“What, darling? You cut out for a second.”
“Wait a moment.” It seemed clearer and clearer by the second, like the sun coming out.
“When will you be back?” Madame Poulain said icily. “I need more vermouth, and some ice. Who is that, Cat? Who’s downstairs?”
“My grandmother,” Cat said. She pulled Luke onto her lap. “Luke, let’s put on your shoes.” She looked up at the thin, lined face. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, Madame Poulain. Don’t wait for me. I’m going to call Henri. He’ll come over and help you. Luke, put on your coat, please.”
Madame Poulain’s eyes seemed to grow entirely round, her eyeballs bulging from her sunken skull. “Don’t you dare to say that. You said you would clean the bathroom this evening. I need it done tonight and before my wash.”
Cat opened the drawer of the bureau and slid two passports into her jeans pocket. She didn’t know why, just that the card file of her mind was flipping over and over, the thoughts that constantly raced through her head of what needed to be done, what she had to take here or there, what she could afford, what she owned, all neatly, precisely itemized; and she realized then that all she needed was Luke. And the means to get Luke away from here, away from this overheated glass menagerie, away from the shadow of Luke’s father, who hadn’t even been in touch since their return, away from this strange, beautiful little island living that was, day by day, slowly torturing them both to death.
Her heart was thumping so loudly in her chest she thought it might burst. “Good-bye,” she said, buttoning Luke’s coat up. “Thank you.” She pulled on her old mac and grabbed her handbag, opened the door, and, hobbling down the steps as fast as she could, calling to Luke to follow her, eventually reached the bottom of the stairs.
She flung open the front door. There, in a great yellow mackintosh with a hood, stood Martha, her green eyes ringed with dull brown circles. She was smiling.
Cat said nothing, just flung her arms around her, sobbing into her squeaky yellow chest. Martha pulled Luke into her embrace and the three of them stood on the narrow little pavement, clutching hold of each other.
“Gran!” Luke shouted, breaking the grip first, and leaping up into his great-grandmother’s arms, so that she staggered back and nearly stumbled. “Gran, you’re here! You are here!”
Cat caught her grandmother, felt how thin she was. She hugged her again, tears flowing along with the rain down her face, and she realized then what it was, this feeling of half sadness, half happiness that stalked her all the time lately. It was love.
“Let’s go and get some hot chocolate,” she said, steering her grandmother away from the apartment. “I think we could all do with it.”
Martha took Luke’s hand. “Of course. Do you—need an umbrella? What about your fearsome-sounding landlady? Does she need to know where you’ve gone?”
“I’ll call her in a while and tell her we’ll be back later,” Cat said. Up above she could see the thinnest seam of silver in the sky. She breathed in, and then she said, “But we might not. We might just never go back there again.” She gripped Luke’s other hand. “What do you think about that?”
She was asking Luke, really, not entirely serious, half-acknowledging that it was clear now that their situation had to change, but Martha said, “I think that’s a very good idea.”
Cat glanced at her. “I was joking really,” she said.
“I know, but—do you have to go back? No. I mean, pack up and get your things, of course, or I could do that, or, you know what?” Martha squeezed Cat’s hand and crouched down next to her grandson. “I could go back to the flat now, get your passports, and we could all go home tonight. Back to Winterfold.”
Cat’s hand was shaking as she took out the passports. “I’ve got them here.”
“Why?” Her grandmother laughed.
“I really don’t know. Just that—I heard your voice.” She started crying. “And I thought we need to be able to not go back there. I’m always trying to think of a way out. All the time.” She hiccuped. “I’ve got used to it.”
“What else do you need?” Martha said quietly.
Cat looked at her son. “Nothing else,” she said. “But we couldn’t do that—so rude to Madame Poulain, and . . .” She trailed off. The idea of walking away from here—it was intoxicating, like drinking champagne. Knowing this bit was over, these years of living this thin, sad, lonely life. She felt almost light-headed. And then she looked at Luke’s face.
“Look, my darling girl, it seems fairly simple,” Martha said. “I need you, Cat. You need me. Luke needs more than this.”
Cat hesitated, then said, “Yes. We do. Yes.”
They hugged again, squashing against a wall to let a chic elderly lady walk past with her little dog. She stared at them from under her umbrella: Cat’s hair swinging in wet black strings around her smiling face, Luke jumping up and down, and Martha, her hands over her eyes, trying not to cry. Her small, Gallic shrug said it all: Crazy English people.
Cat picked up Luke and hugged him tight, and she put her arm round her grandmother as they walked along the road.
“Why are you here, Gran?” she said. “I mean, what made you come?”
“Something Lucy said,” Martha replied. “I’m not sure I can explain, not yet. Not till I’ve finished it all.”
The rain thrummed on the pavements and the swollen gray-blue Seine churned below them, the golden spires of Notre-Dame black in the afternoon gloom. “You don’t have to explain.”
“I do. To you, and to Florence, you see. I’ve got things all wrong.” Cat tried to speak, but Martha said, “I have to put it right. I was always trying to be in control, you know. I was wrong to try to protect you from the truth all those years. You and Florence.”
