“Well,” said Frédéric. “We shall worry about that as it happens. All that matters is that today we have a shop we can open.”
And when I came back from the bathroom, Benoît had made me a cup of coffee.
- - -
Claire looked up at Patsy.
“Patsy, I’ve decided, I want to take a trip.”
Patsy’s face immediately got panicky, as if she’d suddenly gone mad. Claire wondered if she thought she meant trip like a long journey into the night, or suicide or something. Or just a trip, she also considered. Something very different.
“I would.”
Ian had gotten her a film out called The Bucket List. It looked absolutely terrible—old men on a cancer ward having a hilarious time—but the concept stuck with her.
“There is something I want to do. Before…before it’s too late.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Patsy had said hastily.
- - -
Of course, she had met Richard Shawcourt before. But their school lives were very different. He lived in a bought house, for starters, not something tied to the church; just a bought house, but a nice house, a detached. Although now that didn’t intimidate her anymore. She knew a little bit about nice houses. Before, she’d barely have given him a second glance, she was so sure of their differences. She’d have laughed at him, in fact. Very few kids like him even went to Kidinsborough Academy, never mind wielding a clarinet. He’d started off very small, she remembered now, just punchbag material even from her year group, but now, she saw, he’d grown into himself, in the upper sixth, ready to leave for somewhere better, and behind the brown horn-rimmed spectacles, he was actually rather handsome, with his wavy dark hair and strong eyebrows. Not that she was interested, of course. He walked her home from the forest that day, asking her about herself, to which she replied in the most vague of terms, and after that he’d seemed to pop up everywhere. She barely noticed until Christmas came and went, and a card arrived from Mme. LeGuarde, full of family news about the children that didn’t even touch on Thierry, but added a fulsome footnote as to how much they missed Claire and hoped she was (Claire thought, correctly, that this was deliberately pointed) concentrating very hard on her education.
And that was it. Nothing more. Nothing from Thierry or Paris; nothing except the faint tinge of lavender that seemed to scent Madame’s Christmas card, although that may have just been her imagination.
So when Richard brought her a large bunch of blood-red roses and a small brooch in the shape of a frog at the Christmas dance, she let him kiss her up against the back wall of the gym, in amid all the other snogging, writhing couples, to show the world, and Thierry, and Mme. LeGuarde, and Rainie Callendar how very much she didn’t care.
- - -
It was Richard who, when she failed all her A-levels except for French, comforted her and assured her she could still go into teacher training, and it was Richard—nice, steady Richard, who was going to study engineering science in Leicester—who brought the Reverend around to agreeing to let her leave home. It was Richard with whom she slept in the small modern bedroom in the halls of residence that smelled of pot noodle and incense and hash, shocking and exciting him with her prowess, confirming for her that Thierry was a one-off, not like other men. And gone. And after dating a few of the long-haired young men on campus, self-conscious in their new flares, talking endlessly about Herman Hesse and Nixon in overponderous tones, she gradually realized that Richard was as nice as any man she’d ever met; kind, and sensible, and steady and well-off, and there was no more point in loving your first love than in thinking you were still going to marry Davy Jones.
Much, much later, when they were divorcing—they’d kept it as civilized as possible, waiting for both of the boys to have left home and be nicely settled, very little rancor on either side—Richard, in a rare moment of not being businesslike and distant and organized, had said, “You never really loved me, did you? It was never really me. I thought you were amazing and different and mysterious, but now it seems to me you were just thinking about someone else the entire time.”
He’d shaken his head in wonderment. “The thing is, for me, Claire, I got to spend twenty-five years with someone I loved. With someone I really and truly loved. But you…I don’t know what on earth you’ve wasted your life doing.”
And Claire had smiled stiffly and signed the papers his lawyer had sent over and waited until she heard the familiar sound of his Rover turn the corner before she’d sunk to her knees and simply disintegrated, becoming unbodied; she degenerated into a wavering mass of tears and snot and pouring emotion, dribbling beyond the bounds of the self, soaking the good John Lewis carpet they’d invested in together.
Although she didn’t believe, as some did, that cancer was some kind of malignant force or punishment that snuck into you if you were unhappy or upset, she couldn’t help believe that if it was a dark spirit, it would have seen that day—and the nights, the many nights that followed it—as an ideal opportunity to infect a soul that saw nothing but deepest black.
- - -
“What do you mean, a trip?” Patsy repeated when she saw the tight set of Claire’s mouth and realized she wasn’t in the mood to be dissuaded and that she wasn’t joking either.
Claire stared down at her Hickman line and sighed. This was going to be really complicated and annoying and hard work and dangerous. It was going to upset her children, and quite possibly Anna, who, she now realized, she’d sent on this mission in a selfish way to work out what had happened anyway. It would cause expense and trouble and would perhaps be all for nothing, and she was nothing but what she had always been, according to the Reverend and Richard and everyone, it somehow seemed, who’d known her well: a selfish, hard person, with unseemly desires.
She set her mouth. There was more of the Reverend in her, she thought sometimes, than anyone would ever have suspected.
“I want to see Paris one last time,” she said.
Patsy frowned.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Patsy didn’t know anything about Claire’s past, because not even Richard knew more than a hint or two. She’d been very careful that they never went to France, even on holiday. She actually made her French accent worse than it was and never joined in a conversation about Paris, even though she was asked about it often. She knew he would guess something in an instant; in fact, the very reason he was first so attracted to her was the air of difference she had given off after that summer. So Patsy treated her patronizingly, like it was some kind of whim.