“Tu exagères, ma fille. She stayed here once—for maybe three weeks. A month, max. When you were about eighteen months old, or less.” Jesus, Jean thought, was Sophie de Vilmorin a predatory lesbian? There was definitely something creepy about her that day in the dry cleaners. If she was nursing a crush on Vic, that would explain it.
“Anyway, she asked if she could see the house again and how it was like the happiest time of her life here, and that she babysat me, and she was like there, in the room, when I said my first word—‘minibar.’ So I knew it was true.”
“Babysat? She’s making herself sound like our au pair. Which she wasn’t—no one was. You never had any kind of nanny, a fact of which I’m rather proud. Though you may see it differently. And your first word, I’m sorry to inform you, was ‘doh’—for ‘dog.’ You used to point a little bent finger at every dog in Primrose Hill and say ‘Doh!’ True, ‘minibar’ was not far behind, when we stayed at the Carlyle on that glory trip to New York, to show you off to Gran and Noddy. Sophie wasn’t there.”
Jean felt uneasy contradicting the compelling account of an acquaintance-cum-intruder. But as she’d tell herself later, sleepless at dawn in her empty bed, this threatened feeling, this insane suspicion, was simply the product of her own moral degeneration—something she really couldn’t allow to infect her every judgment and feeling.
“So you brought her to the house?”
“Yes, I did. It was a great evening. We looked at all the old albums for hours and it was amazing. She remembered everything, like the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and the cracked blue glass on the landing loo door. The broken loo chain.”
“Lucky her.”
“We were going to call you, but then I don’t know what happened.”
“What happened is that you didn’t call me.”
“Oh Mum, I hope you don’t mind, but she stayed for a few days. This is what I wanted to tell you. I thought it was all right. As she’d stayed here before and everything. Maya had just moved out and so, well, I gave her your room.”
Jean shuddered, dissembling through extreme attention to salad tossing. “Look, darling, you have basically very good judgment, but the truth is, well, you can’t just have people to stay. Not because we don’t trust you… The responsibility is just overwhelming, for anyone—and these things do have a way of spiraling out of control…” Here she could speak with authority. “When was that anyway? What’s she up to?”
“It was a few weeks ago. That’s the thing. I don’t really know. I think she lives in Paris, but she didn’t give me her number or anything. She was around Camden’cause I saw her on and off for ages. And then she was gone. Maybe this is weird, but I kind of miss her. She was really nice and wanted to know all about you and Dad and St. Jacques and stuff—I gave her your e-mail address, though I guess she didn’t write.”
Jean suddenly remembered the French e-mail for Mark she’d seen in their in-box before leaving St. Jacques; she’d completely forgotten to tell him about it. Perhaps it wasn’t a business e-mail at all. Perhaps Sophie had written, just not to her. “I’d be a bit careful if she turns up again, darling. She doesn’t seem to be a very stable person. Understandably enough.”
“How do you mean ‘understandably,’ Mum?” Vic looked so worried that Jean saw she was going to have to give her something.
“She had a pretty rough start, to say the least. You know that Sophie is the daughter of an old girlfriend of your father’s. Sandrine, a French girl he was nuts about a hundred years ago. Nineteen sixty-seven, I guess it was, because Dad was seventeen. He spent the summer with her family, in Brittany. St. Malo.” Vic clearly was waiting for more.
“You really have to ask Daddy, but the thing was, Sandrine then went off with someone else. And she got pregnant. It’s a very sad story,” Jean pressed on, mopping spilled vinegar from the table. “Maybe Sophie told you. Her father died on the day she was born. Some horrific car accident, actually on his way to the hospital to see her for the first time. Terrible. Poor little thing.”
“Wow. She didn’t tell me that.” Vic looked puzzled, maybe a little hurt, to think her big new friend hadn’t trusted her with this pivotal fact.
“Yes, there was flooding all across Europe that spring—you must’ve heard Dad talk about it—Easter, I think it was. Well, we saw her a couple of times when you were little, but then we lost touch. I’m sure Mark used to have some contact with the mother, Sandrine. Though I seem to remember she moved away to…Canada? I don’t know. It really was very sad. Want some ice cream, sweetie? Mango sorbet from Manzi’s. Or mint—tastes so much like toothpaste, you could even skip brushing.”
