Looking forward to it. xxx
In my London lunch hour, I booked tickets on the Eurostar to Paris and the TGV to Macon with a stopover in Paris on the Saturday night. It would have been possible to do the full journey in a single day, but I hadn’t seen Paris for a long time. I emailed the arrival time to Angelina, copying in Charlie.
I got an email straight back—from Charlie.
Got it. Thanks. All good. What’s your mobile number? Mine below. Will meet you at Macon TGV station. You’ll probably recognise my wife… Any probs, just call. Any food prefs? Looking forward to meeting you. Charlie.
I was going to be living with this guy for a week. Did he know I was Angelina’s former lover? I was not going to take anything for granted. Claire knew about Angelina, but only in concept. I had not mentioned her in living memory. I doubted she would remember her name.
I texted Charlie my mobile number and did a quick internet search, turning up two Australian Charles Achesons. ‘Director—Mergers and Acquisitions Partners’ looked a better bet than ‘Legendary Try Against All Blacks’.
Late Thursday night, at my mother’s insistence, I emailed Angelina again: Anything I can bring? There was no reply—they were probably on the plane.
My mother was supportive of the break with Australian friends. Small doses of each other went a long way and ‘It’ll give you both a chance to think about things.’
To confuse the situation further, Claire texted me.
Sheilagh came over totally distraught. Thought it was her fault. I set her straight, but you should contact her. Stay safe. We should talk. Call me when you’re ready. Elvis missing you. Love, Claire.
I had texted Stuart with the news the previous day, and he would have told Sheilagh. It had not occurred to me that she would put herself in Claire’s shoes—or, more likely, imagine herself catching Chad in the same circumstances. A hug is just a hug, unless you’re looking for an explanation for your partner’s changed behaviour. And ‘I was comforting a friend whose marriage had broken up’ is a perfectly good explanation unless you already suspect there’s something going on.
I texted Sheilagh:
Claire and I have split up. As you know, we have been doing our separate things for a while now. Absolutely nothing to do with you. I’m OK. Kill em on Tuesday. Beatles first single was My Bonnie.
Then I texted Claire to tell her I had contacted Sheilagh and would be spending a week or so in France with friends from Australia. I signed off Love, Adam. If my mother had been monitoring our messages, she would have wondered—aloud—what on earth the problem was.
Friday morning I did some shopping for her, packed my kit and took the train to London, where I put in a half-day with the client and checked into a hotel in the West End. Sunday and Angelina, not to mention Charlie, did not seem far away. There were so many unknowns. But what did I want?
Once, a long time ago, I had asked Claire for her project-manager take on why my client was ignoring sound advice that he had paid good money for.
‘You need to know where he’s coming from,’ she said. ‘Think about what he might be trying to achieve by rejecting your input. Make a list of all the possibilities.’
‘It could be anything. He doesn’t want to lose face; he wants to get rid of me; he actually believes I’m wrong…’
‘Write them all down and I’ll tell you which it is.’
In the end there were six items, after I’d resisted the urge to include the facetious ones.
Claire didn’t look at the list. ‘Number them a to f. And your answer is g: All of the above. People are complex. They’re never just pursuing one thing. Sometimes even contradictory things. So if one thing doesn’t work out, they’ve got something else.’
My list of goals for the visit to France would have included a reality check so I could ground myself before moving on with my life. Plus the chance to re-establish an old friendship. And, if I was honest with myself, I was hoping that there might be a terminal problem with her marriage that had led to her contacting me. In which case, the scenario that a day ago I had dismissed as an impossible fantasy might become reality: I might have another chance.
All of the above.
On the morning of my departure for France, it was raining. I gave up on trying to hail a taxi and caught the Tube. It was my forty-ninth summer in England. One word, one simple promise back in 1989, and at this moment I could have been riding home from the Australian Rules football on a Melbourne tram to the loving arms of Angelina and our three children. I could not imagine it. Too much time had passed.
There was, of all things, a piano at St Pancras station, an August Förster upright that had been painted a bluish green. It looked the worse for wear, and I would have assumed it was only for decoration had there not been an Eastern European-looking guy in his mid-twenties playing ‘C Jam Blues’ and sounding good with it. He finished, earned a round of applause from the half-a-dozen travellers standing around, then picked up his backpack and walked off.
It was less than four months since I had listened to the girl at Manchester station singing ‘Someone Like You’, and thought that I would never again feel alive enough to step up and play, but today I almost reflexively slipped onto the stool and did a big intro to ‘For Once in My Life’.
I sang my heart out and sensed a crowd building, responding to the volume and perhaps my enthusiasm.
The player who had preceded me reappeared. He gave me a grinning thumbs-up before fumbling in his backpack to produce a harmonica, a chromatic, the authentic Stevie Wonder instrument. I nodded back and he played a solo, giving it as much as I had been giving, the two of us owning St Pancras station at 8 a.m. on a wet Saturday morning.
I was swept up in the euphoria of playing, of being free and of limitless possibility. More than that, I felt a change, perhaps one that had already happened but was only now announcing itself, a rising sense of confidence, of self-worth. I was twenty-two years older and wiser than when I last saw Angelina. If I had another chance to touch what my heart had been dreaming of, I was going to take it.
