Charlie started our chat on the walk to the village.
“What are you making of all this?” he said.
“Well, the food and wine have been brilliant,” I said. “And the company.”
“Sex not so great?”
“You’re married to her. I don’t have to tell you.”
“I’ll take that as a positive report. Are you in love with her?”
“Yes, I’m in love with her,” I said to Angelina’s husband, admitting it to him and myself at the same time. What else could I call the feeling that had come back in the first few seconds of our Skype conversation, hit me again on the platform at Mâcon, and colored everything since—the emotional dimension that had been strong enough for me to walk away from Claire?
I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of sharing it with Charlie. The words had demanded to be said and I felt some relief in saying them, even to the man who had told me almost nothing about his own feelings.
“You’ve got two years on me,” he said. “You poor bastard.”
“I haven’t spent them all pining. And I have to say I’m not feeling like a poor bastard. I’m feeling like I’m being welcomed where I should be thrown out.”
Charlie was looking over the fields as he spoke.
“So at the end of the week, you’re hoping you’ll walk away with her. Part of you is. At some level, and after a decent period of time and considering et cetera, et cetera. You’re in love with her.”
He looked back toward me.
“I want her to stay with me. In case you were wondering. But it’s not anything you or I can do much about, unless one of us opts out and denies her the choice.”
He was rating my chances higher than I did, much higher than I had the previous night when I had thought the game was over. If sleeping with me was part of a plan to make Charlie jealous or more appreciative of what he had, then Angelina had surely achieved it. If it was a problem with sex, then Angelina’s outsourcing of it with Charlie’s consent seemed like a civilized approach that should maintain the marriage rather than threaten it. Maybe Charlie had agreed, but couldn’t deal with it. That would sit with his three A.M. intervention.
Angelina had said that she did not want a relationship. She had said the same thing in 1989.
“So we wait and see,” said Charlie. “And enjoy the holiday and the company while we can.”
The runaway train metaphor came to mind again. Eat, drink, and be merry, and await the inevitable. On the other hand, this was the man who had invented a lemon tree. I did not see him as a fatalist.
“Let’s get another coffee,” he said, and we walked into a bar that could have been out of a 1940s movie—eight thirty in the morning and old men in berets drinking white wine from little glasses.
We ordered petits noirs, which confirmed Charlie’s assessment of the local coffee.
“Why do you love her?” said Charlie. “She’s not an easy person. And you’re seeing her on holiday. Dressed to impress. You should know that she’s not so relaxed when she comes home after a bad day at work. Or gets a drubbing in the tabloids. Or if I try to serve her Australian chardonnay.”
“She seems to have got a bit pickier since I knew her,” I said.
Privately, I blamed Charlie. He indulged her. I suspected that she would readily revert to generic red wine in old Vegemite jars at Jim’s Greek Tavern. Or, for that matter, a pork pie and a pint in an English pub.
“She’s actually pretty tough,” said Charlie, half answering my question. “We go camping with the kids…” He stopped. “You know we have kids, right?”
“Of course,” I said. “Three.” That was all I knew. “Who’s looking after them?”
“Angelina’s niece.”
Presumably the babe in her elder sister’s arms at the family Christmas, who would now be in her early twenties. It had been a long time.
“Angelina talks to them most days,” he said, “but Stephanie’s almost eighteen, and Samantha’s seventeen. Adam’s fourteen.”
Adam. She called her kid Adam. My reaction must have been written all over my face.
Charlie was laughing. “Sorry, mate, sorry—just having a lend. His name’s Doug. Douglas. After my dad.”
His face was dead straight now. Mine could not possibly have been.
“Might have been better to call him Adam,” he said. “Angelina hated Douglas—the name. Hated it. She started off calling him by his middle name, Anthony. Her dad’s name. And it stuck. Someday he’s going to tell us that being called different names by his father and mother screwed him up in some serious way. It’s the only thing we’d ever really argued about, but my dad had cancer and I was bloody about it—fucked if I’d call him Anthony. Her old man’s a decent enough bloke, but no balls. If he’d stood up to his wife, the family might have been less of a fuck-up.”
