Everything Love Is

by Claire King

  On one side of the room the run of bricks and tables was broken by a massive fireplace. In winter the glow from its crackling logs drew wind-nipped fingers in from their walk home. That night it was still laid with dry wood, as it had been all summer, waiting for the cold to arrive. The bar was half empty and Sophie looked up from serving at a table as I walked in through the propped-open door. We immortalise people in ways they would never choose and this is how I remember Sophie: framed by the doorway, short skirt, long apron, eyes the colour of wet sand watching the red wine rise in the glass, the tangles of her hair in a careless knot at the nape of her neck. Too young to realise how captivating she could be and too nonchalant to care.

  The couple she was serving were already eating their meal. There was a thick-set man I didn’t recognise sitting at the counter on the other side of the room watching the television, and Rémy was at his usual table in the corner by the kitchen, tapping at his phone and nursing a Calvados. Yes, I know, Calvados in Toulouse, but that was Rémy. If it wasn’t coffee it was Calvados, depending on his shift. He must have been on days. Not his favourite. Rémy preferred to be alone, perhaps not the ideal profile for a taxi driver. He explained to me once that his job was worth it because it gave him an excuse to drive around Toulouse at night. Darkness transformed the city, he said. People became shadows against the pink bricks and shuttered shop fronts, and the inky Garonne curved and sparkled under moonlit bridges. His eyes flickered up as I approached the bar. I nodded a hello and took a stool at the counter. Sophie soon joined me, wiping her hands on her apron.

  ‘Baptiste, at last,’ she said, leaning in for a kiss. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘It was Sunday yesterday,’ I said, taking her by the shoulder and leaning to drop a kiss on each cheek. ‘I ate at my parents’ like a good son. Did you miss me?’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ Sophie folded her arms. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Very agreeable. Good food, couldn’t fault the company –’ I paused – ‘which makes a nice change.’ Sophie flicked her dishcloth at me. ‘Have you no respect for your customers?’ I said with a grin.

  ‘You’re not so much a customer as a responsibility.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to know you take your responsibilities seriously.’

  Sophie narrowed her eyes and set her hands on her hips. Dear Sophie, the daily antidote to my work. Exhausting though she could be, after hours of dealing with doubt and hesitation her unshakeable self-assurance was like a cold shower at the end of a hot day. When she first took the job at Jordi’s I found her prickly and stand-offish, and she tells me I asked her far too many questions. It’s a hard habit to break. But we soon recognised something in the other that fit. Like salt on butter or lemon on fish. I sometimes thought that had I been half my age our story might have been quite different.

  There was a copy of the Midi-Toulousaine lying discarded on the bar. I picked it up and feigned interest. On the front page, men holding banners marched through the cobbled city streets. ‘Hey,’ said Sophie, poking a finger at the newspaper, ‘not so much with the reading. I’m counting on you to keep me amused tonight. I want all the gossip from the canal side.’ This was her idea of a joke, a poke at my quiet life. She took out her notepad. ‘But first let’s give Jordi some work to do. If it’s dull out here it must be desperate in the kitchen. What do you want for dinner? He’s gone mad and made a cassoulet if that tempts you?’

  Jordi had felt the shift in the air as well, I thought. Why else would he have made such a heavy dish on such a warm day? ‘That’s just what the doctor ordered,’ I told her. ‘And some of your cheapest red to wash it down with.’

  ‘It’s cheap but decent,’ she said, turning for the kitchen. ‘Fancy isn’t everything. Stay right there.’

  I knew she was expecting me to sit at the counter so she could antagonise me while she polished the glasses, but I felt unsettled that evening. Something was bothering me about Amandine Rousseau and, until I had figured out what, I’d be bad company. ‘You know, if you wouldn’t mind I might just take a table tonight,’ I said. Sophie looked back at me over her shoulder and said, ‘Nonsense. Stay put.’