Part 2
23
As I was waiting for the train, browsing the WHSmith, a slim blond woman of about forty in black jeans and high heels came up beside me.
‘Excuse me, but I just wanted to say you were great. I was feeling flat and you’ve made my day. So thank you.’
She gave me a smile that invited a longer conversation.
‘My pleasure. Thank you.’
‘Going to Paris?’
‘Just for tonight. Visiting friends near Macon.’
‘Do you know Paris well?’
‘Not that well, but I’m only in transit.’
‘It’s home for me. I commute to London.’
‘Well, safe journey. Thanks for taking the trouble to say you liked the playing. Makes it worthwhile.’
She hesitated for a moment before walking off.
On the train, I indulged a brief fantasy about waiting for her at the Gare du Nord in Paris. It gave me a clearer idea of what I wanted. Which wasn’t a casual encounter or even a new relationship. Not a completely new one.
I dined alone in Paris at the French version of McDonald’s. I had thought about visiting the Buddha Bar at the Hotel de Crillon, but did not feel like fancy food by myself. Eating my McChicken Burger I wondered why we—Claire and I—had not done this more often. A couple of hours on the train reading or listening to music; a chance to refresh the French; expenses covered by a day or two of work that I enjoyed doing.
It had been fourteen years since we spent an impulsive weekend in a hotel on the Ile St-Louis. We had been renting in London and decided to buy our own place. This was long before I downshifted to working part-time, and we were getting close to having a viable deposit. We were beginning to accept that there would not be kids, and that the romantic stage of our relationship had passed. The house gave us something else to focus on.
Then, one of the guys I had worked with in Australia
got in touch about a scheme he had bought into. A mathematician had come up with a way to make a killing on the lottery—the lotto. We just had to cover all the numbers and pay a lot of entry fees.
The proposition made sense, it was legal, and the logistics appealed to my technical mind. I put in some money. We took out a US state lottery outright, and after covering the overheads we put what was left of the winnings back in the kitty for the next strike.
I bought some more units and eventually lost the lot. There may have been fraud on the part of the organisers, and there was some talk of the investors suing them, but there came a point where I had to accept that I would not be seeing my contribution to the house deposit again.
I had not told Claire about the plan or the ongoing saga. I confessed over dinner at home. God knows how she must have felt: I had broken her trust as well as her dream. She just got up and walked out the front door. Did not even slam it.
An hour later she came back, wet from the rain. Her composure had not extended to taking an umbrella.
‘We should go to Paris,’ she said. ‘We haven’t been anywhere except Randall and Mandy’s because of the house. Now it’s gone, there’s nothing to stop us.’
I was lost for words. It was in character for Claire to put mistakes behind her, to forgive and look ahead, but this was almost beyond belief. I deserved at least to be berated and screamed at. But Claire didn’t do screaming and abuse.
Dining at the Buddha Bar, where Claire—Claire who didn’t like fancy food and wine—made a mistake with the conversion rate and ordered a £300 bottle of Burgundy, I began to understand. My gamble had been a bet each way. If I won, we would have been able to buy a house immediately. If I lost, our relationship would be over. I had left it up to the lottery, but Claire had taken back control.
A year later, Claire’s mother died and left her the house in Norwich.
I nearly missed my train at the Gare de Lyon, having forgotten to put my watch forward an hour, then spent the two-hour journey to Macon trying to decide what to wear. By the time I had settled on a grey T-shirt and suit jacket with my jeans, and made a dash to the bathroom to change, the train was pulling into the station.
The platform was crowded with passengers waiting to board. I caught the perfume first, the fragrance I could recognise at twenty paces, then the guy in front of me stepped aside and she was there.
She was different. Her lips were less full, her cheekbones more pronounced, and she was slimmer, more elegant. Her hair, the same dark brown, was shorter—as I’d seen in her Skype avatar. She was wearing sunglasses, a white top with an abstract design, a short jacket, light-blue jeans and high-heeled shoes. Rings with big stones on her middle and index fingers, which were wirier than I remembered.
We stood, still, silently appraising each other. Neither of us spoke. The crowd dispersed and the train pulled out, leaving us alone and I knew, absolutely knew, two things. The first was that, whatever the cost and whatever might happen, I had made the right decision in seeing her again. I was back in Shanksy’s bar, the night I played ‘I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You’, and saw her waiting for me, holding a Fallen Angel and trying to hide her nervousness.
The second thing I knew, without anything to justify it except whatever was wordlessly passing between us, was that she felt the same way—and had not expected to.
‘Say something,’ she said.
It took me a few moments. ‘You are so beautiful. Still.’
It sounded just as sappy as when I had sung it for her to get a message past Tina.
She smiled broadly, then kissed me on each cheek. Her hands were on my shoulders and mine lightly on her back, and suddenly we pulled ourselves into each other, as though it was Melbourne airport in 1989 and she rather than Jacinta had come running to make it right. I held her for a few seconds, then we both let go, not awkward or embarrassed, just accepting that we had to rejoin the real world, where she lived with her husband who was waiting in the car for us.
