A Place for Us (12 page)

“I don’t know, Karen,” Bill said, and he looked sad. “I feel rotten, that’s the truth. Haven’t been in touch. Things just slide, don’t they?” He rubbed his forehead, staring blankly at the tablecloth. “Did I tell you about Lucy?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “She wants to write some article about it for the paper. ‘David Winter’s Family Secrets,’ something like that.”

Karen took a moment to digest this. “That’s what it’ll be called?”

He hesitated; she saw the sadness in his face and felt a sharp pain in her heart. “You know what these newspapers are like; they’ve learned nothing. They love picking over the bones of . . . things.”

Karen felt herself shivering in the warm room and gave herself a little shake, as Bill leaned forward on his crossed arms. “I don’t want to say no to her, but I’m not sure about it. I don’t think it’s a good idea, raking it all up. It’ll just upset Ma.”

“You say things like that, but I never really know what you mean, Bill,” Karen said. “Raking what up?” She wished she could keep that
note of impatience out of her voice. “Daisy’s selfish, if you ask me. So’s Cat. They could come back and they don’t. As for Florence, she’s in another world. And Lucy—it’s about time she got on with her career. She’s always saying she wants to be a writer, make it big and all that, and she does nothing about it.” Bill and Lucy’s closeness annoyed her now, as it always did when she got cross with Bill, and she wanted to hurt him. The way they laughed at the same stuff, the way his eyes lit up at a clipping she’d send him or a postcard or a cartoon from the
New Yorker
. Lucy had lived with him after the divorce, and their closeness excluded Karen. Lucy was full of life, a breath of fresh air, too big and clumsy for their small house. Karen wasn’t part of their world, and she tried not to let it get to her, but sometimes it crawled out: a nasty, spiteful, childish desire to hurt. “You’re the only one who seems to care about your parents. The way things are at the moment just leaves you shouldering everything down here.”

“I’m not shouldering anything.” He smiled sadly. “I like being here. I like popping in on Ma and Pa. I’m not like the girls. I’m the boring one. I like a quiet life.”

Their eyes met and they stared at each other across the small table. There was a short silence. Karen knew she’d ruined the evening now; perhaps this was the moment to go. She stood up and crossed her arms. “I’m sorry. I’m tired and it’s been a long day. I’m working too hard. Do you mind if I pop out now, drop that card off ?”

Bill stayed in his seat, looking down at the grain of the wood.

“Bill?”

After a moment he said, “It’s Susan, is it?”

Her voice trembled. “Yes, it is.”

He glanced at her. “Give her my love.”

“I will . . . I will.” Karen turned away, putting her coat on.

“I’ve been thinking.” Bill sat back slowly. “Maybe you need a break. After the party. Maybe we should go to Italy. Florence—we could see Florence. Or Venice. A mini-break in December, before Christmas. Karen? What do you think?”

Her heart was thumping so loud in her chest Karen felt sure he must be able to hear it. She rummaged in her pockets, then reached for her keys, buying time.

“Sure.”

He got up and came over to her. “I know things haven’t been—I know things are difficult.” She nodded, slowly raising her chin so she was looking straight into his eyes. Her husband. His brown eyes, so solemn, so sweet and kind. A pang of memory shot through her like a comet streaking through the darkness, reminding her that she hadn’t been wrong, that there had been something there once. “We deserve a break, both of us. We could get some practice making that baby,” he said softly, as if it were a secret.

Karen put her hands up to his and they were both still, forearms touching. She breathed in, then out, slowly, trying to suppress the wave of nausea that threatened to sweep over her.
You’re a doctor,
she wanted to shout.
Haven’t you noticed it’s been more than three years and nothing’s happening in that department?

Instead she shook her head.

“Maybe.”

“Oh.” He gave a small laugh, and his fingers grasped hers. They were warm: Bill was always warm. “Maybe’s better than nothing, I suppose.”

Karen said, “I’d better go. Susan’ll be—”

“I know,” he said. “I think I’ll probably be asleep when you get back. Long day.”

“Sure. Sure . . .”

Karen picked up the card so carefully propped up on the hall table—more post—and opened the door. Bill said softly under his breath, “Night, then.” And as she walked hastily away, shivering in the sharp autumn night, Karen knew she should feel free, but she couldn’t.

Cat

Cat—

I cannot look after Luke that weekend in November. Luke is not my problem anymore. You made that clear when you took him away from me. You can’t now have it both ways.

