Then I look at Sarah. She’s peeking into the viewfinder, her mouth stretched into a grin. ‘Oh!’ I hear her say. ‘They’re beautiful!’ She’s pointing to a series of trees on the far edge of the water, and even with my binoculars, it’s hard to tell what she’s noticed.
I push aside my surly resentment and join them. Antoine, smiling, adjusts the telescope to my height, noting that I am ‘a little smaller’ than he is in the process. Then I put my eye to the viewfinder. The telescope is trained on a small nest atop one of the lush-leaved trees across the water. Inside, I just catch a flash of yellow, a scurry of movement.
‘They are golden oriole,’ Antoine informs me.
‘What, like a golden tit?’ I say. ‘You know, in English.’
He shakes his head gravely. ‘Non,monsieur, golden oriole is the name in English too, I believe.’
‘Oh, because I thought… You know areola? Like nipples. So…’ I gulp, sensing that I am simply digging myself into a deeper hole. ‘You know… tits.’
‘Tits?’ Antoine asks, his thick accent making the word elongate to ‘teets’.
I perform the universal mime for boobs, curving my hands under my own, almost flat, chest.
‘Oh!’ Antoine says knowingly. ‘You mean breasts.Oh non, monsieur. It is not the same at all.’
Sarah is watching me when I finally tear my eyes away from Antoine’s confused face. Hers is a little flushed and I wonder whether it’s embarrassment for (or of) me, or somethingabout Antoine’s proximity that’s bringing so much colour to her cheeks.
I soon find out it’s neither of those things. She lets out a shout of laughter that causes a flurry of bird activity in a nearby bush. ‘Oh my God, Hal!’ she says. ‘You’re such a dick!’
I’m about to be offended but instead find my mouth twitching. Because she’s not wrong, let’s face it. I was trying to compete with a professional guide’s knowledge of birds, for some reason. And not only did I show off my own ignorance, but I made an idiot of myself in the process.
And her laughter is infectious. I find myself grinning, then giving in to waves of laughter. And suddenly we’re in Chemistry again and Mr Clark has accidentally set fire to his tie with a Bunsen burner; we’re seventeen years old, with our whole lives ahead of us. Not thinking about kids and weddings and bald patches and getting older. But simply living in the ridiculous, hilarious moment.
7
SARAH
As soon as Hal pulls up in a parking space, I can see that Le Hourdel is more my idea of a place to stop. Not that the bird park yesterday wasn’t fun – in the end I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. My leg got a day of rest, and my eyes got to feast on a gorgeous Frenchman. Hal was a little weird on the way back to the site though and went off to have a drink in the bar, while I tried to catch up a bit on some work.
This morning, I managed to log in to the Wi-Fi with a little difficulty and got about two hours’ work done before he got up. Then he took a couple of work calls before we set off on a four-hour drive – that should have been two and a half hours, if Google was to be believed – towards some sort of cheese farm campsite that Hal seems very excited about.Can you believe,he told me,that we can actually visit Camembert? As if it were the Holy Land or something. Maybe it is to him; he has got a penchant for cheese. When we drove past a sign, he made me take a photo of him standing by it and pointing to it dramatically.
So, when he told me that before we parked up on our pitch, he wanted to drive a little farther to the Bay of Somme, I felt myheart sink. I’m not exactly a historian or geography expert, but it sounded to me as if we were going to visit some war memorials or take a trip to a museum. But the beautiful beach visible even from the car park looks like the sandy idyll of childhood holidays.
I used to take Louis to Cornwall for a week when he was a youngster, and loved watching him dig at the sand and create sandcastles, defended with often complex security systems made of shells and moats and twig walkways. Then, ten years ago, when Mum moved to France, we’d go there – it was hard to justify the cost of going anywhere else, although sometimes I longed to. The beach at Nice is… well,nice, but more touristy and not a patch on Polzeath.
But this beachfront feels different. It’s busy, and the sun is beating down at 2p.m., with the usual tourists on towels and kids with buckets on one section of the beach. But rather than the sleek, glass-fronted buildings and ornate stonework facing the sea farther south, the water is framed by natural banks and fields, hedges and basic paths.
I open the door and the air feels fresh; despite the warm day there’s the snap of a salt water chill in the light breeze. Closing my eyes, I take a deep, cleansing breath of it.
Sensing Hal watching me, I open an eye and take a peek. He looks amused. ‘What?’ I say.
‘Nothing. It’s nice, right?’
‘Yeah. Really pretty. Louis would have loved this when he was a kid.’ And there it is again, a lump in my throat. It’s ridiculous how memories of bringing up my boy can choke me up sometimes. He’s not dead, he’s just grown up. And knowing that I’ve had a huge part in raising a wonderful young man should be a cause for happiness, not tears. Yet, if I could have one more squeeze from that little sticky, sandy boy I used to race to the beach on holidays, I’d give almost anything.
‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding in complete agreement, and I’m filled with sudden rage. I’m trying to convince myself that the mood swings I sometimes get have nothing to do with perimenopause – which every magazine I read seems to want to convince me is just around the corner. I’m thirty-nine, still just about in my childbearing years. But sometimes it’s as if I can feel the charge of electric heat rush through me after a spark of anger, and wonder whether it might be early doors for my womb. Not that I’m planning to have another child, but you never know. Sometimes the idea appals me, sometimes I can’t help wondering whether it would be nice to do it all again.
Poor Hal is a sitting duck. But you know what? Maybe this time it isn’t hormonal after all. Maybe this is something that is well overdue. ‘How would you know?’ I snap.
‘Sorry?’
‘Hal, you didn’t come on any of those seaside holidays.’ He opens his mouth to interject but I silence him with a warning finger. ‘Yes, I know you took him weekends, filled him with sugar, went swimming, did all the fun stuff. But you didn’t do the bigger things. Not once. You didn’t offer to come with us; you didn’t take him yourself. So how would you know?’
He looks crushed. ‘We went to Norfolk once, for the weekend. He loved crabbing.’
‘Wow, I guess you must be father of the year, then!’ I snap again.
