by Karen Swan
‘Of course,’ the girl smiled back. ‘Anything.’
Cassie furiously jabbed at the buttons on her phone. She already hated today and they hadn’t even had breakfast. The previous evening’s humiliation, mingled with the confusion from his middle-of-the-night confession and now his debilitating hangover, meant he wasn’t fit to spell his own name, much less explain to her what the hell was going on.
She turned the phone on and the message icon started bleeping at her. She dialled the voicemail and listened in.
‘You have eighteen new messages . . .’
Eighteen? Who the hell could need to get hold of her so urgently? she wondered. She’d only been gone a day and a half. ‘. . . voicemail is full. Please delete any unwanted messages . . .’
She suddenly felt a wave of horror flush over her. Suzy!
‘First message . . . Message received . . .’ She listened to it, her body tense.
‘Cassie. C’est moi.’ She relaxed as she heard Claude’s distinctive voice – probably ringing up to moan about the price of the fish, or the tablecloths coming in the wrong colour. She just hoped he wasn’t going to reschedule their lesson tomorrow. It felt like a long time since she’d seen him, even though it had only been Thursday evening. She pressed the next message.
‘Cassie? Where are you? I need to see you. Ring me.’
She blew out through her cheeks, pressed delete and held the phone up to her ear for the next message.
‘Cassie, it is me again. You must ring. I do not understand. Where are you? Why do you not call me back? Call me. Please.’
Cassie deleted again, somewhat annoyed by the instructions. She didn’t have to answer to him if she wanted to go away with a friend – their mutual friend – for a weekend jolly. She put the phone back to her ear for the next message.
‘Why are you are doing this to me? Is this funny to you? I thought we had an understanding? I thought you understood me?’
Cassie looked at the phone, a knot of nausea beginning to tighten inside her. This wasn’t right. His voice was different – higher, faster. She pressed delete and listened to the next, aware that her hand was beginning to shake.
‘Cass? What’s going on?’ Henry asked, holding his head between his hands, staring at her curiously. She didn’t answer, just kept putting the phone to her ear, listening and then pressing delete, and repeating the manoeuvre again and again and again. Henry grabbed the phone from her and listened himself, his eyes meeting hers as he heard the desperation building in Claude’s voice. By message fourteen, Claude was manic, rambling and swearing at her – Cassie could hear his voice down the phone from across the table. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she held her hand across her mouth as she shook her head.
By message number seventeen, his voice had changed again – slow, dull, inert, rambling. Henry was holding her hand across the table, his eyes red-rimmed, as he pressed play for the eighteenth message. Except for a faraway bang, it was long and silent.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Anouk said, watching as Cassie paced the room. She hadn’t sat down for days, a nervous energy keeping her moving at all times like a spinning top. She’d barely slept either, and she’d lost a ton of weight, seemingly overnight.
‘I don’t!’ Cassie refuted, whirling around to stare down at her – stare her down. Her face was pinched white with anger and blanched whiter still by her harsh black mourning clothes. ‘Why would I? I did nothing wrong. I went to Venice to help a friend. What, in that set-up, could possibly have prompted Claude to kill himself?’
Anouk swallowed in the face of her fury. Cassie’s shock had gradually settled in the past few days since arriving back from Venice, but today, the day of the funeral, it seemed to have been replaced by a molten anger that was stoked by grief. She didn’t want platitudes. She wanted answers.
‘It wasn’t jealousy, I know that much,’ she muttered as she lapped the room. ‘I’ll scream if one more person looks at me as if my loss is more than the loss of a friend. He’d be so furious at them, you know he would.’ Her hands balled into little fists as she stared over at Anouk. ‘I know you believe me . . . that it wasn’t like that between us.’
Anouk nodded. She didn’t dare not to, even though she knew people had been asking why he’d left the messages on Cassie’s phone; why he’d been so unbalanced by her trip with another man.
