I was uneasily following the bus across a bridge and up a hill. Although we had left the town centre behind, I did not think the coach driver was leading me to the mountains. Sure enough, it soon became clear that we were on the road to the caves where St Bernadette had had her visions of the Virgin. A quick U-turn took us back to the centre, which seemed to have filled up even more. We drove up a narrow street lined with shops selling Virgin Mary statues with flashing haloes, and Jesus clocks, and plastic bottles in various holy shapes. People sauntered down the middle of the road, either pretending not to notice us or possibly genuinely deaf. I felt my sanity slipping away again. I held tight to the wheel and silently asked the car to find its way out of town. Another big blue ambulance disgorged its passengers, who were shepherded onto the pavement by nurses dressed in starchy white uniforms. I saw one with a name badge reading ‘Bernadette’ and another reading ‘Marie’.
‘Real names probably Sharon and Tracy,’ commented Greg. ‘Or whatever the French equivalents are.’
‘I’m not sure there is a French equivalent,’ I mused. ‘Not particularly. Hey, look!’
A green sign indicated the way to Pau. Although we had come from Pau, I surmised that this must be the way to the bypass, and, indeed, this proved to be the case. As I pulled onto the dual carriageway that led to the mountains, I smiled with huge relief at the sign with the word Lourdes crossed through. The Pyrenees stood, proud and beautiful, in front of us.
The mountain air was clear and cold. It smelt fresh and crisp, with the scent of different, unfamiliar flowers and herbs. We were all grateful to get out of the car and stretch our legs. Alice ran around us in mad, energetic circles. Rosie stretched her arms above her head, and Greg and I both looked at her toned midriff. After the drive, my legs felt strange. The mountains loomed over us, high and clear, lit by the sunlight, with a small amount of snow on top. It was much colder up here.
The cable car left from the centre of town, right next to where we had parked, and we rushed up a long curving ramp to the booth, keen to buy tickets and head up to the top of a mountain as soon as we could.
The sign read ‘
Fermé
’. All the lights were off, the place was deserted, and a smaller sign stated that the lift had closed on 5 September. It did not say when it was going to reopen.
I began to panic. We had come to the mountains because I wanted to do something exciting. I wanted Alice to experience the cable car, and the glorious sensation of leaving the earth behind and heading high into the sky. I wanted to experience all that myself. I wanted to stand on a mountain top and look down at France, and to appreciate how small I was and how insignificant my problems were. But I couldn’t. I tried not to see the thwarting of my wishes as meaningful.
I looked up. The mountains towered ahead of us. I craned my neck back. Small whirls of cloud swirled around the summit of the nearest peak. I tried not to cry. I longed to be up there, lost in the sky.
‘So,’ I said, trying to prompt Greg to say something.
‘Hmm. Shame. I’ll carry Alice if you want. We can have a bit of a walk. But we won’t get very high and it’s not going to be the same.’
‘I should have checked.’ My eyes had filled with tears, despite myself. I had messed up our big day. I could not shake the feeling that this setback was portentous. I looked down at Alice. ‘Sorry,’ I told her.
‘That’s OK, Mummy.’ She skipped around me. ‘I don’t mind. Can we go up the mountain now?’
Greg and I looked at each other and smiled. It was a poor substitute for the team spirit I used to feel I shared with Matt, but the camaraderie with Greg was, at least, genuine. And the mountains stood impassively above us, sheer and inaccessible, with the smallest glint of snow right up at the summit. The sun was about to disappear behind a peak, but for the moment it was shining in our eyes. I smiled, contented again, with the tears still hanging in my eyes.
My mood swings were curious. I had never had them before. Sometimes I could be objective enough to find them quite interesting. The most interesting thing was how much I got away with. I had always assumed that if I were myself, everybody would hate me. It was beginning to dawn on me that this might not be the case.
‘There’s no point trying to walk anywhere,’ I decided. ‘Let’s have a look round the village.’
It was a funny little place, nestling between mountains on one side and perched high above the valleys on the other. It was shady and cold, then sunny and open. We wandered around, taken aback by the off-season atmosphere. There was hardly anybody there. The people we passed said a polite
bonjour
but seemed to be asking under their breath what on earth we were doing there. We must have made an odd group.
