Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I tie a towel around myself and go back into the house, leaving my footprints’ shrinking wet islands on the tiles. I want to shower and dress before I talk to Philip, who is washing his gardening hands in the sink, while Marie-Laure mops the kitchen floor. Piers has closed the computer, I’m glad to see, and has presumably gone upstairs to pack. It’s all very domestic; I could be the wife, replacing Hannah, coming in from her swim, ready to dress and think about what is for lunch. Marie-Laure comes to ask me, not Philip, how many there will be at table, and do we want her to do vegetables and salad too? Is this what Hannah wants me to feel—what it is like being her? To be the wife, part of a couple, two people growing slowly old together, repeating gestures, echoing words, finishing sentences, dividing up the chores without any need to consult each other? What Alexandre has tried for several times, come to think of it, and has largely failed to achieve. His method in middle age has been—as far as I can see—to find someone apparently suitable, usually younger, marry her and then discover that she is not perfect after all. This after his first wife, Nadine the lawyer, divorced him and took their young son from him, back in the eighties. It takes work, the subjugation of the self into coupledom, however it is done, whatever premise you start from. Is this what Hannah can’t do anymore?

  But Hannah, why are you demanding the impossible of us—me, Philip, even Alexandre—why are you putting us through all this? What is the point, and will I ever understand it, and what must I do to follow you where you now are? Because it seems that I have to. Because even now, at this stage of our lives, I find I still can’t resist your call.

  When I tell Philip and his children, I’m standing at the dining table with my hand on its glass surface as if I were about to make a speech. Melissa and Piers have their suitcases packed and ready in the hall. They are both slightly tanned after the weekend, they look in their neat pale clothes like satisfied tourists; I think, I’m about to shatter that façade. They want to leave, they are relieved to be able to do so. Philip has his harassed English look, his hair strands untidy, his anxiety at their leaving, evident. We have not been able to come up with a plan, even though we have joked about Plan A and Plan B; as usual, the only plan available to us seems to be to do nothing, but of course, to keep in touch. We’ve all of us relied on English sang-froid—ironic that it can only be named in French.

  “Listen, all of you. I’ve just had a message from an old friend. She contacted him. Hannah did. It was to say she’s all right, and she’s going home in a few days.” Talk about blaming the messenger: they all glare at me now. What do I mean, a message, what old friend, why didn’t she call us, what does this mean, a few days? I want to say, it isn’t my fault. I don’t know any more. I try again.

  “The message was that she’s okay, that’s the main thing, she wanted to reassure you all. That’s all I was told but that’s huge, isn’t it? I’m so relieved. At least she isn’t in any danger.”

  Philip says, “This is too much, really. Claudia, why do you get a message and not us?”

  “It was an old friend, from our past, in Paris. Someone we knew when we were students. I’ve kept in touch with him. His name is Alexandre Dutot. She asked him to call me. I suppose calling here would have seemed too hard for her, but I really don’t know any more than this. Sorry, all of you, I’ve done what I can, told you what I was told myself.” My latent anger now seems about to include them, this helpless little group, this family; this husband whose wife can’t trust him, obviously, to let her do what she has to do, these immature adult children. Damn you all, I want to say, it’s not my business, sort it out yourselves. And damn you, Hannah, for being so mysterious. Oh, and damn you too, Alexandre, for being the person in the middle, giving me messages to deliver. I glare back. I’m close to tears too.

  “Sorry, Claude, I didn’t mean to get at you.” Gentle Philip, doing his best. “It’s just all so peculiar. But yes, of course, what a relief. She’s going home? That is, home to England?”

  “Apparently, yes. But not for a few days. So, there’s no rush.”

  Piers puts down his briefcase on the tiled floor. “Bloody hell. What a fucking stupid mess. Why does she have to do this to us? Coming all this way, and now she’s going back to England? Why? What the hell is this all about?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, for the third or fourth time. “It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”

  “Well, it had bloody well better have a solution, is all I can say.”

  Melissa says, “Surely the most important thing is that we know she’s alive and well. You don’t have any idea where she is, do you, Claudia?”

  “No. Apparently she called from somewhere in Switzerland.”

  “Switzerland?”

  “And she’s traveling back to Paris. Phil, she wants me to meet her there, and for you to go home. Please let me do that. I know she’ll come home to you, if I do.”

  Piers starts to say something, but his father interrupts him. “But why does she want you to go to Paris? What’s this all about? Why doesn’t she just come here? I don’t get it, all this mystery.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know. It’s just the message I’ve been given. Do let me go to her, and find out what’s going on and I’ll make sure she comes home after that. I’ll absolutely insist until she agrees. You know,” I play a card that feels false to me, but it may work. “It may be something that she can only tell to a woman friend. Somebody close. We do go back a long way.”

  Philip says, “I’d better tell the police in Avignon, they can stop looking.”

  Piers says, “If they ever were looking. They can’t have been checking borders very thoroughly, can they?”

