30. Cat
CAT
Tuesday. Third week of October, the fields cut back to stubble, radio on, the goat screaming at a bird somewhere outside. Iris at the table doing something unspeakable to a spreadsheet.
I'm browning shallots.
And then, out of nowhere, my hands go cold.
It's the car keys I think of first. That's always how it starts. The keys on the hook by the door, and how long it would take to get to Marseille, and whether the ferry runs overnight.
Nothing's happened. That's the worst of it. Nothing has happened at all.
I put the spoon down, because I don't trust my hand with it.
"Iris."
"Mm."
"I want to leave."
The tapping stops.
She doesn't look up straight away. When she does, her face is very careful, and I watch her decide not to say the first thing she thought of.
"Right now?"
"Right now."
"Something I've done?"
"No."
"Something you've done?"
"No." My voice comes out strange. "It's just here."
She looks at me a long moment.
Then she looks back down at the spreadsheet.
"Okay," she says.
I stare at her. "That's it?"
"Were you after a parade?"
"I said I wanted to leave."
"And you're still standing there." She types something. "So it can't be that urgent."
I open my mouth. Close it.
"Pass the salt," she says.
I pass the salt.
The shallots have caught a bit. I scrape them off the bottom of the pan and add the wine, and the smell comes up, and the radio changes songs, and behind me Iris types, and types, and types.
By the time I'm plating up, my hands are warm again.
She doesn't mention it that night. Or in the morning. Or at all.
I keep waiting for the bill.
It never comes.
Mathilde corners me at the pass on Thursday, in the ten-minute lull between service and prep, and says, without any preamble at all:
"When I retire, you should buy this place."
I nearly drop a sauté pan.
"What?"
"Les Oliviers. When I retire." She's wiping down a board while she says this, entirely unbothered. "I am sixty-nine. I have a bad hip and a sister in Nice who is deeply irritating and lives beside the sea. I am not doing this forever."
"Mathilde—"
"You'd want to change the menu, which is fine, because my menu is thirty years old and I'm bored of it." She holds up a finger. "Not the daube. You may have everything except the daube."
"You want to sell me the bistro."
"I want to sell it to somebody who loves this village and understands what this room means to people. And unfortunately that appears to be an Englishwoman." She shrugs, magnificently. "The universe is cruel."
I stand in the middle of her kitchen holding a pan.
"I'd have to talk to Iris," I say.
"Obviously you'd have to talk to Iris." Mathilde snorts. "She'll have a spreadsheet before you've finished the sentence."
She is not wrong.
I walk home through the stubble and let myself think about it properly for the first time.
The bistro and the distillery. A restaurant and a lavender business, side by side, one feeding the other. Iris has half of it built already — she's been quietly making supplier calls for a month and thinks I haven't noticed, which is adorable, because she leaves the tabs open.
We could actually do this.
We could build a thing that outlives us.
And the thought doesn't send me running.
That's what stops me dead in a field, in the cold, at half past six in the evening. The idea of a whole life — years of it, decades of it, boring parts and all — does not make me want to get into the car.
It makes me want to get home.
Which is, I suppose, how I come to ruin a perfectly good dinner.
I had a plan. I'd like that noted. I had an excellent plan — a proper one, with a date and a location and a ring I have not yet bought and a speech I have not yet written — scheduled for some vague future moment when I would be a calmer and more impressive person.
The plan survives until pudding.
Iris is telling me about a supplier in Aix who has been rude to her on the telephone twice, and she's doing the man's voice, and she's doing it badly, and she has a fleck of tarte tatin on her chin, and the lamp over the table is doing something completely unforgivable to her hair.
And I hear myself say:
"Marry me."
Iris stops mid-word.
The kitchen goes extremely quiet. Even the goat, somewhere out in the dark, appears to be waiting.
"What," she says.
"Oh, God." I put my hands over my face. "No. Not like that. That's not— that was not the plan."
"There was a plan?"
"There was an outstanding plan, Iris. It had a venue—"
"You just proposed to me over tarte tatin."
"I'm aware of what I did."
"With no ring."
"I'm aware—"
"While I was doing an impression of a man from Aix."
"You were doing it badly," I say, with enormous dignity, from behind my hands.
There's a long silence.
Then I feel her take hold of my wrists and pull my hands down off my face — and she's looking at me, and she isn't laughing, and her eyes are absolutely swimming.
"Say it again," she says.
"Iris—"
"Cat." Her voice cracks straight down the middle. "Say it again."
So I do.
I have spent my entire life leaving before anybody could leave me. I got very good at it. It's the single most reliable thing about me. I've run from jobs and cities and people, and once from a small stone farmhouse in Provence with a woman standing in the doorway of it calling my name.
And I sit in that woman's kitchen — my kitchen, our kitchen, my grandmother's kitchen — and I take both her hands, and I don't run.
"Marry me," I say. "I've got no ring. I've got no speech.
I had a plan and I've just set fire to it.
But I'm not going anywhere, Iris, and I want to say that out loud, in front of everyone we know — so that when I get frightened, and I will get frightened, I'll have told the entire village and I won't be able to weasel out of it. "
Iris makes a sound that's half laugh, half sob.
"That," she says, "is the least romantic proposal I have ever heard in my life."
"Yes."
"It has weaselling in it."
"It has weaselling in it. Yes."
"Cat." She's crying properly now, and grinning like an idiot. "It's perfect. Yes. God. Yes."
She's out of her chair and into my lap before I've fully registered it, and there is tarte tatin involved somewhere in the process, and neither of us cares in the slightest.
Much later — plates still on the table, candle burned down, Iris asleep against my shoulder on the sofa like something switched off at the wall — I sit in the dark of my grandmother's sitting room and look at the photograph on the mantel.
Two women. A village hall. Six people and a very poor cake.
They waited thirty-three years.
I look down at the woman asleep on me, with her fist closed in my shirt even now, even unconscious, in case I go anywhere.
"We're not waiting," I tell them.
The house doesn't answer. It never does.
But the shutter knocks twice against the stone, the way it always does, and I choose to take it personally.