Years After You

by Woolf, Emma

  Julien had booked a boutique hotel in the Saint-Germain district. Lily stepped out of the shower and began to rub body lotion onto her freshly waxed legs. They were smooth as silk; Olivia would be proud of her. It was the morning of her birthday and their second day in Paris. She thought of making love with Julien last night and waking in his arms this morning. She thought of breakfast waiting downstairs: freshly squeezed orange juice, freshly brewed coffee, freshly baked croissants, brioches, and raspberry jam. She thought of fresh air, and sunshine, and all of Paris waiting for them to explore. She thought of Stella’s smile and Stella’s laugh and of going home to her later that day. She didn’t feel like a knackered mum now, she felt like the luckiest woman in the world.

  And, like most happiness or sadness, it was entirely undeserved. Lily had never expected to meet someone like Julien. After Harry, after Stella, she hadn’t known she could experience such strong emotions again: lust, love, joy.

  In the weeks after Paris, the chemistry between them was intense. Lily began to reconnect with her body; she began to feel like a whole person again. As she came back to life, she saw how dead she had been inside, for so long. She hadn’t felt sexy since Harry was alive. It wasn’t about motherhood, or being “knackered,” or her pre- or post-pregnancy body. It was the sadness which had made her lose herself. Until Julien, she had forgotten what it felt like to be so consumed with lust that you couldn’t sleep, eat, or think properly. When he’d fly in on the red-eye from one of his work trips, they’d meet for lunch at a gastropub in Belsize Park. They would go back to his flat and lose entire afternoons together.

  But her heart was still fragile. Sometimes when Julien made love to her she had to blink back tears. It was barely a year since Harry’s death, too soon for anything serious. Sometimes she felt ashamed of herself for leaving Harry behind. She and Julien were falling in love, and she was confused. Strong emotions threatened to tip her over the edge.

  But what could she do? Preserve Harry’s memory in aspic and never move on—would that be good for her or for Stella? She didn’t want to bring up her daughter in an atmosphere of frozen grief, with the shadow of her dead father hanging over them. From time to time Lily thought about Harry’s other children, those two boys, and wondered how they were coping. She thought about his wife too, with a deep sense of guilt. Was Pippa still grieving? Would she too meet someone else? And always, those unanswerable questions: How much did Pippa know? How much did she blame Lily? Did she hate her?

  From time to time Cassie took Stella overnight and Lily stayed at Julien’s flat. One night, unable to sleep, she got out of bed, wrapping a cashmere throw around her. She sat in the large open-plan living room, staring at the embers of the fire they had lit earlier that evening. She recalled a phrase she had read years before written by the mystic Rūmī: “You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.” Her heart was broken, and full, and empty, all at the same time.

  In early December the question of Christmas arose. They had been together now for several months and Julien was routinely included in family occasions. It seemed natural enough, during one noisy Sunday lunch, that Celia invited him to spend Christmas with them all in Hampstead. “I can’t bear the thought of you spending the day alone, and we’d absolutely love to have you. If I’m cooking for all this rabble, why not one more!”

  Julien’s answer was polite but vague: “It’s very kind, thank you. I just need to work out what’s happening over the holidays.” He glanced at Lily. “I’ve sort of made plans . . .” There was an awkward silence. “I usually go skiing at this time of year—a bunch of us, some old Credit Suisse colleagues, a few friends from the Sorbonne.”

  Lily excused herself and went to the bathroom. Her face was white in the mirror, and her hands trembled. “Get a grip,” she murmured to herself. “Get a bloody grip.” Later, as they cleared away the lunch table, Cassie cornered her in the kitchen. “Are you OK? Is it about the ski trip?” Lily shook her head and carried on stacking plates in the dishwasher. As soon as coffee was over, she said she needed to take Stella home.

