The French Girl(6)

“Ten sixty,” interrupts the barman impatiently, plonking the vodka tonic down beside Tom’s beer.

“Jesus,” mutters Tom, pulling out his wallet. “London prices double every time I come back.”

“Then never leave again, for the sake of my bank balance if nothing else.” Still smiling, I scoop up my drink. “I’ll hunt down a table. Lara’s running late, by the way.”

It’s too crowded to get a table all to ourselves, but I find us two free seats at the corner of the bar, and we do our best to cover almost two years in five minutes, our heads leaned together conspiratorially to combat the noise. Severine can’t hold court here, among this warmth and life.

“I’m sorry about Jenna,” I offer, after a while. I am sorry, even if I didn’t think them well suited. “I didn’t really get to know her well when we visited you guys, but she seemed . . .” I grope around for the right adjective. Nothing fits. “Like a girl with her head screwed on,” I finish lamely. Jenna’s cool gray eyes had missed very little, in my opinion. It had been lovely to see Tom again, and Lara and I had both loved Boston, but I rather thought the tight corners around Jenna’s eyes hadn’t smoothed out until we were well on our way to the airport.

Tom’s lips twist briefly, and he spins his pint glass back and forth in the cradle of his long fingers. “She wasn’t on top form when you two came over. She really is a nice girl, it’s just . . .” He trails off.

“I know. Lara is a lot to take.”

He looks up from his beer, startled. “Lara?”

“Well, she’s a difficult proposition for any girlfriend to cope with. Even supposing your boyfriend hasn’t slept with her,” I add dryly. Does he imagine I didn’t notice him and Jenna during that visit, in secluded corridors and corners, standing too close and speaking low and fast to each other? I can see them now, Jenna’s right hand making sharp, flat gestures while Tom’s ran through his hair in frustration. “Or maybe you didn’t tell Jenna about that.” Tom and Lara’s affair, dalliance, whatever one should call it, happened a long time ago—during that fateful French holiday—and Lara always maintained it was nothing but fun. Tom said the same, though I wondered if there was more to it for him. After Jenna’s coolness during our Boston visit, I wondered even more. Wives and girlfriends always know.

“I did tell her actually, and anyway, Lara really wasn’t the problem,” he says, a touch irritably, then blows out a breath slowly. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We just weren’t . . . right. I couldn’t see us together in fifty years. I realized I couldn’t imagine what that would look like. Soon after that, going to the gym got more appealing than going home.”

“Fifty years,” I say caustically. “I’d settle for knowing what the next six months is going to look like. Or even tonight.” I grimace and knock back some more of my drink.

“Don’t look like that,” Tom says, laughing. “Caro will be on best behavior. The gracious host and so on.”

“Mmm,” I say noncommittally. “Oh, I wanted to ask you, how come Caro has a different surname than her dad? I know her parents are divorced, but still . . .”

“Well, it was pretty acrimonious.” He takes a swallow of his beer and looks to one side, remembering. “From what I recall, Gordon had an affair, and Camilla—Caro’s mum—did not take it well. Hell hath no fury, et cetera . . . though hers was a very passionless type of fury.” He frowns, trying to find the right words. “Like she wasn’t so much angry with Gordon for cheating on her as angry with him for disrupting her perfect life. Anyway, Caro took her mum’s side. She must have been about thirteen at the time. She officially changed her surname to her mum’s maiden name, though to be fair, I imagine her mum put her up to it.” His lips twist ruefully. “I always felt sorry for Gordon, to be honest. If I was married to Camilla, I expect I’d’ve been having an affair a darn sight sooner than Gordon.”

“She’s difficult?”

“Not exactly difficult.” He shrugs, trying to find the right word. “She’s cold. And nothing is ever good enough for her. Caro’s got the same sharp tongue, but at least she can have a laugh.” He glances at me, one eyebrow raised, as if waiting for me to make a snide comment, but I don’t, partly because what he says is true—Caro can indeed have a laugh; even I have to admit she can be wickedly funny—but also because I didn’t know any of this before. It adjusts the picture somewhat. “Well, anyway, it was a tough time for Caro. That’s when Seb and I”—he glances at me quickly—“started spending a lot more time with her; I think she just wanted any excuse to get out of the house.”

Seb. Tom usually avoids that name with me; tricky since they are not only best friends but also cousins, but nonetheless he tries. I keep my face expressionless. “Is her dad still with whoever he had the affair with?”

Tom shakes his head. “No. Caro refused to see him if he was still seeing her, so he stopped.” I absorb that for a moment: the child laying down the law to her father. There’s a reason children are not supposed to have that kind of power; I wonder how that felt, for both of them. But Tom is still speaking: “You know, now I wonder if her mum put her up to that, too. My parents seemed to think it was a crying shame, that Gordon and this woman would have been very happy together. But Caro was adamant, so . . .” He shrugs. “That was that.”