If you go and see Didier at Bar Georges in the eleventh he will give you the envelope I meant to give you. Something to help you in it. I think you will find it beneficial.

Olivier

C
AT READ THE
e-mail and slammed the laptop shut so hard the corrugated plastic roofing of the stall rattled in the rain. Water dripped off the roof and onto the edges of the ornamental lavenders, the sunny marigolds and geraniums. Tourists huddled miserably against the birdcages crammed with brightly colored canaries who sang all day, an incessant cheeping that filled the air but which Cat had long ago stopped hearing.

She didn’t have time to go see Didier. But she had to. He’d got her, again. She had to get back to Winterfold, and the price of the train ticket was, these days, beyond her reach. But even the thought of going back to the eleventh arrondissement made her angry and afraid. It was the idea that Olivier still had the power to drag her back to her old life.

Once Cat had lived not far from the eleventh, before she met Olivier, and if she could have seen herself now she’d have been astonished at whom she would become. She had had a year of unemployment sprinkled with gardening jobs after university, until the magical day when
she’d heard she’d got the job as editorial assistant on
Women’s Wear Daily
. It came after months of job applications, which had severely tested Cat, shy at the best of times, violently full of self-doubt and lanky awkwardness at the worst. When the letter arrived at Winterfold (she’d kept that letter, the one that brought her here; it seemed so quaint now, a
letter
) offering her the position, Cat had jumped up and down in the hallway, then clung to her grandmother, almost hoping Martha might beg her not to go. Even though all Cat had ever wanted to do was live in Paris and this job was more than she could ever dare to hope for, it still seemed too hard, too much to have to leave this place where she felt so safe, where she had been, she thought, so happy. She’d been away, to university in London, though that had been nothing really but extended periods where she always knew she was coming back to Winterfold. This was different. She was twenty-two, and this was the beginning of real life.

“I don’t want to leave you both. I don’t want to . . . do a runner. Like Daisy.” Saying her mother’s name was always strange. The
D
sang out like a bell, and she felt as though strangers might turn and stare: “Oh . . . it’s
that
girl. Daisy Winter’s daughter. Wonder how
she’ll
turn out.”

But her grandmother had been surprisingly firm.

“You’re not your mother, darling. You’re nothing like her. Besides, you’re not some recluse who’s never left home. You’ve spent three years in London, you’ve got a degree, and we’re so proud of you, darling girl. But I think this is the right thing to do. Don’t be afraid of going. Just make sure you come back.”

“Of course I’ll come back. . . .” Cat had laughed, and she remembered that bit, how ridiculous it had seemed that she might not return to Winterfold, but at the same time she knew her grandmother was right. Her friends were all getting jobs, moving on; it was time for her to do the same.

She arrived in Paris in the spring of 2004, a little unsure, already homesick. She found an apartment not far from Café Georges, on a little
cité
behind boulevard Voltaire. She had four window boxes, which she carefully tended, one tea trunk from home that stood in as a coffee table, an IKEA bed, a chest of drawers her grandmother and Uncle Bill brought over a fortnight later in the car, two hat stands from a market in Abbesses with wire strung between them for use as an open wardrobe, and a set of ten wooden hangers stamped
Dior
, acquired the same day. She loved
playing house, her first proper grown-up home. It made her feel independent for the first time in her life.

Her bare, beautiful flat was usually unoccupied, though. She was either in the office or out with her boss, taking notes at meetings with designers, visiting studios for private views, or, during the biannual Fashion Week, dashing from show to show, sitting in the back row with the other penniless fashionistas, scribbling notes and trying to learn as much as she could. Her favorite part of her job, though, was calling on the individual ateliers and watching the stout, middle-aged Parisian seamstresses who had worked at Dior for years, seeing their flying fingers sewing the hundredth sequin of a thousand onto a shimmering, glittering fishtail train, pinning a tiny tuck-seam on a model’s silk shirt, sliding butter-thick velvet through their machines, tidying, smoothing, finishing, their quick fingers transforming an inert piece of fabric into something magical.

Cat grew to find the world of fashion ridiculous, but never this, the beating heart of the business. It was why she had always loved gardening with her grandmother, for she already knew that creating a beautiful vision to be enjoyed by others meant hard work behind the scenes. Everything had to be perfect, even a seam that no one would see, because if it was to be done it must be worth doing. Her grandmother had always said there was only one rule to gardening: “The more care you take, the greater the reward you’ll reap.”

