I dried up mid-sentence, staring straight ahead although I couldn’t see a thing. The Japanese boyfriend touched my shoulder gently and Robert asked me if I was okay. I had to excuse myself for a moment. Nothing was okay. I couldn’t see how it ever would be.
Meeting over, I crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz, relieved to have swapped my heels for sandals. I mentally sketched a route home through the Jardin des Plantes, a place I used to love. I walked the full length of one of the avenues lined with plane trees, taking in the riotous display of nature in full bloom. What would happen to me come fall, come bare branches, by the next time these plants came into bud? Past, present, future: there was no sanctuary. There was no ending in which I got to keep Philippe, Jean-Luc and my child. I walked through the Fifth and finally took a short cut through the familiar territory of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the one patch of grass where the Keep Off signs were ignored barely visible for all the tourists lounging around. For once I would have welcomed bumping into Daniel – he wouldn’t be able to make me laugh but I wouldn’t have shooed him away this time. I’d become quite attached to him, albeit not in the way he wanted. He would know when to drop all that. He would have listened.
Eventually I could put it off no longer. I’d been avoiding computers and tablets as though they might spontaneously bombard me with unwanted information: the size of a seven-week embryo, French divorce law, details of therapists specialising in whatever was wrong with me. (Sorry, I know you don’t like that phrase.)
The times of TGV trains from Paris to Nice.
At two days’ notice it was going to cost a fortune but my decision was made. It didn’t even feel like a decision. When I came face to face with Philippe I would tell him about Jean-Luc’s accident, so he could tell the Malavoines, and in doing so I would have to reveal everything. I had no choice – for once I would do the right thing, no matter how disastrous the consequences.
I entered my date of travel but before I hit search, I heard the soft clunk of the elevator coming to a halt on our floor, which was strange as our neighbours on both sides were away. Someone must have pressed the button for the wrong floor. They looked very similar: three doors, three mats, three minuscule labels below the bells. Whoever it was would realise their mistake soon enough. It wouldn’t be the DARROUSIER-FOLGATE residence they wanted.
I’d turned back to the screen when I heard the sound of a key in the lock. My eyes swept over to the front door without the rest of me moving, like one of those living statues you see everywhere. ‘Vanessa?’ I called out, anxiety plucking at my vocal cords. She’d had a bust-up with her father and come back early. That had to be it.
The first key was snatched away, another inserted with force and finally the door swung open. It was my husband standing at the threshold of our home and something told me he wasn’t thinking anything good about me now.
Chapter Fifty Eight
Until Vanessa moved in with us I had never once seen Philippe really angry. Irritated, pissed off, of course, just as anyone is from time to time. We’d lived here in this respectable apartment building in the chic 6th arrondissement our entire marriage – five years already – before the neighbours started shouting at us to stop shouting. It was a quiet life, but now I wanted Philippe to lose his temper because his silence was intolerable. My doubts about whether my husband still felt passion for me disappeared before he said a word. If only I could have found out some other way.
He shoved his suitcase into a corner, rocking it from side to side without using the wheels; on top he dumped his nice jacket, now bunched up in his left hand like a rag. He suspended the car keys above the ceramic bowl where we kept them and, opening his fingers, dropped them from a height. I wish it would have shattered.
‘Have you driven all the way from Nice?’ I guessed as much from his pleated brow and hunched shoulders, the way he held his head like a dead weight. When Philippe came into the living room I instinctively took a step backwards and he gave one of those exhalations that is virtually a word. ‘What, you think I’d hit you?’
My gut response was that I didn’t think either of us had a clue what the other was capable of but I immediately revised this. I knew where I stood with him. I tracked his gaze to the train website still open on my laptop, now displaying the search results. He couldn’t conceal his surprise. ‘I’ve spared you a trip,’ he said.
