This Must Be the Place (26 page)

‘I’ve just got up.’

A typical reply from his sister: most people would not be able to decode this kind of Claudette crypticism but, to Lucas, it’s second nature. It tells him that she’s probably not at home, in either LA or New York, that she’s taken off somewhere but isn’t ready yet to say exactly where, that she and Timou have either had a row and she’s done a runner or they are in a good phase and holed up together in some dazzling tropical retreat.

Then there is that noise again. A snuffling. A sense of her moving, her attention being divided. And then he realises.

‘How’s my nephew?’ he says. ‘How’s the …’ forcing himself to form the word they never say, the collection of letters they never use ‘… baby?’

‘Fine.’ She snips the word, as if with a very sharp pair of scissors. ‘How are you?’

He wants to say to her, please don’t. Don’t not talk about him. Don’t pretend Ari doesn’t exist for my sake.

‘No,’ he says, pushing himself to joviality. The cheery uncle: fond but distant, involved but relaxed. He’s almost convinced himself. ‘Tell me properly. How is he?’

‘He’s …’ He senses her thinking. What to say? What not to say? How to navigate this? ‘He’s sitting up on his own now. He’s reaching for food. He’s got your eyes.’

‘Oh,’ Lucas says.

‘And his hair’s starting to curl. He’s basically a mini-you.’

And that’s enough, he wants to say. Any more and I won’t be enjoying this, I’ll just be coping. Any more after that and I’ll be unhappy. Next comes despondency, then despair.

But Claudette senses this. God knows how but she does. He loves her for that, his sister, loves her for the fact that she moves things along, tells him about a letter she had from their mother, about a script her agent is telling her to do.

‘So,’ she says, ‘how long is it until …’

‘We find out if it’s worked or not?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fourteen days.’

‘That seems like a long time.’

‘I know. The two-week wait.’

‘How are you going to fill the days? Have you got any plans?’

‘For the next two weeks?’ Lucas thinks about this. ‘Not ask Maeve every five minutes whether she has any symptoms. Not follow her to the loo to see if everything is OK. Not call the doctor. Just keep our heads down, I guess, our hopes low, our fingers crossed. There’s not much happening at work at the moment, it being winter, so we were thinking we might—’

‘You don’t fancy a trip, do you?’ Claudette interrupts.

‘A trip?’

‘A quick change of scene. For both of you. With me.’

‘You mean to LA?’

‘No, not LA. Somewhere else.’

Lucas smiles, takes a drag on his cigarette. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘spit it out. Where are you?’

They are waiting, Lucas and Maeve, on a strip of gravel outside the thing like a cattle shed that serves as an airport in this part of the world. He has a rucksack at his feet, a hat with earflaps pulled down low on his head; Maeve is huddled inside her waterproof. The wind comes at them horizontally, whipping through a line of ragged trees to tug at the fastenings of his jacket and toss his hat strings in a manner that feels distinctly derisive.

Lucas is experiencing a falling sensation in his midriff, a premonition that this trip is a mistake, one of Claudette’s less inspired impulses, and a suspicion that he has exercised a gross lack of judgement in agreeing to come. It is a feeling all too familiar from his childhood, from the many times his sister persuaded him to do something with her, lured him into acting as her accomplice, to tackle something or attempt something, and halfway through the execution, Lucas would be overtaken with dismay, with regret: how had she convinced him that this was a good idea? How badly were they going to be punished? Making a zip wire from a bedroom window to the ground. Rigging up a makeshift bridge across a flood-swollen river. Rescuing an injured bird from a high branch. Hauling off their mother’s mattress to act as a crashmat for somersaulting off the windowsill.

And, now, almost thirty years later, here he is again, agreeing on the spur of the moment to drop everything and meet his erratic and hopelessly unreliable sibling in the middle of nowhere. What’s more, dragging his possibly (maybe, hopefully, goddamn-better-be) pregnant wife along with him. Maeve had done nothing to deserve that kind of treatment. What was he thinking, leaving their business, their house, their bonsai-tree collection, and embarking on a trip of mysterious and possibly spurious purpose? It’s only a couple of days, he’d told Maeve, when she’d fixed him with her stare.

