A Place for Us

by Harriet Evans

  “Of course I’ll come back. . . .” Cat had laughed, and she remembered that bit, how ridiculous it had seemed that she might not return to Winterfold, but at the same time she knew her grandmother was right. Her friends were all getting jobs, moving on; it was time for her to do the same.

  She arrived in Paris in the spring of 2004, a little unsure, already homesick. She found an apartment not far from Café Georges, on a little cité behind boulevard Voltaire. She had four window boxes, which she carefully tended, one tea trunk from home that stood in as a coffee table, an IKEA bed, a chest of drawers her grandmother and Uncle Bill brought over a fortnight later in the car, two hat stands from a market in Abbesses with wire strung between them for use as an open wardrobe, and a set of ten wooden hangers stamped Dior, acquired the same day. She loved playing house, her first proper grown-up home. It made her feel independent for the first time in her life.

  Her bare, beautiful flat was usually unoccupied, though. She was either in the office or out with her boss, taking notes at meetings with designers, visiting studios for private views, or, during the biannual Fashion Week, dashing from show to show, sitting in the back row with the other penniless fashionistas, scribbling notes and trying to learn as much as she could. Her favorite part of her job, though, was calling on the individual ateliers and watching the stout, middle-aged Parisian seamstresses who had worked at Dior for years, seeing their flying fingers sewing the hundredth sequin of a thousand onto a shimmering, glittering fishtail train, pinning a tiny tuck-seam on a model’s silk shirt, sliding butter-thick velvet through their machines, tidying, smoothing, finishing, their quick fingers transforming an inert piece of fabric into something magical.

  Cat grew to find the world of fashion ridiculous, but never this, the beating heart of the business. It was why she had always loved gardening with her grandmother, for she already knew that creating a beautiful vision to be enjoyed by others meant hard work behind the scenes. Everything had to be perfect, even a seam that no one would see, because if it was to be done it must be worth doing. Her grandmother had always said there was only one rule to gardening: “The more care you take, the greater the reward you’ll reap.”

  She sent Martha regular updates, letters and then e-mails. At first, Cat hardly went back, maybe because she loved the place too well, and a clean break seemed better than constantly revisiting; then, as her life in Paris took root, the trips home became even more infrequent. In the beginning, Martha had come to visit once a year; that had been wonderful. They’d shopped in Galeries Lafayette, walked in the Parc Monceau, strolled through the Marais.

  Her grandmother had asked Cat once, as they wandered by the Seine, looking at the vintage prints and books for sale: “Are you happy? Do you like it here? You know you can always come back, don’t you?”

  Cat had simply said, “Yes, darling Gran. I love it here. It . . . it fits.”

  Martha had said nothing, just smiled, but Cat had seen tears in her eyes, and thought she must be thinking about Daisy. Out of the ashes of nothing except her grandparents’ love and her grandmother’s insistence that Cat must make something of herself, she had fashioned this life, and when she told Martha that it fitted her, she knew it was true.

  Then she met Olivier.

  One sultry June day, in a boulangerie around the corner from her apartment. So Parisian, so romantic. “We met in a boulangerie in Paris,” she told the girls in the office, smiling, her cheeks rosy with shy happiness. “Olivier was buying croissants, I was buying Poilâne, we picked up the wrong bags—voilà.” Appearances could be deceptive—Olivier didn’t eat bread, it transpired; he had been collecting the pastries for a friend. She only wondered when it was all over who the friend was. A girl, waiting in bed for him while he picked up someone else. He had said, “I like your dress, English girl,” and Cat had turned to give him a sharp, colloquial put-down, and been arrested by his tousled black hair, his brown eyes, his beautiful pink mouth with the amused smile playing about it. He was a jazz trumpeter, played every week at the Sunset, and had his own group. They were trying to make it work. He was good, she could just tell.

  She was ashamed—or a little proud, she didn’t know afterward which—to recall that they had slept together that very day. Yes, he had taken her out for coffee, and she had said she would buy him a glass of wine that evening, and so after work they had met in a little bar behind the Palais-Royal, in a cellar that was supposed to be part of Richelieu’s old palace. They had each ordered a kir and picked at a plate of saucisson and cornichons, and after two drinks he had simply said, “I do not want to drink anymore. Will you come home with me?”

