We'll Always Have Paris

by Sue Watson

  Copyright © 2017 by Sue Watson

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2018

  First published in the United Kingdom by Robinson, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2988-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2990-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Nick, who showed me Paris.

  Acknowledgements

  This book has been a joy to write, and I wasn’t alone on this journey, sharing it with a whole team of wonderful people.

  Huge thanks to my wonderful agent, Hannah Ferguson, who believed in me and held my hand along the way.

  Thanks to my lovely friends, fellow writers and bloggers online and in the flesh, who support me daily, make me laugh and give me cake (virtual or real) whenever I need it – which is quite a lot.

  Big kisses to Nick and Eve Watson, who often take second place to my characters when I’m writing a book, thank you both for understanding. And thanks to my mum, Patricia Engert, for making me believe anything is possible.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  All he wants is pineapple yoghurt. It might be his dying wish and I can’t find a pot anywhere. It’s the least I can do for my husband, now lying in bed at home with nothing left of his life, just a tube in his arm and a vague desire for pineapple in fermented milk.

  I’ve trawled all local supermarkets and convenience stores and am now screeching into a parking space at a Tesco too far away. I stop for three seconds, calm myself and check my watch. I’ve been gone fifty-three minutes. I miss him already.

  Almost falling out of the car I run through the car park, winding round shopping trolleys and kids and harassed parents, my hair unbrushed, my face without make-up, but it doesn’t matter. In the great scheme of things lipstick is nothing. Once through the doors, I land somewhere near the chilled cabinets. It’s strange being here on a Friday night when everyone is buying burgers and beer for weekend barbecues and family get-togethers.

  I haven’t been anywhere or done anything for weeks, just moved between the window and the bed in the sitting room around which my life has revolved, watching and waiting, torn between needing to leave and needing to stay. For two days now Mike’s lain still, emerging only now and then from a deep drug-induced sleep to have a water-soaked sponge pressed against his lips, his forehead. I stopped the visitors a week ago, trooping to his bed in a convoy of sympathy, long faces filled with posed pity. ‘It’s like having an audience with the queen,’ I said to him when the last of the gawkers had gone. I was trying to make him laugh, my default position in times of upset, but he’d gazed ahead, beyond laughter, beyond me – his shiny scalp ravaged by chemo, charcoal grey etched under faded eyes.

  Earlier today, when his eyelids flickered open for the first time in two days, I had leapt at the chance to make him happy, to make him smile one more time and asked if there was anything he wanted. When he whispered, ‘Pineapple yoghurt,’ I dropped everything. Anna took my place by the bed and I ran as fast as I could, away from the dreadfulness, knowing as soon as I shut the front door I would feel the need to go back.

  It had all happened so quickly after the diagnosis. ‘I think we’re looking at weeks rather than months,’ the doctor had said.

  I’d stared at his glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose, unable to turn and look at Mike; I didn’t want to see his reaction, that would make it too real. ‘But what about treatment?’ I said. ‘You can’t just say that . . . surely there’s something we can . . . ’

  The doctor shifted uneasily in his seat and Mike’s hand covered mine.

  ‘It’s too far gone,’ he said gently. ‘You heard what the doctor said.’

  On the way home we talked and by the time we pulled up outside we’d convinced each other things weren’t as bad as we’d thought.

  ‘We’ll sell the business, remortgage the house and get you treatment in America,’ I was still saying stupidly, refusing to accept what was happening.

  ‘No. Let’s spend that money on us, take some time off, or pass the business down to the girls and travel. It’s not like we haven’t thought about it . . . we’ll just do it sooner,’ he’d said. I’d been swept along by Mike’s enthusiasm, his desperate need to live – okay, so the doctor had given him only six weeks, but what did he know?

  The following day I discovered Mike in the bathroom coughing up blood and I knew it was too late.

  The girls sobbed as we told them the news, the tableau of him sitting on the sofa, his arms round both of them, reassuring, comforting, will stay with me for ever.

  Six weeks later he’s still here and I’ve tried to make every moment special. Even now, with this pot of bloody yoghurt, I’m trying to show him how much I love him. Stupid really, but I want him to take my love with him wherever he’s going, like a packed lunch of all his favourite things. I want to send him off feeling loved. That’s all any of us want in the end, isn’t it? I try and keep up a brave front for him and the girls, but I can barely comprehend what’s happening. After forty-six years, Mike, the man who held me in the night, built garden walls, put the bins out and slayed life’s dragons, is now frail and scared. Now he wants me to hold his hand and tell him it’s all going to be okay. Each day I tell him I love him, and I do – but it makes me incredibly sad, because we both know my husband hasn’t been the love of my life.

