“Yes,” she told me, “liberating. Alistair had moments of that here as well, I know, but his career was on the rise. His second book did very well. It made him famous, and he had to travel. For a while I tried to do it with him, but I couldn’t be that person anymore. Sometimes you try a coat on that you used to wear, and it just doesn’t feel the same. The style, the cut—it’s not that you’ve outgrown it, but it doesn’t really fit. So you stop wearing it.” She bent her head again above her work. “He didn’t understand that. I’m not sure he ever will.”
She fell silent again for a moment. I didn’t say anything either. I’d been curious about Claudine’s relationship with Alistair, and apparently today she felt inclined to talk about it, but I’d learned through observation it was sometimes best to not leap in with questions. Questions sometimes went unanswered. But faced with a stretching silence, people often sought to fill it.
Claudine finally said, “Success, for him, is something that you win, that other people have to give you. But if other people give you something they can take it back. For me, the work itself, just being able to create—that’s what I want. I don’t need all the high acclaim and recognition. Capturing a wedding, this is not less than a fashion shoot. In many ways, it’s more important. More worthwhile.” She slid the final print in place and closed the album, keeping one hand on its leather cover. “You’ve met him, have you? Then you’ll have seen how he’s restless; how quickly he walks.”
I thought of my cousin’s complaints as we’d kept pace with Alistair all through the woods of Ham Common.
Claudine went on, “Always he’s looking for something, he’s chasing it. Always the neighbor’s grass is greener, somewhere else, over the next hill.” Her smile was slight. “My grass is green enough.”
I looked around the room, at all the many pictures in their frames, with new appreciation for the scope of what she had accomplished, what she had abandoned.
When my gaze returned to rest upon the single photograph of Alistair, relaxing with a wineglass in his hand, head bent above his book, my first thought was: He isn’t walking. And my second was: He looks content, and happy. And then I noticed something that I hadn’t before.
I had already guessed Claudine had been the person sitting in the empty chair, who’d left her wineglass on the table while she’d snapped the photograph, but now I looked beyond the curtain at the casement window by his shoulder, lifting in the faint suggestion of a summer breeze, and saw the outline of a peaked roof framed by trees. Luc’s roof. The chestnut trees in the back garden. The same view I saw myself each day when I looked out the window of my bedroom.
“This was taken here,” I said. I wasn’t sure why that surprised me.
Claudine said, “It was.” And then she said, “I had hoped…”
But she didn’t finish, didn’t tell me what she’d hoped. She only stood and smiled and said, “Come, let’s go down and have some coffee with Denise. We ought to celebrate your finishing the diary.”
* * *
“Darling,” said Jacqui, “you’re not making sense. What do you mean, he’ll have to come to France?”
“Not only France. He’ll have to come here, to Chatou. It’s what she wanted him to do from the beginning.”
“Now you’ve lost me. Who wanted, and why? And what does any of this have to do with some drawing from America?” The force of her sigh made me hold the telephone briefly away from my ear.
I tried again, purposely slowing my speech as I took things a step at a time.
“The drawing,” I said, “is of one of Luc’s ancestors. It was drawn, so the story goes, by a young woman who loved him.”
“The ancestor.”
“Yes. And when Claudine first saw it, she said that the girl who had drawn it had shown us her heart in the drawing, had shown us she loved him.”
“The ancestor.”
“Yes.”
“I’m just trying to follow along,” she explained, in response to my tight reply.
“There is a photograph in Claudine’s studio,” I said, “of Alistair.”
“Ah.”
“Have you seen it? The one where he’s reading?”
“I think so.”
“Well, I think Claudine, in that photograph, showed us her heart,” I said. “She was in love with him then. She still is.” I tried backing my opinion with a summary of everything Claudine had said, and finished with: “That’s why she bought the diary in the first place, don’t you see? Not because she values it for what it is—she doesn’t—but because she hoped that it would bring him back here. Back to her.”
“I see.”
I wasn’t sure she did. I found it frustrating to talk like this, unable to see Jacqui’s face. I might not be able to read everyone’s expressions but I’d studied Jacqui’s long enough to guess, most times, at what she might be thinking. But her tone of voice was lost on me.
She said, “It seems a complicated way for her to do that, don’t you think?”
I thought most people did things in a way that was ridiculously complicated, coming at them sideways all the time instead of saying what they wanted. “Look, just get him here, all right? And if you haven’t told him yet what’s in the diary, then for heaven’s sake don’t tell him now. Don’t give him any reason to decide he needn’t come.”