Thanksgiving (16 page)

‘Where did you get that nightdress?’ I said instead.

She blushed charmingly, a brief flashback to the Claire I remembered. Her pale freckly skin had always made her a good blusher.

‘It’s Mom’s. I finally felt strong enough to go round to the house and go through her stuff. I mean, I know you didn’t want to, right? A lot of it I ditched, of course, and the good stuff I packed up and stored down in the basement. We can go through it all some time later on and see what we want to do.’

She fingered the lace neck of the nightdress.

‘But this, I don’t know, I couldn’t bring myself to put it out for the Goodwill, and it would be stupid to put it in with the jewellery and stuff, so I decided to wear it. Is that all right?’

‘Of course.’

It occurred to me for the first time to wonder why Lucy hadn’t taken that nightdress with her on her fatal trip to the trade fair in Los Angeles. It was in a heavy pink flannel made in Austria, full-length, with buttons up to the lace collar. Cosy, comfy and resolutely unsexy, she’d always claimed that it was her favourite. But then perhaps she’d wanted to have something more alluring to wear to bed when she was out of town, I thought, disgusted at myself for even entertaining the idea.

‘I managed to get a turkey,’ I told Claire. ‘A real one. It was still alive yesterday, so it should be good.’

‘Fabulous. Can I smoke?’

‘This is France. You can do what you like.’

She laughed and lit up.

‘I was planning to have the meal as a latish lunch. Is that all right?’

‘Whatever. I want you to make the decisions. This trip has been great, but there’s been so much planning and schedules and packing and what and where and when that I’m having a hard time choosing what magazine to read, never mind anything else. And it does get exhausting having Daniel around all the time, particularly when you don’t speak the language.’

After breakfast I plugged Daniel back in with the clockwork toys while his mother got dressed. She then got him wrapped up in several layers of clothing, which made him look like a miniature Michelin man. I had proposed a mid-morning walk up to a restored chapel on a peak behind the house as an appetizer, and warned Claire that it would be cold.

We started off about half past ten, along one of the old mule tracks which criss-cross the area. It soon became obvious that Daniel wasn’t up to negotiating the uneven, snow-covered ground, and after Claire had held out her hand to him and said, ‘Up again, Daniel! Up again!’ for the tenth time, I volunteered to carry him. He didn’t like the idea at first, and kept asking for his daddy, but once it was made clear to him that the alternative was walking, he made the best of it.

I won his heart in an encounter with one of the half-feral dogs which haunt these paths, their provenance always unclear. This was a huge black cur which came at us, barking furiously. I set Daniel down, picked up a loose rock and hurled it at the beast. Thanks to the primitive baseball skills I had learned from playing in the backyard with Frank, I got lucky and connected first time. The hound slunk away into the undergrowth, whining piteously, and Daniel gave me a ‘My hero’ look, and then of course wanted the black dog to come back so that he could have a go too.

Further along, the
garrigue
started closing in, a stunted jungle topped by the scrubby holm oaks and dwarf pines which have taken over the landscape since a severe frost killed off the olive trees two decades ago. As always in this landscape, the skull of rock was visible beneath the shallow skin of vegetation.

‘The police came to see me,’ Claire said.

I hugged Daniel and kept walking.

‘An officer from that county in Nevada where Dad died.’

‘They finally got it together to send someone up?’

She didn’t reply. The track had become steep, and we had to watch our footing on the snowy ground.

‘They seemed to think that you might have done it,’ Claire said at last.

I glanced at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.

‘I didn’t. I told you that on the phone. And it’s true.’

‘They said they had a ton of evidence. Those photographs of you holding the gun which killed him. And then of course you leaving the country didn’t look too good.’

‘Kildim,’ echoed Daniel.

‘I didn’t do it, Claire. They’ll never believe me, but I want you to. It’s important to me.’

She stopped now and looked at me.

‘I do believe you.’

I felt tears in my eyes.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘And so do they.’

‘The police? Of course they don’t. They think I’m guilty as hell.’

‘Not any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When they talked to me, I told them that you couldn’t have done it.’

I laughed sarcastically.