  It occurs to me while running blindly round this alien Tesco, looking through the chilled cabinets, that it may be a ruse. Perhaps Mike knows his time is imminent and he can’t bear to watch my pain so he’s sent me on
an impossible quest? Perhaps he knows how futile the pursuit of pineapple yoghurt will be and in a final and typical act of selflessness he’s planned it all so he can slip off his mortal coil without me being there?

  This puts me in a further state of panic and seeing a young shelf stacker I demand to know the fate of the yoghurts. ‘Do they even make pineapple ones any more?’ I ask the bemused young man. He shrugs. He doesn’t care because pineapple yoghurt isn’t something one gives any consideration to until it becomes perhaps the last wish of a dying man. So I continue on alone, rifling frantically through the strange-sounding names – Nestlé, Yoplait and Müller Light – hoping that one, just one, might contain the Holy Grail.

  Mike and I will laugh about this one day, I think, instantly realising that we won’t.

  I move on, restraining myself from pushing other shoppers out of the way and emptying the shelves with one sweeping arm movement. It’s now eleven minutes past seven on a Friday evening, but I don’t care – time and place have lost all meaning. We are existing in a state of limbo – waiting for the end, the agony of loss, tinged with the guilt of relief when it’s finally over – he is finally over.

  ‘I couldn’t get the pineapple, they had mandarin . . . with chocolate chips . . . can you believe?’ I start, as I open the front door and run into the living room holding my breath that he’s still here.

  ‘Ssshh, Dad’s asleep,’ Anna hisses, whipping her head round accusingly. I feel stupid and selfish and thoughtless – like my announcement about mandarin yoghurt might just be the final blow that convinces him to let go.

  I immediately shed the panic and Friday night bustle and sink into the churchlike atmosphere, silently pulling up a chair to Mike’s bed. I’m now sitting next to Isobel, my younger daughter, who looks at me through red-rimmed eyes; the crease in her smile causes tears to run down her cheeks and I gently stroke her arm. Isobel is like me – during difficult times she reaches for others to lean on, and Mike has always been that person for me. Anna, my eldest, is just like him, and in the bleakest of times she finds comfort in ‘managing’ situations and people, channelling her distress into tidying up and organising, for which I have always been deeply grateful. We all need an Anna and a Mike in our lives.

  I reach out and touch Mike’s hand, continuing to stroke Isobel’s arm with my other, and looking at Anna for signs of stress, stretching myself and my love as far and wide as I can.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’ Isobel mumbles.

  I nod, trying to hide the catch in my breath, and she looks at me questioningly, like I have all the answers. I’m reminded of a rainy day, the squeal of tyres and our dog Willow dying by the side of the road, the rain beating down as I cradle her and a sobbing, five-year-old Isobel. I am rocking them both, my hair plastered to my face, the tears and the rain washing together, I’m trying to hide my despair: ‘It’s okay, Willow’s in heaven now, she’s playing ball.’

  ‘But she doesn’t want to stay . . . she’s scared without me, she wants to come home. Bring her back, Mummy.’ The lisping baby voice, the trembling chin.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t do that,’ I say through my tears, the blood now mixing with rainwater and running away together along the gutter.

  Now, as her father’s life ebbs away, Isobel is looking at me in the same way – but I still can’t take her pain away.

  We continue to sit in silence round the bed while Mike sleeps; he stirs occasionally and groans when the pain pushes on through the morphine. The cancer came quickly, a small lump in February, a routine visit to the doctor, followed by an inconvenient trip to the hospital, then tests. Each appointment more serious, more scary, until results day. Hard to imagine now, but I recall feeling slightly disgruntled that the hospital appointment for Mike’s test results was on a Friday, the day before a big wedding, and a busy time for our small florists.

  ‘Can you change the appointment?’ I’d sighed, stressed with the workload before us.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I could do with you there, Rosie.’ I looked up from the carnation buttonholes and saw his face and in that instant everything changed for me. If Mike was worried, I was worried.

  I couldn’t let the girls see my fear and kept telling myself and everyone else that it was ‘probably nothing’. Yet somehow I knew.

  When it finally happened and his life ended, I felt like mine had too.

