Everything Love Is

by Claire King

  ‘So if you think that way then our childhood years, everything that came before, just doesn’t matter?’

  ‘Of course they matter. They’re steps along the way, the ghosts you carry within you of who you once were. They have made you who you are. But they’re not you, not any more.’

  ‘It must be getting pretty crowded in there,’ she said. I raised an eyebrow. ‘OK, OK, I’ll think about it.’ Amandine sat back in the chair.

  ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you felt you could tell me this,’ I said.

  We talked. I must have lit a fire at some point. Time condensed. I can see Amandine standing in stockinged feet at the window with her back to me. She has cleared a small gap in the misty pane and is looking out on to the canal. She is no longer wearing her coat. Her skirt is the colour of milky coffee, and just covers the crooks of her knees.

  ‘So,’ she is saying, ‘what made you decide to close yourself off from the rest of the world?’

  She meant the boat, of course. ‘I don’t, it’s not …’

  ‘Yes you do. You keep yourself at a distance. You avoid intimacy.’

  ‘You think because I live on the boat—’

  She spun around angrily. ‘Have you not been listening to me? It’s not the boat. Although that’s another thing. Candice is not really a boat to you, she’s just a floating house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you ever gone anywhere on this boat?’ I shook my head. ‘Why not? Surely the idea of a boat is the possibility of adventure,’ she said. ‘You could go anywhere you want, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, down to the sea, and yet you never move.’

  What is it about the times we live in, where we can at once condemn people for not seeing how privileged they are and yet still be suspicious of those who are happy with what they have? A contented child is praised but a contented adult lacks ambition. Why?

  I switched on the lamps and began to draw the curtains. Amandine turned back to the window, making slight stretching movements with her neck as though there was tension in her shoulders. Her hair was not so long, and as she stretched the nape of her neck was briefly exposed, and then hidden, revealed, then hidden again. I was only two steps away from her. I could have easily kissed her then, standing behind her, my lips on her neck, then I remembered the roughness of my skin against hers at the café. I ran my knuckles along my bristled jaw. They say infatuation makes you absent-minded. Before I had made up my mind either way, Amandine stepped aside, reaching for her coat. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. All the energy with which she had arrived had evaporated, leaving only disappointment in her eyes. I knew it was me that had disappointed her.

  The hands on my watch confirmed the lamentations of my stomach. What time had she arrived? We must have talked for hours. ‘I’ll walk with you over to your car,’ I said. ‘I’m going that way anyway.’

  I followed Amandine as she crossed from the boat back to the towpath. The cloud had lifted and there was already a fat full moon, hanging low above Candice, champagne coloured and dappled against a dark green sky.

  ‘This didn’t go as I’d hoped,’ she said with an arch look.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I was sorry. I knew I was messing this up even if I had no real idea what it was. ‘I could buy you dinner?’

  ‘Dinner?’ she said, looking down at my feet. In my haste I had forgotten to put on shoes.

  ‘They won’t mind,’ I said, pointing over towards the bar. ‘I’m there so often it’s effectively my second home. I’m best of friends with the waitress. If I missed two nights in a row she’d send out a search party.’

  ‘The waitress.’ Her tone was sarcastic, not unkind, but somehow implying that I shared the joke.

  ‘Yes. The waitress. Sophie,’ I said.

  Perhaps there was something in the way I said her name, perhaps something in my expression, for a sudden tension came over Amandine. There was a strange look in her eyes, something territorial. Then as fast as it came it disappeared. My heart beat in the void. If I was ever going to take the leap, now was the time. Now was the time to tell her. Now was the time to kiss her. I put my hand on her shoulder but she shrugged it off, shaking her head with a half-smile, a wry exhalation. ‘Of course, it all makes sense now. You’re in love with her.’

  What? For a confused moment her conjecture hung between us. Had I understood what she was implying? ‘Sophie?’ Amandine regarded me levelly. ‘No. She must be half my age.’

  ‘Aren’t they always?’ She rubbed her brow and looked over towards Jordi’s. ‘Maybe we’re not so different. Maybe we have both fallen in love with the unattainable.’

  From nowhere the image of my mother came back to me, the graceful, captivating woman I had imagined into being and had been infatuated with for years. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a violin. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again Amandine had already taken several steps away from me. I was letting the moment slip from my grasp. She stood on the towpath with the moon caught in her hair, and looked back at me.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I said.

  ‘Am I?’ she said. ‘I rode that horse, like I promised. And you said you would take a risk, yet here we still are. Nothing has changed. Nothing is ever going to change, is it? Goodnight, Baptiste.’

  The glossy light reflected off the canal and on to Amandine, with her hair blowing around her face, her skirt blowing around her knees. She was quite the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I moved towards her, as though to kiss her cheek but as my lips drew alongside her face there was the slightest shift in the tilt of her head. I felt her breath on my cheek, looked at her mouth, and the energy rose within me like the wind.

  As my lips met hers there was a heart-stopping moment when all I could do was wait, and then she was kissing me back, my fingers were in her hair, the other hand slipped around her back, drawing her in. She tasted like nothing I had ever tasted before. Fresh and wild and ripe.