‘What we shared was a passion, a calling. There was no expectation, no drama. Just conversation and cooking and making up recipes and plans for working toge— Oh God!’ Her voice broke and she collapsed suddenly into a heap on the floor, her face burrowing into her hands. Anouk dropped her cigarette into her coffee and ran over to her.
‘Why?’ Cassie cried. ‘We had all these plans, Nooks! Everything had just come right for him. At last! He’d been unhappy for so long, and then all of a sudden there was this huge change in him. He just suddenly got happy, overnight.’
‘Maybe that was the warning sign,’ Anouk said.
Cassie went stock-still. What had she missed? She peered up at Anouk, and Anouk noticed her hands were trembling. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Maybe it was his final, last-ditch attempt at normality, a desperate lunge towards happiness. You know – fake it till you make it?’
‘No. No.’ Cassie shook her head. ‘He was happy. The restaurant . . . he was so fired up . . . it was real.’
‘Maybe he was never going to be able to find lasting happiness,’ Anouk said quietly, rubbing her back. ‘After what had happened to him, I don’t know how anyone could bear it.’
Cassie looked at her. ‘So you know too then? About his wife and child?’
‘Henry told me,’ she nodded. ‘In the church.’
‘Last week was the anniversary of the crash.’ Cassie’s voice was flat now. Henry had told her too, but only afterwards, at the airport. Why hadn’t he told her before? If she’d only known . . .
‘I know,’ Anouk whispered. ‘Three years. That’s what I mean, Cass, when I say you mustn’t blame yourself. This wasn’t about you being in Venice with Henry. He wasn’t sensitive – he was broken. I think he was always trying to run away from this.’
‘But why all the phone calls? Why to me?’ There was a tremor in Cassie’s voice. For all her defiance, she was plagued by the fear that she had unwittingly driven her unstable friend over the edge.
Anouk chose her words carefully. ‘Because you were the one who let him dare to hope that, maybe, things could be different for him. You brought him hope, Cassie, not despair.’
Cassie stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But I let him down. I wasn’t there when he needed me, when he needed some hope.’
‘There was no way you could have known. He lied to you – he wasn’t even supposed to be in the city. He was supposed to be in Rouen.’
‘But . . . but if I had picked up . . . if I had been there instead of in Venice on some masquerade.’ She spat the last word out.
‘Masquerade? What do you mean?’
‘Henry told me that he needed me to help him research a list for Venice – for his honeymoon.’
‘So?’
‘So there’s not going to be a honeymoon – because there’s not going to be a wedding.’
Anouk stared at her, stunned. ‘Non.’
‘Oh yes. They called it off, supposedly.’
‘Supposedly?’
‘He was drunk when he said it. I don’t know if it’s on or not . . . I don’t know anything about anything,’ she said vehemently, balling her hands into fists again and feeling the nails dig deep into her palms.
Anouk thought back to the funeral service that morning. Henry and Cassie had barely spoken, Cassie choosing to sit apart from them in the pews, tears sliding silently down her cheeks. Anouk had thought it strange, given that they’d been together when it had happened, and she had caught Henry glancing at her worriedly several times during the service. He had delayed the departure of his
expedition by three days in order to attend the funeral, but he’d had to leave immediately afterwards to catch a flight late that afternoon.
‘You sound angry with him,’ she said quietly.
‘With Claude?’
Anouk shrugged. ‘Yes, with him too. But I meant Henry.’
There was a short pause. ‘Well, I am,’ Cassie muttered. ‘I’ve had enough of all his games. I don’t know which way is up with him. I feel like he’s got me on some kind of treasure hunt, some quest he’s devised for his amusement.’ She smacked her chest with her open hand. ‘But it’s my life he’s manipulating, Nooks.’
‘He’s just trying to help you, Cass. From what I’ve seen, he seems to be trying to give you goals and focus and direction. It’s sweet. I mean – wasn’t he the one who introduced you to Claude in the first place?’
‘And the one who kept me from him in the last,’ Cassie said bitterly.
Anouk patted her hand. ‘You can’t think like that. Claude made his decision for his own reasons. I don’t think there’s anything you could have done, even if you’d known. I honestly believe this would always have happened, regardless of whether you were in Venice with Henry or standing with Claude in the kitchen . . .’
