A French Wedding (27 page)

Chapter 21

Juliette

J
uli
ette
h
as forgotten
how cold the kitchen is in the morning; that it takes a while for the ovens to heat the space and that the small window above the sink, looking out to a tiny car park, receives no sunlight until the afternoon. Which doesn't matter when your shift starts at two pm but
n
ow
it is only six am. Juliette reaches under the counter and pulls out the sweater she brought with her. She shakes out her shoulders and gets back to work. She rubs flour into the counter, not even glancing at the stand mixer with the dough hook already attached. Doing it by hand is the very point of it
.

Juliette had sent Louis a text message last night. Did he mind? She still had a key. He had replied quickly.
Bien sûr.
Of course
.
He hadn't changed the locks.
Sans problème.
He did owe her at least this favour, if not a few more, given how cheaply Juliette had sold him the restaurant. It was still doing well too, she learned occasionally, she got messages from her Parisian friends and read reviews every now and then. Apart from some new tables and chairs, the place looked pretty much the same. Oh, and a new till, Juliette observed, it had been needing that. Juliette was always more interested in the food than the systems. That was why Louis was the right person to have
Delphine
, he cared about those sorts of things, he was earnest and diligent and would take good care of the place. And he had.

Juliette pushes the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows. More flour (and yeast and water), shaggy little bits of it now sticking to the knit. She feels the dough under her hands and pushes and pulls at it as she had done a thousand times before. This she knows. Other things, her life, what to do now, she doesn't know. But making dough helps Juliette to feel her way into the future. To hold the possibilities lightly in her mind, while her hands stretch the flour and yeast, sugar and butter and water. Push, pull, this way, that way. Dough and ideas becoming more elastic.

She was rude to Max. Not rude exactly, but it wasn't Juliette's place to tell Max what she thinks, to try to get him to see things the way she sees things. Juliette isn't the boss, not like she'd been here at
Delphine
. She had overstepped the mark. Good work is hard to find in Douarnenez.

Plus, Max is right. Helen is not Juliette's. Will never be Juliette's. If she does not belong to Max then Helen will belong to someone else. Someone vibrant, someone who has their act together, someone with more money, someone from her world. A world of rock stars and artists and gallery openings with trays of glasses filled with champagne that someone else has poured, that someone else passes around. A world of trips to Mexico with the sun shining bright, cocktails by a pool, the sharp smell of chlorine on bikini fabric. Perhaps, later, Juliette will read about Max and Helen together, see their picture in one of those big glossy magazines. A bohemian wedding, somewhere summer lasts all year, where the groom wears no shoes and the bride wears sunglasses and a short dress. Helen belonging to Max, just like Max said.

That is the way of things. The way things work. Juliette knows this. Theirs is the love story of all the love stories. A beautiful woman, a handsome man. Waiting for one another. Belonging to one another.

It is the way of things. The way it is always written.

With love you don't always get to choose.

Juliette pauses, hands in dough. She can feel it pressing back, a little, against her fingers, as she rests them. Resistance. Not much. But enough.

Juliette learned to make
kouign-amann
in Stephanie Jeunet's bakery kitchen. Her mother had charmed Stephanie into it, like she often did. Plus her mother liked to be busy. Yoga, pilates, bridge, her teaching, she busied and gathered and collected and made things, as if her hands couldn't be trusted when idle. Stephanie Jeunet had laughed at her mother's hopelessness with the dough but Juliette, she observed, had an instinct for it. They tried several more times for her mother to master it, each visit and lesson bringing a couple of big bottles of wine. The two women got tipsy while Juliette, the girl between them, watched and learned and grew in confidence. She was always steps ahead of her mother, washing her hands while her mother's were still in dough.

‘Isn't she a wonder?' Juliette's mother had said once, looking down at her sticky fingers.

‘I could use a daughter like her,' Stephanie confessed. ‘I don't know who will take over when I have to give it up.'

Juliette remembered how she had turned away, pretended not to listen, the heat of the oven on her face, as she dried her hands on a tea towel that hung near the oven door.

‘There were two of her,' Juliette's mother said quietly. ‘Irish twins.'

‘What is that?'

‘Babies born in the same calendar year … But Violette was born sleeping.'

Juliette tried not to hear the restrained emotion in her mother's voice, a singing like quality. The quiet, gentle voice she used for soothing and for lullabies. Stephanie had reached over and squeezed her mother's shoulder while her hands were still pressed into dough. Juliette had watched it all out of the corner of her eye, her mother's expression strange and bittersweet.