  I decided to let the will of Sophie wash over me. There would be time later for reflection. Abandoning the idea of moving to a quiet corner, I settled myself at the counter, taking up the paper again while I waited. It wasn’t like me, newspapers sicken my spirits, but there was something about the headline that day which caught my eye. Boiling Point. At first glance it looked like the same old story. Unions and strikes. Politics and protests. Elected three years earlier on the back of promises of economic growth and greater equality, the government had been unable to deliver and was floundering. Forced to push through benefits and pension cuts that meant a tightening belt for most working French people, they faced mounting anger. The unions were going to make them pay. But inset into the main picture were smaller photos. Student protests over unemployment levels were also flaring up and racial tensions were rising in immigrant communities too. Everyone was angry, at the government and each other, and a critical mass was building. I stared at the article, at the grainy photographs of angry faces. There was something wrong. A blemish that suddenly seemed just a little larger, just a little darker than usual. I felt a pang of unease and berated myself. This was why I never read the news. Twisting on my stool I offered the paper to Rémy with a wave. He nodded his acceptance and Sophie intercepted before I had time to stand, making the pass.

  She laid the usual place setting in front of me: a square of thin red paper, a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin, and a small plate of toasts and slices of cured sausage. She leaned close enough that I could smell her perfume – it reminded me of the coast, at once earthy and salty – and on the paper square in soft dark pencil she began to sketch a little kingfisher in the top right-hand corner. She was fast but good. If you sat at the counter at Jordi’s bar you would always get one of Sophie’s doodles on your place mat. It was how she marked you out, and it had made her indispensable to Jordi. Word had got around about her portraits and customers would travel out here from town just to get one. I’ve seen many try to fix it, especially young men, hoping for something that reflected the way they saw themselves, but she always ignored their posturing and followed her instincts. The results were often amusing and almost always uncanny. Mine was always a kingfisher. In the early days I’d assumed it represented my life at the water’s edge. But when I mentioned this once she had taken offence. ‘Baptiste,’ she’d said, ‘you should give me more credit. The kingfisher is not because of where you live, it’s who you are.’

  ‘Explain?’

  ‘When most creatures look down at the canal, they see themselves reflected within it. But not the kingfisher. He sees straight through the surface to everything that lies beneath. That’s what you do with people. Most of us only ever see the surface of others, or else our own reflection. But for you it’s as though the surface isn’t there. That’s how you help people.’ I had never thought about it that way before, but the idea made me smile. ‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘you’re right.’

  ‘I know that,’ she’d said with a wink, ‘because we’re the same.’

  That day, though, I didn’t feel like the kingfisher. I could sense that Amandine Rousseau was like no client I’d ever had. The light reflected off her and I hadn’t so much as glimpsed below the surface. Sophie finished her drawing, leaned on the bar at my side and elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Hey, dreamer!’ she said. ‘Penny for your thoughts. How did today go? Meet anyone nice?’

  I looked into her waiting eyes. It was as though she could read my mind. I ran my finger over the kingfisher’s small bright eye. ‘I’ve been on Candice all day,’ I told her. ‘You know I can’t talk about my clients.’

  Sophie arched a dark eyebrow. ‘You’re a tease, Baptiste. I want to know what happens out there on your boat.’

  ‘You should come and visit me one day,’ I said. ‘Come and meet Candice. You’d like her if you got to
know her.’

  ‘I get sea sick.’

  ‘We won’t take her on the sea then. It’s pretty far from here anyway.’

  ‘Where would you take me?’ she asked, those provocative hazel eyes challenging me from under black lashes. But at least we had changed the subject.

  ‘Excuse me!’ A customer’s voice from the other side of the room.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, turning away. ‘Don’t think you’re getting away that lightly. I’ll be back.’

  It’s rarely the meals you expect to be memorable that stick in your mind. It’s usually unexpected ones, like a perfect soup on a cold day, or the first time you try an oyster and taste the sea in it, or the sandwich you make with someone you’ve just spent all morning having sex with, hurrying it together so you can eat and get back to bed. I remember Jordi’s cassoulet that evening as though I ate it yesterday. The flat terracotta dish was heaped with beans, with chunks of pork belly, sausage and duck poking through the crust on top. I made the first crack in the crust, sliding my fork through, and watched the steam billow out. Sitting there in short sleeves, with the warm evening breeze drifting in through the open door, I breathed in the rich scents of winter, starchy and well oiled with grease. The beans were soft in my mouth, the meat salty, the sausage was seasoned with herbs – parsley and sage perhaps – and the dark duck flesh fell into soft tender strings. The wine was unremarkable but I drank it, and when I had finished Sophie was there across the counter, topping up my glass.

