Chapter 25
‘What’s happened now then?’ The American asked, straightening the napkin onto her lap and nodding an appreciative thanks as the waiter at the hotel restaurant places her martini down in front of her.
‘How do you know something’s happened?’
‘Ava darling, I would love for you to have come here out of the goodness of your heart, to trust that you just wanted to treat an old lady to lunch, but I think I know you a bit better than that by now, and by the look of you…’ she takes me in from my unbrushed hair to my un-ironed shirt that I had picked up off the pile on the floor, ‘you’ve had an interesting weekend. ’
I chew my cheeks a little, nod slowly, weighing up how much I want to tell her, how much she needs to know.
‘Shall we start with your London lover?’ She swirls the olive around in her drink not looking up at me.
‘Left this morning.’
‘Amicably?’
I cringe. ‘Not quite.’
‘And Florian?’
I bite my lip. ‘Even less so, if that’s possible.’
She leans back, her hands thrusting theatrically into the air. ‘Well, well, well, did bringing the man from home to the man in France backfire in your face? Who could see that one coming?’
‘Yes, thank you for that.’
‘So.’ She goes back to swirling her olive.
‘I’m assuming that you figured out that Florian might like you more than you anticipated?
’ I stiffen a little at the realisation of quite how obvious it had all been.
Archie had felt it, Inés too, and this entire time my closest friend had watched me try and fail to navigate my way around it.
‘I figured that bit out just as he was taking off my shirt.’ The American chokes a little on her martini.
She leans closer to me. ‘Not with them both…?’ she whispers, her eyes the size of saucers.
‘No!’ I exclaim, horrified that she could even suggest such a thing.
She looks relieved but plays it off with a shrug. ‘Who knows what you young people are up to nowadays; all I ever see when I open up my magazines are articles about open relationships, threesomes, people fancying saucepans.’
‘Pans…’ My mind wanders. ‘Look, it was going fine, Archie was here, we had a nice time, a really nice time – just us two. Then Florian turns up and invites me to the river the next day, except he doesn’t realise Archie’s here, so ends up inviting both of us.’
The American chuckles. ‘How marvellous.’
‘Well, Archie’s just trying to be nice, make friends, and he suggests that Florian comes to dinner with Inés and all of a sudden last night there’s all four of us, around a table.’
‘Now that’s a dinner party I would like to have attended.’
‘Well, I wish you had because maybe you could have persuaded me not to go to the café alone with Florian for a bottle of whisky, where he basically told me that I wasn’t in love with Archie and never would be, which apparently is a massive aphrodisiac because five minutes later I had my legs around his waist.’
During the juicier details, The American has managed to lean in a little closer, her necklace swinging into her salad. ‘So you… consummated it?’
‘Consummated?’ I screw my face up at the officialness of the word.
‘We’re not Tudors, and no, we were interrupted by Archie ringing me asking where on earth we were.
’ I feel the residual shame of that evening set back in.
I have thought of all of the different ways I could have handled things, been more honest with Archie, been more honest with Florian.
Quite frankly, honesty would have got me through pretty much unscathed, but it’s hard to be honest about something that you don’t entirely understand yourself.
‘I see…’
‘And then we had the delightful task of walking back to the flat where Archie had pretty much become Poirot and called us out over a card game, shouted a bit and then stormed out. His flight took off an hour ago.’
‘And Florian?’
The look of devastation that involuntarily appears on my face says more than words ever can.
‘The book?’ she frowns.
‘What?’
‘Did he find out about your book?’
‘No.’ I swallow hard. ‘We never got close to that.’ My throat becomes taut. ‘I… I told him that it would never work and that we should maybe just stay out of each other’s way for a bit.’
‘Well, what did you do that for?’ She almost slams her hands on the table and once again we have become the main entertainment of the small restaurant.
‘Because it’s mad. It’s totally, unbelievably mad to think that anything could happen. He’s my husband’s brother! I mean surely there’s some rule somewhere that says it can’t happen, and even if there isn’t, I’m damn sure that morally it’s wrong.’
‘Who says?’
‘Every fibre in my body.’
She dabs her lips with her napkin and then leans back in her chair taking me in. ‘Can I tell you something?’ she says after a minute.
‘Of course.’
‘Did you know that I once was entwined in my own little love triangle?’
I try not to let my head get too carried away in the imagery. ‘You were?’
‘Well don’t look so surprised, sweetie, I’ll have you know I was a catch in my day.’ I sit back, skewer a tomato into my mouth.
‘Who were the eligible bachelors then?’
‘Wallace – he was a property lawyer in New York, fairly handsome but very straight-laced, the kind of man that the 1960s sort of ignored. And there was Jack – we had been friends since school, he owned land in Maine, it’s all vineyards now, made a buck or two I can tell you that now.’
‘Which one did you pick?’
‘Wait a minute now, there was another name in the mix.’
I raise my eyebrows, play with the stem of my glass. ‘You really were a catch.’
She ignores my disbelief, trades it instead for more details.
‘There was a French art student who was staying at Jack’s parents’ house you see, had been there for a few months and well, let’s say I was a fan of their work.
We had a lot of fun, I learned a bit of French and tried to paint but I was next to useless.