  Julien drove them back. Outside their house he switched off the engine and turned to Lily. “Shall I come up?” he said. “I’ve got an early start tomorrow but I can stay for a few hours. I’d like to ask you about the ski trip.” He smiled. “We didn’t really get a chance this afternoon.”

  Lily was already undoing her seat belt and getting out of the car. Leaning into the back seat to unfasten Stella, she said, “No, it’s fine. You go and prepare for your meetings—we’ve got stuff to do.” Julien got out of the car to help with the bags but she turned and unlocked the front door with a brief wave. She clasped Stella to her and walked quickly upstairs, wanting to avoid Susan, wanting to get away from Julien. It wasn’t until Stella was finally in bed that evening that Lily allowed the hurt to wash over her. Standing in the kitchen, clutching a mug of herbal tea, she burst into tears.

  She had assumed Julien would be staying in London for Christmas. He hadn’t mentioned the holidays; he hadn’t said anything about wanting to go skiing. Why had she been so foolish—why had she imagined he might want to spend his precious free time in boring old Hampstead with her and her small child? What man would pass up the opportunity to go skiing with wealthy banking friends—for all she knew, with ex-lovers and girlfriends? He was probably counting down the days.

  Lily also felt humiliated. She wished Celia hadn’t invited him in front of the family. It had been obvious that he was embarrassed, and even more obvious that she was upset at his polite evasion. In fact, the whole thing had been a mistake from the beginning. She was a fool to believe that this relationship meant anything to him.

  She was just going to bed that night when her phone rang. It was Julien. She pressed “divert call.” He rang again, immediately. This time she picked up. “Hi. What is it? I’m on my way to bed.”

  “Lily, I wanted to talk about this afternoon, about Christmas.” He hesitated. “I’ve been meaning to ask, but I was just looking into things—why don’t you come skiing too?”

  “Skiing?” Lily nearly laughed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Julien, I have a young baby.”

  “I meant both of you, all three of us,” he said. “People go skiing with babies all the time, we can make arrangements . . .”

  “Arrangements? Quite apart from blowing out my mum’s Christmas plans at such short notice, there are a few practicalities which you may not have considered: taking a baby to a ski resort, finding childcare, the cost of it all . . .”

  “I can cover our share of the chalet, I’d be happy to . . .”

  “And flights and ski passes and ski hire and childcare and après-ski . . .”

  “Lily, honestly, we’ll sort all that out . . .”

  She cut him off. “Seriously, don’t worry about it. Go and enjoy your trip. You work hard, and you deserve a proper break.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that. I wanted to talk about it but there hasn’t been time.”

  “Talk about what? It’s fine, honestly, Julien. It would have been nice to know about it a little sooner, but you’re a free agent. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m tired. Night.” And she hung up.

  So that was that. They would spend the holidays apart. Lily went about the usual Christmas routines—shopping and wrapping presents, helping Celia decorate the tree—but her mind was far away. She tried to understand what had gone wrong with Julien. One minute they were a close family unit, he was spending all his time with her and Stella, he was taking her to Paris and telling her he loved her, and now he was a different person, off on a ski trip with his Russian and Swiss investment banking friends. Off to lounge around drinking Aperol Spritzes and discussing quantitative easing and derivatives and who had the biggest yacht.

  When she had first met Julien in his mother’s farmhouse in Burgundy, he hadn’t seemed that way. Why had he stuck around if he wasn’t serious about her—was she just a way to pass the time in London? She
had been naïve to hope that she meant anything to Julien.

  Then she started to think that maybe it had started further back, before the question of Christmas had even arisen. Maybe he’d been distant for a while. Had it been after the intense passion of that post-Paris period? Had his feelings begun to cool? She had thought they were in a happy routine, but maybe he found it dull. The rhythm of life with a small child wasn’t exactly exciting. Cassie told her she was overreacting, that nothing about Julien’s behaviour suggested that his feelings had changed, but still. Lily felt defensive about the life she had managed to salvage from the wreckage of Harry’s death—and if that wasn’t good enough for Julien, then fine, let him go skiing with his Euro-pals.

