The French House

by Nick Alexander

  ‘A last supper?’ Mark says.

  ‘All three of us?’ Jude asks.

  ‘Of course,’ Mark says. ‘Just don’t get soppy.’

  ‘Soppy?’

  ‘Yeah. Don’t make me cry.’

  When I get home that night, Victor has prepared dinner. It’s admittedly only two aluminium trays of M&S cauliflower cheese cooking in the oven, but walking through the door to a hug, a ready-made gin and tonic, a bowl of olives and the smell of melting cheese really does feel special.

  ‘How was your day?’ he asks me once my wet coat is off. I sit and sip my drink, then tell him about my dull day processing emails, about my funeral-like pub lunch with Mark and Jude, about asking Mark while Jude was at the bar if he had slept here, if he was having problems with Iain, (the answer to both questions was ‘no’) and about trying to talk about my holiday without telling Jude that I have decided, too, to quit our foundering ad agency.

  ‘Have you had any thoughts about that?’ Victor asks. ‘I mean, the actual when?’

  I shake my head. ‘Give me a few weeks,’ I say, ‘and I’ll start to get my head around it all.’

  Victor nods vaguely. He looks unconvinced.

  ‘I will!’ I protest. ‘I know you don’t believe me but—’

  ‘Hey, hey!’ he interrupts, moving behind me and crouching down so that he can wrap me in his arms. ‘I believe you,’ he says, nuzzling my neck.

  And I wonder at how amazing it is, that it doesn’t really matter how dark or cold or rainy it is outside, it doesn’t matter how boring or depressing your day might have been, if you have someone to snuggle with at the end of the day, someone like Victor, well, it’s all all-right really, isn’t it?

  When I get home the next night, Victor has dinner waiting once again — this time a Waitrose chicken korma.

  ‘Is that OK?’ he asks, holding the packet up.

  ‘Perfect,’ I say, taking the gin and tonic from his hand, ‘but I do worry about how you’re going to cope without a ready-meal chill cabinet around the corner.’

  ‘I can cook,’ Victor protests. ‘I’m just enjoying the convenience of it.’

  But in truth I’m ragging him only to disguise just how much I’m loving coming home to drinks and food served by my own personal butler. This, I think, must be what having a wife used to feel like before the women’s lib movement happened. And who could blame men for making that system last as long as it did?

  Victor asks me about my day and so I tell him in detail about my meeting with Stanton and my business lunch, and he listens surprisingly intently.

  It’s not until I ask him about his own day and he replies that he went to the bank and Waitrose that I realise that he is living vicariously through me, that the dull role of house-husband has suddenly made me seem, sound, and indeed, feel, rather exciting by comparison.

  ‘What about all of those ends you said you had to tie up?’ I ask.

  Victor shrugs. ‘There aren’t that many to be honest,’ he replies. ‘I went to the bank today to get them to send my statements overseas. I had to do that in person. And I have an appointment at the tax office on Friday. But other than that . . .’

  I pull a confused face. ‘You said you had masses of things to do,’ I point out.

  Victor grins at me, gormlessly, cutely. ‘To be honest, I really just wanted to be with you,’ he says.

  He tells me that he wants to see his friend Jeremy one evening, a rather boorish college friend I briefly met over a Christmas pint.

  Because I have no real desire to see Jeremy ever again, and because I honestly don’t think that I can sit through another of his micro-brewery-rules-and-lager-is-poison monologues, I phone my friend Sarah-Jane so that Victor and I can coordinate our nights out to happen at the same time. SJ tells me that Thursday night would be perfect as they have made an offer on a house and we should be able to celebrate the acceptance of their mortgage deal.

  As Victor phones Jeremy in the other room, I tidy the kitchen and think about these friendships – Jeremy and SJ and Mark – and wonder how much we will miss them once we are living six hundred miles away. In a way, Mark and SJ have been edging out of my life for a while now, caught up in their own relationships, driven to different locations by their own housing issues. I suppose that there isn’t much that anyone can do to fight that. It’s called getting older.