No shops were open. It was nearly lunchtime.
‘Back to Lourdes?’ Greg asked, raising his eyebrows.
‘Never,’ I said, too fervently.
‘Can we have pizza and chips?’ Alice asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘Depends if anywhere’s open.’ As I spoke, we rounded a corner and emerged in the main square. This was, thankfully, geared up for tourists, even out of season. There were two restaurants, both of them open, as well as a newsagent, and three souvenir shops standing next to each other. A few people were sitting on benches in the weak sunlight. A woman walked past with a huge dog, and Alice held tightly to my leg until they were gone.
‘It’s still mine birthday!’ she suddenly remembered. ‘Let’s buy me a present.’
We took her into a shop to buy some trinkets, emerging with a luridly decorated Pyrenees cup and two snow shakers for Alice, and one each for Greg and Rosie.
‘Can we give this one to Daddy?’ she asked brightly, brandishing her spare one.
‘Of course,’ I said, trying to be pleased that she was, at last, talking about Matt, when she had barely mentioned him for the past six weeks. I was torn in half by the normality of her request. Of course a little girl on her birthday, in the mountains with her mother and her uncle (and a filmmaker), would want to pick up a present for her daddy. I hoped she would get the chance to give it to him.
As we waited to cross the road, Alice started singing, loudly. She sang happy birthday to herself, then moved on to other numbers in her repertoire. By the time we were outside the restaurants, she was halfway through ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. I knew she was being loud, and I was pleased. I was always pleased by things that suggested she had not been crushed by events, as I had been at her age.
An elderly couple walked past and looked at us with obvious disapproval. The woman’s mouth was pinched, and she tutted and shook her head. Her hair was short and brittle, her face absurdly over made-up. The man was hunched inside a raincoat, and looked as if he hated the world.
I could not catch what she said to him, but he nodded, and they both stared back at us, frowning. Alice stopped singing and watched me running after them.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, in my best French. I consciously tried to make my accent as good as it could be. The woman turned round and looked at me, displeased. ‘Excuse me,’ I continued, ‘but I think you have a problem with my daughter singing on her birthday. What exactly is your problem?’
She tutted. ‘There used to be standards of behaviour for children,’ she said drily. ‘In public, children should be quiet. That is, in France. Perhaps things are different where you come from.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s her birthday. She has lost her father. But she’s happy today. I’m not going to stop her singing and nor is anyone else. I feel sorry for you if that’s what you want.’ It wasn’t very eloquent, but it was the best I could do in the heat of the moment. I waited for the woman’s face to soften, but it didn’t. They turned and stalked off, so I called, ‘
Trous de cul!
’ after them. Arseholes. I knew I had proved their point, but it felt wonderful.
We had a large birthday lunch in a fondue restaurant. Rosie insisted on paying, to my relief. Alice drank Orangina, and the adults shared a bottle of good red wine, though I only had a couple of mouthfuls because I was both driving and taking antidepressants. Greg and Rosie finished the bottle easily, and ordered another. I was jealous of their instant intimacy.
Alice took to fondue as if she had been eating it all her life. She picked the fork with the blue spot on it, and carefully twisted it round and round to scoop up all the stringy cheese.
‘I like this fondue a
lot
,’ she said, every time she got a mouthful, and I resolved to buy a fondue set for the house. I knew we would probably move away from France before we used it, but I reasoned that we could always take it to England with us, put it at the back of a cupboard, and forget about it for fifteen years.
The restaurant rustled up three candles which stood, precariously upright, in the floating part of her
Ile Flottante
pudding. Some other diners even joined us in a round of ‘
Joyeux Anniversaire
’.
‘I’m happy you’re here,’ she said to Greg, giving him a sticky kiss as she finished her pudding. ‘Are you going to make Mummy happy again?’
I stared at her. ‘Mummy’s happy,’ I said and I knew as I said it that I was being unconvincing. I sniffed heavily and blinked several times.