“No thanks, Mum. Vikram and I don’t eat sugar.”
That, to Jean’s relief, was the end of the conversation. They’d thought about going to see a movie—a romantic comedy, of course, without Mark in tow—but instead, after dinner, they settled in the living room with refilled wineglasses. Jean closed the shutters while Victoria flicked through TimeOut.
“Cool,” she said, reaching for the remote. “When a Man Loves a Woman. That’s the one with Meg Ryan as a drunk. Just started.”
“Oh, good. I never saw that. Who’s the man, Dennis Quaid?” Jean tucked her knees under her and took Elizabeth onto her lap, nestling down into the big squashy blue sofa. Which, she noticed, was a whole shade dirtier. “He’s her real husband, you know. Or was.” Probably had an affair with a younger, curvier actress, Jean thought. And then Meg had her lips done, as if that was going to help.
“No wonder she’s a drunk,” Vic offered.
“She isn’t really an alcoholic. And I think Dennis Quaid’s a hunk. That smile. Of course he’s only about three feet tall. They’re all midgets. I wonder why they split up. She is kind of annoying—so cute-as-a-button.”
“Not in this one. What they call a ‘brave role’ round Oscar time.”
“No, brave was that orgasm in When Harry Met Sally.”
“Brave or desperate. Yoo-hoo, Oscar! By the way, I know she isn’t really an alcoholic, Mum. Andy Garcia, it says here.”
“Ooh. Even better,” Jean said, happy but nearly ready for bed. “Vikram looks a little like Andy Garcia, does anyone ever say that? Hey, Dad never called back.”
“Too busy draining all that sweet wine?” Vic said, taking another sip.
Jean must’ve fallen asleep because the movie was almost over when Vic said, “I really wish Meg would fall off the wagon. She’s so much better drunk.” The phone was ringing in the kitchen.
“Where’s the phone?” Jean asked, annoyed it was no longer in its cradle on the side table and that Vic didn’t even seem to hear it.
“It broke.”
Typical of a much younger Vic, Jean thought, racing to the kitchen phone: “It broke,” “It fell”—never “I dropped it.”
“Hi!” Jean said, straining to hear. It was Mark. “Sounds like you’re calling from a nightclub—where are you?” She tried to ignore an image of Giovana facedown in his lap at the darkened back of an after-hours club, Mark stroking her hair while he talked to home, her head like a silky little spaniel. When she hung up, she patted Elizabeth, who was purring at her ankles. Then she pulled a bottle of water from the fridge and headed for the stairs.
“Good night, darling,” she called from the living room level, still climbing. “I’m hitting the sack—won’t make it if I stop. Mwa.”
“Night, Mum. Wake me up, okay? We have to get the train at one forty-five.”
“I will.” She paused, smiling to think Vic needed to be shaken awake for an afternoon send-off, until she saw her daughter was crying, the light dancing over her face in frantic blue geometries. “Oh, no,” she said, “what is it?”
“It’s so sad,” Vic said, laughing now, and so pretty with her big, brown, tear-shined eyes. “She just isn’t falling off the wagon. I keep willing her to, but she won’t. It’s a tragedy, Mum. Sleep tight.”
The coffee was snoring through the electric drip,
and Jean was replaying Mark’s message—listening, she had to admit, for non-German background noises—when the phone rang. She pushed the stop button on the answering machine, and when she slid the glass coffeepot from its burner to pour herself a cup, the black stream kept coming. Now Jean had a ringing phone and hot coffee bleeding across the counter. She tossed a hastily wrung shred of a sponge at the mess just as the answering machine kicked back in.
“Hello, Mrs. Hubbard. This is your escort for the evening. The last showing of Shroud of Dew—and, mind you, it is three hours long—begins at seven o’clock. I hope you won’t think me a total shit if we meet there, as I have to go to Sussex now, for the day. Lunch!”
