• • •
The Bourigeauds were distraught to hear that I had to leave so much earlier than planned. I also don’t think they believed us. Camille whined and asked why I couldn’t take her with me, and when would I be back. I said I had to spend a couple days at my parents’, that Grandpa wasn’t feeling well, and that I’d be back sometime next week. Anne was in earshot when I said this, and I watched her grip tighten around the salad bowl she was carrying to the table.
“You really shouldn’t let your clients treat you like this,” said Alain, sitting down. “You have to set some limits.”
“It’s his gallerist who needs limits. Why would you ask such a thing, on the first day of vacation?” asked his wife.
“It’s a very important painting and we need it out of the house,” Anne announced, slamming the salad bowl down.
“I thought it had been in the gallery?” said her mother.
“Same difference. Camille? Don’t sit like that. Put your napkin on your lap. Mom, will you pass the wine?”
“And you really can’t stay for dinner? I mean, this just seems a bit absurd.”
“I really do have to get going. You know, traffic.”
“Of course,” said her father, staring at me curiously, no doubt wondering how much traffic there could be in the En-glish Channel. “Of course.”
• • •
I kissed everyone good-bye and apologized profusely, gamely repeating that I’d be back in several days. Anne, in an award-winning show of solidarity, linked her arm through mine and said she was going to walk me to the door. But once we reached the mudroom, all pretensions fell.
“I don’t want to talk about this or hear about this or even think about this right now.”
“But I can’t—” I said. “We need to.”
“I need a fucking break, Richard,” she said. “I’ll have Camille call you. And then . . .” She shook her head. “And then, nothing.”
Nothing wasn’t something I could work with. Nothing didn’t tell me if Anne was thinking of a separation, or considering a divorce. Nothing was worse than if she hadn’t said anything at all.
Which was exactly what happened when she walked away, leaving me with only my mistakes to keep me company, and an entire sea to cross.
• • •
It was too late to catch a ferry and, with a national holiday upon us, all of the scenic places were filled, so I spent the night in a budget motel on the side of the interstate leading into Saint-Malo.
The first thing I wanted to do upon arriving was brush my teeth. Teeth brushing has always been a kind of ablution for me, an oral atonement to the gods. But when I opened up my Dopp kit, I saw that I’d forgotten to bring toothpaste. Or rather, it was in Anne’s bag.
This oversight made me despondent. I literally felt like I wasn’t going to be able to see my way out of the mess I’d created while having scuzzy teeth. Things were so bad that I actually went downstairs to the lobby to talk the befuddled night receptionist into squirting some of his own toothpaste onto my brush.
I think when you reach a moment of tremendous desperation, a point at which your worst imaginings have actually come true, you’re protected by a force field of incredulity before reality sets in. As I sat there on the flimsy mattress across from a fleet of tent-cards promising an El Dorado of blockbusters just a credit-card swipe away, I couldn’t believe that what had happened had actually happened. If I’d left the letters at Julien’s, like I’d planned to. If I hadn’t left them in my bag. It wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be, Anne couldn’t have read them. It would be heartbreaking if she did. It would kill her. It, quite literally, would ruin everything we had.
But the proof that it had happened was right there in my suitcase, smothered between the letters I’d stuffed back in my bag. It was in the fact that I was sitting alone on the first night of vacation in a fifty-five-euro-a-night hovel with another man’s Aquafresh lingering on my gums. And yet. And yet, despite this proof, I still refused to accept the fact that there might be no more us.
I know that I shouldn’t have been able to, but that night I actually slept. In my dream, Anne and I were watching figure skaters in a competition. We were in a hotel room, but it wasn’t the one that I was in now. It was an unrecognizable location, very late at night. We had plans to go somewhere, but when we saw the figure skating, we became fixated by it. Anne leaned her head against me and said she’d always wanted to wear one of the costumes with the feathers on the bustle that spun out so magnificently when you twirled. I said that I’d had ice-skating lessons when I was younger, which isn’t true in real life, but it was true in my dream. And then Anne danced her fingers across my chest and suggested we order take-away, and the alarm clock on my phone rang, and I woke up, and I was still alone, and all the bad things were true.
8
IF I’D gone to London from Paris, it would have taken me just over two hours on the Eurostar. But from my perch in Saint-Malo, I had to board a ferry that would take six hours—six—to get to Poole. Poole is a two-hour drive from my family home in Hemel Hempstead. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, I’d have plenty of time to think.
With the Peugeot and The Blue Bear safely parked in the boat’s bowels, I made my way up to the public atrium, where a troupe of plum-and-navy chairs were flanked by a glass-encased duty-free center where one could watch the English splurge on tins of foie gras and macaroons.
I picked a rather dismal area under an air vent in hopes that no one else would sit in the two vacant seats beside me, but my aspirations were dashed by the appearance of a round and ruddy fellow sporting a felt hat.
He was wearing an orange raincoat and khaki pants with the utility pockets near the ankles, not a useful place for them at all. He had the excited energy of a man on an expedition, and I could tell the minute he performed the universal is-this-seat-taken gesture that he would want to chat.
