The Witches of Cambridge (6 page)

Noa gives her aunt a little smile and takes another scone.

“That’s when you’ll know love though,” Heather insists, “because you’ll feel more yourself and happier in your own skin than you ever did before.”

Noa laughs. “That wouldn’t be love, that’d be a bloody miracle.”

“Yes.” Heather smiles, dipping her finger into the cream. “Exactly.”

—

Amandine fell in love with Eliot by degrees. And the day they married Amandine knew she loved him more than she’d ever loved another human being and believed then she’d reached the heights and depths of her capacity for love but, as the years passed, she realized that day had only been the beginning. Sometimes another degree of love snuck up on her. She’d catch sight of Eliot cooking dinner—the way he lost himself so completely in the act—and suddenly her heart would swell anew and she’d find tears falling down her cheeks, her body unable to contain her feelings.

Sometimes she was (fairly) ready for it, though the impact still surprised her every time. The night the twins were born and she watched Eliot holding them both in his arms—still squalling and bloody—Amandine was overcome again. Witnessing the man she loved falling in love deepened her love for him more than she could have possibly imagined. And, although people told her she’d soon love her children in an all-consuming way that she would never love Eliot, Amandine hadn’t yet found that to be true. While her heart had immediately expanded to include her sons, her husband hadn’t been ousted in the process. If anything, she only loved him more: as a father as well as a man.

Whenever Amandine heard other women complaining about their own husbands, who regularly seemed to forget about birthdays and foreplay and housework in varying and woefully negligent ways, she felt a fresh swell of secret love and gratitude for Eliot, who forgot none of these things and always remembered considerably more on top of it—cups of tea in bed, foot rubs, her love of yellow roses, and secret kisses before bedtime.

All of which, unfortunately, only serves to make the present condition of her marriage all the more painful. Perhaps, Amandine thinks, if she’d had a slightly negligent husband to start off with, she might have been better prepared for the drastic decline that was to come.

—

Héloïse sits on a park bench, halfheartedly throwing peanuts for a squirrel, trying to tempt him out of a tree. She dips into the bag and pulls out another fistful. It’s the same bench in the Botanic Garden, next to the rock garden, overlooking the little lake, the one she visited every day with François for five years. They’d planned on doing this for another twenty years, before he died so suddenly. After Amandine graduated and left, and he retired and she semi-retired in order to join him, just doing the odd tutorial now and then, they spent breakfast-time sharing their cold buttered toast with the birds.

We had such a time here, didn’t we, mon amour? Do you remember when we adopted the robin and he visited us every morning?

Héloïse doesn’t answer. She wants to. Her reply is on the tip of her tongue, the smile on the edge of her lips. But, with great effort, she swallows her words. The squirrel scuttles down the tree, leaps across the grass, and picks up a peanut at Héloïse’s feet. Slowly, she uncurls her fist so a palmful of peanuts is open on her lap. She doesn’t have the energy to throw them anymore. The promise she made to herself yesterday is already broken. She stepped outside, on Amandine’s insistence earlier that morning, but she doesn’t have the energy to let go. Not now, not yet.

Let me stay
, he says.
Please, let me stay a little longer, s’il vous plaît
…

Héloïse looks out at the park, at the trees against the Tupperware sky, at the light drizzle beginning to fall. And suddenly she feels more alone than she’s ever felt in her life, filled with a deep black emptiness heavier even than the day François died. As if every moment of despair over the past two years has been spun together, woven into a blanket that falls over Héloïse, suffocating her, breath by shallow breath.

Je t’aime. Je vous aimerai toujours.

The squirrel stops nibbling at her feet and glances up, darting its head from side to side, then jumps up and scurries along the bench, snatching a peanut out of Héloïse’s hand. For a second the squirrel looks at her, black unblinking eyes fixed on hers, before darting off the bench and springing back up the tree. As Héloïse watches the squirrel, Amandine ambles across the grass toward the bench. When she rests her hand gently on Héloïse’s shoulder, Héloïse yelps.