She winced at his “loonch” and “Soosix,” listening with both hands on her throat, like a person feeling for swollen glands. Dan was still talking. “What was it you said about being judged by the lunches you chuck? Well no chucking the film, or supper for that matter, which is on me if we survive to eat it. So see you there, at the box office, six forty-five? I’ve booked the tickets in your name. Bye, now.” Click.
Jean had been standing watching the phone in her robe and Maya’s Garfield slippers, still holding her neck as if only her hands were keeping her head from falling off—too horrified to pick up, too horrified to sip the coffee that made such a mess. She was more horrified still when she realized Dan hadn’t left a cell number. She quickly dialed 1471 and was told “Number withheld.” She’d call him at home—just say Vic decided not to go to her party after all. His number had to be here among the two decades’ worth scribbled by different hands in many pens on the wall around the kitchen phone. “Yes,” she said when she spotted it, Dan Manning—H, for home. She stabbed at the buttons as if there was smoke everywhere and she was calling the fire department.
“This is Dan.”
“Dan! It’s Jean!” she shrieked.
But he kept on talking. “I don’t seem to be here at the moment…” With a jammed ballpoint, the only pen in sight, Jean carved the number into the side of the cereal box. Only when she’d finished and he signed off did she realize it was the office number.
“Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Good morning to you too,” Victoria said, wandering in, midyawn, coming to a stop in front of the fridge. Both arms rose and trembled as if they were hefting invisible weights. She rolled onto the outsides of her feet. For once Jean was too distracted to worry about her daughter’s instep. The big yawn lifted Vic’s big T-shirt, grazing her slim bowed thighs and showing, at full stretch, her underpants. God she’s tall, Jean thought. And Jesus, she’s wearing a thong.
“It was Dan Manning leaving a message I couldn’t intercept because someone not mentioning any names didn’t clean the coffee machine.” Jean’s indignation suffocated her shock at Vic’s underwear—too many syllables for so small a garment.
“What’d he want that freaked you out so much?”
“You don’t like Dan, do you.”
“He’s all right,” Vic said dismissively. “Just that he slept with Maya about thirty seconds after she split up with Gavin.”
“Really?”
“He’s a total predator.”
“Well, she had broken up. Did he cheer her up at least?”
Vic flashed her mother a look of exaggerated disgust and pity, an expression that might have been borrowed from a sitcom, and then she softened into an authentic smirk. “Actually, she said he was brilliant in bed. ‘Genius,’ to use her exact word. She got all worked up about him, but he didn’t want to know. What did he want, anyway?”
Given Vic’s obvious contempt for Dan, Jean was embarrassed to tell her about the film—anyway, she planned to get out of going. “Oh, I forgot to give him the revised drawings for Dad’s fridge campaign and he needs them today. I’ll have to run them round later.”
“Maybe I could drop them off if he can’t be…bothered to come get them,” Victoria offered, uncharacteristically helpful. “We’re leaving from King’s Cross.”
“No, don’t worry, darling, I can do it later. I’ll walk and get some fresh air.” She hadn’t told Vic about the biopsy, and though she almost wished she had, she still couldn’t imagine bringing it up.
“It’ll take you till Tuesday to walk to Clerkenwell, Mum. And it looks like more rain,” Vic said, peering out the window up to the street, adding her own “Shit.”
“Tell you what,” Jean said, inspired, shifting the hissing coffee machine to get at the trapped spillage. “I’ll drop you at King’s Cross and go on to the office. That way you don’t have to lug your bag on the tube. We’ll cab it. I’ve got to get through the rest of my twenty-pound notes at some point this weekend.”
She’d lied, but at least she’d spared Victoria a tube journey.
Saturday evening. Jean was quick to Waterloo. When she emerged from the Underground, she saw that the rain had stopped. Or paused. She gave her magazines to a young woman sitting cross-legged by the entrance, begging with a puppy in her lap, and in the pink early evening she approached the theater with time to spare. She wandered around the leaking concrete complex, feeling shame for the decade of her childhood—the ugly sixties—and in no rush to meet the “total predator.” At five to seven she arrived at the National Film Theatre. No Dan.