‘Well,’ said Greg, ignoring me and looking earnestly at Alice. ‘I think between us we can make your mummy pretty happy. But it’s quite complicated. Mummy’s doing really well and she loves you very much, so she’s all right really. Everything’s all right.’
As we stood up from the table, he said, under his breath, ‘The fucking bastard.’ He looked at Rosie. ‘And you can quote me on that.’
While I still felt dazed and half dead, Greg was a tonic. I knew it was good for me to have someone in the house, because I often wished he wasn’t there. He stopped me wallowing, and made me get on with the routine things. Greg didn’t notice if I forgot to brush my hair for a week, if I never bothered to shower or if I drank too much coffee. But he did frown if Alice was late for school or if I announced that we were all having toast and jam for dinner. With him around, we all ate three times a day, and I managed not to go out looking like a bag lady very often. Watching the development of his romance with Rosie took my mind off my own troubles, and I was constantly trying not to say anything cynical to either of them.
‘You’re much less bossy than Bella was,’ I told him one day. He looked surprised.
‘Good!’ he said. ‘I would be a little put out to be told I was more bossy than the woman known throughout north London as Gengha Khan.’ Greg had called Bella Gengha throughout his teenage years, to her fury. He had sat back and smiled his lazy smile, knowing that with every protest, scream and threat she was reinforcing his point.
‘I mean,’ I told him, ‘Bella was great. She pulled me out of myself just in time.’
‘I know. But she’s bossy as fuck. And annoying. And, I don’t know, I’m on strange territory here because I know nothing, but maybe she, like, should have let you go to pieces. Maybe you might have needed it. I don’t think that trying to be superwoman when you feel as crap as you obviously do is necessarily the thing.’ He looked away, embarrassed.
I tried to think about what he had said. ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I was in pieces for a few weeks. It wasn’t just Bella who kept me going. It was your mum and dad, too. Specially Geoff. He tried to take me to London. I wanted to stay here. I couldn’t have gone to London.’
‘Then they could have found you somewhere else to go with more support. Having a kid to look after is such a responsibility. It must make you internalise things because you’ve got so much to do to get through the day. I just don’t think that internalising things like this is the way to deal with them.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m not internalising,’ I told him. ‘I’m struggling through the days. You’re right, I do feel like crap, but that’s good. I’ve never felt like this before, so raw, because up till now I’ve bottled it all up. This is me in pieces, Greg. And it’s all right.’
After eating, Greg would sometimes lean back and put his socked feet up on the table, to Alice’s delighted horror.
‘Greg!’ she would squeal. ‘It’s
naughty
to put your feet on the table!’ She would give me a sideways glance to check my reaction, then put her feet up too. Reluctantly, I would tell them both to sit up properly. I began to enjoy my role as the responsible adult. It made me feel like Bella, like a proper grown-up.
Rosie turned up extremely regularly while Greg was around. I kept expecting to find her in the bathroom in the morning, wearing one of Greg’s big T-shirts. Rosie’s camera was perpetually trained on him. He would turn and make faces, or roar at her, or flick her the finger. She loved it.
The builders, meanwhile, were aiming to finish by Christmas. Most weekdays, my house teemed with friendly men in overalls, and at the end of each day I would derive some level of satisfaction from the tangible changes that had taken place. One day they arrived at six and started putting the long-awaited windows into the back of the house. By the time I came back from dropping Alice at school, the downstairs two were in. By the time I picked her up, the whole back wall boasted five brand new wooden windows. We were finally airtight. I liked things like that, things I could see happening.
The masons worked, and made the house so dusty that I would change Alice from her pyjamas into her school clothes at the front door, to minimise the risk of her brushing against anything. If she did brush against a wall, I would have to grab something from the ironing pile and smooth it down against her body, telling myself she looked tidy enough. Nonetheless, the changes to the masonry were quick and satisfying. The fireplace was soon reworked; it lost its ugly stone cladding and was moved up to a foot off the ground, with a niche for logs underneath it.
‘It would make the room smoky otherwise,’ the mason explained. ‘Now you have your new windows, there won’t be any draughts.’
The new, improved fire heated the sitting room beautifully, and the three of us, or, often, the four of us, spent our evenings there, huddled round the fire, roasting chestnuts.