Kate and Max had both applied to live in Paris for their third-year placements, but when the letters came only Kate had been accepted by the Sorbonne.
“I think it will be good,” Max said to her when he phoned to tell her that a university in Medellín had taken him at the last minute. “I think maybe I need some distance. And there won’t be many English speakers on the course, so at least I’ll get good at Spanish.”
Max was becoming frustrated by the accumulation of family silences around the death of Bernadette. For reasons he did not yet understand, his father had started to avoid mentioning his grandmother by name, and it was somehow impossible not to follow his lead: Bernadette’s car became the Polo, her house was now only ever Bisley House, her cherished art collection just a commodity.
He noticed that his uncles had also adopted the new register. When Alasdair came to Latimer Crescent, he spoke with brutal pragmatism of his mother’s remaining assets, and more often than not Rupert found a reason to leave the room whenever her name was mentioned. And so before Max had had his visa approved, before he had even booked his flights and had his vaccinations, he was negotiating the euphemistic language of loss.
In Colombia, Max quickly found ways to distract himself. Getting high, or taking party drugs, it was easy to break down the barriers that might have left him isolated. There was always music, reggaeton and salsa, coming from the windows of restaurants and bars into the steep cobbled streets, and he would ride out his highs in a club with a cheap bottle of rum or lying in the hammock of some third-floor apartment, while somebody played a guitar and somebody else rolled a spliff. It was easy, here, not to think too much about home.
Kate could see that a change was taking place, whenever they spoke on Skype. She rarely mentioned Bernadette directly, but whenever she asked him how his family was, or whether he had heard what was happening with his grandmother’s house, he would shrug, and Kate could tell that he was looking at something else on his screen. But a moment would pass and his face would brighten again, and he would be smiling straight into the camera, calling her Katherine or Katie, anything but the name everybody else called her, telling her he missed her and that the only thing that would make his life there better would be for her to come too.
“Drop out,” he’d say. “Drop out and sign on to my course instead—my friend has a spare room in her flat. Come, please come, we’ll have the time of our lives.”
Though Kate never admitted it to Max, she would in fact have loved nothing more than to leave the Sorbonne to go and live in Colombia. But something stopped her: she had set herself a challenge, sticking with Paris, and she refused to feel that she could not cope without him. There was no denying, however, that loneliness had so far been the defining feature of her stay: it was as though she was back in her first term again, in the time before she’d met Max. When she’d been with the Rippons in the summer, Kate had asked Zara how she should spend her time in France. Zara had opened her laptop and put on her glasses, and had looked up the addresses of her favorite cinemas, a bar in Le Marais where, she said, all the actors and theater directors went after their shows, and a market where she could buy macarons better than those sold in Ladurée but cheaper than any patisserie.
There would be grime, Zara had warned, and isolation: Parisians lived alone, not in shared flats like Londoners, but all of this had added to the romance Kate had been expecting. She had never lived in a big city, and she had fantasized about drinking coffee in bars, meeting mysterious strangers, taking solitary, mid-afternoon trips to French cinemas, just like Zara once had. But she was not prepared for the crushing loneliness she would experience in those first months. She drank so many solo coffees that she would frequently feel sick before lunchtime, and her attempts to start conversations in her student French, itself far less fluent than she had let herself believe, were met with bafflement. She tried the cinema and learned not about the nuances of New French Extremism but how best to identify and avoid the audience members—always male, always alone—most likely to start masturbating during the film. When she’d told Max about these guerrilla masturbators, he had responded with incredulity.
“I just don’t believe people actually do that,” he said.
“Trust me,” said Kate.
Early in the year, more out of loneliness than desire, she had fallen briefly in love with a Norwegian called Erik who had broad shoulders and was the kind of man who looked forward to reading online reviews of electrical appliances prior to purchasing them. Kate’s infatuation had sustained the first two months of their relationship, strengthened by a Christmas of heartache, but then suffered an inexorable decline slowed only by her fear of being alone for the rest of her time in Paris. It was the three-month anniversary present, Kate told Max, that had laid her feelings for Erik to rest. Erik had given her a necklace and a poem he had written on handmade paper and had folded into a heavy envelope. Kate had read the poem, and, to avoid having to discuss it with him, kissed him before sitting up and presenting the back of her neck so that he could fasten the clasp. Two weeks later she ended the relationship with the very tenuous excuse that it was preventing her from immersing herself fully in French culture. This was a cause to which Erik could willingly martyr himself, and in an ominous gesture of goodwill he wrote and presented to her another poem.
After, determined to make better use of her time here, Kate started going to see films every day. If she went in the late morning, straight after lectures, she could adjust to the gray daylight afterward with a lemonade and a cigarette in the park between the cinema and her apartment, watching people disperse from buildings for their lunch breaks. The woman who buzzed and waited in front of the apartment building opposite, craning her neck to see whether the shutters on the third floor were open, had finally gone to confront the lover who had stopped returning her messages; the man sitting across from her had lost his job but was still leaving the house to go to work every day. She found frames for these strangers, completed them with needs and secrets and desires, and this way learned to distract herself from her feelings of loneliness.
