Loving Amélie (20 page)

Chapter Twenty

“She looks so good. She
smells
so
good.”

Amélie held her child close to
her like they were about to dance, cheek to tear-stained cheek.

“You must have missed her.”

“Every moment of every day.”

She looked past the baby’s soft
brown head into his face, with eyes prepared to challenge him.

Her flat seemed bright and
airy: there were fresh flowers in vases and the aroma of braising lamb
enveloped the inmates with goodness and hope.

“How did we manage to get
here?” he said.

*

Adrienne Bénoit returned with
baguettes and set about serving lunch. She was poised and purposeful, Chris
noted, as though she were used to having staff in her kitchen, but no doubt
relished the days when they were absent or unwell, so she could assert her own
agenda. Her polished nails and crocodile skin shoes were not the accoutrements
of a lady who was in the habit of peeling potatoes or blotting baby stains; but
she appeared to be capable of dealing with such unlikely developments, in the
course of her otherwise orderly life, with particular aplomb.

Chris wondered why her
brother-in-law Pierre had spoken of her with his tone of resentment and
disrespect: she seemed, to him, in these first few hours of meeting her, a
rather inspiring individual.

“Has your father been?” asked
Chris, over their meal.

Adrienne’s eyes shot between
him and her daughter as thought this were impertinent.

“No,” she replied. “He is busy
in Paris.”

“I used to think that was his
name when I was a little girl,” said Amélie, turning her fork in her food
impishly.
 
“
Occupé. Extrémenent occupé.
He was the
busiest man in Paris.”

“
That’s
your father,” said Adrienne,
giving her daughter an unhappy, chastising look that made her take up her knife
and fork and eat more respectfully. “And
your
parents, Chris, have they seen their
granddaughter?”

“Just last week,” he said.
“They were thrilled.”

“Well, that’s something.”

She cleared the dishes; and was
keen to leave them alone again:

“I would normally encourage her
to rest after lunch,” she said to Chris, as though her daughter were absent. Amélie
was attending to the baby. “However, today I think you two have much to
discuss.” She put on a neat coat and tied a
Hermes
scarf around her neck. “I am quite the
doting
grandmere,
Chris; but I shall run some errands on my own for a couple of hours.”

Chris followed Adrienne into
the hallway, where other residents were to-ing and fro-ing: they were strangers
to him – foreign, maybe Eastern European - but they nodded a greeting to
Amélie’s mother. He was caught in a strange interlude; where the three of them
– parents and grandmother – were dodging an awkward truth: he had
waited for a lifetime to see his lover; and yet, at this moment, he did not
want to be alone with her. It felt like this woman would be their interpreter;
an ally.

She was about to make a parting
comment about the London weather, or maybe talk about bringing back pastries
for afternoon tea: but he stopped her in her tracks by taking the arm of her
smart mackintosh:

“Adrienne, how could you let
her do it? Send her baby away?”

She looked him courageously in
the face with blue-grey eyes, not like her daughter’s at all. Chris reckoned
Amélie’s dark brown, defiant eyes would be the image of her father’s.

“She is not well.” Her chin
rose. “She needed to trust someone; and she chose you.”

“Not her family?”

Adrienne smiled and graciously
helped his hand slip away from her coat sleeve.

“Are you not your daughter’s
family?”

“Of course,” he answered, but
he was not convinced.

“I have two daughters, Chris;
and the experience has presented me with many surprises.
Alors
,” she concluded, with an
apologetic smile for a French word that was more appropriate than any English
one she could think of. “Do not think badly of us. We are not bad people.
Claude and Pierre – the family – they are, mostly, lawyers. It
means the truth is sometimes hard for them to see.”

He returned to Amélie and the
baby; allowing Adrienne to escape into the late summer sunshine in search of a
necessary diversion and some
bonbons
for her daughter.

Their child took her afternoon
nap as though she, too, were affording her parents some time for private
contemplation. Amélie made coffee that they took outside into the shady garden.
She pulled off her sweater to reveal bare arms in a loose silk vest: she seemed
thinner, a little fragile.

“You must hate me,” she
declared, simply, when they had drained their first tiny cup.

“I don’t.”

“Not even a little?”

The words were childish; but
her tone was simply inquisitive. He scratched his head to buy more time before
his response; and answered the woman he had disappointed all those months ago
without any of his old fear:

“Not even
un petit peu.
”

This distracted her from her
train of thought and she smiled: dimpling. His heart turned over.

“Your tree is still poorly,”
she ventured, bravely, with a wave of her finger. “I think perhaps it has
yearned for you.”

“Well, that is decent of it,”
he replied, comically. He got to his feet and placed his hands on the peeling
bark. His fingertips made to strip some dry pieces as though he were giving in
to the impulse to remove the dead skin following sunburn, but he resisted. They
were interrupted by the baby’s crying, and brought her out into the garden. She
was introduced to the tree trunk; and banged her palms on to it with primordial
glee.

“She has her mother’s disregard
for a tree’s finer feelings,” he smiled.

They poured more coffee and
Amélie searched for a piece of chewing gum:

“While my mother is not here,”
she explained. “I have given up smoking, since the baby; but she disapproves of
my habit. She says it would be better to have a cigarette in the evening,
outside, than chew gum like an American tart.”