  In the run-up to Christmas, they still spent time together; he invited her to his company’s corporate carol concert in Fleet Street, and they took Stella to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, but Lily began to feel like a burden. Where she used to joke about his busy work schedule and demand that he make time to see them in between trips and airports, she now waited for him to contact her. When he rang, she was short on the phone. When he suggested coming round to her flat, she was diffident. The atmosphere had always been relaxed and easy between them, and now it was strained. She began to lose confidence in his feelings and she withdrew.

  The day before Christmas Eve he left to join his friends in St. Anton.

  It was not a good Christmas. Apart from the previous year, when she’d been reeling from Harry’s death, it was the worst Lily could remember. Yet nothing had actually happened. They hadn’t split up or even argued—Julien had simply gone skiing for a few weeks. So why did it feel more serious?

  Sitting up late with her sisters at Celia’s house on Christmas Eve, Lily kept her misery buried inside her. She had a superstition that if she started talking about the end of their relationship, it would come true. Anyway, she wasn’t the only one with personal problems, and she didn’t have a monopoly on family sympathy. Her sisters had their own lives to worry about.

  Olivia had recently returned from Italy where she and Giovanni had reconciled and reunited (again). She was happy but frustrated at the situation: “I just don’t know where we go from here. He’s talking about getting engaged at some point, but where are we going to live? We can’t stay in Rome with his family, their apartment is tiny. Either he needs to move here and get a job, or—I don’t know, we just carry on like this? I’m going to be thirty in a couple of years, we can’t keep breaking up and getting back together . . .” She paused. “The thing is, I really love him. When I listen to my instincts, I know we’re right together.”

  Cassie nodded. “You have to follow your instincts, Liv. I felt like that about Charlie. Even though he infuriates me quite often, I just know the two of us are right.”

  They were right about trusting your instincts, Lily thought. The fact that she was thinking this way about Julien was a signal that something was wrong. All her past relationships had borne out this simple truth: feelings were mutual. Positive and negative emotions were there for a reason. When you felt happy and relaxed in someone’s company, they were happy and relaxed too. When you felt tense and anxious with someone, as she did now with Julien, they were tense and anxious too.

  He didn’t communicate much over the holidays. A noisy call from the hotel bar on Christmas evening, clearly in celebratory mood. She heard female laughter in the background, male voices, the clink of glasses and loud music. She could just picture the scene: bottles of Cristal champagne in some exclusive private members’ club, the men dressed in Italian suede loafers and gold signet rings, the women in all-white après-ski outfits or stunning little black dresses, with their year-round tans and glossy, shiny manes. Lily would never have that kind of hair.

  And yet Julien had always made her feel beautiful. Whether she was wearing jeans and T-shirt or an evening dress and killer heels, she felt good around him, interesting and attractive. What had changed? She brooded over him and his wealthy pals in St. Anton, and felt past her sell-by date.

  To make matters worse, one week later he rang from Charles de Gaulle airport. “I’m flying out to the States,” he said. “Vincent called to say he was going to see Mum and Claude, and I had this sudden urge for some winter sun.” Lily couldn’t believe how off-hand he sounded. They had often talked about going to California together to visit their respective parents, and now he was going without her. What a great start to the year.

  On New Year’s Eve, Claude and Marie WhatsApped some photographs of them all at a fireworks party in San Francisco Bay. Wish you were here, they wrote underneath. Did that include Julien, Lily wondered. Did he wish she were there too?

  When Julien got back to London in early January, Lily knew their relationship was in trouble. They met up a few times but the magic had gone. That relaxed, easy enjoyment between them was missing and she didn’t know how to bring it back. No matter how hard she tried just smiling, being breezy and carefree, the conversation floundered. The more she tried to hide her anxiety, the more strained the atmosphere grew.

