She didn’t drain her glass. An inch or so left.
“You think he loves her?” I said.
The questions you come to ask. That even a best friend wouldn’t ask. The part of the job I’d never imagined.
She sipped—barely a touch of the lips.
“I think so.”
She might as well have said, “I know so.”
“And—she loves him?”
“Harder. Oh—I can see that she could. Ha!” Her face brightened, went dark again. “She’s the one who’s leaving. She can’t not go back. That’s what she says—what Bob says she says. It’s her country—homeland. Maybe she’s torn: it and him. I’ll tell you something, I’ve never followed the news so closely. I blessed the day when the Croats started fighting back, pushing back the Serbs, and the whole thing looked like it could soon be over. I thought this could be my—our solution. I wanted to cheer them on. Never mind they were killing each other, never mind they were doing as bad things to the Serbs as the Serbs had done to them. I was on their side! Our solution. Never mind the international solution. Crazy, isn’t it? Wanting a war to be won just so it might save your day. And Bob … I think Bob was praying for the opposite, that the Croats would lose, that the whole bloody thing would go on, just so Kristina would never have that—way out. She’d always be—his refugee.
“Appalling, isn’t it? And it all happened. I mean, it happened my way. The dust had to settle, she had to be sure. It all happened in August—it’s almost November now. But you can put yourself in her shoes, can’t you? A refugee here—a free citizen there. In her own country. Back where she belongs. Terrible, isn’t it?”
Gladstone’s. The corner table. I go there still of course. It’s a blow when the table’s taken. It was a blow when they changed the upholstery from red plush to smoky blue.
“Of course, it gives her the chance to look virtuous, to look as if she’s doing it for us. To look sorry. She’ll give up Bob, she’ll get out of our lives. She’ll let everything go back to what it was.” A dry little laugh. “Her sacrifice. Her concession. She can’t go on causing all this—mess. It’s a possibility. According to Bob, it’s what she says. I haven’t exactly talked it over with her. We haven’t exactly all sat down round a table. The other possibility is that she sees where her life is now, where her future is, and she’s ready to say, ‘Goodbye, Bob.’ Bob wouldn’t tell me that, would he? Maybe Bob wants her to go. For her sake, for ours. It’s his sacrifice. He’s the peacemaker. He tells me that too. It’s another possibility.”
She gave me a long steady look, the look of a woman who no longer trusts her husband, but hasn’t stopped loving him. I’d seen the look before, come to recognize it, like a symptom, in clients.
“Have you heard of the Empress Eugénie?”
I looked at her. Maybe I looked lost.
“I do translating, as well as teaching. I’ve been given this book to translate—from French. It’s a life of the Empress Eugénie. The wife of the Emperor Napoleon III.”
Maybe I looked completely foxed.
“One of the weird things about the Empress Eugénie is that she was Empress for twenty years but when the Emperor died she lived on for nearly fifty years. She died aged ninety-four. As if she had two lives really—an empress life, another life.”
“I know about the Empress Eugénie,” I said.
“Do you?”
Sometimes, maybe, fate steps in.
“She lived in Chislehurst. She and Napoleon III lived in Chislehurst. They were—”
“Rich refugees.”
Her eyes were suddenly alight. Sometimes fate steps in just for you. You’re there in the class, in the front row, and the only scrap of anything you know is just what the teacher has asked.
“Napoleon died there,” I said. “Eighteen … seventy-something. He was the Napoleon who died in Chislehurst.”
Not just a detective, not just a pretty nose.
“I lived in Chislehurst—grew up there. It’s how I know. It’s the only reason I know.”
“George, I lived in Chislehurst—well, Petts Wood—when I was a girl.”
Sometimes fate comes and gives you a pat on the back.
“They lived where the golf course is now,” I said. “Chislehurst Golf Course. Their house became the club house. My dad used to play there. They were the Emperor and Empress who lived on a golf course.”
She actually laughed. Her face all alight. A woman holding a glass of wine, laughing. For a moment it seemed there wasn’t any other agenda. We were sitting here in a wine bar in Wimbledon on a Tuesday evening to swap notes on an Emperor and Empress who’d lived over a century ago. This could be how it was with us.
For a moment, I had a picture of her and Bob, their regular life. The end of the day, the kitchen. He’s opened a bottle of wine, rolled back his shirt cuffs. The smell of something cooking. And she’s telling him about this book she’s signed up to translate. The Empress Eugénie. Did he know (he was a gynaecologist) about the Empress Eugénie?
It’s how their life should always have been.
I saw her eyes come back to the present.
“And the other possibility is … Is this just me? That it’s their way out. Their escape route, their plan. All the other stuff is a cover. That they’ll drive off together, or fly off somewhere, and he won’t ever come home again. I don’t know, I really don’t know—or I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.”
She smiled, as if she might have known me for a long time. She swallowed the last of her wine.
“So you were born in Chislehurst?”
“Brought up there. There was a plaque on the wall—at the golf club. I used to think it was the Napoleon. I never knew there was more than one.”
She put down her empty glass. I picked it up quickly, tilted it towards her. She nodded, no hesitation, but her eyes kept me in my seat. On her seat, beside her, on the red plush, the black leather shoulder-bag—the two of them inside.
“And the other possibility is that they don’t know themselves. They really don’t know what they’re doing. What they’ll do. They’ll only find out at the airport. So even if he does say goodbye to her, even if that’s where they say goodbye, I want to know how he does it, how they do it. I want to have been there—but invisible—for that. Do you understand?”
I must have nodded.
“Watch them, George. Watch over him for me.”