Chapter 9 #2
T: So are you phoning for a particular reason, or…?
W: No, not really. I was just talking to a friend about—
T: You have a friend?
W: I… Um… Yes.
T: Sorry. I mean, in France. You have a friend in France?
W: I do. She’s the post lady. And she was telling me about her brother, and it made me think of you and Fifi. I miss you. I miss you both.
T: Did you phone my evil sister as well, then? I haven’t heard from her in ages.
W: No, only you. I spoke with Fiona a few days ago, though. She seems fine.
T:
W: Sorry, why is that funny? Did I miss something?
T: Oh, just, you know… Fiona being fine.
W: Why do you say that? Isn’t she fine?
T: Oh, she’s probably fine as far as she’s concerned. She always is. It’s just to everyone else she’s a bloody nightmare.
W: Ahhh! Sibling rivalry.
T: Nah, just observing a family trait, I think.
W: What family trait would that be, then?
T: Being a nightmare, maybe?
W: Haha. Very funny, Todd. So, what have you been up to? Tell me.
By the time she hangs up, she has learned that Matti drove them all to Margate at the weekend, where they had fish and chips and played the slot machines.
Margate has quite a ‘cool vibe’ according to Todd, something she pretended to be flabbergasted about even though she’s heard this repeatedly over the last few years.
Kids love being reassured that their parents are out of touch, and it’s hard not to play up to that.
Other than the Margate escapade, Todd’s news had been rather sparse, so sparse in fact that she’d launched into a brief, ill-advised monologue about the honest conversations she’d been having with her French teacher and how nice it would be if they could communicate more openly as a family.
Todd had laughed at this idea. ‘Yeah, well, you’re not the postie’s mum, are you? Otherwise she wouldn’t tell you anything at all.’
Wendy steps outside and lights a cigarette. The evening is unusually warm and it’s difficult to imagine that snow is on its way.
She blows the smoke into the breeze and retraces fragments of the conversation in her mind.
Todd’s ‘joke’ about their nightmare family trait – had that been a dig at her, or merely self-mockery?
She suspects it was the former, but she’s glad she managed to resist reacting.
And Fiona… Does Todd really resent her? Or is that, too, just habit?
And finally, Christmas. God, there it is! Amazingly she has managed to completely avoid thinking about Christmas until now, and for a moment there she still believed she could blank out Todd’s almost-mention of it as well. But no, here it is, thundering towards her like a big red steamroller.
Is she strong enough to survive Christmas here alone? Or will it derail her fragile, newly found sense of wellbeing?
An image flashes through her mind’s eye, a terrible scene in which she’s here, alone, drunk and weeping in front of some dreadful Christmas movie.
Still, she tells herself, attempting to battle the image into submission.
She’s done it before, hasn’t she? But that defence quickly crumbles because the truth is that no, she hasn’t.
Even last Christmas Eve she’d been with Jill and Bern.
And on Christmas Day proper, even with Jill and Bern next door, the idea of being home alone had been so horrific she’d preferred to stay on at work.
At that moment, at the precise instant she feels her resolve might crumble entirely, something catches her eye – a movement on the far side of the cabin. A rat? A rabbit? No, a cat!
She crouches down and makes kissing noises by sucking through her teeth, but instead of being drawn to her as she’d hoped, the cat is surprised by the noise – shocked by her presence. In a single leap it bounds out of sight behind the cabin.
She remembers the face she saw peering in a few days ago and scans the horizon as she wonders how far away the nearest houses are.
A stray! she decides, feeling a little burst of empathy and wonder and, yes, need for this cold little animal.
She creeps to the far side of the cabin and peers around the corner but the cat is nowhere to be seen.
‘Silly cat,’ she murmurs. ‘You could have got yourself some tuna there.’
But perhaps it will come back. She decides to put food out just in case.
The next morning there’s not a cloud in the sky and definitely no sign of snow. She wonders if the forecasters have got it wrong.
Before heading out for her walk she phones the rental company, who instruct her to check her emails where she discovers (happily) that they’ve refunded her half of the cost of her rental, and (less happily) that they’ve cancelled the remainder of her contract.
When she phones them to ask why, they explain in perfectly understandable franglais that as far as they’re concerned she’s become uninsurable.
The only smidgin of good news is that she can ‘probably’ still rent from someone else.
