‘Right, gorgeous,’ Rosie said, putting her camera away. ‘Off you go to work. Off I go to the hospital.’
I squeezed her hand. ‘Good luck.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s not as if I’m actually doing anything.’ Rosie was collecting all her notes, referral letters, and paperwork, ready for her return to England in two days’ time.
I kissed her and she got into the car.
I picked up my bag and set off for work. I thought of the twenty-minute drive to the Chamber of Commerce as my transition time. By the time I arrived there, I was a teacher. I was outgoing, firm and enthusiastic, qualities I still often lacked at home. I was getting better, however. I could sometimes wake up, now, without the thud of realisation hitting me. Now that the pain was becoming more manageable, I was discovering that Alice and I really had been a single parent family all along. There was nothing for me to do, now that Matt had left, that I had not done before. Some mornings I woke up and enjoyed a few moments of brief solitude before Alice climbed in with me. I would stretch out, luxuriating in the expanse of sheets. Other times I would still find myself curling in to where Matt ought to be, reaching for him, half asleep, and waiting for him to push the hair off my face as he used to do when he was with me.
Alice had almost stopped asking about her daddy. She would only mention him when she saw somebody else’s father, or when Louis’ dad came from Geneva to take him out for the weekend. Her eyebrows would knit together and she would turn her face up to me. Her puzzled expression broke my heart.
‘Where’s mine own daddy gone?’ she would ask.
I always had an answer ready. ‘He’s working very hard,’ I told her. ‘He’s going to come to see you soon.’
I pulled into the staff parking area. This still thrilled me. It was strange to feel that somebody valued me enough to pay me for my time. I reapplied my lipstick and checked my nails before I got out of the car.
The building had a self-consciously modern pillared edifice with an indecipherable sculpture in the middle of its grassy front garden. The corridors inside smelt of polish. People clicked efficiently along, holding files under their arms. I liked joining them, carrying my own files of class notes and my big dictionary. I liked the sound my new small heels made as I descended the stairs to the language teaching corridor. I liked everything about being a teacher.
There were six students in each of my classes, and as they were adults, they all wanted to learn. The youngest was Chloe, who was about twenty and highly ambitious in her management job for a telephone company. I predicted that she would shortly be moving to Bordeaux and then on to Paris. Her ambition was to work in America, and she gave my English classes everything that she had to further this goal. Chloe had creamy skin, rosy cheeks, and black hair. Sometimes I looked at her and imagined Alice at her age, looking just as beautiful. The oldest was Bernard, in his late fifties, who had been sent by his company to learn English and was slightly grumpy about it. He failed to see, as he often told me, what was wrong with speaking French.
They all went to grammar classes with a qualified teacher. My job was simply to sit with them around a table in a tiny room for two hours, and to get them talking, to speak to them only in English, and to make sure they used a wide variety of vocabulary. I had been nervous the first time, but had covered it up by being stroppy and strict, and by refusing to countenance a single word of French.
Today I stood in front of the class and asked them to tell us about their families.
‘Chloe,’ I said. ‘You start us off.’
‘OK,’ she said, pleased. ‘I have a sister, Béatrice, who is seventeen. She lives with our parents, near Villeneuve. My father is a teacher. My mother is a nurse. One day I will have my own family. I have three boyfriends but now I am single. I think this is OK.’
‘Very good,’ I told her. ‘But you should say, I have
had
three boyfriends. Otherwise it gives the wrong impression. Bernard?’
‘My name is Bernard,’ he said carefully. ‘My family is my wife. My boys are old. Twenty-eight year and thirty year. They live Bordeaux and Lyon. I do not speak English good. I like the French. I have visit England. I do not like to eat in England. Have you eat English food? Is terrible. I ask for chicken and it comes . . .’ He slipped into French to share his horror with the other students, and, intrigued, I didn’t interrupt. ‘It said chicken something on the menu, so I thought,
poulet
, good,
poulet
must be good, but when it arrived, the chicken was covered with orange breadcrumbs, and it tasted like rubber, and . . .’ He drew breath to announce his punchline. ‘There was cream cheese in the middle!’
