Petite Anglaise

by Catherine Sanderson

  When the water grew cold, I hauled myself out, shivering. Finally, swaddled in a white towelling bathrobe, I picked up the phone and, hesitating for only an instant, instinctively dialled a number, one of the few I knew off by heart.

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘It’s me.’ My voice sounded hollow. Last time I’d used it, it had been to ask James to leave.

  ‘Quelque chose ne va pas?’

  ‘James left me. Last night.’ Silent tears welled up, and my nose began to run. ‘I’m a mess. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call…’

  There was an incredulous silence. No doubt Mr Frog had prayed for this outcome – anything which would prevent me leaving with his daughter – and I was probably the bearer of the best news he’d heard all year. I pictured him smiling, or punching the air jubilantly. But when at last he found his tongue, his voice betrayed nothing but concern.

  ‘Come over, if you want,’ he suggested. ‘She’s having her nap. It’s probably better if she doesn’t see you like this.’ At first I was taken aback by his suggestion. Surely Mr Frog was the last person who should be comforting me right now? But the idea of company – any company – was so appealing that I cast my reservations aside.

  ‘I… Okay, yes, I’ll just pull on some clothes. I’ll be there in five minutes.’ I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I unlocked the front door. I cut a sorry figure: puffy eyes, a corned-beef complexion, damp hair matted. He was right – it wouldn’t do for Tadpole to see me in this state.

  Sitting cross-legged on the warm tiles of Mr Frog’s living-room balcony, I rested my back against the sliding glass door. The weather was mild for early March; the skies pale and cloudless. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate only on the feeling of the cool breeze caressing my face, erasing the track marks left by my tears.

  ‘Here you go,’ said Mr Frog, handing me a cup of mint tea, which I cradled in my hands, waiting for it to cool. Lowering himself to the floor beside me, he lit a cigarette. We sat in silence for a few minutes, looking out across the rooftops. Paris, the city I’d been about to turn my back on, stretched as far as I could see in every direction, and sunlight glinted off a hundred metal chimney stacks.

  ‘You know what’s weird?’ he said finally. ‘I think I feel angrier with him now than I did when he stole you away from me.’

  ‘I suppose you’re relieved,’ I replied, trying to keep bitterness from tainting my voice. ‘That I won’t be leaving Paris any more, I mean.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course I am,’ he admitted. ‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. Just imagine if you had left, and it had gone wrong a few months later. Think how much worse that would have been…’

  ‘I know,’ I sighed. ‘But I just can’t quite believe it’s really happened, yet. That I got everything so wrong. Or how much it hurts.’

  I was bracing myself for an ‘I told you so’ which, oddly, never came. Instead Mr Frog listened quietly while words spilled out of my mouth, silently taking my cup and refilling it with tea when he noticed it was empty. He’d always been a good listener, I thought to myself, but I’d been so intent on seeing my glass as half empty that I’d spent most of my time criticizing him for not talking enough. The only thing he didn’t do was touch me. I had forfeited the right to any physical expression of sympathy: he couldn’t even seem to bring himself to put a comforting hand on my arm.

  When the time came for Mr Frog to rouse Tadpole, I slipped away and pulled the front door quietly closed behind me. In an hour or so, Mr Frog had promised he would bring her over to spend the rest of the weekend with me, so that I needn’t be alone. I straightened up my flat, picking up the damp tissues scattered around my bed and replacing the mascara-smudged pillowcase. Once all the evidence had been concealed, I picked up the telephone again, this time to break the news to my mother. I knew she hadn’t read petite anglaise yet. If she had, I would have heard from her by now.

  ‘I did worry sometimes, about how the two of you would cope in Brittany,’ she admitted, once she’d got over her initial shock. ‘Financially, I mean. And all that travelling back and forth to share custody at weekends, I was afraid it would really wear you down.’

  ‘I worried about those things too,’ I confessed. ‘I never imagined it was going to be a walk in the park. But James seemed so sure. He brushed away my concerns. I can’t believe I let him make me feel guilty for having doubts…’

  ‘He’s let you down, love, whether he meant to or not. He wasn’t as strong as you thought he was. He made a lot of promises he simply couldn’t keep.’

