A Place for Us (16 page)

“Yes . . . most of them,” Joe said. “Your brother—he sewed up my
finger after I sliced it open a couple of months ago. Did a fine job.” He held up his hand and Florence stared at it, impressed.

“Good grief, that looks nasty.”

“Would have been a disaster for me if it hadn’t been done well. I—I owe him a lot.” He gulped back the rest of his tea and stood up. “Look, I have to get to the shops to pick up a couple of things I’ve forgotten. It was great to meet you, Florence.”

And he left, without even waving good-bye. Martha followed him out.

“Funny bloke,” said Florence, taking a sip of tea. “Is he always like that?”

“Like what?”

“Shifty,” she said. “Like he’s just nicked your wallet, Pa.”

David was fiddling with the jar of pencils that always stood on the table. “Don’t be a snob, Flo. I think he feels uncomfortable here. For some reason.”

“I’m not being a snob!” Florence said. “He was pretty odd, that’s all. Like he thought we were about to arrest him or something.”

Her father put his hand over one eye, then sat back in his chair and said quietly, “Oh, don’t ask me. These days I just draw and have naps.”

“You?” she said cheerily, though she watched the way he squinted, as if he couldn’t make her out. “Hardly!”

“I can’t afford to do anything else, my darling.”

Florence gave him a sharp look. “What does that mean?”

“What I say.” He wouldn’t look at her.

“Pa,” she said, her heart thumping, “are you all right? You don’t look all right.”

David laughed and sat up a little. “Charming child.”

“Sorry. I mean, since I’ve been back. You . . . you look rather gray.”

His face cleared. “Not really, that’s the honest truth.”

Florence took a deep breath. “Oh.” She could feel her throat thickening, tears swimming into her eyes. “How bad is it?”

David took his daughter’s hand and kissed it. “Do you remember when we’d go to the National Gallery for your birthday?”

“Of course,” she said, alarmed that he’d think she’d ever forget.

“I’d like to take you back down to London sometime.”

“Yes, Pa, I’d love that. We can look at
The Annunciation
, have lunch.
Have a steak, go for a walk in Green Park, visit that cheese shop you like. . . .” She spoke almost frantically.

They were alone in the warm, cluttered kitchen. He smiled. “ ‘The most beautiful representation of motherhood in Western art. Mary is every woman, alive or dead, at that moment.’ ”

“I wrote that,” Florence said, surprised.

“I know you did,” said her father. He glanced up as Martha walked past the kitchen window, carrying a basket from the garden. She waved at Florence, shielding her head from the rain with her hand, and smiling. Joe Thorne climbed into his car, said something to Martha, then slammed the door. They could hear the engine, stalling and revving again as, having reached the bottom of the drive, he turned around in the circular area in the front of the house.

“This might be the only chance we get,” David said urgently, his voice soft. She had to lean toward him to hear. “Listen to me. I love you all, but I love you in a way I didn’t the other two. You know that, don’t you? Always a special place for you. You are my golden girl. I saved you.”

“Pa?” Florence shook her head, her mouth dry. She peered into his glazed eyes. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“You must promise me you’ll always remember I told you that. You were my favorite. Shouldn’t say that. You’ll understand one day. I’m so proud of you, my darling.”

“It’s absolutely bucketing down out here!” she heard her mother call from outside. Florence didn’t move. She stared into her father’s eyes, squeezed his hand gently. “Dad—I wish you’d tell me what you mean.”

“Soon,” he said, nodding, and he was smiling, and the smile was what made her want to cry. “Very soon.”

Outside, Joe drove down the drive. In a blur Florence heard Martha call loudly, “Good-bye!”

It happened in slow motion. Florence looked up and saw, through the blur of rain, her mother wave, then drop the basket and shout, her hands pressed to her cheeks. Then the crash, the sound of splintering glass, someone screaming, someone shouting. Then, silence.

They stood up, Florence and David, struggling from his chair, in time to see a slim figure, hair flying, running down the drive.

“Oh, God,” said Florence. “What—”

The figure was screaming, “Luke! Luke! Oh, my God, darling,
Luke!
”

There was a shattering crunch as Florence dropped her mug of tea on the floor, and stared through the window.

A little boy stood in front of them, thumb in his wide-open mouth, face purple with yelling, and blood dripping from his forehead. He screamed, pulling at his black hair, smearing blood across his wet cheeks.

