This Must Be the Place (54 page)

I move back into the hallway. ‘Claude?’ I say, softly.

No reply. I try the front room – where I discover the addition of a somewhat dilapidated chandelier since my time – and the scullery, where all the laundry is done, in a soap-and-steam-scented haze. She’s not there either. Just some piles of clothing, in varying states of cleanliness, and some bottles of something labelled as plant-based, detergent-free laundry liquid.

I ascend the stairs, halfway. ‘Claudette?’ I call again, louder this time, tilting my head, straining my ears.

I hear an answering ‘Yes?’ coming from somewhere, a muffled, indistinct noise. Was it upstairs or down?

‘Claude?’ I try again.

‘I’m here,’ she replies.

‘Where?’ I ask, baffled. I’m wandering now, down the corridor, into the sitting room, out again, seeking the source of her voice, a person engaged on a treasure hunt, desperate for clues.

‘Here,’ she says again.

‘I’m going to need a little more detail on that.’

‘In the—’ and she says something incomprehensible.

‘The what?’

‘The Time Capsule,’ she replies.

I stand for a moment, my hand on the newel post where, a long time ago, Marithe, sent out here for throwing her dinner at the wall, carved several nicks in the wood with a penknife left carelessly on the stairs.

I had forgotten all about the Time Capsule. That was what Claudette always called a small wedge-shaped space leading off the front room. None of us quite knew what it was for, awkwardly and inexplicably attached to the main room, shelved in marble, with a miniature fireplace set into the wall, where you could have burnt – at most – one or two twigs at a time. She never did anything with it: she kept it exactly as it had been when she’d found the house, so the walls were streaked with verdure and the fireplace was eaten by rust. Hence the name: the Time Capsule.

She liked to throw open the door sometimes and gleefully declare to whoever was listening – me, the kids, her mother, the dogs – this was how the house was when I found it. It was her testament, her monument, to her and the house, how far they had come together.

I find my way there now, through the front room, which, by the looks of it, is still used pretty much by Calvin and Marithe for knocking about on days too wet and cold to go out.

The Time Capsule door always was a little stiff so I put my whole weight behind it but it seems it must have been planed or rehung because it opens easily and I fly through it, arriving in the cramped space more precipitously than planned.

My ex-wife is crouched on the floor, her ass towards me. I land almost on her – I have to grip a marble shelf so as not to fall right on top of her.

‘Jesus, Daniel,’ she is saying, putting up her hands to protect herself, at the same time as I am saying, ‘Oh’ and ‘Sorry’ and ‘My goodness’.

It takes us a moment to recover from this. We need to avoid eye contact, brush down our clothes, resettle our nerves.

She has changed into overalls and appears to be in the middle of peeling up the carpet, ripping it from the tacks that hold it in place. The walls have been scrubbed clean, the fireplace scoured and some tiles decorated with butterflies have emerged from the decay.

‘So,’ I say, after a moment, ‘you decided to fix this place up.’

‘I did,’ she says, turning back to her work. ‘I just thought, you know, why not?’

‘Why not indeed?’ I say, and wonder why I’m being so agreeable, so fucking hearty. What is going on with me? I need to find the right tone for what I’m hoping I’ll find the guts to say; I need to locate the proper register.

Claudette wrestles a claw-hammer into place by the skirting-board and pulls down on it. ‘I met a woman in the village,’ she says, as she strains against the handle, ‘whose mother used to work up here as a housemaid. So I asked her about this room.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘You know what she said? She said,’ Claudette waggles the hammer back and forth, her bottom lip held between her teeth, ‘that this was the flower-arranging room.’

‘The what?’ I say, and look around the walls, the shelves. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. They had a room just to arrange their flowers in?’

Claudette gives a wry grimace. ‘Apparently so.’

‘Because everyone needs one, right? A dedicated flower space. I can’t believe I don’t have one. I’m going straight back to New York to put that right.’

‘Well, good luck with that.’

‘I hope that’s what you’re going to be doing in here. I can see you now, with your vases and your secateurs and the world’s smallest fire roaring away in the world’s smallest grate.’

Claudette smiles and rips up a section of carpet.

I lean against the door jamb (in itself a work-in-progress, I notice, with half the paint scored off and several test strips of colour painted on its edge), fold my arms and watch her, this woman I was married to for almost ten years.