  I bit my lip. My instinct, even now, was to rush to James’s defence. I loved him, and although a day would surely come when hearing him criticized and diminished was of some comfort, that day had not yet come. A tapping at the front door provided me with the excuse to cut short our conversation. ‘I’ll call you back later, Mum,’ I said, silently thanking Mr Frog for his perfect timing, ‘I think they’re here now.’

  ‘Well, you take care of yourself, and give my granddaughter a big cuddle from me,’ she said with a sigh. It must be unbearably difficult, I thought suddenly, being a long-distance mother. Maybe one day I would experience this first-hand, trying to console a heartbroken Tadpole over the phone, cursing the hundreds of kilometres of land and sea between us.

  The very first thing I saw when the door swung open was a bouquet of pale-pink tulips wrapped in cellophane, which Tadpole brandished triumphantly, the blooms obscuring her face. Mr Frog hung back, letting Tadpole hog the limelight, but I sensed he was feeling extremely pleased with himself. He’d never once surprised me with flowers in all the eight years we’d spent together – an irony not lost on me – but this gesture meant more than any birthday or Valentine. Words were the weakest currency at a time like this, as well he knew.

  ‘How lovely of you! My favourite flowers! What a surprise!’ I cried, dropping to Tadpole-level, laying the flowers gently on the floor and pulling my daughter into a needy embrace, ravenous for physical contact.

  ‘What’s matter, Mummy?’ Tadpole raised an inquisitive finger to touch my damp cheeks.

  ‘Mummy’s crying because she’s very, very happy to see you.’ I caught Mr Frog’s eye over her shoulder and gave him a wobbly smile.

  ‘I get a mouchoir.’ Tadpole tugged herself free and scampered into the bedroom, returning with the box of tissues. ‘Look! I make it better!’ Grabbing a liberal handful, she dabbed clumsily at my cheeks, knocking my glasses askew.

  ‘Je vous laisse. If you think you’ll be okay?’ said Mr Frog, still hovering in the hallway, as though he were reluctant to cross the threshold.

  ‘Thank you… for everything,’ I said. My voice sounded small and thin, but did not break. ‘She really is the best medicine.’

  ‘I know, remember?’ he said with a nod. His half-smile removed the sting from his words, but I winced all the same.

  It wasn’t exactly clear to me who was looking after whom that day, but maybe it didn’t really matter. For the rest of the afternoon I snuggled up on the sofa with my daughter while she watched cartoons, savouring the warmth of her body as she nestled in the crook of my arm, matching the rhythm of her breathing with my own.

  Shortly before Tadpole’s bedtime tears threatened to well up again and I decided some sort of explanation was probably necessary. I was bound to have unsteady moments over the next few days, and the last thing I wanted was for Tadpole to think she might be in some way responsible for my sadness. Setting down The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which I’d just recited tonelessly from memory, I hoisted Tadpole on to my knee, her eyes level with mine, and groped for the simplest words I could find.

  ‘Mummy is feeling sad today. Because Mummy’s friend James has gone home, and he isn’t going to come back and see us any more. We won’t be going to visit him on the train either, and we won’t see Amanda and Carrie. Mummy didn’t want James to go, so she’s feeling very sad. And sometimes it makes her cry.’

  Tadpole listened
solemnly but said nothing. I doubted she had any grasp of the gravity of the situation. To her, James had been a friend, an occasional visitor. She had no inkling – as far as I knew – of our plans. No idea that James’s home should soon have become ours, that we would have seen him every day. I’d refrained from kissing or hugging James much in her presence, and more often than not he had waited patiently in the background until Tadpole was safely tucked up in bed. I thought once again of the photo I’d found: James a benign presence on the sofa, hovering on the periphery of Tadpole’s vision.

  Switching off the fairy lights above her bed, I pulled the covers up to her chin, and said goodnight, first to the collection of soft toys with which she shared her bed, and then to Tadpole, planting a kiss on her forehead. The ritual complete, I turned to leave with a heavy heart, reluctant to begin the long evening alone.