  Chapter One

  A year after Mike’s death

  Since losing Mike, life’s been strange for me. He’d been so unreachable in those last few weeks I’d almost wanted him to go. I longed for his release from the pain and the limbo he and the rest of the family existed in. At sixty-four, Mike was a year older than me, and though neither of us were spring chickens, we had our plans. Before the diagnosis I’d finally convinced Mike to retire and together we were going to tick a few things off our to-do list. This wasn’t an easy ask for my practical, dependable hubby, but when I thought we still had a life ahead of us I had researched the possibility of a holiday in New Zealand. My idea was to visit the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, because there was nothing he loved more than stargazing. It was ironic that Mike, a factory worker who’d never left his hometown, enjoyed gazing at the stars millions of miles away. But even when looking up into that vast velvet night, his feet stayed firmly on the ground. As I marvelled at the ‘diamonds in the sky’, he’d say, ‘Rosie, that’s not diamonds, love, it’s distant nuclear fusion.’

  Neither of us were religious. I’d had it thrust down my throat from an early age and my atheism was rebellion against everything my mother had held dear. Mike had lost his father in a road accident when he was just nine and found it hard to believe in God, but he seemed to find solace in the stars – he said they gave meaning to his life. The ability to see something that existed millions of years ago provided a surreal concept of time and the past, and put life into perspective for him. He said he found it comforting to think life goes on, that we are all just part of the cycle, and it helped him come some way to dealing with the loss of his father.

  Becoming a dad was also a revelation for him, discovering the joy of children and family life. When the children were tiny some of our happiest times were when we’d all head off in the car to nearby fields on summer nights and spot constellations, meteor showers or misty clusters of ‘exciting’ young stars. ‘They’re hundreds of light years away,’ he’d say, adding that they were young at ‘only’ a hundred million years or so, which always made the girls giggle.

  The stars retained their significance in our family and when Mike had known his time was short he said, ‘I’m not leaving. Look up into the sky and I’ll be there, swinging through the Plough.’

  The girls were comforted by this, a perfectly rational concept for two women who had both been able to say aurora borealis by the time they were three years old.

  In the few months after he died, living in my starless universe without him, I felt lost, like my future had been taken away. I lived in the past, wandering around directionless, waiting for him to come home. I would listen for the key in the door, his voice in the hall, the sound of the kettle going on, then I’d remember that it was just me and thick, thick silence.

  Recently, the old me has reappeared, a forgotten figure waving from a distant shore, a shimmering sea between us. She’s been gone a while, but yesterday I breathed her scent on a bunch of freesias, sweet with spring promise. I feel a frisson of hope glimpsing sunshine in muddy puddles, stars glowing in a black sky, her voice a rustle of leaves whispering to me like a ghost. Life is slowly thawing, and I’m reassured by the way my heart lifts again at a faint glimmering on the horizon . . . I don’t know what it is, but I’m finally feeling warm again.

  ‘Mum, you’ve put make-up on,’ says Anna with a smile when we meet for coffee. I’m sitting in her sunny kitchen, it’s Saturday morning and the house is filled with the noise of arguments and hairdryers upstairs. Anna has two girls and I’m constantly surprised that despite
laptops and iPhones the arguments about lipstick and boys still dominate as they did when my girls were young. We all think we’re the start of something new and that our generation has all the answers, but we’re just a mash-up of every other generation. Even my sixties’ youth of miniskirts and free love wasn’t as liberated as we’re now led to believe; we were still conflicted and shaped by the morals and values of our parents. We were a reaction to their repression, I think, as Anna pours boiling water into a cafetière of ground coffee.

  ‘If you put boiling water in, it kills the taste,’ I say absently, now immersed in the sixties and that wonderful summer.

  ‘So would you like to come over later? James is cooking,’ Anna asks, dragging me back into the twenty-first century.

  ‘Will the girls be here?’ I take a proffered cup.

  ‘No, they’re with their dad tonight.’

  ‘In that case I won’t. Thank you, darling, but I doubt James would appreciate three at the table.’ I smile.

  ‘Oh, he’d be happy to have you around, you make him laugh.’

  ‘Mmm, well I doubt it’s laughter he’s planning on tonight, my love. No, I’m going to phone Corrine – I haven’t seen or spoken to her for weeks.’

  ‘You two were so close once, you need to go out with her again, it will be good for you . . . Mind you, she’s a bit wild. Didn’t you say she ended up in bed with someone within ten minutes of meeting him?’

  I laugh. ‘Corrine certainly gives a new meaning to the art of “speed dating”.’ I love my friend, but she can sometimes be a bit full on. I’m not sure I’ll get to speak to her on the phone tonight as she’s got a new man. Everyone’s busy with something or someone.

  ‘Well, we don’t want you “doing a Corrine”.’

  ‘That’s never going to happen, love, I’m not the type. I’m not interested in meeting new men, not at my time in life. Besides, I’d never meet another one like your dad.’

  Anna smiles wistfully. ‘I miss him so much, Mum.’