‘Well, I’ve still had enough. Henry can take his bloody list and take a running jump as far as I’m concerned. I’m not having anything more to do with any of it.’
Anouk paused for a moment. ‘Well, that’s a shame.’
Cassie looked at her. Her voice was odd. ‘What do you mean?’
Anouk stood up and walked over to the table in the hall. A small pile of unopened cards – from Bas, Kelly, Suzy and others – was stacked up on it. Cassie was resolutely refusing to accept any sympathy or kind words from friends. She was determined to punish herself.
Anouk picked up a thick white envelope.
‘This arrived for you the other day.’
Cassie took it. It had been opened.
‘I accidentally opened it without looking. I’m sorry.’
Cassie pulled out the stiffy inside. It was a startling white, with a smart cream script across it. In the top left corner, someone had written her name.
She looked up at Anouk in amazement. ‘When did this come?’
Anouk shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Yesterday? The day before? Why?’
‘Because that’s Claude’s writing,’ she said, pointing to her name. ‘But he died last week. Are you sure it didn’t arrive sooner?’
‘No. Definitely not.’
‘So then who sent this to me? And why?’
Cassie got to the bus stop ten minutes early. She’d had to factor in extra time getting there as the list of extras she was required to bring – tablecloth, tealights, glasses, a bottle or two of wine and a small hamper – made it difficult to walk.
She put her bags down with a clatter, feeling both conspicuous and ridiculous amongst the home-bound commuters in her all-white outfit – after all, it was only the end of April and still far too early to be wandering around the city in summer clothes. She had settled upon a white trouser-suit in the end, worn with a pale pink silk shirt of Anouk’s and a wide-brimmed floppy white hat, and now she leant against a wall, keeping her head down as bus after bus arrived, disgorged and swallowed up passengers, and drove off again.
After ten minutes exactly, a string of buses pulled up in front of her and, as she looked up, gathering her bags protectively as passengers got off, she noticed that everyone on board looked just like her. In fact, the bus almost seemed to shimmer from the inside out, like a glow-worm in the dusk.
‘Come in, come in,’ they cried, recognizing her as one of their own. She had her invitation in her bag, but clearly no invitations were necessary. The distinctive dress code and being in the right place at the right time were all that was needed to show that you were on the guest list.
Cassie climbed on, stepping cautiously around hampers and crates and cardboard boxes, instantly enveloped by the party atmosphere on the bus. The doors closed behind her and they pulled off along the rue de Rivoli. There were no seats left, but Cassie preferred to stand anyway, looking at the different interpretations of the dress code. Some people had come as pierrots with whited-out faces, others in their wedding dresses, a few had copied the trouser-suit Bianca Jagger had worn to marry Mick; someone had even come swaddled in bandages as a mummy. Her chic suit felt dull and uninspired by comparison.
The buses swayed around corners and ornate landmarks picking up more and more guests – Cassie glimpsed at least five other buses in their convoy – eventually coming to a stop outside the Opéra. The doors folded back on themselves and everyone rushed out like spilled buttons, seemingly with their own sets of orders about what to do next, be it carrying and opening picnic tables, shaking open tablecloths and napkins, setting up candelabras and tealights or opening bottles of Sancerre and unpacking smoked salmon parcels. Cassie watched in amazement as every single bus disgorged its all-white load all the way down the boulevard des Capucines, so that within minutes the length of the pavement on one side of the road was cloaked in white, like a freak snowstorm.
She stood motionless, her bags hanging limply from her hands, not quite sure where to go. Everybody seemed to know somebody else, and although they were a friendly crowd, she felt distinctly alone. She asked herself for the hundredth time why she’d agreed to go. It was madness. Inappropriate.
‘Your first time?’ a woman behind her asked.
Cassie turned. A thin, ultra-blonde woman was giving her a half-smile. Cassie recognized her immediately, although of all the people she would have thought wouldn’t be here, it was surely her.
