The Place Where Love Should Be

by Elizabeth Ellis

  It was several weeks before Francine went to William’s house again. When he finally persuaded her to visit, she suspected he’d had words with Evie. Still remote, she did at least sit at the table and make a great show of helpfulness by amusing Joanna and clearing the plates. Rhona hovered in the background, which seemed to have a calming influence, but whilst affection poured effortlessly from Joanna, Francine was not convinced Evie had had a change of heart.

  In his quiet unassuming way, William seemed to value her presence: a glance across the tea table or the brush of her arm as they sat on the floor to play snakes and ladders. His interest in her drifted somewhere beyond mentoring a colleague or a friendly ear when homesickness overtook her. And there was something else when he looked at her now: a shaft of hope, a spark.

  At the end of the year, Francine returned briefly to Albières, to reset her life plan and placate Maman. Having broken with home, she had no wish to return and at the end of August, she came back to England. Six months later she had moved in with William and six months after that they were married. A step too far, or too soon, one more that Evie could not accept.

  Twelve

  William was in the kitchen making himself a modest supper when the phone rang again.

  ‘William? It’s me.’

  Francine’s voice prompting another thump in his chest, William turned off the soup and sat down.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ Francine said, ‘I know you’ll be doing your supper.’

  ‘It’s only soup,’ he said. His hand shook a little, he rested his elbow on the table and asked how she was.

  ‘I’m ok. It’s cold here – there’s no heating and I can’t get the fire to light. The wood must be damp. But I’ve made a start on Maman’s things – a small start anyway.’ Francine spoke quickly, not leaving any gaps, not wanting, William supposed, any awkward questions – the ones he was longing to ask. When will you be coming home? Can I not just come over and help you?

  It would be easy to overlook the revelations she’d showered on him before her departure. A one-off, she’d said. It only happened once. Well, William now thought, comforted by the warmth of her familiar accents down the phone line, what did he expect? She was always too young for him, and he old before his time. It wasn’t as if he was able to offer her much in that department – if indeed he ever had. A grim thought, but probably true. His love for her had grown not from passion but from gratitude, renewed and strengthened each day that she’d stayed and taken all that was flung at her, gallantly hanging on through all her pretty years. She’d stayed and turned his floundering existence into something good again. No, he could hardly blame her, or even bring himself to mind that much. He just wanted her back, as it was, as it had been a year ago, before any of this.

  Francine was still talking, saying something about Joanna. ‘William – are you there?’

  William put the phone to his other ear – his better one. ‘Yes, I’m here. What were you saying – about Joanna?’

  ‘William, does Joanna know what’s happened? Have you told her why I’ve gone?’

  ‘She thinks you’re sorting out your mother’s house.’

  ‘And I am.’

  ‘But no, she doesn’t know any more than that. She doesn’t need to.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Francine said softly. ‘I’m not sure what to say to her at the moment.’ Then she added, ‘Actually, William, the reason I’m phoning – it’s Evie. I’m worried about her. She seems even more distant than usual.

  ‘Has she been in touch?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what’s so odd. You know how she is with me.’

  William did know. Something else he preferred not to think about, something else he’d failed to deal with.

  ‘I’m not sure Mark is coping very well either. You remember how it was when we went over?’

  William felt powerless, he didn’t want to talk about this. ‘I’m sure they’ll manage,’ he said. ‘It takes time to adjust. She’s only had herself to think of, now it’s different.’

  ‘I suppose so. But there’s more to it than that. I just wish I’d managed things better.’

  ‘You did your best. We both did.’

  ‘I need to know she’s alright.’ Francine’s voice cracked. ‘She’s very dear to me.’

  William swallowed, brushed the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘It’s not your fault, you know. None of this is your fault.’ He wasn’t referring to her one-off. ‘It’s just the way it is – Evie will realise that one day.’

  ‘And in the meantime, she’s not part of our lives?’

  ‘She will always be part of our lives. But it’s up to her what happens now. We’ll just have to see.’ William surprised himself – this must be the first positive thought he’d had for days. It made him bold, bold enough to ask when she might be coming home. ‘Only, it would be good to see you,’ he said.

  There was another pause. ‘William, please. I don’t know. I’ve still a lot more to do. It will take a while.’

  Her mother’s affairs, or this hiatus in their lives? ‘Just a thought,’ William said, knowing he’d gone too far. ‘Take your time – it can’t be easy for you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not.’ Another silence. Francine seemed to have run out of things to say.

  William was tired, worn out with not-sleeping, the weeks of drama. And now a new and deeper worry with Evie, the stirring of events long-buried. It all seeped into his bones, the weariness about him more down to circumstance than to his seventy-three years. ‘I’ll phone Evie later,’ he said, knowing that he probably wouldn’t.

  His moment of strength dissipated. William replaced the phone in its cradle and went back to stirring the soup. As he leaned wearily over the cooker, he tried to remember a time in his life when he’d ever been certain about anything.