She sent Martha regular updates, letters and then e-mails. At first, Cat hardly went back, maybe because she loved the place too well, and a clean break seemed better than constantly revisiting; then, as her life in Paris took root, the trips home became even more infrequent. In the beginning, Martha had come to visit once a year; that had been wonderful. They’d shopped in Galeries Lafayette, walked in the Parc Monceau, strolled through the Marais.

Her grandmother had asked Cat once, as they wandered by the Seine, looking at the vintage prints and books for sale: “Are you happy? Do you like it here? You know you can always come back, don’t you?”

Cat had simply said, “Yes, darling Gran. I love it here. It . . . it fits.”

Martha had said nothing, just smiled, but Cat had seen tears in her eyes, and thought she must be thinking about Daisy. Out of the ashes of nothing except her grandparents’ love and her grandmother’s insistence
that Cat must make something of herself, she had fashioned this life, and when she told Martha that it fitted her, she knew it was true.

Then she met Olivier.

One sultry June day, in a
boulangerie
around the corner from her apartment. So Parisian, so romantic. “We met in a
boulangerie
in Paris,” she told the girls in the office, smiling, her cheeks rosy with shy happiness. “Olivier was buying croissants, I was buying Poilâne, we picked up the wrong bags—
voilà
.” Appearances could be deceptive—Olivier didn’t eat bread, it transpired; he had been collecting the pastries for a friend. She only wondered when it was all over who the friend was. A girl, waiting in bed for him while he picked up someone else. He had said, “I like your dress, English girl,” and Cat had turned to give him a sharp, colloquial put-down, and been arrested by his tousled black hair, his brown eyes, his beautiful pink mouth with the amused smile playing about it. He was a jazz trumpeter, played every week at the Sunset, and had his own group. They were trying to make it work. He was good, she could just tell.

She was ashamed—or a little proud, she didn’t know afterward which—to recall that they had slept together that very day. Yes, he had taken her out for coffee, and she had said she would buy him a glass of wine that evening, and so after work they had met in a little bar behind the Palais-Royal, in a cellar that was supposed to be part of Richelieu’s old palace. They had each ordered a kir and picked at a plate of
saucisson
and cornichons, and after two drinks he had simply said, “I do not want to drink anymore. Will you come home with me?”

His apartment was tiny, the shutters flung open, the sound of people carousing, arguing, singing floating up from the street below all night, as they came together in a way she had never known she needed before. Cat was organized, controlled: she feared more than anything else being like her long-lost mother, a woman who had so little clue of how to live her own life she had had to leave everyone behind, go to the other side of the world to help people worse off than she was.

So at first she was horrified to discover, three years after moving to Paris and establishing her life so beautifully, that everything had collapsed like a pile of cards. That Olivier’s strong, smooth hands, cupping her breasts and moving along her arms till his fingers twined with hers, his knee pushed between her legs, his lips on her neck, his words in her
ear . . . filthy wet words that made her moan; that all this could quite simply unman her—unwoman, in fact, although she had never felt more womanly, never felt so sensuous and sexy in her life. The rest of that summer was forever in her mind an ache between her legs, where she wanted him inside her all the time. She grew pale and stringy: while her workmates were tanned from holidays, the sea, the outdoors, Cat was inside with Olivier, whole weekends lost in a haze of sex, sleeping, eating, the whole cycle over again. She was so happy, she felt like a new person, reborn here in Paris with him. He had not known her as the spotty, awkward, thin teenager, the girl without a mother. He only saw her as the person she had remade herself into, and he loved that person, or so he said, and so she loved him for it, even though all the time she kept wondering,
When will he find me out?

Afterward she would look back and see how short a time the happiness had actually lasted. By winter the signs were all there, but she chose to ignore them. It made her sick, how stupid she had been. What was crazy was how long she’d let it go on.

How foolish she’d been, she saw that now, too. In the New Year she’d given up her flat, moved in with Olivier. She had gone home for Bill’s wedding in 2008. To everyone’s sly inquiries and Lucy’s open enthusiasm about this mysterious boyfriend, Cat was noncommittal. And they didn’t ask more. She had been a low-key, sardonic person for so long now that her lack of cozy tidbits about life with her French boyfriend didn’t surprise anyone. “Typical you,” her aunt Flo had said. “You always were a dark horse, Cat.”

