This Must Be the Place (16 page)

‘Er …’ Daniel casts his mind back to a recent evening by the well and can remember her talking, pointing to the barn and saying something about ironmongery but can recall only his attempts to grope her in the dark. She’d been wearing a diaphanous dress thing and not a lot else. ‘Sort of.’

‘Well, I managed to get hold of the right kind of rope, strong enough to hold both kids, I mean, but—’

‘Hang on a second. You mean this – this winch is for … what? Stringing up the kids?’ He tries to think of a way to begin to object to this plan, coming up only with ‘Claudette.’

‘What?’

‘Are you sure? I mean … have you thought about …?’ Daniel flounders for the right approach. He knows that her somewhat overblown and baroque parenting is just an expression of her sublimated creative urges. It’s the way she works off all the energy she once used for making ground-breaking films. She has to do something with all that fire and spark, he reasons. But he draws the line at rendering his children airborne in a homemade fucking winch. ‘I’m not sure this sounds entirely safe.’

‘I knew you’d say that,’ she says. ‘Which is why we’re doing it while you’re away. They want to put on a play, you see, for when you get back. Marithe has been making Calvin a unicorn costume and—’

‘Well, is there any chance it could be a terrestrial-based play? And we can discuss the winch when I get back.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘When will what be?’

She exhales. ‘When are you coming back?’

‘Next week, as planned. But, now you mention it, I was wondering …’ He comes to a standstill outside a grocery store. Banked up in bright pyramids are oranges, peaches, nectarines. All he would have to do is extract one single fruit from the wrong place and the whole perfectly balanced display would come crashing down. He pictures orbs of fruit bouncing like rubber balls all over the sidewalk, around his feet, into the gutter.

‘You were wondering what?’ Claudette prompts.

‘How would it be if I …’ he has to turn away from the grocery display, so strong is the urge to unleash chaos ‘… extended the trip by a day or two? I may not, I don’t know. It’s just a possibility. Would it be all right with you? I know it means you’d be on your own a bit longer with the kids but you’d have time to rehearse the unicorn extravaganza and it shouldn’t be—’

‘Are you thinking of staying on with your family?’

‘Um,’ he says, slowly, ‘not exactly.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Claudette says. ‘Where would you be in these two days?’

‘The thing is,’ he says, aware that he hasn’t consciously made this decision, aware that this is the moment in which the decision appears to be making itself, imposing itself upon him, and hasn’t he always lived his life like this, or used to? ‘The thing is,’ he says again, ‘there’s something I was thinking of following up. Just a very small something. When I get back, I mean. I’m going to see my dad now but it’s just occurred to me that I could change my flight to come back via London. I might take a day or so because there’s not much on at work and there’s something I have to see to. Maybe. I wanted to run it past you. Just two days. Maybe three. I’m not sure.’

There is a pause.

‘You’re not sure?’ she repeats.

‘No.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘It’s very …’ Daniel gropes for the right word, the exact term. How to communicate to Claudette the towering fear he has at letting even a molecule of what happened twenty-odd years ago leak into the life they have carved out for themselves? Because this is how he sees it, as a gaseous poison, bottled, stoppered, sealed, never to be opened. ‘It’s a bit complicated, Claude. Too complicated for me to tell you over the phone. There is someone I might need to go and find.’

‘Who?’

‘No one you know. Someone I was at college with.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Daniel,’ she shouts. ‘This is about a woman, isn’t it? You just swore to me on your children’s lives that—’

‘It’s a guy!’ Daniel yells, startling a couple drinking coffee at a table a few feet away. ‘He’s a guy called Todd, OK? I knew him when I did that year in England and I thought I might go ask him something.’

‘What? What do you have to ask him?’

Daniel scans his mind, takes stock of the situation. Can he tell her over the phone? Can he give a brief enough description of things? Can he go into the minutiae of what happened, all those years ago, what might have happened? He can’t even remember if he’s ever mentioned Nicola to Claudette.

‘I told you,’ he says, ‘it’s very hard to explain.’

‘Well, try me,’ Claudette says, ‘and I will attempt to rally my meagre cerebral resources.’

