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“Tea?”
Laure gathered her hair into her hands, pulled it over her right shoulder and twisted it nervously. “Please.”
They made their tea the way each of them wanted—Laure’s without milk—and carried it through to the sitting room where they would be more comfortable for the heart-to-heart chat Iris knew they were going to have.
“Is this okay?” she asked, pulling the low table nearer to the sofa so that their tea and phones were within easy reach.
“Perfect.”
Laure settled at one end of the sofa, Iris at the other, their legs drawn up onto the cushions so that their feet met in the middle. As Laure reached for her mug, the early morning sun streaming through the window burnished her hair a rich mahogany.
“How are you?” Iris asked.
Laure took a careful sip of her too-hot tea. “Hurt. Confused. He said he never wanted children. Maybe if we’d had some, I wouldn’t be feeling so betrayed.”
“How did you find out that he has a child?” Iris asked, because Laure had been so tearful last night it had been hard to follow the actual sequence of events.
Laure cupped her hands around her mug. “I first knew something was wrong after the holiday we spent with his family at Easter. It was to celebrate his mother’s seventieth birthday so all Pierre’s cousins were there with their children, and his sister with her four children. It was lovely, but always after these holidays, Pierre and I joke about the lucky escape we had, because we are exhausted from playing with his nieces and nephews. I like that we joke about it, I need to hear Pierre say it, because sometimes when I see all the families together, I’ve wished that we’d had children. But when I see how relieved he is that we didn’t go down that road, the sadness I feel goes away because I know we did the right thing in deciding not to have any. At least, for him,” she added, gulping back tears. “But then, after those holidays, he became very quiet and I thought it was something to do with his work. I keptasking him what the matter was but he said he was fine. It got to the point where he was no longer talking to me and last week, I said that I wished we’d had some children because at least I’d have someone to talk to. I was trying to make a joke, because I needed to see him smile; I was trying to get him back to how he used to be. And that’s when he told me.”
“What did he say?” Iris asked, struck that for the last couple of months, both their husbands had been in crisis.
Laure put her mug down on the low table, took a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose delicately.
“He just turned and looked at me and asked me how I would feel if he told me that he had a child. My first reaction was that he was joking. Then I saw something on his face and it made me so scared. It was like—desperation. And I thought, this is real, this is not a joke, and I knew we’d reached a defining moment in our marriage and that I needed to stay calm and say the right thing.”
“And did you?” Iris asked, trying to think of what the right thing would have been. “Stay calm?”
Laure gave a little laugh. “No, of course not. I was so upset that I couldn’t be nice or reasonable. I thought it was recent, that the baby had been born a few weeks before, it would have explained why Pierre had been withdrawn for the last couple of months. But then he told me that it had happened some years ago.”
Iris’s mobile buzzed, interrupting Laure. She glanced at the screen and saw a message from Beth:Hi Mum, free for a chat?She hesitated, torn between her daughter and her friend, but answering Beth at this point in Laure’s story felt rude. Reaching out, she turned off her phone.
“So how did Pierre know about the baby? You said yesterday that it was a one-night stand and that he hadn’t kept in contact with the mother.”
Laure nodded. “Apparently, a few months ago, he bumped into the woman in Paris. She was with a child and Pierre said that as soon as he looked at her, he felt this connection and immediately knew thatshe was his. But when he asked, the woman denied it; she was annoyed that he should think it just because they’d slept together once. Pierre apologized and suggested they had a coffee together for old times’ sake. And while they were sitting on the terrace of Les Deux Magots, while the mother wasn’t looking, he took a stray hair from the child’s head and used it for a DNA test.”
“What?” Iris couldn’t keep the shock from her voice. “Can he do that? I mean, is it legal? Without the mother knowing or giving her consent?”
“I don’t know.” Laure gave a Gallic shrug. “I don’t think it’s against the law.”
“So what does Pierre intend to do, now that he knows the child is his?”
“I don’t know. He says he wants to be involved in her life, because he has already missed so much of it. But he doesn’t want to make trouble for the woman.”
“He already has, by telling you.”
“I almost wish he hadn’t, because then I wouldn’t have had to leave. But I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t bear to look at him.” Laure reached for her mug, took another sip. “It was all right me coming here, wasn’t it? Now that Mum has moved in with her new man, I didn’t feel I could go to her, especially when I don’t particularly like him. I didn’t want to stay with any of my friends in Paris as I didn’t want them to know, and anyway, I wanted to get as far away from Pierre as I could.”
“I’m glad you felt you could come here. But what about your job?”
“I called and told them I’d had a personal crisis and asked to take the rest of my holiday allowance. I’ve been here a week now so I’m due back at work on Monday the twenty-seventh. Is that okay?”
Iris made a quick calculation; three weeks. She gave Laure a smile. “Of course.”
“I thought at first it might be Claire.”
“Sorry?” Iris said, her mind still on the three weeks.
“I think Claire might be the child’s mother.”