  I see how anxiety makes men angry; perhaps it’s better than being simply worried. If I were Hannah, I think, I wouldn’t want to come back at all. But maybe her trip to England will be just a visit, to tell them that she’s permanently moving somewhere else. At least she isn’t dead, she isn’t injured, she isn’t lost. I too should feel simply relieved. Yet—although I certainly don’t tell them—I’m still angry, like Piers. Maybe it’s nothing to do with gender, just a general sense of helplessness before the mystery of other people. None of us likes feeling helpless.

  Then Philip sits down at the table, buries his face in his hands, and begins to cry. It’s more of a dry groan than a sob, as if he’s in pain. Melissa puts an arm around him. “Daddy, it’s all right. She’s all right.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. Piers pats his shoulder. They don’t want him falling apart too. “Nothing to be sorry about, Dad. It’s only natural. You’ve been under a hell of a strain. Can I get you something? A drink? A cup of tea?”

  Philip shakes his head, no, no, I’ll be all right; but his face is gaunt. He looks up at me. “You’re sure there was nothing else? No explanation?”

  “No,” I say, “Nothing else. Just that. She’s alive. I’ll go to Paris and meet her, and we’ll talk about whatever it is, and then she’ll be home.”

  It’s time for the twins to go. Piers is looking at his phone, frowning, unwilling to leave such an unsatisfactory situation.

  Melissa hugs me. “I think you should go, Claudia. She trusts you. After all, it’s what she wants. I’m just so relieved, I mean we didn’t know anything, did we, and now we know she’s alive and sounds okay. She did sound okay?”

  “Alexandre, that’s our friend, said she sounded okay, yes.”

  Piers turns to his father. “Is this all right for you, Dad? It’s all very weird, if you ask me, but perhaps Claudia should be the one to go and find her.”

  Philip says, “I agree. Now, you two had better be on your way, or Mel will miss her plane.”

  “Dad, call us, please. I’ll ring you as soon as I get home. Or, on the way, if you like. You’ve got my mobile number.”

  Philip’s face still shows the marks of shock: relief, curiously, has done more damage than anxiety
. Perhaps he didn’t sleep. I feel a pang for him; he loves Hannah, he has been in agony, and in his stoic way, has kept it all in. I think now that he must have lain awake in the big bed upstairs, missing her, fearing that he would never see her again, imagining the worst. She could do that to him; she can still do that to anyone who loves her; not the first time, I wonder at her desperate self-involvement, that she can ignore other people and their feelings so entirely. But I’m the one who is now officially allowed to go and meet her, and for this I am glad.

  The twins leave, with the hesitancy of people who are longing to depart but still aren’t sure if they should—the kids, Martin, you do understand Dad, and, I’ve got work tomorrow, look after yourself, be in touch, don’t worry, take care. They aren’t Hannah’s in this sense: they feel guilt as they go.

  The car turns, crunching grandly on the gravel that Philip has laid down, and he presses the button to open the electronic gates, and they disappear out onto the track, white dust and waving bamboo, the canal dangerously close, and set off to cross the bridge and join the main road. I see them both waving. I see Philip raise a slow hand. I feel the weight of it, the grown children, the brave pretense, yes of course I am all right, fine, fine, as he gets older without them. I am part of this, this whole scene, whether I like it or not. As we turn to go back into the house, I put my arms around Hannah’s husband for a long hug, and feel him against me, his bony frame and slackened skin, the fatigue of being himself, the coping, the fear of her being gone, the exhaustion that comes with relief. He releases himself at last, sniffs, and says, “Claudia, thank you. I don’t know what I’d have done without you this week. And now, this.”

  That evening, over our aperitifs, pastis cloudy in our glasses, a tray of nuts and olives laid out between us, he says, “There is something I didn’t want to talk about in front of the twins. About Hannah.”

  I sip my drink, and wait. It’s a time to say nothing, but be here with this man who finds it hard to speak, hard even to begin.

  “It was the only time anything like this happened, that I can remember. You asked me if she’d ever just disappeared, and I said no; but there was this one time. It was when she was pregnant with the twins. She went off without telling me, when she was about two months pregnant. I was afraid she was going to try to get an abortion.”

  “She didn’t want them?”

  “She seemed very ambivalent. We’d always said we wanted children, then nothing happened. She went back to work, she was writing a thesis at the time, at the University of East Anglia, she had been planning to do some lecturing there. Then we found out we were having twins. Two babies at once, well, of course it was a shock, and I think she felt overwhelmed. She went away, as I said. Just took a train from Ipswich station and I eventually discovered she was in London. But she came back, and we never mentioned it again. The twins were born early, but they were all right, and so was she.”

  “Philip, you never asked?”

  “I asked once. She just looked at me, as if to say, if you can’t trust me, what are we doing together? It scared me, so I didn’t ask again. Much later, she did tell me that she went to London, not to see a doctor at all but to spend three days going to see all the plays and films and exhibitions she could, one after another, because she thought she’d never be able to do it again for years. I was stunned. Of course, I asked her why she hadn’t simply told me. She said it would have ruined it. She needed just for that time to be invisible, just a person in a crowd, without anyone knowing where she was. It was a thing with her, to be invisible somehow.”

