The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  *

  The flat looked bored, almost hostile, when she opened her front door. Not you again, it seemed to say. Kitty dropped her bag on the floor and went through to the tiny kitchen. There was a bottle of wine in the fridge and a plastic tub of olives, sell-by yesterday. She opened the wine and poured herself a glass, then ripped the plastic film off the olives and dug a half-finished packet of digestive biscuits out of the cupboard.

  She’d just got up to pour a second glass of wine when the doorbell rang. She didn’t answer it the first time: no one ever came to the door. But it rang again, for longer this time, and she thought with a surge of almost-pleasure of a neighbour in trouble, needing her help. She had an entryphone, but instead of pressing the button she went to the window and looked out. Standing outside on the pavement, just far enough from the building for her to see him, was Daniel.

  For a long moment Kitty stared down at him. He looked strange from this angle, just a tangle of dark hair and that long coat of his, but unmistakably familiar too, as though her brain had scanned his appearance so minutely that she would recognise any part of him now, from any angle. He stood on one leg, the other cocked behind him, attentive and impatient. The temptation to let him in, to let him fill up her evening and her weekend, was powerful.

  But she didn’t. She stood completely still by the window, watching, until Daniel gave up and went away. She saw him pull his phone from his pocket, and heard hers vibrating on the other side of the room a moment later, and then he turned abruptly and headed off up the road. He didn’t look up at the window, and he didn’t look back once he’d started walking. For a moment Kitty fought an urge to rush for the entryphone, for the stairs, to pursue him into the street, but it evaporated sooner than she expected.

  Her satchel was lying where she’d dropped it, just inside the door. She took out the sheets of manuscript and smoothed them flat. She could hear the salmon’s song in her head, his terrible resignation to his fate. She could hear how the words would be sung: the baritone voice straining for the top notes, the melody unsupported by the rushing semiquavers on the piano. Perhaps there wasn’t so much missing after all. Perhaps it was right that the piece barely held together. But she sat down at the little table in the corner and let it fill her mind again, let it carry her along, show her its nooks and crannies and eddies and crevices. These were her tools, she thought: time and thought, and the willingness to expend them.

  15

  It was late afternoon by the time Flora left Les Violettes. The path through the woods was sharply streaked with shadows, and the glimpses of countryside between the trees, snatches of green and blue, made Flora think of jewels, and of the cornflower and forget-me-not dyes of her batik blouse.

  It struck her then how little colour there was in her memories of the last few weeks. The grey-scale shades of her room in the evening and the close-weave text of her book; the darkness of the yew hedges in the maze, intercut with chalk-white paths. Even the monochrome patterning of sea and sky from the ferry, divided by a thread of land. How strange it would be, she thought, to live without colour.

  That evening at dinner she behaved beautifully. She listened sympathetically while Friedrich explained the difficulty of finding one’s way to Montallon. (‘There are signs,’ his wife interjected, ‘but not easy to see.’) She sampled the goat’s cheese Madame offered, appreciating not just the variety of tastes but the names – the sharp Sainte Maure de Touraine, with its distinctive stalk of straw; the soft, sour Pouligny Saint Pierre; the nutty Crottin de Chavignol. She enjoyed the tarte tatin, and the glass of sweet Coteaux de l’Aubance Madame Abelard served with it, but she did not share with her fellow guests the delicious memory of the 1959 Vouvray. Something about Madame’s expression, the way her eyes dwelled on Flora, stopped her from mentioning Martin, or Les Violettes. Something that gave her, despite herself, a tantalising glimpse of intrigue.

  She woke the next morning with the pleasant feeling that a responsibility had been lifted from her shoulders. She didn’t have to entertain herself today: Martin was collecting her at ten. A tour of essential sites, he’d said. She could hardly accept the loan of his house and not allow him to introduce her to its surroundings. She wore her linen trousers again, and a cheesecloth blouse that had seemed improbably skimpy when she’d packed it three weeks ago.

  ‘First stop,’ Martin said, as they turned out of the Abelards’ gate in his sportif Citroën, ‘the best producer in Vouvray. No point living here if you don’t know where to go for wine. Sauvignon you can get anywhere, but there’s more of a knack to Vouvray.’

  The Brouillard cave was literally a cave. Martin was pleased by Flora’s surprise as they pulled off the steep road and into an unkempt driveway where a series of doors led directly into the rock face.

  ‘Rather charming, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Perfect conditions for the wine, of course.’

  ‘Where do they grow the grapes?’ Flora asked. There was no room here for vineyards, nothing but a few children’s toys scattered around and a stack of empty wine bottles.

  ‘Just up the road.’ Martin gestured vaguely. ‘Acres of vines up there.’

  As he spoke, the largest door opened and a plump woman emerged.

  ‘Madame Brouillard, Madame Macintyre,’ Martin said.

