A Small Indiscretion (15 page)

I looked over at your father beside me in the car. He was staring straight ahead, and he was crying. He wasn’t trying to stop the tears or hide them or wipe them away. He was just letting them run down his cheeks. I’d never seen him cry like that. I’d never seen him claim his own feeling with that kind of abandon. I reached over and squeezed his hand. I felt lost in my feeling, too—that we were indeed blessed and lucky now that you were finally coming home—but I know now that his emotions were much more complicated than mine.

From the backseat, you couldn’t tell your father was crying. I wonder if you have ever seen your father cry. I don’t think you were listening to the radio, either. You didn’t notice what song was playing. You didn’t know what it meant to us. You were in your own world, in back, staring at the house and its lights.

“Everything looks different,” you said. “It’s weird. It’s like I don’t know my own house.”

“Maybe it’s the lights, Robbie,” I said. “It’s the same house. Nothing has changed.”

“Some things have changed,” your father said, but so quietly, I don’t think you heard him over the music.

T
HE EBBING DAY
. The house ablaze with light. Your father’s tears. The images of that homecoming evening are merged, in my memory, with those of our Christmas Eve celebration, four nights later. Clara and Polly in their finery, dragging the dogs under the mistletoe and smacking their furry heads with kisses. My brother, Ryan, sprawled on the couch with a guitar in his lap. Your father shoving wood into an already blazing fire. My own mother and father standing together in the kitchen spooning the stuffing from the turkey. My mother pausing entirely by accident under the mistletoe, and my unexpected happiness as I watched my father lay a deep kiss on her unsuspecting lips. Then Mitch arriving at the front door with an outrageously expensive bottle of champagne, and a moment later, the star of the show—you, Robbie—materializing in a bow tie at the top of the stairs. In that moment I felt again that we were blessed and lucky. I hoped that this time I could make it last.

D
ECEMBER HAD ARRIVED
in London. I remember that it snowed, but the snow melted as soon as it hit the ground. In the office, I pretended Malcolm had never come to my room that night after the races. He never brought it up, and nothing changed between us, at least not that we acknowledged.

I wrote my mother a letter. I told her I was not coming home until spring, at the earliest. I did not detail my holiday plans, since I hadn’t made any. I was holding out hope Patrick would invite me to Ireland. In the meantime, Malcolm invited me to France.

I can’t quite reconstruct the circumstances under which he first introduced the idea that I come with him and his family to Paris for Christmas. I only know that as December marched forward, it became the principal item of discussion between us. He did not approve of my spending the holidays alone in London. He thought I would enjoy Paris. I had studied French, after all, hadn’t I? It was no imposition, since there was plenty of room. Louise was enthusiastic about the idea. The penthouse had been in Louise’s family for generations, so it didn’t cost them anything, and Louise thought it would be nice for Daisy to have a companion.

“Is that why you want me to come?” I said. “To babysit Daisy?”

“Of course not. I want you to come because I want to be with you. And I don’t want you to be alone.”

I didn’t tell him, of course, that I hoped to be with Patrick. My plans for the holidays had not come up in conversation with Patrick. The future rarely did. Not even the immediate future. Not a day or an hour and sometimes not even a moment in advance did I have any idea what Patrick had in mind for me, or whether he had me in mind at all. This uncertainty lay like a sore under the surface of my skin, erupting again and again, then subsiding, but never healing.

Sometimes I told Malcolm I would think about coming to Paris. Sometimes I told him no, outright. But he would not give up, and every day he had a new prop. A photograph of the penthouse. A description of the holiday decorations on the Champs-Élysées. A review of the restaurant he’d booked for the twenty-third of December.

I ventured to the gallery on the Wednesday two weeks before Christmas. Patrick wasn’t there. On Saturday, he wasn’t there again. The following week was the same, until finally, beside myself, I inquired with the owner and was told that Patrick’s work schedule had changed. I could not call Patrick, because the only phone he had was in the cottage, and he shared the line with Malcolm and Louise. He couldn’t call me, because the only place I could be reached was
at work, and Malcolm would be there. He did not once come to Victoria to find me.

Two days before Malcolm and Louise were to leave for Paris, Malcolm pulled up a chair next to my desk and sat down. He leaned toward me and put his elbows on his knees and folded his hands.

“It’s not too late to change your mind and come to Paris,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“If you don’t come, who will sort out my French?”

“I’m sure your wife can sort out your French.”

“She could, but she won’t.”

“Why won’t she?”

“She’ll be too timid. She won’t want to speak French in front of Patrick.”

“Patrick?”

“Louise has invited him to come along and he’s agreed. We received news that Daisy won’t be arriving until Christmas Eve. She’s been invited by a school friend to ski at Saint-Moritz and she seems quite set on going. So Louise said she’d like to invite Patrick, and there was no reason I should object, and now there is absolutely no reason you should not allow yourself to come.”

He looked triumphant. He had played his final card, and he was about to win, but not for the reasons he thought.

“Louise is all right with this, Annie,” he said quietly.

“She’s all right with what?”

“Us. The two of us. I mean if you will ever … if we were ever to try again to be together.”

“You asked her?” I could not believe he would do such a thing.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“When?” I asked, wondering if it was before or after that first failed attempt in my room at Victoria, which I’d worked so hard to pretend had never happened.

“I cleared it with her when you first arrived,” he said.

