Chapter 28
I don’t know what to wear to a graveyard.
I didn’t know what to wear to his funeral either.
Mum suggested I wore his favourite colour, but I didn’t really know what that was.
And then I cried some more because I would never get the chance to ask him.
I’ve never really liked colour at a funeral anyway, it feels wrong.
I wanted all the colour to drain out of the world, do a Queen Victoria and wear a little black veil for the rest of my life.
I imagine Ettie sitting on the edge of my bed, rolling his eyes as I stare at the void of my wardrobe, how the clothes are mostly thrown into drawers and sagging off hangers.
He would tell me that it didn’t matter, just shove on something and get out of the door.
I reach for jeans and a bright-green jumper that we had bought together when I hadn’t realised that a couple’s trip to Prague in March might be a little brisk.
‘Perfect,’ he would say, emphasising the ‘f’. ‘You look like a couple hundred euros.’ And I would hit him and pretend to be offended.
I do my hair, my make-up even, put on my jacket and then sit on the sofa checking whether my phone clock has actually stopped working because once again, despite trying my hardest to be late, I am on time; no, in fact today I am early.
The apartment is strangely calm. I had filled it with as much noise as I possibly could, but typically it’s only now when I have five days left of my tenancy that I realise quite how peaceful it is, how it feels safe and warm and clean, how it feels like mine.
I don’t have a place that’s mine when I get off the plane.
I have a bedroom with a fresh beige carpet with beige walls and a beige bed.
It will be spotless, vacuumed, dusted, there won’t be cobwebs and dust and birds on the walls and it will feel like I am a million miles from home even though I am there.
I reach for my diary from underneath the coffee table; it’s still left open from my session after Florian had dropped me back after the gallery.
Amongst the guilt of forgetting why Wednesday was significant were particularly vivid reruns of details I never want to forget: his smile when he saw me, the protective arm around me in the gallery, his jacket on my shoulders.
I turn to a fresh page, write the date, press my pen to the first blank line and feel a distinctive and recognisable tremor of inspiration.
I close the diary, reach for my shopping bag and throw it in along with some fruit and wine for the meal tonight, Florian had made the decision that he would cook; said that perhaps more space might defuse the tension than sitting at a restaurant for other people to listen.
When Florian rings me to say he’s outside I’m grateful to see the front seat is empty.
He gets out of the car, holds open the passenger door with an outstretched arm. I hover before getting in, take him in. He has gone for the same approach to his outfit as I have, like if we treat this as normal then maybe it might feel it eventually.
We stand there assessing each other for a moment, an awkwardness descending that feels so alien now. I place a hand on his shoulder as he presses his lips to my cheeks and then we pause, bodies still locked together and then I lean in, stealing the simplest of kisses. His cheeks flush.
‘I’m never sure what the protocol is,’ he mutters, eyes still half closed.
‘I’m not sure there is one for this specific situation. I think we get to make up the rules.’
His hand slips to my waist. He chuckles and then he kisses me back. ‘I like it.’
‘Is she not coming?’ I ask, gesturing to the empty backseat as Florian thunders down the cobbles, the entire car vibrating beneath us. I know I sound entirely too hopeful.
‘She’s meeting us there.’
‘And does she know that I’m meeting her there?’ Florian swallows and then nods a little apprehensively, the ghost of a conversation he clearly hadn’t wanted to have still lingering in the air.
‘She does.’
‘And I’m guessing she wasn’t best pleased?’
He manages a sideward glance in my direction. ‘No comment.’
I feel the saliva dry in my mouth, an all-consuming nausea descending on me. ‘Maybe it’s a bad idea, we can go anytime just you and me…’
‘I’m not doing this on my own.’
Ettie was buried in a town thirty kilometres away.
It wasn’t his home. It made no sense. The only connection to the fortress balancing precariously on a hilltop was the fact that the Grenauds had a family vault there, where three generations of his family had rested their own skeletal remains.
Whilst I tried to protest, I had been too numbed by Valium and shock, so I quickly gave in.
Ettie and I never wrote a will; I’m sure we would have got around to it eventually, maybe if we ever decided to have kids, but it was never exactly high on his agenda.
