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‘Oh, Claire,’ he said. ‘Oh, love.’
He wrapped his arms around her then, tightly, and started to rock.
Sunday
The truth is too simple, one must always get there by the complicated route.
George Sand
The Crack of Dawn
It was a determined rapping sound that brought Harry back to consciousness. He was lying on the bathroom floor, cold seeping into the hollow spaces in his bones. The rapping came again. It was the door. There was somebody at the door.
Cautiously, he raised himself to his knees and then hauled his body to standing. Now the phone by his bedside rang and rang again. Hesitating between the door and the phone, he chose the door, attempting to flatten his hair with his palm as he lurched to open it.
‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ A pimply boy in a black uniform stood to attention beside a trolley. The smell of coffee rose from a silver pot.
‘Come in, come on in.’ Harry was flustered. He stood back to make space for the trolley and grabbed the phone.
‘Hello?’ he said, taking his wallet from the nightstand.
He extracted a twenty-euro note and handed it to the boy before he left.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur Carter,’ said a bright female voice in his ear. ‘Your car will be at the front entrance at eight o’clock.’
‘Er .?.?. great, yeah,’ he said, rubbing his left shoulder, and trying to remember why he’d booked a car for the Goddamned crack of dawn. ‘Merci beaucoup.’
Harry sat down on the bed and opened his phone. The time was 6.45am. I must have had a plan, he thought. He tapped the screen again. No messages. Out of habit, he rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. He stopped, realising that he didn’t actually have a headache. His body was stiff and sore, like a giant bruise, but his head was surprisingly light. The bathroom floor had provided the deepest sleep he’d had in weeks.
He half-filled a cup with coffee, topped it up with hot milk from the second silver pot.Be a devil, he thought, and added a brown sugar lump. He scrolled upwards through Friday night’s text conversation with Nancy, then the emails again. If he’d burned the bridges, she sure scuttled the boats.
Even if he didn’t tell her he was sick, she was going to find out sooner or later. Whenever it happened, she was going to feel bad about that email. Harry surprised himself with the realisation that he drew no solace from that – the opposite, in fact. He was the one at fault. He should never have asked her to come to Paris. It was never going to happen. All he’d done was reopen old wounds. Maybe he should call her and have it out, once and for all. It wasn’t 7am yet. There was a chance that she was still awake.
He pulled up her number and sat there, looking at the wordcallon the screen. Then he thought of her line about him walking out on their life as if it was a movie that got boring. It wasn’t true. He was never bored. He’d just been momentarily distracted. And monumentally stupid. As a defence, he had to admit, it was pretty lame.
What was the point in getting into all that now? He’d only be hounding her, hurting her all over again. What good would it do? He’d left it too late.
Deliberately, he turned his thoughts to Caroline. To say that he had traumatised his daughter was overstating things, he thought. In all honesty, he hadn’t thought about it too much. The thing was, had Caroline not been witness to his moment of weakness, he never would have left with Rita. He would have bundled the conniving minx into a taxi and made damn sure he never laid eyes on her again. He’d stood there, butt naked, in his kitchen with two available pathways: he could face up to the embarrassment of his daughter, the inevitable anger of his wife and a guaranteed prolonged diet of humble pie – or he could walk out the door with the sequined promise of sex on tap. What man, he asked himself for the umpteenth time, wouldn’t have done exactly what he did?
That was the thing, though – he circled round to it again. He had blamed Caroline. Not entirely – he wasn’t that deluded – but maybe just enough that she could feel it. Maybe it was him, not her, who had built the barrier between them.
He scrolled down his contact list, and this time hitcall. After just one ring, she picked up.
‘Dad?’
‘Hi, honey.’
‘Hi. Has something happened?’
That stung him.
‘No, no. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to check in, make sure you’re doing okay. You all good?’
‘Yeah, I’m good.’
Silence hung on the line. It was gut-wrenchingly clear to Harry that Caroline could think of nothing to say to him.
‘How’s that new apartment working out?’