But I’m not
, Cat had wanted to tell them.
I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.

At the reception back at Winterfold, after the curious wedding in the Guildhall, she was trying to text Olivier, wondering what he’d want her to say. She felt something gripping her arm, and she jumped. It was her mother; it was Daisy.

Cat looked down at Daisy’s tiny, skeletal fingers pressing into her arm.

“I’m just trying to send this text.” She was short. She hated this, being here, feeling so out of place.

Daisy had leaned forward, skull-like face mirroring Cat’s.

“Don’t try to pretend I’m not your mother, Catherine. We’re the
same. I know it. I see it in you. We’re exactly the same, so stop thinking you’re better than me. You’re not.”

The scent of lilies in the cool dining room; Karen’s white dress, flashing in her peripheral vision; the hot sun outside, beating down on the yellowing grass. Her mother’s voice, hoarse and silvery. “I know what you’re like, Cat. Stop fighting it and get on with it.”

Cat had removed Daisy’s fingers from her arm. She’d leaned back, away from her thin, awful face. “If I’m like you, God help me too,” she’d said, and walked toward the open door.

That was the last time she’d seen her. Cat went back to Paris knowing she couldn’t ever tell any of them what was really going on. She just had to make the best of it, because she was lucky, wasn’t she? It was wonderful, wasn’t it? She had such high expectations, because of her mother, because of everything, and she should just stop being so difficult, as Olivier said, and shut up.

And it was such a boring cliché. The gradual change, so that within months she had gone from glorious certainty in his love to absolute certainty that he despised her and that he was right to. The sudden absences, the unexplained behavior, the hours she’d spend waiting for him, only to have him turn up angry at her because he said she’d gone to the wrong place. She lost all confidence in her ability to make decisions. How often, when evening fell and she grew hungry, had she stood dithering in the hall about whether to start cooking for him? Was he nearly there, would he want some food? Or would he be back hours later and shout at her for letting his meal go cold? “How the fuck am I supposed to eat this—this shit, Catherine? You’re so selfish, you couldn’t wait another hour? What, okay, an hour and a half ? So I met some friends—they’re important contacts—I’m supposed to rush home because if I don’t I’m not allowed any supper?” He always made it sound like he was right, and she always ended up apologizing.

They acquired a dog, a wire fox terrier called Luke, after Olivier’s English grandfather, a soldier who’d stayed on in Brittany. When Cat laughed at this—naming your pet after your grandfather seemed to her a crazy thing to do—Olivier slammed out of the apartment and didn’t come back till the following morning. At first he was obsessed with Luke, as though he were a son, or a new best friend—taking him for walks in the Tuileries Gardens, even once to a gig, where Luke sat obediently on
a chair next to his trumpet case, Olivier exclaiming with pleasure when Luke did
un caca
on the parquet floor—but soon, as Cat was realizing, as with everything in Olivier’s life, the obsession waned, to be replaced with disinterest, annoyance, and then downright contempt. Luke, still not quite a year old, did not understand why, when he trotted over to his master and stared hopefully at him, he was ignored or batted away with one big, hairy hand. “
Vas-y! Vas-y,
you stupid dog.”

It was through Luke that Cat started to realize what a mistake she’d made, but it was longer still before she saw that it wasn’t her mistake—that he had hoodwinked her. She was worthless to him except as a pretty plaything; and once that bored him, she—like Luke—was of no use. On the day that changed everything, she had coffee with Véronique, an old, very dear friend from work. They had once been almost the same: girls with long brown hair and fringes who giggled together over male models at the shows and saw each other into cabs after one too many glasses of champagne; they had struggled up flights of stairs with each other’s boxes, moving into tiny apartments; they had slept on each other’s couches and shared lunches. But these days Véronique was almost a parody of everything Cat should have become. She had worked at
Women’s Wear Daily
and was now at
Vogue
. She had shiny, glossy hair, patent-leather Marni sandals, a black Paul and Joe chiffon top finished off with a tailored pink blazer, and matching baby-pink nails. Cat, who barely cared what she looked like these last few months, was in dirty jeans, pulled-back ponytail, and blue Breton-striped top. She couldn’t be bothered to dress. She felt sick all the time, a tight nausea at the back of her throat, she wasn’t hungry, and she couldn’t sleep.