  The woman shook Flora’s hand, then she and Martin plunged into a conversation Flora could only half-understand. She followed them into the darkness, the cold a shock even though she’d anticipated it. The cave ran deep into the rock, filled with neat piles of boxed bottles, wooden casks of maturing wine, great steel drums for the maceration. The smell – yeasty and sweet and damp, with an edge of rot – was pungent but oddly pleasant. This was like an elves’ workshop, Flora thought, or a moonshine still. Martin broke off now and then to explain something to her, or to ask her a question, but otherwise she was content to listen to the rapid-fire French, picking up an occasional word and marvelling at the strange circumstances in which things were made.

  They left with two dozen bottles for Flora. She could hardly remember what she had chosen, after the little ceremony of the tasting: which année and cuvée, whether sec or moelleux, tranquil or mousseux. A whole poetry of wine, she thought; and something recalled her train of thought from her walk home the previous evening.

  ‘What do you suppose it would be like if we could only see in black and white?’ she asked, as they pulled onto the main road along the banks of the Loire.

  Martin glanced at her, then after a moment he laughed, as though he’d realised belatedly that she was making a joke. ‘You ought to know,’ he said, ‘with your scientific education.’

  Flora felt a little abashed now – mostly at the uncharacteristic flippancy of the question, but also at the way the admission of ignorance diminished her in his eyes.

  ‘My expertise is embarrassingly narrow,’ she said.

  ‘What is your expertise?’

  ‘The place where the oesophagus joins the stomach.’

  Martin looked at her again, and this time Flora laughed.

  ‘That’s what happens to surgeons. The focus narrows and narrows. Orthopods close in on the ankle or the elbow; I started with the whole bowel and finished up as an expert on the gastro-oesophageal junction.’

  It sounded absurd, put like that. Almost as though she’d made it up, Flora thought, although no one outside the medical profession would ever think of inventing anything so preposterous: a whole career devoted to one obscure corner of the body, and a book’s worth of scientific papers on surgical techniques for the different cancers that attacked it. It had fascinated her, of course, the crucial distinction between malignancies that spread from above or below the junction and those that started at the knuckle itself, but it seemed suddenly extraordinary that it had occupied so much of her life.

  ‘Impressive,’ Martin said. ‘And fascinating, I should think.’

  Flora shook her head with a smile. Another problem with a career in surgery – who wants to hear ab
out it, unless they’re after your professional assistance?

  The Loire drifted along beside them, a great wide streak of water broken up by narrow islands and lazy side-streams. What was required now, Flora wondered? Some intelligent questions about winemaking? An observation about the river? The trouble was that she and Martin had moved too swiftly from being complete strangers to an assumption of familiarity that had little basis in fact – and neither of them, apparently, was much good at small talk. That was par for the course among surgeons, but surely wine merchants were supposed to have the gift of the gab?

  ‘Where are we going now?’ she asked eventually, as they swooped over the river and down into the flat plain below.

  Martin perked up. He grinned suddenly, like a little boy up to mischief.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ he said.

  *

  The surprise was a zoo. A wonderful zoo, in a landscaped park with abundant space for the animals. A sign at the entrance announced the birth of a baby koala a couple of weeks before; another encouraged visitors to visit the manatees, the white tigers, the birds of prey that flew free in the amphitheatre three times a day.

  ‘We used to bring the children here,’ Martin said, as they watched the antics of the penguins. Flora examined his tone for unease, but found none. The penguins’ tank was bounded on one side by a glass wall so that visitors could watch them swimming underwater. Flora was sorry she had let the battery run down on her iPhone. It occurred to her that this was the first time for a long time that she’d wanted to take a photograph. She wanted to remember the neat black bodies of the penguins skimming and dipping and twisting, and Martin standing in front of them, his hands in the pockets of his trademark chinos: a stranger who had brought her to the zoo.

  *

  Flora wasn’t sure when she realised how the day was going to end. It crept up on her, an understanding that these last couple of days had a shape and a pattern to them that she couldn’t resist. As they walked around the park, observing elephants and orangutans, watching a troupe of chimpanzees play, she was increasingly conscious of a tingle of anticipation that she hadn’t felt for forty years; a teasing mishmash of uncertainty and inevitability, and of trepidation and desire.

  They didn’t leave the zoo until six o’clock. There was no discussion about what happened next. The journey home was short and somehow dreamlike: the straight roads, the late sun colouring the flat landscape, and then the tall gates of Les Violettes. Dreamlike, Flora thought, in the sense of things being known that you have no reason to know; things being understood without explanation. An acceptance of a different order, different rules, a different world.

  Martin carried her boxes of wine into the house and put them in a corner of the cellar. He came back up with a bottle of his own, a sparkling Vouvray this time. He poured them each a glass, and lifted his in a toast.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘good day,’ and he looked at her for a moment in a way that made her tremble a little.

  His kitchen was perfectly ordered, the tiled surfaces free of clutter and a slice of the garden, the beautiful garden, visible through the back window. Flora thought with pleasure of cooking in here and carrying food outside onto the terrace every day; then she thought of doing so without Martin and the pleasure ebbed away. Stop, stop, she told herself, but she knew she couldn’t. The delicate flavour of the wine was already infusing into her bloodstream, and her brain, and her heart. The world wasn’t black and white, she thought; and colours might look different at different times, but it was no use waiting until the light changed, the moment passed, to make a sober judgement.