  His apartment was tiny, the shutters flung open, the sound of people carousing, arguing, singing floating up from the street below all night, as they came together in a way she had never known she needed before. Cat was organized, controlled: she feared more than anything else being like her long-lost mother, a woman who had so little clue of how to live her own life she had had to leave everyone behind, go to the other side of the world to help people worse off than she was.

  So at first she was horrified to discover, three years after moving to Paris and establishing her life so beautifully, that everything had collapsed like a pile of cards. That Olivier’s strong, smooth hands, cupping her breasts and moving along her arms till his fingers twined with hers, his knee pushed between her legs, his lips on her neck, his words in her ear . . . filthy wet words that made her moan; that all this could quite simply unman her—unwoman, in fact, although she had never felt more womanly, never felt so sensuous and sexy in her life. The rest of that summer was forever in her mind an ache between her legs, where she wanted him inside her all the time. She grew pale and stringy: while her workmates were tanned from holidays, the sea, the outdoors, Cat was inside with Olivier, whole weekends lost in a haze of sex, sleeping, eating, the whole cycle over again. She was so happy, she felt like a new person, reborn here in Paris with him. He had not known her as the spotty, awkward, thin teenager, the girl without a mother. He only saw her as the person she had remade herself into, and he loved that person, or so he said, and so she loved him for it, even though all the time she kept wondering, When will he find me out?

  Afterward she would look back and see how short a time the happiness had actually lasted. By winter the signs were all there, but she chose to ignore them. It made her sick, how stupid she had been. What was crazy was how long she’d let it go on.

  How foolish she’d been, she saw that now, too. In the New Year she’d given up her flat, moved in with Olivier. She had gone home for Bill’s wedding in 2008. To everyone’s sly inquiries and Lucy’s open enthusiasm about this mysterious boyfriend, Cat was noncommittal. And they didn’t ask more. She had been a low-key, sardonic person for so long now that her lack of cozy tidbits about life with her French boyfriend didn’t surprise anyone. “Typical you,” her aunt Flo had said. “You always were a dark horse, Cat.”

  But I’m not, Cat had wanted to tell them. I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  At the reception back at Winterfold, after the curious wedding in the Guildhall, she was trying to text Olivier, wondering what he’d want her to say. She felt something gripping her arm, and she jumped. It was her mother; it was Daisy.

  Cat looked down at Daisy’s tiny, skeletal fingers pressing into her arm.

  “I’m just trying to send this text.” She was short. She hated this, being here, feeling so out of place.

  Daisy had leaned forward, skull-like face mirroring Cat’s.

  “Don’t try to pretend I’m not your mother, Catherine. We’re the same. I know it. I see it in you. We’re exactly the same, so stop thinking you’re better than me. You’re not.”

  The scent of lilies in the cool dining room; Karen’s white dress, flashing in her peripheral vision; the hot sun outside, beating down on the yellowing grass. Her mother’s voice, hoarse and silvery. “I know what yo
u’re like, Cat. Stop fighting it and get on with it.”

  Cat had removed Daisy’s fingers from her arm. She’d leaned back, away from her thin, awful face. “If I’m like you, God help me too,” she’d said, and walked toward the open door.

  That was the last time she’d seen her. Cat went back to Paris knowing she couldn’t ever tell any of them what was really going on. She just had to make the best of it, because she was lucky, wasn’t she? It was wonderful, wasn’t it? She had such high expectations, because of her mother, because of everything, and she should just stop being so difficult, as Olivier said, and shut up.

  And it was such a boring cliché. The gradual change, so that within months she had gone from glorious certainty in his love to absolute certainty that he despised her and that he was right to. The sudden absences, the unexplained behavior, the hours she’d spend waiting for him, only to have him turn up angry at her because he said she’d gone to the wrong place. She lost all confidence in her ability to make decisions. How often, when evening fell and she grew hungry, had she stood dithering in the hall about whether to start cooking for him? Was he nearly there, would he want some food? Or would he be back hours later and shout at her for letting his meal go cold? “How the fuck am I supposed to eat this—this shit, Catherine? You’re so selfish, you couldn’t wait another hour? What, okay, an hour and a half ? So I met some friends—they’re important contacts—I’m supposed to rush home because if I don’t I’m not allowed any supper?” He always made it sound like he was right, and she always ended up apologizing.

