The Kindness (22 page)

‘I came by it years ago. When we first met,’ she said. ‘But there was never a right moment to give it to you.’ She hefted her canvas bag on to her shoulder. ‘Also, I liked hoarding it, knowing that one day you would have it.’ She smiled back at him. ‘Like a lovely secret,’ she said. A saxophonist busked the opening bars of Pachelbel’s Canon. A breeze caught a few ribbons tied to the bridge, and Julia adjusted a rag she had wound around her hair. Even in Paris she looked ready to dig a garden in her floppy brown top and rolled-up chinos. He felt a childish stab of disappointment that she hadn’t dressed up for his birthday. He pulled the rag from her head, mussed up her hair. ‘My birthday,’ he said when she objected. And that’s how it started.

They weren’t so used to being apart in those pre-Firdaws days. His sap was high after the nights spent alone in his swanky Paris hotel that smelt of cinnamon, its draped-black bed and suede-effect walls.

In the rush of leaving London he’d forgotten all sorts of things: a plumber who was due to mend the boiler and that he’d promised Karl dinner.

He had been about to shout to Julia to let her know about Karl but the phone immediately rang again. It was the French animator Claude De’Ath, the great man himself, and of course Julian was prepared to drop everything to work with him in Paris. In the panic of packing and Julia coming in from the greenhouse and growing a little tearful that he was leaving, he forgot to cancel Karl.

He only remembered their date the next morning while walking with Claude De’Ath through the Tuileries, his schoolboy French stretched to its limits by the director’s vision for his film. They stopped to watch the toy boats at the fountain and Julian excused himself. Karl’s number clicked straight through to the answering service and he remembered that he had been only passing through London on his way to a conference in Brighton. He was about to leave a message when a dark-brown rat crossed his path within kicking distance. It was fat, with the confidence of a cat. He shook his head at it and it wandered into the bushes.

He told Julia about the rat as they walked along the bridge, making her shudder. ‘Its tail was like a fat worm dragging along behind it.’ He decided (‘My birthday’) that they should kiss again to the strains of a nylon-strung guitar, though she, desperate for the
Mona Lisa
, said she’d heard better on the underground.

He started listing all the things that a ‘my birthday’ should entail. ‘Café crème in St Germain, freshly baked madeleines, French news-stands and billboards with underclad French girls, baguette and a cold slab of unsalted butter, oysters on a bed of ice, preferably one with a pearl at its heart, the hotel room and my tongue . . .’ She interrupted him, laughing and shushing him and pulling him to the side of the bridge.

‘Put your padlock here.’ She poked him and pointed to the wire meshing. ‘Let’s do it.’ She gave his arm a shake. ‘Go on, quick. Lock it here now and throw the key to the Seine.’

‘What? Why?’ he said, keeping his fingers closed around the lock.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I feel superstitious, that’s all,’ she said.

‘OK, but let me own it a bit longer.’ He was already sad to think of it gone. ‘But in return, and as it’s my birthday, I get everything my own way.’ He lit up at the thought of a dare, said: ‘We’ll have half an hour with your Giaconda but then it’s pastis and shopping.’

The Mona Lisa smiled, the pastis made them heady, the boutique was expensive.

‘This one, really, must I?’ She emerged from the changing room in the clothes he’d chosen. ‘I’m not sure I can even walk in this skirt, it’s like being hobbled.’ The skirt was incongruous with her loafers, the blouse as soft as emulsion. It was almost impossible to keep sitting on the hard chair beside the mirror as the shop assistant came back with the very high heels in her size.

‘Julian . . .’ she made an imploring face.

‘My birthday,’ he said, laughing. ‘You agreed.’

She was unsteady on the shoes at first, wobbling from foot to foot as she walked towards the mirror, as unlike herself as he’d ever seen her, and somehow more naked. He made her squeak by pinching her through the silky blouse: ‘That top is a little bit see-through, by the way . . .’ She batted him away as he went on: ‘. . . and tonight no bra.’ The shop assistant pretended not to hear or speak English.

Lunch was in the Rue Bucci in a restaurant with Belle Époque ceramic frescoes, goddesses and water lilies, flowing robes, baguette that was almost nutty it was so good. There were two dozen oysters raised on their silver sacrificial bed and Julia got the giggles doing quivering stung-oyster squeals as he dropped Tabasco on to their flesh.