‘Claude,’ he murmurs, ‘come on. Don’t do this. Please just trust me, OK? You know you can trust me. It’s just two or three days to go to Sussex and then I’ll be right back and—’

‘Sussex? Why Sussex?’

‘That’s where Todd lives. Did I not say?’

‘No, Daniel, you omitted to mention that. I can’t believe you’re—’

‘Look,’ he interjects, ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to do it yet. I may not, I may just come straight home but I wanted to talk it over with you first and then I’ll decide whether or not—’ He hears Marithe’s querying voice in the background, in French, and even though he doesn’t speak the language, he knows she’s asking is that Papa and can she talk to him, and Claudette is saying,
Non, ce n’est pas Papa
, and he thinks his heart will break, right there, right then. He doesn’t know how to survive this.

‘Go on, then,’ she cries. ‘Bugger off to Sussex, go and see this
friend
I’ve never heard of, see if I care, see if—’

‘You need to calm down, OK?’ he says, in as reasonable a voice as he can manage. ‘The kids can hear everything you’re saying and—’

There is a clatter on the line, then the flat monotone of a cut connection. Claudette has hung up.

Enough Blue to Make

Claudette, New York, 1993

C
laudette balances in her bare feet on the edge of the bathtub. One hand grips the sill, the other pincers a near-expired cigarette. She squints up at the New York sky – a hazy, china-blue bolt of cloth, cross-stitched with white vapour trails – and a plume of smoke drifts from her mouth out of the window.

She has been looking out at the apartment windows across the air vent. Most are obscured by blinds or drapes but there is one, directly opposite her, where some people are sitting around a dinner table: two couples, various children, a narcoleptic cat stretched out along the dresser behind them. Claudette watches their mouths opening and closing, their arms moving, the hands lifting cutlery, putting it down. It’s like watching the rushes of a film without headphones. One of the women goes to the stove, comes back, goes again. The other darts at one of the children with a cloth. One of the men has a child on his lap; he holds an arm about the boy’s ribcage. Something white flies about the boy’s face and, for a while, Claudette wonders what it is – birds, scarves, some kind of toy? By straining her eyes and leaning further out of the window, she discerns that the child is wearing gloves. A small pair of white gloves, rather like the anarchic cat in that story about the brother and sister forced to stay inside all day.

Claudette is wondering why a child might choose to wear white gloves when something her father used to say about the sky tugs at the edge of her memory. She frowns, her hand poised in mid-air. What was it? She almost has it. Enough blue to make – something. A pair of trousers? A sailor’s trousers? It was said in the tone of buoyancy and optimism. It could be lashing with rain but he would point through the windscreen of the car and say it: look, enough blue to make – whatever it was. But what was it?

Claudette allows the ash to fall from her cigarette into the waiting toilet bowl below. She will ask Lucas next time she speaks to him. He will remember, she is sure. He’s the kind of person who—

The bathroom door opens and, just as it always does, crashes against the tiled wall, dislodging the towel rail hooked over it, making a startling, metallic clang.

Timou, in practised fashion, leaps sideways, catches the falling towels and rail in one hand and, with the other, pushes the door shut behind him.

‘Nicely done,’ Claudette says, from her position on the edge of their bath.

Timou regards her, half amused, one eyebrow raised. ‘So,’ he says, ‘you are hiding in the bathroom? Like a truant?’

‘No,’ she says.

‘And you’re smoking?’

She takes a drag of her cigarette. ‘Certainly not.’

‘It looks,’ he says, replacing the towel rail, ‘very much like smoking to me.’

Claudette exhales. ‘I don’t smoke. I never smoke. You must be imagining it.’

Timou comes towards her. He wraps his arms around her legs and buries his face in her midriff. ‘Those things will kill you,’ he mutters, his voice muffled.

‘Really?’ Claudette stubs out the cigarette and hurls it from the window. ‘I never heard that before.’

‘I don’t want you to die of cancer.’

She runs her fingertips over his shorn hair, sleek as the flank of a cat. ‘What do you want me to die of?’

‘Nothing,’ he says, into her abdomen. ‘You are never to die. It is simply not allowed. Never ever. At least, not until I do.’

‘How come you get to die first?’

‘Because I said so. I – how do you say it? – booked it first.’

