Claire bit her lip. “Ha! No one wants me to go. Not one other person. Everyone thinks you’re trying to kill me.”
“I do want you to go! I’m coming to fetch you! I booked the tickets! But I’m not sure I can perform miracles.”
I wondered briefly if they were right, then put the thought out of my mind. If I got really, really ill—well, I suppose we all do one day, there’s no way around that. But if I got really, really sick, and there was something I really, really wanted to do, I’d have liked very much for someone to help me, even if everybody did think it was a stupid idea. If you asked me, the stupid idea was cancer. It was a bloody stupid idea, but hardly my fault.
Claire calmed down instantly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just getting agitated. Don’t worry. I’ve left…well, if anything happens. You’ll be totally exonerated.”
“Uhm, okay,” I said, not entirely sure how I felt about that.
Laurent hadn’t been in touch at all, which made me slightly annoyed, then slightly pleased that I hadn’t slept with him, as presumably that would have come to the same end, and regardless of Sami’s libertarian spirit, that would have made me slightly unhappy.
Given, though, that Alice had also told me to back out, it made it very hard to find out how Thierry was doing and how much he knew about Claire’s plan. Alice popped down to the shop every couple of days and hummed crossly when she looked at the cashing up, but was frustratingly tight-lipped on Thierry’s progress. All I knew was that he had to still be at the hospital because, as Frédéric said, if they’d let him out even for a second, he would have been back in the shop before they’d taken out the drip.
Claire was ready. So ready. Everything in the house was immaculately tidy. Her oncologist had been cross at first—like all doctors, Claire surmised, he liked mindless gratitude and obedience. Well, like all people, she supposed. But then he’d gradually gotten used to the idea, postponed her next round of chemo, and prescribed her several very strong emergency painkillers just in case. He’d warned her repeatedly that she wouldn’t be insured in France and that her health insurance card wouldn’t help her out with her preexisting condition and that she could get in serious trouble, but she clearly wasn’t listening, so in the end he had smiled and wished her all the best and reminisced about a time as a young medical student when he’d snuck into the Folies Bergère and it had been the best night of his life, and she had smiled back. Paris touched so many people.
Her suitcase was packed. Her sons had both come around and sighed heavily and complained and begged her to change her mind but of course to no avail. She had more color in her cheeks than she had for over a year.
- - -
Taking the train back to the UK was a revelation. I couldn’t believe how nervous and anxious I’d been on my way here, how sick I still felt, in body and in spirit, really. How I was convinced it would be such a disaster and I’d be thrown out for being a fraud, or that I would sit in a rented room for three months not talking to anyone because everyone would be so rude to me and I wouldn’t be able to speak the language.
And before I got on the train even, I would probably have said, on balance, that more bad things than good had happened. Thierry’s illness, my nonstarter flirtation with Laurent, my very slow learning to make one or two types of chocolate that even now I was only beginning to truly appreciate.
But on the train, as I smelled the awful fake scent of the hot chocolate dispenser—which had never bothered me before—and watched the brightly dressed, blond-headed British girls get on, with their big bosoms and ready smiles and little gin and tonics in their hands, I realized I had changed. That I was more comfortable, more confident—not just than I’d been before the accident, but maybe than ever before. Okay, so I had hardly taken Paris by storm, but I had made friends and kept my job and eaten some unbelievable food. I stroked my plain pale gray Galeries Lafayette dress, which I wouldn’t have looked at three months ago but now I felt suited me very well, listened to the safety announcements, feeling quite at home in either language, took out my magazine, and settled my head back and realized how happy I was to be going home, but how happy I would be to come back too.
- - -
I hadn’t rung Laurent, for lots of reasons, the main one being I was a big fat crazy coward who hated dealing with things straight on, but I had emailed him, telling him when we’d be arriving in Paris, with all the dates, and hoping that Claire would be able to see Thierry. What I meant by this, clearly, is that I hoped Laurent would smooth everything over with Alice, but I didn’t put it like that.
Anyway, I was putting stupid thoughts of stupid Laurent out of my head completely. As if in strict defiance of what he or any other French person might think, I marched straight up to the buffet and ordered a large packet of Walker’s chips—cheese and onion—and ate them, straight from the packet, in public, something no French person I had yet met would ever have done. So there, I thought to myself.
- - -
Mum burst into tears when she saw me. Which I know, I know, should have made me happy. Obviously, it’s nice to be loved, of course, I know I’m lucky but, you know, Mu-um. Also I hate the implication: that she was totally sure that I couldn’t leave the house on my own without being eaten by crocodiles or kidnapped by white slave traders. It was a bit insulting to be honest, that she was crying tears of full relief that her useless daughter who couldn’t be trusted in the real world hadn’t actually died when traveling to the nearest possible foreign country to Kidinsborough. (Unless you counted Liverpool. Hahaha, only joking.)
I didn’t say any of this, of course, just buried my head in her shoulder, so pleased to be home. Dad patted me lightly on the back in his jolly way.
“Hello, girl,” he said.
“Hi, Dad.”
I found myself choking up a bit, which was ridiculous as I’d only been away for two months, but I hadn’t been like that girl Jules in my class who’d gone away to university miles away, then worked in America and traveled all over the place. That wasn’t me at all, never had been.
I looked at Kidinsborough with a funny air through the car windows. Another pawn shop had opened. Another little café had closed down. The people seemed to walk so slowly. I wondered, almost abstractly, if I was turning into a snob, but it wasn’t that. If you believed the papers (which I didn’t really understand anyway), the UK was doing well, while France was pretty much running on fumes, but you really wouldn’t see it to set up a street in Kidinsborough against the rue de Rivoli.