Behind him a woman came running toward him, her mouth also wide open, her eyes wide, white, wild. She caught him in her arms and he buckled to the ground, still wailing with pain.

“Luke!” she screamed, turning this way, that way, then crying out as she caught sight of them, framed in the window. “Gran! Southpaw! Help me, Luke’s, he’s . . . he’s hurt.” And she buried her face in his, sobbing and stroking his hair.

Cat

S
HE WAS AHEAD
of herself, for once. For once! A miracle. The Eurostar had been on time. She had picked up the car without incident, though it was slightly unnerving, getting into a completely strange car when she hadn’t driven for years, let alone on the left-hand side, strapping Luke in, and then setting off along the Euston Road, easily one of the busiest roads in London. Thankfully, the Wednesday afternoon traffic was thin and she drove through the drizzling rain with almost a light heart. When they got to Richmond, she turned on the radio, sang along to a Blondie song, “One Way or Another.”
One way or another
. She was coming home. And even though she hadn’t planned it like this, she had Luke with her, and perhaps, really, that was wonderful.

“What will we see, Maman? Will we see the tiger who came to tea?”

Luke was incredibly excited. He had never been to London, to England, never been away from France. He still didn’t properly understand that he was half-English, despite what she told him every night as she stroked his hair and soothed him to sleep in their little room. He was too little to understand that you could be from another country, too.

Once they were on the motorway, he dozed, and a couple of times she turned around to check on him. His cheeks were flushed, his mouth in a pout; there was a scratch on his forehead, a line of little beaded scabs, the result of some convoluted dispute with Benoit over a ball at the nursery. He was here. Her son was here, with her.

•   •   •

The week before she was supposed to go, one night in their room when Cat was sitting up in her bed engrossed in a Ngaio Marsh, she suddenly
heard a noise, and Luke’s small hand burrowed under his duvet, out toward the edge of the bed, and found her hand. “I want to come with you.”

“What?”

“To England.”

“Oh, Luke,” she’d said. The idea he might want to hadn’t ever occurred to her, so busy was she planning, controlling everything to make his life as safe and warm as possible. “Don’t you want to stay with Josef ? It’s only two nights. It’ll be fun.”

“I want to see the Queen. And I want to see the paper dogs.”

“The dogs Southpaw drew me, darling?” The words caught in her throat.

“The ones in the frame. I want to see them.” The little voice was clear in the darkness.

In the end, as big decisions often are, it was a simple choice to make. Why on earth wouldn’t she take him? He wasn’t four yet, he didn’t need a ticket. When she rang to confirm this, the operator told her they were offering discounted transfers to a train the day before, as her train was overbooked. Gleefully, Cat said yes. She would get to Winterfold early and give them a real surprise, introduce her son, her secret, beloved, precious little boy, to her grandmother and grandfather. She would tell the truth at last. And somehow, the element of surprising them a day early took away the terror of reality. The fact that she didn’t know where her mother was. The reason for this birthday lunch. And most of all, the fact that she had had this child, kept him a secret from her family for three years.

•   •   •

When she found she was pregnant, she was at the lowest point she’d been able to go. Olivier had stopped telling her what to wear or lashing out at her in rage, driving her into a corner of fear so great she tiptoed around him, making him even more vicious, contemptuous of her. Now he openly despised her. He barely came home by then, and when he did, brought people back with him, musicians, artists, philosophers—it made Cat feel very bourgeois that she didn’t understand how one could be in one’s late twenties and have a job as a philosopher. They stayed up long into the night, talking, playing music, drinking beers, banging out rhythms on Cat’s old trunk–cum–coffee table. She never joined them.
She had a new job now, at the flower stall in the market on the edge of the Île de la Cité, and it meant getting up early. It paid virtually nothing, but she’d taken it because she didn’t know what else she could do, and Olivier had made it clear he didn’t want her hanging round the house during the day when he was sleeping off the excesses of the night before. She liked it, too, except that the hours were long, the pay small, and the weather sometimes tough. But it wasn’t a career. At night she would come home, exhausted, and fall into bed praying that she wouldn’t be called upon to see the others he brought back with them, ridiculed as the “fat English girl who lives with me. She’s pathetic, like my dog, panting and following me through the place.”

