Three-quarters of an hour later, after I’d taken Claire to the bathroom and we’d done what we could in the swaying room, Richard reappeared, again with food, which none of us felt like. The storm hadn’t abated, and even the happy screaming holiday children had quieted down.
“Are you still set on doing this then?” he said gruffly.
“Yes,” said Claire with dignity. “And I think I can walk now.”
Her muscles had slackened up with the drugs and the massage; very carefully and precariously, she made her way up out of her chair, and Richard and I took an arm each and we started to move, very slowly, out of the salon and toward the steps at the back of the boat.
There was a man standing there too, but we explained that we really wanted to go up top, and he looked at us and told us to be careful but wasn’t stopping anyone, just kids, he explained.
Through the swing doors at the top, the wind caught us straightaway and nearly sent us staggering right to the side. It was extremely strong, the clouds above us black. Seagulls screamed through the air, desperately searching the boat’s wake for discarded chips and other excellent human morsels. The wake churned up the already foamy waves behind us in a long line.
Then we turned around to face the front, and Richard let out a low whistle.
Straight ahead of us where the beaches and cliffs of Calais spread out in front of us, the little old section of the town on top of the hill, the weather had cleared. It was as if someone had drawn a line down the middle of the sky between the UK and France. Calais had hardly any cloud and the late afternoon sun was piercing down to illuminate it.
“You did this on purpose,” muttered Richard, but Claire wasn’t listening. She was walking forward, on her own, hand on the railing but otherwise steadily. The deck was deserted. She skirted around the lifeboats and buoys until she was right up at the prow.
“Ma belle France,” she muttered under her breath as I ran to keep up with her.
And we both stood as far front as we could, as the wind gradually slowed and the rain died off, and gradually things came into focus and we saw the ferry port closer and closer, and, right at the very tip of the farthest dock, we saw two figures, one standing, one slouched in his own wheelchair. My better eyesight caught them first.
“Look,” I said to Claire, taking her hand to point in the same direction as if she were a child. “Look over there.”
Richard stayed at the entrance to the basement, and as the loudspeaker came alive again, instructing everyone to return to their cars and buses, he held the door open for us.
“You go this way,” he said, indicating a line of foot passengers lining up with bicycles and rucksacks.
“What do you mean?” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve come…I’ve come as far as I possibly can.”
I realized then he’d seen the figures on the dock.
“I booked this when I got the tickets,” he said, seeing my face. “It’s all right, they know I’m coming straight back.”
The boat was sloshing about, maneuvering itself up to the jetty.
“What do you mean?”
In such a short space of time, I realized, I’d come to rely on him as being the grown-up.
“I’ll get the chair and your bags,” he said. “You’re going to be fine.”
His face was grave and full of sadness as he disappeared down the stairs. I watched as a long ramp, to let pedestrian passengers off, extended to the quay side. There was a passport box with a hot, grumpy-looking man in it—I still couldn’t believe the change in the weather. It was like a great dotted line, like on a map, had separated the UK from the rest of the continent. People were blinking in the sunlight. The smell of fried breakfasts and sprayed perfume and damp carpet from the ferry receded as we breathed in the fresh air.
“Oh,” said Claire. “I think I need to sit down.”
- - -
Claire still couldn’t believe Richard had done all this for her, even when he set the chair down, as if he’d been handling wheelchairs all his life instead of filing actuarial tables.
“Thank you,” she said, feeling both weak and terribly nervous. She hadn’t been able to eat a thing, which she knew wasn’t good for her, but she dreaded vomiting and being unable to clean herself up; she couldn’t face it. Cancer was such a disgusting disease on top of everything else. Sometimes she wished she had something at least a bit romantic, like typhus, maybe, like in La Bohème, where she could lie on a sofa, cough into a handkerchief for a bit, then die in an elegant fashion, without the vomit and the diarrhea and the baldness and the bollocks of it all.
Her heart, she thought, fluttered. Her eyesight wasn’t what it once was, and she hadn’t recognized the figures on the pier at all, even though Anna had jumped and shouted and clapped her hands in excitement. She would just have to take her word for it. Maybe Thierry was half-blind too. That might be useful. She tried to stare out of the ferry, now rapidly emptying, but it was hard to focus in the bright sunshine.
Richard was crouching next to her suddenly. He made a slight noise getting down there.
Richard was face to face with her now. That was one good thing about her eyesight, she thought. He didn’t look massively different to her now than he had at school, his tufty hair, his thick glasses. She smiled. He didn’t smile back. He took her hand.
“This is as far as I go,” he said quietly.
She nodded her head. She understood. “Thank you,” she said from the bottom of her heart.
He shook his head. “Oh, it was nothing.”
She was cross he didn’t understand what she was saying.
“No,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for making me go to teacher’s college, and for taking me away from the Reverend, and for marrying me even though you knew I didn’t really…and for the wonderful boys, and for making me secure.”
“I’d rather have made you happy,” said Richard, tears glistening in his eyes suddenly. She hadn’t seen him cry since that awful night so long ago when he’d confessed his affair.
She shook her head.
“I don’t…I think I was too stupid to realize it. But I think I was happy. Silly, daft, head full of nonsense…”
They both looked out on the French shoreline and smiled quickly at each other, a smile of long understanding. Seeing the beach, she had a sudden memory…the boys must have been very little and they were on a huge beach, first thing, almost no one else around except some dog-walkers, but Ian had always been up at the crack of dawn, even on holiday. The boys had been in their bathing costumes already and they had charged headlong into the water, then squealed like tiny baby pigs when they realized how freezing the surf was. And instead of laughing at them or ignoring them, Richard had seen their predicament and gone tearing in too, straight into the perishing ocean waters, picking up a boy under each arm and throwing them all around until they’d gotten used to the water and could splash at each other and laugh and laugh and laugh, till they came out, blue and chattering, and she had wrapped them all in towels and poured Richard hot coffee out of their Thermos, and he had declared it the best drink of his life.