Loving Amélie (11 page)

Japanese waitresses deftly
removed plates and replenished their drinks. They made appreciative faces and
cooing noises at the sleeping baby.

“Well, this baby thing is just
so
huge,
”
said Sara, choosing not to press him for meaning. “It’s like a wrecking ball
smashing into the side of our lives.”

“She is much more delightful
than that!” Chris protested, gently. He searched her face for evidence of the
unfailing friendship she had shown him for so many years. Where had the woman
gone who, only four days ago, was showing him how to change a nappy and wield a
baby bath?
 
“And she will only
change things for the better.”

Chris switched to tap water
– with Tash and Ian gone he needed to keep a particularly clear head for
night duties. Sara, therefore, drank twice the wine, cheered up and became
expansive, regaling him with tales from work and from Rick. She took off her
jacket, loosened her tethered hair and relaxed. Chris was glad of it; and
appreciated how gorgeous she was, as men eyed her appreciatively as they passed
their table, or as she swayed off to the ladies’, no doubt eyeing him too, with
envy. Amélie, for her part, slept on.

They had first met over twenty
years ago – both newcomers to London – getting horribly drunk on
Beaujolais Nouveau at a tacky boat party on the Thames, staggering home together
to the digs that Sara shared with former university pals, their sights set on a
night of passion. As the cheap purple booze flowed and civility waned, Chris
could hardly contain his mounting excitement to get under her shirt and into
her knickers. Even now, the sight of a Beaujolais label always reminded him of
the discomfort of a pair of jeans straining at the groin.

“Shall we make a pact that
whoever vomits first comes last?” she had drawled at him, through her
dishevelled ruddy mop of hair, occasionally pressing a finger to either his
lips or her own to ‘shush’ them and prevent waking her housemates. Chris
laughed like an idiot that night, before throwing up a tidal wave of puke into
somebody’s window box. It was still dripping the next day, he noticed, when he
left (sober, but thick headed) to make his way back across the city to his
brother’s flat.

The next time they met, still
sexually untested, Sara was one over the eight in an Irish bar near Tottenham
Court Road, sitting on a table wearing a very tight vest and cowboy boots,
lamenting the loss of the affections of a rugby prop forward.

“I am
so
glad you’re here,” she rasped, with
drunken difficulty, through the fog of smoke and blaring noise of the bar.
Chris had been helping to whitewash the cellar in Peter and Linda’s flat,
spurred on like a man with a possessed paintbrush at the prospect of easy sex
with a voluptuous girl later that evening.

“You are?”

“Because I want you to punch
his lights out, the bloody lying, cheating Irish wanker!”

Here was where Chris’s early
prospects tailed off, and would never recover – despite many other
drink-sodden opportunities for wanton sex with Sara. The other men were always
preternaturally large, or rich; and as Sara got older and more successful in
her own right, her quest for the combination of both qualities became something
of her Holy Grail. She was beginning to doubt her chances of ever finding her
Mr Right – Chris guessed this by how frequently she declared she ‘lived’
for her job in recruitment – when she met Richard Gale at a Christmas
drinks party she was throwing for her most prestigious clients; and, while his
wife and young family were ensconced elsewhere in suburban ignorance, they
began a very passionate affair. It was true she would never have looked twice
at him on the
Windsor
Belle
with a glass of cheap red wine in his hand, or in
Kilkenny’s Bar
–
he was lacking in both sense of humour
and
muscle power – but, the two of
them, in their late thirties, shared a mutual
 
imperative: to make money, to be sexually experimental and
to text each other only when absolutely necessary.

“Did you say
jealous?
” she
said, with a hiccup, in the sushi bar with Chris and his baby daughter. “You
know I have no ambitions in the baby department, cute as your little bundle of
joy is. And I love my Rick, I really do. He’s never going to leave his
wife
, but
that’s just the way it is.” She was wrapping her capacious bosom into a
Burberry mackintosh, flipping her curls over the collar. “Plus I have
you
, despite
your thing for the Amélies.”

