Nowhere, she said.
I'm beginning to think that was a lie.
28
CAT
I've moved the photograph four times.
First to the mantel, because that's where it belonged — Marguerite and Hélène on their wedding day, six people and a very poor cake. Then to the shelf in the office, because the mantel started to feel like a shrine. Then into the kitchen drawer with the string and the batteries and the corkscrew nobody uses, because I kept catching sight of it.
Then back out of the drawer at half past one in the morning, because putting my grandmother's wedding in with the batteries felt like something only a monster would do.
It's on the windowsill above the sink now. I look at it while I wash up. I look at it while the kettle goes.
Two women who waited thirty-three years, and then stood in a village hall and promised each other all the rest of it.
All the rest of it.
I don't sleep much that week.
What I do instead is lie in the dark beside Iris and run the numbers.
She's thirty-two. She has been a lesbian for four months. She walked out of a career, an apartment and an entire life in a fortnight, on a feeling. She stood on our terrace and told her mother to leave.
People don't do that. Not sensible people. Not people whostay.
People do that in the first part. And then the first part ends — it always ends — and they look across at whoever they did it for and think:what on earth was I doing.
I know they do. I watched my mother do it. She loved this place so much she stole me out of it, and she loved me so much she never once told me why, and she went into the ground with it. That's what love does when it gets frightened. It runs, and it takes you with it, and it calls the whole thing a decision.
I don't say any of this out loud. I just lie there and do the arithmetic and let it eat me.
I stop touching her first.
Nothing dramatic. I simply don't reach across the gearstick anymore. I take the far chair. I find reasons to stay late at Les Oliviers, which is easy, because a kitchen will always take more of you if you offer it.
Iris notices on the second day, because Iris notices everything.
"Are you all right?"
"Fine."
By the fourth day she stops asking and starts watching, which is worse.
On the sixth, she gets in front of the door.
"Cat."
"I'll be late."
"You've been late every night this week. Mathilde told me you've been sending yourself home at eleven." She doesn't move. "Talk to me."
And God, I want to. I want to put my head on her shoulder and sayI am so frightened I can't breathe, and I don't know how to be anybody's forever, and I keep looking at a photograph of two women who managed it and I cannot find us anywhere in it.
"There's nothing to talk about," I say, and go around her.
The fight happens on a Thursday, and it starts over the distillery schedule — which is not what it's about, which is how you know it's a real one.