‘Bagged,’ she murmurs. ‘Bagged it first. But I’m not sure you can bag the order in which we die. Surely it’s the kind of thing we need to discuss and agree on. We might have to draw up a contract. You can’t just—’

‘Cloud,’ he interrupts gently, ‘you know there’s a journalist in our living room, right?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘He’s there, waiting for us.’

She stretches her hand into the air beyond the window. It is heavy, balmy, stirring, filled with noises. Air-conditioning units hum, car horns, a siren, music from a stereo or perhaps the bar on the next block, the clatter of an engine somewhere. The soundscape of a city going about its Wednesday-afternoon business.

‘Do you ever wish,’ she says, almost to herself, ‘that we could just make films? Just make them and send them out into the world to fend for themselves, without talking about them, without explaining, without anyone ever seeing us, without—’

‘I’ve given him coffee,’ Timou says, ignoring this speech, ‘but there’s a limit to how long we can expect him to wait.’

Claudette rakes her outstretched fingers back and forth through the air. The diners opposite are all on their feet, lifting dishes, milling about the kitchen, their backs to the window.

‘Cloudy?’

‘Mmm.’

‘What does “mmm” mean? “Yes, Timou, I’m coming right now”? Or “I’m going to pretend this isn’t happening and maybe walk out halfway through, like last time”?’

‘Mmm,’ she says again.

‘You know, they gave you a nickname in that article.’

‘Which article?’

‘The one you walked out on.’

‘What was it?’

‘I don’t remember … It was to do with running but it sounded like rivets or metalwork. Bolting? Something like that.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘The Bolter?’

‘Yes, that was it.’

She laughs and pulls in her hand, surprised. ‘Like Nancy Mitford?’

‘Eh?’ Timou tilts his face back to look at her. ‘You’ve given yourself a reputation for bolting. You know that?’

She puts her arms around his shoulders and lowers herself down off the bath, until she is face to face with him, his features blurringly close, his stubble sharp against her cheek. They are pretty much the same height, which often surprises her. He is so much stronger than her, so much more of a physical presence: that he should reach the same point as her on a height chart seems ridiculous.

His arms lock, just as they always do, around her ribcage so that she can barely draw breath. ‘Just don’t bolt from me,’ he whispers, ‘OK?’

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise.’

She smiles into his face. ‘I promise.’

He kisses her and she closes her eyes. His mouth is hot, his body pressed against hers. He is like an anatomy figure, each of his muscle groups standing out beneath his skin. She has never known anyone else with Timou’s focus, his drive. Whatever he sets his sights on, he will work towards with a singular determination, letting nothing and no one distract him, an oil tanker on course.

When she feels him pulling at the waistband of her skirt, she opens her eyes. ‘Timou,’ she says, ‘the journalist.’

He is unzipping his trousers and pushing them down with the same intense urgency he does everything. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘so now you’re worried about the journalist?’

‘Listen,’ she starts to laugh, ‘this is ridiculous, we can’t, we have to—’

‘Come on,’ he says, divesting her of her knickers with a deft downward movement, ‘you have to strike while the eye is hot.’

‘The eye?’

‘It’s not correct?’ Timou’s breath scalds her ear.

‘No, it’s …’ She’s half smiling, while trying to think straight, which is hard when Timou is lifting up her shirt, unhooking her bra. There is a slight buzzing in Claudette’s head, distant, disconcerting. She feels as though she has heard this colloquial misstep before somewhere; it feels important that she remember it, remember this. ‘Iron,’ she gets out. ‘While the iron is hot.’

‘OK.’ He is lifting her, pressing her up against the cool tiles of the wall. ‘Whatever.’

Claudette tries to clear her mind, to navigate her way to the source of this unease. The eye is hot. But then it slips away, bobbing out of reach. She forgets all about it, her legs stretching out so that her feet may once more find the rim of the bath.

The air-conditioning in the living room must be faulty. It appears to be churning away, the long white curtains lifting in the movement of air, but the atmosphere feels weighty and moist, like that of a greenhouse.

Claudette shifts in her seat, tucking her still bare feet beneath her. Her hand separates a length of hair and she smooths it, twirls it, loops it, twists it between two fingers, feeling its roots tug gently at the side of her scalp.

She tunes in briefly to the conversation going on around her.