CHAPTER 1 Simone #2
‘Do you know, I’ve never seen it,’ he says, and she hears their cat, George, meow in the background.
Almost twenty years old, they had him before Lucy, before they opened the restaurant.
Old and decrepit, he’s moved with them multiple times across London, the houses and the mortgages getting larger, George getting slimmer and slower.
Now he sits in a bay window all day in their Victorian house; the first thing any of them sees when they come home.
Of course, every day Lucy says she thinks this is the day he’s died there, something which Damien doesn’t find funny at all but Simone kind of does, but, so far, he’s in great health.
‘Good luck with your second shift. Most chefs would’ve had a lie-in.’
‘I’m better busy,’ he tells her; he feels no qualms about missing her, nor saying it. ‘Fourteen days to go.’
Simone feels a lurch of longing for him, her calm husband, the restaurant, that bay window, their old cat, and something else, too. All this driving on the right side of the road, the late hour … there is something unsettling about it.
She turns off the highway, the slip road on the right – there’s no one around, and she has to tell herself she isn’t simply driving up it the wrong way – and on to roads that get narrower and narrower until they’re just tracks covered by a lattice of late-summer trees, the scenery only headlights, fluttering moths in their twin beams, and Simone, her face reflected twice in the passenger and driver windows.
She can see Lucy’s exact features lurking beneath hers; under the veneer of age.
And here it is, their lodge: a squat wooden building that sits with a handful of others on a wide, dusty street.
It overlooks the mountains in Fort Davis, Lucy told her when she sent the booking confirmation.
There are cabins with pine porches, craggy rocks, big bonsai-style trees all around, and not much more that Simone can see, such a contrast to built-up London.
She stops and cups her hands around her face, looking out of the driver’s-side window.
It’s so silent, the other lodges perhaps unoccupied: windows as blank as closed eyes, no cars around, security lights off.
Lucy spent a week here at Easter – Simone counted down then, too – at a spring camp that she wanted to come back to for longer this summer. She can see now why Lucy likes the landscape. It’s wild and different, just like her.
Simone knows she ought not to be counting down. She cooks, she goes to a book club, she does yoga. Having an older child means she has her life back. But the reality, at the end of each busy day, is simply that Simone has loved being a parent, more than anything ever.
As she ascends the creaking porch steps, she feels it: a kind of trepidation, unusual for Simone, who has fended for herself her entire life.
She ignores it, finds the code Lucy sent, types it in, then wrenches a screen door that doesn’t feel techy at all.
As she steps in, she suddenly misses Damien’s protective, bearlike frame with a real yen.
Simone becomes too cynical when she’s alone for too long, getting pissed off about people’s flavourless burritos and her own lost luggage.
He calms her; they ought to have made a trip out of it.
She ought to have told him they could both leave the restaurant, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d want him here.
Anyway, isn’t it always after the fact that you know how you truly feel? It is for Simone, anyway.
It’s warm and dark inside the lodge, so warm Simone – who feels the cold – is immediately looking forward to sleeping cocooned up in it, feet tucked into the end of the duvet.
There are cheaply panelled walls everywhere, beds with old-fashioned covers, second-hand books on windowsills.
That curious holiday feeling descends: footsteps echoing around unfamiliar rooms, searching for light switches and which cupboard contains the mugs.
She will cook while she waits for Lucy, who’s now five minutes away. The kitchen is perfunctory but fine. Blunt knives, an electric hob with a coating of something on it, but there is milk and a bowl full of eggs.
She cracks one open, checks it’s still good, and starts to make two three-egg omelettes.
A stocking-filler of a meal, comfort food.
As she begins, she can feel her body relaxing, limbs becoming soft and tender.
In the unfamiliarity of an empty lodge in Texas, she is home, here, bent over the cheap hob with the stuck-on something.
Hot butter bubbling strawberry-blonde at its edges, eggs, (cheap table) salt and dusty cayenne pepper from the back of a cupboard.
She makes them baveuse, runny in the middle, no colour and no crease.
The proper way, the French way, the way people may say is pretentious but Simone knows to be simply correct.