She heard him once, fucking a girl on the sofa, a lithe, smooth, ginger-haired thing of about eighteen who smiled patronizingly at her in the morning and offered her a coffee as Cat staggered blearily out of bed in her baggy T-shirt and into the shower. After that she started wearing earplugs. She didn’t really know what else to do. She had no spine, she had no will, no energy to fight.

She had had a miscarriage six months previously, and had gone straight back on the Pill. When she missed a period she thought nothing of it; she wasn’t regular, her body was behaving in strange ways. When another month went by and she eventually did a test, she was astonished: how could this relationship, this awful toxic mess of humiliation and unhappiness, have created something? Olivier did not want children, he had made that clear the last time. She didn’t admit it to herself for a week or so, thinking perhaps it would go away, or that she would make the decision to get rid of it.

Cat had thrown herself into her relationship with Olivier thinking it would provide her with something she’d never had before: her own home, her own unit; and so it was ironic that it was finding out she was pregnant with his child that gave her the strength to break it off. She knew, though, if she was going to do it, she had to have thought it through. She had to carry on as though, to everyone else, everything was normal. Her grandmother came to visit; she told her nothing. She went out for drinks with Véronique, and said nothing. Here the seeds of secrecy were sown.

By the time she told Olivier, her exit plan was worked out. Her new boss at the flower stall, Henri, was always complaining about his elderly
mother. Madame Poulain, it had been decided, needed a lodger, but she was so difficult it was impossible to persuade the procession of live-in helps to stay. It was not too arduous, so why was it so hard? She needed someone to help with her shopping, to collect her prescription, and to make sure she took her pills. (She had had cancer and she now had a heart condition, and diabetes and osteoporosis. In the years to come, Cat often had to remind herself of this, that for all Madame Poulain’s faults, she really had not been well.) She needed someone to sit with her of an evening, an old-fashioned companion. No, she did not mind a baby. There was a
chambre de bonne
, a tiny room on the top floor, and the infant would be out of the way there, and an excellent public nursery was just across the river. All would be well. To Cat, desperate, it seemed like good luck from a movie or a fairy story; she didn’t consider how it might actually work.

So, when she was around four months pregnant and starting to show, one beautiful spring day when Paris was coming alive with green and the trees were bursting with blossom, she packed up everything she owned in the coffee-table trunk; she kissed Luke the dog good-bye, her tears dropping onto his kinked, soft fur, stroked his ears, and hugged him close to her; and then she left. She didn’t tell Olivier where she was going, just said she was leaving. A week later, an
avocat,
a lawyer wife of someone with whom she’d worked at
Women’s Wear Daily
, a specialist in family law, had written to Olivier, explaining that Catherine Winter was pregnant and that he was the father and would be required to pay her child support.

She never received a penny, nor did she want to, but it did the trick: she turned from being a person of interest to Olivier—albeit briefly, although it was always dangerous—into a sad bitch who was trying to get money out of him, thus allowing him to be the wronged party. The one mistake she made was in the naming of the baby. A couple of months after she moved out (and long after Luke the dog had run away, never to be seen again), Olivier, deciding to toy with her, somehow managed to blame Luke’s disappearance on her, demanding that he choose the name if the baby was a boy. He picked Luke. Some sad way of reminding her of his ownership of her? What else could it be?

But in the grand scheme of things, Cat didn’t care. She liked the name Luke and she had loved the other Luke. She simply couldn’t get upset
about Olivier’s games anymore, or so she told herself. When Luke was a year old, Olivier moved to Marseilles. He saw his son a few times, peripatetically, if he was in town. He’d bring Luke presents—a stuffed wicker elephant that took up a corner of the tiny bedroom, some jazz records, once a pair of shoes, which were too small, though new.

Cat wanted Luke to know he had a father, and to know that his father loved him. And so she had to let Olivier see Luke when he was in town. On the last visit, when he was three hours late, unshaven, smelling rank and unwashed, Luke had stared at him and said, “You stink!” Then laughed. “Stinky.”

She’d seen Olivier’s eyes narrowing, the precursor to his anger. The little quiver of the bottom lip. The tone of his voice when he said, “Don’t say that again.” And she was afraid for her son, afraid of what loving his father might do to him.

Luke sometimes asked, “Why doesn’t my father live nearby?”
But he never said anything else, and their strange but safe little life continued, high up in the tiny back bedroom on the Île-Saint-Louis, the days she took one at a time turning into weeks, then months, and now her baby was three.

