Chapter 5 #2
Still troubled, she pulls on a dressing gown and descends the stairs, then adds wood to the burner and opens the slats. This is starting to feel like a morning ritual – starting to feel like the normal way one starts a day. The sensation of following a routine is reassuring.
She makes a pot of coffee and sits staring out at the colourless landscape waiting for the sunrise to light everything up.
She sips her coffee and thinks about her conflicting thoughts. Stay. Go home. She refuses to reconsider the other one.
She imagines returning home to reclaim her family.
Because she really could do that, couldn’t she?
She could pack her bags right now, drive to the airport and buy an overpriced ticket to fly today.
She imagines Harry finding her on the sofa.
She imagines the look of surprise on his face. That would be a thing to see!
But what if she arrives to find a mystery woman has replaced her?
A mystery woman. There! That horrific thought is out in the open.
It’s not the first time she has imagined Harry might be having an affair, but it is the first time she has really let her mind go there since she got to France – since she left Harry alone, for months on end, to get up to whatever the hell he wants.
So might she really get home to find another woman in their bed? And if she did, would Wendy even have the gumption to tell her to leave?
Perhaps moving out is where she went wrong. Because though her reasons were good ones – because she really was protecting her family by doing so – she can’t help but feel that it was that specific gesture that, ironically, made them think she didn’t care.
If a new woman really is there, then Wendy’s moving out would definitely be the act that created a vacancy.
She regrets inviting Jill. Because of course, with Jill coming, she can’t go home, can she? No, she thinks. That’s rubbish. Jill wouldn’t mind at all. She’d probably be overjoyed for her.
Is going home really what I want?
She pictures the scene again. She’d let herself in while everyone was out and have dinner ready when they all got home. ‘Enough is enough,’ she’d tell Harry. ‘This has all gone on for too long. I’m back.’
The idea feels exciting. She has butterflies in her chest just thinking about it. And it’s got to be more constructive than sitting here, on her own, on a freezing mountain in France, hasn’t it? Because what did she ever expect to achieve by being here?
The backlit peak she’s been staring at starts to blaze as the sun moves above it. A ray of sunlight hits her left cheek.
She moves her head lower so that she can feel the rays warming her eyelids, then sits back and watches as the strip of sunlight begins to stretch downwards with surprising speed, along her arm and leg, and then onward across the floor until the whole apartment is bathed in orange light.
She pulls her new slippers on and steps outside to sniff the pine-scented air.
The frost on the grass is already melting and steam is rising from the ground creating horizontal strips of brilliance where the sunlight cuts through the trees.
My God, it’s so beautiful. It’s like a little treasure, purpose designed to send her a message, a message she really needs this morning: that being alive to see this is a gift.
Of course she’s not going home! This is why she’s here – to reconnect with life.
She blows through pursed lips at her own madness.
You’re all over the place today, she tells herself. But that’s OK, too.
She eats muesli and throws the leftover bread out for the birds.
She locks the cabin and starts the car. She has decided to return to the supermarket for a longer-life form of bread.
But as she passes by the bakery she sees that it’s open, so she swings around the roundabout and returns, pulling up in the little car park.
The shop, overnight, has been transformed. Where yesterday it looked almost derelict, today it’s sparkling. The windows have been cleaned and are bordered with coloured flashing lights. The wooden interior glows orange, like a lump of luminous amber.
As she pushes the door, an old-fashioned bell announces her arrival. A woman appears from another room, backing into view, her arms laden with baguettes. The smell of freshly baked bread is intoxicating.
‘Bonjour !’ the woman says brightly, speaking over one shoulder as she loads the bread into a rack.
‘Bonjour,’ Wendy replies, taking a deep breath and promising herself she’ll do better than she did with the post lady.
‘Deux secondes !’ the woman says, as she continues to organise the bread.
Wendy scans her surroundings. There are four or five kinds of fresh bread, pizzas and quiches, and shelves stacked with honey and jam. There’s even a tiny vegetable section in the far corner.
‘Voilà !’ the woman says, turning to face her. ‘Je suis à vous.’
Wendy’s not quite sure what that means, but the hands on the hips and the inquisitive smile are easy enough to interpret.
‘Une baguette, s’il vous plait ?’ Wendy says, trying to sound like the woman in her French language app, trying not to think about how bad her accent must sound.
‘Tradition, aux céréales, ou normale ?’ the woman asks.
Wendy grimaces. Whatever she’s been asked definitely didn’t feature in the bakery lesson. In the app, the woman asks for, ‘Une baguette, s’il vous plait ?’ and the baker replies with the price.
The baker smiles at her and repeats her question more slowly, this time pointing to each kind of baguette. ‘Tradition … céréales … ou normale ?’
