Loving Amélie (7 page)

“Come to bed with me,” he said.
“You are
completely
beautiful.”

“Is that shameless flattery?”

“Maybe, but flattery can still
be truth. All I know is if you were to let me make love to you tonight, I would
die tomorrow, quite happily.”

Amélie giggled and put away her
cigarettes.

“
Le petit mort
!” she said. “The perfect
end to a perfect lunch!”

Chris took a packet of condoms
from his bathroom cabinet and surveyed his face in the mirror. He was flushed
with wine and success; and mounting excitement.

Sara, God bless her, had
organised the changing of his sheets and discarding of the awful detritus that
floated on the lino floor around his bed: this had been transformed into a
soft, inviting island of white cotton and plumped up pillows.

He waited while Amélie stripped
naked and turned to face him. He cast off his own clothes, put his arm round
her waist, and lifted her off her feet. She whimpered slightly in surprise, but
made a little gasp of pleasure as he tightened his grip and spun her carefully
around. She was no weight at all! He laid her back onto the duvet, enjoying the
caresses of her uplifted hands as he traced his first journey with a warm, open
mouth down her neck, across her nipples and from her softly contoured navel to
the coarse wetness between her thighs. He rose up, and their fingers worked
together with needy dexterity to fit him with a sheath.

At first he felt he should
apologise for the speed of his entry and despatch; but Amélie groaned with such
satisfaction and he was at ease with nature’s way. He was more restrained the
next time. And the next. He lay in the changing light with his eyes on the
ceiling, resigned, challenging Death to come and shake his hand.

He appeared to have been
spared.

                                                           
*

Peter and Linda were waiting
for him in the bistro, with the sign on the door of
Skinner’s
flipped over to
Closed.

“Our kid,” said Peter, by way
of a greeting. “This is a turn up.”

“It’s like the plot of one of
Nessa’s awful films,” said Linda, who had been peering into the papoose on
Chris’s body as though she were approving a delivery of vegetables. “Was it Tom
Selleck or that annoying short guy who was left ‘
holding the baby’
?”

It occurred to Chris for the
first time in fifteen years that there had been no patter of tiny feet for
Linda and Peter; with not so much as a fleeting reference as to why.

During this time, Linda’s
father had bought outright the premises that became
Skinner’s
; allowing his daughter and
son-in-law to pay him back, by degrees, when they started to make a profit. By
now, there couldn’t be much left to pay - something else they had never really
discussed. The
Skinner
over the door was in the singular, and could have been a reference to
either one of them; although, in reality, Chris knew he had the smallest claim
to stake, given that Peter and Linda were by far the more industrious and
motivated two-thirds of the partnership. It was Peter and Linda who dressed up
in tuxedo and black frock to attend the business dinners; or schlepped to the
accountant’s with the files of paperwork: Chris shrank, without their
judgement, from all of that. His only major stakeholder duty was to run the
restaurant during the annual skiing holiday that Linda deemed to be sacrosanct,
so she could meet up with her sporty sisters, get a healthy glow about her, and
come home reinvigorated to serve
raclette
.

“Her name is Amélie,” he said.
“And, if she could, she would probably say ‘pleased to meet you Auntie Linda
and Uncle Peter’.”

“Oh, Chris, I’m sorry!” said
Linda, flicking the tea towel she had in her grasp over her shoulder, and
applying her hands to the baby’s cocooned back: in much the same way she would
apply them to a joint of meat she had seasoned for the oven. “I think I’m in
shock, that’s all, and what with tonight’s cover…And I don’t know a baby’s bum
from its elbow!”

“I’m finding it’s pretty much
the same as yours and mine,” said Chris. “Although more yours than mine in the
bum department, Lin.”

“I’m sure she’s a real
sweetie.”

The central island in the
kitchen was a vast stainless steel hot plate, grazed all over with tiny
scratches from incessant scrubbing, and top lit by a row of
 
lamps that were as bright and searching
as those that might illuminate a stage. It was on here that Peter placed three
mugs of tea.

“What are you going to do?” he
asked. “Get in touch with Amé and sort something sensible out?”

“Those weren’t my immediate
thoughts.”

They drank their tea: Peter
slurping his back like a man merely replenishing vital fluids in order to be
ready for his next endeavour. He was thinking of lamb shanks and fillet of
beef. And a
jus.
Which
jus
?
Chris swallowed his tea; and felt his baby move and sigh in her sleep.

“I can’t apologise enough about
tonight, guys,” he said. “I know Sundays are evil for getting cover. But I am
in a bit of a fix. I will organise help and get things back to normal, but I’ll
need a few days. A week at most.”

Peter and Linda exchanged
glances that betrayed a discussion they had had about Chris’s ‘fix’ already.

“Look, you mustn’t worry about this
place,” said Linda. “Tonight is fine.” She waved her arm in front of her face
as though she were dismissing any sense of alarm there had been. She was what
Chris’s parents described as a ‘trooper’: she probably even thrived on the
unpredictability of life. “We have contacted Alison, Gaston and Marcus. They
will rally. But I don’t think it’s as simple as taking a week off.”

She eyed her husband: his
visual cue to speak up.

“Before you and Amé split, you
were talking about a break,” said Peter. “I know it won’t be quite the same as
a trip to Europe, God knows, but maybe you should consider taking some
paternity leave. It will give you time to straighten things out. And we will
know where we stand here. Cover wise.”

His cup drained and cool, Chris
rested it on the top of his daughter’s tranquil head: it balanced perfectly.

“Bistros and babies don’t run
themselves,” said Linda: she passed a sad, sympathetic look between the
brothers.

Chris hugged her, then Peter;
and took Amélie home for her supper.

