by Claire King
When I think back on that journey, it is impossible to remember it without recalling the hours that we devoted to making love. Mornings, midday, evenings, we would reach for each other, delighted with ourselves, drenched with desire. When we lay together you were like a thirsty man drinking from a pool. You buried your face in me, bathed in me, ran your hands through me, my name in your mouth. When we slept you lay curled against my back, your long arms folded around me, the bones of your hands hard against my cheek and your fingers knotted in my hair. Your intensity took me by surprise. Once you had decided, at last, that you wanted me, your desire was so fierce it was as if you were trying to absorb me through your skin. And yet every day as we stood at the wheel you tried to let me go.
You told me that I should leave you while things were still good. That was the deal. That was your plan. That way, you said, we would have all of the highs, but I would be released before things got too bad. When I resisted that idea you reminded me that if I didn’t leave I would lose you anyway. You would be gone, you said, and I would find another man in your place. Perhaps a ghost from your past, perhaps a stranger, but that either way I wouldn’t recognise him.
‘I can get to know your ghosts,’ I said. ‘You can tell me about your life. Then I’ll recognise you, whoever you are.’
‘Maybe,’ you said. ‘But there’s still no escaping the fact that even if you recognise him, he might not recognise you. He won’t love you. I couldn’t bear that to happen.’
I knew you were right. There was every likelihood you’d forget me; the dementia would make you confused and out of confusion would come mistrust. And later you would need the kind of care that relies on trust. ‘We don’t have to think about that now,’ I told you. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’
But you were adamant. ‘No. Promise me you will leave when the time comes,’ you said. ‘There can be no happy ending for us.’
That’s where we were divided. You had already begun to think about the end because you had it in your sights. But I was happy to let the future come at its own pace. I told you long ago that what I really wanted was to feel alive. I wanted love and everything love is. You put that within my reach. With every day I spent with you I felt gravity returning. When I first met you I was air. Now I was water, now I was earth.
I had never been looking for the happy ending you find in books. That’s not the kind I believe in. They are simplistic constructs that make it easier for us to bear the long continuum of our stories. But no one ever ends at the ending. After the lovers kiss and the last page is turned, their lives barrel on messily towards the grave and maintaining some kind of happy ending is an ongoing battle. If you don’t keep that in mind, happiness will slip through your fingers like water.
In that sense you might say it was a blessing to know how little time we might have, for it made us truly alive. Everything good became magnified: every embrace was a gift, every morning you woke and said my name my heart sang, every kiss was like a reunion, a second chance. I took those exquisite days and salted them away. They have sustained me through the days and weeks when I wished more than anything that I had taken your advice and cut my losses.
I had been ready to go to Paris, the idea had appealed. A chance to give Sophie something I had wanted for myself, stepping into an unknown future rather than choosing one that I already knew bore pain and responsibility. But it would have been a mistake. Sophie didn’t need me there, she only needed to know I’d be there if she asked, but you needed me and I needed you. There are still days when I question my decision, but when I have rested, when the family have rallied round as they always do, I always come back to the same conclusion. I do not regret choosing you at all.
In the end I told you that you must be the one to decide. I promised you that when that day came, when you thought it was time, I’d go. All you had to do was say. And until then we would rejoice in the present.
48
Time stretched and compressed in strange ways. It could have been days we were away, it could have been months. Whole, perfect minutes stay with me, sense-rich and vibrant, yet entire days seem to have vanished. The sun was glorious – I don’t recall a single rainy day – and newly emerged butterflies filled the sky like wind-blown blossom. The mornings were heralded by distant cockerel calls and the glockenspiel chimes of cows. White light reflected off the water giving bank-side grasses stars for blooms and dappling the underside of bridges as we slipped beneath.
‘The light is different on the water,’ Amandine said one afternoon as we stood side by side at the wheel. I agreed, but I couldn’t explain how. ‘There’s no need to,’ she said. ‘We both feel it. If something speaks to your heart, why try to pin it down with a description?’
I hadn’t expected to find the travelling so soothing. Our pace through the water was so sedate that cyclists on the towpath regularly overtook us, much to Amandine’s delight. We let this serenity guide us and soon sank into a deep, peaceful rhythm, sank into each other. Every day a little. Never too much. Never too far.
Every evening, as the twilight plane trees transformed into sentinels against the violet skies, we found a place to moor and stepped off the boat, walking out together to feel the new, different earth under our feet. To smell the place, listen to its sounds, breathe in the subtle differences, to try and know it even for a while. You’d be surprised how much changes in just a few kilometres. When we returned to Candice we would sit up on deck and listen to the cicadas in stereo, the amorous frogs and the chatter of late-night mallards, drink a glass of wine and eat a simple supper. Neither of us was a great cook, but we managed with what we found in the villages we passed – cheese, asparagus, artichokes, fresh bread and eggs.
