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‘And pride.’
‘Yeah.’
He kissed the top of her head.
‘It’s hard,’ she said.
‘It is, yeah,’ he answered.
They sat with it, the hardness of it, and the fullness of the night settled around them. A sensitive stranger passing by might have noticed it – a stillness in the air around them – the way the city gathered up her forces and threw a shield over their shoulders.
* * *
‘I want to show you what I bought at the market this morning.’
‘Sure.’
Claire showed him the postcard first, the century-old view from Sacré-Coeur. ‘I knew when I saw it that I wanted to remember last night, sitting up there on those steps. I think I knew then that I wasn’t going tostaymad with you, but I needed tobemad with you for a while. Does that make sense?’
‘You needed a scrum.’
‘What?’
‘To reset the game.’
She laughed. ‘Alright. That’s a new one.’
‘Is that all?’
‘No.’ She pulled the lace-trimmed bonnet from her bag and passed it to him.
He took it and spread it open over the back of his hand in just the same way she had done at the market. His voice, when he spoke, was very low. ‘Why did you buy it?’
‘I wasn’t going to. I was standing there looking at it, thinking that it absolutely failed the little dance test, you know?’
‘Right,’ he said.
‘I was thinking how, if I bought it, it would make me sad every single time I looked at it.’
‘It would.’ He fiddled with the ribbons. ‘It will.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s the thing. It won’t.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You see, I met this woman, an American. I was standing there, in a sort of daze, and she put her hand on mine and asked me if I was alright, and – I dunno – it was like a locked box in my head clicked open.’
She recounted her conversation with Edith West.
‘She asked me what my daughter’s name was. No, actually, that’s the thing – she said, “whatisyour daughter’s name?”, in the present tense.’
He said nothing.
‘She said it as if she was talking about a real person who exists in the world, like as if Ihavea daughter, not that I had a daughter for half a minute.’ She looked away from him. ‘Not even that long.’
His eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really see what difference it makes. She died.’
‘I know she died, but she didn’t cease to be. Somehow, itdoesmake a difference. To both of us – you, too, do you see? It makes a difference that she exists in the present tense. She might not be right here, but she exists. She’s more than just a memory. We have a daughter. We have a daughter together. We are still her parents, you know. And we always will be. She unites us.’