“And would you really want to
wake up every day next to a man with no hair?”

“You know, in the words of
Norman Stanley Fletcher, you can sometimes be a charmless nerk,” Sara retorted,
teetering on her heels. “Anyway, I have enough hair for two.”

They hugged each other warmly
and Sara set sail for the tube station and Chris headed with his pushchair to
the bus stop.

“Text me lots!” she yelled; and
began apologetically shoving her way through the moving bodies. “Love you!”

Chapter Eleven

There was something predictably
aloof – and familiar – about the female French guard on the
EuroStar platform at St Pancras station that made Chris wonder why men ever
fell in love, and remained in love, with women like Amélie.

“You are late, sir. You must run.”

She clasped her walkie-talkie
to her chest with a manicured hand, as though it were a device with which she
could detonate a bomb to eliminate all the tardy train travellers in London and
Paris with one flick of a scarlet-tipped finger.

“Oh! You have a child, I am so
sorry,” she relented, raising her arm to a male colleague who was waiting by
the doors of the train. He, in turn, did not seem remotely affected by either
Chris’s lateness or the lady guard’s signal.

Tash and Ian had had the good
sense to purchase a buggy that collapsed down to a compact unit like a miracle
of modern design: the men had marvelled at this in Chris’s flat, and proceeded
to open and close it, making small noises of approval, while Tash looked on in
silent good humour.

Things had come a long way
since the enormous boat of a perambulator Chris’s mum had wheeled both him and
Peter around in back in the sixties. He remembered photographs of them both
fastened in at either end by a formidable system of reins: Peter had allegedly
worked out how to unchain himself and climb out, although only on one side, so
that he ended up dangling over one side, like an oversized pram toy.

With the buggy stowed away,
Chris settled himself and his daughter into their seat by the window. He was
beginning to relate to the people – usually women – who travelled
around the city with babies and small children. It was hard work, requiring
meticulous planning and the often unreliable generosity of strangers to ease
one’s passage. He realised, too, that Amélie – at around three months
– was an object of admiration; but that older children who sat in
gangways in heaps of two-year-old tantrums were treated with horror; and the
expressions of doting approval once directed at their parents could easily
change to glares of accusation and disdain. While he was deciding to make the
most of his time in the limelight of social acceptability, a young woman
sitting opposite Chris appeared from behind the screen of her laptop and said:

“Will it be very loud?”

“Do you mean the train or my
daughter?” he replied, self-righteous warmth spreading under his ribcage.

The woman gaped a little in
humorous embarrassment; as he leaned towards her and added:

“Only one of them has travelled
at 185 kilometres before.”

She was fresh-faced: her lack
of make-up serving to accentuate her blushes. She quickly offered her hand:
“I’m Gabriella Dixon. I am sorry to sound so rude. I don’t have children
myself; and people like me use trains as offices.”

“I am Chris. And this is Amélie.”
He resisted pointing out that becoming a parent didn’t eradicate your former
understanding of how the world worked: there was a two hour journey ahead and a
volley of sardonic ripostes could get tiresome.

“She is very small,” she said.

“And sometimes loud. If she
gets too much, I will take her out of the office.”

Gabriella Dixon closed her
laptop and covered it contritely with her hands:

“I feel like such a dragon now.
I wonder if I might make amends by getting you something from the buffet?
 
I was going to get a coffee.”

“A coffee would be good,” he
replied, lifting his arms to illustrate that his attendance on Amélie made the
favour a welcome one.

She waved aside Chris’s offer
of cash; and disappeared for the fifteen minutes it took for her to queue up
and buy refreshments.

“I imagine the baby won’t want
anything?” she said, resuming her seat with two large cartons of coffee. She
was slender, dressed in a business suit and devoid of bright colours or
jewellery. He mentally placed her in the category of a woman who takes ages to
choose from the menu.

