She looks up at him, suspicious.
‘Still do. Something strange is happening to me. Something’s changed.’
He wants to explain it to her but he can’t find the words, managing only to increase her mistrust. She uses a knife to break up a lump of sugar at the bottom of the cup in front of her; an industrious pixie, infuriated by a stone in the soil where it’s trying to plant something. The corners of her mouth point down.
Cat studies the man she lives with. Sometimes he seems like a caricature of vitality, a man for yoghurt adverts. She loves him with an intensity that she begrudges him on occasions because she can’t imagine it’s reciprocated to the same degree. That he’s chosen this morning to emphasize his zest for life is one illustration. He takes no account of her, really, and not because good news is coming. This morning she’s going to refuse to be dizzied by his confidence.
‘Let me go with you.’
It makes no difference that he’s correctly interpreted her disgruntlement. She resolutely shakes her head.
‘I can wait in the car.’
‘Let me do this alone,’ she says.
He wants her to call him as soon as she knows anything.
He’s set aside half a day to go with her, so the appointment with his next client isn’t until the afternoon. He reluctantly throws himself into his paperwork, putting his mobile phone where he can see it and checking the landline is working—it’s working.
The folder of invoices is a catalogue of domestic problems. Although his memory usually lets him down when it comes to names and faces, he recalls the houses and the conversations he’s had in them. Because those conversations are rerun repeatedly in his mind as he works, it often seems in retrospect as if he’s left them behind on the walls, covered with a thin but impenetrable coating to protect them against time.
Today, however, the invoices and the reminders they bring fail to distract him. Cat’s appointment was at 8.30. It can sometimes be busy in hospitals. He mustn’t bother her, mustn’t ring.
At ten o’clock he can’t bear to wait any longer. She shuts off his call. She’s face to face with the doctor, he tells himself. She’s sitting there looking at the doctor. Last time the results were as good as they could be at that point; today she has to be declared completely cured. She seemed to assume the results would be given to her immediately.
For another half-hour he paces the floors and stairs of their house, faster and faster, then he calls again. And again when she fails to answer.
‘Yes?’ she says, her voice powerless.
Seagulls, he thinks. Is that the sea? ‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘I’m on the beach.’ De Panne, perhaps, where her parents live. Did she want them to be the first to comfort her? He can’t imagine so.
‘What did the doctor say? Not good?’
‘No.’
An ice-cold fish is tossed into his stomach cavity, where it thrashes for life.
He can guess which part of the beach she’s walking on: the broadest, between the campsite, the dunes, and the sea. ‘Stay there,’ he says, deaf to her protests.
He curses this region of winding lanes now; if a ring road ran north from their house he’d be with her in fifteen minutes. It takes twice that long.
After he’s parked the van, though, he finds her almost immediately. She’s sitting cross-legged on the dry part of the beach. This is where they usually come for a breath of fresh air after visiting her parents.
The way she stands up—reserved, ill at ease—prompts a sympathy that softens him. He won’t leave her side. Their raincoats fly up in a wild dance as they embrace.
‘What exactly did the doctor say?’
With a dismissive gesture, she turns away from him and starts walking.
‘The last test was fine, wasn’t it? Is it back now? At the same place? How’s that possible?’
She shrugs. He presses her to him again. You generally only believe there’s a pit called tough luck after you fall into it. The unfairness that makes such a fall possible. His anger turns against him. He’s forty—how can he still let himself be misled by a few months of joy and inner harmony? He’d secretly started to believe in an autobiographical success story. A light that shone inside him. Fundamental well-being. Were he to cling to a more clearly defined faith, he’d be convinced he was being punished now for managing to enjoy personal happiness in recent months. It’s certainly a bitter warning.
Cat doesn’t want to talk about it. Not now. Nor does she want to visit her parents, calling them the worst option after bad news, a view he can only endorse.
He doesn’t understand why she wants to keep him out of this, so he asks her to explain. They’ve shared plenty of misery in the past. But she insists: no need to cancel his appointment with his new client, she’d like to stay here alone for a while in the wind and sea air. ‘There’s no way I’m going to do myself any harm,’ she says finally, irritated.
Everything has a heaviness about it when he reaches the van. It doesn’t feel right to drive off and leave her at this point. Being unwanted gnaws at him. THE LAST STRAWBERRIES! he reads—a message chalked on a sign beside the road, a metaphor, the title of a song about this day on which things turned their back on him after all, completely unexpectedly. He mustn’t have such melodramatic thoughts. He stops at the side of the road, close to a muddy ditch, to allow a monstrous agricultural vehicle to thunder past. Everyone is eager to share their distress with him except the woman he loves. It seems a reprehensible thought, but he’s unable to shake it off.
The woman is transplanting a hydrangea in her front garden, between a small model windmill and a low holly hedge. She’s about sixty and her head is down. The pinafore she’s wearing makes her as timeless as this district, on the boundary between fairy tale and destitution. He loves the old houses, especially the small ones, slightly lopsided, with their postage-stamp gardens filled with kitsch and the glories of nature, every sundial so polished, every calyx so diligently propped that even the most cynical guardian of good taste couldn’t help but be moved by it. The care this woman devotes to her little garden certainly moves Alphonse. Perhaps he’s more receptive to it now that his mood has sunk so low.
Then she looks up at him and he’s startled by his own sorrow, which he sees magnified and stretched like a reflection in a fairground mirror. She smiles, the woman, but inside her deep eye sockets lie heaps and heaps of something else.
He introduces himself, reminds her of the room he’s agreed to take in hand. It’s just one room and she’s called Madeleine Claeys—it all comes back to him now.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, or rather sighs, in a hoarse monotone; she must be deeply tired. ‘I’ll show you the room.’
He walks inside behind her and up a narrow flight of stairs. Unlike the front garden, the house is badly neglected. The wallpaper in the stairwell cries out for replacement—it might well be older than he is—but he never makes suggestions.
Oh, so it’s one of those stories, he thinks as she pushes the door open for him. The silenced child’s room from another era, radiant with weekly cleansed disuse, the smooth patchwork quilt over the narrow mattress, washed every year, the ancient teddy bear and scary clown on the pillow gazing at the stains on the wallpaper, the only interruption to which is a black-and-white photo of a sweet little boy of about two years old. A beautiful child, it goes without saying. An old one, though, thinks Alphonse.
‘My brother. He’s dead.’ The woman’s rasping voice sounds decisive.
He nods, doesn’t wait for any further information, not after this morning. ‘Do you want it to look the way it does now or to be unrecognizable?’
‘The