‘Don't pity me,' she had whispered to Stephanie, barely loud enough for Juliette to hear. ‘My heart is full.'

Juliette sees that she has been feeling the weight of two lives, two sets of expectations on her shoulders. She has been scared and ashamed, trying to make herself smaller, to make her life smaller. Reducing it to the bare minimum; to simply waking each day and doing only what she needs to do and nothing more, to not thinking too much. Not wanting too much. Reasoning that she doesn't deserve to want for much. It is safer this way. Safer to be in Douarnenez, her parents' cottage with mementos cluttered around her. Safer to have a basic job, a simple, small life. To serve others and bury her own desires. Her own truth.

Juliette pushes against the dough one more time. It is ready. She forms it, gently, into a large, misshapen ball and lifts it into the bowl, covering it over with plastic wrap. She stands back, arms at her sides. Juliette doesn't have all the answers. There is no plan. But there is one thing to do and she will do it and somehow it will lead to something else. She can feel it. The same way she can feel the dough, making the
kouign-amann
by hand, from scratch, without a recipe. It is embedded in her sensory memory – the smells of the market as a child, the taste of hot pastry and rich butter on her tongue, the laughter between her mother and Stephanie Jeunet, as she tried to show her mother how, Jean-Paul's smile when he first tasted it, the others she has made it for since – the women she has loved, those that loved her and those that didn't, the patrons at her restaurant, Celine,
bien sûr
, and Max. It is a knowing in Juliette's fingers and muscles and bones. A knowing that reaches back into the past but out into the future too. The times she will make it, the people she will love, the possibilities she will grasp, the heartaches, the stepping forward of time punctuated with love and loss and laughter.

Juliette will do what she knows she must do.

She will tell Helen how she feels. About who she is.

She will tell her about Violette.

She will tell it all.

Because she knows the price of an untold truth.

Though telling is a kind of madness. Though Helen is not hers to love.

Chapter 22

Max

H
ospitals don't make Max feel sad. They make Max feel carved out; empty. Max has never lost someone at a hospital. When people leave Max's life they just vanish. Or he does. Either way it just ends and there is nothing. Person, gone.

Nina, Lars and Hugo are in the hospital room with the French doctor, who looked younger than Max expected. The consultation room has a frosted glass window in the closed door that reflects Max's face. Max's old face. He tries not to look at his face very often. Women he sleeps with look at their faces a lot. They spend a lot of time in his bathroom putting stuff on their faces, and then they spend a lot of time using other stuff to take the original stuff off and then, in the morning, putting the first lot of stuff back on again. Max stares at the face. It's the face of a stranger.

There aren't enough seats in the corridor, so Max and Eddie stand by a vending machine while Beth and Sophie sit at the other end of the hallway. Beth with her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead, Sophie frowning at a phone, next to a man in a tweed jacket who has a walking cane between his knees. Beth wears a floral dress with a knitted cardigan; her lips unpainted. Inside, somehow, like a Russian doll, is a baby. Max cannot bend his head around it.

Max glances down the hospital corridor. Rosie has taken Helen to find coffee for everyone and to try and get hold of Soleil again. Max has barely spoken to anyone this morning, after waking up thirsty, exhausted and confused on the couch. He doesn't want to look at Helen or Rosie. He doesn't want to see any sickness in Nina's face or the baby in Beth or the confusion in Eddie. The only person he can bear to look at is Lars, who is in the room, so he stares at the little window in the closed door instead, his miserable reflection staring back at him.

He is lost. The only thing worse than unspoken love, Max realises now with stabbing clarity, is unrequited love. The kind you know will never, ever be returned. The feeling is an old memory. One of his mother's shoes, left by itself in the wardrobe, the ashtray she always used pushed to the back of a cupboard, a heavy sensation in the air. Hope evaporated leaves a solidity that cannot be explained. It settles on a person. There is no word for it. Max leans back into the wall behind him.

‘You'd never think it,' Eddie murmurs. ‘Nina. I mean.'

Max nods, though he wants to close his eyes and disappear.

‘She's always been so tough.'

