My brother made it to the wedding, which I never expected. Within a year he had started his first prison sentence, but that was after.
He got on well with Larry. He got on very well with Larry. They were always hiding out in the backyard, smoking and talking – London art, London artists, London parties, London men.
In the pub, after the wedding, I watched them standing at the bar, laughing loudly, just them two, not looking at me at all. My brother’s glass was always empty, and Larry’s always full.
Larry wasn’t shy any more. He didn’t stutter.
I smoothed down my dress, sat with my mother and wondered why none of his family could travel for the wedding. 11th of January 1962. In later years, I would discover that, thirteen minutes into that date, in Peru, an avalanche buried a village and killed four thousand people. Sounds like a coincidence to most people, I expect.
Our honeymoon was abroad, the only time I’ve ever needed a passport although I’ve always kept one ready, for running. It’s like a talisman now, despite where it took me then.
Larry arranged the trip with my mother. She adored him, even though she never wanted me to marry, and even though he insisted on a registry office wedding which she had always said didn’t count. She wanted to wave us off at the airport, she had never seen a plane, but he borrowed a car and drove us himself.
I felt so sophisticated, just one of twenty people privileged to board the plane with its giant silver propellers. I was wearing clothes I’d bought specially. Well, the cerise fitted jacket with three large matching buttons was bought. My mother had made the buttercup knee-length pencil skirt and matching blouse. I had the same hairstyle as for the wedding, a chin-length contour cut which swept up either side of my face into two large curls. I was happier having my hair done than I was standing next to Larry, but the plane distracted me and I resolved to be a good wife and enjoy what he had arranged.
We arrived in Paris on the 18th of January and Larry seemed happy, if slightly tense. He looked around a lot and fidgeted with his buttons. I had the impression he was waiting for something, and it wasn’t me. Our hotel was in Montmartre, and I’d have happily stayed in those cool, tight streets but he was always heading down to the wide boulevards, the open squares and the people.
We sat in cafés and bars outside Saint-Chappelle and Notre Dame, but never went inside them. He barely spoke but watched the drift of airy, composed women who never looked quite straight at him, and echoed the ever watchful men posed with one hand holding a cigarette and the other in their pocket. Larry looked like a local, carnivorous, with one eye closed against the smoke from his cigarette. I tried to copy the women, dispassionately flinging their wrists to the sky but I felt stiff. Larry laughed at me and I stopped. I discovered he could speak French, picking up foul slang I supposed, guessing from the reactions of the women he tried his statements out on.
He drank strong coffee in tiny cups. I always seemed to end up with soup bowls of milky coffee that I was too scared to pick up. I had my going away suit and one spare blouse to rinse in the sink with my stockings. Larry took me by the elbow, directed me into shops but I was bewildered by the handwritten Francs. Their uncommonly fashioned sevens I read as ones, the comma which marked some kind of division of numbers. I couldn’t translate it into pounds, never mind shillings. He picked up one item after another and I shook my head. I was starting to feel that everything, this honeymoon, my clothes, was a debt to be repaid.
Outside Notre Dame he said, ‘I have to make a visit about half an hour away, a bidonville. Do you want to visit some of these churches you’ve been so desperate to see while I’m busy?’
I did want to go to them. The Sacré-Cœur was about three streets away from our hotel, but I didn’t trust his smile.
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.
‘In those shoes?’ He pointed to my feet.
I looked at them, oxblood leather with an oversized buckle. I hadn’t had time to save for them before the wedding and I had a good few months until I could pay them off.
‘Yes, in these shoes,’ I said, lifting my chin. ‘They’re good enough for anywhere in Paris.’
He smirked. When we arrived, he explained that bidonville wasn’t the name of a place but a translation. It was a slum, full of bright, clever, filthy children and shoeless, hollow-cheeked adults. They looked at his feet, rather than his face. They knew him and he scared them. All of the anxiety that had built since our arrival began to feel justified.
I couldn’t understand any of what he said to them or them to him, but I could tell enough. He owned them in some way. I felt as if my wedding and my honeymoon had been some kind of excuse to let him finish his deal. What kind of business he had with poor immigrants living in half-sheds outside Paris I never knew. The next day I had a pretty good idea but I didn’t ask. After all this time I had freed myself from parents who I couldn’t ask about anything, and a brother I couldn’t talk about, and nailed myself to a man I could neither ask nor talk about. I couldn’t look at him either, only at the mud stains around the sides of my shoes. They never came out, no matter how much I polished them.
