Yesterday's Weather (9 page)

‘Well,’ I say carefully. ‘He always liked France. He is a Francophone.’

I talk about him some more and Shay starts to realise how old Hoa is. He does the thing men do when they think I might not be getting the ride; amused but surprisingly vicious, too.
I’d fuck you
.

And I smile.

My husband sleeps every afternoon, quite simply. Sometimes I wander in and out again, without noticing that he is there. I cannot hear his breathing. He might as well be a sheet of paper – a blank sheet of paper – stretched out on the bed. Then he opens his eyes, and sees me.

‘So how old is this guy, actually?’ says Shay. We are drunk, now. It has come to this.

‘Old enough,’ I say.

And he lifts his glass to that.

‘Here’s to love,’ he says.

Fifteen minutes later he is making chopping motions on the table with his fat, large hand. He says all our partners can’t be refugees or have cancer or what have you but the implication is there – the implication is there – that some day they might be, and that we will still love them, we will still be married to them, no matter what. And I can’t disagree with that. I am
about to say so, but Shay takes my intake of breath as a stab at recrimination and he fights on.

By now I am almost done with Shay. I watch him and wait for the ruin of our love – the secular, ordinary, drinkers’ love we have always had for each other. He is unbearably coarse now; the texture of his skin, the big expressions on his big face. He knows nothing, he says – well, he knows very little – about the history of it all and what went on, but it is important in all of these situations, complex as they are, fucked up as they are, to know who did what. At the end of the day, he says, it is important to know
what your husband did during the war
.

I light another cigarette. Shay sees the look on my face, and subsides.

After which there is truculence, regret, a slow, bitter apology – each of which I have to jolly him through, because this is all my fault, after all. He is depressed now. The whole business of accusing me has worn him out.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, because he seems genuinely hurt by it all. Besides, I will never get rid of him unless I confess to something, whatever it is – the nameless thing that I have done wrong – my refusal to live in Epsom and mourn.

Which is all very well, I think, as we hug and separate outside the little café, never to see one another again. Which is all very well, I think, as I walk home to a man who can not pass an Alsatian dog without wetting himself, a man whose left foot and ankle were broken in fifteen different places; an ordinary old man from Vietnam, who snaps at me sometimes like I am a servant girl, and spends ten minutes every morning in a shoulder-stand in order to cure his piles.

Which is all very well.

I turn down rue Rataud and look up, as I always do, at one of the buildings halfway down the street. I saw a man with a gun up there once. It was in one of the corner apartments, and he was leaning over the little balcony. He pointed this large ugly pistol down the cross street. Then he swung around and pointed the gun at me. Or past me.

Those corner apartments are so beautiful; such enviable places to live. I mean, this was the 5th Arrondissement. It was the wrong place for such a thing to be happening – though there was no doubt that it was happening. It was very real. The timing was odd, and there was no soundtrack, and everything about it was too banal. I did not look up again – I did not want to attract his attention, I suppose – and in a few moments I had walked through the intersection in a very ordinary way. Down off the kerb, across the cobbles, up on to the opposite path. I did not look behind me, to check that he was pointing the thing somewhere else, or that he was gone.

I still walk down the street most evenings. And every time I do this, I think about a bullet in the back – about the fact that most of the time, it does not happen to me.

I walk home to Le Quang Hoa, thinking about his body in death; neat and beautiful on our marriage bed. I open the door and wonder if he is real. And if he is still alive.

H
ONEY

When she tried to think what they looked like, the women who stood in front of him at wine receptions, or at his desk, or at the door of his office, the nearest she could come up with was ‘drenched’. They stood with their arms slightly lifted from their sides, as though their fingers were dripping water. Like a childhood picture of the Princess and the Pea, when the princess arrives at the palace door; her dress a sopping sheet, and rain trickling out of her little green shoes.

Of course there would be other things going on – chat, or laughter, or the way they worked their eyes, but none of it so remarkable as this straining stillness; standing at his threshold, or placing some file quickly on his desk, or interrupting his small talk in a crowd to say, quite wordlessly, ‘Fuck me again. You must. You must fuck me again,’ because this was very clearly what was going on – or what had gone on and would not, at a guess, continue to go on, any more.