“Sorry,
Maman
,” Amandine says. “It’s only me.”

“Oh,” Héloïse gasps. “I didn’t see you.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have scared you.” Amandine nods at the bench. “May I?”

“Of course,” Héloïse says, “you’re the one who dragged me out here in the first place.”

Amandine sits, resisting the impulse to roll her eyes. Instead she takes her mother’s hand and holds it gently in her own.

“It’ll get better,
Maman
, day by day, you just have to keep trying, keep bringing yourself back into this world and, one day, you won’t have to try anymore, you’ll just be here, it’ll happen all by—”

“How do you know? You’ve never lost anyone you loved.”

“He was my father—”

“He was
my
lover, my best friend, the man of my life.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“Non!”
Héloïse exclaims. “You have no idea.
Se taire. C’est conneries!”

Amandine wants to stand, she wants to bite back, to tell her mother to snap out of it, to tell her it’s been long enough now, it’s time to move on, to forget him (or, at least, not remember him every second of every day) and to forgive herself. Instead, Amandine tells herself, yet again, to be patient.

“Désolé,”
Héloïse says. “I didn’t mean to say, to be…”

“It’s okay,
Maman
, I underst—I mean, I don’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean I can’t help you, it doesn’t mean—”

Héloïse nods. “I know…I know you want me—you think I’m holding on too tight. And I try. But…when you’ve loved and lived with a man for thirty-five years, it isn’t so easy to let him go just like that.”

Amandine takes a deep breath. “I just—”

“I know,” Héloïse says, squeezing her daughter’s hand. “And I will. I am.”

“Okay,” Amandine says softly. “I just want you to be happy. You’re still young, you can still love again, or—”

A smile creeps to the edge of Héloïse’s lips. “Don’t finish that thought,
s’il vous plaît, non
.”

“Oh,
Maman
, you’re such a prude.” Amandine squeezes her mother’s hand, flooded with hope at the sight of her mother’s first smile since her father died. “And you’re still at the center of your life, even though you act as if you’re circling the edges of it, you can still have pleasu—”

“Oui, oui,”
Héloïse says, “enough of that.”

Amandine nudges Héloïse gently with her shoulder, grinning.
“Je t’aime
.
”

Héloïse is about to answer but instead starts to laugh. At first it’s a little giggle at the back of her throat, then a full chuckle so her shoulders shake with delight. And, while she laughs for the first time in a very long time, Héloïse feels free. And the blanket of grief and guilt begins to lift a little and let her breathe.

Amandine seizes the moment. “
Maman
, will you come to the book group tomorrow night? We all miss you and I’d—”

Héloïse looks at her daughter, her laughter dried up, but its echoes still in her voice. “I haven’t read the book.”

“You have. It’s
She Came to Stay
. You’ve read it at least five hundred times.”

Héloïse snorts. “Hardly.”

“Don’t tell me you couldn’t recite it by heart.”

“Perhaps.”

“Please,
Maman
.” Amandine draws out the syllables
ma-man,
as she did when she was a little girl. “Please come.”

Héloïse waits, torn. She can feel François’s breath on her cheek.

Je t’aime. Je vous aimerai toujours.

She wants to listen. She wants to pretend he’s still sitting next to her on that bench. She wants to hold his hand. And then she looks back into her daughter’s eyes.

“
D’accord
,” Héloïse says at last. “I will come.”

W
HEN
C
OSIMA
R
UBENS
was eight years old her teacher asked the class what they all wanted to be when they grew up. And, when they’d decided, they had to pick a role model who had that job and interview them. Cosima didn’t have to think twice, she didn’t have to weigh her options or investigate the possibilities; she’d known since she was four years old what she wanted to be: a mother. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a mother of her own to interview on the subject, only her big sister, Kat, who refused to answer her questions, claiming—perhaps rightly—that she didn’t have the necessary qualifications. And so, instead of finding someone else’s mother, Cosima pretended her own mother was still alive and answered the interview herself on her mother’s behalf. Cosima told her teacher that this experience had only further convinced her that she had indeed chosen the right path for herself.

