She does not finish, because Cat has already got me.
A hundred and ten people make a noise I will hear for the rest of my life.
Somebody wolf-whistles. It's Nadia. I feel it's beneath her.
And the piano starts — the piano we did not own on Monday, played by a man whose name I still don't know, who tuned it for my grandmother for thirty years and has come to tune it one last time.
Cat's mouth is at my ear.
"Wife," she says.
I have to hold on to her arms.
"Say it again."
"Wife."
The party goes until four in the morning, and I remember it in pieces.
Mathilde, weeping openly, serving a fish course.
Duval dancing with Monique with the terrible correctness of a man who learned how in 1961.
Michel, who has drunk a very great deal, explaining the basket at length to a table of French farmers who speak no English. Heis using his hands. They are nodding. One of them appears to be genuinely moved.
Jacques teaching me a dance I do not understand and will never be able to do again.
Sophie and Nadia, heads together at the end of a table, plotting something. I do not want to know.
An old woman I have never seen before in my life taking my face in both her hands and telling me something in French far too fast to follow — something that makes her cry, and then makes me cry. I still don't know what she said. I never will. I've decided it doesn't matter.
And Cat. Everywhere. Across the terrace, in a doorway, laughing with her head thrown back, feeding somebody.
Always, at some point in every minute, looking for me.
It's nearly light when the last of them goes.
We stand in the wreckage of the terrace. Glasses everywhere. A chair on its side. A hundred and ten people's worth of crumbs. Somebody's shoe.
"We should clear up," Cat says.
"Absolutely not."
"Mathilde will be back at nine."
"Then Mathilde can be appalled at nine."
Cat laughs. She has her shoes in one hand, her hair is a catastrophe, and there's lavender in it — and there's lavender in mine, and there is going to be lavender in this house for approximately the next fifteen years.
She takes my hand.
We go in. The kitchen light is on, because I left it on, because I always do now.
And she fills the kettle — at half past five in the morning, on her wedding night, still in her dress — because she is exactly who she is.
"Tea?" she says.
"Please," says my wife.