“That’s very kind of you. I
usually have to do a bit of busking before someone buys me a coffee.”

She nervously ducked the joke:
“What do you do?”

“I run a restaurant.”

“That must be tricky with a
baby?”

“Well,” said Chris, sipping his
coffee, to remind him the conversation was worth it: it was at times like these
he felt his brother appear as a devil on his shoulder, saying something like
Send her back for
a doughnut
. “As you see, she is very small. Only a few months old. So it
hasn’t been tricky for long. Plus I run it with family.”

“I see.”

They drank coffee.

“And what do
you
do?” he
asked politely.

“I work for a pharmaceutical
company.”

The train began its sedate
journey out of London, gliding serenely along the rails with no prediction of
the high-speed action to come. Chris was prepared to be thrilled: or, at least,
diverted. The carriage was full. Gabriella, prim in her cream blouse, tapped
away at her keyboard, occasionally assailing his dozing senses with wafts of
her scent: more woody than floral, like an aftershave almost – probably
the same perfume she had worn for years.

He pre-empted Amélie’s first
stirrings from sleep since leaving the flat as her need for a change and a
feed; and he left his seat for a while to perform his parental duty and return
with a bottle warmed up by the jolly buffet attendant, a dark-skinned Frenchman
who appeared to greet every customer like meeting an old friend. Chris wondered
whether he was wasted on such a trivial role in life; or whether the world had
simply become far too accustomed to dispirited customer service.

“I thought I might have
frightened you away,” said Gabriella Dixon, who looked as though she had been
waiting for him, with her laptop set aside and (if he wasn’t mistaken) the
addition of a hint of lip gloss.

“Duty called,” he said.

Amélie consumed half her lunch
with wide-eyed restraint; and sat up on Chris’s knee to somehow take stock of
her latest environment. She was wearing the knitted strawberry hat Sara had
sent as a parting gift ‘to make her look like a girl’; and there was something
about the style that did just that, transforming her universal baby features
into an image that was more feminine and delicately pretty. Like her mum.

“She is like you,” said
Gabriella. “What is her name again?”

“Amélie.”

“Ah! Is her mother in Paris?”

“Yes,” said Chris, and found
himself waggling his knee to distract his daughter from the deceit:
You won’t tell,
will you?

“My parents would love me to
have children,” his new friend confided in him, rather wistfully.

“Do you have a partner?”

“No,” Gabriella replied.
“Although my sister is married, but can’t have kids. She was born without a
womb.”

“Would you do the honours, and I
will get the coffee this time?” Chris decided to interject; not wishing to
dwell on whether Gabriella’s current flush of colour was as a result of
confessing her lack of a mate or her sister’s infertility. He left Amélie in
her bewildered but not unwilling grip and made his way back to his less
complicated friend serving drinks in the buffet carriage.

He received a call from Linda.

“How’s the
trip
?”

“It’s fine, so far. St Pancras
is never that intrepid.”

“Chris, I just wanted you to
know we love you; and to say sorry if Peter has been odd about stuff. You know
what he’s like.”

Chris looked at the scene from
the window; feeling the gentle banking of the train as it swallowed up the
curves of the French countryside. A sense of his brother Peter moved in and out
of his consciousness: it hadn’t changed from childhood, like the taste of
Marmite or the texture of a Lego brick.

“Thank you, both. We will be in
touch when we get to the hotel.”

Le Gare du Nord
loomed
into sight while Chris and Amélie were sleeping. He had Gabriella Dixon’s
mobile number and address in London and Paris on his phone. Lying on his chest,
his daughter smelled of the woman’s woody perfume which mingled rather
pleasantly with her usual scent of Johnson’s baby products. He half-dreamt of her
taking him by the hand, telling him everything was alright in a peremptory but
comforting tone. He peered at her through his eyelashes, while she concentrated
on her work screen; absent-mindedly scratching her neck where one wisp of pale
hair kept irritating her skin.