We skipped drinks and conversation. We skipped discussion and promises. We undressed each other with trembling hands and a sense of wonder, both so aware that we would remember this moment for the rest of our lives.
I was almost tearful by the time we were naked and together in my bed. The frisson between us was everything I’d read of, imagined. I finally understood every piece of music I’d ever played.
In the last seconds before we made love, David lifted his lips from mine, his hair silhouetted in the light coming through my bedroom window.
“I’m married,” he said softly, breathing into my face.
It was my decision to carry on.
* * *
In the morning, David spoke first. We were still wrapped in each other, covered by the white bedsheet he’d looped around us as we slept.
“I’ve never done this before.”
There was a catch in his voice as if his heart would break. His arms were tight around me, my face against his chest; I felt him give a heaving sigh. “I don’t know what to do next. I hardly want to leave.”
The word “hardly” was a dagger. It meant that, whatever I’d told myself, whatever magic I’d hoped had been woven, he would leave. He would find his way back to his wife.
I must have flinched, shown my surprise—as ridiculous as it was. He pulled me tighter to him.
“It won’t be easy but we’ll sort this out.” He sighed across the top of my head and my hair ruffled. “I can’t stay here now, but soon. We will sort this out.” He pushed his arms straight, moving me to where he could see my face. “We will be together.”
We both cried when he left, not more than an hour later. We hadn’t discussed any details, any practicalities. All I knew was that he lived in France with his wife and that I had to trust him. He had been struck as hard as me by this lightning bolt and I had to let him go and begin to unravel the complications it brought with it.
* * *
The sickness began three weeks after David left. He called every day, just as he said he would. It was frustrating that David couldn’t give me a number to call him on our first morning together, but he posted me a mobile phone from France as soon as he got back there. It was 2002, I hadn’t even begun to think about getting a mobile; I would have had no one to call on it. He bought himself a phone at the same time as mine; a hotline solely for use between him and me, a private courier of messages, a keeper of secrets.
At first I assumed I had a stomach bug. I lay with my face on the cold bathroom tiles, close enough to the toilet bowl to lean over it and retch what seemed like a hundred times an hour. My head was thrashing and my throat burning with the acid of my continual vomiting.
I missed two of David’s calls on the second day; I simply couldn’t leave the bathroom for long enough to answer the phone.
After four days, even though I had graduated to sleeping in my own bed but with a bucket by my pillow, I realized that I would have to see a doctor. My face was gaunt with dehydration, my skin puckering and shiny with stress. The GP came to my house.
“Is there any chance you might be pregnant?” she asked.
“Not unless morning sickness can start in a couple of weeks and last all day and all night.” I remember that I smiled as I said it.
She nodded, her eyebrows raised slightly. “You need to take a test.”
* * *
My hands shook as I held the tester stick, waiting for the lines to connect in a chemical blue strip. In the three weeks since I’d met David, since we’d joined our covert world of phone calls and messages, one-line emails and snatches of conversations often interrupted, my life had taken a sea change.
When David finally called very late that night, I was still astounded, still teetering between elation and fear. I picked the phone up from beside my bed.
“I’m pregnant,” I whispered into the dark.
Chapter Five
Last night, while David slept, I crept downstairs and sat with my cello in the sitting room. I rested its cool polished wood against my bare legs and thought hard about the things that matter to me, the things I really want.
Knowing David was upstairs and making sure that I focused on that, accepted it, I tuned my cello and picked a tune, pizzicato, across the strings.
I played—in a muted voice and without my bow—the first bars of Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1. At college, Nikolai always said it was the very best arrangement of notes for finding out what you or your instrument could do.
“Even in Bach, you have no trust,” he would say and lean his arm into mine, his hand covering my hand, pushing the bow hard across the strings. “Listen to what happens when your muscles believe, when they concentrate. You can do this with me but not alone?”
He never expected an answer from me, his questions were rhetorical and directed at my playing arm, my rigid wrist. The one-to-one sessions we had were never as painful as the group lessons, the ones where he would use the five of us in his quintet as ammunition to destroy one another. I knew it was all for our own good, but often I would be sick with fear before the lesson.
David has taught me to trust again, that he will always find time to call me whenever he can, that he thinks of me daily and spends every possible moment with me. It has mattered so much to be that valued by another human being, but I still cannot find a way over this wall that keeps part of me hidden from him.
I played—without my bow—in a whisper that I knew David wouldn’t hear. I didn’t play for long—three or four minutes at most—but when I got up this morning, I felt those notes hiding around the sitting room and I was quietly positive.
When I come down for breakfast, David is bent over his laptop, his shoulders solid with stress. I put my hands on them, palms against the knotted muscles. Over his shoulder I can see Twitter filling the screen.
“Bad?” I ask him, not wanting to say too many words, not wanting to make it worse.
“Fucking hérosmystère; it’s viral. Have people nothing better to do than send these stupid messages around? It’s in every French-speaking country.”
“Oh.” A penny drops for me.
“Oh, what?”