W
E LEFT FOR
P
ARIS
three days before Christmas, at seven-thirty sharp. I waited on the sidewalk in front of the boardinghouse with my duffel bag. The sky pressed down flat and cold, and the street was emptied of life. The car pulled up to the curb. Malcolm put my bag in the trunk and opened the front passenger door. I had imagined that for appearances’ sake we would pretend this was an everyday sojourn, a married couple and their younger friends traveling from London to Paris—and I thought I would sit in back with Patrick. But it appeared Louise was to have Patrick to herself, and I was to be stuck with Malcolm. I had to remind myself that officially Patrick and I had met only once—at the gallery the night of the anniversary party. I turned halfway around to the backseat to say good morning.

“We meet again,” Patrick said, smiling.

Louise was directly behind me and I turned and extended my hand and she gave it a halfhearted squeeze. Malcolm handed me a map. He’d drawn a black line to indicate the route we would take from Victoria out of the city to Dover, where we would catch the ferry, then another dark line from Calais to Paris. The darkness and thickness of the lines had blocked out some of the names of the
roads, so I couldn’t tell where we were, or what direction we were heading, or even which way to hold the map. Impulsively, I passed the map back to Patrick.

“You don’t mind navigating, do you?” I said.

“Not at all,” he said.

It was foggy and cold, and now and then Malcolm had to turn the wipers on to clear the mist from the windows. From the back, Louise kept telling Malcolm to slow down at the roundabouts and reminding him when he’d left his blinker on. How many times had this commentary run between them? A hundred, a thousand times? I was suddenly weary of them. I had barely slept at all, wondering about Patrick, wondering why he’d agreed to come, and why he’d slipped out of my life, and what Malcolm was expecting of me, and whether I had packed the right clothes. Louise would be stylish, and I would not be. Patrick would take note of the disparity. Patrick had said something to me once, when we’d been window-shopping and I’d pointed out something I liked in a shop. He’d said that at some point in my life, I would arrive upon a more definitive sense of style. The statement had deeply offended me, but it had also worried me every day since.

I fell into a half-sleep. I sensed the three of them in my dreams, their breaths and separate thoughts. Also Patrick’s humming—incessant and beautiful and unselfconscious. In my dream a thin, silver thread extended from me to Patrick, tying us thinly by the wrists. I woke with Malcolm’s fingers on my arm. We had reached Dover.

“Those are the White Cliffs,” Malcolm said. “And Dover Castle’s just beyond. We’ll have time to walk along the ridge before we board the ferry.”

I peered out the car window but I could not see the castle in the fog.

“It’s awfully damp out,” Louise said. “This wretched fog. We’ll barely be able to make anything out.”

Malcolm ignored her and opened the car door.

“Really, dear. I don’t know that we all want to trudge out in this weather.”

“It’s barely spitting,” he said.

“But this wretched fog.”

Malcolm sat for a moment with his door open. “Let’s at least pose for a photo,” he said shortly.

“You three go on,” Louise said. She stayed where she was, her tiny hands folded in her lap, her thin lips made even thinner by determination.

Patrick brought his camera. We walked against the wind to the cliffs. Malcolm made me stand alone for a photograph. I tied my scarf tightly around my neck and hugged my coat close, until Patrick ordered me to let the coat blow open and the scarf fly free.

Then Patrick went to the car and I tied the scarf around my neck again and buttoned my coat against the wind. Patrick returned with the tripod, and Louise.

“Our lady has agreed to a photo after all,” he said.

He set up the tripod and placed us—Louise, then Malcolm, then me—leaving a space beside Louise for himself. He set the timer, then slid into place, slipping his arm around Louise’s waist. Malcolm, in turn, put his arm around mine, but I must have pulled away, because in the photo there is a gap between us, evidence of my unsuccessful protest. And that is the immortal moment, preserved for more than two decades, then transported into our mailbox last June.

You’ll want to know how it found its way to us, and why. You’ll want answers to the same questions that plagued me last summer, until I went to London and behaved foolishly, and the car expelled you into a ravine, and the whole matter became irrelevant.

What did I notice, some twenty years after the fact, when I first held the photo in my hands? The silver-halo effect, yes, and the swipe of red, but also, to be perfectly frank, my clothes—the ill-fitting coat, the clunky boots, the scarf tied much too tightly around my neck. My face was not so bad. My features were the right size and shape. My skin was clear. My hair was long and dark and thick. I was young, after all.

P
ATRICK RETURNED THE
tripod to the car. Louise decided she could brave the weather, after all, and we took a look around. The White Cliffs were not really white; they were the color of dirty sand. The fog was dense. The ground was frozen in places, muddy in others. A single tower of Dover Castle was visible in the distance, poking through the low-lying fog. Malcolm explained it was chalk down-land we were standing on, a rare material that contained more species of plant life than an equal size of tropical rain forest. That was because it was inhospitable. It was difficult for plants to take root in it, so many tried, and the result was diversity. Where the down met the sea, Malcolm said, the chalk was exposed to the wind and weather to form the White Cliffs.

I stood on the frosty ground at the edge of the cliff. It was very steep and there was no railing. I could have jumped. Or pushed someone.

I was furious with Patrick for not standing beside me in the photograph. And for failing to touch me the whole morning. And for absenting himself from my life after our trip to Canterbury, and appearing, now, completely at ease with the distance imposed between us. And for acting as if I were nothing to him—perhaps I
was
nothing to him—and forcing me to pretend he was nothing to me.

On the other hand, he had been solicitous of Louise. He had
opened the car door for her. He had persuaded her to stand for a photograph. He had referred to her as “our lady,” and posed beside her.

But of course I did not push him off the cliff. I believed I could not be happy without him.

Below us was a sharp drop onto another plateau, then the ferry terminal and the sea. Malcolm said that on a clear day, you could see the Continent from here.

“Not today,” Louise said bitterly.