She looked at him, feeling a little hazy.

“And you’re right in the middle of treatment…it’s not fair on any of us. You’re just not strong enough. You have to realize that.”

“I’m not strong enough for any of it,” she said.

“Mum, don’t talk like that. You’re only fifty-eight.”

“I’m fifty-eight with cancer in three different bits of me. That’s not like those hill-climbing, marathon-running fifty-eight-year-olds you see on television, all right?”

She hadn’t meant to be snappy—detested it, in fact—but she had spent a year now—no, when she thought about it, most of a lifetime—allowing herself to do what other people wanted her to do, gently following their paths, being a good girl, doing what she was told. And where had that gotten her? Stuck in a chair by a window, with her children annoyed at her, even after she’d broken the heart of a perfectly decent man.

“This is what I want to do,” she said again carefully, so she didn’t sound drugged. She was aware that she sounded like someone trying to pretend they weren’t drugged. “My friend Anna is going to help you.”

“The one with the chopped-off toes? She was in the paper,” said Ricky. “She didn’t get anything like the payout she should have done; she was crazy. She should have gone for them.”

“I think she just wanted to forget all about it,” said Claire. “Anyway, that’s not important. I shan’t disturb you, you don’t need to do anything; we’ll arrange it all.”

“It’s not about the arranging,” said Ricky, his face suddenly white. “It’s not about that, Mum. It’s about whether it makes you sicker.”

They didn’t know, thought Claire. They couldn’t, with their young fit bodies and young families and all their lives spent thinking about the new car and the mortgage and where they’d go on holiday next year and the year after that. Even though every single person on Earth was living under a death sentence, to actually have one written down on paper…However much they tried to pretend there’d be new treatments, new ways of fixing her, more chemo, always more chemo. But she knew. That there wasn’t a lot of sand left in the hourglass, that the time was coming. That if there was anything she wanted to do, she had to do it quickly. They were scared they might lose her—well, they were losing her. They just hadn’t faced up to it yet. She had.

And there was only one thing she wanted to do. And this was it.

Ricky looked at her mutinous face. “I’m telling Dad,” he said, as if he was talking to Ian and they were nine and seven again.

Claire shrugged. “There’s not much he can do now, I would say.”

She and Richard were always courteous, although she was aware she found it easier to be so than he did. She liked Richard’s new wife, Anne-Marie, too, liked her a lot, and her daughter. Anne-Marie in her turn was so relieved that Claire wasn’t a terrifying nightmare who would still be phoning Richard every five minutes and turning the boys against her, and had been very kind to Claire, sending her magazines during her illness about soap stars that didn’t make a lot of sense to Claire, but in her darker moments she enjoyed looking at the colorful pictures of peacock dresses and losing herself in a world where losing or gaining weight meant love break-ups and romance, not chemo and steroids.

“Well then, I’ll call that girl.”

Claire raised her eyebrows. Trying to get Anna to do anything she didn’t want to do was an interesting challenge at the best of times.

“If you like.”

- - -

I figured I’d phone first. They must have someone who could help out. I took the phone onto the balcony. Hearing the blank computer voice explain that my call to DownSouthNet Rail was important, please could I continue waiting—while I explained back that clearly it wasn’t, otherwise they would hire someone to actually answer the telephones, then remembered that I was speaking to a machine and wondered if anyone listened in on these bits, then assumed that they didn’t, then started to get impatient and cross and wonder if I could do this later.

Then I thought about Claire, how thin and weak she had looked the last time I saw her, and Thierry, his big face suddenly transformed by the huge grin on his face the moment I had said her name. It was so strange to me. I’d never had anyone to feel that way about—I mean, Darr was all right, but, you know. I don’t think seeing Darr would be the last thing on anybody’s list, unless you needed some really average rendering done. So I sighed and held on.

“Your call is important to us.”

It was strange, what was important, I thought, looking down on the street where already people were gathering for early aperitifs in the sunshine. Tiny glasses of Pernod were brought to the small rackety tables at the bar opposite, along with a jar of olives and a plate of cooked meat; good customers then. It was a man and a woman, in middle age, engaged in an intense and lively conversation. I wondered what about. How nice, I thought. How nice it would be to get to that age and still be together and still have so much to talk about, so much to think of. Mind you, anyone looking at my mum and dad would think the same thing, except that in actual fact, they would be in the middle of a fight to the death as to whether my father should take his extra raincoat to fishing club. When it was abroad, it just seemed so much more exotic and interesting to me. Presumably if you were in the conversation, it might not seem like that at all.

“Please continue to hold.”

The great bells of Notre Dame chimed the hour—three o’clock. I thought of Laurent at work, delicately spraying the chocolate with sealant so it wouldn’t whiten up if it were to last right to the very final cafés of the evening in the Pritzer’s winter garden, each perfect square imprinted with the hotel’s signature. Did people even know, I wondered. Did people even know how much care and attention went into the chocolate on their pillow? Maybe in France they did.

I felt anxious and antsy, restless. I know what Sami would have said: get laid. But I didn’t want to “get laid.” In this big and lovely and scary city, I wanted to do what Thierry wanted to do and Alice, presumably, and Claire, and everybody else; I wanted to fall in love.

“Hello, love? Sorry for keeping you waiting.”

The voice was a woman’s, reassuringly northern and normal; she sounded motherly and actually, genuinely sorry for a system that I supposed, when you got down to it, wasn’t her fault.




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