Doctor's Wife (5 page)

    “The sixties?”

    “Early sixties,” she lied.

    “Was it run down then?”

    “It was my first time in Paris, so everything looked
super to me. It was nice, though.”

    “So the
quartier
hasn’t really
changed?”

    “Well,” she said, and as she began to speak, she
went back in her mind to that time, remembering the cafés she sat
in, the Old Navy and the Mabillon, telling how Le Drugstore in
those days was a big brasserie called Le Royal Saint-Germain, and
about the Australian girl with red hair and white clown makeup who
used to wander along the rue de Buci, always with two boy friends
in tow. Trying to give him the sense of that summer, the excitement
of coming from Belfast and Dublin to her first great foreign city.
But not telling him the end of it, the sadness when the summer was
over and she returned to Queen’s for four years of study, locked up
in Ulster for four more years of her life.

    And so, walking beside him, she reached the
Luxembourg Gardens and went down a gravelly avenue past kiosks
unchanged since the time of Proust, old-fashioned wooden structures
whose licensees sold old-fashioned balloons, children’s wooden
hoops, toy boats, tops, whips, and boiled sweets. From there they
reached the
rond-point
and the octagonal basin and walked
around the formal gardens and off down another avenue, in among
trees and grassy lawns and the greening statues of poets she
remembered from her Sundays, that summer long ago.

    Talking to him: talking with an eagerness she had
forgotten. At home, these last years, conversations seemed to fail.
At home, if she would try for an hour of “general” talk, it was
like floating on water. The moment you thought of sinking, you
sank. Kevin would turn back to the television, she to a book.
Lately, she read books the way some people drank. But now, with
this stranger, the talk came easy as she told of the things that
had happened here that summer; she and Edna Morrissey, what
innocents they were, how they had lived two days on one
baguette
each, because Edna’s mother had sent her
allowance to the wrong address. She had been so wrong about Yanks,
he was not at all like those desperate loud double knits who went
around Ireland in tour buses. He was different.

    At eleven, as the clock on the Palais chimed its
slow announcement, he put his hand on her sleeve. “How about that
cup of coffee?” And, later, sitting with her at a sidewalk table in
the Café de Tournon, just below the entrance to the Sénat, where
flics
in white gloves directed traffic and Gardes
Républicaines stood sentry outside their red-white-and-blue-striped
boxes, he leaned across the table and again put his hand on her
arm, as though unconsciously he could not help touching her. “What
time are you meeting your husband this evening? Is he flying direct
to Nice?”

    “He’s not coming today.”

    “Oh?”

    So she explained about Kevin’s being delayed until
Friday. “Even then it’s not sure. He’s terribly busy just now.”

    “So he mightn’t join you at all?”

    “Oh, he’ll probably manage it on Friday.” She was
angry with herself for having started this.

    “But if he’s not coming today, why not stay longer
in Paris? You could sleep over at Peg’s.”

    “Well, I’ve made arrangements with the hotel in
Ville-franche and my flight is booked and everything.”

    “You could change your flight, that’s easy. And
they’ll hold the hotel room.”

    “No,” she said nervously. “No, I couldn’t, we have
demi-pension and I booked ahead. It’s too complicated. Besides,
Peg’s busy, I wouldn’t want to impose on her.”

    “Oh, come on, it’s no problem. And I’m not busy, I’d
love to show you around. First, let me buy you some lunch. Then
I’ll phone the airline. And the hotel. It’s easy.”

    But it’s not easy, she, thought; easy for him, but
I’m too nervous about things like that, I’m no Yank, I’ve already
written to the hotel and paid my deposit and specially booked room
450, and got my tickets and left addresses and phone numbers with
Mrs. Milligan. Besides, what if Kevin changes his mind and comes on
to Villefranche tomorrow? “No,” she said. “I’d love to, but I
can’t.”

    “Have lunch, at least. You can always take a later
flight this afternoon.”

    But that would mean phoning British Airways and
changing the flight, maybe being wait-listed on a later one,
getting into Villefranche after dark, and besides, I wrote the
hotel I’d be there early this afternoon. “No,” she said. “I think
I’ll just stroll back to Peg’s place and get my suitcase and make
my way to the Invalides.”