  She had so wanted this to work: Julien was intelligent, handsome, generous, and kind. She admired his values and respected his opinions and she loved being in his company. But she couldn’t make it happen if his heart wasn’t in it.

  Gradually it dawned on Lily that this ending was inevitable. Why had she been blind for so long? It was time to accept the reality, that they lived in different worlds. She told herself that eventually he would move back to Paris. He’d marry a chic Parisienne with glossy hair and they’d have two immaculate, bilingual children. They would spend the winters skiing in Zürich or Verbier and the summers in Cap Ferrat or sailing around Montenegro in someone’s super-yacht. Everything would be chic and well-ordered. That’s not you, Lily admitted to herself. You’re unconventional and sometimes chaotic. You’re alone and you have a baby by someone else. You don’t fit into the life that Julien wants for himself.

  In late January, a few weeks after his return, he stopped calling. An entire weekend passed without hearing from him, and then it was a whole week. One evening, when Cassie was over, Lily broke down in tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve known this was coming for weeks but I was trying to get a grip. It’s Julien and me, I think we’re over. It’s been a horrible atmosphere since he came back—actually, it was like this before he left for Christmas—and it’s getting worse. And now I haven’t heard from him, I think he’s given up.”

  “But I don’t understand, he always seemed besotted with you. Look, you don’t have to wait for him to contact you—why don’t you ring him now? I’ll stay here with Stella, and you can meet up and talk. Surely it’s worth a try.”

  Lily shook her head. “Honestly, Cass, I’ve gone over and over this one. He doesn’t want to be with me, that’s clear enough. I don’t need to humiliate myself by begging him to meet up. It’s strange: Julien was the last person I’d have thought would play games or go cold like this. I simply can’t work out what he’s thinking or who he is any more. I feel like a piece of rubbish which has been thrown on the scrap heap.”

  “You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong,” Cassie said. “Even if Julien has changed his mind, that doesn’t make you a piece of rubbish. Can you maybe use this as a stepping stone? Look how far you’ve come in the past year. After Harry died you thought you’d never be with anyone again. Perhaps Julien was just a lesson, part of the process of coming back to life. Forget about him and focus on the positives: you were dating again, and you had wonderful times together, even if . . .” Cassie shook her head. “I know you’re terribly hurt, Lil. I would be too. His behaviour makes zero sense. But remember, you still have me, you still have all of us, and we love you very much. It hasn’t worked out this time, but there will be better times ahead.”

  Despite all the hurt and confusion, Lily knew that her sister was right. Julien’s change of heart wouldn’t break her; she couldn’t let it. She might even look b
ack on their short-lived relationship as just that: a brief, healing romance. Falling for Julien had helped her through the grieving process and reminded her what it felt like to be alive. Perhaps that’s all it was.

  “Thanks, Cass. I just wish I understood why. If I’ve said or done something, if he’s met someone else or what . . . Anyway, it’s all experience.” She wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “Enough about me, what about you—you said you had some big news?”

  A few days later, Cassie had a miscarriage. Her “big news” had been that she was nine weeks pregnant. They had been for an early scan and seen the tiny form and heard the heartbeat. “I’m actually going to have a baby,” Cassie had said, hugging Lily, tears running down her face.

  And then she started bleeding. Charlie took her straight into hospital but there was nothing they could do. The doctor was kind but matter-of-fact and told her to go home and rest. It was common enough, he said. Up to one in three pregnancies terminate naturally—she would probably be fine next time around.

  Lily was desperately sad for her sister and felt powerless to help. She and Celia took it in turns to visit the Pimlico flat every day, taking fresh food and flowers, a new book or magazine, anything which might lift Cassie’s sorrow. She lay on the sofa, pale and silent, her body curled beneath a cashmere blanket. Lily ached for her. She remembered how Cassie had looked after her during those terrible weeks after Harry’s death, and she longed to soothe away her sister’s pain. It seemed beyond words.