  I move to the kitchen sink and stare out at the garden – at the now entirely dead Leylandii – and wonder if it now needs to be cut down before it rots and falls on someone’s house. I stare at it swaying in the breeze and try to guess which way it would fall if it did.

  ‘You OK?’ Victor asks, making me jump at his sudden proximity. He slides his arms around me and I squash myself back against him. ‘You look deadly serious,’ he says, so I half-turn and smile up at him.

  ‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘I was just miles away. Thinking about how things have changed. Thinking about that tree and wondering how long it will be before it rots. I suppose it needs to be cut down, now that it’s dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, leaning his head on my shoulder and looking out. ‘Yes, I suppose it does.’

  SEPARATE NIGHTS OUT

  When I get to SJ’s house, it is George, her husband, who opens the door.

  ‘Ooh,’ I say, stepping inside and handing him two bottles. ‘I didn’t know we were going to be graced with your presence.’

  ‘Yep,’ George says with a bemused expression. George always looks slightly embarrassed and it’s really rather attractive. ‘My travelling days are over now,’ he explains.

  He leads me through to the front room where SJ is lounging in a slovenly manner on the sofa while holding her bump and managing to look distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘Don’t move,’ I say, leaning over her and giving her a peck.

  ‘Two bottles?’ she says. ‘You know I can’t drink, right?’

  ‘One of them is Appletiser,’ I say. ‘Anyway, you said it was a celebration.’

  SJ smiles unconvincingly and glances over at George.

  When I follow her gaze he sighs and raises an eyebrow. ‘I’m in the dog house,’ he says.

  ‘Oh? How come?’

  ‘They turned us down,’ George says.

  ‘The mortgage people?’

  ‘Bloody banks,’ SJ says. ‘The cunts!’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I’ll get a corkscrew. You’ll need a drink for this one,’ George says, heading off to the kitchen.

  I sit next to SJ and take her hand in mine. ‘So what happened?’

  She shrugs. ‘They changed their minds and withdrew the offer. That’s all.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ George says, re-entering the room. ‘I let slip that SJ is going to stop work after the baby arrives.’

  SJ shakes her head in despair at her husband’s ineptitude. ‘All the paperwork was on the table,’ she says. ‘It was on the bloody table. All he had to do was keep quiet and sign the thing.’

  ‘The guy asked how long it takes to commute from Amersham . . .’ George explains.

  ‘The paperwork was right there,’ SJ says, pointing to an imaginary desk just above her pregnant belly. ‘There!’

  ‘And I told him that it didn’t make much difference, because I’m working from the High Wycombe office now, and SJ . . .’

  ‘I kicked him,’ SJ says.

  ‘She did. But I didn’t get what she meant.’

  ‘So he told them that I won’t need to commute because I won’t be working any more.’

  ‘Ouch,’ I say.

  ‘By the time Big Mouth here had closed his gob,’ SJ says, ‘the guy had dragged all the paperwork back to his side of the table.’

  ‘Because, what? The mortgage application was based on both your salaries?’

  ‘Got it,’ SJ says.

  ‘But would you have been able to manage the repayments?’

  ‘Course,’ SJ says. ‘But you know what they’re like now. ‘Getting a loan is like tryin
g to get inside a nun’s knickers.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘We’ve appealed,’ George says.

  ‘But it will be refused,’ SJ adds. ‘We know it will be refused.’

  ‘SJ pointed out that they wouldn’t even exist without all our taxpayer’s money to prop them up.’

  ‘I bet that helped,’ I laugh.

  ‘Exactly,’ George says.

  ‘Hey, I’m not the one who fucked it up,’ SJ says with a mixture of sarcasm and real anger.

  ‘I’m not sure that telling the guy that there’s a reason why wanker rhymes with banker exactly helped though,’ George says.

  I turn to SJ. ‘You didn’t?!’

  ‘Well . . .’ she says. ‘I was so fucking angry.’

  George pours a glass of wine and starts to hand it to SJ but then withdraws it. ‘Sorry,’ he says, giving it to me instead.

  ‘Can I have one?’ she asks. ‘Just one glass? It is exceptional circumstances.’

  George shrugs and looks at me.