We were both still standing, awkward and ill at ease in our apartment that felt like an empty shell. I waited to find out how much he knew, how serious it was on a scale of basic, bad and dreadful. It was curiously empowering that he couldn’t know everything, although the part he couldn’t know would only make matters infinitely worse. Whatever accusations he made, I was guilty. It was reassuring to know I could put up no defence. I didn’t have the energy.
When Philippe could finally bring himself to look at me, his eyes were about to spill over. ‘Toi, qui es si bonne,’ he said, in sheer desolation. He thought I was a good person and for reasons I couldn’t fathom he was still using the present tense. I leaned across to him, tears of my own building up. ‘Don’t, please,’ I said. ‘I’m not worth it.’
He wiped his face on the back of his hand. Even before I was unfaithful I’d never given my husband any reason to think so highly of me. But maybe that’s what love is, a willingness to accept the other person for all that they are, to consider their flaws outweighed by the good.
I’m ashamed to say I pitied Philippe. It had to be anger and jealousy that had driven him home – nine hours on the road – and now he was here, he was too beat to yell at me. ‘If I had heard about this from anyone but Geneviève I would have thought it was a lie,’ he said, perhaps still hoping it was.
‘How long has she known?’ I asked, my voice not rising because there was a significant element of me that didn’t care.
‘Maybe this is news, but you’re not very good at this, Alexandra. And you don’t know a warning when you hear one. Geneviève told me she spoke to you in Normandy, thinking you’d back off. If you had, I would never have needed to know. She never wanted it to come to this.’
‘So you didn’t know?’
‘Me? Good God, no! But she’s been onto the two of you a long time, after calling on you at the office.’ I held my breath – she knew my entry codes too. ‘Says she got no answer but her son only went and left his skateboard in the courtyard.’
How could Jean-Luc have been so stupid? Philippe’s eyebrows did an uphill/downhill in response to my expression. ‘Well, you’re no better. Geneviève found all sorts of things of yours in his bedroom when they got home yesterday. She got particularly worked up about a lipstick for some reason.’
After Jean-Luc flipped out and injured himself, I didn’t check the floor carefully for the contents of my bag. Before I left I registered having the three important items: wallet, keys and phone, and gathered up the few items I could see.
‘I mean, doing it in their home! That was what made Geneviève crack. Have you no shame? I used to read Jean-Luc stories in that room when he was a little boy and he ends up…’
I held up my hands. ‘Stop it!’ It was pointless to explain how reluctant I’d been to go to the Malavoines’. The problem was what we’d done, not which room we’d done it in. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before, I promise you.’
Philippe snorted bitterly, and it was a ridiculous claim, now I thought about it. I’ve never had an affair with your best friend’s son before, I swear.
‘I mean, not even remotely.’
‘You clearly have no idea how it works.’
‘Too bad I didn’t ask for your advice then, since you’re such an expert.’ There was a flicker of uncertainty in his expression. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I know about you and Nico.’
I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this disdain. ‘You want to talk about that now? Really? So I’m not perfect either. That’s been over for a while, and it was nothing to me—’
Oh, here we go, I tho
ught.
‘But more to the point, she was nothing to you. You will never have to look Nico in the eye. You will never find yourself struggling to account to anyone for what I did. Whereas I have had to apologise for your behaviour. I’m ashamed of you.’
That made two of us. But even so, what Philippe did wasn’t nothing. ‘I found out about your affair before anything happened with Jean-Luc,’ I said, for the record.
Now Philippe’s mouth fell open. ‘You’re unbelievable, Alexandra! Are you suggesting I’m somehow responsible for this?’ He looked away, shaking his head over and over. ‘I hold my hand up to my own actions but yours are down to you. No one else.’ He extended the fingers of one hand and stirred the air with them, inhaling deeply, as if about to explain something to an exceptionally difficult person or a very dense one. ‘You don’t shit on your own doorstep,’ he said, in English. It’s funny how the French have no equivalent of that delightful expression but maybe they don’t need one. They just know. ‘So you were upset, you wanted to get your own back – fair enough. But did you have to do it like this? Of all the young men in Paris, why pick our friends’ son?’ He paused as an unwelcome thought occurred to him. ‘Why are we even together if that’s what you want?’