As a little girl, Cosima spent much of her time practicing the art of mothering. She dressed her dolls in different outfits every morning, brushed and plaited their hair, and served them a nutritious and balanced diet of imaginary food for every meal. Sometimes she asked Kat’s advice about certain things she wasn’t sure of, like how to make a neat bed with hospital corners, or how to bake an imaginary loaf of bread, or how to explain to her doll daughters that some people died before you’d even met them and never came back.

At twelve years older, Kat was fully able to furnish her sister with all the required information and knowledge. And, even when she didn’t feel so inclined, when she’d rather be chatting with her friends or doing her homework, she still did it to the best of her ability. Kat took care of Cosima because it was her duty and she believed in such things as duty, honor, and family. She also loved her sister. When Cosima hit puberty and began looking at boys, Kat, by then studying for her PhD in Applied Mathematics at Cambridge University, advised her to keep looking for the best and not marry her heart to the first one she met. Fortunately, as a teenager, Cosima heeded this particular piece of advice well, recovering easily from rejection and heartbreak and quickly renewing her search—once she’d shed her tears—for a better specimen of boyhood. Her standards were high and her mission a pressing one, so she couldn’t afford to stay fixated for long on anyone who failed to be a perfect fit. By the time Cosima turned thirteen, she’d dated and discarded every boy in her class and a good many boys in other classes too.

Kat, on the other hand, as is so often the case with people who give great advice, didn’t follow it herself. At twenty-five, she suffered from an inability to fall out of love with her best friend who, she was pretty certain, didn’t return her affections. Not wanting to damage her credibility as a good role model, Kat kept this information a secret from her sister. She added it to the other, far more dreadful, family secret she’d recently discovered on a routine visit to her doctor. Kat kept this secret for another year, every day unable to break her sister’s heart. It wasn’t until Cosima turned fourteen and got her period that Kat finally told her: she wasn’t allowed to have children.

—

Cosima’s heart remained impervious until she turned eighteen and met Tommy Rutherford. She’d just finished her A-Levels and was wondering what to do next when she saw him playing cricket on Midsummer Common one Saturday afternoon. Tommy was tall, broad, and blond and Cosima couldn’t take her eyes off him. She completely forgot that she’d been on her way to meet her sister for lunch and so, while Kat was left waiting at Fitzbillies, Cosima settled on the grass to watch the man who, she was quite sure, would become the love of her life.

By a lovely stroke of luck the cricket ball rolled straight into Cosima’s lap after Tommy bowled out an irate member of the opposing team and, when he ran over to collect it, she struck up a conversation and let him convince her to wait and take her for a drink after the sun had set and the game was over. She went home with him that night and by the time the sun had risen again she knew that this was it: he was The One. She prayed to Hera, the Greek goddess of love and marriage, that he felt the same way because Cosima knew that, this time, for the first time and quite against her will, she’d given her whole heart and wouldn’t be getting it back, at least not in one piece.

They moved in together six months after they met. He proposed on her twenty-first birthday and they married in Venice while traveling around Europe. They fell in love with the city and stayed, living in a beautifully dilapidated room overlooking a canal and ten minutes’ walk from St. Mark’s Square where Tommy spent his days as a waiter and his evenings drinking espresso in the red velvet booths of Florian’s Café, imbibing the spirits of Henry James and Mark Twain and hoping to pen his own masterpiece there. Cosima found a job as a kitchen porter in Café Del Gusto and, finding to her surprise that she enjoyed cooking, rose slowly up the ranks to sous chef in charge of puddings and pastries. On Cosima’s twenty-fifth birthday Tommy’s manuscript was accepted by an agent and sold to a publisher for a good sum, enough to enable them to return to Cambridge, rent a nice flat, and allow Cosima to open her own café. A year after that, the novel
Lost for Words
was published to great acclaim and Tommy soon spent much of his time in London and touring. Cosima sometimes complained that she no longer saw enough of him, but really she was happy and proud of her husband. Sunday, whenever Tommy was in the country, was their day together.