  ‘Hey, don’t ask me,’ I say. ‘That’s your decision.’

  ‘You are dating a gynaecologist,’ SJ says.

  ‘Ex.’

  ‘He’s your ex?’ she says, her eyes widening. ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘No, he’s an ex-gynaecologist. And despite what my mother would say, you don’t absorb people’s knowledge by simply spending time with them.’

  ‘No, I suppose,’ SJ concedes, holding out her hand for wine.

  George reluctantly serves her with half a glass.

  ‘So what happens now?’ I ask. ‘You just stay here?’

  SJ shakes her head.

  ‘It’s too late, we’ve given notice,’ George tells me.

  ‘Then withdraw it!’ I say. ‘Surely you can withdraw your—’

  ‘Too late,’ SJ interrupts. ‘It’s already been re-rented. We have to be out by the end of the month.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  SJ pulls a face and tips her wine into my glass so that she can switch to apple juice. ‘I don’t want this after all,’ she says. ‘So yeah, looks like we’ll just have to find a new flat to rent.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I wish I could help, but I don’t know any bankers. Except mine, and they’re useless.’

  SJ shakes her head violently as if to dislodge the whole sorry story from her mind. ‘We’ll sort it. Somehow. Anyway, enough of all that. How was France? How’s it all going with the lurve machine?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I reply.

  She pulls a face at this, and I suddenly wonder why I’m understating it. It’s not as if SJ and George are lacking anything in the love department. It’s not like they’re going to be jealous.

  ‘Actually, he’s bloody brilliant,’ I admit. ‘I love him a bit more each day.’ And so I start to tell her about the farmhouse and Distira, and Georges and Myriam . . . I tell her about the holes in the roof, and the holes in Victor’s half-baked plans, and about the snow and the icy bathroom.

  Both she and George, as believers in love, are wonderfully enthusiastic about all of this and leave me in no doubt whatsoever about what they think I should do, but when they ask me how I am going to organise all of this, when they ask me when I am leaving, I subtly change the subject.

  I do this not just because I don’t know the answer to those questions, but also because I suddenly realise that I can turn their housing misery into something positive for all of us. It’s a solution of such simple elegance that I can hardly believe it. But I don’t say anything just yet. I need to run it by Victor first. And I can already imagine the grin on his face when I tell him.

  It’s just after midnight when I get back to Primrose Hill, and Victor isn’t home yet.

  I sit in the lounge, lit only by the orangey street-lamps outside, and sip at a cup of tea while stroking Guinness. I think about the ambience of the silent flat, a flat I have lived in for years. It feels safe. It feels reassuring. It’s hard to believe that I might soon be moving.

  After a while, I glance at the clock and feel a vague pang of unease that Victor isn’t home yet, but immediately order myself to snap out of it. He’s a fully-grown man, and I am not his mother. It’s hard to remember sometimes that life isn’t a film; that happiness doesn’t always have to crash upon the rocks of misfortune for added dramatic effect.

  I move Guinness to his favourite cushion, dump my cup in the sink, head to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then gratefully slip under the covers, where I fall instantly asleep.

  I’m woken by a heavy thud. I lie in bed, holding my breath and listening. Silence. And then a groan, a muttered ‘fuck’, and the sound of the kitchen door being opened with so much force that it whacks back against the cupboard behind it.

  I yawn, climb out of bed and shrug on my dressing gown. The clock display reads 3.57 a.m.

  In the unlit kitchen, I find Victor at the kitchen sink with his back to me. He is drinking water from my discarded mug.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I ask, and he turns to look at me, spilling his water in the process. His face looks swollen, as if it has been pickled in beer.

  ‘Drunk. C’m’ere,’ he slurs, opening his arms, again slopping water from the mug. But I don’t move. I once dated an alcoholic, and it didn’t end well. Ever since Ronan, drunks have made me nervous.

  I rub my eyebrow and watch as he sips at the now-empty mug, peers into it in confusion, and then turns back to the sink for a refill.

  Guinness is weaving around his legs in the hope of an extra serving of food.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’ I ask, a conscious attempt at being OK about this, a conscious attempt to fight my rising, if inexplicable, anger.