The insides of her wrists were stained with lipstick, a dozen fading gashes. Her chin was cupped in her hands and lately he’d been noticing little creases around her eyes when she frowned. He raised his glass to her and she wrinkled her nose – the scattering of freckles across its bridge would give her the look of a girl at any age. He wished she’d wear her hair loose more often. He pulled the padlock from his pocket, put it on the table between them. ‘So. How did you know I loved it?’

‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to give it to you for ages. Since my last day at the shop when Mr Gelding asked me if there was anything I wanted . . .’

‘Woah, that was quite a risk for Mr Gelding.’

‘To be honest, I’d been hoping he might give me some sort of bonus, I’d worked there so long. And I didn’t have the wit to ask for something that we could sell.’ She looked quite depressed at the memory.

‘With what we were trying to live on that would’ve been fair enough . . .’ he said.

‘I remembered catching you once, reflected in the glass at the front of the shop. I was with a customer and I saw you pick it up from the tray, look around to check if I was watching you and then you lifted it towards your pocket. It really made me catch my breath and just as your fingers were about to disappear, you put it back.’

‘Really?’ He choked on a mouthful of wine. ‘I can’t remember that at all.’

‘If you’d stolen it, we had no future together, that’s what I told myself at the time. So that’s what I asked for and Mr Gelding was happy enough. I wanted to give it to you straight away, I even had it engraved in the High Street. But then . . . Oh God, Julian, it was awful. Back at Mrs Briggs’s the day you chucked your course. I’d been in your room all day, feeding the gas meter with coins, with all the coins we had. I had the padlock in my bag, ready to give you. I thought it would cheer you up. I waited for you, surrounded by your books and notes, your desk thick with them, your atrocious scrawl, reams of what would now, because of me, not be completed. You came bounding back into the room. You looked like a boy. You even had a bit of acne.’

‘I did not! Julia, I can’t bear this.’

‘You were so thin and your elbow stuck right through a hole in your jumper. And there I was, about to be an old bag of thirty, pregnant, brainless and broke. I felt like I’d already trapped you. The last thing I could give you was a lock.’

He leant across and kissed the tip of her nose. It made his heart ache to think of her so anxious and frightened. He pictures his room at Mrs Briggs’s, its terrible stained mattress, its worn sticky carpet, the taste of blood on Julia’s lower lip, she’d been chewing it so much. The hotel room that was waiting for them had chocolate-dipped strawberries in a crystal dish, dark folds around the bed. He picked up the padlock. If she completed his dare, he had promised her to go back and lock it to the bridge in the morning. The shopping bags were on the banquette beside her. Every time he glanced across he smiled to himself, though it took the rest of the bottle to believe she would go through with it.

But she did it, just for him. He would never forget the man in the brown corduroy suit nor the sight of her flailing about on that bed with its rumpled dark coverings, her heels drumming his shoulders and her face contorting in an uncontrolled scream as she came back at him, straight into his face: ‘I did. I did. I did.’

In the morning she was too hungover for the Pont des Arts.

‘It’s OK,’ he lied, concealing the padlock in his sponge bag. ‘I have to cross the river to meet De’Ath. I’ll do it en route.’ On his return they headed out to a café and, hiding from the weak sunshine behind dark glasses, passed a shop selling baby things. Her arm was in the crook of his elbow, he felt the subtlest tug as she slowed her stride and on impulse he turned and pulled her inside. They’d never done such a thing before. The assistant wrapped the white silk christening dress in layers of tissue paper as though it might break.

Alone in the porch he drains the last of his coffee, rolls his second cigarette of the morning. He turns the key in the padlock one last time and on his way to the kitchen for a refill hurls it into the box of Julia’s junk. Let her know he broke his promise. What does he care now? Things keep turning up around the house: bits of paper with her writing on, her swimsuit, stretched and faded as an old skin, a jar of Clarins cream he’d made the mistake of unscrewing and sniffing before chucking in. The box is almost full. He must remember to buy some packing tape.