‘In English,’ I told him sternly. ‘Bernard, I think you ordered Chicken Kiev. That was a mistake. The food in England is not always terrible.’
‘
Si.
’
‘
Non
. I mean, no. OK, let’s talk about food. Because British cities are so multicultural, you can find any cuisine there. French, Japanese, Ethiopian, lots of Indian. Curry is the national dish. Has anyone been to the Indian restaurant here in Villeneuve?’ They shook their heads. ‘It’s supposed to be good. We’ll all go at the end of term.’
It was a revelation to me to realise that responsible adults with good jobs respected me as a teacher. I knew that I would never have got this job without my good haircut and my new clothes. I generally wore black trousers and my green shirt to teach in, since I could not afford to expand my wardrobe, and I felt both smart and funky. Sometimes Rosie lent me skinny black clothes, and I loved myself in them. I began to see the glimmer of a future. I started to suspect that if I could maintain a positive mindset, I might have potential.
‘What about you?’ Chloe asked suddenly. ‘Emma, tell us about your family.’
I drew a breath. For a moment I contemplated lying, creating the family I thought I had, months ago. Then I decided that I had nothing to lose by being honest.
‘You might regret this,’ I told the room, ‘but I’ll tell you if you like.’ They all nodded, intrigued. I caught a whiff of the relief that hits any classroom when a teacher decides to go off at a tangent and the pupils are required to do nothing more than sit back and nod.
‘Right,’ I announced, determined to tell them my story. ‘From the beginning. I never knew my father. My mother was ill with manic depression.’ I noticed some frowns and quickly looked it up. ‘She was
maniaco-dépressive
. Come on, guys! You should have worked that one out. I lived with her until I was three, and then she committed suicide.’ I watched them, checking they understood.
A handsome man in his forties, called Alain, whispered, ‘
Elle s’est suicidée?
’
I nodded, and eyebrows were raised, sympathetic looks and murmurs extended. ‘I lived with my aunt and uncle and my cousins after that. But I didn’t know until last month that my uncle is also my father. No, not incest. He’s my mother’s sister’s husband. So my cousins are my brother and my sisters, too. I have one brother and two sisters.’ I scanned the faces, surprised at how liberating it was to tell this story. This is me, I thought. This is who I am. And it’s all right. ‘It goes on,’ I warned them, laughing. ‘In fact, it gets worse. I have a daughter, Alice. She’s three. I moved to France with her and my partner, her father, but he was still working in London. He travelled back and forth every week. Then I discovered that he had another family, another child, in London. He had been married to someone else all the time I had known him, and I never realised. You can call me stupid if you like. Believe me, I have called myself stupid. So now, it’s just Alice and me, and many different friends and relations who stay with us.’ I looked at them and grinned broadly.
They looked wary. Alain, who was a classic example of a beautiful, well-worn Frenchman, asked Chloe if he had understood correctly. I assured him that he had. I was sick of being sad. It felt good to be able to tell strangers about my life. For as long as I could remember, people had gossiped about me. Now I was gossiping about myself.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Chloe, eventually. The others nodded and joined in. Bernard pronounced, in French, that such a beautiful woman should be cherished like a rose. I masked my delight by telling him sternly to speak in English. Then we got on with the class.
The only catch with my new venture was the fact that the money came nowhere close to what we needed. It covered our food and petrol, but it did not touch the builders’ bills, the mortgage, or anything extra. Geoff offered a loan, but I refused it. I knew I could fall back on him if necessary, but it would have felt shabby to have discovered my father, and immediately bailed myself out with his cash.
‘It wouldn’t be bailing out,’ he said grumpily. ‘It would be a just redistribution of resources. A nice Old Labour gesture. You should approve.’
I banned myself from little treats. I wouldn’t meet someone for coffee if I could invite them to the house instead. Better still, I would go to their house. I stopped buying Alice her favourite cake bars, shaped like teddies, and started baking biscuits. I saved up money for her school lunches, and bought fifty canteen tickets at a time so I would not run out. At weekends, we would walk through the fields, or stay at home. We did nothing that cost any money.