    “You’re sure?”

    “Yes. I suppose I’m a real stick-in-the-mud.”

    He laughed. “Look, I’ll come along with you and
carry your bag. I’ll ride out to the airport with you.”

    “What for? It’s a long way out and back.”

    “
What for
?” he said, laughing again. “Does
there have to be a reason?”

    It was not very funny. Then what was she laughing
at; what were they laughing at? She did not know. But there,
sitting laughing in the Café de Tournon, she felt again as though
she were a deserter from home. Again, she saw that woman in the
Queen’s Arcade after the Abercorn Café explosion, the dirt-matted
blond hair, the blood on the woman’s cheek, the priest kneeling on
the pavement saying an act of contrition over a dying old man, Mrs.
Redden standing beside the priest, holding the priest’s hat for
him, and, when the woman ran out and saw this, her face became all
hate and she lifted her arm and struck the priest’s hat out of Mrs.
Redden’s grasp and hit Mrs. Redden in the face, shouting, “Fucking
Fenian gets!” as if Mrs. Redden and the priest and the dying old
man had set the bomb off and were not victims like herself.

    She looked up at the clock on the Palais, then at
the
flic
in dark-blue uniform directing traffic, signaling
with his white-gloved hand, then wheeling like a robot to beckon
the opposing stream of cars. What about those men you read about in
newspaper stories who walk out of their homes saying they are going
down to the corner to buy cigarettes and are never heard from
again? This is Paris. I am here. What if I never go back?

    Chapter 3

    • Her flight had been called twice and now it was
definitely the last call. There was no delaying it any longer,
there was nothing to do but say goodbye, turn her back on him, and
walk through the security check and onto the aircraft. An anxiety,
the unreasoning anxiety of departure, came into her voice as she
said, “Well, I
must
go this time.”

    He stared, his dark eyes all question, as though he
waited for her to give him some sign.

    “Goodbye, then,” she said.

    He did not speak.

    “If you ever come back to Ireland you must look us
up.”

    He moved toward her. She was sure he was going to
kiss her, but, instead, he stopped and awkwardly held out his hand.
For a moment she thought of kissing him on both cheeks in the
French manner and making a joke of it, but her courage left her,
and instead she shook his hand, then went up to the security
people. A man and his wife were ahead of her in the check line,
loaded down with cartons of gifts. She turned to look back. He was
still standing there. She waved, he smiled and waved back. And then
she entered the security checkpoint and, once through it, could no
longer see the departure lounge. When she entered the aircraft, the
seat-belt sign was already on, and as she sat down in her allotted
seat, a stewardess offered her a choice of magazines. She took the
first magazine off the pile, hurriedly, because she wanted the
stewardess to move so that she could look across the aisle at the
window facing the terminal. But saw only the terminal wall. No sign
of him. The aircraft door shut and the plane taxied out for
takeoff. She sat, staring numbly at the magazine cover.

                L’EXPRESS

                ---------

                L’APRÈS

                POMPIDOU

    There was a photograph of the deceased President
and, under it, the caption:

                GEORGES
POMPIDOU

    
”L’avenir n’est interdit à personne.”
Gambetta

    As thé plane moved forward in the takeoff queue, the
quotation repeated itself in her head:
L’avenir n’est interdit
à personne
—the future is forbidden to no one. The engines
increased their thrust, the plane rushed down the runway and lifted
into the air. Outside the window, great canyons of cloud opened and
closed like the corridors of heaven as the plane climbed up into a
bright-blue void. The seat-belt sign went off. On the intercom, a
female voice announced that drinks would be offered and that
luncheon would be served. She remembered the fuss she had made in
the British Airways office in Belfast, two months ago, when the
clerk told her this luncheon flight was fully booked, but that
there was space on the later flight at three o’clock. She had
wait-listed herself on this flight because she didn’t want to miss
lunch. And if I hadn’t done that, at this moment I would be having
lunch with Tom Lowry in Paris. Why didn’t I change my reservations
this morning, why did I worry about the stupid old hotel? How did I
get so bogged down in ordinariness that even this once I couldn’t
do the spontaneous thing, the thing I really wanted to do. The
future is forbidden to no one. Unless we forbid it to
ourselves.