  I was about to step into the hallway and pull the door closed behind me when Tadpole finally spoke. ‘Dever mind, Mummy,’ she said brightly. I smiled. She always said ‘dever mind.’ I could protest until I was blue in the face and it wouldn’t alter her conviction that ‘dever’ was a word.

  ‘Never mind,’ I repeated quietly. ‘Mummy will be better soon.’

  The next day I was pathetically grateful for the opportunity to lose myself in routine activity with my daughter.

  In the morning we walked briskly to the Grange aux Belles teaching pool near the Canal Saint Martin. I wrestled Tadpole into her swimming gear, then shyly changed into my swim-suit, self-conscious in the unisex open-plan changing rooms. The indoor pool, filled with lukewarm water which barely grazed my nipples at its deepest point, was filled with an assortment of polystyrene shapes, yellow plastic ducks, balls of every colour, floating platforms and slides. Bébés dans l’eau was more of an aquatic playground than a swimming class. But seeing Tadpole’s delight as she seized a floating plastic turtle, watching her overcome her reticence and hurtle down the slide into my arms, these small things made our expedition worth the effort. I followed her as she bobbed around the pool in an inflatable ring, not so much swimming as walking upright through the water.

  Mr Frog had been bringing Tadpole here on weekends when she was in his care, but on my weekends we’d been away in Rennes, more often than not, so I’d seldom visited the pool. Daunted at first, I began to relax once I’d established that most of the toddlers were accompanied by a lone parent, no doubt while the other savoured a skilfully negotiated lie-in or looked after a second child. Whatever the reason, it was a relief to blend in. When I was with James – even when he was hundreds of miles away – I’d rarely given my status as a single parent a second thought. But now that he was out of the picture, I suddenly felt more vulnerable than I ever had before. I was a single single parent now. An anomaly in a world of couples.

  Later that afternoon, enticed outdoors by the gentle promise of March sunshine, we braved the weekend crowds in the Buttes Chaumont. Taking the main avenue leading across the top of the park, Tadpole teetered along the kerb, her arms outstretched like an aeroplane, while I pushed her empty buggy listlessly, a few paces behind. Exposed to the sun, my skin felt like a stiff parchment stretched over my cheeks. Crying had wrung every drop of moisture from me and my body felt brittle, insubstantial. I was a dry autumn leaf– which had no business being there in springtime – and the slightest gust of wind might blow me away.

  The park was filled with painful, jarring reminders of what I’d lost: an elderly couple sitting on a bench, gnarly, arthritic fingers interlaced; a handsome young man in a baseball cap whispering something in his pregnant wife’s ear, his arm draped protectively around her shoulders.

  Taking a shortcut along a narrow path at Tadpole’s insistence, we almost blundered into a couple of dark-haired teenagers kissing under cover of a weeping willow. At the sight of them, my lungs constricted. I remembered writing about the young couple kissing in the métro all those months ago. Then I’d only felt wistful: pining for something I thought I would never taste again. Now I was an open wound: I’d felt like they did, for a while at least, but it had slipped through my fingers.

  ‘Mummy,’ begged Tadpole, ‘can I go on the manège?’ We had emerged from under a low bridge into the area of the park she knew best, where Tata and the other childminders converged with their charges on weekday afternoons. People milled about everywhere, children clamoured for ice cream and helium balloons, pony rides or candyfloss. Usually I was reluctant to bow to pressure, but I didn’t have the strength to refuse anything today. Fumbling in my pocket for loose change, I bought a plastic jeton from the kiosk. Tadpole clambered inside a fire engine, delighted, and I flopped on to a bench as the roundabout began to turn slowly. I waved every time my daughter whizzed past, forcing a smile. But when the carousel carried her out of my line of sight, I abandoned my charade, the smile curdling on my lips.

  ‘James, where war you?’ Tadpole called expectantly when we returned home, reaching the front door before me and knocking insistently on the bottom panel. I gripped the door handle with bloodless knuckles, steadying myself for a moment before I put the key to the lock.