‘Well that’s very sweet of you. Great to have a character witness on my side, but if they ever get their hands on me they’ll go ahead and fry me just the same.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘I told them it was impossible for you to have killed him, because he called me from a bar somewhere on Monday, the day after you got back to town and checked into that hotel. So he was alive then, which means you couldn’t have done it.’

We looked at each other in silence for a long moment. The air was very still and the whole landscape seemed to be listening intently.

‘He called you?’

‘That’s what I told the police.’

‘Yes, but did he really?’

She looked at me in a way I had seen her do at Daniel, a mixture of affection and exasperation.

‘That’s what I told them. And they believed me. The guy even sounded relieved. I think that plane ticket to Seattle just about bust their budget. When I told him that Dad had been a depressive drunk, he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. We won’t bother you again.” So you’re off the hook. No longer a suspect. There aren’t any suspects. They’re calling it a self-inflicted gunshot wound.’

I ought to have felt an immense sense of relief, but I didn’t. On the contrary, I realized that I’d been counting on the police coming to arrest me, just as I’d been counting on Lucy coming to haunt me. Now they’d both let me down. I was going to have to struggle along as I had for the past days, a downward spiral of booze, indolence and despair with no end in sight.

When the track emerged from the scrub, the wind made itself felt for the first time. Flurries of snow were whirling about as we climbed the steps to the balcony of the little chapel whose name I could never remember, Notre Dame de something or other. I set down Daniel and started making a snowman with him while Claire leant on the railing and admired the view.

‘Who’s that?’ she said.

I bunged another fistful of the dry, powdery snow on to our figurine, rubbing it to make it cohere.

‘Who?’

‘That woman.’

I stood and looked.

‘I don’t see anyone.’

‘Standing there on the path staring at us.’

I followed Claire’s pointed hand. There was no one there.

‘Oh, just one of the locals,’ I said casually. ‘This is a short cut to the village. The road’s probably icy. It almost never snows here, and when it does the whole place grinds to a halt.’

I realized I was babbling, and turned back to help Daniel finish our project with two sticks for arms and pieces of gravel for eyes.

Our Thanksgiving meal turned out to be a great success. We started off with some sea urchins I’d bought the day before. Claire was at first suspicious of the bright orange, fruit-like innards, but was soon won round. Daniel spat his only spoonful out, but was fascinated by the spiny black mines as toys, particularly after one pricked him and made him bleed and he discovered that he was allowed to take his revenge by stomping on each half-shell as soon as Claire or I emptied it, smashing it to pieces on the kitchen floor.

After this, the turkey with mash and gravy came as a familiar relief, and by the time we’d worked our way through the cheeses and Madame Allier’s cherries with a dollop of
crème fraîche
, not to mention a couple of bottles from my father’s cellar, everyone was feeling pleasantly drowsy. Claire tucked Daniel into the camp bed I’d set up for him in her room and then returned to the kitchen, where I’d thrown another log on the fire.

‘Listen, I was wondering,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’ve sort of got a favour to ask. I don’t want you to think this is why I came or anything. I hadn’t even thought of it before, to be honest. Only seeing you get along so well with Daniel, it just sort of occurred to me.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, you remember last night I was talking about how we’d been in Paris? What I didn’t tell you was that I met someone there.’

I looked at her in genuine surprise.

‘You did? Good for you.’

‘His name’s Jean-Claude. He works in marketing French cheese overseas, kind of like Mom did with Washington apples. He speaks pretty good English with this incredibly cute kind of Jacques Cousteau accent. He’s been to the States a million times and loves America.’

‘And Americans.’

She blushed once again.

‘How old?’ I asked.

‘A couple of years older than me.’

‘Married?’

‘Oh, stop being the surrogate father! The answer is no.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘At a club.’

‘With Daniel?’

‘Of course not. The hotel we were staying at had a baby-sitting service, so I took advantage. This really nice black woman. She talked to Daniel in French and he talked back in his version of English. They got along like a house on fire and I went out and strutted my stuff.’

I poured us both more wine. Claire lit a cigarette and offered me one, which I accepted.

