‘We could go home now,’ she murmured.
‘In the morning. Be home for Christmas.’
Billie’s face mottled with emotion. Wounds stood out lumpy and purple on her forehead. She ground her heels together.
‘We don’t have to,’ she said.
‘I do.’
She pushed away from him. ‘You go.’
‘I can’t leave you here.’
‘You left me before.’
‘Oh, Billie.’
‘You’ll choose her! She’ll make you choose! She said come on your own! I can read, you know! Do you think I’m a slow learner? I can read.’
She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to see, but deep down she heard the tiny voice tell her — you only have one mother, you only have one. She felt his hands on her baking face and knew she would go.
• • •
THEY LEFT THE TINY RIVER island and crossed the Seine at Pont Marie. At the little playground past the quai, Billie stopped to peer through the wrought-iron fence at the kids who yelled and blew steam, skidding in the gravel. She looked at their faces but didn’t know any of them. Granmas stomped their feet. A ball floated red in the air. Scully pulled her and she went stiff-kneed along the street into their old neighbourhood.
Scully steered them past the Rue Charlemagne without a word. There wasn’t time to think of the sandstone, the courtyard, the smells of cooking, the piano students plunking away into the morning air. They walked up into the Marais where the alleys choked with mopeds and fruit shops, delicatessens, boutiques and kosher butchers. The air was thick with smells: cardboard, pine resin, meat, flowers, lacquer, wine, monoxide. At the fishmongers Scully resisted the urge to touch. Cod, sole and prawns lay in a white Christmas of shaved ice. The streets bristled with people. It was a vision — he felt giddy with it.
Billie yanked on his arm. ‘I need to go.’
‘To the toilet? Didn’t you go back at the hotel?’
‘No.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Don’t say that. Gran says you’ve forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.’
‘I’ll parcel you up and post you to Gran if you don’t —’
‘I’m bustin. D’you wanna argue with my vagina?’
‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ He looked up and down the street, saw a café. ‘C’mon.’
He hoisted her into the smoky little joint and found the toilet under the stairs.
‘In there,’ he murmured, nodding to the patrons propped against the bar.
‘Messieurs.’
The proprietor, a fat man with earrings and peroxided curls raised his eyebrows.
‘Et pour monsieur?’
Scully took a moment to get it. No such thing as a free piss. He ordered an espress and sat looking at the bleary men with their English rock-star complexions. They all had moustaches, it seemed, and had taken the night’s revelry into the morning. They looked spent.
His coffee came and Billie emerged from the stairwell.
‘I looked for Femmes.’
‘Yeah?’
‘But they were all Homos.’
‘Hommes.’
‘No, it was Homos on both doors. There was a man in one.’
Scully paused, coffee halfway to his mouth. ‘Oh?’
‘He was asleep on the floor. Too tired to pull his pants up, I spose. He had a flower sticking out his bum.’
The coffee cup clacked back into its saucer.
‘Come on.’
Scully left some francs on the table and hoiked her out into the street.
‘Let’s stick to the automatic toilets from now on, huh?’ The further he got from the little café the sillier he felt.
‘The ones you put money in? The money dunny?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘They have music so no one hears you fart. And they wash themselves, you know. But the music’s the best.’ She looked at him, smiling suddenly. ‘I reckon someone stuck it in for a joke.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The flower.’
‘Oh gawd.’
‘Still,’ she smiled shrewdly, ‘it could have grown there. If he didn’t wash.’
All the way up the Rue de Rivoli, bumping against each other like drunks, they screamed and giggled.
• • •
IT WAS COLD AND STILL in the Tuileries. The long arid promenades of white gravel crackled underfoot. Bare chestnuts and planes stood without shadows. From the Louvre entrance they walked nervously, eyes narrowed with alertness. Now and then, in their path, lay a horse chestnut left over from the time of sunlight and leaves. Only a few people were about. Children in hoods and mittens chased by au pairs. Old men playing boules. Up at the Concorde end the fountain stood in the air straight as a flagpole.
Scully scanned the terraces toward the Orangeries museum. Twenty minutes to spare. His jaw ached with the tension. Billie scuffed in the gravel beside him, hat low on her brow. He dug out five francs for the swings and watched her tip and soar for a while. Bit by bit his sense of triumph was ebbing. What would he say? How could he control himself? He mustn’t frighten her off with the intensity of his feeling. He felt like a ticking bomb. No outburst of questions, no hint of recrimination. No bawling and breastbeating. Just try to be dignified for once in your life.
Scully gave Billie sixteen francs for the carousel. The coins rattled damply in his hands. Billie climbed up onto a white horse with a flaring tail. He sat beside two teenage girls who chattered and admired one another’s cowboy boots. The lights and bright paint of the carousel made a livid whirl in the dull midday. Scully shifted from buttock to buttock in the cold, swivelling now and then to scrutinize the trees behind him. He felt watched. Or paranoid. Or something. The girls beside him grew uneasy and moved off.
Five to twelve. He stood and prowled about the carousel, handed the operator more money, and waved sickly to Billie. Her horse’s teeth were bared, as if striving to bite the tail of the horse in front. They were all the same, each horse bearing down upon the next. The gay antique music set his nerves on edge.
Shit — would she show up? Okay, he’d brought Billie, despite the strict instruction of the telegram, but what alternative did he have? How could she hold it against him? He was without a clue. He had searched himself, as the Salvos said, he had examined his heart and come back to complete incomprehension. After all his guesses, all his agonies, he couldn’t know why she hadn’t shown at Shannon and now he didn’t know why she was turning up here. Faith. He was running on the scrag end of faith. In ten days Jennifer had become a ghost to him, an idea, a mystery. But her telegram crackled against his chest. A sign. It was all he had to go on.
She’d get off at the Concorde Metro and come in by the Jeu de Paume entrance, outlined by the blank expanse of the fountain pool. Their old route from St Paul when they’d come to buy Billie books at W.H. Smith across the road. Yes, that’s the way she’d come. No ghost. His wife. He knew her too well.
Tonight he’d take them out somewhere flash and traditional. Brass, leather, lace curtains. Waiters with their thumb up their arse. Snails, tails and quails — the full Gallic gallop. A good Bordeaux. A stroll on the quais. A return to civilization.
‘I don’t feel good,’ said Billie climbing down.
Noon. The ground felt spongy beneath him.
‘Sit down for a minute. You’re dizzy.’
Billie sat in the spinning shining world. Her skin was bursting and the blood inside her boiled. A chime went off inside her head. She saw sculptures up behind the fountain. They danced in the woozy glow. The seat shook like the floor of a jet. The marbled veins in that white, white face. Billie reaching out, scared to touch, scared not to. Her fingers outstretched to feel the white skin before it sets and goes hard. The smile tight as cement. The skin cold. Right before her, Billie sees it, as the cloud of silence comes down in the air of the plane. Bit by bit, her mother is turning into a statue. Something stopped. Something the rain hits and runs off, something whose eyes pale over. With an open mouth, saying nothing.