  “I remember. Do you think she might be doing that sort of thing now? Just being invisible for a few days? It’s only been a week since you called me in the US.”

  “It’s possible. That’s what I’ve been thinking. Maybe she just wanted to—get out of her life for a while.”

  “You haven’t had it easy, have you?” I put out a hand to him, and he takes it and then obviously feels embarrassed and lets it go.

  “Well, I think I’m terribly lucky to have her. But sometimes it’s been quite hard.”

  The proud man’s admission, at last. And I thought this was the perfect match, he supporting her, she finding the freedom she needed within those limits. I should have remembered: Hannah doesn’t do limits.

  I dare to ask him now, “She never had an affair, though?”

  I hear his intake of breath. There’s a long silence before he says, “Well, yes, she did. It was early on, before the children were born. I knew, without her telling me. You can feel these things.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “She said that it was someone I didn’t know.”

  “And you never asked who?”

  “Claudia, a big part of staying married is not asking the wrong questions.”

  “But that must have left you in a lot of doubt?”

  “In a relationship one can often be in a certain amount of doubt, wouldn’t you say? I handled it. I still do.”

  I can’t imagine this degree of stoicism; I say nothing.

  “I thought it must have been someone at UEA, where she was spending a lot of time trying to finish her PhD. There was a crowd of young writers there, we used to have some of them over for dinner. But you see, I didn’t want to spy on her. I didn’t want to go any further. No, I said to her that if she broke it off, I’d never ask her about it again. She promised that she had, and so I never did. Sometimes it’s better not to know. You imagine things. It hurts to have an actual person to hate.”

  “You weren’t curious?”

  “Of course. But I wanted her back, and I still do. More than ever. But then, too, I would have done anything. And I think she’s kept her word.

  “And then you had the twins?”

  “Yes, not very long afterwards. So, you never know. She once confessed to me that she was sick of just having sex to see if she could get pregnant. It was true, it was beginning to feel like a chore for both of us. And then she came back to me, and—bingo.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Well, if you’d been around at the time, I’m sure you would have known about it all. You were always the person closest to her; she would have told you. And probably told you who he was.”

  “Maybe.” But, I think, she was always so good at not-telling. If I had been in England, instead of in California, then maybe.

  “You don’t think she might possibly be with that person all these years later?”

  “Well, I suppose anything is possible. But I really doubt it, Phil, that’s all I can say. Anyway, I’ll see her, and I’ll know more then. I promise, I’ll do my utmost to get her to go straight home.”

  “Yes. I trust you. I have to, don’t I?” He sighs deeply, and rubs his eyes.

  “So you’ll wait for her at home in England, and not try to get in touch with her before that?”

  “Oh, God. All right. Tell her I’m waiting for her. Tell her to take her own time, but to come when she can. Tell her—no, don’t tell her anything. I’ll stay put, keep quiet. You know, I’d been thinking she might be dead. I don’t know how I could bear it if she was. I really don’t think I could live without having her there. I think it’s even why I didn’t really want to talk to the police, because they might tell me—they might say, she’s been found, she’s dead, she’s been killed. Or—even, I did think it, killed herself. But now. Oh, thank God.”

  PART III

  17.

  Alexandre calls me when I am on the TGV going north.

  “Tell me where she is. Which hotel …”

  “Yes, of course. And you and I, we can meet?”

  “When I’ve seen her, yes.”

  Only a day later, I’m in a hotel room in Paris again, waiting for Hannah. I lean on the windowsill, the shutters pushed wide, and watch the swallows rise and fall between the narrow walls of the courtyard,
above the garbage bins and pots of flowering shrubs, geraniums, waxy camellias. Another hotel room, another staging post along the journey of our lives.

  In the hotel courtyard, three floors down, a ginger cat is stalking something that disappears between big flower pots. I watch, see the twitch of the tail as the cat waits. The backs of these old Paris houses, always faintly mysterious, always the same: the façades are done up, the front steps polished, and the doors replaced with ones made of glass, but at the back, there’s always this sense of a different life going on unseen. The cat pounces. A mouse?

  My telephone’s chime brings me back into the present and the room. Alexandre. That voice I used to wait for, long for, still here quietly speaking into my ear. Oh, life. Oh, time. I think, I need a drink. He tells me that Hannah is at the Hotel Fortune on rue Bonaparte, that she’s scared of seeing me, thinks I’ll be angry. Then, “I’ll see you later? Call me.”

  After we’ve hugged, and looked at each other, she raises her eyebrows and grimaces a little, as if admitting a fault. And then she falls into alarming silence.

  I wait and then I can wait no longer. Then, “What’s happening, Hannah? What is going on?” I take her in: slimmer, wearing black. Her hair cut shorter, eyes that clear gray.

  “I know, I’ve been putting you all through it, and I’m sorry. But I had to. But first, thanks for coming, Claude. Obviously, I have something I want to tell you.” She’s standing there, her hands clasped before her, still defensive. Against the long window, in this room, this hotel where she has summoned me: Hannah, whom I thought I might never see again.

  “I went to Zurich,” she begins.