  Francine threw the phone down on the table where it skidded across the piles of paper. Once she’d seen William’s inertia as a strength, a still small voice of calm to soothe her way with Evie, to counter her own sense of failure. Now it seemed to underline an ever-widening rift, the gaping void between them. William was coping better than she’d feared – not cheerful, but not in bits either. Though this lessened the guilt, it irritated too: the way he could just dismiss what she’d done, his altruism so marked that he could rise above all matters of the flesh, all aspects of passion. His aversion to the complexities of life, his ostrich skills. She had always pandered to them, wrongly perhaps. The things she had kept from him festered at times but she had come clean about Simon, and as things stood, there was nothing else to tell.

  Francine poured herself a large glass of wine and went into the living room. A little-used space, the girls would sometimes come here to play cache-cache, hiding behind the log stack or beneath the corner unit. Logs were still stacked on the hearth, ashes lay in the grate, though there had been no fire here for years. After the bakery closed, her mother had lived in the kitchen, she too kept warm by the gas hob.

  A pile of old magazines sat yellowing on a low table in the middle of the room: Nouvel Observateur, Télé 7 Jours, a copy of Paris Match with François Mitterand on the front and he’d been dead a long time. Why had she not begun to ease things out gently, to make a start, especially when her mother grew sick? The sofas would fetch nothing at the brocante market, the rug had faded, though it usefully covered a dip in the flagstones where the floor had subsided. A glass fronted cabinet housed ancient crockery – heirlooms she would have to reject. It may have fetched something but meant little to her now, part of a past she could not remember, ancestors she had never known. Her mother had kept it out of loyalty, had hoped Francine might want it one day for her trousseau. But Francine had run off abroad and married an Englishman with everything already in place, including two children. Her mother had never quite recovered from that.

  Francine’s first months of family li
fe had passed smoothly. There was no major event that marked her permanent installation in the household, just a gradual merger of separate lives into something resembling a union. Though Francine had precious few belongings, there was little space in William’s house. He gave her a drawer in the living room for books and work folders; she mixed a few Georges Brassens albums with William’s collection of Mahler and Bach and took up a small space in the wardrobe for clothes. Scarcely a dent in the décor, though Evie complained about a spongebag and an extra toothbrush being too much in the bathroom.

  Francine continually sought a way in with Evie, a point of interest, something they might share: singing, dance, the garden, books, baking. The closer Francine stepped to the line they had drawn, the faster Evie backed away, each attempt met with the same polite: No thank you, so and so’s mother is taking me; I read that one last year; Daddy says I mustn’t do any more after-school activities, even though William had said nothing of the sort. She’ll come around, William assured her after six months. He said it again after a year. Meanwhile Francine busied herself with the simple, rewarding task of catering for Joanna’s needs. Biddable, effusive, Joanna was a joy, unhindered by the anger that plagued her sister, blissfully untainted by the pain that had caused it.

  Baking was her consolation, her sacred head-space. At night preparing dough for the morning bread, the throwing and pounding relieved in part whatever tensions hounded her in the day. Most mornings she would add croissants or brioches to the warm pile on the breakfast table. A craft as familiar as breathing, learned at Joanna’s age, long ago in the bakery with Philippe, as soon she was tall enough to peer into the bowl. She filled William’s house with the rich, primordial scent she’d grown up with and it helped in part to give this strange and complex life she had fallen into, something of her own. From the delicate threads Francine had gathered to make a new life with William and the children, the cautious tactical dance she wove around Evie, something new and settled began to surface. As William had predicted, a guarded truce emerged – they even found ways to connect: the summers at Albières with Maman in constant attendance and her father overjoyed to have new blood in the house. Just as Francine found strength by following in her father’s footsteps, here it seemed Evie could set aside the spikes and gripes that dogged so many other weeks of the year.

  Gradually the baking progressed to a small business run from William’s tiny kitchen. With orders for bread and croissants and commissions for complex celebration cakes, Francine was now catering for a growing market. She saw how artisan goods were beginning to replace their mass-produced counterparts. One or two notable restaurants placed regular orders, enquiries even came in from the city ten miles away. When a shop became vacant on the High Street, it was William who encouraged her to take it.

  But we can’t, she protested, it will cost too much – I have no business plan. I only know how the boulangerie works in France – it’s so different here!

  Well, William had said, we can learn.

  And that was it. Francine enrolled on a small business course and William provided the capital to start it all up.

  Bread. The stuff of life. It was all she’d ever known.

  Thirteen

  Rose’s words are stuck in my head: You could ask your Mum to come down. I’m sure she’d love to help. But if I do need help, I’m not sure where to go now. I’ve tried Francine and that didn’t work. Joanna’s full of apps and websites and chat rooms. She sends me links daily. I’ve been tempted at times, even had a brief look once or twice. But this means owning up to failure, admitting I can’t cope. And I can cope. I will.

  Perhaps I’ve left it so late I’ve underestimated this whole motherhood thing, did not expect those long-ago years to sidle back on the scene, reaching across the decades to catch and claw and leave me lost and staggering.