By the time she hangs up, she’s shaking with frustration, but she decides she’ll deal with the fallout after her walk, once she’s calmed down.
She stomps out of the cabin, along the road, and up the hill virtually without noticing her surroundings.
It’s only when she gets to the top that she reconnects to her environment, to the beauty of right here, right now…
The air is crisp and bracing. Occasional gusts of wind make her cheeks smart, but when the wind drops, the sun is strong enough to prickle her skin. As she raises her phone to take the photo she spots a distant bank of cloud to the west. She wonders if they’re snow clouds.
After her walk, the baker greets her with more talk of snow. Perhaps obsessing about the weather isn’t a purely British thing after all.
‘You must buy more,’ the woman tells her, a profiteering glint in the eye. ‘Sometimes, when it snows a lot, we ’ave to close. Sometimes even Manon cannot deliver. You do not want to be ’ungry.’
So she fills three boxes instead of the usual one.
In go bottles of wine and long-life bread; olives, cheese and butter.
In go carrots and leeks and potatoes; biscuits and peanuts and chocolate.
And then, because there’s still a little space left in box three, another four bottles of wine and two tins of cat food.
‘You ’ave a cat?’ the baker asks, as she rings up the purchases.
‘No. Just a stray I want to feed,’ she says, wondering if the cat found the tuna. After the business with the car hire company this morning, she forgot to check.
‘A stay…?’ the woman repeats uncomprehendingly.
‘Stray,’ she says, with an ‘R’. ‘A lost cat. A wild cat. Sauvage.’
‘Ahh,’ the baker says. ‘You must take care. If you feed them they are forever. This is ’ow we get our cat! But we do love ’er.’
Back home, the bowl she put out is empty, though whether it was the cat or birds or some other wild animal that ate the tuna, she can’t possibly know. But she moves the bowl so that it’s within view and refills it just in case.
Though the temperature is too low for her to be able to sit comfortably outside, the winter sunshine warms the cabin nicely, so she lounges indoors in the sun alternating between reading and doom-scrolling the news on her phone.
She also fires off a few long overdue texts, to Jill, Sue and Harry.
She’s feeling uncharacteristically forgive-and-forgetty this afternoon, no doubt something to do with the warmth of the winter sunshine. She considers phoning Harry at one point, but ultimately decides on a more measured, reflective approach. She’ll write him an old-fashioned letter instead.
But despite her excellent mood, once she’s armed herself with pen and paper, she stalls after the opening line. She still doesn’t know what she wants from Harry. How could she possibly know what to say?
At sunset, as the light is fading, she spots the cat creeping up to the bowl, moving in slow motion as though he believes this makes him invisible. She can see this time that he’s a long-haired variety gone wild. His fur is dirty and matted.
She resists the urge to rush outside to befriend (and brush) him and instead moves towards the window using the same slow-motion strategy as the cat. After sixty seconds of eye contact he seems to accept the deal, namely that in exchange for the food this strange woman is going to watch him eat.
‘You see, we’ll be friends eventually,’ Wendy says, once the cat starts to dig in.
She’s surprised when the cat pauses and stares at her, glares at her, in fact.
He can clearly hear through the double glazing.
‘OK, OK, I’ll be quiet,’ she whispers, and she could swear the cat gives her a nod of approval before gulping down the rest of his meal.
Sue: Good morning, France. Ici Londres !
Wendy: Hello, you.
S: I’ve been meaning to call you for ages.
W: So what happened? Me, too.
S: Anyway, thanks for texting me.
W: No worries. I wanted an update from the old country.
S: How’s it going down there? That’s what I want to know. You’ve been in France, what? A month?
W: Yeah. A bit more actually. And it’s nice. Remote. Very wild. Tiny village. Typical French cliché, really.
S: Sounds heavenly.
W: Yeah… Mostly it is.
S: Where are you again?
W: I can’t believe you don’t remember this! Do you not listen, or are you feigning disinterest to drive me insane? Um, down south. An hour north of Nice. In the mountains.
S: That’s it! I knew it was somewhere around there. So how are you spending your days?
W: Oh, you know… reading, walking, learning French…
S: God, I’m so jealous.
W: It’s a bit lonely sometimes. But mostly I’m loving it.
S: And Harry?
W: What about him?
S: Is he…? He’s not with you, is he?
W: You know he isn’t, Sue. He’s at home. With the kids.
S: But Todd’s at university now, isn’t he?