Mme. LeGuarde had held her hands on the last evening, genuinely sad to see her go; Arnaud and Claudette had held on to her legs.
“I hope you have gotten a lot out of your stay,” she said, and Claire had gotten tears in her eyes and sworn that she had, that she could never be grateful enough.
“I don’t want to be patronizing,” said Mme. LeGuarde, “but it is nice to have love affairs when you are young. But there will be many, you understand? One swallow does not make a summer is the English phrase, I know. You are confident now and you have learned many things on your way toward being a grown-up woman, so take these memories. But do not cling on to Paris, no? You have your own life, your own way to make. You are far too clever to hang around, waiting for crumbs, relying on other people, you understand me?”
And Claire, struck dumb with misery, had nodded and remembered the words and she knew deep down it was wise advice. But oh, how much she didn’t want to hear it. She wanted Mme. LeGuarde to say, “We cannot do without you. Forget school, come stay with us until you marry Thierry.” Even thinking something so ridiculous brought a blush to Claire.
Back home, her mother had been so pleased to see her, but Claire felt like a stranger in her mother’s arms; how could it only have been two and a half months? She was a new person. A woman of independence, who worked, then spent her evenings as she chose. How could she be expected to concentrate on algebra and verb declensions?
Her father had looked her up and down. He had never particularly enjoyed Claire growing up, even though she had been as respectful and obedient an adolescent as one could find. It was evident even to his unpracticed eye that she was growing further away from him than ever. He grunted.
“I hope you haven’t picked up any fancy ways in Paree,” he said. “They’re loose over there.”
“She’s a good girl,” assured her mother, stroking her all over. “You look wonderful, dear. So kind of Marie-Noelle to take such good care of you. She wrote to me.”
“Did she?” said Claire, looking startled.
Her mother smiled a secret smile. It had obviously been everything she’d hoped for her gorgeous but too staid daughter.
“Don’t worry, nothing bad. Apparently she was a credit to the family, Marcus.”
“Well, I would hope so,” said the Reverend, looking slightly mollified. “You would hate to be neither use nor ornament, hmm, Claire?”
Claire nodded. It had rained all the way on the train home. After the golden heavy light of Paris unfolding onto ancient cobblestones, of verdant parks and iron railings and great churches, the bland red brick and corrugated iron of Kidinsborough, the already dripping cement of the new NCP car park and the shopping center, with its overturned trolleys outside, felt worse than ever. She couldn’t believe what she was doing back there. She wished she had a best friend to confide in, for once.
Her mother had made mince and potatoes for her homecoming, once her favorite. “I’m really not hungry,” she said to her mother apologetically. “I might just go to bed. I’m so tired.”
“Your mother has made good food,” said the Reverend. “It would be a sin to waste it.”
So she had had to sit, in the old dowdy traveling clothes she had last worn at the beginning of the summer—now too short in the leg and too tight in the bust, and try to choke down the overboiled carrots and mushy potato, try not to think about melting camembert that came in its own little wooden basket, baked in the oven with herbs and served on a crisp green salad (the only salad that had hit Kidinsborough in the early seventies was a couple of leaves of damp iceberg lettuce served with tasteless quartered tomatoes and salad dressing). Or the golden roasted chickens they bought from a man who sold them on a spit that tasted so hot and salty that they had let the grease run down their chins, and Thierry had licked it off, and she had laughed and laughed, and they had mopped up the rest of the juices with the most incredible fresh bread, still warm from the oven. Thierry had shown her how to know when bread was at its freshest by the crackling noise it made when you broke into it, adding smugly, “But Pierre would never give me second bread.”
She could barely remember that girl. And as the days grew shorter, and school started again, she felt like she was trapped, trapped in the body of a child who needed to do what she was told.
Every day, she woke up early, terrified she might miss the postman. Her father wouldn’t understand Thierry’s letters but her mother could, and her father would get the gist, surely, or just disapprove in general. She watched him like a hawk; she couldn’t trust the Reverend not to block any incoming post, but he seemed his normal irascible self, grumbling over his newspaper about the terrible state of everything and how Britain was going to the dogs and how the union men were “wicked, wicked.”
He started preaching this, too, from his pulpit, which did not go down at all well with the local population of Kidinsborough, who were hanging on to their steelworks by the skin of their teeth. His congregation dwindled, and men came from the bishopric in the evening, talking to him in low voices.
Every day, Claire got up early to make sure her father didn’t make it to the post before her, but he never did. So as the days went by, it became stranger and stranger that she had received no letters. She had returned to school, gazing at the stranger she had become in the mirror—not the carefree girl striding happily down the Bois de Boulogne, but a sullen teenager in a short gray skirt and a too-tight tie, looking just like anyone else.
In class she barely paid attention, except in French, instead writing endless letters to Thierry, circular in tone, about how much she missed him and how much she hated Kidinsborough and how next summer she would find another position and come back to Paris and this time they couldn’t make her go back, nobody could, sending it to the shop, although who knew where he was now, where he was posted.
There was no response.
In November, they moved.
Claire cried. She begged. She pleaded. She ran the whole gamut of teenage rebellion, slamming doors, staying out late, sulking, but nothing worked. Complaints against her father were growing; his old-school, fire-and-brimstone sermons had fallen out of fashion. “Hippies,” the Reverend complained. “Nothing but g-damned hippies getting into everything. They’re going to ruin everything.”
As a result of this, Claire went out and bought incense, which turned him practically apoplectic with rage.