He took a more reflective bite of his second cake.
“I thought…I thought we would have time, always. That the summer would never end, that things would never have to change…I am an old fool, Anna. Don’t be like me.”
“Things aren’t so bad for you,” I said instantly.
He smiled. “Ha. Thank you. You are kind.” He leaned forward. “Do you think…do you think I could talk to Claire?”
I tutted. “Have you never heard of the telephone? You can talk to her whenever you like.”
“I feel uncomfortable on the telephone,” said Thierry. “And also I did not know; what if she didn’t want to talk to me?”
“You two are worse than teenagers,” I said, meaning it. When my brother Joe had a crush on Selma Torrington, he sat in his bedroom for a week. James found a poem he’d written and we were so taken with the horrible seriousness of it all, we didn’t even tease him about it.
“You’re grown-ups,” I said. “Just phone her. Or write back to her.”
His face looked unhappy again.
“I don’t…I am not so good with the letters.”
“Well, you have to do something.”
“Then I shall do that,” he said. “You think she would be pleased to hear from me?” he asked again, beckoning over the bill.
“Of course!” I said, exasperated, and he smiled.
He positively bounced back along the riverbank with me, sweating slightly and seemingly full of newly inspired energy, pointing out various landmarks and asking did I think Claire would be able to travel and would she like to come and see them again, and pondering how much they might have changed in forty years and how she had been in the interim without him, and asking questions I couldn’t answer, like what her husband was like.
“Oh,” I said. I had been wondering when would be a good time to bring this up, but hadn’t seen an opening in the conversation so far. “I met your son.”
He stopped short and looked at me.
“Why?” he said. “How did you meet my son?”
I didn’t say I had thought he was going to try to attack me and steal my mobile phone.
“Uhm, just about town,” I said. Thierry narrowed his eyes at this.
“I thought this was your first time in Paris,” he said.
“It is,” I stammered. “I just have a very sociable flatmate.”
Thierry looked displeased. “Well. He is a do-nothing.”
“Doesn’t he have a job?” I said, a bit shocked. I’d just assumed he did. Maybe that was why he had such a tiny scooter.
“Well, if you call making ridiculous confections for a great big company that is not your father’s company and is in fact in direct competition…”
His face went brick red.
“Sorry,” I said. “I really am. I didn’t realize things were quite as bad as that.”
He shook his head. “He says I was not a good father. He makes Alice smoke too much.”
I wondered if Thierry’s self-obsession and gadfly enthusiasms, while fun, might not be ideally suited to fatherhood.
“Maybe you are very alike,” I ventured.
“We are not at all alike,” he said, and as soon as he said it, I got the family resemblance in the brown eyes with their thick fringe of lashes. “He doesn’t listen.”
“Shall we get back?” I said. I didn’t particularly want Benoît to take against me any more than he had already, and they’d be shutting for lunch soon and I still had pots to clean.
“He never listens to me, his father,” said Thierry, not listening to me. He stepped out into the road suddenly. A car screeched and swerved to avoid him, and we both jumped back, frightened.
“Idiot!” shouted Thierry, his face purple, shaking his fist in a rage at the disappearing little gray Peugeot. “Bloody monster! You cannot drive! You should not be allowed to drive!”
The lights had changed, and I ushered him across the cobbled road, as he continued to shout threats and gesticulate behind him.
“You bloody son of a pig! You do not look where you are going!”
We were one step onto the Pont Neuf when it happened. The pavement was busy, thronged with people going to work in the huge Ministry of Justice building, and ready to visit the cathedral, and several people found their way blocked as the huge man suddenly stopped short in the middle of the pavement, clutching his chest and left arm.
1972
There we are,” thought Mme. LeGuarde, as they returned from Provence, the children tanned and happy to do little more each day than paddle in the stream at the end of the garden, try to catch snakes in pillowcases, and fall asleep in restaurants in the evening, little Claudette often under the table, as they met up with friends—the same friends, Mme. LeGuarde noticed with more amusement every passing year, that they saw all the time in Paris, dressed a little more casually and discussing the local dishes with some passion. Ah, well, that was the life of the bon chic, bon genre. More than once, her thoughts strayed to Claire and whether she had done the right thing leaving her alone with that bear of a man. She had, she decided. The girl was nearly eighteen years old and had never been allowed an inch of freedom her entire life. She was a sensible child, and he was a kind man. This would be good for her.
Nonetheless, her eyes swept the house on her return, everything so anxiously placed perfectly and Claire standing there with wide, nervous eyes—she’d obviously been up all night making sure everything was just right. There was a (watery, poor) shepherd’s pie in the fridge she’d made for them, and to Mme. LeGuarde’s practiced eye, Claire looked rosy, happy, anxious, overtired, and well and truly in love.
Claire herself felt delirious. She was happy, excited, transported. She was terribly nervous and had no idea how she was going to look after the children. Somehow she’d thought that when she and Thierry got together—if they ever did; she hadn’t quite been able to believe it would ever happen till the very second it actually did—it would somehow calm her down, quell the craziness in her breast, the fact that she spent every moment of the day thinking about him. In fact, if anything it had gotten worse. The softness of his curly hair; the fire and tenderness in his eyes, the bulk of him…they spent every moment together they could: eating, talking, making love, all of them done with Thierry’s huge appetite for life. She felt as if he had brought her to life, that she had been leading a black-and-white existence, and with the arrival of this affable Frenchman, everything had burst into color. The Reverend’s house was Kansas, and Paris, to her, was Oz.