“I’m all right, I’m all right,” said Claire, wheezing and waving her away.
“Claire? Mrs. Shawcourt?” I said on my end of the phone. Gradually she managed to control herself.
“Yes,” she said finally. “Yes. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you for letting me know.”
“That’s all right,” I said, still amazed about her reaction. There was a pause.
“He’s alive?”
“Yes, he’s alive.”
“But he’s not very well?”
“I think that’s about it.”
Her voice quieted.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I would like to see him so.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. How could she get on a plane to Paris? She couldn’t walk three steps without running out of breath. She couldn’t even change trains. It was impossible. I felt so sorry.
“Maybe when he’s better, he can come and see you?” I said. “I’ll make him.”
Claire looked again at the old, collapsing purple veins in her left hand. Her right hand was getting sore just from holding up the phone. She could see her reflection in the window. He wouldn’t know it was her. He wouldn’t recognize her.
“No, don’t,” she said. “Don’t. But let me know, won’t you? Let me know how he’s getting on.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
“And what about you?” she said suddenly. “How are you? How are you enjoying Paris?”
I half-smiled to myself as I wiped away a black glob of mascara from underneath my eye. I wasn’t going to be the bearer of any more bad news.
“It’s…it’s eventful,” I said.
“Tout va bien à part ça?”
“Oui, à part ça.”
- - -
I realized as I hung up that I had been hoping that Claire could have been my savior, that I could have poured my woes out to her—she would understand, surely. She had been a young girl in Paris once. I wasn’t much of a young girl, but she’d sent me here.
I hadn’t expected her to be quite so enervated by the news. She was so tired, mostly, so weary; everything took her so long. But when she had giggled, nervously, jumpily, I’d caught a glimpse of another Claire, a younger one. I had thought she would be concerned—but from a difference. When I was recuperating, other people’s bad news slightly washed over me; I was too selfish and wrapped up in myself to pay it that much attention. But Claire had responded completely differently, as if Thierry was someone she still knew terribly well, intimately, that this news about someone she hadn’t clapped eyes on for forty years was somehow of intense importance to her.
- - -
1973
Claire had seen Richard Shawcourt around. He went to the same school as her, but he was in a higher year. He wore brown horn-rimmed glasses that made him look too serious to be a schoolboy, and sometimes he’d carry a music case. He was carrying it that day as he swung through the woods.
Claire was skipping school. Some days she felt sad, some days dreamy. Today, she felt mutinous. She’d snapped repeatedly at her mother over the breakfast table (there was no point in cheeking the Reverend if she ever wanted to leave the house again) and stormed out nastily, barely even bothering to check the post. She’d started out in the direction of school—she had French oral practice that morning, which she was good at—but had gotten halfway there and seen a huge gaggle of girls, including Rainie Callendar, all giggling and screaming at each other and laughing at Looby Mary, a big lummox of a girl in their year who always walked alone and never spoke. They were obviously being viciously mean about her, even though Mary was clearly educationally subnormal and barely clean, asking her questions about whether she had a lad and which discotheque she would take him to, and it turned Claire’s stomach all of a sudden, the stupid, pointless cruelties of school life. She wondered what Thierry would do. He wouldn’t stand for it, she was sure; his benevolent attitude toward the world wouldn’t allow it.
She marched up to them.
“What are you guys, eleven?” she said, her voice not even wavering. “For God’s sake, you’re practically school leavers and you’re running around being bullies.”
“Get over yourself,” said Rainie Callendar, who dyed her hair already.
“Oh, it’s the French madame’s pet, oh je t’aime,” said Minnie Hutchison, who was her evil sidekick. Everyone started laughing, but Claire just turned around to Looby Mary and said, “Are you all right?” and Looby Mary just looked really confused, like she hadn’t properly understood what was happening in the first place, and scuttled off. The group of girls had reconfigured and were now talking loudly in shocked tones along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know who she thinks she is,” and “I suppose she thinks she’s better than everyone,” and Claire sighed, rolled her eyes, and marched off to the woods.
“Aw, too scared to come to school?” shouted Rainie, and Claire ignored her.
- - -
She sat in the bough of her favorite tree in the copse behind the school, lighting one of her precious Gauloises—barely inhaling, just letting the smell of the smoke calm her down to stop her kicking a tree.
The sound of someone coming made her scuttle down and put it out, trying not to be seen.
“Sorry,” said Richard Shawcourt, looking awkward and a bit embarrassed, his trousers already getting too short even this early in the school year. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to say well done and make sure you were all right. I never dare stand up to bullies; they break my glasses.”
She stared at him up and down.
“What’s in that music case then?” she said.
- - -
It was worse than I had thought. When I got back, Frédéric and Alice were having a full-blown stand-up row in front of the shutters. They were screaming at each other too quickly for me to properly follow them, but it seemed reasonably obvious from the way they looked at me with furious eyes that it had a lot to do with me and my perceived weaknesses. Frédéric was obviously continuing to insist on the closure of the shop. This solution didn’t appear to be cutting any ice with Alice at all. They both gazed at me expectantly.
The good thing about our corner of the Île de la Cité is it contains lots of tiny alleyways that are good for ducking down. I ducked down one now. Then I took out the telephone number that I had purloined from Alice’s phone.