As she stepped back, I registered what she was wearing around her neck. It was the locket I had given her for Christmas in 1989. Did it still have our photo in it?
‘Are you okay, I mean with what’s happened with Claire?’ she said as we walked the length of the platform to the exit.
‘It’s been coming for a while. I think we’ll stay friends. Which was the problem, in some ways.’
‘What about our being in touch?’
‘There were other things.’
Charlie was waiting in the drop zone, arms crossed on the roof of a little Renault. He was a big guy, about six foot five, mid-fifties, brown hair turning grey, neatly trimmed beard, carrying quite a bit of weight over a well-muscled frame.
He shook my hand and was friendly in that instant Australian way.
‘You okay in the back seat? We don’t have far to go.’
He squeezed himself into the driver’s seat and I was reminded of Mr Incredible, the cartoon superhero, in his too-small car. I got in behind Angelina.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s our caretaker’s car—he smokes like a chimney. Still raining in England? You didn’t tell me, any food preferences?’
‘Happy to go with the flow,’ I said. ‘If you’re planning steak tartare, I might give it a turn in the pan.’
‘You okay with offal?’
‘Lamb’s fry and kidneys for breakfast.’
In line with my healthy-eating program, I had been starting my day with muesli and yoghurt until the break-up with Claire, but my mother was not for turning from the full English catastrophe.
‘Oh yuck,’ said Angelina. ‘I’m going to be sick.’
‘Good man,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re going to eat well.’
It was apparent he was a keen chef, and it was equally apparent that he saw me as an audience for his cooking. There were worse ways for my ex-lover’s husband to see me.
We stopped at a bar in Cluny and sat at a table on the street, Angelina beside me and Charlie opposite. It was a sunny day, I had a salade niçoise, we shared some fries, a double line of little kids walked by hand in hand, and that is about all I can recall. The town is, by all accounts, quaint and full of history.
Charlie was studiedly relaxed, leaning back in his chair, ordering a small carafe of red wine, a salad for Angelina and a steak for himself in bad but confident French. He was wearing a dark-blue sports jacket, blue open-neck shirt, neutral slacks and a plain but large-faced gold watch.
There was something familiar about him, though I had not seen any images when I googled him. Possibly he just resembled someone I had worked with or a public figure: a touch of Peter Ustinov, perhaps.
And Angelina. I was trying to join the dots between the young woman who had said I love you, the older, sophisticated woman opposite me sipping wine and delivering a history lesson on the abbey, and the disembodied source of flirtatious emails.
She did not stop talking.
‘It’s warm, isn’t it? I don’t want to drink too much. Charlie will have a bottle open as soon as we’re in the door…’
She picked at her salad, made a trip to the bar for a soda water, then excused herself to go to the bathroom.
Charlie smiled a smile that said: She isn’t always like this. As we both know.
It suited me. Shut up and listen would be a good principle until I worked out what was going on.
‘How’s the red?’ said Charlie.
‘Good, ta.’
‘Local plonk. Gamay.’
He mopped up the last of the pepper sauce that had accompanied his steak and washed it down with the remains of the red. As Angelina walked back to the table, he raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. It was the look of approval that Stuart would give if a fetching young woman passed our table at the pub—a look that I would endeavour to ignore.
Angelina would have earned the nod from Stuart, but Charlie was her husband. On my part, the frisson I had felt on the platform was morphing into desir
e. The glass of wine hadn’t helped.
Whatever the marital or political correctness of drawing attention to his wife’s attractiveness, Charlie was no Richard. He may have been a lawyer, but that was all they seemed to have in common. Physically he was the antithesis: Richard had been neat and compact. Charlie exuded bonhomie, whereas my impressions of Richard had been of meanness and a controlling, sniping possessiveness. He would have either ordered with a Parisian accent or expected the waiter to understand English.
Angelina may have been precipitous in jumping from one marriage to another, but she had not married the same man twice. Charlie was punching his PIN into the waiter’s machine before I had a chance to offer.
‘Since you didn’t tell me what you eat,’ said Charlie, as we drove home, ‘I thought I’d wait till I had the picture.’
The village was small, but it had the basics: post office, hairdresser, a huge pharmacy with a condom dispenser outside, a couple of bars and a tourist office which Charlie informed me was closed on weekends, in line with French traditions of service.
He stopped at the small supermarket, jumped out of the car and signalled for Angelina to take his place behind the wheel.
‘I’ll walk home,’ he said.
It was about half a mile up a hill to the stone house, far enough from the centre commercial to be pretty much in the countryside. I had joined Angelina in the front of the car.
‘Is this how you imagined me when we were emailing?’ she said. ‘Or were you thinking about big breasts and flawless skin?’
‘I was imagining Jessica Rabbit. While I was eating my lunch at work. Where were you?’
‘In bed.’
‘So what were you imagining? A twenty-six-year-old with a beard?’
‘How was the Lake District?’
She had not had to imagine. She had only to search for my image on the web, where one of the walking group must have posted photos. The fit outdoorsman, impeccably kitted out, surrounded by friends. Not a bad image.