“What have you done?” was the first thing she said, almost hissed. It wasn’t clear if this was directed at either or both of us.
“What have you done?” said Laurent, standing up completely this time. “You’re the one who punted him around so many boring dinners and lunches with your beau monde chums to show him off, where he had nothing to do but get bored and eat and drink too much. You couldn’t just leave him alone, could you, doing what he did best—creating and enjoying himself.”
“How would you know?” said Alice, sneering. “We never see you. You’re off too busy ‘making it on your own,’ except of course, oh how convenient, you appear to have a very useful last name.”
Laurent looked utterly furious for a second and a half, then turned away.
“Oh yes, we’re all so concerned about his welfare now,” spat Alice, two circles of pink appearing high on her cheekbones. “Bit too late, don’t you think?”
I stepped up. “Uhm, maybe we should all calm down?” I ventured. “I don’t think Thierry would want us to be squabbling…bad karma?”
They both turned on me, and for a second I thought I was going to get it in the neck. Then Laurent held up his hands in resignation.
“Yes, yes, you’re right,” he said. He fixed Alice with a hard stare. “I think we should put aside our differences for Thierry, do you agree?”
Alice gave a shrug so Gallic it was impossible to believe she wasn’t French born and bred, and whipped out her mobile phone.
Moments later, the atmosphere was lifted somewhat by Benoît and Frédéric arriving, both of their heads down. They were so obviously miserable, it gave me something to do, to comfort them. They had closed the shop for the afternoon for the first time outside of August in forty years. Already, worried customers had come around asking if it were true, and the newspapers had been on the phone. By the sound of her, Alice was dealing with that side of things. Now all five of us stood or sat, Laurent not looking at any of us, Alice walking up and down talking on her mobile, as if making herself busy would in itself make a difference. I focused hard on the linoleum. Every minute that ticked by made me feel less optimistic.
Suddenly the doctor was standing at the door, removing her mask. Her face was completely unreadable.
- - -
Claire clutched the handle of the chair very carefully. She had tried to call Anna back—she knew there was something wrong, there had to be, she could hear it in her voice—but she couldn’t get anyone to pick up the phone. She bit her lip. Monserrat, her caregiver, was fussing about cheerfully in the background, clearing up, lining up her medicine bottles for later when the community nurse would come around. Monserrat was great, but she didn’t want to get into a big conversation about how she felt and what was up.
It had been her decision, when first diagnosed, not to tell people. She couldn’t have explained why. She didn’t want to draw lots of attention to herself to begin with; she couldn’t bear to see pity in people’s eyes. She never could. Not when her marriage broke up, not when she had flunked her A-levels. It felt more painful than chemo ever could. She knew on some level that it was pride; stupid pride, inherited from her father more likely than not, but it didn’t make it any different.
Also, what was her ex-husband Richard going to do anyway? Drop everything and rush back and undo their entire lives? And the boys were busy. When it finally got so much and she had to tell them, they had been wonderful, and those nice girls they married, but she had always attempted to minimize any pain or discomfort so they wouldn’t worry so much. She much more enjoyed the stories of what the children were doing and, sometimes, their hand-drawn cards. Anything that took her out of herself, that helped her stop thinking “cancer cancer cancer” was all for the best.
Project Anna had been the best thing she’d found to date. She had told herself it was purely about extending the girl’s life experience; showing her a different way of doing things, the same way, once, Mme. LeGuarde had shown her, for Anna to enjoy her own youth. She only had the memories of the lovely girl she had been once. (And she could look back now without embarrassment; she had indeed been lovely.) These days her body was all pale folds, swollen by steroids and strong drugs, softened by childbearing and age. She felt herself starting to hang loose from her bones, her teeth softening in her head.
But then, seventeen and fair-haired and fresh—she could understand now why Thierry had been so attracted to her, even if then it had seemed completely out of the blue. Anyway, she didn’t want to ruin those memories. When she’d first gotten the Internet (quite late; she’d had the prickling sensation that, even though he’d been dead many long years, the Reverend would not have approved of the Internet one bit), she had of course looked him up. And she’d found him too, still often in the pages of the French press, or in many, many cookery books and guides to Paris. His heft had surprised her, although she remembered with pleasure his gargantuan appetites for everything—for food, for chocolate, for sex and wine and cigars, and for her. It wasn’t entirely surprising, she supposed, that it had caught up with him. On the other hand, she had led a blameless life of teaching and cooking healthy meals for her family and keeping her weight down and not smoking and not drinking to excess and look where she had ended up, on a ward with tubes sticking out of her, feeling like she was 190 years old, so did it matter, really, in the end?
She had idly wondered, many times, what would happen if she wrote him a quick letter—she knew where to find him, after all. But she had always stopped herself. It was ludicrous, a crush from so long ago, a two-month wonder. He must never think of her at all. She couldn’t imagine anything more embarrassing than someone turning up in your life you completely forgotten ever existed. She imagined him searching his memory, trying to be polite, the awful dawning realization of how much thought she’d given him throughout her entire life, how much time. It was a ghastly idea. Until Anna had given her the perfect excuse.
- - -
1972
“There, there,” her mother had said, as she lay back in her old bedroom, with its ridiculous posters of Davy Jones and ponies. It was the room of a child, utterly stupid to her eyes now, and seeing it had only seemed to confirm how much she no longer fitted in in this place.
She had cried all the way back on the train, on the ferry, and on the train again, even as she remembered Thierry’s fervent words—do not forget me, do not leave, come back, come back. And she had promised, she really had, but she had no money and no hope and no idea of what to do, and she was trapped in a pale blue bedroom with ducks on the mantelpiece and a valance on the bed, and a school uniform hanging up in the cupboard.