  ‘A-one,’ Victor says, turning the tap the wrong way before managing to close it off.

  ‘I have to be up in three hours,’ I say. ‘So, I’ll just head back to bed. You, um, sort yourself out and then come in when you’re ready.’

  Victor lurches in a strange way that I understand was meant to be a nod, had his hand not lost grip of the countertop. As he does this, he manages to stand on poor Guinness’s tail. Guinness wails and runs from the room. I shake my head in dismay and follow him.

  I try to sleep but there is too much adrenaline pumping through my system: a strange mixture of seething anger combined with real concern that he might hurt himself. And so I lie there and listen as he knocks a chair over, trips on the fallen chair and then stumbles against the wall. Finally, saying ‘Shhh!’ to himself, he staggers into the bedroom and then falls, face first and fully clothed, onto the bed beside me.

  He lays an unbearably heavy arm across the small of my back and then shuffles to my side of the bed so that his head is against my neck. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he says. ‘You know that?’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, pulling a face at the pure ethanol stench of his breath. ‘Don’t you want to get undressed?’

  But Victor is already snoring.

  I lie like this for a few minutes before I realise that I don’t want to sleep next to a fully clothed man with his shoes on, so I am going to have to undress him. Turning him over takes me three attempts; he seems twice as heavy as normal – the weight of the beer, perhaps.

  Because I position him on his back to pull his trousers off, he starts to snore again, so I have to sit up one more time in order to pull him towards me so that I can roll him onto his side. This makes him smile in his sleep.

  It takes me ages to get back to sleep, but at some point I must drift off, because the next thing I know it is morning.

  I spend all day worrying about Victor’s drinking. I reflect on the fact that it takes a very, very long time before you can truly say you know someone, because who can say how often Victor feels the need to get legless. Of course, I argue with myself, he just had too much to drink – that’s all that happened here. And a guy is allowed, occasionally, to get drunk. Right?

  But I know where dating a drunk can go. I know where that road can lead. I’ve had the
bruises to prove it. So I’m allowed to feel uptight about it, too.

  At 6 p.m., as I walk the last few hundred yards to the house, I decide that there is only one explanation for the fact that Victor hasn’t phoned – he has plumped for the Big Gesture. I am fully expecting, as I insert my key in the door, to find bunches of flowers and piles of gifts on the other side.

  Yet I find the flat in semi-darkness. I head through to the kitchen and find Victor sitting and nursing a mug of tea at the kitchen table. He looks up at me and smiles halfheartedly. ‘Hiya,’ he mumbles.

  I don’t answer. I hang my coat up and cross the room so that I can lean against the countertop and glare at him.

  ‘How’s the hangover?’ I say coldly.

  Victor wrinkles his nose. ‘Pretty bad.’

  I only just restrain myself from saying, ‘Good.’

  ‘I bet,’ I say instead.

  ‘I had way too much to drink,’ Victor volunteers, looking into my eyes with a vague air of puzzlement. ‘They had a lock-in.’

  I nod. ‘Nice.’

  ‘You look like you’re a bit angry,’ Victor says.

  ‘Not really angry,’ I say. ‘More concerned.’

  Victor nods slowly, and then starts to look less contrite and more annoyed. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Please don’t give me a hard time here. I had too much to drink. It happens. I spent the whole day with a hangover.’

  ‘You were blind drunk,’ I say.

  ‘Did I . . . say something horrible? Did I upset you?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It just . . . well, it makes me uncomfortable. I had a boyfriend once. He drank a lot. It got nasty.’

  Victor nods. ‘I didn’t get nasty though, did I?’ he asks.

  I shake my head. ‘No,’ I admit.

  He bites his lip and suppresses a smirk.

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ I say, but I realise that I soon will be, and that it’s probably the only way to move beyond this.

  ‘No, no, I see that.’ But in spite of himself, Victor starts to grin and it takes all my effort not to smile back. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he says, standing, crossing the kitchen, and wrapping his arms around me. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  I sigh. I’m not giving in just yet.