  They acquired a dog, a wire fox terrier called Luke, after Olivier’s English grandfather, a soldier who’d stayed on in Brittany. When Cat laughed at this—naming your pet after your grandfather seemed to her a crazy thing to do—Olivier slammed out of the apartment and didn’t come back till the following morning. At first he was obsessed with Luke, as though he were a son, or a new best friend—taking him for walks in the Tuileries Gardens, even once to a gig, where Luke sat obediently on a chair next to his trumpet case, Olivier exclaiming with pleasure when Luke did un caca on the parquet floor—but soon, as Cat was realizing, as with everything in Olivier’s life, the obsession waned, to be replaced with disinterest, annoyance, and then downright contempt. Luke, still not quite a year old, did not understand why, when he trotted over to his master and stared hopefully at him, he was ignored or batted away with one big, hairy hand. “Vas-y! Vas-y, you stupid dog.”

  It was through Luke that Cat started to realize what a mistake she’d made, but it was longer still before she saw that it wasn’t her mistake—that he had hoodwinked her. She was worthless to him except as a pretty plaything; and once that bored him, she—like Luke—was of no use. On the day that changed everything, she had coffee with Véronique, an old, very dear friend from work. They had once been almost the same: girls with long brown hair and fringes who giggled together over male models at the shows and saw each other into cabs after one too many glasses of champagne; they had struggled up flights of stairs with each other’s boxes, moving into tiny apartments; they had slept on each other’s couches and shared lunches. But these days Véronique was almost a parody of everything Cat should have become. She had worked at Women’s Wear Daily and was now at Vogue. She had shiny, glossy hair, patent-leather Marni sandals, a black Paul and Joe chiffon top finished off with a tailored pink blazer, and matching baby-pink nails. Cat, who barely cared what she looked like these last few months, was in dirty jeans, pulled-back ponytail, and blue Breton-striped top. She couldn’t be bothered to dress. She felt sick all the time, a tight nausea at the back of her throat, she wasn’t hungry, and she couldn’t sleep.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Véronique had said immediately. When Cat had tried to explain, she’d shrugged her shoulders in horror. “Why are you still there? Leave, for God’s sake, Catherine! This man is . . . he’s killing you slowly. What if you have children with him?”

  A tear had run slowly down Cat’s cheek. She brushed it away.

  “I know,” she said. “I had a miscarriage six months ago. He was glad. I was too, after a while, and now . . .” She started crying, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes, rocking forward and backward, uncaring of who might see her.

  After a while she said, “Sometimes I wish he’d hit me. To prove it. Maybe I deserve it.”

  Véronique had leaned back as if she’d been hit herself, and there was a silence.

  She didn’t leave him that day, nor that week; but once the words were out, it became something tangible. The look on Véronique’s face—­complete bewilderment, pity, a tiny flicker of disdain was the closest Cat could come to describing it—was almost a wake-up call: the two of them had once been so close, not just in temperament but in stages of life.

  When it was all over Cat could see how lucky she had been. She had got out before he’d sucked her further in. She had nothing else, and so much water had flowed under the bridge, the many bridges, that she could not now, ever, ring up her grandmother and explain. Martha, who had been so proud of Cat, who had raised her to be like herself, not like her mother.

  The last time Cat had seen Martha was before Christmas a year ago, when she came over for lunch and to do some Christmas shopping and “to see you, darling, because I feel I don’t know anything about your life now.”

  They met in Abbesses and ate confit de canard in a dark red bistro with views over the city. It was very different this time. There was so much Cat couldn’t tell her grandmother now. Something huge had happened to her, and somewhere along the way that had meant cutting everyone else out to try to cope with it.