It was bad for business, in a mild sort of way. Catherine was a client, after all – but these women ignored her; they just couldn’t wrench their heads around to be introduced. And she did feel herself to be elbowed aside: ‘You must not speak to her, whoever she is. You must fuck me instead. Now. Any time.’

It happened three, perhaps four times, in the few years she dealt with him. Mostly Catherine was amused by it, though she did find the women really very rude. Each of them so beautiful and distinctive. Of course they didn’t last. And she might have felt aggrieved on their behalf – for the way they were pushed out while he continued to make his way up – were it not for their ambition, which was so open, almost livid. Catherine had never slept with anyone for gain, in her life. If you could call it gain.

She wondered if she was missing something. She felt so ordinary beside them, fuddy and intellectual. There was too much pleasure, for her, in the way he just looked at them steadily, and carefully spoke, and then turned back to her to say, ‘Sorry, sorry. Go on.’

Phil Brogan. Five foot nine, at a push. Fortyish. Sex machine.

Actually, she liked him. Clever and restless and constantly perceptive – in some ways, he was not like a man at all. And it wasn’t as if he was married, as she said to her partner Tom, so why not? There was a story about a stationery cupboard – which she didn’t believe – but even so, it said something about the suddenness of him. She assumed this was what got them going. Though she didn’t know what it was that brought them back for more.

‘Big cock,’ said Tom.

‘Do you think?’ she said.

‘Absolutely.’

Which was a brittle enough attempt, as these conversations go. But in the last while, they had other things on their minds.

Catherine’s mother was dying, far too young, and far too painfully, of cancer. So as well as all the phone calls and the ferrying, there was the mother thing, which is to say, too much complaining and too much love. She was in chemotherapy: four months in from a late diagnosis, and an unknown number of weeks or months or years from the end of it all. Her mother was so weak she reeled into the car door every time Catherine went around a corner, and when they braked, it was only the seat belt that stopped her from bumping her face on the dash. And she complained all the time. Catherine was going too fast, she was going too slow, she wanted to have a cigarette; what was wrong with high heels, when was Catherine going to lighten up, get something done with her hair.

And then in the hospital, when the pain relief was good, such peace: her mother existing – breath by breath – at her side. Both of them listening to her body, the silent chemicals doing their silent work, and the dent on the side of her breast the largest thing in the room.

Catherine thought about bees in a swarm; the cancer being smoked out of her mother’s body to settle in the space under her arm, a drowsy mass. If she could just scoop them up as a beekeeper might, and carry them away, and leave not a single one behind.

In the evening, while Catherine dozed in the chair, a hand might come out to startle her. It would touch her arm or face, her mother’s voice behind it, saying, ‘Go home, Kitty-kit. Go home to that man of yours.’

Tom was being sadly perfect since these days; there was always food in the fridge and clean T-shirts in the basket, and silence when silence was the necessary thing. But Catherine knew that once the light was out he would break across the space between them, in a rush to comfort her, with hands and mouth and all his large, physical self.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me cry.’

As the months ground on she told him it was as though she was missing something down there – a widget, or a grommet, or a switch you might throw. She did not say that when he stroked her, it felt as though her skin was coming off under his hands.

And so they had some sex – not much – and snapped at each other or did not speak, while Catherine’s mother was discharged with no talk of readmission and, around a schedule of home helps and neighbours, work staggered on.

The maddest thing was the way she decided her mother must be better, if the hospital had let her go: the way she thought, very clearly and thoroughly, that even though her mother was not cured – even though she was, in fact, dying – she was also much, much better, in many significant ways. Of course she was better. She was back home.

In the middle of this strange and untrue time, Phil Brogan rang. He needed to bring a client to a conference in Killarney, he said, in May. Would she do it? Would she mind? The hotel was fantastically swish. Call it a freebie. Her Christmas bottle of brandy, arriving early in the year.

