Alain was frowning at me. Oh shit, I thought. I have to teach him next week. I will never be able to look him in the eye. I seemed, however, to be unable to stop looking him in the eye. He carried on looking at me. Then he reached out and touched my hand, lightly.
‘You know you are worth more than he could ever give you,’ he said. ‘There will be plenty of men out there who are worthy of you. This one is not.’
We were the last to leave the restaurant. I was pleasantly drunk, and glowing. I let Alain put a hand on the small of my back to guide me to the car. He had offered to drop me off at home. I would retrieve my car from the restaurant in the morning, with the help of Matt and his hire car.
We drove back to Pounchet in near silence. I was not used to being out in the evening, and stared out of the window at the total darkness. When we were on a particularly dark stretch of road, with tall trees on either side and barely enough room to pass an oncoming car, an owl flew directly in front of the headlights. For a second it was illuminated perfectly, and I could see every feather, every crease on its talons. It stared at us with unreadable glassy eyes, then flew up and away with a screech. I smiled at Alain.
‘I’ve never seen an owl close up before,’ I told him.
‘But you live in the countryside!’ he marvelled.
‘And I don’t often go out in the night. I’ve seen them at a distance, seen their outlines on electricity lines, but I’ve never ever seen one like that. It’s wonderful to see. I’ll have to start taking Alice out with a torch in the evenings to look for more.’
‘That has made you happy,’ he commented.
‘Yes,’ I readily agreed.
‘Are you sure you want to go back to England?’
I was deflated. ‘I’m not sure about anything. You know that.’
When we got back, Alain stopped outside the front gate, and kissed me gallantly on each cheek, with the engine still running.
‘Thank you for a wonderful evening,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you on Thursday.’
‘Thank you for your company. I hope you make the right choice. Remember that you are worthy of everything.’ He swept his hand around, encompassing the stars, the house, the countryside and the owls.
I was still smiling as I walked through the front door. Matt was standing in the hall, looking at me.
‘Hello,’ I told him, with a slightly drunken smirk. ‘Everything all right? Alice all right?’
‘Alice is fine. She didn’t go to bed till nearly ten, but she’s fine. She’s sound asleep now.’
I looked at him, trying to read his face. ‘Good.’
He said nothing, so I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on. ‘Tea?’ I asked, politely. ‘Coffee? Herbal tea? I’m going to have a green and mint one. Because green tea’s so good for you but I hate the taste of it. And these tea bags just taste of mint which is nice. So you get all the benefits of green tea without the nastiness.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sure, why not, I’ll have one of them.’
He watched me pour boiling water into the two cups. I felt self-conscious as I bashed the tea bags around a bit with a teaspoon, and put them in the compost bin. He took the cup as I passed it to him, and we sat in the armchairs by the fire.
‘Good evening?’ he asked. It almost sounded casual.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Lovely.’ I was still glowing. ‘That was the first date I’ve been on, by the way,’ I added.
‘Perfect timing on my part, then,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t make any difference. I hardly know Alain. He knows all about our situation. I’m not in the least bit romantically involved with him. But he does seem to be a good friend.’
‘He’d like to be more, I’m sure.’
‘Maybe he would.’ I put another log on the fire, and waited a couple of seconds for the flames to leap up. I kicked off my uncomfortable shoes and pulled my legs up under me. ‘How does it feel, being back?’ I asked him.
‘Weird,’ he said at once. ‘You and Alice have done so much. I’ve missed it all. And it’s unbelievably odd to be your babysitter.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Have you been thinking about my suggestion?’
‘I’ve been thinking about little else.’
‘You must have been a fun date.’
‘He didn’t mind. I don’t know, Matt.’ I looked at him. His eyes made me melt slightly, but I wanted to be honest with him and with myself, so I said what I thought. ‘At first I decided to accept your proposal. To see what happened. But when I came back from shopping and you and Alice weren’t here, I thought you’d kidnapped her. I don’t know how long it would take before I trusted you again. I don’t want to live on a knife edge, waiting for something terrible to happen.’
‘It won’t.’