‘Oh,’ Wendy says. ‘Um, normale, s’il vous plait ? Non, tradition !’
‘Et avec ca ?’ the woman asks, placing the bread on the counter. ‘Anything else?’
‘Oh, um, une croissant et une pain au chocolat.’
‘Un,’ the woman corrects her. ‘Un croissant et un pain au chocolat.’
‘Oui,’ Wendy says, missing the point. ‘C’est ca. S’il vous plait ?’
As she steps back outside, she’s feeling pleased with herself. It’s only the smallest of victories, but it’s a victory all the same.
As she climbs back into her car, the postal van pulls up beside her and the post lady jumps out with a handful of letters. ‘Bonjour !’ she says brightly. ‘How you are today?’
‘Très bon !’ Wendy replies, emboldened by her success in the bakery.
‘Très bien,’ the young woman corrects. Then, faced with Wendy’s silence, ‘Moi, ca va aussi.’
Wendy frowns as she tries to decode individual words.
‘It means, I’m OK too,’ the girl says, as Wendy manages to work it out.
‘C’est bon,’ Wendy says. ‘Um, non… c’est bien ?’
The girl laughs. ‘We need to make work on your French,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ Wendy says. ‘Oui. I agree.’
‘Have a good day. I must…’ And then she waves the letters at Wendy and skips off in the direction of the bakery.
Back home – so, she’s starting to think of the cabin as home!
– she eats the bread with the remainder of yesterday’s soup.
The baguettes from the supermarket weren’t bad, especially when compared with the baguette-shaped pappy mush they sell back home.
But this bread is on a whole different level.
There’s a complex yeasty sourness to it that is so delicious she has to force herself to stop otherwise she could easily munch her way through the lot.
Lunch over and the dishes washed, for want of a more worthwhile project, she returns to the car park at the foot of the hiking trail from where she starts to make her way back up to the sphere.
Her legs are stiff and achy from the last time but it is this stiffness – and the lack of fitness the stiffness implies – that motivates her. Perhaps she’ll do this walk every day. Imagine how fit she’d be then!
As she reaches the final rise to the radar, she crosses paths with a couple coming down.
They say, ‘Bonjour,’ but without making eye contact, and she can tell that they’ve been arguing.
There’s something in the atmosphere around them – she can almost see the purple haze.
Their little terrier, Samson, would rather walk with her, too, and who could blame him for that?
He has to be sharply and repeatedly called to heel before, looking sad, he waddles off down the track.
The view from the top is obviously the same as yesterday, but in a way it’s completely remade by this different day. The atmosphere is more transparent than yesterday, making the blues of the sky and sea that much deeper.
She starts to take another photo, but then imagines how cool it would be if she could take identical photos from the exact same spot every day.
She could get them all printed up on a big poster, the panoramic strips shifting tint from top to bottom as the seasons progress.
So she checks the previous image and then chooses a landmark so she can stand on a specific rock every time.
It’s a pointless project in a way, and she can imagine how Jill or the kids would cynically roll their eyes if she told them.
Only Harry would get it. In fact, Harry would be positively enthusiastic about her venture.
He’d probably buy her an expensive camera and a tripod, just so she could do it properly.
Oh, Harry… We used to see eye-to-eye on so many things.
Anyway, enough of them, because it pleases her, this little project, and she’s not going to be put off by the fact that the right people wouldn’t like it, nor that the wrong person (Harry) would approve. She’s going to do it every day.
By the time she gets back to the car she’s cold – in fact, she’s positively chilled to the bone.
She needs a different kind of coat, something breathable but warm – something midway between the draughty duffle coat she has chosen today and her boil-in-the-bag puffer jacket.
Perhaps she’ll buy one when she’s out with Jill.
As she drives, she thinks about the reality of Jill’s impending visit, and she’s at a loss as to how it will go.
She can imagine Jill hating the remote cabin and complaining twenty-four/seven as easily as she can picture her falling in love with it and refusing to leave.
As she locks the car door, her phone buzzes in her pocket and once she’s indoors in the warm, she pulls off the duffle coat and perches on the back of the sofa to read it.
Harry: Can you give me a call this evening? I want to hear how it’s going. If I’m honest, I’m a bit worried about you. Haz xx
Two kisses, she thinks. That’s a turn-up for the books.
Perhaps this is going to turn out to be a good strategy after all. Perhaps it’s not absence but distance that makes a heart grow fonder.
‘A good strategy,’ she murmurs, echoing the thought out loud. Is that what she’s doing here? Is she strategising to get him back?
She shakes her head and sighs as she rises to make tea. Because once she knows the answer to that one, she’ll know the answer to everything.