Everything Love Is

by Claire King

  Etienne inhaled. ‘If you had asked me thirty years ago I would have told you one thing, twenty years ago something different, and today something else again. In my experience love doesn’t only take one shape. It grows and adapts.’ He paused. ‘Or it doesn’t.’

  I looked down at the deck as he spoke, tracing the dark Rorschach patterns where the branches overhead kept it shaded and damp, trying to give shape in my mind to my own point of view. ‘And in all that time have you felt that way?’ I couldn’t get the thought straight in my mind. I was failing to explain the idea that Amandine had described so clearly. How had she put it? I saw her on horseback, her fingers tangled in its mane, flying hooves along the sand. I saw myself at the piano, absorbed and transported out of myself. ‘As though René were not separate from you but part of you, or that you were part of him?’

  ‘Baptiste, I can’t even begin to tell you about everything our love has been. My experience of love can’t be the same as yours. It’s not even the same as René’s. You just have to let the bloody thing take its course and see for yourself.’

  I looked over at him. ‘But has it made you happy?’

  His regard was wry and sympathetic. He shook his head. ‘Of all the days to ask me this. Listen. Love has made me happier than anything else in my life, and it has made me the most miserable. It has changed me, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And it’s not done with me yet.’ He dropped his cigarette into the tin can that served as an ashtray. ‘It’s that woman of yours, isn’t it?’

  That woman of mine. I shrugged into my coat against the wind. I would ask Marcel and Yvette next time I saw them. ‘Yes, it’s her.’

  Etienne leaned back. ‘Tell me about her.’

  It was hard to know where to start. I wanted to tell him about her green shoes, as if he would understand why that was important. Instead I told him that she was a doctor, that she was beautiful, that she was flirting with me without mercy. That there was something between us that shouldn’t be there.

  ‘And I’ll ask you again: why not?’

  ‘And I’ll remind you again: she’s a client. She doesn’t really know what she wants yet. She just thinks she wants it. I’m supposed to be helping her, not taking advantage of her.’

  ‘Give her some credit to know her own mind, Baptiste. Neither of you are kids. Why are you overthinking this so much?’

  One of the dark patterns on the deck resembled a butterfly, its wings ragged and uneven. I felt a stirring of sadness. When I looked up Etienne was staring at me.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m not the psychology guy, all I know about is money and markets, but even I can see you’re using that as an excuse. You have plenty of clients these days, you wouldn’t miss one, right? Have you actually asked her outright which she’d rather be, your client or your lover?’

  I thought back to the first time I met her. How there was something odd that I couldn’t put my finger on, and at the same time there was something intoxicating about her. How that first night the only thing I had figured out was that things weren’t what they seemed. How she had constantly evaded my questions by turning them back on me. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure I’d get a straight answer. And even if I did, I’m not sure it would be the answer I want.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Etienne looked triumphant. ‘There’s your problem. Part of you wants it, but part of you is afraid.’ I was sure my mother had said something similar, or was it Sophie, or Amandine herself? Everybody seemed to have an opinion about me these days. I shrugged. ‘That’s why none of these blind dates people try and set you up with ever work out. And now, even when the opportunity has fallen into your lap, you’re still resisting it.’

  ‘What blind dates?’ I laughed. ‘I’ve not been on a date in years.’

  ‘People are always trying to set you up if you’d let them. That girl from the bar, for example, what’s her name?’

  ‘Sophie.’

  ‘Sophie, right. Anyway, it’s normal,’ he said, ‘none of us like to feel vulnerable. But you have to get past the fear. What’s the worst that could happen? What have you got to lose?’

  I waved my hand around the deck, the trees, the water. ‘All of this. I’m happy here. I might never know where I come from, but I know where I belong. Here. This is where I’ve put down my roots.’

  ‘Roots can tie you to one place and put the rest of the world out of reach.’

  ‘Roots are what nourish you,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to give up what makes me happy for something that might not last.’

  ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself.’

  ‘Better to envisage that scenario now than to fall in love blind and have to face it later.’

  ‘Too late for that, I’d say.’ Etienne reached over and put his hand on my knee. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘take my advice on this. Don’t embark on love expecting it to last for ever. Don’t embark on love worrying about if it will make you happy or unhappy. Just embark on love for the sake of it. If in the future you realise it’s no longer what you want, you’ll be sad but you’ll get over it and you’ll figure out what to do next.’

  Etienne’s smile was at once encouraging and melancholy. I took my friend in properly for the first time that day. He looked exhausted. I felt ashamed that I’d been too self-absorbed to notice before. ‘Is something wrong?’ I said. ‘You look pretty terrible.’

  ‘Oh, it’s probably just the weather,’ he said with a wink. ‘Or too many late nights. We’re trying to work out what to do about Christmas. The usual questions about where we will spend it. Every year it’s the same thing. René wants a party, a big family get-together, but the boat’s too small and our families live so far apart. We usually end up dashing about the country to make sure we see everybody. Just for once I’d love a quiet Christmas, with just the two of us, or even a holiday away somewhere, but René wants to be near children. He says what’s Christmas without children? It’s times like this I think it would be easier to be alone. One set of parents to please, a quiet home to come back to.’

