26
‘Tell me, how old are you?’
Sabrina is sitting on my terrace, waiting for the tea she’s requested. She turned up twenty minutes ago and I’m still none the wiser as to why she’s here. I assumed she wanted to see Jack and I told her he’d gone on a trip.
It was unexpected, Jack’s leaving. He appeared at breakfast yesterday morning with his leather holdall, told me he’d rented a car and was off for a few days. I didn’t ask where and he didn’t volunteer the information. He looked like he hadn’t slept and seemed distracted, nervous almost. I assumed, with a disarming pang of jealousy, that he was taking Sabrina’s niece with him, though Sabrina seems as in the dark over Jack’s absence as I am.
‘Aren’t French women meant to be all enigmatic about ageing?’ I say, handing Sabrina a mug and sitting across from her.
‘Don’t play coy with me, my dear. You can’t be much older than, what, forty-two?’
‘I’m thirty-nine, but thanks for that. Good to know the facial yoga is working.’
‘So. You are still young.’
‘Depends who you’re talking to. I’m too old to understand how perms have managed to make a comeback; hopefully too young for starting sentences with, “In my day …”.’
‘Do you always do this? Make a joke out of everything?’ she says with an air of exasperation.
‘In my day, sarcasm was all the rage,’ I say, unable to help myself.
Sabrina sets her mug on the table and purses her lips, taking me in.
‘Tell me, why do you dress like this?’ she asks.
‘Like what?’
‘Like a clown. Is it to go with your little jokes?’
I look down at my outfit. I’m wearing my favourite electric-blue harem pants and a Del Monte t-shirt I’ve had since I was eleven. You got it free when you saved up a certain amount of coupons from the premium orange juice brand.
‘This is my style,’ I say, wounded. I thought Sabrina and I had turned a corner.
‘Is it?’ says Sabrina. ‘Or are you trying to pretend that you don’t care about appearances?’
‘Well, I don’t,’ I say. ‘I mean, haven’t we evolved from judging women on what they wear?’
‘Oh please, the human brain is no more evolved now than it was during the Stone Age, whatever we care to tell ourselves. You want to wear giant pantalons because you like it? Mais oui , enjoy. But I think you dress like this because you don’t want to be noticed. You don’t want to admit that the things that matter to other people matter to you as well.’
‘What things?’
‘Being desired, being loved, romance. And why don’t you brush your hair? You’re too old for messy hair.’
‘I thought you said I was young a minute ago.’
‘When a woman gets to a certain age, not owning a hairbrush is unacceptable.’
The truth is, I stopped brushing my hair the day Mum walked out. She used to run a comb through it after bath time on a Saturday night. I’d sit between her legs in front of The Late Late Show while she went over my wet scalp, gently untangling each knot until it was gone. Considering the volume of hair to be tamed, it was a rare display of patience on my mother’s part.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘Much as I appreciate … whatever this is, I’m fine. I do have a hairbrush. Somewhere. And as for romance, that’s not on the cards right now.’
‘Are you certain about that?’
Sabrina looks at me purposefully.
‘That’s a lovely bracelet,’ I say, eager to change the subject.
‘This?’ Sabrina places her index finger on a silver cuff with cobalt-blue stones on her left wrist. ‘A boy I met in Kabul gave this to me many years ago.’
‘You were in Afghanistan?’
It’s hard to picture the chic, composed Sabrina Rousseau somewhere so exotic.
She nods. ‘In the early seventies. Before the Russians invaded.’
‘What happened to the boy?’ I ask, leaning forward, my curiosity piqued. I had assumed Sabrina had never left the Tarn. I realise I’ve been making a lot of assumptions lately.
‘I used to travel, you know,’ she says, ignoring my question. ‘I swore I’d never end up back in Cordes, but when my mother got sick, my father asked me to help him run the bakery. I told myself it was only temporary. That before long, I would get back to travelling the world. That was thirty-five years ago.’
‘What happened?’