At night it took me a while to get used to having Amandine with me. I had been accustomed for so long to the weightlessness around me when I slept, the way the covers fell over the shape of me, and now, even if we were not touching, if she had rolled away from the heat of me, my skin could sense her. Her presence invaded my dreams, my mind inventing scenarios to explain where I must be. I was working, or on the streets, or in the bar. Amandine said I talked a lot in my sleep those first few days, asking strange questions and murmuring to myself, and it was only after a while she realised she wasn’t expected to answer. When I woke and got my bearings the first thing I would do was pull her closer, so that everything made sense again. Amandine filled a space in my bed that hadn’t existed before, but would be forever desolate when she left.
That wasn’t the only change I found unsettling. Nothing was familiar any more and it bothered me more than I thought it would. I came to understand that Candice was only part of my home. The towpath was home too. The trees where owls made their clandestine nests, the way the light and shade fell through the leaves on to the deck in the afternoons, the time the ducks took their noisy breakfast. I had known my surroundings so intimately that I hadn’t had to think about it at all, and now every tree was new, every face, every cloud. Many times I woke hazily and had no idea where I was. Whenever I asked Amandine she always replied that it didn’t matter. She felt it too, the ambiguity of having left our moorings, but she was so contented it just washed over her. ‘We’re right here,’ she’d say.
We both liked to rise early, while the morning mist still lay over the water like an exhalation. We found our routine; I made the coffee and laid the table while Amandine warmed bread and croissants, then we would open the windows and let in the air, sweet with the fresh scent of dew and the sharp tang of cut grass that drifted over from the canal-side cottages. While we were moored I felt at least partly connected to that world, the world of houses and bakeries and offices and roads, of postmen and politicians. But as soon as we set off again and the bank released its hold on us our lives became perpendicular. It gave me the same feeling I got when I was on a moving train and saw the faces of people in cars waiting at a level crossing.
Beyond the confines of the Toulouse tourist circuit it was clear
everyone on the canal felt this otherness too, creating an instant bond between us. Every time we passed a boat travelling upstream there would come a cheerful call, ‘Bonjour, Candice!’ We quickly learned to look out for the names of boats as they approached so we could reciprocate. ‘Bonjour, Beatrice!’ we’d reply. Or, ‘Bonjour, La Coquette.’ There was so much in those simple greetings, an acknowledgement of community, a shared joy. By contrast those on the land still saw us as otherworldly. People would park their cars on the roads that ran parallel to the canal or stop on bridges that crossed it, leaning out of their windows to take our photograph. On the move, Candice had become even more of a curiosity.
There were lots of cars, I remember, lots of families. Perhaps it was the Easter holidays. They looked hot up there in their vehicles stuffed full of belongings and crisps and squabbling, the radio bleeding out of their windows. When the children waved to us from the back seats we always waved back. Amandine never tired of their fascination, and at a distance I didn’t mind it either. I was quite used to it. But when walkers and cyclists on the towpath photographed us it felt somehow more intimate, more intrusive. Some would smile, say hello and ask if we wouldn’t mind them taking a photo, but many others just snapped away, viewing us through the screens of their phones as though we were on television. As though we couldn’t see them back.
One day when we had found a particularly beautiful spot to pause for tea, we were sitting on deck watching a robust yellow and black dragonfly hunting the delicate petrol blue damselflies across the water when a young couple walked by hand in hand. The first thing they did when they stopped by the boat was to turn their backs to us. I thought it strange until I realised the woman had her arm extended, taking their photograph with Candice in the background. ‘They haven’t noticed us,’ Amandine whispered, with a grin.
‘Let’s say hello,’ I whispered back. I cleared my throat loudly and they both spun around with startled expressions.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to alarm you.’
‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry!’ the young woman said. ‘I didn’t see you there.’
‘It’s no problem.’ Amandine smiled kindly. ‘People do it all the time. But would you mind taking our photo too?’
My heart sank. I have hated posing for the camera ever since I realised how much significance a photograph can give to a random fraction of a second. After a long battle with my escalating reluctance, my mother gave up asking me to be in photos years ago. Of course it’s all changed now. You can take a hundred snaps and pick and choose and edit. Still, I was reticent at first but after having been persuaded by Amandine I was greatly relieved afterwards when she showed me the picture they’d sent to her phone. There we were, the two of us shoulder to shoulder, framed in blue, the hint of a mischievous grin still playing on my lips and Amandine looking right at the camera, smiling and radiant. Everything about it looked perfect. I couldn’t quite believe it was me in the photo. Was that how we appeared to other people?
The woman with the camera had asked Amandine afterwards if we lived on the boat all the time. For the sake of simplicity Amandine had said we did. ‘That’s amazing, you’re so lucky,’ the woman said. ‘I wish I could do that.’
I wondered if we offered, the woman with the camera, the people in the cars, would they really want to exchange places with us, for a day, for a week, for ever? Those people looking down at us from the bridges on the outskirts of towns and cities, all they could see was the long corridor of calm, a rare stretch of empty air in their cluttered world. It must have looked idyllic. But what they couldn’t see below their feet was the graffiti scrawled under the bridge, the mattresses and bin bags alongside the dandelions. Looking back on their holiday snaps they would never see the homeless man hidden from sight. We try to keep our shame hidden, the things we don’t want tourists to see. But even they can’t help but notice the trees.