The women sat me on a stool while the men raised their voices. One gestured to me, her right hand tapping her left ring finger. I nodded. She turned to a woman next to her and said something to which the second woman tutted repeatedly and shook her head.
I agreed with her. I wanted to slap myself. I knew I’d never get away.
When we just missed being blown up the next day, the 22nd, outside the Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay, I just wanted to go home. Larry was thoroughly enjoying it, the dead and the injured. He revelled in describing to me the details of how the bomb on the truck killed a postman, how others were injured by the shattering glass which had nearly pierced us, looked slightly disappointed by the safe return of the abducted MP.
He didn’t show a single flicker of surprise. The bomb was close enough so we could witness it but not so close that we’d be hurt. I knew in one way he intended to protect me, he didn’t want me dead, but I didn’t understand what else he wanted from me. I thought back to the quick-eyed men of the bidonville and the slow-eyed women. I thought I would faint as he explained what had happened and I asked him to stop translating.
‘You look pale,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘What a delicate little flower you turned out to be.’
He sat in the bars, listening to the outrage and gossip, the rumours and condemnations, flexing his fingers, one at a time. It was then that I noticed he could move each finger quite independently. First I couldn’t breathe at all and then I couldn’t stop breathing, shuddering and faint. I couldn’t focus on anything else.
He eventually saw me watching and turned to me with a grin which showed his teeth.
‘Second thoughts, Greta?’
I shook my head. I was onto my fourth, fifth and sixth thoughts.
‘Good.’ He loosened his tie and winked. ‘For better or worse.’
At home my mother asked me about Paris but Larry answered for me.
‘The Eiffel Tower was the best bit, wasn’t it?’
I nodded.
We hadn’t been anywhere near it. I had seen it from a few distant places, like Montmartre, but I just smiled as he told my mother all about the incredible views.
‘You got Greta to go up the top of that tower?’ My mother was astonished. ‘She can’t climb a ladder.’
‘She loved every minute. She was like a different woman. That’s the effect Paris has, I suppose,’ he mused.
My mother giggled. She didn’t read the papers or watch the news, knew nothing about the fighting for and against Algerian independence. She noticed nothing different about me whatsoever. I said nothing that whole afternoon and she didn’t even look at me. I began to wonder if she’d ever looked at me properly. She started to talk about my brother’s descriptions of Paris to Larry, as if they’d never met. Larry cut her off in mid-flow and she didn’t mind a bit.
There had always been a girl and then a boy. My grandmother had one daughter and then one son; my mother had one daughter and then one son. But when I had a son (and in my twenties too, not my forties) I could see the stress lift from my mother’s brow. Things had altered. The order of things had changed. Her movements became larger. She even smiled, now and again. She would leave her house, once without her shawl, and come to our new-built house.
‘A brand-new bath that’s never been used.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s beyond anything I ever imagined for you, Greta.’ The inside toilet she didn’t mention, because she didn’t talk about them, but she meant that too. She still had to walk to the bottom of the garden to empty the pot she kept under the bed.
Sean was born on the 22nd of November 1962. For years I told people that he was born on the day that Kennedy was assassinated, but it was a whole year earlier. I’d said it so many times that I started to believe that they’d recorded Kennedy’s death wrongly. I was always looking for links, even then, even when they were wrong.
Sean was exactly a month old when the winds brought the winter properly and, on Boxing Day, the snow which froze the country. I was convinced he would die, and shut us up in the back room with a fire going day and night. Larry always found coal and wood and I didn’t ask how or where.
My mother was happy and left her house every day, and not to visit the church.
She said, ‘When there’s snow, you can see if there have been hoof prints. It’s the only way to be sure if he’s here.’
I hated her coming, opening the doors to let the heat out. She adored Sean, although she couldn’t understand why I’d allowed his father to give him such a foreign-looking name. She would come round in the daytime and leave after I’d prepared tea in the icy kitchen. When it thawed in March, I didn’t see her for months. I missed her then and didn’t like the thought of her keeping a watchful eye for the devil by herself.