‘I would never have picked Jean-Luc. You have to believe I didn’t go looking for a younger man or any man, Philippe. It wasn’t about revenge.’
His shoulders dropped and he gave a sigh. ‘There’s no end to what Henri and Geneviève have been through with that boy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He was a nightmare as a teenager: angry, depressed. Going missing. Bunking off school.’
‘Why have you never told me this?’
Philippe threw me a furious look as if I’d suggested it was his job to vet my lovers.
‘Have I ever told anyone about your brother? You know how Geneviève likes everything perfect, she wanted to hush it up. Well, from now on you can keep your secrets, all of you! I am sick of it!’ After a moment he was off again. ‘Did it start after the launch? I saw you talking, and you took a long time to show up for dinner.’ He turned away, as if looking at me and thinking whatever he was thinking was too much to stomach. ‘You didn’t do it in my gallery?’
‘Philippe, for goodness’ sake, nothing happened in your gallery! It started before that when he came to the office.’
‘Oh, that’s classy!’
‘All this when and where is irrelevant. It is already over. He is very clear about that now. And it was me who ended it,’ I added, recalling that this had been a consolation when I found out Philippe had broken it off with Nico. A slim one.
It was completely dark now and over Philippe’s shoulder I could see the shapes of people moving around in the apartments opposite and our reflections in the living room windows. ‘Of course it’s over now,’ he said, ignoring the order of events, which irritated me unreasonably. ‘I still cannot imagine how this began.’
‘We are not having this conversation,’ I said, aware I had very little dignity left to preserve. ‘If something is over it makes no difference how it started.’
‘It does to me! It was you who made the first move, wasn’t it? You should have told me if I didn’t satisfy you. Not that I can compete with a pretty little bastard less than half my age, of course.’
‘Don’t call him that.’
‘The least you can do is answer me.’
‘It won’t make you feel better.’ As if anything could. ‘If you insist, he made the first move, on the spur of the moment, I’m sure. I should have ignored it. It was a mistake, it was wrong. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Well, you could tell me why, if you regretted it, you kept going back for more?’
He made the assumption most people would. Mistakes and regrets usually belong together. I couldn’t tell Philippe that I’d wrestled with my conscience but been overpowered by desire for Jean-Luc. Or that it had turned out to be so much more than sexual.
I deeply regret the way it ended but to this day I cannot say I regret it entirely. I know it’s shocking, but it’s not as if I choose to feel that way. And I’m grateful I can remember that it wasn’t all horror and pain and deceit. If I can hold on to that, one day I’ll have a chance of explaining to our daughter how she came to be. She’s the proof that it was something beautiful. It wasn’t only about what we could destroy.
‘Now I understand why you’ve been so distant. Why you didn’t want me anywhere near you.’ I went to protest – I’d provided intermittent sexual favours with all the warmth and affection of someone doing it under a railway bridge for twenty euros a pop. But we both knew that wasn’t all he meant. ‘I was trying to be sensitive, after that time it was obviously so distressing for you.’ My hand went to my mouth. That time. He had sensed something was wrong, he just didn’t know what.
‘I can honestly say it was just sex with Nico – she was often here from Rome on business. It was a casual arrangement for both of us. It began in the winter, when you were feeling bad and you and I weren’t sleeping together much. I was flattered. Nothing was going well and it made me feel better. That’s all it was.’
A whoosh of indignation powered me up. We could argue all night about who did what but there were no innocents here.
‘That’s all it was? You put our marriage at risk over someone you didn’t even care about and it’s no big deal? I realise I wasn’t supposed to find out, but if you thought this was okay… At least I have the decency to feel bad about what I’ve done.’
Philippe held a balled fist to his mouth and it was a while before he spoke again. ‘I can see now that it was pretty despicable, especially given the circumstances. But I would never have done it if I thought it would harm our marriage – you mean too much to me. I’m such an idiot!’ he said, turning his anger inward. ‘I don’t know if you can forgive me.’
