EPILOGUE
Ten years later
The best thing about running a guesthouse in the south of France in August? No guests. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a lot more sociable than I was when Ari and I first arrived in Cordes, which, admittedly, is a useful trait in hospitality. You need to ‘get’ people to survive in this business. There are some serious characters out there. Like the former Wisconsin dentist who had a come-to-Jesus moment performing routine root canal surgery. He realised he’d spent thirty-seven years smelling what other people had for breakfast, while making do with bad filter coffee and a muesli bar from his staff room. So he quit his job and decided to Eat, Pray, Love his way around the world (with a focus on eating – not so much the praying and the loving). His social media account, ‘Filling the Cavity’, in which he documented himself breakfasting in fifty different countries, was a global hit. By the time he got to La Maison Bleue for breakfast no. 45, pain perdu , the world’s media was waiting for him. I’ll still never fully understand the human race, but I ought not to complain – we were fully booked for months afterwards.
That said, I appreciate the periods of calm, when everyone has gone home and it’s just Ari and me – and Sabrina. She sold Utopie last year, the day after she turned eighty, though continues to rise at 4 a.m. to bake. She says at her time of life, the chances of waking up after sleeping are about the same as me mastering the art of femininity, so she tries to do as little of it as possible. I can’t remember when our morning coffee went from casual arrangement to sacred ritual, but every day at 10 a.m. without fail, Sabrina turns up armed with hot croissants and unsolicited advice on how to help various things in my life thrive: the garden, the guesthouse, my vagina.
It’s funny August should be our quietest month. It used to be the time of year when the French downed tools for four blissful weeks and escaped to the sea or countryside. Barely anyone travels south in the summer anymore. It’s too hot, forty-plus-degree heat the new normal in these parts. To be fair to climate change, it hasn’t been disastrous for everyone. The tourist board in Ireland has capitalised on the country’s recent run of balmy weather by promoting Wexford, Cillian’s home county, as the Irish Riviera, only with less style and more sunburn.
Speaking of Cillian and inhospitable environments, he and Nicole joined the mass exodus of Hollywood to New York after California came dangerously close to running out of water for the third summer in a row. He said he was all for conserving H 2 O, but objected to having to wait in line at public taps for his daily allotted eight gallons, as it ate into valuable time in which he could be living a life of service.
Ari has visited Cillian a few times. I think he likes it out there. It’s hard to know – he doesn’t say much these days. If I want to know anything about my son’s life, I have to follow him. Not online. (Apparently, every time a new social media platform launched, it wasn’t long before the old people turned up and ruined the experience. So Gen Alpha decided to leave us to it and have taken to letter-writing instead. It’s genuinely fascinating to watch. They think they’re the first generation to communicate through the medium of pen and paper.) No, I mean, I literally follow my teenage son. I’ve hidden behind trees in skate parks, lurked with a latte in coffee-shop corners. I’m satisfied Ari has friends and isn’t spending his weekends snorting fentanyl, although, if I’m being honest, I’ve never had any concerns in that regard. I guess I miss him is all. The kid he was, the closeness we had.
Sabrina tells me Ari’s reluctance to share is standard behaviour for his age and he’ll revert to normal human interaction within four to six years. She says my actions are not standard and instructed me to cut it out. Dad reckons I’m worrying over nothing and need a boyfriend to distract me. It shouldn’t be too hard to find one, he says, because fifty for a woman isn’t what it used to be what with the menopause rebrand and Botox and what have you.
Yeah, Dad. He’s back on the scene. I wasn’t sure what he’d say when I reached out to him, how he’d respond when I told him I’d had a baby and moved to France since I last saw him at Tommy’s funeral. But forty-eight hours after I hit ‘send’ on that first email, he was on a flight to Toulouse to meet his grandson. Ari was thrilled to have a flesh-and-blood grandfather and was only marginally disappointed to discover he wasn’t the conductor on the Polar Express.
Dad and I didn’t discuss Tommy that first meeting. After a while being back in each other’s lives, I realised we never would. That I wouldn’t get the answers I was looking for. My father remains a gobshite, but he’s a gobshite who spent a week building a treehouse for Ari, taught him how to play Sudoku. (I have no idea when he started playing Sudoku. Mum used to say he barely had the patience to sit on the toilet long enough to empty his bowels.) I’ve thought a lot about what Jack said. About how most of us spend our lives swimming in the murky middle, sometimes popping up for air, sometimes allowing ourselves to be dragged to the bottom – endlessly disappointing and delighting one another in a million tiny ways.
I called Joan. Told her how sorry I was. How I’ve thought about her every single day since Tommy’s funeral. Regretted my inaction every single day. She wouldn’t hear a word of it. Wanted to know all about Ari and our life in France. She came to visit once. We drove to the sea and had ice cream on the beach, and Joan was tickled to see a French man wearing an actual beret. She had a massive stroke two years ago and died in her sleep. Sabrina made an I-told-you-so face when I gave her the news.