“When I looked it was trending in Canada and Vietnam. Somewhere else, as well. Belgium, that was the other one. I get it now. At least it’s only in French.” I know that doesn’t help; it will be in French when David’s children read it.
“There’s one in English and one in Arabic.” He points at the screen, at a jumble of shapes in a list of words. “There you are.” He runs his finger under the text: بطلغامض# “Hashtag al-batal al-ghamidh,” he says.
Whenever I remember how many languages David speaks, how very un-ordinary he is, it makes me glow. It is a wonder how someone so intelligent can find the things I say funny. I’ve never stopped being amazed that he thinks I’m interesting.
I stroke my flat palms down his shoulders. The worry is coming off him in waves.
“Do you want me to stay here today, close the shop?” I have no intention of being anywhere else but here with him; it’s an empty gesture.
“You have no chance of leaving this house today.” He stands up and pulls me into his arms, kisses my hair. “I’ve got people working to shut this down. It won’t be that bad, but I will have to go up to town and supervise them tomorrow.” His sigh is longer than it should have been.
I try to look up at him but he holds me tight, his chin resting on the top of my head.
“Today belongs to us, darling girl. Just the two of us.”
* * *
I don’t know what I thought would happen the night I told David I was pregnant. I hadn’t imagined anything past the first sentence. The relentless nausea, the prickling purple and white goose bumps crawling across my skin, the blurred vision, filled my world.
“How many weeks?” he asked after a silence like the gap between lightning and thunder. How many weeks: the terminology of experience.
“How many weeks do you think?”
“It can’t be . . . I’m not. I don’t think it can be mine.”
“Well, there wasn’t anyone else.” I was surprised by the curl in my voice, the cold anger. Later it dawned on me that this was the growl of a lioness.
“Have you done a test? Seen a doctor?”
“I’m lying on my bathroom floor with an ice pack on my face. I’ve been here for a week. It did occur to me to see a doctor.” This wasn’t the conversation that people have in films, in books. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
“I’ll come now,” he said. “It’ll be OK. We’ll sort it out. I’ll be there by the morning.”
* * *
David was with me by first light. We had spent one night together and hundreds of hours on the phone. It was an odd basis for a family, but it was ours.
“This is my fault,” he said. “I should have asked about contraception. I should have been more careful.”
“It didn’t even occur to me. Like it couldn’t biologically happen, all reason just switched off. I’m shocked at myself.” I could feel the heat rising up my face that meant I would be sick again any moment. I was lying in my bed, David stroking my hair, kissing my face. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Shh, it’s OK, hang on.” David rushed out, came back with the bucket I’d had by the sofa. “You need to rest. You look really ill.”
He rubbed my back as I heaved into the bucket, strands of clear spit dribbling from my mouth. He rinsed out my flannel in the bathroom and brought it back to wash my face.
“There, we’ll sort this. Get it over with before I go back. You’ll be OK.” He traced the knobs of my spine with his fingers. I was alarmingly thin from the vomiting, and his fingers clicked down my vertebrae like a xylophone.
“I can’t get rid of it. I’m not having an abortion.” My conviction surprised me as much as it seemed to surprise him.
“What? You can’t go through with this. I’m a stranger. You don’t know me at all. I don’t know you. I know we have this crazy . . . connection . . . but, we can’t. We just can’t.” He buried his face in his hands. “What about your business? Your career?”
“I’ll manage. People do.”
“No, no they don’t. People manage because they have a partner, a support network, family around them. You don’t have any of those things.”
I had decorated my bedroom in cool whites. I looked around the room from my bed and saw what he saw, a rootless person, an isolated orphan, an only child. There were no photos of nieces or nephews, no cards from well-wisher relatives. The room was elegant but empty. It made even more sense to fill it with our baby.
“I want this baby. I’m going to have it.”
He stood up and walked across the room. He stood by the door and put his hands flat on the wall to either side of his head. He almost reached the ceiling. His head hung down in despair.
“You can’t, Grace. You can’t. We can’t.” His voice was low and quiet. “Everyone loses like this. Everyone. We will have a baby one day, I know it. But not this baby, not this time. I’m so sorry.”
I leant my head forward off the bed and retched again.
David dashed across the room and got onto the bed behind me. He held me tightly to him. Even though it was only midmorning, I fell asleep in his arms. David’s long body stretched out beyond mine, he tucked my head into his shoulder and my heels lay on the curve of his knees. He had been traveling since the early hours and we were both exhausted.
He was still sleeping when I woke. He looked peaceful and so very beautiful. I pictured those same dark lashes on our son or daughter, the same untroubled softness to his or her skin. Something in me didn’t really believe that David would still feel the same, now that he had rested and relaxed a little. I was certain he had just been afraid.
I went quietly to the shower to make the most of a rare respite from the sickness.
The noise of the water must have woken David. He stepped into the shower with me and we made love so tenderly, so gently, that I knew everything would be all right. I couldn’t tell whether there were tears on his cheeks or if it was just the spray from the shower.
We got back into bed, still damp. The afternoon sun was warming the room, the windows were wide open. I had a slight headache but wasn’t sure whether it was from the upset and confusion of earlier in the morning or the sickness creeping its way back in, overtaking everything but the baby.