What can I say about the end of our marriage? That I lost my way and she her patience. That it was, without doubt, the most ill-judged misstep I ever took. That I still wake, four years on, stunned that I ever let her slip out of reach.

That at my lowest ebb, she dispatched my son, Niall, to my flat in London. That this saved my life. He was fresh from Donegal, from this house. I could almost smell it on him when I opened the door and found him standing there: the air of this place, the valley, the trees, these rooms. He told me in his perspicuous and unadorned way that I had the choice between an early death or getting myself together. So he and I moved back to the States, two lame ducks together, and I checked myself into rehab and my son looked after me, cooked my meals, did my laundry, housed me and basically did the things that I should have done for him all those years ago when he was growing up.

So here I am. Still alive, by the skin of my teeth.

Claudette yanks at the carpet and a section comes away with a violent ripping sound.

‘If I had to place a bet,’ I say behind her, ‘you or the carpet, my money would be on you. That hairy old thing doesn’t stand a chance.’

She turns and I see that her mouth is filled with tacks.

‘Have you thought about seeing a dentist?’ I say.

Claudette rocks back on her heels and takes the tacks from her mouth, one by one, and lays them carefully on the shelf above her.

‘You look …’ She stops, considering me, her head on one side.

‘I look what?’

‘Different. Healthy.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I was hoping for “manly” or “incredible”.’

She rolls her eyes, passing her claw-hammer from one hand to the other.

‘But I’ll settle for “healthy”,’ I say, crossing the room, fetching a chair and settling myself in the doorway.

She looks at me; she looks at the chair. ‘You’re leaving tonight?’ she says – somewhat pointedly, I feel.

‘I am. I gave a paper at the conference this morning and now I’m done.’

‘What time is your flight?’

I shrug. ‘I still have a couple of hours. I thought I’d take a look through those boxes in the barn, sort out the things I want to keep from the things I can chuck, then I’ll arrange for them to be sent to the States. If that’s OK with you.’

She nods and turns her head away, back to her carpet. ‘I think Marithe is waiting for you to say goodbye,’ she says indistinctly, as she bends back over her work.

I kiss Marithe, who is already mostly asleep. I straighten the comforter over Calvin. I look in on Ari and Zoë, who are both fast asleep. I visit the bathroom, I put my briefcase and overcoat by the front door. I do all the things one is meant to do before departing for the airport.

Then I come back into the Time Capsule, or the Flower Room, as it should now perhaps be called. Claudette has half the carpet up. She is surrounded by rolls of old matting and underlay. She has her hair tied back and her sweater off. I look at her bare arms, her shoulders, the nape of her neck, and I am struck by how the familiar can sometimes look so ineffably strange. I think about the four women I’ve slept with since her and how none of them came anywhere near her. But, then, how could they?

‘Wasn’t it Cleopatra who rolled herself up in a carpet so she could visit Mark Antony?’ I say, as I get hold of another, smaller, claw-hammer from the heap of tools on the shelf.

Claudette fixes me with a stare that I recognise the way I recognise my own reflection in the mirror: assessing, evaluating, not fooled by anything.

‘Caesar,’ she says eventually. ‘Julius.’

I kneel, my left knee complaining only a little. I catch the edge of the carpet tucked in around the fireplace with the spikes of the hammer. We are, her and I, wedged into this wedge-shaped room, like cats in a basket.

‘As opposed to?’ I say as I tug.

‘Octavius or Augustus.’ She points to my hand, to the hammer. ‘You need to waggle it back and forth.’

I do just that, as I say, ‘I never knew you were such an expert on Ancient Rome.’

She shrugs. ‘I did the play.’

‘And you were Caesar, Julius?’

She turns to give me a look. ‘No, I bloody wasn’t. I was Cleopatra.’

‘Of course you were.’ I turn to face her and we regard each other at our new proximity. ‘Now that’s what I call typecasting.’

She narrows her eyes at me and is just about to utter a riposte when the nails suddenly give way, the underlay tears, and we stagger backwards holding a large section of old carpet between us.

‘Want to be rolled up in this,’ I say, when we’ve regained our balance, ‘for old times’ sake?’

She lets go of her end, pulling her best hoydenish face. ‘No, thanks. And that bit doesn’t appear in the play,’ she says, ‘actually.’

‘Well,’ I say, tossing aside the carpet, ‘it should. Shakespeare missed a dramatic trick there.’