It was amazing how little comfort it gave me, infecting him with my guilt.
‘The issue isn’t going to be whether I can forgive you, Philippe.’ There was only one option left that felt anywhere near right, one I’d considered several times back when it could have done some good. It was too late, but I would do it anyway. I would tell my husband the whole story. Except that I didn’t start at the beginning. I never do. First I heard the words in my head and then they were out in the open, a knife pulled from a wound. Now he sat down.
Chapter Fifty Nine
Philippe and I were still under the same roof but that was as far as it went. We weren’t in any sense together. I’d spent most of the four days sleeping, finally surrendering to a hormonal fatigue I’d been living with for weeks, which was no longer offset by endorphins or adrenaline. I ate and drank because it wasn’t just about me – I never wanted to harm another living being.
Philippe spent most of the time out – I didn’t know where – but when I heard him moving around the apartment I made sure to stay in the guest room, where I’d been sleeping since that night. I was like a mother trying to shield her child from some traumatic sight that could leave lasting mental scars. But I was Philippe’s wife, pregnant by another man, and the sight I wanted to protect him from was me. And it pained me to look at him in turn. For a tall man, he seemed diminished in every way. Haggard, caught between shock and devastation. I know that place and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. ‘Did you have to fall in love with him?’ he’d said.
I ended up saying the same to both of them, word for word. I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.
Those strange, vacant days brought back one of my few clear memories of childhood that predate Christopher’s death. I was six years old when a major earthquake took place off the coast of Humboldt County. My parents were glued to the TV as we waited for aftershocks. Men in suits pointed at weather maps with sticks, predicting further tremors, of which there were many. But now, as with everything, I’d completely lost my bearings. This was nothing of the kind – so far all we’d had was the foreshock.
When I
ventured outside for the first time since Philippe’s return, craving sunlight, I found a small padded envelope in the mailbox addressed to Alexandra Darrousier. The pointed courtesy of this gesture made me want to throw the contents around the courtyard – its message as clear as if it were daubed all over the wall in the Chanel Coromandel lipstick inside: Geneviève might refuse to get my name right but her behaviour, unlike mine, would remain beyond reproach.
I tried to tell myself it had found its way into the envelope by accident when she was retrieving my lost belongings; the greatest indictment wasn’t the lipstick, the cheap mirror compact or the BHV special edition of Paris Pratique that screamed you will always be a tourist. It was a chip of plasterboard from the wall of Jean-Luc’s room, two or three centimetres wide with jagged edges, one of them softly tinged with red. I put all of it in the trash.
On that walk I made it as far as the tip of the Ile de la Cité, near the Pont Neuf. For over an hour I sat listening to a man play Spanish guitar. When he left, he came over and asked if his takings would be any help to me. ‘Why would you do that?’ I said, realising I had left home with nothing but the keys in my pocket. ‘People normally say this to me,’ he said, ‘but you made me feel so sad.’
* * *
The receptionist at the doctor’s office handed me some forms and a sample pot before turning quickly to the next woman in line, whose belly was so huge that her maternity dress hitched up at the hemline. The future maman gave me a sisterly smile and I clutched at the edge of the desk as fear lashed at me. I dreaded thinking what kind of mother I would make. Loving the right people was something I found difficult – what if I didn’t love my baby? Cold sweat beaded at the roots of my hair.
When I was summoned, I handed my sample to Dr Lafarge who set it down on the desk. ‘How have you been?’
The answer couldn’t be hard to guess. The last few days had leached the colour from my skin, the area around my eyes looked frail, the capillaries visible underneath. When she suggested an examination, there was a tentative quality to the question. I forgot my stoic act when she inserted the scanner. Almost immediately there was that winking again on the screen, darker, lighter. I felt the doctor lingered on it. She concluded with, ‘All normal for eight weeks.’
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