  ‘Not too much,’ I told her.

  ‘I don’t want you rushing off back to your Candice just yet. Not when we have so much to talk about.’ She pushed the bottle back below the counter and made to clear my place.

  ‘Not so fast,’ I said, stopping her fingers with my own. She tried to pull her fingers away but I held them just long enough to wipe a piece of bread around the bowl, catching the last crumbs and remnants of sauce. ‘You can tell the autumn is coming,’ I said. ‘Have you noticed? Even this morning I—’

  ‘Baptiste!’ Sophie shook her fingers free and snatched away the bowl. ‘Stop stalling. We have better things to talk about than the weather.’

  ‘But, cherie,’ I said, ‘we have been together for so long now, it’s possible I’ve run out of things to say. Of course I should have married you years ago, before you had a chance to get bored with me.’

  ‘Great. Trapped in a marriage without the perks. Doomed to make small talk in a bar with the same man for the rest of my life.’ She shook her head. ‘How do people do that though, seriously?’ I shrugged in resignation. It was an old conversation, but one that still amused her. ‘Oh that’s right,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know. Yet.’ Sophie had never understood why I was happy as a bachelor. Despite the trend amongst the young to dismiss marriage as old-fashioned and constraining, I think she was traditional at heart. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was married by now.

  ‘In my experience,’ I told her, ‘which is admittedly not first hand, the challenge of marriage isn’t to stay interested in the same person for the rest of your life but to keep up with how they change. If you don’t stay on your toes you can end up living with a complete stranger who you haven’t learned to love. I think the couples who make it talk about the weather to buy time while they catch up with how they feel about the person they are now married to.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Baptiste. People don’t change. We’re born raw and by the time we hit thirty we’re as set as if we’d been cooked. Just look at you.’ I caught a glance of myself in the mirrored shelf behind the bar. My hair was getting long, I thought. I should get it cut. ‘The older you get, the more fixed you become in your views,’ Sophie washed beer glasses as she spoke, twisting them carefully over the brushes set into the sink, ‘and the more resistant to change.’

  ‘Maybe a little, but—’

  ‘There’s no denying it. At some point people just lose momentum, you become the establishment and it’s left up to the next generation to progress. We challenge the status quo because our parents have become it.’ She pointed over at the muted television in the corner where young men and women with hand-painted placards crowded across the screen, the students from the Midi. ‘And then this kind of thing happens.’

  I shook my head. ‘Those students don’t want change, Sophie, they want to prevent change. They want to live in the same world as their parents’ generation.’

  Sophie scowled. ‘Don’t be pedantic. They’re standing up for their basic rights against people who have already feathered their own nests. Anyway, we’re digressing. So, you’re afraid of how a woman might change, is that your excuse?’

  ‘I’m not afraid. I just …’

  ‘Haven’t met the right woman yet?’ She grinned. ‘Or have you?’

  I put my elbow on the bar and rested my chin on my fist. ‘Women find me intimidating because of my devastating good looks.’

  Sophie blew air through the corner of her mouth. ‘Pah,’ she said. ‘You’re not as attractive as all that, you get fatter every day with more grey hairs. I’d get a move on if I were you.’

  ‘Would you now?’

  She held my gaze. I could see she was set to labour this one yet again, but then her phone buzzed in her pocket. She looked briefly at a message on the screen, then back at me with a broad grin. And then just like that she dropped it and asked instead after my work. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘seriously. Whatever happened today has definitely left you preoccupied. Is that a good thing? Are you sure you don’t want to bend my ear, womanly advice and all that?’

