8
Naturally, I asked Prim if she wanted to come to Lyon, but I didn’t try too hard to persuade her when she said, ‘No.’
Our serious discussion two days before had made me realise just how much we were living in each other’s pockets, and given me a nostalgic urge to do something on my own, just to remind myself what it was like. I was pretty sure that Prim felt the same.
I did no tourist driving heading for Lyon, but followed the autoroute all the way, sticking to the coast past Narbonne this time, on through Montpellier and Nimes, finally heading north after the Orange junction.
Although I had never stopped in Lyon before, I knew that Allan worked at the head office of Sprite Oil, in the heart of the city. I had no intention of giving him advance warning of my visit, so I stopped at a filling station near Vienne to buy a street map, and check the address in the telephone directory.
Lyon is a big place, and like many of the major French cities, a river runs through it. By the time I reached my destination the Rhone seemed like an old friend, since I reckoned that I had crossed and recrossed it at least four times on the journey. Its smell was strong in my nostrils when I found Allan’s office, just where the phone book and the map said it should be. I was prepared to give my French a whirl, but the receptionist’s English made it unnecessary. Going on for three months in Spain, my Mediterranean tan shining gold in the light reflected from the building’s big glass walls and, she still clocked me as a Brit before I’d opened my mouth.
‘Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?’ She was a nice-looking girl, with a wide smile and curly brown hair.
‘I’d like to seeAllan Sinclair, in your marketing department.’
‘Of course. Who shall I say is calling?’
I smiled at her. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. Could you just tell him it’s someone with a message from his wife.’
The receptionist nodded, dialled a number then spoke rapidly in French. The only words which jumped out clearly at me were, ‘sa femme’. After a few seconds, she looked up at me again. ‘Would you wait over there, please, sir. In that room.’
I thanked her and followed her pointing finger to an obscured glass door at the side of the hall, behind which was a small office with a view down to the river. I had been waiting for almost ten minutes when the door opened and my brother-in-law appeared. Quite suddenly it dawned on me that as a professional interviewer I had prepared badly for this one. I had no idea what I was going to say.
Allan solved my problem for me by kicking things off and making me mad in the process. He arched his eyebrows, and looked at me down his nose — or should that be up his nose, because he’s three inches shorter than me — in that ‘This is too tiresome’ way of his. This is a guy who could make you feel unwelcome in your own house.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I was told that it was someone from Ellen.’
‘So?’ I said, belligerently. ‘Listen, Allan, if I’d said it was me, then all of a sudden you’d have been in a meeting. I know you, pal.’
He shuffled his feet and started to reply, but I beat him to it. ‘Anyway, I do have a message from my sister. She’s not coming back to France, Allan, or to you. I’m sorry, chum, but that’s it. Now, what she wants, what we all want is that you should face up to it and accept it.’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘Why should I? She’s my wife, dammit. She made vows, that sort of thing. Now she’s broken them, and she’s stolen my sons.’
Allan had always got on my tits, even from the days when he and Ellie were newly engaged, but I was doing my level best to keep to my honest broker role. That crack got to me, though.
‘Am I hearing this? Are you calling my sister a thief?’
He held up his hands as if to ward me off. For an instant it had been necessary. ‘Okay, taken them, if you prefer. But she did. She just took the boys and left me a note on the kitchen table. No warning, no nothing.’
I looked at him. ‘Allan, I spent one night in your house in France, and I could see the warning signs. You were just too fucking blind.
‘It’s time you opened your eyes and faced up to some truth about yourself. My sister’s bright, man, as bright as you. She’s dynamic, if anything more so than you. Time was when she had ambition too. Yet you stuck her away in that place in the middle of nowhere, with no other function than to look after your kids and make your meals.
‘When was the last time you took the boys to the seaside, or took Ellie to the theatre? I know the answer, Allan. Never. You imprisoned her over here, pal. Now she’s escaped.’
My brother-in-law looked at me, huffily. ‘She felt enough for me to marry me, Oz.’
For the first time, I began to feel sorry for him. ‘True, Allan. Because you’re good at your job. You felt you should have a wife, so you looked at the women you knew and you picked Ellen. Then you marketed yourself to her, like a barrel of oil. But you never had a fucking clue what being a partner’s about. It’s not something you are, it’s something you become. You have to work at it. It’s taken me thirty years to realise that. It’s bloody hard work too, I’ll tell you. You both have to make the effort. Ellie did, but you never had a fucking clue. So now she’s given up, and you only have yourself to blame.’
I looked at him. ‘Tell me honestly, Allan. Do you think that you and she were ever really in love?’
He sat down on one of the wooden chairs set around the room’s small table, and looked up at me, for quite a long time. Finally he did something that for him was really very strange. He smiled. I hadn’t seen him do that since Jonathan was born. ‘It’s funny that you of all people should ask me that. When Ellen and I were engaged, I used to think that you were a waster. A scatter-brained, self-indulgent waster, without a career plan, and with no idea of where you were going in life.’
I laughed. ‘Life’s a Mystery Tour, pal. Didn’t anyone tell you?’
But he held up a hand to shut me up. ‘Yet there was one thing about you of which I was really jealous. I used to look at you and Jan, the way you were together, the way you touched each other without even knowing you were doing it, the way you looked at each other, and I wished that I could be like you, in love like that.
‘I supposed that once you were married, that was what did it. I was wrong, though. I was proud of Ellen, and I did my best to give her the best, but I never could feel that way you and Jan used to look, or the way you and what’s her name looked when you turned up in Perrouges, just before Ellie left.’ He paused. ‘You didn’t persuade her to go, did you?’
I shook my head. ‘No, man. You did that yourself.’ I felt thoroughly sorry for him now. And a lot more reflective than I had been half an hour before.
‘About that lawyer’s letter, Oz,’ said Allan. ‘That was temper and pride on my part. Tell Ellen I’m sorry about that; I shouldn’t have tried to bully her. We can sort out a separation agreement, but between ourselves. As long as I can see the kids when I like.’
I interrupted him, right there. ‘No, not just when you like. Jonathan and Colin are best with their mother, all right, but they deserve a father too, even if he does live a long way off. You can stop being a husband, Allan, but you can’t stop being a dad. I know yours wasn’t around, and I know you used to treat mine as if he wasn’t there either. Well, you should look to him now. You’ve got a lot to learn about dadship, and you won’t find a better role model than Mac Blackstone.’
‘I hear you,’ he said, standing up. ‘Tell Ellen from me that it’s okay.’
‘No, sir,’ I answered, firmly. ‘I’m just the bridge-builder. Tell her yourself. Phone her tonight, then as soon as you can, take some time off from this place and visit her and the boys. Sort everything out between you. Think about this as you do it, Allan. You and my sister don’t belong together any more. You probably never did. But maybe there’s someone out there for you, someone to make your eyes light up. Who knows, there might even be more than one!’