‘And you’ve lied to me so much that I can’t believe you. You have no idea what I went through. I fell apart. I’m all right now, just about, but that’s recent. I hated you for what you did. I still do. It was the worst sort of betrayal, because I don’t even have any happy times to look back on. They’re all tainted by what I now know, by me imagining you sneaking off to phone Jo all the time. I never really knew you.’ I looked at him, waiting for a reaction, but he didn’t say anything. He was staring into the fire, so I carried on talking. ‘I don’t think you did it out of malice,’ I said. ‘I think you were very, very weak. I think that if we did try to create a proper life together, it would take a few years before we would know if it was working. But if we tried, I would only be doing it because I didn’t think I was worth any more. And I’m starting to think that that might not be true.’
‘Emma,’ he said slowly, ‘I can’t tell you how impressed I am by you. You look stunning. The house is . . .’ He paused, looking at me with a smile. ‘Nice. Alice is a well-balanced and lovely little girl, in spite of her crap father. I’m humble before you. I won’t leave your side for years, if you like. You’ll know where I am the whole time. I will never ever do anything to hurt you, ever again. I’ll help you with everything. You’re worthy of everything. We’ll be real partners.’
‘It’s tempting,’ I told him. I did not try to hide the tears in my eyes. ‘It really is. I just don’t know, and I’m not going to decide tonight. I’m going to bed.’
He stood up. ‘Can I come?’ He laughed at his own cheek. ‘I don’t know what the future holds. But please, Emma, let me sleep next to you, for old time’s sake. I’ve missed you so much.’
I opened my mouth to say no. Then I changed my mind. My evening with Alain had left me feeling deeply attractive, and I still loved Matt. I felt stirrings that had not troubled me for many months. I knew exactly what would happen if I let Matt sleep in my bed.
I stood up, in my stockinged feet, and held out my hand. Why the fuck not?
‘Come on then,’ I said, smiling at him.
‘It’s nearly time,’ called Fiona. ‘Five minutes. Get yourselves in here, quick.’
I picked up my kir royale and went into the sitting room. Fi was sitting on the sofa with baby Maxime on her breast. He was a hungry baby. She seemed to have spent the four months since the birth sitting in front of a TV, with him clamped to her nipple.
Andy followed me in. ‘Oi,’ he said. ‘Max. Your days are numbered. I’m reclaiming Mummy’s boobies one day, OK, mate?’
Fiona spoke in Max’s voice. ‘All right, Daddy. But I need to be breastfed for six months so you have to wait a bit.’
‘I’m counting, little sod.’
Alice adored Max. In her eyes, he fell somewhere between a doll and a pet. She was staying with Coco that night, because I had no idea how the programme would look and there were certain to be many things on it that I did not want her to see. She had become too French, rarely going to bed before nine, and I knew that, had she caught wind of the excitement – had she realised that she and I were on television – she would have been stationed in front of the screen for the duration. I could not have her in the house.
I was desperate to watch it myself. I had had satellite installed especially. At the moment, the adverts were on.
Moving On
was ‘next up after the break’. It was eight o’clock in England. Prime time. And this programme was all about me.
I was overwhelmingly relieved to be watching it in my house in France. Geoff had finally succeeded in lending me the money I needed to stay, and I was surprised at how much work I was getting as a private tutor. My finances were precarious – satellite TV was a luxury I could not really afford – but I was managing.
Alain came in and sat next to me. I moved up to let him in, and pulled down my microskirt for decency’s sake. Coco had made me buy it. Now that I went running most days, she said I had the legs for it. It was a magnificent garment: red velvet and barely there. Alain adored it.
He draped an arm round my shoulder. ‘I hope I will understand enough of this,’ he said in English. I frowned. I hoped he wouldn’t. I hadn’t wanted Alain to see it. After seven months of increasingly intimate dates, I was still getting used to thinking of him as ‘my boyfriend’. I preferred talking about him in French, when I could just call him ‘
mon ami
’ which was nice and enigmatic.
Alain and I were happy together. He seemed to adore me. I was comfortable with him, and I trusted him. Gradually, I was beginning to see that we could very well have a bright future together. After Max’s birth, Alain had hinted that he would not mind having a fourth child, one day. I was on the brink of asking him to move in with me. The house was too big for just Alice and me. I basked in his whole-hearted appreciation of me.
Sending Hugh away had been the best thing I had done, and I thanked my lucky stars every day that Alain had come along in time to stop me prolonging the pit of mistrust and recrimination that would have been my renewed relationship with Alice’s father. I had stopped calling him Matt, now. He had always been Hugh.