She makes a dismissive gesture with her hands. ‘Time passes. The longer you wait, the easier it becomes to find excuses to stay still. I had been planning on taking a trip. Closing the bakery for a few months and visiting a friend in Tuscany. But my niece Chloe arrived from Lyon last month with her son. Theo’s father is, how you say? An asshole. He has not been good to Theo or his mother. They needed a fresh start. They are living with me for a while. Theo will start the lycée in Albi in September and we hope he will go to college the following year. Jack has been very good to us. I asked him if he could help Theo with his English one day a week. He comes almost every day. Refuses to take any payment.’
I feel giddy. Is it possible there’s nothing going on between Jack and Chloe? Is that what he’s been doing these past few weeks? Helping Sabrina’s great-nephew?
‘Of course, even without my house guests, I cannot go anywhere thanks to la Covid ,’ she continues. ‘The government thinks it knows best, treating people my age like children. Telling us it is unsafe to leave the house. To think, this whole crisis could have been avoided if the Chinese ate chicken like civilised people.’
Christ, Yiv wasn’t wrong about the Sinophobia.
‘Umm, I don’t think you can say that,’ I say.
‘I’m seventy-four, ma chérie . I can say what I like. That’s the fun part about getting older.’
She winks at me and reaches for her mug.
‘How are you finding life in Cordes?’ she asks. ‘You are enjoying running the guesthouse?’
‘“Enjoy” is a strong word. I wasn’t expecting it to be this hard, to be honest. I’ve thought about going back to Ireland a lot.’
‘But you are still here. You are strong.’
I appreciate the vote of confidence – first from Doctor Bourdariat and now Sabrina. But I don’t feel strong. I feel like the house made of straw in The Three Little Pigs. One puff and I’ll fall down.
‘I don’t know about that. If I could afford it, Ari and I would be on the first plane back to Dublin.’
I don’t tell Sabrina that that day might come sooner than I’d thought. Earlier this morning, I got an email from Sophie. She and Nicolas have found a buyer for La Maison Bleue. All being well, the sale should go through in November, which means Ari and I will be back home by Christmas. We’ll still have some savings left. I’ll find another job in publishing, build our nest egg back up. In a couple of years, we’ll have enough for a small deposit on a flat. We can pick up where we left off. I mean, it’s embarrassing, proving Dermot right, failing yet again, but better that than squander what little money we have left. Isn’t this what I’ve been waiting for these past two months? An out?
‘Here,’ Sabrina says, rooting through her bag and producing several colouring books and a box of crayons. ‘I noticed Ari likes to draw and I had these in the house from when Theo used to visit as a child.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, touched by the gesture. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘ C’est rien. This is for you.’ She hands me a small glass jar. I open the lid and sniff, the smell of mandarin and camomile filling my nostrils.
‘Moisturiser?’
‘Relax,’ she says. ‘I do not expect you to start grooming like a French woman. You don’t have the discipline.’
‘Wow, the compliments just keep on rolling today,’ I laugh.
She looks at me sternly. ‘That aside, you are young and you are attractive. You should make the most of it while you still can.’
‘Sabrina, thank you, but …’
She raises her hand to silence me. ‘This is not for a man, though trust me, there is no beauty product more effective than a night of passion. This is for you. We start by loving ourselves. All good things grow from this.’
I give in. I get the impression ‘no’ isn’t a word Sabrina Rousseau is used to hearing often. Besides, the moisturiser does smell amazing.
Sabrina gathers her things and tells me to stay put – she’ll see herself out. After she leaves, I bring the empty mugs inside and put them in the dishwasher. I go to the bath room to pee. Washing my hands, I see Ari’s Tangle Teezer beside the sink, his red hairs covering the bristles. I remove the clump, tossing it into the wastepaper basket. I rinse the brush and run it over my scalp, going over each knot until my hair is smooth. Sliding my back down the wall, I sit on the floor with my knees pulled up against my chest and for the first time in years, I allow myself to cry.