‘I’ve been feeling pretty wretched and rejected since Jeff dumped me. In fact, to be honest, I’d just about come to terms with the fact that I might never get laid again. Until Jean-Claude.’

‘It can’t be easy to start an affair with a three-year-old in tow.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Does Jean-Claude know about Daniel?’

She beamed.

‘Yes! And he thinks he’s adorable. We even all went out together to a park once. But it was kind of tough his not being able to spend the night. We just want to be alone, you know what I mean?’

I nodded.

‘Like you and Mom when you first got together,’ Claire added, ever so slightly pointedly.

‘So now you’d like to go back to Paris, leaving Daniel here with me, right?’

‘It’d only be for the weekend. He’s all potty-trained, so it’s fairly low maintenance. It’s just a question of having someone to keep an eye on him, really. But if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll completely understand.’

‘Won’t he miss you?’

‘Oh, he’ll fuss for ten minutes after I leave, then forget all about me. Besides, if I don’t do this, or something like it, I think I might go nuts. How’s he going to like having a nutty mother?’

‘Good point. All right, when do you want to go?’

‘You’ll do it?’

‘There’s a train to Marseilles every hour. From there you pick up the TGV and you’ll be in Paris in no time. Do you want to go tonight?’

‘No, no. Tomorrow will be great. Wow, thank you so much!’

Once Daniel woke up from his nap, I spent the late afternoon teaching him the rudiments of soccer in the garage downstairs, using a beach ball and two old paint tins for a goal. Once I got him to realize that the object of the game was not to crush the ball like a sea urchin, he caught on quite quickly. That wore him out again, and after an early supper of cold turkey and some of my dad’s dwindling hoard of Heinz baked beans, he went happily off to bed. Once he was soundly asleep, Claire read for a bit, but soon started yawning. She wanted to make an early start in the morning, so she excused herself and went off to the room she was sharing with her son, leaving me alone.

I seemed to be the only person who couldn’t sleep. I found myself rather missing the mistral. By contrast with that external turbulence, the house had been gifted with an illusory inner calm which had now turned into mere stagnation. To add the stupor of sleep seemed intolerable, a surrender to mindless inertia only a breath away from death. So I stayed up, battling sleep by pacing, drinking, smoking Claire’s cigarettes, and reminding myself that she had been prescribed glasses for her distance vision when she was fifteen, but had been too vain or feckless ever to wear them. Inevitably, sleep won.

I got undressed and went to the bathroom, not switching on the light in the hallway. Daniel had developed night terrors since his father left, Claire had told me. Our agreed solution was to leave the door to the guest bedroom open, with a small table lamp plugged into one of the sockets in the hall and turned on all night. This created enough light in their room to avoid him having a panic attack if he woke, but not enough to keep his mother awake.

I padded along the tiled floor to the bathroom, closed the door quietly, turned on the light and peed. In the black plastic garbage bin beside the sink, on top of a mound of used tissues and other junk, was a long empty paper cylinder, torn at one end, with ‘Tampax’ printed on it in green lettering. I smiled wryly at the thought that Jean-Claude’s romantic weekend might prove to be more problematic than he had anticipated.

I flushed the toilet and waited until the cistern had refilled and all noise ceased. Then I turned off the light, stepped out into the passage and started back to my room.

‘Sweetie?’

The voice came from the open door into the room where Claire and Daniel lay asleep. I recognized it immediately. I walked over to the open door and looked inside, but my eyes hadn’t yet adjusted from the bright light in the bathroom, and I could make nothing out. I was about to leave when the voice resumed, low and drowsy.

‘What are you doing? Come to bed. It’s my period, so we can’t fool around, but I need you to hold me. I had this dream that you left me and I was all alone. Just come and hold me, so I can get back to sleep.’

I stepped cautiously into the room, one pace at a time. By now I could make out Daniel lying sprawled on the camp bed, the covers thrown off. I picked them up and replaced them. Then I turned to the other bed, where a hunched figure lay on the far side, Lucy’s side. I crossed over and then lay down as gently as I could on top of the covers. After a moment, a warm head came to rest on my left shoulder, tickling me with its mass of frizzy hair, and sighed contentedly.