The year after we moved to Cordes, a veteran US broadcast journalist visiting family in the region came to stay for a week. I warmed to Peggy Sadowski immediately. She had spiky hair and big opinions, and was increasingly frustrated by the media ’ s failure to adequately cover the climate crisis. One evening, over scallops and sauvignon blanc, she told me of her plan to launch a global media collaborative to steer newsrooms away from breaking news like, ‘ Katie Holmes steps out in Tribeca with pierced nose’ in favour of the stories that might actually encourage us to get our fingers out of our arses and do something about the radical destabilisation of life on earth. And so, for the past eight years, journalists and media types from around the world converge at La Maison Bleue every February for three days of talks and workshops. Peggy runs the show; I do whatever’s needed – edit documents and press releases, keep guests fed and watered. There are those who say what we’re doing is a drop in the ocean, that the world is headed in the wrong direction no matter what, and my correcting stray parentheses isn’t going to stop sea levels from rising or crops from failing or economies from imploding, so what’s the point?
The last time I saw my mother, I told her I was going to change the world. I used to think the only way to do that was to lead a big life. I’m not so sure about that anymore. We spend our time thinking it’s the macro that counts. The global summits, the major decisions. But what if all the tiny choices matter just as much? Striking up a conversation with the barista who makes your morning coffee. Keeping an open mind about the TV personality you think you know. Turning off the tap. What if even the smallest life can have impact? And what about a billion small lives together? What would that look like?
Jack returned to Sunrise Britain after our summer together, but left a few months later, claiming his career needed a change of direction. These days, he presents current affairs shows, chairs panels, fronts ads for a life insurance company. His memoir was an instant bestseller, though fans expecting a rant on woke culture were disappointed by the considered tone, and concluded he’d lost his edge. Jack Hamilton’s Real France never materialised. Before Jack left, we agreed to make a clean break. That if he was going to give his marriage another shot for Max’s sake, we couldn’t see each other again. So he backed out of the show and the gig was given to Jeremy Clarkson instead. The series was even more obnoxious than it would have been had Jack been at the helm, Clarkson driving through the French countryside in a battered Renault 4, asking old men in berets why they eat frogs’ legs. Still, when it came to La Maison Bleue, he was all charm. I don’t know what deal Jack struck with him, but it can’t have been fun for Jack – Clarkson is infamously scathing about his younger rival.
At first, I stalked Jack online obsessively. I wanted to know what he was up to. Wished AI would invent something that transmits scent digitally so I could smell him every day. After a while, I weaned myself off my daily fix of Jack Hamilton and didn’t relapse, even after Yiv sent me an article six months ago confirming his divorce. He and Helen went their separate ways after Max left home for university. And then last week, on my birthday, I got a card out of the blue. On the cover was a photo of Gregg Alexander, in all his bucket-hat glory, the words, ‘You Get What You Give’ underneath. It was from Jack.
~
It’s 4.30 a.m. I pad into the kitchen in my bare feet, careful not to wake Ari on the creaking floorboards. I fill the kettle with water and pop a teabag into a mug. I’m back to sleepless nights. It’s the usual culprits – hormones, existential dread, that ill-advised cup of coffee at 4 p.m. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve learnt not to fight these periods of restlessness. They never last. Nothing does.
I walk over to the fridge for milk. Pinned to the door underneath a magnet – a photo of a kitten, captioned ‘Lesbians eat what?’ (a gift from Yiv) – is Jack’s card. It arrived accompanied by a ticket to a debate at the Sorbonne in Paris next month. The motion is ‘Humanity is in decline’. The host, Jack Hamilton. I slide the card out from underneath the magnet and read, for the hundredth time, the message inside.
Fiadh,
I know your first trip to Paris was a disappointment, but am hoping it’s not too late to fall in love, dog shit and all?
J x
I run my fingers over Jack’s initial. Outside, the sun is slowly starting to rise, waking everything up – including Enzo, our neighbour’s German Shepherd, a hateful creature, whose incessant barking and snarls have put Ari off dogs for life. Sometimes, I fantasise a police car on patrol will spot Enzo and decide they need him on the force. Maybe today will be the day. I smile, thinking of Leonard. He was right. Mornings, they’re full of potential.
The kettle comes to the boil. I place Jack’s card back on the fridge and fill my mug with hot water. Taking a seat, I grab a nectarine from the fruit bowl. It’s been there days. I’d expected it to have gone off by now, but it’s still good. I take a bite, its juice running down my chin. My phone is lying face down beside the fruit bowl. I scan the room. Everything is pretty much as it was when we got here ten years ago. I’d planned on renovating the kitchen as soon as I had the money, but over time, I realised the carcasses were already good, the foundations solid.
I reach for my phone, log onto the SNCF website, and book a train ticket to Paris .