Luke was fiddling with the toggles on his raincoat, twisting them round and round so they spun out in a corkscrew, the tension released. Cat watched him. “What’s it got to do with Florence?”
“I’m going to see her after you, if she’ll let me. She’s won her court case. I’ll tell you then.” She shivered. “This really is appalling weather. Where’s that hot chocolate place, then?”
“Yes, appalling,” Luke agreed cheerfully. “Appalling weather!”
“It’s just around the corner,” Cat said. She shook her head, water flying everywhere. “Do you—I should go back and get some of Luke’s things afterward, shouldn’t I?”
“Of course you should, and I’ll come with you. You don’t need to run away like a thief in the night, you know, Cat. And I would like to see where you spent all this time. I’d like to meet Madame Poulain. Then we will leave, and I promise you won’t ever have to go back there.” Martha nodded to herself. “Right. That’s . . . that’s done.” She gave a little shiver. “And it was easy! Wasn’t it?” She looked down. “Would you like to go home after that, to Winterfold, Luke? Would you like to come and live with me for a bit?”
“Thank you, baby Jesus and the Holy Mother,” Luke said solemnly, putting his hands together in prayer and looking up at the sky. “At least you did listen to me about that, for once.” He pushed open the door of the crowded, cozy café and stood looking at his mother and great-grandmother as they gripped each other’s arms, caught somewhere again between laughter and tears.
Florence
HER SANDALS SLAPPED loudly on the cold marble as Florence heaved her suitcase up the stairs, sweating silently in the late afternoon heat. She had been away from Italy for nearly two months, and summer had arrived in her absence.
As she unlocked the door, a cloud of stale warmth hit her. A pile of post lay scattered on the floor, the printed names on the envelopes leaping out at her: Oxford University, Harvard, BBC, Yale University Press. She was in demand, as they’d all predicted.
Everywhere else a light film of dust sat on the surfaces, on the little wooden table she ate at, on the t
umblers by the French windows. Florence dropped her bag on the floor and opened the door to the balcony. A faint breeze blew softly into the apartment. She ran her hands through her hair, looking out over the rooftops, trying to feel glad to be home. But being back here was curiously mortifying, after the things that had come out about her life in this place over the last couple of months.
The flight had been delayed. She was dirty and sticky and tired, that kind of dazed weariness you get from traveling. She made herself a coffee and began to unpack, and as she did the phone rang. She ignored it. Her mobile rang next, as she sorted out her clothes, put in a load of washing, slotted her books back onto the shelves in her study. The landline rang again. She put the papers from the case into a box file and shut the lid firmly. She didn’t ever want to see them again. Sometimes, when she thought about what had come out in that courtroom, she thought she’d sink to the ground, pass out. With the momentum of the case carrying her along, it had been bearable; but in the intervening week the memories—the notes, the mug, the strange behavior, the witness statements—had burrowed into her brain. They haunted her so that it was all she could think about now. Florence had gone to court to stand up for herself, and she’d made herself a laughingstock in the process. Before, she’d been merely mildly risible.
And that was what they wanted, all these people who kept calling and writing to her. They wanted a slice of her notoriety, not her mind, and it wouldn’t stop. The hammering in her head about not knowing who she was, what she should be doing: it wouldn’t stop.
“All my own work,” she said, as she sat down with her coffee to go through two months’ worth of post. Three letters from publishers who wanted to “have a chat” with her about her next project. Two TV companies aside from the BBC who wanted to meet her. Endless letters of support or abuse from strangers who didn’t know her, and she didn’t know how they’d found her address. She read them with a weary kind of acceptance: they either wanted to tell her she was great, or that she ought to be ashamed of herself. One of them even said, “It’s women like you who are responsible for the mess we’re in today.”
Florence thought about writing him a letter back. A really beautifully crafted, exquisite riposte that would put him in his place so firmly he’d never write another cruel letter to another person again.
But she told herself there was no point.
And then she found his letter. Postcard, really. The Sassetta Saint Francis, taming the wolf of Gubbio. A very small, doglike wolf with his paw in Saint Francis’s hand, and a plethora of severed limbs and savaged bodies lying behind him. It was, she knew, one of Jim’s favorite paintings.
Dear Flo,
A little card to welcome you back and to say
I HOPE YOU BREAK AS MANY OF YOUR MUGS AS YOU DID MINE
and also
COME BACK SOON
because I’m writing this and you’ve just left and well—damn it, why not just write it down? I miss you. I really miss you, Flo.
Jim x
She pressed the card to her heart, feeling her pulse racing. Darling, kind, sweet Jim. But as she did, she remembered doing exactly the same with Peter’s communications, such as they were. She’d overlaid each one with some ridiculous symbolism. In this very room, she had done it.
As if she’d conjured his spirit, as she put Jim’s card down she caught sight of Peter’s handwriting, black, spidery, and difficult, on a small white envelope.
Florence’s hands shook as she opened it. She glanced anxiously around, as though she wished someone else might appear, a friendly ghost to battle the demon, alive with her in the apartment.
Dear Florence,
I shouldn’t be writing this letter, I’m sure. Am sure it’ll get me into more trouble. I just want to make one thing clear:
I really regret everything I did.