I knew that Rosie’s camera had captured me at my absolute worst. I was steeling myself to remember those days. I knew I was going to see myself when I was fat, shiny-faced, and desperately, horrendously miserable. Alain had insisted on coming to watch. He was massively excited on my behalf and he had assured me that
of course
he would not be shocked by anything I said or did before I met him. He was terribly proud of me. But he had never seen me badly dressed. He had never seen me raw.
I tried to regulate my breathing. My hands were shaking and I felt sick. I was dreading the next hour, but at the same time I was compelled to watch every second of it. I wanted to know what film Rosie had made about me. I wanted to see my crisis through someone else’s eyes. I was agitated and almost tearful. Alain pressed his hand against my shoulder.
‘
Ça ira,
’ he kept saying, as if to a child. I knew I was stiff beneath his touch and made a conscious effort to relax. I was completely myself with Alain, because I had no appetite at all for being anyone else. I made no pretences, and he seemed to like me all the same.
Andy nodded to me. ‘Rosie won’t have screwed you over, will she, Ems? Course she won’t. She’s practically family now.’
The programme began with a shot of me surfing. I was standing up on the board, wobbling slightly, but on my feet and grinning insanely. I came to the shore and almost screamed, ‘That is the best thing I’ve done in my whole life!’
The voiceover, a woman’s voice but not Rosie’s, intoned, ‘Emma Meadows moved to the south of France last year with her partner Matt and their young daughter Alice. Matt commuted to work in London, Alice started at the village school, and Emma set about renovating the house. At first everything went smoothly.’
‘It did not,’ I said, under my breath.
‘In the summer, however, Emma was to discover that something was very, very wrong. She found out that the father of her child was, in fact, married to someone else, and that he had a young son in London. Matt had been leading a double life and Emma faced a momentous decision. This is her story.’
The theme music kicked in, and the words ‘Moving on’ appeared in a cursive script across the bottom of the screen.
‘Fuck,’ I said, racking my brains, again, in a further attempt to remember all the time I had spent with Rosie. I had never cared whether her camera had been on or not. The camera had become a piece of furniture. I had seen it as an irrelevance. Now, everyone I knew, and millions of strangers, were sitting down to watch my most intimate moments. ‘Can I back out at this point, do you think?’
Fiona smiled beatifically and shook her head. Motherhood suited her. She was dazed and tired, but she seemed extraordinarily contented. Max was sweet-natured and sleepy, which helped. Andy had made her life hell for the last couple of months of the pregnancy, insisting that he was going to have a DNA test performed the moment the baby was born, but as soon as he had seen Max, he changed his mind. He said now that he knew Max was his son, that he did not need science to confirm it for him. I sensed that he did not want to know if he wasn’t.
They had featured on
Moving On
the previous week. I had been excited for them, and embarrassed by my own brief appearance in their programme. Rosie had obligingly edited out all but the most cryptic references to the Didier episode, and they had both come across well. Fiona had been enormously relieved.
The programme began with Matt pushing open Andy and Fiona’s front door. He stared straight into the camera, and turned and ran away, his arms over his head. He looked ridiculous, and, indeed, everyone except for me laughed as the camera stayed focused on him as he ran past me and Alice, who were crouched down playing with dinosaurs next to a plant. He flung open the wrought-iron gate and ran away. The camera focused on me. I was frowning, staring after him. I was heavier, with my double chin greatly in evidence, but I didn’t look as bad as I had expected. I pulled Alice, who looked tiny, close to me, and told her not to worry.
‘When we first met Matt, he was slightly camera shy,’ smirked the voiceover. ‘The reasons soon became clear.’
I shut my eyes and gathered my strength. This was going to be a long hour.
Hugh had not intended to watch it. He had strongly intended not to watch it. All day long, he had worked hard, creating projects where there weren’t any, sorting out all of his personal filing, filling in his expenses. Anything to keep his mind occupied. He knew that everyone he knew would be watching this programme. His parents knew about Alice – indeed, they had met her briefly, in the summer, when she had come to stay with him – but he had tried to keep all the details of his behaviour from them. He knew they knew it all already, but he was humiliated beyond belief that it was being televised.