One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [54]
Some hours later, I woke to find her on the balcony with Seffy. I could tell by the light it was early evening, and he was standing on her lap, his sturdy legs and bare feet bouncing on her thighs, as she pointed to the crowds below. The children’s carousel, its lights flying round and round, flashed patterns on the bedroom wall: the smell of chestnuts roasting drifted up.
Later that evening when the low sun bathed the ochre roofs from our window in a warm glow, and when Seffy had been fed and changed and was asleep in his pram again, we went downstairs to a café. I felt weak, exhausted, but I finally drank that pastis. More than one, actually. And I told her about Dominic. About how I loved him, or had loved him, and how no one had ever come close to rousing such feelings in me. How my soul ached for him always, every day when he was alive, and now that he was dead… he can’t be dead. I’d stare into my drink, tears streaming down my face in blank disbelief.
She’d reach out and squeeze my hand, rocking the pram with the other, being quiet, occasionally murmuring sympathies. Later, as I slumped back wretchedly in my chair, she told me a bit about herself. She was older than me, thirty, and she told me how she’d loved a boy for seven years. A Parisian, how they’d lived together, bought a flat in Montmartre. And then one day he’d left her, without too much explanation, and weeks later, became engaged to a friend of hers. This friend was expecting his baby in August. She told me how she, Françoise, had been unable to stay in Paris knowing the two of them were round the corner, how she’d come back to England just two months ago.
‘Come back?’
‘Yes, because I’m half-English, you see. My father was French, but my mother’s English.’
‘Ah.’
I’d wondered about the London accent, not a trace of Franglais. She told me that Françoise du Bose was just her professional name to reassure punters of the authenticity of her brocante: that her real name was Maggie. She’d come to England when she was ten, when her father died, been brought up in Hendon. Not far from me, we discovered, since to my mother’s chagrin, I’d started life in Neasden. For a while, Maggie said, she almost couldn’t speak with the pain of losing Étienne: didn’t want to get involved at work, at Antiquarius, didn’t want people to get to know her, ask questions. She said that although Étienne wasn’t dead, he might as well be. And sometimes she wished he was.
She got me to eat a bit, even though I didn’t want to, and later, made me have the bed back in the hotel, whilst she slept on the floor with a pillow, even though I insisted I was fine. I felt too weak to argue.
The following morning I woke up and the bedroom was empty. No Maggie, and Seffy was gone. I ran to the open French window. The muslin curtain billowed dramatically, and I cast about the square in horror, eyes wild. I didn’t know this girl. Didn’t know her at all. And then I saw her. Down below in the square, on the children’s carousel: Maggie was slowly gliding round on a painted golden horse, Seffy on her lap. She waved. I waved back. Nausea rose in my throat as I remembered Dominic, but I knew, too, that moment of panic for Seffy had been worse. That he’d been the first thing on my mind as I woke and that nothing, absolutely nothing, was as strong as my love for him. It helped, a little.
Maggie and I stayed another two nights in Fréjus. I rang Christian and told him what had happened. It was Sunday anyway, so the market was closed, and I just said, a friend’s died, I’d like to stay longer in the sun. He understood. Perhaps he knew it was more than a friend.
Those few days I spent with Maggie were the closest I’d ever got to anyone, bar Dominic or my family. We talked and talked. The