  Amandine came back to me in a flash. My heart quickened. I shook my head. ‘I often get like this with a new client,’ I said. Sophie waited for me to elaborate, but her question had opened floodgates within me and thoughts of Amandine began to eclipse everything else. The way she sat poised in the Louis XV, the green of her shoes against the boards of the boat, the way she had scrutinised me as though she were the therapist and I were the client. My mind shuffled the images, trying to fit the first pieces of the puzzle.

  Sophie gave an exasperated sigh, her patience wearing thin. She could tell I was hiding something, even if she didn’t know what, and it had already begun to drive a wedge between us. ‘OK, whatever,’ she said. ‘If that’s all you can think about tonight, why don’t you go home and think about him there?’

  ‘Her,’ I said. But she had already turned away, summoned by Jordi, who was standing at the limits of his world, looking out at her across the room. He filled the doorframe in his faded chef’s whites, his apron-wrapped belly and his profuse red beard both proud of the threshold, one hand raised in greeting. He was the captain of his kitchen, the floor of the bar a fathomless sea.

  The night is full of ideas. In the slow drift into sleep when the mind softens and unravels, intuition speaks. There is no point then in trying to focus or to follow the threads, all I can do is accept them, write them down without question. Dawn will decide if they make sense. Some mornings I wake to rambling pages of my own scrawl – sometimes brilliant but often complete nonsense. During the night following Amandine’s first visit I had written one single, cryptic line: It’s not what you think.

  When I read those words back the next morning I felt a tightening in my stomach. It’s not what you think. What did it mean? I didn’t remember writing it. Was it about Amandine at all? Did I suspect she was lying? About what?

  I had a headache, not helped by the ducks battering their bills against the hull behind my head. I craned to look out of the porthole, where the mallards were breakfasting on algae along the waterline. A small brown face peered up at me, and then turned tail as I stretched and swung myself out of bed. I needed some fresh air to think straight.

  Barefoot as usual, I took my coffee, my bread and my notebook out to the old fig tree that grew slightly downstream from the mooring, my favourite breakfast spot, where I could press the soles of my feet against the roughness of the roots that reached like arteries over the earth and down int
o the water. I often feel unstable on land, but the banks are different. For me, the roots are part of the fabric of the canal, holding things together, forming the cradle in which we rock.

  I looked back over at Candice, her bottle greens and inky blues, her name in wine-red script along her starboard flank and the scattering of yellow-green leaves as big as my hands that lay discarded on her decks. There was no new fall at my feet yet, only the older, desiccated leaves from last year, or perhaps the year before, caught in the grasses at the water’s edge. There’s something melancholy about the way trees stand amongst their fallen leaves, like old men in dusty houses, indifferent to the skin they shed.

  My mother refused to tolerate dust, but many of my friends’ houses were thick with it all summer. When we were forced indoors on an odd rainy day, or to eat at the table, it was clear that summer had made dusting irrelevant. You could write your name in it, although we soon learned not to. I ran my fingers through the grass. With the children now back at school, mothers across France would be setting their houses in order. The same routine as every year. Summer dust would be wiped away, memories of seaside afternoons whisked from sandy corners and windows thrown open to let the early autumn winds sweep through rooms left shuttered all summer against the heat.

  I could never bear shutters. The ones in my bedroom back home were the colour of irises. They would creak as they folded into place, shutting me in and the air out. To quell the claustrophobia I would imagine they were not shutters but a window looking across the ocean. But my imagination was thin and I couldn’t convince myself for long. One spring as a boy, when the light evenings continued beyond my bedtime, I decided I couldn’t stand it any longer. I waited until my parents had said goodnight to me, then slipped out from under the covers, opened the shutters wide and returned to bed. Only a few moments later though, the wind caught against them and they banged closed. I would have to fasten them back against the wall. Even though I was a tall child, I couldn’t reach, even standing on my toes. I had to lift myself higher. I remember the hard line of the windowsill under my hips, the unfamiliar horizontal perspective as I leaned out of my room and over the twilight garden in order to reach the clasps. The tulips below. I don’t recall the sensation of falling at all.