I came to realise that part of his attraction to me was my age: he could get away with ten more years of pretending that he wasn’t ageing; ten more years of drinking too much; morning, lunchtime and afternoon sex.
He wanted lie-ins and cigarettes for breakfast. And I wanted him.
Florian parks the car at the bottom of the hill and we have to walk up a steep cobbled pathway until the dome of the Basilica comes into view.
It is impossibly beautiful. It does make the thought of him being here a little easier, that he gets to lie at the foot of this vast and entirely ridiculous tribute to a God that I’m not sure Etienne ever believed in.
‘You know the Virgin Mary showed up here.’ Florian kindly stops, letting me catch my breath as we ascend higher.
‘Over there by the caves. A starving girl saw her, and she gave the girl bread. That’s why this is here.
’ He gestures upwards to the white stone temple that looks like it should belong in Rome, not up a hill in the middle of nowhere.
‘Funny how these saints always show up in pretty places, isn’t it? They never just pop out of the woodwork in Hounslow or Staines.’
Florian’s face is blank; it is one of the only times I am aware that we are from entirely different places, that our mother tongues are not the same. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Madame Grenaud is perched on a marble bench overlooking the gates to the graveyard. She is wearing black; of course she is wearing black. Her dark glasses and hat speak slightly of a theatrical performance and even Florian looks slightly taken aback.
‘Mama, you look… smart.’
‘Thank you.’ She kisses him like a stranger, afraid that he might wrinkle her black two-piece perhaps.
‘Ava.’ She barely glances in my direction. Florian clears his throat. ‘I am glad you could join us today,’ she adds as an afterthought, and I wonder whether he had threatened her into at least being civil.
‘Thank you for letting me come, Maxine.’ I smile and she bobs her head at my own civility.
‘Well, shall we?’
She gets to the gate but pauses, gestures for Florian to open it and then grabs onto the crook of his arm before he can register what’s happening.
There is sad grey shingle on the ground, the occasional cluster of green weeds struggle out from under the stones and swing defiantly in the breeze. It is a little strange, contradictory almost, that life is still managing to slip through the cracks.
Immediately we are banked on both sides by large marble tombs in muted greys, blacks and browns.
I hang back from my two companions, my feet performing some sort of macabre wedding march, my eyes taking in the unfamiliar names, the dates, the small faded pictures in marble frames that indicate whose bones I am walking past.
Ettie is in the far corner, under the shade of a budding oak tree. It is a peaceful place with far-reaching views over the valley, a valley that probably looks as it did when his great-grandfather was the first body to be interred.
The gravel stops crunching under our feet as we reach the family vault.
It is a gargantuan box of granite that rests a metre off the ground, covered with the names and faces of distant relatives that in some bizarre way I am, and always will be, related to.
I take in the faded sepia cameos of the dead.
I recognise a few faces from photo albums, most notably the picture of Mr Grenaud, a man who I never met.
His picture is an old one; he probably was the same age Ettie would be today, smiling, in a brown suit with the same wild hair Ettie had inherited.
We all stand there in an uncomfortable silence.
I watch as Madame Grenaud steps towards the monument, places her hands on the stone and starts muttering in French.
Florian folds his arms to his chest, and I notice how his lips mouth an ‘amen’ when she finishes.
I don’t embarrass myself with joining him; there is a strong possibility I might combust.
Madame Grenaud then steps back, gestures for Florian to do something.
He reaches into a bag I hadn’t realised he was carrying and pulls out a little wooden box and hands it to his mother.
She takes it gently, opening up the clasp to reveal a small oval picture frame carved out of a crisp sand-coloured granite.
She looks at it fondly, her hands smoothing the edges.
She says something to Florian in French, the words make him soften.
She places the picture on the grave, on Ettie’s grave.
It looks so out of place, too fresh and clean amongst the other weather-beaten tributes that have seen decades of rain and snow and bleaching sun.
Madame Grenaud makes space for Florian to approach.
They both lay their hands on the stone again except this time they don’t mutter a prayer: they just stand there, as if they are touching something more than the cold, hard nothingness beneath their fingers.
I feel like a voyeur, so far removed from the sentiment and purpose I might as well be a stranger.