  There was an honesty in that moment that had been lacking between us for months. The relief sighed from us both and it became clear that we weren’t going to stop at a kiss. I slid my hands under her blouse to touch her skin. The desire to bury my face in it was overwhelming. But instead I pulled her gently towards me, kept my mouth on hers. With my hands holding her at the waist and my fingers on the muscles of her lower back, the tips of my thumbs stroked the rise of her belly, where they slid over soft ridges, like tide marks on sand. And as though pulled by the tide, her flesh shrank away beneath my touch.

  ‘Don’t.’ Amandine pulled back as though stung.

  ‘Amandine.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really have to go.’

  I stood barefoot on the moonlit towpath, my lips still wet with the taste of her, and watched her walk away. Whatever I had done, it was the wrong thing. But there was no taking the kiss back now. No unknowing her skin and the secret it had just revealed. I would be kept awake by it that night, lying there waiting for the sun to rise, listening to the groan of the ropes.

  28

  It tends to happen when you first wake up: they rise to the surface of you, haunting you, possessing you, insisting that they are you. You’ll never know just how prescient your explanation was about our ghosts within.

  I never know who will come next or for how long. Sometimes you are visited for an uncertain hour, sometimes a whole morning, sometimes longer than that. Sometimes they leave you alone for days, and at other times they are upon you one after the other: you’re still living at home with your parents, or in your flat in the Mirail. You are still eating at Jordi’s every night. You are still working. You are still young.

  The first time it happened you were so convincing I was almost persuaded that it was true. You had become more animated than usual, fussing around Candice making everything tidy. Other than that you appeared perfectly rational. You were waiting for a very interesting client, you told me. ‘He’s the most positive man I’ve ever met. He’s amazed by everything. He’s drunk on life.�
� You checked yourself.

  ‘I was thinking of going out to get something for dinner,’ I said, uncertain what else to say.

  ‘That’s fine,’ you said, distracted. ‘Obviously you can’t stay anyway.’

  I hesitated, afraid now to leave you alone. ‘Why is he seeing you if he’s so happy?’

  ‘He can’t rein it in, so people can’t abide being around him, they find him exhausting.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ I said.

  ‘You should hear him speak,’ you said. ‘He makes even the most insignificant things sound astonishing. The scent of an apple, the sensation of the sun, the colour of a shirt, the sounds of the city. It’s as though he’s reading from a wine menu.’

  ‘Perhaps I will just stay until he arrives.’

  ‘Fine, but I need to get ready now.’

  I watched at a distance as you made extensive notes in longhand, all of which seemed to make perfect sense, and then sat at the piano for hours waiting for him to arrive, playing from memory, music that I had never heard you play before.

  When he didn’t come, and it grew dark, you simply put the notebook away by the side of the bed, and said, ‘I’m hungry, shall we eat?’ By the time we sat down to dinner the ghost was gone.

  I have never had the courage to try and convince you that things are anything other than how you perceive them. Your reality is what it is and I am a time traveller, privileged to meet these spectral versions of you that otherwise I would never have seen. Since I appear to be living with not only you, but all of your ghosts, I may as well fall in love with you all.

  Not everyone agrees with this approach, and everybody has the right to an opinion. It is, as they rightly point out, living a lie. I’m not helping you by indulging your fantasies, and what will happen when you realise that there are inconsistencies in who and where you think you are? How will you ever trust me again? Fortunately for now your ghosts are untroubled by my presence. I am incorporated without question and without fuss, as is Candice and the canal, all seemingly just details without consequence. But it’s true that everything is becoming more complicated.

  I stood with you today at the wheel as you, or the ghost of you, told me about Sophie. How she was leaving for Paris. I listened with interest, asking questions in all the right places and you were satisfied with that. Maybe this will be a day like so many others that you will have no recollection of at all when you wake up in the morning. But maybe it will be one of those increasingly rare times that succeed in claiming a place in your memory. Then what? Will you remember it just as it was? Where will it sit in time? Will you remember the wind that blew clouds right over the top of us, causing sharp bursts of spring rain punctuated by floods of glorious sunlight? Will you remember the sweet smell of the mimosa blossom coming at us in waves from the table behind us and me close beside you, too close to only be a friend?

  What does it matter now? Even if you were to remember these moments perfectly, the irony is that so much of it is already a lie.

  29

  The true heart of Christmas at home is the nativity scene that takes pride of place in the sitting room: the stable, as shabby as I imagined the original must have been, the crouching figures of awestruck shepherds, the mother beatific amongst the asses and the sheep. On Christmas Eve, almost every character was in place and only the manger remained empty. In the next room, the dinner table was already set with dried figs, nuts, dates and a plate of glacé fruit like a stained-glass window slick with sugar. First there would be church at midnight, thirty or forty of us villagers perishing inside its cold stone walls, and then back to eat in the warm cottage, fragrant with clementines and pine.