There was a power cut in the
flat that night: not for long, as the electricity company was always pretty
efficient. Long enough for Chris to light some candles around the place; but
not so long that he had any concerns about heating Amélie’s bathwater or bedtime
bottle.

He kept a few of the candles
lit as darkness drew in. He spread a mat out on the floor of his lounge and
watched his daughter wriggle on her back, raising tiny knees in what seemed
like an effort to do one of those clever two-legged leaps that he and Peter had
tried to master in order to get up from a lying down position while playing
football. She was never going to achieve it, he figured: but, then again,
neither had he.

He eased her onto her tummy,
where she snuffled and battled to lift her head up; succeeding in resting first
one cheek, then the other, onto the mat below.

“What will I do when you stop
staying in one place?” he asked her.

She fixed him with an uncertain
stare when he lowered her into the bath; powering her limbs around like a
wind-up toy. She was unimpressed by the squeaky duck that Sara had provided
with the plastic bath; and therefore the procedure was cut short by a fit of
angry tears. He threw the duck over his shoulder – slightly ashamed that
Rick was his imaginary target – and muffled her up in a towel that she
promptly peed on.

“When will you start splashing
and having fun like a proper baby?” he asked, rubbing his nose on hers. She
grabbed a tiny fistful of his hair, and he waited, with a watering eye, till
she let it go.

She was poppered into a vest
and babygro: clean and dry, if a little stiff from the uncompromising heat of
the radiator. (He made a mental note to buy a clothes airer of some kind: the
sort of thing people possessed who also owned an iron; and a tablecloth). He
had worked out that a bib was an essential prop for feeding time, or the front
of her suit got damp and the creases of her neck filled with rivulets of
formula that got really smelly.

 
He cradled her on a cushion in the crook of his left arm, and,
as she suckled, he stroked her nose with his forefinger. He learned that
conversation was too distracting until she got to her last few mouthfuls, when
he wanted her awake enough to be sat up and encouraged to burp back the air she
might have swallowed. The book described an upward rubbing motion with the
ledge of his hand, where her ribs met her spine, to bring forth the excess gas.
On this occasion, she graced him with a belch that sounded like the crack of a
boy’s cap gun: one that would have earned the applause of a bar of hardened
drinkers. Chris laughed:
“Now then,” he said, nestling her close. “Tell me about your mum. Did she talk
much about me?”

Amélie was asleep.

It was their sixth feed.

Chapter Seven

Amélie’s had been a ground
floor flat on a wide street in Paddington.

French doors opened onto a
terrace where you could drink coffee or a glass of wine without knowing,
exactly, which part of the world you might be in: unlike the aspect from
Chris’s flat, that screamed ‘London’ at you from every angle.

There was a solitary birch tree
that thrived despite the shady and seemingly inhospitable conditions in the
garden – although thriving was a strange truth for this particular tree,
as it leaned arthritically to the left, as if it were desperate for a lie down
that it would never quite achieve; and was clad in bark that - although in a
permanent state of peeling - never gave full disclosure to the new, fresher
complexion beneath.

Chris had an affinity for this
tree: it became a silent companion during wakeful nights when Amélie was a
world away,
endormi;
and was an independent witness from the natural world to the joys and
creeping uncertainties of a human story. He sometimes put his drink down and
stripped off a few pieces of the tree’s skin, where it appeared to be
especially curly and dry, in the naïve hope that it might bring it some relief.

Amélie witnessed this from her
seat in the sun, her slender brown legs stretched out onto the rusty, wrought
iron table that also served as a bird feeder.

“It’s the nature of the tree to
shed its bark like that, that is all,” she said, uncritically.

The focal point of her flat was
a large, disused white fireplace that drew her and her visitors to it –
in the absence of drawing up flames – to deposit their keys or mail on
the mantelpiece; or to kick off their shoes into the hearth. Amélie kept a
sansevieria plant in place of a grate: whose sharp, tongue-like leaves gave the
illusion of green flames rising from a red pot. It was a subtle fantasy. The
walls were white, too – a little flaky in parts – although the deep
skirting boards were brought to life, intermittently, by Amélie’s paintings and
sketches that were propped up against them.

She had a real talent for
drawing people. When he first saw the room, Chris said:

“You either go to an art class,
or you know a lot of people who are prepared to strip for you.”

“I go to a group,” Amélie
replied. “We have a sitter. And I draw from memory. I have done it for as long
as I can remember. My mother said my sister and I were born with crayons in our
fists.”

Chris grew to enjoy her
innocent exaggerations; particularly when they evoked the child she had been
who, it seemed, could be both stubborn and sweet in equal measure.

“Did you study art at college?”

“No. My father did not consider
it a
real
subject.
My college course had to prepare me for the world of business, law; which was
his
world.”
At this, her brown eyes – brimming with hidden meaning - stared towards a
distant place. They were reclining on her bed: she was wearing a cotton sheet
that bound the contours of her petite frame, as though she, herself, had
covered up in the aftermath of a sitting. Her hair was twisted into a loose
knot.

“My sister Angélique and I went
to an art class every Saturday morning. We had bowls of
chocolat chaud
and were taken round to
Miss Latour’s apartment a few streets away from where we lived in Montmartre.
It was very elegant with black painted railings outside.”

“It puts me in mind of
The Aristocats
!”

“Yes, I suppose it was a very
typical upmarket French dwelling. And Mademoiselle Latour
did
have a cat! A very haughty pussycat.
How we would say
hautain.”
She screwed up her nose as the spiteful cat and her attendant mistress
sauntered through her memory. “A little like Mademoiselle Latour, actually, who
thought a great deal of herself!