“So where you heading to, then?” he asked, taking out a printing-press worth of newspapers from his bag.
“Well, Poole, obviously.”
“Poole, obviously!” he roared, striking my arm. “And then?”
“Hemel Hempstead,” I said. “That’s where I’m from.”
“Blimey!” he replied, nearly hitting me again. “I’m from Great Gaddesden myself.”
“Is that right,” I said, honestly surprised. “Were you on holiday?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I work for Xerox. Big presentation out in Rennes.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “How’s that?”
“Well, they just bought the Color DocuTech 60. Fastest full-color laser printer in the industry.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do,” he said, opening a paper. “People are really intimidated by color copiers, you know? So I’m their hand-holder. Harold Gadfrey,” he said, holding out his hand.
I shook it. “Richard Haddon.”
“Haddon,” he said. “Mind if I read a spot of the paper here? You want one? They had a ton in my hotel. English or French?” he asked, showing me an assortment.
I pointed to the pink one, the Figaro’s financial section.
“Ah, good,” he said, handing it to me. “I can’t read French. You seen this, by the way?”
He shook the Sun in my direction. Above a photo of Saddam Hussein, the front headline read DOES HE OR DOESN’T HE? SKEPTICISM LOOMS.
I winced.
“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s no good. So what do you think? Does he, or doesn’t he?”
“I think he . . . doesn’t?”
“I think he doesn’t, too.”
We stared down at our papers, relieved.
“It leaves you thinking, though, doesn’t it?” he said, rustling the front page. “What can we do, really? I’m forty-two years old; I’m not going to fight.” He sighed. “I’m not m
uch of an activist, I guess. You?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m an artist, so . . .”
He sat back and studied me, said he’d pegged me for a writer. “Well,” he said finally, folding his paper open. “You should do something about Iraq.”
“I’m thinking about it, actually.”
“I’d think fast.”
We spent the next hour reading, and then shared a light lunch together in the pub, talking about his work and my work, the various joys and responsibilities that made up our lives. Harold was a family man, two daughters, a wife of seventeen years, two-car detached garage—in his own words, “the whole bit.” He was older than me by almost a decade, but he had the youthful air that accompanies people whose default mood is good.
When it came to discussing my family, the mood noticeably shifted. I told him my wife was a lawyer, that we lived in Paris, the basic facts. And then I pulled out a photo of Camille that I kept inside my wallet. She was on a tricycle in Brittany, with a ladybug helmet on.
“Ooooh,” Harold cooed. “She’s a sweetheart. Does she take after her mum?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, ashamed that I didn’t have any pictures of Anne on me. “My better-looking half.”
“We’ve gotten a bit lax back in Great Gaddesden, I’m afraid,” Harold said, pinching his waist. “Fat and happy! You should come by while you’re in town, actually. My wife’s a splendid cook!”
“Oh, that’s very kind,” I said, swallowing. “But I don’t plan on being here very long. Just a couple days, you know, to go to London, and see my parents.”
“Of course.” He nodded. “Well, lunch, maybe? Or breakfast? I don’t know a lot of artists,” he said, shrugging. “In my line of work, Richard, you’re an exotic plant.”
• • •
After lunch, Harold rolled into the empty row of seats behind me for a snooze, and I read some more papers before dozing off myself. All in all, the time passed more pleasantly than it might have, and I found myself giving my parents’ landline to Harold on our arrival in Poole.
“It’s something, isn’t it,” I said, ripping off a piece of paper from my planner. “I haven’t lived there since sixth form, but I still remember the number.”
“It’s nice they live in the same place,” he said, passing me a slip of paper with his own cell-phone number written on it. “Not a lot of stability, otherwise, today.”
I nodded. I was happy to have met him, this great pelican of a man. I was happy to see how glad he was to return home to his wife and daughters. His wife had called while we were in transit to tell him she’d made his favorite: steak-and-kidney pie.
When we docked, I got a coffee before calling my own family to let them know I was arriving early. I apologized for not calling earlier, a last-minute situation, I said, with the London buyer. My mother was crestfallen to hear that Anne and Camille weren’t with me. I said I was, too.
• • •
My relationship with my parents is an odd one. Once they gave it to me, the Haddon seniors ceased taking an active interest in my life. In fact, the extent of independence I was given as a youngster could easily have been mistaken for negligence on my parents’ part. It’s not that my parents weren’t affectionate—they were—it’s just that they spent most of their time fundamentally distracted.
My father, a history teacher, would often come home after his classes and eat a bowl of cereal with his nose stuffed up the pages of the Scientific Observer. He used to balance the magazine against a vase we had on the kitchen table that my mother rotated once a month with various genera of plastic flowers. It never occurred to my father that most dads don’t eat Weetabix for supper.