  I found a box of photos once in my father’s wardrobe. There was one of my mother, young and smiling, standing in the wind with the sea behind her. I kept it hidden in a drawer and from time to time would take it out and show Joanna, my way of keeping her alive. I asked my father about her many times but he did not elaborate beyond the basics: she was ill and had to go away to get help. And year by year she withered, as Francine took up the space where once my mother had been. My loss turned bitter for a while, most of which I showered on Francine, but I grew up, moved away and settled then for indifference, an equilibrium of sorts. Whilst Joanna married young and spawned the next generation, I made a life less ordinary, found joy in growing other things and set up my own small business crafting flowers. But in these past months, all that has changed. Lately I’ve been wondering where my mother is and whether I want to find her. Now Rose, in all innocence, has stirred the mud. Would it help to seek out my mother and rid myself of the years she stole? Will she even care?

  It’s early morning and I’m in the living room. Mark is in Yorkshire and Edward is sleeping, having been awake half the night. So have I. My eyes are gritty and reading the screen doesn’t help. I’d somehow imagined that finding people involved the police, or a long trek around towns, knocking on doors and asking questions. But I realise it’s simple. These days you can find a needle in a haystack if you want to.

  I don’t do social media except for work, yet its power to locate is weirdly seductive. My mouth is dry, my chest thumps. I tiptoe to the kitchen for a glass of water, take it to the table, sit down and flex my fingers like a pianist before a recital. Then I type my mother’s name into the search bar and click. On the screen I’ve called up a random string of faces all with the same name as my mother. Dozens and dozens of them. I scroll through the list wondering why I’ve never done this before, why in all the recent years it never occurred to me to look for her in this way. Did I assume she wouldn’t be there? Did I just want to keep the door closed, the memory of that dark night at the top of the stairs locked and bolted?

  I filter countries and whittle it down to a list of forty names but scrolling through, there is no likely match. It’s possible she’s not posted a photo, in which case I’m wasting my time as I have no idea where she lives, or what she does for a living. Then I realise she may be using her maiden name, which I somehow remember is Watson, and begin the search again. This time the list is longer, there are dozens of faceless icons, I begin to despair and am ready to give up.

  Then just like that, I find her. The picture she’s posted could only be her: small features, still-dark hair, Joanna’s smile. I stare at the screen, the cursor hovers over ‘Message’, I begin to type. Finally, I click again and the wait begins.

  In the week since I sent the request, I’ve become a Facebook fiend: drawn in, completely hooked. Not difficult, with my reason so impaired. It keeps my mind from the here and now, I skit above the morass of trying to cope. When Mark comes home at the weekend, I say nothing about it. He’s used to my silence anyway: his terse enquiries, my mumbled response. We prowl around each other and stick to the facts, the core essentials of food, of chores and whose turn it is to sleep. As often as possible I sneak off to the bathroom to check my phone like a guilty teenager, locked in subterfuge. I continue to screen Joanna’s calls, though sometimes after a long, broken night she catches me out and I’m tempted to tell her what I’ve done: Hey, guess what? But it’s too soon to share, it’s all too uncertain and like any addict, I’m restless, impatient, hanging hopeful on the reward.

  I have to wait another week until it comes, and when it does, the years of silence fill with sound.

  I leave Edward with my neighbour and set off for the crematorium. An odd choice for a meeting – this meeting – but it’s anonymous, a short walk from home and I’m not up to driving yet. I know the place well; in another life I brought flowers here for my customers.

  When I push open the door of the chapel she’s there, in the centre of the room, leaning over the glass case where the book of remembrance lies. She stands reading the entries and I wait by the door, not
wanting to disturb her. Then as she lifts her head and turns towards me, the room flows over, heavy with too many flowers and memories that reach far back into the years I’ve hidden away.

  My mother.

  She looks across at me, tips her head to one side, taking me in. ‘Evie?’

  My mouth opens and closes, the decades rush at me, rolling up from the past. But then anger, a mad fury, overtakes me, frightening in this quiet place. I cannot go to her now and mumble joyfully into her thick coat. I turn instead and take off into the cold.

  ‘Evie, wait!’ I hear before the door slams behind me. I run through the cloisters to the rose garden, but there’s nowhere to go from here and she cuts me off, standing before me, her hands clasped together, as if in supplication. She looks down, then hoists her bag onto her shoulder and says simply:

  ‘Let’s get a cup of tea, shall we?’

  We drink tea in a small café off the High Street. Or rather, she drinks while I fiddle with my spoon. I try to take a sip but my hands won’t hold the cup steady and tea spills onto the blue checked tablecloth. My mother takes a pack of tissues from her bag and mops it up. Nothing can persuade me to eat the cakes she’s ordered, they sit neatly, untouched on the plate between us.

  When I am calm and able to breath, I look at her across the table. She is not the woman I remember, not the memory I have hoarded all these years. The blackbird has flown and in its place a small dark woman in late middle age, a sliver of silver on her crown. Joanna’s eyes and mouth and a nose I see every day when I look in the mirror. A common gene-pool, nothing more.

  ‘So.’ She drops the soggy tissue into her saucer and wipes her hands on a napkin. ‘You will be wondering.’