‘Hang on,’ she said, and checked her diary. She could go if
her mother was a little better by May. Or she could go if her mother was dead by, say, the end of April. But if her mother was actively dying during those four days in May, then Catherine would not be able to make it. So, because she loved her mother, there was only one answer she could give: ‘Yes. No problem. Thanks.’ Not even stopping to think whether a conference in Killarney was really her bag.

In the next four weeks her mother’s pain became unbearable and, talking to her GP, Catherine realised that she would have to beg for a hospice bed. Once she gave in to the idea of death, she could not stand the wait. People weren’t supposed to linger in hospices – who was clogging up all the beds? Keep moving, she shouted in her head. Keep moving.

Nights, she and her sister took turns to sleep in their mother’s spare room with a shelf full of medication and a list of times and doses that they checked and re-checked until the writing made no sense. Rolling her mother over to change the soiled sheet, or scolding her while she tried to get a hypodermic into her thigh, Catherine was sustained by a peculiar fantasy – she was riding a horse around the lakes of Killarney, like a bad costume drama, with Phil Brogan in tow. Sometimes, they got down off the horses and went for a swim. Sometimes, they stopped under a spreading oak tree.

And then the hospice. The doctors were generous with their drips and shots – her mother one day wild on morphine, sitting up in bed, applying green eyeshadow and saying, ‘These are the things I regret: I never slept with a Frenchman. I never slept with that little fucker whatsisname who went on to make all the money. I didn’t enjoy you girls enough when you were still young enough not to thwart me. I deeply resent all that dieting. Deeply. Bitterly. What else? Nothing. I hate the taste of caviar.’

For two weeks, Catherine walked the corridors with sympathetic nurses and murmuring friends and did not give in to the obscene urge she had, which was to say, ‘Well, she’ll have to die soon. I am going to Killarney in May.’

In the event, her mother made it with more than a week to spare.

Catherine threw twelve white roses into the open grave, and stepped back from the loose earth and the sharp drop. Tom held her by the waist and forearm as though they were skating, and that was what it felt like – an incredible lightness as she walked away from the mess of ground. The air was shocking; pure and sharp, with the smell of early summer rising from the soil. In the distance, someone was mowing the graveyard grass. It was May. The planet was turning. Her feet still touched the ground.

She packed and repacked for Killarney four or five times. She had to bring togs; she had to have business suits, and dresses for the evening, and mid-morning jeans for lounging around in and horse-riding gear. She wondered if she could play golf.

‘Have I ever played golf?’ she shouted at Tom through the open bedroom door.

‘No,’ he said.

‘I’m sure I played golf with you once. Somewhere high – like Howth, or Bray Head.’

‘Not with me,’ said Tom.

That evening, he walked into the bathroom as she was waxing her legs, and winced, and went back out again. In the morning, he dragged the oversized suitcase to the car, and kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Relax. Have a good time.’

The hotel was a large old country house. Catherine felt like another person when she walked up the granite steps: she felt like a person who liked hotels. There wasn’t a piece of chintz in sight, it was all slate and warm wood and waffle-cloth robes.

She rang Phil’s room from the phone beside her bed. She could hear him shift and settle after he picked up, and she knew that he was lying down too.

‘So. You made it.’ Then he didn’t seem to want to hang up, for a while.

They met downstairs and ordered coffee.

‘No,’ he said. ‘What the hell, it’s after four, we could have a gin and tonic or a beer, something fizzy, what about champagne? Do you do it by the glass?’

The waitress blushed. Catherine thought he was being really cheesy, until he turned back to her and said, ‘Sparkling wine?’

It wasn’t the waitress he wanted.

It was true. Phil Brogan wanted to do something very sudden and very urgent with her, Catherine Maguire, recently bereaved. Or, seeing as this was a hotel and not a stationery cupboard, something very urgent and very slow. She felt a rising impulse to giggle, but he held her gaze and did not look away. There was nothing in this guy’s pants that liked a joke. This was what all the drenched girls knew. This imperative. This trap.