He knew she’d been thinking about the last time they’d answered one of Claudette’s late-night suggestions of a trip. They had met up in Rome. Claudette and Timou got into a flaming row on the Ponte Sisto (it was to do with what an Italian location scout had said to them earlier in the day, about artistic ownership or the challenges of collaboration or something along those lines). The two of them were going at it, Claudette furious and tearful, Timou gesticulating and yelling, when a gang of photographers had turned up and started taking pictures. Claudette had turned on them and hurled a handful of stones (they were small stones, she insisted to the
carabinieri
afterwards, tiny, just gravel really, not rocks, not boulders, not at all), and when one of the photographers, struck in the face and bleeding, called Claudette a word that implied her profession was something other than acting, Timou had yanked him off his scooter and punched him. They had all been kept at the police station until the middle of the night. Maeve had murmured to Lucas, as they sat with their backs against the interview-room wall, never again.

Outside the airport, a bicycle creaks past, powered into the headwind by an octogenarian with a pipe. Maeve clears her throat, raises a hand to her mouth; Lucas manages to stop the words, are you OK and do you feel sick, from making it out into the air. He is forced to do this, on average, every three minutes, has to stop himself saying, how do you feel, do you feel anything, are you nauseous, just a little bit, a lot, is your sense of smell enhanced, do you feel tired, more tired than normal, less, do you feel anything out of the ordinary, anything at all, has it worked, do you think, oh, please, for God’s sake, let it work.

‘Um,’ Maeve says. ‘Is she definitely coming?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure we’re in the right place?’

‘Yup,’ he says, with a confidence he doesn’t feel.

Maeve swings her head from side to side, shivering again in the blasting wind. ‘She arrived yesterday?’

‘Two days ago. Maybe three.’

‘And she knows we were on this flight?’

Lucas shrugs. ‘She booked it.’

Maeve snorts. ‘I very much doubt that.’

‘Well,’ he sighs, ‘she would have asked one of her minders, or whatever they are, to book it, I suppose, but I don’t—’

‘Is she travelling with her minders? Do you think this might be one of them now?’

She points at a blue car circling the rockery roundabout. The car pulls up at the kerb and a person of indeterminate gender steps out wearing a moth-eaten, ankle-length garment, mirrored sunglasses and an alarming balaclava.

‘I hardly think so,’ Lucas murmurs, and Maeve gives a laugh.

The doors to the cattle-shed airport flap open and shut, the bicycle creaks on.

‘Oh, God,’ Maeve breathes, ‘he’s coming over.’

‘Quick,’ Lucas whispers. ‘Look busy.’

They turn, in unison, to examine a peeling bus timetable behind them. When Lucas casts a look over his shoulder, the person from the car is sidling up to them. He decides not to risk eye contact but to look steadfastly away, as if fascinated by the line of wind-battered trees. Maeve affects deep interest in the timetable.

‘Got a light?’ the balaclava person says, in a thick Irish brogue.

‘No,’ Lucas says to the trees.

‘Go on, give us a light.’

‘I don’t have one. I don’t smoke.’

‘Liar.’

Lucas spins his head just as the sunglasses are lifted and the balaclava pulled down. His sister is grinning at them.

‘Jesus.’ Lucas cuffs her on the shoulder, then hugs her, then cuffs her again. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘I never knew my Irish accent was so convincing. I’m going to remember that.’ She hugs Maeve, jiggles the car keys in her palm. ‘Well, are you going to stand there all day or are you coming?’

‘We’re coming,’ he grumbles. ‘What else would we bloody well be here for?’

Before they get into the rental car, Lucas and Claudette must stand in the freezing gale to argue about who should sit where. He thinks she should drive; she is sure it should be him. He counters that she can’t map-read but she can drive; she says, try me. Maeve opens the back door, muttering that she often wishes she had siblings but at other times she’s glad she doesn’t. Claudette says he can’t map-read because he doesn’t know where they are going.

‘True,’ he says, and clicks open the driver’s door, ‘so why don’t you tell me?’

She slides into the passenger seat, slams the door, and the relief at being in a confined, windless space is enormous. She unfolds a map, talking about a slightly longer route that goes past a beautiful mountain. Her hair spills out of the constraints of the balaclava. The last time he had seen her, six months ago, or was it seven, it had been dyed brown but it’s back to its original colour. As a child, her hair had been pale gold, almost colourless, hanging down her back in plaits that flicked from side to side like whips; their mother had braided them each morning before school.