  ‘James isn’t here,’ I said quietly. ‘Remember what I told you at bedtime, yesterday?’ The concept of ‘never’ – or ‘dever’ – was too abstract for Tadpole, who lived mostly in the present tense. I half wished I could do the same, no longer regretting the past, or fearing for the future.

  Once we were inside, James’s imprint was everywhere; he was superimposed across every room like a watermark. His ghost was seated at the dining table, head bent over his laptop, brow furrowed in concentration. In the kitchen there was an echo of him towering over the hobs, making dinner. Drawing the bedroom curtains at nightfall, I skirted around an imaginary suitcase.

  With Tadpole in bed, the evening yawned ahead, mocking me with its emptiness. I took a seat at my computer and stared at my inbox, which brimmed over with messages of concern, virtual bouquets, kisses and hugs. Scrolling through them one by one, I began to compose short replies of thanks, signing ‘petite’, as always, my hands shaky at first. I didn’t copy or paste. That would be cheating, and the task would be over too quickly. As time wore on, my hands shook less.

  ‘I read your post late last night and my stomach just flipped over,’ an anonymous stranger wrote. ‘I don’t even know you, but I lay awake in my bed worrying about you.’ There were scores of messages like this one: readers who reached out to put a virtual hand on my arm, who passed me a box of cyber-tissues, who shared their own break-up stories in the hope that, after reading them, I would feel less alone.

  ‘I just wanted to say I’m really, really sorry,’ wrote Anna Red Boat. ‘I’ve been thinking about you all weekend and didn’t know whether emailing was the right thing to do or not, supposing that all your readers were doing the same thing.’ I smiled, touched to see that Anna saw herself as a virtual friend and set herself apart from my other readers. After all the emails we’d exchanged over the past year or so, that was definitely the way I saw her too.

  When I’d cleared my inbox, I glanced at the clock and shook my head incredulously. It was midnight already. Four hours had slipped by since I’d opened up the first email. I wasn’t sure if I felt better, exactly, but I was certainly grateful for the distraction. Anything had to be better than staring unseeing at the white walls of my apartment, or sobbing silently into my pillow.

  The new-message icon appeared just as I was about to shut down the computer and make myself a cup of hot milk. Seeing the name of the sender, my heart stuttered. James. His message was untitled. Opening the body of the email, I scrolled down to see two pages of dense, meticulously crafted prose. I could sense that he had weighed every word carefully, typing and re-typing, re-reading and editing.

  I haven’t written until now because I wanted to try to make sure I said something worthwhile. I don’t know if I will, but I’ll do my best. If what I say makes no sense to you or seems stupid, cruel or just contemptible then I’m offering no defence
. How can I?

  There were sentences which made me groan out loud; paragraphs which confirmed all my worst suspicions. He confessed to feeling defensive about his ability to provide for Tadpole and me, and to doubting his strength to become a father again. He lamented the fact that his emotional baggage had turned out to be weightier than he had ever imagined. But there it was again, the razor-sharp phrase which had cut me to the quick. ‘I do still love you, but – and this is the bit that hurts to say and to hear – I don’t love you enough to be able to give you the things we dreamed about and planned.’

  I could argue with everything else, try to convince him that together we could vanquish his demons, we could make things work, but against the finality of that statement I was powerless. You can’t make someone love you enough. His intensity had not survived the months of waiting intact. Instead there had been a slow, silent unravelling.

  A chill, accepting calm descended upon me. This ending, however wretched, was necessary. Neither of us deserved to settle for less than what we had shared in the beginning, before it waned.

  28. Shredded

  ‘You seem distracted today,’ remarked my boss, looking up from the work he was reviewing to where I dithered in the doorway. It was Monday morning, my first day back in the office since James had left. I was dry-eyed but still felt strangely detached from my surroundings, my brain out of gear. I’d got up to fetch something from the filing cabinet in my boss’s office, but in the space of five or six steps my mind had gone as blank as a computer screen in sleep mode.