“I think you make the right
choice,” said Chris; and he perceived a flicker of pleasure from her as she
swayed around the little garden with their baby on her hip. She stroked
Amélie’s delicate head and spoke to her in private song. It was an
extraordinary fact that, as he watched them, he could believe that they had
never been separated from each other; or from him.

“We need to talk about her life
with us,” he said, boldly. He had explained to her in some detail about his
visit from the social worker and his meeting with her uncle Pierre: she had
listened, palpably anxious, but driving this down through her activity with her
tiny daughter.

“I know,” she said, now.

He had agreed to bring enough
of Amélie’s baby things with him to Queens Gardens that day for an overnight
stay: neither of them had been able to think or talk about anything beyond
that. Chris had battled with an inner surge of latent, imagined advice from
friends and family, but took deep breaths as he left his flat, knowing in his
heart that he was free to do what he thought was
 
best for the three of them.

The baby had a pretty white cot
in her mother’s bedroom, overhung by a mobile consisting of woolly lambs,
suspended in the dainty expectation they would lull their little shepherdess
into a blissful sleep. It reminded him of the play gym that Sophie and Cécile
had constructed for her during their visit to the Hotel Bénard; and he told her
all about the children and their indefatigable uncle. She had kept the picture
on her phone that he had sent her that night; and listened carefully and
contentedly to the account.

“How generous; how good,” she
said, wistfully, enviously: although the envy was more about the Bénard’s easy
grace than about missing the occasion itself.

“He is one of the best men I
have ever met,” said Chris; and added, in spite of things: “I would love you to
meet him.”

Amé laughed:

“And you are sure he would want
to meet
me
!?”

“Of course!” he replied. “Who
wouldn’t?”

He took the liberty of securing
her face lightly in his hands; and she did not resist. There was a moment of
awkwardness where they both wondered what was keeping her mother so long. It
was perhaps this thought that made her remove the gum from her mouth, like an
errant schoolgirl.

“I see what your mother means,”
said Chris, with mock disgust. “Will it go on your bedpost overnight?”

She laughed again; rolled the gum
into a ball, and attempted to stick it to the tip of his nose. Between them, in
her dad’s arms, Amélie squealed her disapproval. Amé wiped his nose, and placed
a modest kiss on his cheek.

“I should go,” he said, after
some silent seconds while they looked at each other over their daughter’s head,
trying to defer connotation. He looked for his jacket.

“My mother will be sorry to
miss you,” Amé protested. “Will you not wait until she returns?”

He felt a rising panic beneath
his ribcage at the thought of leaving the flat, with its comforting smells and
the inhabitants that were the joint key holders to his every happiness.

“Of course, you must go when
you see fit,” she scolded herself, witnessing his turmoil. “I am sorry. Please
understand that I don’t mean to be the helpless, selfish,
child
of a woman that I must seem.”

She had almost spat these final
words out into Amélie’s hair.

 
He left her with her own sense of turmoil; carrying away with
him a minor variation of his usual suffering; hoping he might at least meet
Adrienne on his way home.

Chapter Twenty One

His flat without his child was
as desolate as he had anticipated, as he placed one foot in front of the other,
all the way home, creeping closer and closer to the inevitable.

He had lived a lifetime without
her; and now their brief meeting – in the greater scheme of things
– would change everything else to come, tweaking him ever so slightly one
minute or punching him full in the chest the next, with the knowledge that she
was out there, just being his daughter.

He had imagined that the
passage of Amélie – her mother – through his life would be
the
defining
feature. Now he realised that every milestone and mishap of their child’s life
would make its mark, even more enduringly, like the glacial ripples on an
ancient landscape.

There was a ragged flower
arrangement on his doorstep, from Sara. He wondered whether she might have
delivered them by hand; as they both knew that delivery people were often loath
to make the arduous journey to the top of the building and occasionally ended
up discarding their wares en route. The card said: “I won’t go away” with a
couple of kisses. He couldn’t work out whether it was her handwriting or not.

He took the arrangement inside
and thought how different it looked from Adrienne’s floral artistry - soothing
visual displays in crystal vases - colour coordinated with her daughter’s
décor. This was a basket of blooms that had been severed half way down their
stems and gouged into a block of oasis in a riot of strong shades: orange,
purple, pink; intertwined with bits of ribbon and coloured wire.

Since when had he been the
person to whom one would send flowers? He had an unpleasant memory of watching
a film where this type of thing, unchecked, burgeoned like a malignant growth
into rooms filled with balloons and enormous messages written on billboards; so
he decided to call her.

“I got your floral tribute,” he
told her answering service. “I don’t know whether to press the flowers
immediately to preserve the sentiment for ever; or just put them straight in
the bin. You daft cow. I don’t expect you to go away; I just need you to
respect my need for some time apart…”

“Chris!” Sara cut him off, a
little out of breath.

“Ah, you’re there.”

“How’s things?”

“Alright. And you?”

“Fine. Just fine,” she said,
with customary brightness. “Can we get a coffee some time, or a drink?”

“Probably, but not yet.”

“Then when?”

“When I am ready.”

“Oh! You’re insufferable!” He
imagined her on a busy London street, a drinks carton in her hand, probably blinking
away a few tears but ready to drive on through the rest of her day. She would
be churning insults, excuses, as the seconds ticked by.

“Can you do our friendship the
biggest favour so far by leaving me alone, for the foreseeable future?” he
said.

“Just like that?”

“Yes. I have stacks of things
on my mind. As I’m sure you do. But I need to work them out without any other
diversions.”