  The small tree by the fireplace was hung, as every year, with the same ancient baubles and a scrap of red tinsel. My mother always put up the pagan decorations to make me feel festive; she knew my childhood Christmases were locked within them. That faded, threadbare length of tinsel held such power over us. On Christmas mornings when I was a boy, they would invariably find me up early, sitting by the embers in the half-light, gazing in awe at the gifts glittering below the tree. While we slept, magic had been visited upon us. I remember little about the presents themselves; the excitement was the thing. Somewhere inside me, when I see those faded silk baubles, that wonder still exists; a boy who believed, a ghost of Christmases past.

  My mother was busy in the kitchen. When we got back in from church she would set out the rest of the food: the oysters and the foie gras, just a little, and the sweet wine, and we would give thanks as my father placed the Baby Jesus reverently into his manger. Apart from my mother’s withdrawn mood – she didn’t want any help with supper, thank you – this was the Christmas I had always known. It hadn’t changed in almost forty years, except that these days I found it easier to sleep on Christmas Eve, and would no longer come downstairs at first light in my pyjamas.

  After the roast goose on Christmas day my father excused himself to change; he was going out to the chapel. My mother and I sighed with relief. The fog that had smothered the cottage thickly since dawn had finally lifted. He had been fighting off a black mood all morning and we had prayed for the weather to brighten. On this of all days he was anxious to be out there in the field, and were it not for our beseeching he would be, heedless of snow, lightning or hail. Neither weather nor old age was going to stop him finishing his life’s work, he said, but he was getting unsteady on his feet and we worried what he would do in case of a fall. That year I had given him a mobile phone to take with him, a gift that had not been well received.

  ‘I’ve got by without carrying a phone around before,’ he’d said. ‘Phones are for in the house.’

  ‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘even if you don’t use it as a phone you can do crosswords on it while you’re having a break. You can check the weather forecast. Marie-Thérèse has one, she says it’s marvellous.’

  ‘I can do crosswords in the newspaper,’ my father said. ‘I can look up and see the weather.’

  ‘You’re not too old to change.’

  ‘You should talk,’ he said. But he went over to where she was sitting and kissed her forehead. Her smile was sublime.

  When he was gone my mother took to the sitting room with her sewing basket for an hour’s quiet reflection, but she didn’t lift the sampler, her attention drawn instead to the nativity. I followed her solemn regard, wondered what she was thinking. As a boy this would have been the time I’d have spent with a new toy, or gone out to play with friends while the adults rested. As a man I had taken to choosing one of the books my parents had given me and just sitting in peaceable silence with my mother. I always found it hard to relax though. I should have felt the warm, easy satisfaction that other people describe when they are back in their family home for the holidays, but instead I felt a kind of inverse seasickness. The room was too dark and too stuffy, the furniture too soft, but worst of all, the cottage felt lifeless – it never sighed and shifted like my Candice. I wished myself somewhere else and at the same time regretted that I was not enjoying these moments more while they lasted. I looked back at my mother, who was falling into a doze in her chair by the fire. Age had crept up and settled over her like a frost.

  ‘Maman? Would you like to take a nap?’

  She lifted her lolling head and looked at me through red eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Baptiste, I didn’t sleep too well.’

  One of the things she prided herself on was that even at her age she still got a good full night’s sleep. ‘Are you OK?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s that boy. I can’t stop thinking about him and his poor mother.’

  We had heard it on the radio on the morning of Christmas Eve, and after the mass last night a special prayer had been said. It had all started with a Roma boy from the camp up by the hospital in Toulouse. His name was Pesha. He had been sent out with his pregnant mother to beg, which was nothing new; a lot of those families were penniless and starving. But the bus driver had refused to pick them up to take them to t
he more affluent neighbourhood they usually worked. In desperation, because she knew she could not go back to her husband empty-handed, the mother said, they had gone into a shop in a poor immigrant quarter. The people there were disaffected French Algerians and Moroccans, who felt that a lot of local crime was blamed on their youths when in fact it was down to the nearby Roma. The mother had only wanted some staple foods – the box of lentils she had in her skirts was dropped in the doorway and spilled over the white shop tiles in the reports – but her hungry son had not been able to resist the displays of sweets by the tills and had pocketed some chocolate. The boy Pesha had been caught by the store owner and his brother and, the Roma claimed, beaten to death.

  ‘It must have been an accident,’ my father had said. ‘No one would beat a child over a bar of chocolate. No one. How could anyone believe anything else?’

  The boy’s mother had tried to intervene but she too had been abused and pushed to the floor. It was unclear whether her baby had survived. When the incident hit the news later that day the Roma men had come out on the street seeking retribution. They had swarmed into the Arab quarter, and the Arabs had come out fighting too. Between them they had knives, planks of wood with nails in, metal bars, and they also had guns. Shops had been looted in the suburbs, cars were burning. Now the buses and trams were refusing to stop for Roma or Arabs, claiming their lives and those of other passengers were in danger, and there was a threat of a general strike in their support. The police were out in force.

  ‘Think of the families,’ my mother said. ‘Whatever religion they follow, they must all have known what time of year it is. Is His message of peace forgotten?’

  ‘Why don’t you go for a nap?’ I said again.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She picked up her sampler and began to stitch, but after a few minutes it was abandoned on her lap and she was snoring sporadically into the empty hum of the air, her rasping breaths accompanied by the crackle of the fire and a wood pigeon calling out from beyond the window.