She looks at him, map in hand, the balaclava still obscuring the lower half of her face.

‘What are we doing here?’ he says, with a patience he doesn’t feel. ‘Can I ask that now?’

‘I …’ she begins, her voice muffled by the balaclava, then stops.

He frowns, looks at her more closely, leaning towards her, as if to avoid missing any clue she might drop. A film location, a meeting with an obscure Irish writer, some bizarre photo-shoot: he and Maeve had speculated on all of these. But, looking at her in this rental car, on this bleak, wind-battered road, quite alone, quite unchaperoned, he realises it’s something completely different.

‘What?’ he says, seized with a sudden foreboding. ‘What is it? Are you OK? Is it Timou? What’s happened? What’s he done now?’

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing’s happened. I just … I was thinking …’ she glances away from him, out of the window ‘… I need your help with something.’

‘With what?’ Lucas asks.

Claudette turns to face him and her eyes are bright, almost defiant. ‘It’s hard to explain. Better that I just show you.’

He turns to Maeve, to roll his eyes at her – Claudette and her bizarre whims are common ground between them – but the jokey utterance forming dies on his lips because, in the back seat, he sees two things simultaneously. His wife with a face that is stretched and still and also pleading. And a baby seat, one of those that fits into a car backwards. Over its black plastic side, it is possible to see the soft curve of a tiny head, covered with dark down.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘The baby’s here.’

Claudette looks at him, she looks at Maeve. ‘Well, I could hardly leave him behind,’ she says, ‘now could I?’

Rain hurls itself against the windscreen in staccato gusts; the wipers flail back and forth, sisyphean in their ineffectuality. Lucas has to lean forward to see the road before them. Through the rain, through the steamed-up windows, it is just possible to make out the louring bulk of mountains at the sides of the road, huddles of trees, the pocked surface of rivers.

Claudette and Maeve are talking, as they always do, as they have done since they were all teenagers at school. About the kids they took up Helm Crag the other day, about Claudette’s search for a nanny, about the script she is currently reading, about Pascaline’s unfathomable penchant for broken furniture.

‘Left here,’ his sister throws in, interrupting a monologue about the many chairs of their mother’s in which it is forbidden to sit. Lucas knows both these women, probably better than anyone else in the world, and he knows that, underneath their surface conversation, Claudette is not mentioning the embryos and how they might be faring, how they have eleven more days until they find out whether they have stayed, whether they have hung on or whether they have fallen, drifted, feathers on a breeze, to somewhere beyond reach, beyond recall. She isn’t mentioning the cost of the treatment, or that he and Maeve have no more embryos in storage, that this is their last chance. He also knows that although Maeve is asking about Timou and the next film, what she is really thinking, what she is really saying to Claudette is: if only. And: please. And: I’m terrified, I don’t know how we’ll cope if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what we’ll do.

A rough track unribbons before them, the car climbing and climbing the side of a hill of gorse and moss and bare grey rock. Claudette gets out, again and again, to open and close five-bar gates.

‘Is this right?’ Lucas asks, as she gets back into the car, bringing with her the scent of bracken, of weather.

Claudette nods, brushing rain from her brow.

‘Are you sure?’

She nods again.

The wheels skid and flail against grit but they turn a corner and suddenly, before them, is a small clearing, cut through with a stream, silver birches gathered at its banks. Lucas edges the car forward, and out of the mist appear shapes, angles and planes, faint at first but then more distinct. He peers ahead, straining his eyes, wondering if he had seen anything at all, whether whatever it is might just vanish, as mysteriously as it had arrived. But, as he looks, it resolves, assuming corporeal form. He can make out a window, a wall, a roof.

By the stream, in the lee of a meander, stands a stone house. It has casement windows in peeling white paint, a tiled roof, a front door, which stands half open, like a door in a fairytale, as if they are to be lured from their lives into a parallel adventure.

‘There!’ Claudette says, with an odd flourish of her hand, as if she has pulled off some magic trick, as if she summoned this vision from the earth itself. ‘Want to see inside?’

At that moment, there is a noise from the back, like the wingbeat of a small bird. Both he and Maeve turn, in unison, towards the baby’s seat. Claudette doesn’t take her eyes off the front façade of the house. ‘Oh, he’s woken up,’ she murmurs, pushing open the door. ‘Perfect timing.’