She stood with her arms crossed and her knees locked together, wishing she’d worn something warmer. She had on her brown suede boots, black tights patterned with holes like chair caning, a thin brown dress, and her mac, still puckered from yesterday’s downpour.
The last film lovers were moving into the cinema when Dan appeared, running, his olive-drab T-shirt faintly pricked with sweat, leather jacket flapping behind him. “I’m so sorry,” he panted, combing his fingers through wind-bent hair, guiding her into the semidarkness with a flat palm on her back. “Appalling traffic.”
Was there any other kind, she thought, furious she’d let herself in for this but maintaining a dignified silence—at least until she saw the near-empty theater. “Good thing we prebooked,” she said. Dan’s chest was heaving as the lights dimmed to black. With her eyes not yet adjusted, she leaned toward him and asked, “Did you run all the way from Sussex?” Still too winded to reply, he squeezed her forearm instead.
Apparently he’d been playing rugby all day. “My fortnightly Old Fucks’ game,” he explained when he caught his breath. “And then tea with the godchild.”
“What position do you play? And just how old are you?”
“Wing. Thirty-one. Anything else you’d like to know, Mrs. H.?”
Yeah, she thought, what exactly did Maya Stayanovich mean by “genius”? Instead she smiled her serene boss’s wife smile, silently doubting the discernment of the breathless, eternally embroiled Maya Stayanovich. Finally, the film was about to begin—no reminders to turn off cell phones, no jingles or trailers, just the scratched countdown of numbers. Jean glanced around. Adult education, she thought gloomily, her stomach rumbling.
She leaned and whispered to Dan, “They only sell drinks out there, right?”
“’Fraid so. Can I get you one?”
“Sure, g and t if they’ve got it.” And then, in a scarcely audible whisper as Dan ducked back down the aisle, she tried out “rugger bugger.” It was her own fault, of course. She’d been counting on some popcorn to keep her going. But all hunger and irritation was soon crowded out by incredulity. The film was in black and white. Three hours long, he’d said, and the first four minutes felt like fifteen: a long panning shot of Chinese trees in colorless blossom… Unzipping her boots, she prepared to nap.
Jean had to say it—she wanted to tell everybody—Shroud of Dew, this misty Othello set in China at the time of the last emperor, was fantastic. When Dan offered to leave at the intermission, she insisted on staying. And she couldn’t stop crying—all the cross-purposes and tragic misapprehensions. The fresh gin and tonic in the squeezy plastic cup helped, but still the tears kept leaking out. Jet lag, she murmured, exhausted, and glad for the d
ark because she knew she must look terrible.
When she turned toward Dan, his leather jacket on his lap like a pet, she could see his neat, slightly wolfish teeth in the dark. He was watching the screen but smiling; and as they settled into the second half, he produced a handkerchief, one which in the dark he had carefully folded for her. “You can check,” he whispered, loud enough to provoke a hiss from a woman sitting in front of them, “no strawberries.”
So he’d read Othello, Jean thought, and carefully: how many people would even remember the strawberries embroidered on Desdemona’s handkerchief? As she handed it back, she wondered why he’d folded it for her anyway; not because it was snot-encrusted on the other side. No, he’d done it as you might partially unwrap a chocolate bar for a small child, lending a hand. The white cotton square gave off a good strong aroma, just like him: clean laundry cut with unclean leather jacket.
“Mark would love that movie,” Jean said, pink eyed, blinking with discovery in the sharp night air. “Too bad he’d never see it. Not in a million.”
Another discovery: the pleasure, after the movie, of talking about it. Mark hated talking about movies. He thought they were like books, an entirely private experience. And Jean thought the loneliest walks of her life were not along some wind-lashed beach in Ireland but the two blocks home from the Odeon in Parkway. Jean told Dan about Mark’s perverse post-movie rules—emphatically, as if fervor would justify the mild disloyalty. She wanted to know if he agreed—that with all the ads and all the reviewing of all the ads, as Mark had told her a hundred times, reviewing the movie was too much like work.
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