    •

    Ninety minutes later, the plane began its approach
to Nice, flying along the coastline over Saint-Raphaël and Cannes.
Through the window she saw villas on cliffsides, emerald swimming
pools, white feathers of yacht sails scattered in the bays. When
she had first looked down on this coast long ago on her honeymoon,
she had turned in excitement, saying: “Oh, Kevin, wouldn’t it be
marvelous to be able to live here all the time?” only to have him
take her literally and answer, “I suppose it would, if all I wanted
to do was water-ski the rest of my life.” She remembered that now,
as the plane wheeled, pointing down toward land. Below her, cars
moved, slow as treacle on the ribbon of seafront road. The plane
skimmed the tops of a row of palm trees, came in over a cluster of
white rectangular hangars to land with a jolt of its undercarriage
and a sickening rear jet thrust.

    The jitney bus which took her into Nice went along
the Promenade des Anglais, then out on the Corniche road to
Villefranche, under layer-cake terraces of luxury hotels, past
villas set in high cliffs, hanging bougainvillea in walled gardens,
a great sweep of bay curving out from smaller arcs of private
beach. Again, she thought of herself and Kevin on that honeymoon
flight, coming here to the direct opposite of the cold, rainy
strands and bleak, limestone-fronted promenade boardinghouses of
the seaside towns at home. And now, when the bus let her off at the
top of the road above Villefranche and she took up her suitcase to
walk down to the seafront, Villefranche was just as she remembered
it. In those sixteen years, it was Ireland that had changed.
Belfast bombed and barricaded, while in Dublin new flats and
American banks had spoiled the Georgian calm around Saint Stephen’s
Green. And all over the country, in the smaller towns and villages,
new housing estates and motor hotels. Cars everywhere: every farmer
had his own car now, horses and donkeys were becoming a thing of
the past; even in the villages of the west, the arrival of the
morning bus was no longer the big moment of the day. Yet,
paradoxically, here on the Riviera nothing had changed. It was as
though, long ago, when this part of the coast had been built, house
on house, terrace on terrace, winding street on winding street,
nothing further could be added. Belfast, with its ruined houses and
rubbled streets, was now, to her, the alien place. Here, as she
came down into this small French town, she came home to the past,
the remembered narrow, winding streets, the fountains and souvenir
shops, the dusty orange customs building, the fishing boats lining
the quay.

    The Hôtel Welcome, too, was just as she recalled it,
its rust-colored façade exactly as it had been in the
vue du
port
paintings of Villefranche one hundred years ago. But when
Mrs. Redden entered the hotel lobby and the porter came to take her
suitcase, she saw that
something
had changed. Surely the
residents’ dining room was on this floor? She remembered those
evenings when Monsieur Guy, the florid, courteous proprietor, would
walk among the guests’ tables at dinnertime, smiling, pointing to
the pastel sky outside the windows, explaining to the new tourists
that it was
l’heure bleu
, the twilight hour, for which, he
said, “
la Côte est connue dans tous les pays du
monde
.”

    “What happened to the dining room?” were her first
words to the young girl at the desk. The girl looked surprised.
“The restaurant is downstairs,
Madame
. On the quay,” the
girl said. “Do you wish a room?”

    “My name is Redden and I’ve booked.” And then she
recognized the proprietor’s wife, a sallow-skinned woman sitting in
the little front office, going over bills. She spoke, in French, to
the proprietress, asking about the missing dining room. “Ah, that
was a long time ago,
Madame
,” the proprietress said. “Now
we have only one dining room for residents and non-residents alike.
That’s the restaurant below, on the quay. The dining room which was
on this floor, the residents’ dining room that you remember, is now
the television room. What can you do? The clients want television,
they have to have it. And I tell you, it is not at all good for
business. Our bar is not what it used to be in the evening time.
When were you last here,
Madame
?”