“And you were there?” said Sami, kindness fighting with his curiosity for gossip. “Poor little bird. Was it awful?”
For the first time since the nightmarish dash to the hospital and all its memories, I just let myself go and burst into floods of tears.
“Oh, my little bird,” said Sami, giving me a rather oddly scented hug. “Would you like your uncle Sami to take you to a party? Yes? We shall go to a party and you can tell everyone all about it and feel much better.”
At that precise moment, there was nothing I would rather do less. I explained this to Sami, who got exactly the same confused dog look about my not wanting to go to a party as Frédéric had gotten at the idea of imitating Thierry’s recipes, but he eventually left me in peace.
I had little doubt that Alice would get her way—she was just that kind of person—so I was going to spend the next few weeks very busy indeed. I just hoped I was going to be up to it.
- - -
1972
Although completely wrapped up in herself when she got back to school, it finally penetrated Claire’s haze that something was up with another girl. At first she couldn’t put her finger on what was different about Lorraine Hennessy. Then everyone started gossiping and whispering, and poor Lorraine could no longer do her skirt up and that was that; she had gotten herself pregnant, some people said by a boy who’d come around that summer on the carny and whizzed her too hard on the Tilt-a-Whirl.
It wasn’t quite still the days of sending women off to special homes for fallen ladies then in Kidinsborough, but they weren’t that far away. And for Lorraine to have made it all the way to senior year…as the wives gossiped in the covered market, you think you get that far, then everything is plain sailing after that. Poor Lorraine had fallen at the last hurdle, for a twinkling-eyed boy with a missing tooth, dirty fingernails, and wild, long, curly hair. She left school at the autumn half-term and most people carried on regardless.
Claire, though, was obsessed. Even when the Reverend brought it up at supper, with much tutting and judgment and disapproval, she couldn’t help thinking about it. She was simply too careful. She imagined herself carrying Thierry’s baby, a round, chubby, pink-cheeked laughing little cherub. She looked carefully every day at her stomach, just in case. Yes, they used precautions, but as the Reverend had said in one of his more risqué sermons, contraception was next to useless; the only true protection was chastity and the love of Jesus Christ.
She wished they’d been less careful. When she ran into Lorraine in the high street—her mother, conscious that her father’s spies might be around, wanted to hurry her back—Claire stopped and said hello. She couldn’t help it; she drank in every feature of Lorraine’s full vase-shape; her newly rounded, pale breasts; the tight, high bump, so unfathomable that inside was another being; the trembling, defiant look in her eye.
“Good luck,” she said to Lorraine. In the two minutes they’d been standing there, they’d both already ignored whispers from passersby.
“Aye,” said Lorraine, whose mother, next to her, seemed to have aged ten years. Lorraine didn’t look proud, but her glowing, fruitful body did. Claire was the only girl at Kidinsborough Modern who envied her, who didn’t join in the nasty chatter disguised as concern. She would have taken her bump in her arms and gone straight to the ferry and taken the train and turned up late at night in Thierry’s garret, and he would have been delighted to see her. She ignored, once more, the lack of letters, the possibility that in fact his face would fall as she arrived, confused, that there might even be some other girl in his bed; she was under no illusion that he was short of offers. No, she would be there and he would jump up, that wonderful broad smile on his face, his mustache tickling her belly as he kissed it and kissed it again and they sat up all night making plans for their little one and how he would be the bonniest, best fed baby in all of Paris, until the dawning sun hit the rooftops of the rue de Rivoli and bright pink morning turned Paris’s white streets into a sea of roses with the promise of a fresh golden day beyond…
“You seem distracted.” It was Mrs. Carr, the French teacher. She had been unflatteringly surprised at the improvement of Claire’s French during the holidays and was pushing her hard to take it to a higher level—Claire was smart, she could go to university, be a translator, travel the world…Claire’s distraction and lack of interest drove her crazy. Years later, Claire tried harder with the dreamy children than almost anything else. Naughty children needed boundaries and direction; that was easy. Motivated children of course easier still. But it was the ones with their heads in the air, miles away, who were the hardest to get through to. You never knew what was going on with them.
Claire had been the best French speaker they’d ever had in the school. But Claire didn’t bother doing her homework, skipped class sometimes, and was hardly present even when she did turn up. Mrs. Carr tried to impress on her the importance of the year, but it didn’t seem to be doing the least bit of good whatsoever. She might have suspected a boy—so many promising young girls could fall completely apart at this age, look at Lorraine Hennessy—but Claire had always been such a sensible girl, raised in a religious home…oh, who was she kidding, they were always the worst.
Claire had sixty-two pounds in her post office account, which was enough to get her to France. The problem was how to get it out; she wasn’t allowed to withdraw the money on her own until her eighteenth birthday, which was five months away. It might have been five years as far as Claire was concerned; she couldn’t imagine it.
But the days went by and the weather turned absolutely vicious, gray and windy and wet, the children wearing hooded parkas that came right up over their faces and completely obscured their vision, so they looked like tiny monsters looming out of the gloom.
Claire knew she was failing at school and couldn’t bring herself to care. The Reverend shouted at her, and she stood there, meekly taking it and not really listening. This only annoyed him even more, but she’d been listening to the Reverend rant and rave from the pulpit long enough to take it to heart. When the form came for university, her mother quietly filed it away on the sideboard. Claire didn’t even look at it.
The weight she’d gained in Paris fell off her, and the tan faded. The very experience started to feel like a dream she’d had once, or a story she’d read, or a film. She wasn’t that girl who’d skipped down the Bois de Boulogne, who’d scooped fresh avocado and salsa together, its slippery tartness making her eyes pop open, Thierry’s generous laugh at her surprise.