by the drawer and pull out a handful.
‘Oh,’ she would say, ‘we took that in the Aquitaine. You were about six I suppose. Do you remember that holiday?’
I did recall going there, but my memories of it were different: the taste of an apricot tart, a thunderstorm over sand dunes. Encouraged, my mother would show me houses, churches, and markets, photos of me with a friend I had apparently made on that trip. ‘You remember her, don’t you? You wrote
to each other for months afterwards.’ I didn’t. But the next time we came across those photos I would remember more, the holiday, the penfriend, the lashing waves. The sweet tang of apricots faded into the shadow of those memories that had their authority stamped on to glossy three-inch squares.
This is how I came to know my mother’s version of our shared past, and later, this is how I came to know you too, glimpsing your snapshot stories as they rose to the surface, rifling through fading pictures out of context. I have been glad of them. For many these days, if a moment is not recorded and shared it doesn’t truly exist. Our tiny experiences are captured, passed about and approved of, a trail of breadcrumbs we leave as we go, permanent in their record. I never liked that way, it was never my style, I always preferred living to talking about having lived, and so did you. But now I am thirsty for those details. If only there were more. And so I tug at any slight thread of the past, teasing it from you to see if we could fill in the gaps before it’s too late.
6
My mother is always happy to remind me about the childhood memories I fail to recall. Every minute seems fresh in her mind, aided by the hundreds of photographs fluttering in unmatched frames around the cottage walls like fading butterflies, each one with its own story that she will tell and retell to anyone who’ll listen.
There is one at the foot of the stairs where I am tiny, perhaps two years old, standing precariously on the lid of the old upright piano in the front room, looking down into the open box. I am on the tips of my toes, one hand pulling at the strings inside, the other splayed against the garish, floral wallpaper behind me for balance, a small brown bird on a giant scarlet tulip. ‘I look like I’m about to fall,’ I said to my mother once. ‘Why didn’t you stop me? Why take the time to go and find the camera and take a photograph?’