My mother worked at the local library to which she commuted on an ancient green bicycle with a makeshift wicker basket that she’d fashioned herself. On Saturdays, when most left-leaning women her age were at home breast-feeding and baking carob muffins, Mum taught an art class at the local community center for a group of middle-aged women who, in between watercolors and felt collages, delighted in exchanging recipes and trading their secrets for removing underarm stains from their husbands’ shirts. My mother used to check out the latest self-help books from the library in order to find a theme for each class that would lend a certain “zest” to her students’ artwork. Judging from the yellow legal pad that my mother left in the family den one day, “You Can’t Love Your Husband Until You Love Yourself” and “Oral Sex: What If We Talked About It?” were just some of the creative catalysts for the Hempstead Women’s Art League in the 1970s.
I sat in my car with the other cross-Channel commuters, waiting for the drawbridge to go down. I hadn’t seen my parents since last Christmas, ten months earlier. It was inexcusable, really. Lamentable as a son, and as a father. How was it that Camille hadn’t seen her grandparents in ten months? Where had Anne and I been, as a couple? But I knew the answer. We’d been in the dumps.
• • •
It was shocking driving through Hemel Hempstead. All of the villages around ours had been improved with fancy shopping centers and river walks, but the Bennett’s End district still looked like total crap. Constructed after World War II as a “new town” development, Bennett’s End was mostly made up of dreary public housing: two-story single-family homes with detached one-car garages. Street after street, the red brick, the white shutters. The homes with novelty mailboxes and neon-purple perennials and whimsical garden sculptures, the bikes overturned on the front lawns. It wasn’t scenic, and it wasn’t charming, but it was home, and I could feel it in my shoulders as the stress started unwinding. I was happy to be back.
I parked the car in the driveway and checked the sky for rain. I’d have to ask my dad to swap out his beloved Vauxhall Chevette for my Peugeot so that the Bear didn’t get sopped.
Just outside the front door, I was stopped in my tracks by the smell of my mother’s one-pot cooking. Red wine, sherry, tinned tomatoes, meat, the perversely comforting scent of burned carrots and singed garlic. My mum has always been a terrible cook. She’s one of those people who doesn’t care what food tastes like; she eats because she has to. This had been a problem during my own family’s prior visits, until Anne finally invented a visit-salvaging tradition called “Duck in a Can.” Each time we came over, we brought a massive (and I mean silo-size) can of duck confit that would last us through two dinners. I’d forgotten it this time. It didn’t matter. Shitty food suited my shitty state of mind.
I rang the bell and immediately heard a scurry of footsteps behind the door. The little eye on the peephole slid open, then closed.
“Richy!” The door opened, and there was my mum, her dark curls frazzled, her hands in oven mitts. She threw her arms around me and I embraced her, running my hands along her birdy bones. Even when I was a teenager, she only came up to my shoulder.
“Oh, love, it’s so good to have you here!”
“Hi, Mum,” I said, pulling back to smile at her. “I brought you guys some treats.”
“Ah, love, you shouldn’t have.” She accepted the plastic bag of wine and tinned caramels I’d got from duty-free before nodding at my tiny suitcase. “Is that all you have?”
“That, and the painting,” I said, looking toward the car. “I’ve got to get it in the garage.”
“You’ve got to move the Vauxy, Georgie!” she yelled. “He’s got that painting on the car!”
My dad popped out in a fuzzy yellow sweater and ancient brown trousers.
“My boy!” he said, pulling me to him.
“Aww, lovely,” said my mother, watching us embrace. “What a shame that Anne and Camille couldn’t make it.”
“I know,” I said, frowning. “I shouldn’t be here either, actually. It’s a unique situation. A very special client.”
I put my stuff down in my childhood room, a robin’s-egg-blue box with a desk beneath a window that looked out onto the s
mall backyard. A weathered poster of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry still adorned the wall above the single bed I’d slept in as a child, along with an Arsenal football calendar from 1979.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said to my mother, standing in the shadow behind me. She hit me in the back, playfully, her oven mitts still on.
“You want noodles or rice with the stew?” she asked. She did both terribly. She used instant rice and tended to slow-cook instant noodles.
“Noodles would be great.”
“Let’s give them a call, first!” My mum tugged on my sweater. “Tell them you’ve arrived! I want to say hi to my granddaughter!”
“All right,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Let me just get my things sorted, and I’ll call.”
Once she left the room, I shut the door and sat down on the bed. I checked my cell phone: no calls, no messages. Because I am a devious person, I called the Bourigeauds’ landline.
“Allô?” said a voice that was definitely my spouse’s.
“Anne?” I said. “It’s me.”
“Yes, well,” she said. “You arrived.”
“I have.”
Silence.
“Listen,” I said, “My mum really wants to speak to Camille. That’s why I’m—”
“Yes,” said Anne. “That’s fine.”
I listened to Anne call out for Camille and heard the phone drop, and then get picked up again by much smaller hands.
“Grand-maman?” went Camille.
“No, sweetheart, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Daddy! I caught sand eels!”
“Well done! Are you gonna eat them?”
“Yup. Mommy’s frying them now. Did you take the ferry all the way to Grandma’s?”
“No.” I laughed. “The ocean doesn’t go there. I had to drive.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
I took advantage of the sudden pause to decode the noise I heard in the background, to try to visualize the stiffness of Anne’s posture, to wonder if Inès was helping her or if she was cooking alone.
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