“Maybe you and I are going through something similar,” Kate said to Max one evening over FaceTime. “Detaching from reality, somehow?”
“Are we?” Max said, sniffing loudly and wiping his nose.
Kate, who had assumed that Max would have the insight to recognize this hedonistic phase in his life, shrugged and backtracked.
“Just, you know, being somewhere different. Away from everyday bullshit.”
“Fuck, I don’t know if I want to come back,” Max said. He buried his head in his hands for a second before resurfacing, rubbing his eyes. “But we’re still living together, right, next year? You’re not going to leave me for Erik?”
“Absolutely not. Erik is dead to me.”
“Well. That makes it bearable.”
In their final year Kate and Max shared high-ceilinged rooms on the top floor of one of the old buildings overlooking the river. Living in such proximity, they rapidly closed the distance that had opened between them during their year abroad as they once more got used to the long hours sitting in each other’s rooms, talking late into the night. Max’s room was bigger, but Kate’s had a window that opened onto a wide ledge edged by a concrete balustrade. In winter it was good for smoking, and when the weather started getting warmer they spent hours sitting there on the ledge.
When Max was drunk, he would shuffle right out so that his legs were dangling down below. There was a time when this would have made Kate nervous, when she might have tried to pull him back in, but now she lay on her bed, closing her eyes and feeling the warm breeze on her face as they talked.
“I put on weight in Paris,” she said, her eyes still closed, her fingers pinching her hips. “It’s only just beginning to shift.”
“I think you look really well,” Max said.
“Your dad has said that to me literally every time I’ve met him,” Kate said. “Does he think I’m fat?”
Max snorted in dismissal.
“I definitely did put on weight.”
“Next time you should do more drugs,” Max said. “It’s the perfect appetite suppressant, just like loneliness is a stimulant.”
“So if you do drugs alone you’ll probably stay about the same weight?”
Max laughed.
“It’s true. My dad does always say that to people. It’s because he’s a doctor: if he tells everyone they look well they forget to show him their moles and foot fungus and shit like that.”
Kate stopped pinching her hips and lifted up her T-shirt, inspecting the birthmark next to her belly button.
“What kind of mole?”
“Freaky ones. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t become a doctor. Ruins your social life.”
“And you failed chemistry.”
“I got a D.”
“Is that a pass? How did you even get into university?”
“Charm.”
Kate pulled her T-shirt back down. “Do you think your mum will help me get into film school if I ask her?”
“For sure.” Max turned round properly to look at her. “You’re applying, then? Don’t you need to have made a film?”
“That’s where you come in.”
“Am I going to star in it?” Max climbed back in through the window now and started playing with his hair in the mirror. He sucked in his cheekbones. “Have you seen my Natalie Portman?”
“Actually, I was going to ask if I could borrow your camera.”
Seeing that she was serious, Max dropped the act. “Of course you can.”
“It’ll be really short, just one shot, no dialogue.”
“What’s the shot?”
Kate paused. “I haven’t worked it out. But I had an idea when I was away. This woman, on the balcony opposite me. Every afternoon she used to come out and roll a cigarette and smoke it. And the whole time she smoked it,” Kate said, “she would have this milkshake Frappuccino thing in front of her in a plastic cup, piled high with whipped cream and chocolate shavings and marshmallows. And she would just watch it while she smoked her cigarette. So I was thinking of just having somebody sit there with this big extravagant thing, the camera focused on it and they’re looking at it but they’re not eating it, they’re just smoking.”
“Can I audition?” Max said.
Kate shook her head. “It has to be a woman.”
“I like it. It sounds cool. Mum will definitely help you. Definitely.”
“Thanks,” Kate said. She was smiling: this was the first time she had articulated any of this, to Max or to anybody.
“You two should have a chat about it next time you come over. Perhaps when we’re next in Gloucestershire.”
“I’d love that.”
“The house is in a bit of a state, though. I’ve no idea what’s happening. I have a feeling my uncle wants to sell it, but nobody’s talking about it.”
“Rupert?”
“Alasdair.”
Max hadn’t heard from Rupert in weeks and he knew that if he voiced his fear that his uncle was getting worse, and that he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone, then Kate would try to persuade him that he needed to intervene. And Max, who suspected he was not up to the task, had begun to wonder whether it would be worse to try and to fail than not try at all.
“That would be sad,” Kate said now. “It’s been in your family for years, hasn’t it?”
“It’ll all be packed up,” Max said, ignoring Kate’s question. He sat down heavily on the bed where she was lying, deliberately squashing her feet and patting her on the leg. “But you should definitely come and see it. After we graduate, maybe. In the summer you can climb out onto the roof there too. And the rest of our lives will have begun by then. None of these bullshit exams, real adult life.”
Kate groaned. “I’m not ready,” she said, putting her pillow over her face.
Max turned and climbed farther on top of her, pressing down on the pillow.
“I understand,” he said. “I’ll just have to kill you instead.” Kate hit him with the back of her hand, and he lifted the pillow.
“Do you do this to your girlfriends?”
“No,” Max said. “But I don’t love them as much as I love you.”