  Cat said as little about herself as she could. They walked around the shops in a desultory way, time dragging, until the hour abruptly came for Martha to leave if she was to make her train, and then she was gone. But Cat couldn’t help but keep with her the gloved hand on her arm. The whisper in her ear: “We’re always here when you need us, darling. Never forget that.”

  Then the desire to blurt it all out had nearly overwhelmed Cat. To sob on her grandmother’s shoulder, tell her about Olivier, about Luke, Madame Poulain, about how she had nothing, how she sometimes missed lunch, how she had taken two pieces of bread off the table in the bistro for later. How she was doing everything wrong and couldn’t just change one thing, needed to start again completely to have any hope of unpicking the tangled threads of her life.

  But at the fatal moment Martha had gently, for a split second, looked away, then at her watch, and—

  “I must go, darling. Are you sure you’re all right? Tell me, you will always tell me, won’t you?”

  “Yes, yes.” She had kissed her grandmother again, saw the tiny chink of light closing. “Please don’t worry about me. How can anyone be unhappy, living here?”

  The scudding December clouds, the twinkling fairy lights golden in the gathering gloom, the soaring towers of Notre-Dame, the honk of the bateau-mouche below as Cat watched Martha hurrying toward the Métro . . . She turned for home, alone again, knowing that something had changed. Too much time had passed. She could never really go back. This was her life, whether she had chosen it or not.

  • • •

  The following afternoon, Cat opened the door of the Bar Georges, just off the rue de Charonne. Despite her misgivings about returning, she liked the eleventh; real Parisians lived there, families—it reminded her of a happier time in her life. She checked her watch, always making sure she wouldn’t be late for Luke. Forty minutes. Twenty minutes here, twenty to get back.

  She waved hello to Didier, the owner, and took a seat at the bar.

  “Ça va, Catherine?” Didier was polishing coffee cups, and expressed no surprise at seeing her after three years. “Un café?”

  “Non, merci.” Cat spoke in French. “Didier, I had an e-mail from Olivier yesterday. He said you have an envelope for me.”

  Didier nodded. “Yes.” He
carried on polishing the cups.

  “Well . . . can I have it?” Cat said, trying not to sound impatient.

  “He’s pretty sad, Catherine,” said Didier. “You have been very cold.”

  Cat closed her eyes very slowly. “Huh-uh,” she said. She nodded. Don’t get cross. She pictured herself rolling up into a tiny ball like a wood louse, no part of herself visible or vulnerable. Think of what you have to do.

  Didier reached under the cold white marble bar. He produced a square brown envelope. Cat stared at it; it was thick. “This is it?” she said, but she knew the answer. Her name was on the front, the handwriting she knew so well.

  “Yes.”

  “So, you saw him?” Cat asked.

  “I was down in Marseilles for the jazz festival. He asked me if I could help. I was glad to.” Didier slid the envelope across to her.

  Cat didn’t know whether to open it in front of Didier or not, though her hands were shaking. In the end, she stood up and, clutching the envelope, waved it in front of him. “Merci, Didier. Au revoir.”

  “You don’t care how he is?”

  She stopped and turned. “Olivier?” She wanted to laugh. “Um—yes, of course. Does he care? About us?”

  “Of course he cares,” Didier said, looking faintly disgusted. “How can you say that?”

  “Evidence suggests otherwise.”

  “You are the one who left him.”

  Cat stood perfectly still. “I was pregnant,” she said.

  “Yes, and—”

  She cut across him. “He nearly broke me.” She said it very quietly, so quietly she wondered if Didier would hear. “He would have done the same to—to Luke.”

  “He loved that boy. Like he loved that dog, and you—”

  Cat shook her head. “No, this is wrong, you are wrong,” she said. Already she was terrified that Olivier was here somewhere, that he’d demand to see Luke, that he’d follow her home like before, that this was a trap. “He chose his name. I let him call him after his stupid dog, don’t you see how crazy that was? Don’t you see I’d have done anything to keep the peace? To stop him. . . .” And it didn’t matter now, it didn’t matter at all; but when she thought of any of it, it made her remember how low she had been. She had to leave. She had to get out of here, get back to her son now. She waved the envelope. “Au revoir.”