Perfectly Ordinary People(104)

‘So if you don’t tell him, I will,’ Jake slurred.

At the taxi rank, I made him promise he’d wait until we had the final cassette, and then I asked Abby, who was far more sober, to control him if he forgot that promise.

As I walked off in the direction of the Tube station, I phoned Freida to ask how much of a bonus I would need to pay her to get that final cassette #6 done right away.

‘Oh, it’s done,’ she told me. ‘I sent it this morning just after tape number five. You didn’t get it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I only got number five.’

‘I will send it again then, right now,’ she said. ‘It will be with you within half an hour.’





Cassette #6

ML: And we’re off! This is Marie Lefebvre, talking with Genevieve Schmitt, cassette number six, fourth day. Hello again, Genevieve.

GS: Day four! You must be getting bored with me by now, aren’t you? I think I’m getting bored with the sound of my own voice. I’m a bit hoarse today. Can you hear that?

I can! I’m sorry if I’m wearing you out. And no, I’m not bored at all. But – and I know this is extremely difficult to estimate – but I am going to have to ask you if you have any idea how long you think we still need? I just need a vague idea.

So you can buy more cassettes?

Well, there is that too. But no . . . the thing is that I only set aside a day for this at the start. So I’m getting behind with the other interviews I have lined up. My editor is starting to complain, too.

Oh, I see. I knew I was being too chatty!

You’re really not. But if we go on beyond today then I might have to come back at a later date. At the end of the month, maybe, once I’ve caught up with everything else I need to get done.

Actually, I don’t see why we can’t wrap it up today. If you help me stay on track, that is! Most of the shocking bits are past us now anyway . . . The rest is just . . . you know . . . normal life.

Sure, though I gather your lives weren’t actually that normal, were they?

No. Perhaps not. I suppose it depends on what one considers normal.

Maybe we can see how things go today and decide what happens next. When the last tape ended, you’d finally found Ethel. And you’d managed to convince her you weren’t in love with Christophe.

<Laughs> Honestly! How could she even imagine such a thing? But yes. She cried a lot when it finally sank in that she was the one I loved – that I’d been waiting for this moment for five years . . . I cried too, and eventually Christophe realised that he’d lost us and doubled back with Guillaume, and he ended up crying as well. Predictably, the fact that three adults were crying set Guillaume off, so we ended up in a strange comedy moment of hugging and crying, all four of us in the middle of the street, as people passed by. But in 1945 I don’t think it was even particularly unusual. People were finding out things that made them weep all the time back then – who had died, who had lived, what had happened to their loved ones, good news as well as bad.

We got all the way to Vauxhall before Ethel announced that she wanted me to return to Islington so I could spend the night with her – she couldn’t bear to leave me, she said. But I was too worried about what Irene might say. I was scared I’d have to walk back all over again, only this time on my own. So we arranged to meet the next day outside Ethel’s workplace instead.

Where was Ethel working by then?

In a workshop – a small factory, I suppose it was really – near Smithfield Market. She was sewing clothes for Polly Peck. She loved it there, in fact she worked for them until the late fifties. And that’s where we met the next day.

Was this all of you, or just you and Ethel?

Just the two of us. Christophe thought, quite rightly, that Ethel and I needed some time alone, so he volunteered to look after Guillaume. I was pretty desperate to kiss her. That’s what I kept thinking about: getting naked and kissing her. I was craving physical contact with her skin.

We went for a drink first – I think we both thought that some alcohol might help. And then we travelled to Islington by bus. Irene was out – Ethel had known that she would be – and so we ran upstairs and locked the door. No prizes for guessing what happened next.

And how did that feel after all these years?

<Laughs> Awkward is how it felt. Very, very awkward. It was as if we were all elbows and knees, as if our bodies were all angles and no longer fitted together properly.

Did that worry you?

A tiny bit, I suppose. But I still loved her so much. That hadn’t changed at all. And I could tell that it was reciprocal. We cried every time we looked into each other’s eyes. We just felt so lucky to have survived, to be reunited . . . It felt like a miracle, really.

Afterwards we lay naked on the bed and tried to fill in all the gaps – everything that had happened since 1939. But there was so much ground to cover that process ended up being almost continuous. Even years afterwards, we’d sometimes say, ‘Did I ever tell you about when . . . ?’ and discover we’d found another gap we needed to plug.

And then she shocked me by asking me when I was going back to France – how long did we have together? That caused a bit of a moment.

A moment?

Yes, that’s what we used to call them, Ethel and I. When, you know, there’s a misunderstanding and suddenly everyone’s bristling . . . I got up and pulled my clothes on, I remember. I felt too vulnerable naked to have that discussion with her. Because she’d assumed that I was only visiting and I assumed that meant she didn’t really want me to stay . . . Anyway, we had a ‘moment’, and we both got dressed and crossed our arms and glared at each other for a bit. But then we talked it through, and I told her that I didn’t care where we lived as long as I could live with her.