She sets them on two plates, steaming hot and beautifully yellow.
Headlights outside illuminate the street with a quick wink, a flash of the mountains, and then an engine begins to idle, and the countdown is over.
Simone checks her watch: just after midnight on 1 September.
It’s the longest time they have ever been apart.
Five weeks and three days. And then Simone is out on the wooden porch, rushing so much she starts the swing seat moving in her wake, and there she is: her daughter.
Shorts, T-shirt, tennis socks pulled up to her calves, Crocs. Enviably cool Lucy.
She is getting her bag out of the boot of the cab, and she looks different.
Is she taller? Surely not some late growth spurt, just confidence.
Long, tanned limbs, new clothes that Simone has never laundered, never folded or ironed, not that this ought to matter but does.
Dirty-blonde hair now sun-streaked. But the rest is the same, the strong nose they both share, the sardonic smile that’s hard to win for most people, the fine bones: clavicles, the tips of her shoulders, slim wrists. Lucy’s never eaten enough.
The taxi driver gets out and begins to help Lucy with her bag. He is in leathers, like a motorcyclist, which creak and strain as he moves.
‘Hey, thanks,’ Lucy says to him, taking the case. She tips him, a seamless transaction, palm to palm, and he thanks her. Simone watches this play out: her daughter, the adult.
‘Ah, it’s this part,’ the driver says, gesturing around him. ‘I thought it was. People are always pulled over for speeding just here, where it goes from an eighty to a fifty. This your mom?’ he asks. Simone sometimes forgets how obvious their likeness is.
‘Mother-and-daughter holiday. Camping,’ Lucy says. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Can’t stand camping,’ he tells her.
Lucy smiles, cocks her head. ‘Why?’ The actor in Lucy is interested in people. She will talk, later, to Simone about his mannerisms, imitate them perfectly.
‘Feel the cold!’ he replies. ‘At night in the desert. Anyway, howdy. You be safe now.’ At this he glances at Lucy for just a beat.
‘I made omelettes,’ Simone says to Lucy as he gets back into the car. ‘Midnight snack.’
‘Good. The singing prison was not interested in feeding its inmates nice food,’ Lucy says, letting her bag fall from her shoulder in the hallway.
She’s been at what she calls this singing prison for the final week of her summer, after camp.
She has an unconditional offer to join RADA in the autumn, but the letter contained an advisory that she needed to learn to sing.
Simone was going to come over a week earlier, but Lucy pushed it back when she found what she called an old-school Southern lady called Bea who she said could teach anybody how to sing.
Simone had tried not to feel pushed out, knew it wasn’t reasonable to.
The taxi leaves, clouds of dust around its wheels, and the engine fades to nothing, and, suddenly, they are totally alone.
Lucy brushes past Simone to get the omelette. And, no, they’re still exactly the same height.
Simone can’t hug her – Lucy will balk – but she reaches for her hand instead, fingers that used to be fat and jelly-baby-like, that curled around Simone’s thumb in a maternity ward surely only yesterday, and squeezes.
Lucy squeezes back before releasing her, and Simone explodes into a puff of multiple Xs, thirty-eight of them representing thirty-eight days, as she is back, whole, with her daughter. A cracked egg, repaired.
Half past midnight, and they’re both cross-legged on one of the beds.
‘The thing was that on the very first night, after we’d finished around the piano, Bea says she’s going to take our phones off us, says she will lock them up.
’ Lucy then enacts a perfect Southern American impression: ‘Even vocal cords need nine hours’ sleep.
’ A pause. ‘One of the other singers there was forty.’
‘God,’ Simone says.
‘Anyway, clearly, she’s just made it up because she realizes right then that she doesn’t have anywhere to lock the phones. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘So she collects them all up and she puts them in her car. Absurd. Then she has to go through with that every night. Ten tone-deaf singers’ phones into the boot. She said she could teach anyone, but she’s clearly never taught a soul in her life.’
Laughter burbles up in Simone, and she thinks several things simultaneously: God, I have missed you, and Please never leave me again, and Please don’t move away and only invite me to sit in the audience of the plays you’re going to star in.
‘Where did you even find her?’