‘Mrs Holland?’
‘Katrina, please.’ The woman narrowed her eyes in concentration. ‘Cassie, yes? From Dior?’
‘Yes.’ Cassie was amazed that Katrina should remember her name. Their meeting in Anouk’s studio – brief and uneventful – had been three months ago now. At least Cassie had the advantage of society pages and Bas’s outrageous gossip to prompt her memory.
‘You seem surprised.’
Cassie shook her head, trying to recover her manners. ‘Well, I’m surprised I’m here, to be honest. I have no idea how I came to be invited.’
‘No one ever does,’ she smiled. She was almost albino-pale, her hair Bas’s special camomile tint and not much darker than her ivory crêpe-de-chine jumpsuit, which did an impressive job of showing off her international-standard thinness. ‘Are you here with anyone?’
Cassie shook her head. ‘No, I uh . . . wasn’t sure of the form.’
‘Well, would you care to join me? I’m alone too.’ She indicated a small table next to her. There was no handsome walker or miniature dog in attendance, but an all-white butler had smoothed a fine linen tablecloth over the table, and was laying white-gold cutlery settings with a porcelain dinner service.
Cassie nodded, relieved. ‘I’d love to,’ she smiled. ‘If you’re sure I’m not imposing . . .’
‘Of course not. Come, let us have some Salon. It’s a blanc de blancs, the whitest champagne I could think of.’ She smiled, pouring them each a glass. ‘It’s rarer than hen’s teeth, with only two vintages since the Millennium.’
Cassie watched as the butler started unpacking an enormous Fortnum’s hamper that two men had carried over from a limo parked by the kerb. Queen scallops, moules marinières, oysters, foie gras and sole meunières were decanted on to warmed plates in front of them. Cassie discreetly kicked her hamper under the table, too embarrassed to hand it over to the butler. The cheese baguettes inside were wholly inadequate in the face of this blanched feast, and she didn’t want to get into a discussion about why she’d lost her enthusiasm for cooking recently or how her appetite had diminished to the point that she could barely finish a slice of toast.
But as they sat down and Katrina busied herself with eating only the oysters from a solid silver oyster-shaped holder, Cassie realized no such discussion would be necessary – a top-tier socialite
was her ideal dining companion whilst she was deep in the depths of grief. She managed a few of the scallops and some salad, as Katrina shared her deep fondness for Bas and her belief in his absolute genius with a hairdryer.
Time passed and the noise levels ratcheted up quickly, not just because of the jubilation of the guests as they tucked into their picnics, or the passers-by stopping to cheer and take photos, or the waiters from the ‘hijacked’ cafés coming out to clap and smile, or the cars honking their horns at the spectacle, but also because a flat-bed truck was driving by very, very slowly with a live jazz band sitting on the back of it.
A few people got up to dance, igniting a round of applause and cheering that left Cassie feeling more and more uneasy. Since the funeral a fortnight earlier, she had closeted herself away, going out only to work or to take walks along the Seine so early in the morning that the only other people about were the tramps huddled beneath the bridges. And now here she was in the middle of music and feasting and champagne and laughter and dancing and the bright glare of an all-white guest list.
She closed her eyes for a moment. She shouldn’t be here. It was too much, too vibrant, too alive. It was wrong to be here, at a party, when her poor dear tortured friend was so recently dead.
She opened her mouth to make her apologies to Katrina – she’d been a consummate hostess and Cassie knew that what she was about to do – abandon her halfway through the dinner – was unforgivable – when there was a sudden noise further along the pavement, the distinct whine of a microphone surging up.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ a man said, speaking as loudly as he could, for there was a fair distance to cover. He was wearing a white suit and fedora, and sunglasses obscured his face so that he remained anonymous. ‘Thank you for coming to the Dîner en Blanc tonight. For those of you who have been before, you know that the Dîner is only made possible by your discretion, joie de vivre and great taste.’
Everyone laughed except Cassie. She stared instead at the tablecloth, dismay and guilt written all over her.