‘She'll be okay,' Max mumbles, though he is much less sure than he was. The whole world is unsure this morning. Like he's woken up after the apocalypse. Max feels unhinged. It is best everyone else assumes he is worried for Nina. It is bad enough that he is so selfish he cannot worry about Nina right now. He can only feel sorry for himself. What was it someone told him once? A person can only hold one fear, one grief, at a time? That the human brain was a blessing like that? Maybe it was one of Helen's artists. Someone Max had met at an opening. One of those guys that wore his hair long and shoes pointed and meant to be ‘ironic' as often as possible. Max's mind shifts to imagining Helen fucking one of those guys, and his hands form fists and he near punches a hole in the wall behind him if it isn't for Eddie clearing his throat.

‘Hey, mate; look I'm sorry about … well, Beth didn't know you were there.'

It takes Max a long moment to figure out what Eddie is talking about. And for his heart rate to slow, his hands to unclench. He glances at Beth, but she clearly cannot hear them.

‘We're, ah, still working it out,' Eddie says.

‘Oh, yeah, sure, mate,' Max says.

‘Trying to decide what's best. For her, me … well, all of us.'

Max turns to look at his friend. Eddie's face looks older too. That makes Max feel a little better for a split second. He nods. ‘Sure, sure. No need to apologise. You'll work it out.'

Eddie nods back, staring at the hospital door with the window. ‘We haven't been together for very long. It's sudden. She's young. I'm not. I'm pretty terrible with kids. Not that I've had much … We just need to work out what is best.'

Max nods. He can do this. He can talk about something other than Helen. Other than the enormous hole roundhouse-kicked through his chest. ‘What does Beth want?'

Eddie looks at Beth and then back down to the floor. ‘She wants to know what I want first.'

‘Do you know?'

‘What?'

‘What you want?'

Eddie shakes his head. ‘That's always been my problem. I'm not good with decisions. Well, you know that. Remember Australia?'

Max nods. The trip had been Max's itinerary the whole way, excepting a few pubs Eddie had wanted to go to, hostels he'd wanted to stay a little longer in, mainly because of girls he'd wanted to sleep with. Eddie is never in a rush. Max is more impatient. Eddie is easy-going, Eddie never minds that Max makes all the plans.

‘Rosie couldn't stand it, see? She was always deciding where we would go, what we would do; she wanted to be with someone … well, someone stronger, I guess. Someone like Nina. Like Hugo. She got sick of me.' Eddie shrugs. ‘It was fine. I got it. I get sick of me too.'

Max turns. ‘Eddie. You're a good guy.'

‘Maybe. But I've just drifted along. You can't deny that.'

‘You go with the flow,' Max counters.

Eddie gives a wry laugh. ‘You know who I always wanted to be?'

Max knows the answer before he says it.

‘You,' Eddie finishes. ‘I just wanted to be you. I did whatever you did. With women. With life. You know that already, don't you?'

‘We're mates. We like the same things,' Max replies, hopefully.

Eddie shakes his head. ‘That could be true. But I wouldn't know, would I? 'Cause I never found out. We might be the same or we might not be, Max. Problem is I don't, for sure, have your talent. So I'm fucked on the rock-star front.'

‘It's not all it's cracked up to be,' Max mumbles.

Eddie continues, ‘So I can't do it anymore. I can't live your life. And now I've got to make this huge decision …' Eddie looks to the floor, gripping his hands together tightly. ‘And I've had no fucking practice. I'm about to go into my forties with no experience at living my own life. Christ.'

‘Eddie …'

‘It's fucked up, Max. You have no idea.'

‘I have a bit of an idea.'

‘You've got it all sorted out, mate. The money. The girls. Max, you're literally living the dream. You're living it.'

‘I'm not, Eddie.'

‘Who am I supposed to be? How do I work this out?' Eddie's voice is rising. ‘Do we have this baby, Max?' Eddie stares at Max and looks as though he might cry. Max glances down the corridor at Beth, but she's still staring into space, hands neatly cupped like she is in church. Eddie whispers, ‘I'm scared, Max.'

Max blinks fast and nods.
I know. So am I, mate. So am I.

‘Who am I supposed to be?' Eddie asks again.

Sophie looks up from her phone at Max. For a moment he sees the child in her, the girl she once was, in the innocence in her dark eyes.

‘Be Lars,' Max replies, weakly.

*

The door with the little window swings open and Hugo comes out first. Max studies his face. Earnest but not grim. Behind him, Lars, who gives a small smile and Nina, who looks tired. Eddie and Max both push away from the wall at the same time. Sophie puts the phone into her bag and Beth stands.

