The French Girl(94)
Tom and I talk about France; we talk about Severine. We both dread the day someone across the Channel takes it in their mind to trawl through cold cases and decides to reopen this one. I know there will never be enough evidence to convict Caro, so all that can happen is months of distress and no satisfactory outcome. Not that this current outcome is satisfactory, though it is an outcome—ultimately Darren Lucas went to the police and Caro was prosecuted for fraud, though her sentence was suspended. It’s hardly a murder conviction or even an attempted murder conviction, but she can never practice law again, she can never be a partner at her father’s firm and Seb has cut her off completely. A messy, oblique sort of justice, if it’s justice at all, though I think for her it’s somehow fitting. I don’t know what she is doing now, or where she is doing it. I don’t think of the baby bird.
And then one day I do see Caro, in an airport lounge. I’m hunched over my phone in an armchair, trying to connect to the airport Wi-Fi, and she sits next to me. “Hello, Kate,” she says; my head lifts, and there she is.
“Caro.” I’m completely floored; her name slips out before I can stop myself from saying anything at all. She’s dressed in casual clothes, jeans and a blazer, typically stylish. She looks older, of course, and just as thin. Her hair is a brighter color than I remember.
“I’m sure you don’t want to talk to me—” she begins. High color is climbing her cheeks.
“I don’t. Leave.”
“I just—” But I’ve grabbed my bag and I’m out of the armchair before the rest of her sentence can reach me. I cannot allow myself to expend one iota more of mental energy on Caro. I don’t even tell Tom I saw her; I refuse to waste the seconds it would take. I never see Caro again.
Severine, though, I do see. If I’d ever entertained the notion that once the case was “solved” she would depart—turn and walk happily (not happily, exactly, not Severine, but at least not reluctantly) into a bright light, perhaps, or evaporate slowly like an early-morning mist that fades with the rising of the sun—well, if I’d ever expected that, it’s not to be. Severine still hovers.
Perhaps, one might say, not as much as before. It’s instructive to note what piques her interest. On the whole, family life seems to bore her; she was nowhere to be seen for the birth of our children. She’s much more likely to make an appearance in my workplace, or any kind of event I’m dreading: the parents’ socials at the twins’ school, for example. Tom reckons it’s a reaction to stress, to which I reply with a certain vehemence that the twins’ birth was about as stressful as anything I can imagine, and where the hell was she then? He just shakes his head, amused, and says, “Not that sort of stress.”
Tom is often amused now. Gently and also to the point of genuine laughter. We both laugh more; I can’t remember a point in my life up until now when I have laughed this often. It’s the twins, especially at the age they are now. They are literal, no room for grays; they don’t understand irony or cynicism. They strip that away from us and instead extract an exaggerated politeness and a readiness to laugh; they make us into the people we want them to see—they make us kinder. More tired, certainly, but kinder.
Channing Associates makes me tired, too. We are seven now, with larger offices, and champagne glasses hidden in the back of one cupboard in case we have new contracts to toast. Paul is smugly satisfied that he stayed, but no less bipolar. Gordon Farrow has become the firm’s informal mentor, and I meet him at least monthly for lunch or dinner, and often more. We don’t talk of Caro. Sometimes I wonder if he is a father figure to me now, in which case am I a daughter figure? Though I should know by now not to assume symmetry in relationships.
And so the lovely ribbon of time keeps slipping through my fingers, and through it all, a walnut brown girl with impossibly slender limbs saunters by, her dark, unreflective eyes taking everything in but revealing nothing. I never do see her smile.