A hand on his shoulder makes him jump. Katie has scrubbed away her panda eyes. If she’s hungover she’s managing to disguise it beneath pink cheeks, her hair brushed back into a ponytail, the mintiness of her breath suggesting she’s helped herself to his toothbrush. She lifts his hand and presses it to her forehead. ‘I need paracetamol,’ she says, and flops down beside him. She is drenched in hyacinths.

She dangles her pumps from the end of her toes. ‘I don’t remember much about last night. I hope you didn’t take advantage of me.’

‘Stop it,’ he says, and she digs him in the ribs with her elbow.

‘I hope I’m not still drunk,’ she says, yawning. ‘I’ll need to get my act together before I face the inquisition back at the Mill. I’ll have to tell the boys my car wouldn’t start.’

‘Perhaps if you left now there’s a chance they might still be asleep?’ he replies and she ignores him, says she’s gasping for coffee.

‘I woke up thinking about our conversation last night and now I can’t get it out of my head.’

He feels himself prickle. ‘Do we have to go there again?’

‘What? Oh, I see. No, not the hotel. I meant, about Mira at the hospital. I keep thinking if I had to stare day after day at Billy or Arthur unconscious . . .’

He holds out an arm and she snuggles in, her head on his chest. ‘Just awful.’

‘The worst of it is that you’ve got so long to sit there and regret every crappy thing you’ve done. We’d been dreading the chemo and the op, but as you saw when you visited, we’d sort of got into the routine of her being kept in. I mean, it was better that than have a sudden emergency with her blood pressure. You know there wasn’t a single night that one of us didn’t stay? And then, after what happened with her liver, there was no hope of getting her out until after the operation and only then if she got the all-clear.’

He sees Mira propped against her Disney pillows, the day she got off the ventilator, coming back to the world crying, soundlessly at first, her lips making the shapes but her vocal cords silenced by the path of the tube. Angry, silent tears. Leaning over her, him and Julia, trying to kiss them away and soothe, her cries becoming thin rasps, the ventilator gone. As they wheeled her bed back to Lion Ward he thought she’d never been so beautiful as now she’d lost her hair. Her wide lovely eyes and lashes, the smooth dome of her head vulnerable as an egg.

‘Oh, God. Katie, stop me now. Let’s talk about something else. Anything.’

They hear Jenna call from the kitchen. ‘Is anyone else up and about on this beautiful day?’ He stands and offers Katie a hand.

She follows him inside, says: ‘OK. I’ll tell you. I think I’m about to accept the permanent job at Woodford Primary.’

‘Good God, you’re staying on at your mum’s? What does Adrian think about that?’

She made a gesture of brushing so much dust from her hands. ‘Well, there’s always the train. I expect he’ll have them for half the holidays, but we’ll see . . .’ She looks spiteful, enough that Julian shivers. ‘. . . He should’ve thought about that before he got his cock out.’

Jenna is already chopping things in the kitchen. Michael is squeezing oranges. He stops what he’s doing and glances at Katie, raises an eyebrow at Julian, who replies with an irritable shake of his head. Jenna asks if anyone’s remembered to feed the dog.

Katie is resting her cheek to his back with her hands around his waist as he heats the milk. ‘Just one coffee and I’ll be off,’ she says.

He hears a car pulling up, the slam of a door. Michael leaps to attention, Zeph barking. Julian disentangles himself from Katie as his mother thrusts bowls at them. Her special breakfast: baked slices of last night’s pudding topped with glistening fruits and nuts. Michael returns from the front hall, his face a little rueful, and behind him William.

William fills the doorway in his this-is-what-we-wear-to-the-country coat, all flappy pockets and plaid lining, slinging down his luggage and throwing wide his arms. ‘Aw, mate,’ enclosing Julian in a voluminous waxed-cotton hug.

‘William,
what
are you doing here?’

William doesn’t get a chance to explain as Katie advances with the coffee pot. ‘This is Katie,’ Julian says, as she hands him a cup. William shoots him a look and for the second time that morning he has to shake his head in denial. William releases him with another slap on the back. ‘Mate, it’s good to see you,’ he says and turns to give Katie the onceover, visibly approves, and then to everyone: ‘Christ, have you lot not heard the news?’