I had promised myself a surfboard, but now I knew I could not pay for one. I could not even afford the petrol for outings to the beach. Surfing, like everything else, was filed under ‘when I’ve got cash’. Which was a shame, since surfing was free.
On the night that Rosie flew, terrified, to London, I sat in front of the fire. The family liaison committee, comprising Geoff, Christa and Bella, had decided that none of them needed to take time off work to babysit for me. They declared me to be all right. I was responsible. I loved Alice. I was coming back to London anyway. I was officially trustworthy again.
I curled into an armchair, with a blank sheet of paper and Matt’s old laptop in front of me. I stared at the screen. All the shutters were closed, the doors were bolted and Alice was asleep upstairs. The building work was almost completed now, and this sitting room, where the three of us had lived on a lilo for our first five days, was cosy and warm. A lamp in the corner provided a low light, and the flames of the fire made shadows on the oak beams of the ceiling. The terracotta tiles glowed. There was no dust in the air, no piles of rubble, no more drilling to be done. They were fiddling with the electricity and doing the last details. My house was my home at last. Paradoxically, this meant it could be my home no longer. I knew I was going to have to put it on the market. It broke my heart.
Those first few nights seemed a lifetime ago. A year had passed since Matt had shifted Alice and me out here, to keep us away from his other family. I looked back on my preoccupations then with fond sorrow. I had been terrified of the move, of leaving my home and having to start again somewhere new, but I had known I would be all right because I had Matt. I had been naïve and stupid. In the event, the move had been all right. Matt, not France, had been the problem, and I had not expected that for a moment.
Everything had changed. I desperately missed his companionship. I never admitted it to anybody any more, because Bella and Charlotte and Greg, and Fiona and Andy, and Coco, and Rosie – everybody in my life – all believed that I was getting over him, that I despised him. But I had been waiting for his calls. He’d not phoned me since Christmas.
I wrote a large heading on the sheet of paper. MONEY, it said. Then I copied down the contents of the bank account from the internet banking screen: €5,439.39. This was all the money I possessed. The proceeds of the house sale had withered away. I had just paid a builders’ bill, and there was only one more to come. I doubted I had the funds for it. The mortgage was €755 per month.
I wrote down my earnings. They were insignificant.
I turned the paper over and wrote down the word OPTIONS. I could think of only two, and the second one was a dream. In the morning I would ring the estate agent.
Rosie called me from London. She sounded as if she was crying.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ she said, accusingly.
I pretended I didn’t. ‘What?’
‘That Greg was meeting me at the airport.’
‘How else would he have known what flight you were on? Are you all right?’
‘Mmm. Scared.’
‘Is he with you now?’
‘He’s barely left my side. I’m dragging him down. I feel terrible. I can’t believe you did that to me.’
‘Don’t be so stupid. Just get yourself well again. When are you going to hospital?’
‘Tomorrow. God, Emma. I’m going to die.’
I sighed and tried to say the right thing. ‘We’re all going to die one day. And I’m certain that your day isn’t now. You’re young and strong. Just look after yourself, let Greg look after you, and for God’s sake, stop feeling guilty.’
Winter dragged on and on. Everyone said it had been a particularly cold one, and indeed it had been frosty since November. I felt that I was emerging from hibernation, and impatiently awaited the weather emerging with me. The fields behind my house were solid with frost, and twice we had had a sprinkling of snow.
‘What can I do?’ I asked Fiona. She had asked me to meet her in St Paul for a manicure. I had managed to turn the invitation around and go to her house instead. I was drinking coffee, and she was sipping herbal tea, in an unfeasibly warm living room. Its ceiling was so high it must have been extortionate to heat. ‘I literally haven’t got any money,’ I told her. ‘We can manage to live here for a couple more months. After that I’m bankrupt.’
She put down her teacup. It was a delicate, hand-painted cup from an expensive shop in Bordeaux. I wondered whether, now that I had smartened up my appearance, I was supposed to throw out my chipped random cups and replace them with chic, expensive ones. I knew it could not happen.
‘What should you do?’ she asked incredulously. ‘What do you think you should do? Squeeze Matt for every last
centime
, darling. What else?’