  ‘After all you just said.’

  ‘Don’t you dare use that as an excuse. We’ll figure something out. We’ve managed it every other year. I never said it was easy.’

  A wet gust of air blew through the plane trees, skimming my cheeks. I closed my eyes and let myself sense the wind. Broad, papery leaves were coming down in droves now, I could hear them landing on the deck and skittering off again into the water. It reminded me once more of the first day I met Amandine, when the first leaves had started to fall. Then a sharp clatter on the deck made me open my eyes with a start. At first I didn’t realise what it was, then I saw that my cup had slipped from my fingers and broken in two at Etienne’s feet, a tiny splash of coffee joining the pieces.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  Etienne shook his head. ‘You’re in a bad way, Baptiste,’ he said. ‘There’s only one way to fix it.’ He picked up the pieces and stood to leave.

  ‘Wait, you never answered my question,’ I said.

  ‘Which question?’

  ‘If you can feel that way about someone you love. That connection between two people. Does that really happen?’

  ‘Take my advice,’ Etienne said. ‘Go and discover that for yourself.’

  26

  It’s all very well, this romantic idea of being in tune with someone you love, but sometimes it’s just too hard.

  I’ve done it. I’ve felt the profound pleasure of seeing you happy, been swept up in the waves of your desire. But I have also felt your fear and frustration as keenly as if it were my own. I’ve let your anger become my anger. I have become so engulfed in you that I almost lost myself.

  You once described to me how you managed to stay detached from your clients’ malaises. You were so logical about it, if I hadn’t known you better I would have thought you cold-hearted. ‘There’s a reason we can’t truly empathise with those who are suffering,’ you said. ‘If we did it would overwhelm us.
Our impotence would paralyse us, and what use would that be? Empathy is useful in short bursts, but no one can keep it up over the long term, it doesn’t help anyone.’

  You were right. You didn’t know it then, but you had given me the words I would fall back on later to change myself. To love you I had to learn to let things be as they would be. I had to learn to let go.

  Before, when I was still affected by every setback, Lucas overheard a conversation we were having down in the garden. He must only have been three or four. I was upset. I had allowed your deterioration to come as a surprise. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to expect, but for some reason I had still clung to the hope that somehow it would be different for us. It wasn’t different for us.

  ‘When life gets hard, most of us can at least console ourselves with memories of good times,’ I was saying. ‘But now Baptiste remembers so little that’s real, never mind if he was happy or not. What comfort can I give him?’

  Even at that age, Lucas was very pragmatic. ‘I’ve got a good idea,’ he said, when he came downstairs to join us. ‘If he’s lost all his memories we’ll have to make him some new ones.’ It was the best advice anyone could have offered. Every day since then we have made sure we do at least one thing that makes you happy or makes you laugh. We layer them up, tiny joy upon tiny joy. Every moment a pebble dropped in water, sinking fast and leaving only the disturbed surface to work out its passing until we can throw the next one in. We look at the stars, we cook, we walk along the towpath, we tear mint leaves into tea, we tend to your plants and try to get butterflies to sit on our fingers, we sit on the floor and read books together.

  Lately even books are a minefield though, and I have had to become discriminating about what you read. Life and fiction blend together now in your mind. Just as you often don’t recognise these stories as your own, so other stories that you have read become your truth.

  You sleep mostly during the day now, like a cat. What at first was the occasional afternoon nap became a regular occurrence and you started slipping out of bed before dawn and pacing the boat, sometimes reading, sometimes playing the piano (but always softly, muting the sound with the pedal, trying not to wake me). I always pretended not to have been disturbed. Then you were tired in the mornings, and a morning nap took hold. Now you have given up on dozing in your chair, instead accepting your fatigue and retiring to bed whatever the hour. It was the last step in your transformation to a night owl. After dark you are generally at your most lucid and I stay awake with you as late as I can, but I still have to get up in the mornings. In the scant hours I sleep you are a voracious reader and I have often woken to find that you have temporarily become someone else entirely. You have insisted variously that you are a professor, a fisherman and a detective. All of this was manageable until the morning you became shifty and defensive because you had been reading a thriller and believed yourself to be a murderer.

  I try to steer you towards benign characters now for the benefit of everybody concerned.

  27

  When Etienne left I put on my running shoes and took to the empty towpath, the autumn leaves thick along its sides. It was like running through a spice market, barrelling through piles of cinnamon, red chilli and cayenne, nutmeg oak and saffron acacia. Magpies scattered into the low skies and branches as I approached. But it was cold. Everything bled into grey and I soon turned for home. I had only just got back in and was stripping off to take a shower when the cowbell clanged. Etienne again I guessed, but the face at the door wasn’t his. Still half way up the steps, I froze when I saw her.

  When she caught sight of me, Amandine opened the door herself. At first I must have been partly obscured by the jungle of plants, but as she stepped inside she too stopped short. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, holding her hands up before her and backing off towards the door. ‘You’re busy.’