We had eight weeks together until I had to make a decision, whether I stayed over in the States, married Wallace or Jack, or whether I ran away to Paris and said goodbye to the life I had spent twenty-four years living. ’
‘And you chose the artist?’ I roll my eyes.
‘I chose Jack,’ she says quietly and a little too quickly.
‘What, why?’
‘Because I was a smart girl too, Ava. I looked at my life, realised how lucky I was, looked at how much I had to lose, at how my family would never speak to me again, how much harder I would make my life if I went with the choice my heart wanted me to make. I was too smart for my own good. I married Jack.’
‘Were you happy?’
‘Mostly.’ She swirls something in her drink. ‘He was a good man, we rubbed along just fine, better than a lot of our friends, probably because we never bothered to complicate our friendship with silly things like passion.’
The conversation has drifted into unfamiliar territory for us.
I am used to being the centre of the inquisition; it was a comfortable space for us, her squeezing out my feelings, meeting each one with a quick quip or incredulous eyebrow, but this is deeper, realer, and I realise that she isn’t somebody who opens up her own life as quickly as I open up mine.
‘Did you keep in touch with the artist?’
‘Yes, we wrote to each other every year on our birthdays.’
I manage a soft little smile. ‘And did you ever see him again?’
The American chuckles into her salad. ‘Jack and I were married for forty years. Did it all properly you know – till death do us part – and then I was seventy sitting in a big house with more money than we ever needed and no one to pass it down to, so I did the first brave thing I had done since I was born: I booked a flight to Paris and made it my mission to find my artist.’
I imagine her navigating Charles de Gualle with a set of those antique trunks that wouldn’t be out of place on the Titanic. ‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’ She grins, her whole face lighting up. ‘I found them alright, here of all places, living in a tiny little attic apartment on Rue Saint Jacques.’
The name of the road. My road. ‘Wait…’ I screw up my face, trying to piece together the fragments of a story with the fragments of conversations we had had when we met. ‘Your artist’s name was…’
‘Her name was Bluette, yes.’ She knows she has floored me, knows that her story has destroyed the little picture I had been drawing in my head and replaced it instead with a million questions.
‘She was your “friend”.’ I roll my eyes, frustrated that I hadn’t put two and two together before.
‘That’s what we called each other, it was ironic of course and true all at the same time. It was easier for two girls to co-exist together than it was for the boys, we just looked like companions who liked to eat dinner together a lot.’
‘So, you were together, eventually, after all that?’
She nods enthusiastically. ‘Yes. This place was a little too quiet for me back then so we only came back when we needed to have a little rest. We travelled together, visited museums and galleries in far-flung cities. We went everywhere: Egypt, Greece, Kenya, hell even Peru, and we did it all together.’ And then a sadness passes over her.
‘And then Blu got ill, four years ago, so we came back here to rest thinking that maybe she would get better but…’ Her eyes are glassy at the memories and I reach for her hand.
She lets me and I squeeze it. ‘We were old ladies by the time we eventually got to it and it wasn’t fair because we had wasted so much of our lives on other people.
’ She pauses, gathers herself. ‘So… you see, Ava, why I have such an issue with you saying that you can’t even try to be with Florian because there’s some imaginary moral compass that you are judging your actions by, because I used the same compass and it robbed me of a life that I so deserved and wanted. ’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I know how empty and pointless those words are but sometimes there really isn’t anything else to say.
‘Don’t be sorry.’ She shakes her head. ‘We found each other at the end, when it mattered.’
‘When did she… pass?’ I find myself making the same face that people have made for me so many times over the years.
‘Oh, she hasn’t.’ The American pales a little, looks down at her bracelet and then when she looks back up at me she has readjusted, drawn back on her smile.
‘Alzheimer’s. She’s in a facility in Toulouse, near her nieces; they were close to her, like daughters really, wanted her near them.
I couldn’t argue with that, considering I had missed so much.
I couldn’t face being in that apartment, it didn’t make sense without her so I came up with my little arrangement here. ’
We are silent for a moment. It’s like all the noise and bustle of the restaurant quietens as we try to find our way back to our conversation.
‘My point is, Ava, I know how it feels, to be on the precipice of something that scares you. And I think – no, I know – that you have been numbed to the possibility of feeling something other than sadness for far too long, and that you have told yourself, subconsciously or not, that this numbness is your last bastion of grief. But Florian has scuppered your plan because you do feel something with him, you feel everything with him. You said it before the last time you visited me, you said, “I just feel.” It wasn’t an unfinished sentence, it was everything you wanted to say: he makes you feel.
And how utterly terrifying it is to feel again.
’ The tears start to slip down my face and I let them go.
‘You’re rather wise, you know.’ I sniff back the sob.
‘I try my best.’
I shake away the emotion, steeling myself at the memory of how he looked when he left last night. ‘You should have seen his face yesterday, he’s done, I’ve ruined whatever it was that we had or could have had.’
She squeezes my hand again and I look at hers, her skin, the thickness of tracing paper, weighed down with a multitude of silver rings.
‘I don’t claim to know much about men but I do know, in my bones, that if you showed up at his exhibition tonight in a low-cut dress with a sort of sad little smile on your face then he would forget everything he said fairly quickly. ’
‘And then what, what do we do after that?’
‘What’s with the labels, the destinations? You don’t do, you just be.’