She kicks some underlay into a rough pile, picks up a saw, puts it down. ‘So,’ she says abruptly, without looking at me, ‘how is life with you, these days? I hear you have a new apartment.’

She is making a great show of examining the window frame, running her fingers along the sash mechanism, picking at the peeling paint, the crumbling putty.

I think about her, as she is in front of me, in her weird overalls and woollen socks and fancy leather slippers. I wonder if she still wears that Indian shawl around the house, if she still drinks hot water with a spoonful of some honey that she claims has miraculous, anti-viral, immortality-giving properties, whether she still plays the piano late at night and insists on cooking pasta in not-quite-boiling water because she’s too impatient to wait. I wonder whether she still crashes the gears on the car as she’s driving but denies all knowledge of this. I wonder if there is anything of mine that she’s kept, any shirts, any books, any letters. I wonder if she still walks in her sleep and whether there is anybody there to get up, follow her and lead her back to bed.

And then I think about the earth in the borders of Scotland. Niall told me once, when I asked him, that it would be made up of soft sedimentary strata. I picture this earth as dark, near black, and moist, riddled with tree roots, with knotted tubers, the slow leaf-rich paths of worms. Soil is memory made flesh, is past and present combined: nothing goes away. I think about a night I spent there, sleeping on its surface, its crust, with that dense matter teeming beneath me. I think about a moment across a café table in Bloomsbury, when I could have changed things, could have laid my hand down and said, no, this must not be. I think about how Nicola and I might have come back together but in all probability not for long: we were too young, too different, we were straining in opposing directions. There might have been another Sullivan child – Niall would not have been my first-born, but my second – but otherwise I might still have ended up at a crossroads in Donegal, finding a woman and a boy sitting on the roof of their car, looking up at two hawks and a buzzard. Claudette would still have happened, either way. I think about this, how she is my unavoidable constant. And I think about an afternoon in a drugstore where I might have put myself between my child and that boy, absorbed that bullet into my own guts, my own head. How different it all might have been, how minuscule the causes and how devastating their effects.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I do have a new place. I figured it was finally time for me to fly the nest. It’s really not that dignified to be living in your son’s guestroom at my age.’

This, I want to communicate to her. I choose this. The here and now. I almost gesture around me, at her, the mysterious room, the floor above where our children lie sleeping, but manage to stop myself. We must pursue what’s in front of us, not what we can’t have or what we have lost. We must grasp what we can reach and hold on, fast.

My fingers grip the fabric of my shirt cuffs, as if to underline this point to myself.

‘And … how about the drink?’

I grin at her. ‘Sober as a nun. Haven’t touched a drop for nearly two years,’ I release my hold on my cuffs and cross myself with an ironic flourish, ‘so help me, God.’

She doesn’t say anything but sidesteps me and slips out of the door. I hear her making her way through the front room, under the chandelier and out into the hallway. There is something about this departure of hers that feels definitive to me, final, in a way nothing else ever has. I find myself standing in the confines of the Flower Room, devastation sweeping through me. Can she really have walked out, just like that? Is there really no hope for us at all?

After a moment or two, I go and find her. She is pulling a jacket around her shoulders, an old corduroy one of mine that I had forgotten about. ‘Shall I,’ she says, ‘show you where those boxes are?’

I look at her, I meet those green eyes, and we stand in the hallway of the house, she and I, and we look at each other. Her gaze is uncertain, wary, a crease between her brows. I think again of the first day I came here, the state of the place, Ari as a speechless six-year-old, the holes in the floorboards, which later I would mend, cover up, hammer down. I realise we are standing in the exact place where we first touched, first laid hands on each other – or, rather, she laid hands on me because I, uncharacteristically, couldn’t bring myself to do it, to pull it off, to reach out for her. This is Claudette Wells, I kept telling myself, as she cooked dinner for me for the third time that week, as we settled Ari to sleep together, as we sat on her couch, finishing a bottle of wine. You can’t possibly make a move, are you crazy, get yourself out of here without making an idiot of yourself. So she went for it first: the one and only time in my life that this has ever happened. I think she must have sensed my predicament. I was saying goodnight and thank you for dinner, I was heading back to my B-and-B for the night, I was going in for the single peck on the cheek when I felt her grip the lapel of my jacket, felt her other arm curling behind my head and I remember it was the first time that I had ever felt faint, felt consciousness waver, so great was the rush of blood shot out of my heart.