She’d found that, since becoming a mother, she thought ceaselessly about her own mother. Cat knew where her father was—he was a charity worker living in Kent, with three children and a wife called Marie. He’d always kept in touch, assiduously enough to remove any sense of mystery about himself, and whenever she met him Cat found herself wondering how on earth she could be related to him. Winterfold was where she came from, not from this nice, kind, mild rangy man who wore wireless frames and had hair that stuck up in tufts.

When Cat had been nine, he’d taken her to the pantomime in Bath (“I think you should call me Giles, don’t you agree, Catherine?”), as a special Christmas treat. He had talked all through their pizza about world hunger, then sat cross-armed and perplexed through the pantomime, hissing at Cat when she shot her hand up to go onstage. (“No, Catherine, honestly—I think you’d better not. You are in my care, after all. . . . Is that okay? I’m awfully sorry. . . .”) Cat had sunk down in her chair furiously, watching with envy as a little girl called Penelope and not her was chosen, then shot out of a joke cannon on a seesaw by Lionel Blair. Giles had refused to buy a program or an ice cream, and then
forgotten where he’d parked the car. Cat had come back and told her grandmother she thought he looked like an owl, but most of all he was very dreary.

She’d seen him since, lunches in London, and when she was at university she’d even stayed with him in Kent, but it was that encounter she remembered most clearly and about which she often felt guilty; it occurred to her when she had Luke that it must have been quite a thing for Giles, leaving his (then very small) three children with his wife, a few days before Christmas, to drive from Kent to Somerset to take a cross little girl out for an expensive treat. She liked him for sending Christmas cards, for the fact that he’d always been clear about where he was (“Dear Catherine, This is to let you know we have moved, should you need to contact me. We are all well. Emma is . . .”).

She could contact Giles if she wanted, but she didn’t really want to. No, it was her mother who haunted her, who filled her dreams. All through the hot sweltering summer before Luke was born, Cat lay in her new little bedroom and thought about Daisy, tried to piece together what she knew about her. The only concrete evidence she had was the clothes her mother had left when she walked out, nearly thirty years ago. A dress for every year, every occasion, and she’d hung them all up in a row and just walked out of the house and kept on walking, and that had been that. “Not to be shared”—somehow Cat felt sorry for her mother, so desperate that Cat should have her own things. She didn’t understand that by leaving her like this she had ensured her daughter would have nothing but her own things. When Lucy came to stay, Cat was so keen to share her toys that often Lucy, bored, would wander off into the garden: “I don’t care about your Sindy house, Cat. I want to play with this stick.” It was what had led Cat to cut up her mother’s dresses for dolls’ clothes, that fateful day. It seemed such a waste, having them hanging there, unworn.
She
wasn’t ever going to wear them, no fear of that.

When she gave birth to Luke, at l’Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, he was very small and they took him to the baby unit and kept him in an incubator. Cat was in a ward on the floor below. She couldn’t sleep, and so she walked the corridors at night slowly in her new bright yellow dressing gown, stomach still distended, very sore, feeling like a waddling duck. On the third day her hormones kicked in, and a male nurse found her sobbing brokenly into a wall, helpless with tiredness, with worry about
this tiny baby who was so small she could hold him with one hand, about why she wasn’t producing enough milk to feed him, with how she would get him home from the hospital, about the horrible, dark, nasty world he had come into and how she couldn’t protect him from it.

The nurse sat her down on a plastic chair in the squeaky-clean corridor, the only sound the faint mewl of babies in the room next door. He patted her hand as she cried, tears dropping like rain on the shining floor.

“Take it day by day,” he told her, and she only realized afterward that he had spoken in English. “Just day by day. Do not worry about the future. Do not worry about the past. Think of the day and what you have to do to get through, and it will be okay.”

And that’s what she did. Every day. When she thought about the future, how Luke couldn’t possibly grow up in a tiny room with his mother, how she had no money, how she had to tell her grandparents one day, how she had let all of this happen and screwed it up . . . when the walls of her life started to crowd too closely in on her, Cat focused on the immediate present.
Get to the bank. Buy more vermouth for Madame Poulain. Put aside twenty euros a week for Luke’s new shoes. Breathe. Just . . . breathe.