“I’m so, so sorry it has to be this way, Gracie,” he murmured against my back. He pulled me tighter. “I’ll be with you every step of the way. I’ll come back for your appointment and I’ll stay until you’re better.” He sighed. “And then I’ll be here as much as I can, as often. I can’t bear this; it’s too awful for words.”
I deliberately stayed silent. I didn’t trust this new fire inside me; I couldn’t predict what it would make me do.
“It’s my baggage that’s the problem. It’s my issues that are crippling me.” He placed his face flat against my skin and it was obvious that he was crying. “I can’t do it to the children I already have. Not now. They are six and eight. I can’t risk their being raised by someone else. Or our baby. What if we separated? What if someone else took the role of my baby’s father because I’m in another country and I can’t be here?” He turned me around to face him, looked into my eyes. “I want to pick our child up from school, Grace. I want to go to sports day. I can’t have furtive conversations on a mobile phone with my own child. And I can’t abandon the children I have now.”
Reality was cold and crawling through me. I tucked my chin into my chest to stem the rising tide of vomit that swelled in my throat.
David held me closer and continued to speak. These were words for the dark, words that revealed sores and secrets. They came out incongruous and alien on this bright August afternoon.
“I was a little boy who no one loved.” He spoke slowly and evenly; it was clearly hard for him to talk about. “My parents separated when I was eight. My father remarried and began to spew out new children. By the time my mother died and I had to go and live with my father and stepmother—I was twelve at the time—he’d changed his whole method of parenting, taken on board all the responsibilities and roles he hadn’t even thought about for me.”
I wasn’t ready for this. It was unexpected. David seemed so composed, so whole. It was hard to imagine him as a small and lonely boy.
David broke off from his story as a wave of nausea hit me. He wiped my face and went to wash out the bucket.
He came back into the bedroom and sat beside me on the bed. “They sent me to boarding school. While my three brothers stayed at home and enjoyed every indulgence imaginable. On the odd occasion I came home, I shared none of their privileges or—worse—their closeness. I didn’t belong to anyone. During the school holidays, I mostly went to my mother’s parents in France—it got me out of the way—but even there, I was an English boy in a household that spoke only French; I was still a cuckoo.”
I pulled the sheet around me and closed my eyes tight. I didn’t want this invasion of history smashing down the world I had built in my head.
“And I swore I would never do it to my children, Grace. I love them. Whatever happens between me and my . . . in my marriage, I can’t start another family until my children are old enough to understand, until there’s nothing left for me to miss of them.”
I hadn’t considered any of this in my bare and skeletal plans. I had only thought of my rosy-cheeked baby, of its downy hair and sweet face. I had only imagined David and me, side by side, watching it grow, helping it to flourish.
“You’re an artist, Grace. You make beautiful instruments; you play the cello. There’ll be something amazing of you left behind for future generations. I’m just a pen-pushing bean counter who happens to speak a few languages; I can’t make anything, do anything. The only things I can leave for the world, if I get it right, are my children. And I can’t mess that up. I can’t.”
The world outside my fantasy was ugly
and real and intruding.
“I have to go, baby. I have to go and clear my desk, get things out of the way. I’ll be back as soon as I can and we’ll sort it all out. OK?”
It wasn’t OK, but I said it was.
Chapter Six
David is going to London to sort out the consequences of phone calls he made yesterday. The injunction against British papers reporting on the mystery hero is almost watertight. He is hoping that the disinterest in the British press will help quiet the story in continental Europe. At the moment, the world seems to be caught up in the romance of hérosmystère, the idea that David is some superhero figure, protecting Paris by night, mild-mannered businessman by day. The close-up clips of David being pulled off the track and the train shooting into the station are played over and over and still make me feel sick. We are trying not to think about it, trying not to let it darken these precious days together.
Nadia has been watching the shop for me. Her summer holidays are boring her and she has been edgy and easily irritated. I remember the same feeling, when six weeks was a lifetime of separation from one’s routine, when the pleasure of sleeping late and doing nothing paled in days. Six weeks pass like lightning for me now.
I automatically check under the counter for Nadia’s mess. I haven’t even made myself a coffee. I know it will be there and I know I need to clear it away before a customer comes in and the bow cases need to come out.
Nadia’s detritus is her usual style. There are two dirty teacups, one stuffed with a screwed-up crisp packet, the other still half-full of cold tea. They sit, with the nibbled-out corner of a sandwich, on a blue sketchbook.
I take the rubbish out, sighing as I do it, even though there’s no one there to hear me. I carry the cups in one hand and use the sketchbook as a tray for Nadia’s leftovers. Her habits are at odds with her appearance; she is always immaculate, her long black hair straightened every morning, her makeup flawless and consistent.
I put the book down on my workbench. I didn’t know that Nadia draws, and I open it to see what she’s been doing. I don’t think she’ll mind; as a violinist she has been open to the scrutiny of an audience since she was small, and, anyway, Nadia is good at everything.
Goodbye, Paris Page 5