I stayed with Charlie’s family. “What sort of cancer?”
“Liver. It’s a bastard. Three months and gone.”
“My dad’s was lung. Could as well have been liver with the amount he drank. Same result.”
“You were close?”
“He left when I was fourteen, so not really, not as adults. But we both played piano. I don’t know if it makes sense to you, but it was a connection between us.”
“Makes perfect sense.”
It was hard not to like this self-deprecating guy who could open a bottle of champagne when he discovered his wife with another man and the next day drag her back to bed. But there was one important thing we differed on.
“How wedded are you to croissants for breakfast?” I asked.
“Not specially. It’s more an excuse for a walk to the village. Angelina has fruit and muesli anyway.” He must have been eating four.
“How’d you feel about a full English breakfast?”
“Bring it on.”
* * *
On the way out of the bar, I picked up a card for the local taxi company. I wasn’t planning any excursions, but it gave me some independence—and an escape route, if I needed it.
We purchased the makings of breakfast at the boucherie, and I had to move fast to pay ahead of Charlie.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” I asked as we walked up the hill.
“At the end of the week?”
“Yeah. You’re being amazingly … calm … about it.”
“Because I think she’s going to stay with me. I’m not saying it’s perfect between us, but we’ve got kids, a house—we’ve got a life together. I try to support her and what she wants to do.”
He stopped, picked a handful of cherries from a tree overhanging the road, and tossed them in the shopping bag.
“If you’re seeing something wrong, I think it’s because we’ve reached a limit. The way we work relies on me pulling rabbits out of the hat for Angelina. Not just rings on her birthday but trips, surprises. For her fortieth birthday, I got everyone from her past together—all the actors, everyone—and we all went to this place in Thailand. I offered to fly you out, but she said no.”
“So I’m this year’s bunny?”
“I think ‘rabbit’ has a certain appropriateness. But you see what I mean. What do you offer after that?”
“So what does she do for you?”
“Appreciates it all. I’m not being flippant. Why do you play piano for nothing?”
There was a question that could have provided material for twenty years of psychotherapy—or about five seconds of my mother’s free alternative: You’ve always been a show-off. Perhaps the same applied to Charlie. I let him go on.
“She does do things for me. For my fiftieth birthday, she booked a studio and made me a recording of ‘Because the Night’ with a band. You know the song? Patti Smith.”
I nodded and didn’t bother to elaborate on the authorship.
“For my forty-fifth, she gave me a portrait of herself by an Archibald Prize winner. Naked. It’s in my study on the wall in front of the computer. Kids never, ever use my computer.” He laughed.
“I’ve got a room like that,” I said. “Had a room.”
“Your man cave?”
“We inherited Claire’s mother’s house, and one bedroom was set up as a shrine to her sister who’d died when she was three.”
Charlie nodded. He was puffing with the effort of walking and talking.
“Now it’s my office, but Claire’s never set foot in it. Not to dust, not to get a stamp, not for anything.”
“Who cleaned it out?”
“Me. She wouldn’t go into the house before I’d got rid of everything. At that stage we were still trying to have children, so…”
“Not much fun for you.”
“I still have nightmares.”
“You know what they say,” said Charlie. “Who must do the hard thing? He who can.”
We walked for a minute or two in silence until the path leveled and Charlie got his breath back.
“From my point of view, if she does want out, if I’ve got it wrong, better to do it now. Get it over once and for all, everyone move on.”
For the first time, there was feeling in his voice.
Not many men would be able to match Charlie in the rabbit-out-of-hat stakes. Some might have the money, but few would be prepared to contemplate this week’s indulgence. So what? Most marriages survived without escalating birthday surprises and visits from ex-lovers. Charlie’s indulgence and Angelina’s apparent need for it spoke of some longing, some hole that no amount of 1966 Bordeaux could fill.
As we reached the house, he said, “If you’re wondering why I’m so relaxed about having you around, it’s because you’ve always been around. You didn’t have to do anything. It’s better to have you here in person. Do your worst and we’ll see what happens.”