Really regret it.
I regret ruining my career because of you and your second-rate mind. You think you’re an expert, but you don’t expose yourself to anyone else. How you swung that Courtauld job is a mystery to me, and to George. You are not an expert in your field. You are the worst an academic can be: you’re trenchant and ignorant.
Having sex with you and seeing you déshabillé is one of the
great regrets of my life. Again, it has cost me a lot, and it wasn’t worth it.
I’m writing for two reasons: I will ask you for the final time now that this case is over, please leave me and Talitha alone. I think you are a very strange, sad woman with many problems, the greatest of which from my point of view is that you have no concept of real life. I am very sorry I met you, sorrier still that we live in such close proximity. Secondly, in the light of this unfortunate case, and speaking as a member of the same institute as you, even though it be beyond my jurisdiction as your manager, I strongly advise you to seek psychiatric help.
With many regrets,
Peter Connolly
Florence put the letter down as though it were very heavy. She frowned, thinking about her last night with Jim at his home in Islington. How she’d looked up from grating the Parmesan while they were making pasta one last time, found his gaze resting on her. His kind gray eyes, his sweet face, long, lean, and still handsome, even though he had a few years on him now.
She wished she’d reached over, taken his hand, kissed him. Just once.
She wished he were here. So simple—she could see it now that she was back—but it was almost certainly too late. Florence flapped Peter’s letter between her fingers, wondering if she ought to keep it.
Then she saw the bottle of pills again on the wedding chest, and it suddenly seemed as though it would be so easy to do it now. It was simply a gentle idea, but it grew, like a breath growing into a gust, then a storm, the butterfly effect.
It would be very easy to go now. No one would really miss me. Not really—Pa’s dead.
There was a list that she kept running through in her head. The way I feel, all the time. The court case. Getting up tomorrow and going on. Home. How awful I was to Lucy, to Bill, to Ma . . . Pa is dead. Pa is dead, he’s dead, and I don’t know who I am.
It was the truth; she didn’t. The knowledge of this had been forcing its way to the front of her mind for ages now. Before David’s death, really. When the invitation to the party had arrived, nearly a year ago now. Maybe even longer ago than that—all her life, perhaps. Florence saw that it had all been building toward this moment, this reckoning, this first night back at home. She bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood. Don’t think about Pa. If she thought about Pa properly, she’d cry, and if she started crying, she’d never do it.
• • •
She didn’t know how long she stayed there. It was quiet up on the top floor of the old palace. As the evening came and the sun started to slide over the roofs, Florence sat still, not really thinking. The phone rang again; she ignored it. Moths crashed into the glass of the French windows; ambulances raced by. She felt frozen to the spot, only her clicking tongue reminding her she was still breathing.
Eventually, when it was quite dark, Florence stood up and went over to the chest. She heard her feet clacking on the floor, thought how strange it was. Sound, sensation, taste. How hard would it be to stop them, to take them away from herself ?
She picked up the bottle and shook a handful of the pills out onto her palm, stared at them. A church bell rang out over toward the river, a loud arrhythmic clanging. She remembered, suddenly, the story of Lorenzo de Medici’s doctor, who was so upset after the prince died that he jumped into a well. She smiled, thinking perhaps that was a good way to go. Brave, if nothing else.
The phone rang again. Florence reached down and pulled the cord out of the wall. She stood staring with surprise at the flex in her hand, the hole where the plaster had crumbled.
“Now,” she said, brushing away a tear.
She looked at the bottle in he
r hand properly for the first time. She read the label. And then Florence looked again, and laughed and laughed.
Joe
IT ALL STARTED because Joe wanted to collect some nettles. To make nettle soup. It was a beautiful May day and he was going mad, cooped up here. He wanted to feel the stretch of his legs and the blue sky above him. Back home he’d be up on the moors first thing on a day like this, feeling the turf underneath him, the sound of his mother’s voice still ringing in his ears: “You be back here before lunch, Joe Thorne, or I’ll come fetch thee and then tha’ll be sorry!”
“I’m just going up to the woods. I won’t be more than an hour.” He hesitated, scrunching the plastic bags together in his hands. “Do you want to come with me? It’s a beautiful day.”
Karen looked up from the sofa where she was reading a magazine, eating some crisps. “Joe, do I look like I want to come with you?”
“I don’t know. I thought perhaps you’d like a walk.”
She gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. “I’d love a walk, but since going more than a hundred meters makes me feel I’ve run a marathon, I’ll pass, thanks.”
“Right. Sorry.”
This only seemed to irritate her more. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m saying I just don’t want to go. Don’t take it personally.”
“Of course not.” He grinned at her.
But that wasn’t true. There were still three weeks till her due date, and a kind of sullen acceptance hung over the room. Lately, whenever they were together Joe had the sense Karen was angry with him, and he didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t like he could tease her into acquiescence, or give her a hug, or massage her feet. They were strangers, he knew it now, living in a tiny flat, bound by four or five nights together.
Sheila had tried to ask him about it a few weeks ago. “But this—you two. Everything okay? You all right about it?”
“Of course I am. I’m responsible for that baby.” Joe wanted to tell her to mind her own business.
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