All along the Canal du Midi are the tall iconic plane trees that have strengthened the banks and given shade to the passing boats for generations. They are dying one by one and there’s no cure. Once a tree is infected it can still look healthy and strong on the surface for years, ripe with fresh green leaves in spring and the balls of seeds that hang on threads like baubles, but it will be shrivelling from the inside. Eventually, if you’re observant, you might notice clusters of small branches where the new growth is stained and curling at the edges as though dipped in caramel, the first signs that the disease has taken another one. It’s an epidemic and no one knows how to stop it.
The further we travelled the more evident the disease became. Many trees were already stripped bare, their branches bent haggard and hopeless. Some were taken by ivy, giving the appearance of living on, yet others remained inexplicably rejected and barren. In other places there was nothing but a stump, or turned-over earth where a tree should have been. A missing note in a song.
I looked back down at our smiling faces on the screen and realised I was spoiling the idea of what was just a beautiful photograph.
I pulled Amandine close. ‘Thank you for insisting,’ I said. ‘I love it.’
‘I bet your parents would too,’ Amandine said. ‘We could send it to your father’s phone.’
‘Let’s wait,’ I said. ‘When we get back to Toulouse I’ll take you to meet them.’
49
Your mother and I took to each other straight away. She set you to peeling potatoes and took me out into the garden, vigorous with growth and vibrant with the scent of sun-warmed fruit and flowers. ‘Do you know much about gardening?’ she asked.
‘I’m terrible with plants,’ I told her.
She laid a soft-skinned hand over mine. ‘I’ll teach you.’
‘That’s kind, but I don’t have a garden. I never have.’
‘And your mother?’ I shook my head. ‘Everyone should have a garden, no matter how small.’
‘That’s what Baptiste says.’
Your mother smiled. ‘He’s been alone for so long, gardening is good for his soul. A garden teaches you to work with what you have, the space, the soil, the light. No one gets it right first time, but you work at it. Some things fail, some things flourish and things happen beyond your control – bad winters, pests and droughts – but the rewards are so satisfying, and eventually you know your garden so intimately it’s as though it is the only possible garden you could have sown.’ She looked back at the cottage pointedly. ‘Well then,’ she said. Was I imagining it, or was she trying to tell me something?
You still hadn’t told your parents. As long as you could hide it, you had decided to spare them the upset. If they had noticed a change in you, and as a mother I would be surprised if they hadn’t, they had chosen to leave it unsaid.
‘Baptiste tells me we have something in common,’ your mother said as she walked me slowly around the garden. ‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you? That’s good.’ She paused long enough for her next question to sound like a non-sequitur. ‘He’s looking well, don’t you think?’ Without waiting for a reply she lifted a handful of soil and raised it to my face. ‘And look at the colour of that,’ she said. ‘I was a midwife myself. Of course, it’s not the same thing exactly.’
‘Baptiste told me. It’s as hard a job as mine, if not harder.’
She nodded. ‘See how the sun floods the garden now?’ she said, bending slowly to pluck out a sticky length of trailing weed, ‘but look, there under the apple tree there’s still plenty of shade for the little flowers that don’t like the heat. As the sun gets lower in the sky at the end of August, that shade will swell across the garden and those little things spread like wildfire.’ When she spoke her face was creased into the well-worn smile we reserve for those dearest to us. I could see your warmth in her and it made my heart ache.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a tall, rangy tree with just the earliest signs of fruit.
‘It’s a persimmon,’ she said. ‘Looks like nothing now but just wait until Christmas, it will have no leaves at
all but its fruit will hang like golden baubles.’ She reached for my hand. ‘Under the persimmon tree, that’s our spot. When we die that’s where we’d like our remains to go, but only if Baptiste decides to keep the cottage. Not if he sells it to strangers. When the time comes you’ll know what’s best for you both, but if you did keep the cottage, could you remember that for me?’
That weekend was the first and last time I saw your father, although you don’t remember it that way. You don’t remember the call the following day from your mother, or the way we all sweated through the funeral that blistering summer afternoon. You don’t remember the way his ashes sat in an urn on the mantelpiece for years, as though in limbo.
‘I knew it was coming,’ your mother told me as we milled around with neighbours and distant family in the cool of the house. She was calm in the way that some wives are at funerals, busying herself with others, passing canapés, tissues and condolences. She claimed to have seen it in his face, the afternoon just days earlier when he had pulled up outside the house in his old blue truck with all his tools stacked on the flatbed. He had brought everything back. He was finished. ‘When you’ve been with someone this long,’ she said, ‘you know.’ She took hold of my wrist then looked me in the eye. ‘I’m glad he got to see you and Baptiste together. I’m glad he saw his son in good health as well as good spirits. He died knowing everything would be all right.’ A chill ran over my skin. She knew. I nodded, and she drew me in for an embrace. ‘Bless you both,’ she said.