‘All good?' Eddie asks Lars.

Lars hesitates and looks to Hugo.

‘Dr Chesneau is optimistic about a surgical option. There is a risk of unilateral hearing loss but there been good success with previous cases. And he's thorough; he wants to gather all the information and then give more comprehensive advice. Right, Nina?'

Nina nods.

Max has never known Nina to allow someone to answer for her. She looks to Hugo. ‘Thank you. For helping to get the appointment. For translating.'

Hugo looks to his feet. ‘It's a good prognosis. Or it could be. You know.'

‘I know,' Nina replies.

Lars takes hold of Nina's hand. Nina doesn't have lovely fingers or lovely hands. Lars's long, slender fingers link with Nina's shorter, thicker ones. Max watches as Lars squeezes, Nina's fingers paling for a moment and then returning to pink.
I've got you
, it says.
Don't worry, I've got you
. Two hands, woven together.

‘Is everything okay?'

Max turns to see Rosie and Helen. Both carrying a tray each, the holes filled with paper coffee cups.

Nina nods. ‘The doctor wants more tests but I can do them in London. Then there's treatment and surgery, after that.'

Rosie stares at her husband and quickly back to her friend.

‘That's great news,' Helen says, but her voice is splitting. Everyone looks over to her but she is staring only at Max. Her eyes are filling with tears. Max hesitates for a moment and then goes to her, wrapping his arms around. Helen curls into his embrace. Small, warm and trembling like a child. Nina touches her back.

‘It's okay, honey,' Nina says, soothing. ‘It's going to be okay.'

Muffled, against Max's chest, Helen sobs, ‘I can't lose you.'

‘You won't.' Nina looks at Max.

‘I can't lose any of you …'

‘Shh, shh shh,' Nina comforts.

Her cries cleave him; they seem to tear through his chest to his very core. He murmurs, ‘You heard Nina. You won't.'

Though he longs, wishes, to vanish or run away. To drink till he cannot think or see or feel.

Lars draws closer, as does Rosie.

‘We'll figure it out,' Eddie mumbles, talking to Helen but looking at Beth.

‘It's an optimistic prognosis,' Hugo repeats.

They all gather around. A huddle of them, Helen and Max at the centre.

A skulk.

Nina strokes Helen's arm. ‘Hey, hey, hey, it's okay.'

‘I'm sorry,' Helen says, voice still shaking. Max knows she is speaking to him.

‘Monsieur Dresner?'

Max looks above the heads to two policemen in the corridor.

The huddle loosens. One
gendarme
is tall and has a grey moustache. The other is a woman who looks a little like Rosie.

‘Max Dresner?'

Max finds his voice, ‘
Oui
?' The man with the moustache speaks in French. Max can pick out words but he's never been good at stringing whole sentences together. He should have learned. He should have made an effort. But of course he never had, it was all too hard. Hugo is looking at Max, eyebrows pinched together.

Une agression … la victime … enquête …

‘
Pardon
?' Max asks, dumbly.

Hugo frowns. ‘He's saying you need to go with them. He is saying there has been a charge …'

‘A what?' Eddie comes closer to Max, stands taller.

‘A charge for what?' Helen asks.

‘Assault. No … sexual assault.'

‘What?' Helen blanches.

‘That's not right,' Max murmurs.

Snake hair, shimmering dress, grass.

His heart sinks.

‘You've got it wrong. Sorry, but you've got it wrong,' Eddie says, voice growing louder.

Beth lays her hand against his shoulder. ‘Eddie … I saw it.'

‘No!' Helen protests.

Eddie turns. ‘What?'

‘I saw.' Beth glances at Helen. ‘It was Soleil.'

‘Oh, no,' Nina says firmly.

The
gendarmes
are speaking directly to Hugo now.

‘They want you to go with them,' Hugo says to Max.

‘This isn't right. This can't be right,' Helen says, shaking her head. Max looks at Eddie. Beth is at his side. Eddie stares at Max. Then silently takes Beth's hand.

Max steps towards the cops. There is an odd feeling in his stomach now. A kind of lightness, a strange calm he has never felt before. As though everything is playing out as it should.

He turns to Helen, her face tear-stained and bewildered.

‘I'm sorry,' Max says to her, before following the
gendarmes
down the hallway.