  Martin opened the fridge and Flora saw a little array of dishes and pots, a supper for two left ready. He took out a jar of foie gras and a small casserole dish which he slid into the oven. Then he put plates and cutlery on a tray, and found a candle in a drawer. Flora watched him, learning his movements, telling herself she was learning the way around his kitchen.

  ‘Outside?’ he said, and Flora nodded.

  This evening they sat on the lawn, looking back at the house. This was a view Flora hadn’t seen, a different perspective on the garden with the rear of the house as backdrop. She counted three floors, three symmetrical sets of windows, tall and graceful.

  ‘I’ll show you the rest of the house later,’ Martin said, following her gaze.

  He cut some bread and passed Flora the jar of foie gras.

  ‘You do like it?’ he asked, as she hesitated.

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course I like it.’

  He smiled. ‘What, then?’

  She shook her head. Ridiculous, impossible, to explain the pleasure of the moment. He was different from yesterday lunchtime; but everything had changed since then. She looked back on that time already with nostalgia, even though she knew, hoped she knew, that what was to come was even more delightful.

  The casserole contained coq au vin, which they ate, after the foie gras, with bread and salad. There were figs and cheese waiting too, but Flora declined both and Martin didn’t press her. It was dark by now, the night air cool and soft, the candle casting a little pool of light into which bugs glided now and then. Flora didn’t want to move, to spoil the moment, but the ache of anticipation had grown almost unbearable.

  ‘Let me show you around, then,’ Martin said, and he took her hand as she got up from the table.

  He didn’t take her to his bedroom, but to a room overlooking the garden which he had prepared – had he? – for her. A guest room, she assumed, with songbirds on the walls and lace on the bed. She realised when he put his hands on her shoulders that she’d had no idea, until that moment, whether her instincts were right. The flood of relief and surprise and gratitude was greater even than she’d expected. This felt an extraordinary thing to happen to her, to anyone. She couldn’t remember kissing someone like this before, or the acute pleasure of being touched, undressed, with such gentleness and lack of reserve. She was both sharply aware of her body and unembarrassed by it, as though she had been returned to her essential self: almost a spiritual sense of purification and remaking, a shedding of the weary depreciation of long life.

  ‘Flora,’ he said, and her name sounded like a mantra, a spell, an affirmation.

  May 1990

  The house is completely still when Flora gets home. It’s four o’clock in the morning and everyone is asleep. Even the embers of the fire Henry was lighting when she left eight hours ago lie silent in the grate, although she can smell the wood smoke still, the flavour of it colouring the cold air in the hall.

  Returning from the hospital after operating at night, Flora finds it hard to go straight to bed. She needs to sleep for an hour or two before she has to get up again, but first she can take a little time, at this dead hour, for herself.

  She flicks a switch, and the kitchen fills with fluorescent light, illuminating the chipped yellow Formica they’ve never changed. Opening the fridge, Flora reaches for a small jar and a half-bottle of wine near the back. She takes them out carefully, so the chink of glass doesn’t wake her husband or her daughter, puts everything she needs on a tray and carries it up to the bathroom at the far end of the house.

  This is a ritual she keeps to herself: a set piece that signifies pleasure of a particular, private kind. She can feel a sense of calm creeping up on her as she shuts the bathroom door; the high-tensile, euphoric calm that is familiar after fifteen years of surgical on-call. Her mind replays the complicated procedure that filled five of the hours she’s been away: the child who almost died, the moments when they thought she would, the drawn look on the usually devil-may-care face of the anaesthetist. Blood and stench and steel tools too large for that narrow little body.

  She ought to dread the intrusion of such drama and near-tragedy into the texture of family life, but she doesn’t. She loves the thrill of the operating theatre, especially when she’s summoned like the cavalry to a case where the odds look grim. This is what she went into surgery for: the years of diligence and drudgery
have given her what seems to some an almost superhuman power. Day by day she forgets it, taking her skill and deftness for granted, but in the middle of the night, caught in the blaze of the theatre lights, the magic of it comes back to her. She can still feel the strain in the muscles of her arms, still hear the thump of her heartbeat as the monitors raced and plummeted, and she feels vividly, ecstatically alive.

  She turns on the hot tap and scoops a handful of jasmine bath salts – prohibitively expensive – from the jar she keeps on top of the bathroom cabinet. The noise in the old pipes as the water starts to flow causes her a moment’s worry, but the house is full of shudderings and squeaks; they sleep with its sounds every night. Flora imagines Henry turning over in his sleep, the twitch of Lou’s hand on the pillow, as she watches the bath fill.

  With a sigh, she slips into the water, holding her breath for a moment as her lungs fill with scented steam and her skin tingles with heat. Bliss, she thinks. Absolute bliss. She lies back, the glass of Sauternes in her hand. Henry doesn’t like sweet wine: she buys this for herself, a case of half-bottles at a time. Savouring the taste of honey on her tongue, she thinks again of the child with the perforated bowel, and a swell of triumph rises in her chest. The little girl is out of danger, safely asleep in the paediatric intensive care unit, and Flora is cocooned by Sauternes and foie gras and the ambrosial scent of jasmine.