  I was taken aback. What day was it? Did we have an appointment? ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling suddenly exposed standing there without a T-shirt. ‘I must have lost track of the time. Come in, sit down. I’ll just go and make myself decent.’

  When I returned five minutes later, clean and fully clothed, she was in her usual chair, but perched on the edge of it still wearing her coat. She looked misplaced, like a bird fallen from its nest. I felt such a strong impulse to approach her that I put aside my professional reservations and rather than accepting the awkwardness of the couch as usual I sat right by her, on the edge of the chest.

  ‘I should have called,’ she said. ‘I was just passing …’

  Not the most believable of excuses. ‘There’s something on your mind,’ I said quietly.

  Amandine leaned forwards such that the silver ladybird became a tiny pendulum at her throat. ‘I went riding,’ she said, so softly it was almost a whisper.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was like finding something precious that I thought I’d lost and would never see again. It made me extraordinarily sad, actually.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I wanted to thank you.’ She put her hand on my knee and my breath caught in my throat. She would do these things as though they were entirely natural, as though she could see no limits between us. ‘I needed it.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I asked her. ‘Please.’

  Amandine shifted in the chair, turning it to face me. As she did its deep violets reflected in the pearl of her hair in the low light. ‘Do we all lose ourselves as we get older, do you think?’ she said. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You think who you are today is not really who you are?’

  Amandine pursed her lips. ‘Yes, because I’ve neglected those parts of my character that make me who I am. I’ve failed myself. I’ve become someone else.’

  ‘Who have you become?’

  As she paused I counted her breaths: one, two, three. Deep inhalations as though the air in the boat had thickened around us. My notebook was out of reach. I would just have to do without. ‘I think like most people, I’ve become the person everybody else wanted me to be. It starts with our parents, doesn’t it? Then our teachers, the media even, all the other influences on us. And then as we get older we have other responsibilities. Work. Family. Life gets to us.’

  Goosebumps rose on my forearms, lifting the dark hairs. I was beginning to cool down after my run, my hair wet on the back of my neck, but I couldn’t interrupt this now. I looked carefully at Amandine. Was she feeling the cold too? But no, she seemed fine, relaxed even. ‘So who do you want to be?’

  ‘I liked who I was before. I was less complicated then. It took the ride to remember that. But we can’t go back, I know. We can’t unremember things.’

  When she saw that I was not going to break my expectant silence, Amandine gave a rueful smile. ‘When I was a little girl,’ she said, ‘my father left my mother for a younger woman.’ She dropped her eyes to her hands. ‘I missed him terribly. Of course I was angry with him. I couldn’t understand why he had left us. My mother was the same person she always was. She hadn’t become boring or unkind. She hadn’t grown fat or old. Then I heard him one night, he must have come back for some things, his voice was agitated and loud, coming down the hall and through my thin bedroom walls. They must have heard in the apartment next door too. He just didn’t love her any more, he said. I believed in happily ever after then, and I thought his idea of love was as stupid as you could get, as though you could just fall out of love like falling out of bed. And yet … and here’s the thing, once he left us, despite his betrayal, I loved him more, not less.’

  After all this time. I could scarcely believe it. ‘Go on.’

  ‘When I was younger I thought it was because I felt sorry for him. He was making such a huge mistake and I thought eventually he would be lonely because of it. But as I got older and got to know myself better I realised it wasn’t that at all. I loved him more simply because now I could see life without him. His presence had become more precious because it was transient. Do you see?’

  ‘Yes
.’

  ‘I liked that feeling of teetering on the edge of loss. It made me feel so … alive. I became almost addicted to it. Some people would say that’s screwed up, I know, but I learned how to use it. When I was angry with my mother and I thought I hated her, I started to imagine losing her too, and it put everything back into perspective. When being with someone is painful or tedious, if you imagine the void they would leave in your life it clarifies how you really feel about them. You should try it.’

  She lifted her eyes to mine. ‘So in one way it has saved me when things got hard,’ she said, ‘but I’m aware it’s not all positive. The cliché of a downside is that I’ve always found myself attracted to the wrong kind of man, the ones who are afraid of really committing to another person. The ones like my father, of course.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘I thought I’d got over that … but I haven’t, have I?’

  I felt the blood rise in my skin, an ache in my core. I looked out towards the canal to compose myself. Behind Amandine I could scarcely see a metre beyond the window, the brume closing around us like a cloak. Amandine crossed her legs, folding her arms across her chest. Perhaps she was getting chilly after all. ‘Anyway, I know we can’t stay children for ever, but it’s a pity how such things can affect our entire lives.’

  Sitting on the chest was starting to make my back ache. I stood and crossed to the galley to put some water on to boil. I hadn’t even offered Amandine a drink.

  ‘It depends on how you look at things,’ I told her, leaning against the divide. ‘If you believe that your experiences are the ingredients that make you who you are, then you can’t rid yourself of past disappointments and pain any more than you can take a rotten egg out of a cake.’

  ‘How else could you look at it? You think we can just forget what we’ve learned about life?’

  ‘No, but I think we are constantly reinventing ourselves, keeping some elements, discarding others, and there’s no need to hold on to the previous versions. We have to let them go.’