Chapter 6
Thankfully L’Auberge is down a side street, and I go the long way round to try to make up the time. Even when I try not to be, I have always been frustratingly punctual.
I didn’t need to worry, The American is already here, sitting at a bistro table on the terrace, sunglasses shielding half of her face with her shoulders wrapped up in a grey scarf I fully expect to be cashmere.
‘Ava, you made it!’ She doesn’t make the effort to get up which I am grateful for, instead she leans over the table for me to kiss her on the cheeks. She smells expensive.
‘I thought I was going to be early but looks like you beat me to it.’
‘I’m a bit of a cockroach. I turn up at nine for a coffee and they won’t get rid of me until dinner.’ The waiter, a middle-aged man who is smoking by the door, looks up.
‘She brings in the customers.’ He shrugs and then grins widely at her. He stubs out the cigarette and transports a cumbersome chalkboard menu to the table. We are the only ones here.
‘What’s good?’ I ask, plastering on a smile.
‘Depends what your position is on animal welfare.’
‘Easily swayed depending on taste.’ Her eyes sparkle at my response and then she gestures to a scribble under the entrées. ‘Well then I’d go for the Normande.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘I find the quickest way to lose your appetite here is to ask for the ingredients.’
I am satisfied that she’s right and let her give my order to the waiter who has already managed to deliver a carafe of red with two glasses.
‘Are you local?’ I ask.
She smiles. ‘Yes. I’m a long-term resident of Chateau Eleanor.’ I rack my brain until the image of a rather grand hotel on the edge of the Bastide is bought into my vision.
‘The hotel?’
‘Yes. I came one summer a few years back to meet my friend – the one who owned the apartment – never left.’ She lights a cigarette and then offers one to me. I take it, grateful to do something with my hands.
‘I didn’t know you could live there?’
She smirks. ‘I don’t think they did either. I’m sure it’s an imposition in the summer but the manager and I came to some understanding. At least in the winter the bills get paid.’
I wonder how open she is to questioning, whether she will think I’m nosy or interested if I push further. I punt for the latter. ‘Why there?’
She nods her head from side to side as if weighing up her response.
‘I like getting waited on. Back in the States I’m sure I would have been lumped in some “assisted care facility”, probably charge me more than they do, and at least they don’t talk to me here as if I’m senile. Probably get fed better too.’
‘I read about people doing that on cruise ships.’
She shrugs. ‘I get seasick.’
She greets the waiter who has swapped his cigarette for a tray of steaming food. He places the plat du jour on the table with a flourish. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until I start to eat.
The American looks on proudly. ‘I thought you might need feeding.’ She elegantly takes a bite of her own and nods her approval at the waiter. ‘Your best yet.’ She raises her glass with her spare hand and I think I can see him blush.
‘It’s so good,’ I mumble through another mouthful.
‘You never came here before?’ The American asks quizzically, I’m not sure if the glasses are magnifying her eyes or whether they have always been this large. I know now that it is my turn to swap some information.
‘No.’ I wipe some sauce off my chin. ‘We didn’t really venture this far out of the square.’
‘We?’
Shit. A slip of the tongue and now we’re here. I weigh it up. There isn’t much point in lying; if she does live in the hotel there will be people who eventually will recognise me, put two and two together. ‘My husband and I.’
‘Oh.’ She doesn’t look taken aback. I realise that in the same way I have been guessing what brought her here, she has been doing the same about me. ‘And your husband is back in England?’
‘No.’ I take a swig of red from the carafe.
‘He died, brain aneurism, all very sudden.’ I have learned that the best way to deal with delivering the news is similar to ripping off a plaster.
That if I give all the information at the outset there’s only space for one sympathetic, kind-hearted response.
If you give the bare minimum, people get curious, and the whole thing gets dragged out for weeks.
‘I’m sorry.’ She’s taken aback now, but unlike a lot of people who are met with that sharp statement, she doesn’t shrink from it.
‘It’s okay, I’m guessing it wasn’t your fault.’ I let out a little snort. ‘Sometimes I say I’m divorced. It’s easier.’
She looks at me differently now, but not in a way I’m used to. She looks strangely proud. ‘Has it been long?’
‘Three years, almost four.’
She looks up at me, chewing what’s left in her mouth, her fork balanced in a knotty hand.
‘I bet it feels like no time at all.’ It isn’t something I’ve heard before in the multitude of pointless things people say.
It is the comment of someone who knows loss.
Who has been told ‘time heals all wounds’ and has also wanted to stab them with a fork in response.
‘No. It feels like yesterday.’
‘And you lived here? Together?’
‘Yes. It’s where we met. He ran L’Avenir.’ I gesture in the general direction of the café. I used to love telling people that, back when Ettie was alive. It cemented the fact that I was more than just a tourist.
‘The one in the square?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Life can be so bloody relentless, can’t it.’ She shakes her head. ‘You miss him.’
‘Lots.’
‘And your loose ends?’
‘A book, about him, well more about losing him really.’
‘Ah, a writer.’ She smiles widely. ‘I thought there was something about you I liked.’ I feel in that moment that I have been brought into her confidence and it is glorious.
The waiter brings out coffee and madeleines to finish and we smoke another cigarette whilst sitting in a comfortable silence, watching people come and go, the traders hauling their wares back to the vans on the outskirts of the walls.
And then I see him.
A figure walks past, quickly, his phone pressed to his ear so it’s difficult to make him out entirely but just the way his body moves takes the air from my lungs.
He’s in the café’s rust-red t-shirt showing the same lean, muscular arms, with the same long slender frame.
Just as I think he’ll turn his head, look me directly in the eye, he pivots and jogs down a side street away from me.
‘Ava?’ The American pulls me out of my trance.
‘Did you see—’ I can feel my breath come back, pulling at my lungs, thin and clawing. I feel like I’m drowning.
‘Ava, you don’t look well.’
‘I need to go.’ I pick up my things. A cup falls off the table and shatters by my feet.
I don’t even have time to apologise. It is like some force is in control of my body, moving it of its own free will.
I break into a jog, down the same cut through, my eyes desperately trying to make out the ghost that had just appeared in the middle of the street.
I had of course imagined the possibility. What if it was all some ruse to dump me? An exit strategy. I think I could understand that eventually. It made more sense than all of that life suddenly being extinguished overnight.
The alley reaches a fork, and I see the flash of red at the end of a passage on the left and follow. My jog has turned into a clumsy run, my trainers occasionally catching on an uneven bit of stone, but I am determined to catch up with him.
The passage widens. There are voices now, a large cacophony of lunchtime chatter, as I am catapulted into the square and this time I don’t care that I’m here, this time there is no creeping dread and fear of bursting into tears.
I start pirouetting, my head a lighthouse, searching the crowd for any sign of him. I think of the shirt he was wearing, the very basic uniform of the café that Ettie insisted we wore.
People move out of my way instinctively; I must look mad.
I see the parasols, smell the cigars and the coffee, it hasn’t changed at all.
Of course he’s still here, he never died.
I must have hit my head, imagined the last three years.
He’s going to see me and wonder what on earth all the fuss is about.
I reach the terrace. There are a few occupied tables, mostly it’s empty.
Behind the archway of the stone cloister there is the familiar sight of the coffee machine obstructing the bar, the shelves of glasses, the tv blaring out some horse racing.
I look for him behind the counter, but I can only make out a woman.
And then there he is, I can feel him behind me, footsteps and then a hard, and very real, hand on my shoulder.