IF I’D gone to London from Paris, it would have taken me just over two hours on the Eurostar. But from my perch in Saint-Malo, I had to board a ferry that would take six hours—six—to get to Poole. Poole is a two-hour drive from my family home in Hemel Hempstead. Whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, I’d have plenty of time to think.
With the Peugeot and The Blue Bear safely parked in the boat’s bowels, I made my way up to the public atrium, where a troupe of plum-and-navy chairs were flanked by a glass-encased duty-free center where one could watch the English splurge on tins of foie gras and macaroons.
I picked a rather dismal area under an air vent in hopes that no one else would sit in the two vacant seats beside me, but my aspirations were dashed by the appearance of a round and ruddy fellow sporting a felt hat.
He was wearing an orange raincoat and khaki pants with the utility pockets near the ankles, not a useful place for them at all. He had the excited energy of a man on an expedition, and I could tell the minute he performed the universal is-this-seat-taken gesture that he would want to chat.
“So where you heading to, then?” he asked, taking out a printing-press worth of newspapers from his bag.
“Well, Poole, obviously.”
“Poole, obviously!” he roared, striking my arm. “And then?”
“Hemel Hempstead,” I said. “That’s where I’m from.”
“Blimey!” he replied, nearly hitting me again. “I’m from Great Gaddesden myself.”
“Is that right,” I said, honestly surprised. “Were you on holiday?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I work for Xerox. Big presentation out in Rennes.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “How’s that?”
“Well, they just bought the Color DocuTech 60. Fastest full-color laser printer in the industry.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do,” he said, opening a paper. “People are really intimidated by color copiers, you know? So I’m their hand-holder. Harold Gadfrey,” he said, holding out his hand.
I shook it. “Richard Haddon.”
“Haddon,” he said. “Mind if I read a spot of the paper here? You want one? They had a ton in my hotel. English or French?” he asked, showing me an assortment.
I pointed to the pink one, the Figaro’s financial section.
“Ah, good,” he said, handing it to me. “I can’t read French. You seen this, by the way?”
He shook the Sun in my direction. Above a photo of Saddam Hussein, the front headline read DOES HE OR DOESN’T HE? SKEPTICISM LOOMS.
I winced.
“I know,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s no good. So what do you think? Does he, or doesn’t he?”
“I think he . . . doesn’t?”
“I think he doesn’t, too.”
We stared down at our papers, relieved.
“It leaves you thinking, though, doesn’t it?” he said, rustling the front page. “What can we do, really? I’m forty-two years old; I’m not going to fight.” He sighed. “I’m not much of an activist, I guess. You?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m an artist, so . . .”
He sat back and studied me, said he’d pegged me for a writer. “Well,” he said finally, folding his paper open. “You should do something about Iraq.”
“I’m thinking about it, actually.”
“I’d think fast.”
We spent the next hour reading, and then shared a light lunch together in the pub, talking about his work and my work, the various joys and responsibilities that made up our lives. Harold was a family man, two daughters, a wife of seventeen years, two-car detached garage—in his own words, “the whole bit.” He was older than me by almost a decade, but he had the youthful air that accompanies people whose default mood is good.
When it came to discussing my family, the mood noticeably shifted. I told him my wife was a lawyer, that we lived in Paris, the basic facts. And then I pulled out a photo of Camille that I kept inside my wallet. She was on a tricycle in Brittany, with a ladybug helmet on.
“Ooooh,” Harold cooed. “She’s a sweetheart. Does she take after her mum?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, ashamed that I didn’t have any pictures of Anne on me. “My better-looking half.”
“We’ve gotten a bit lax back in Great Gaddesden, I’m afraid,” Harold said, pinching his waist. “Fat and happy! You should come by while you’re in town, actually. My wife’s a splendid cook!”
“Oh, that’s very kind,” I said, swallowing. “But I don’t plan on being here very long. Just a couple days, you know, to go to London, and see my parents.”
“Of course.” He nodded. “Well, lunch, maybe? Or breakfast? I don’t know a lot of artists,” he said, shrugging. “In my line of work, Richard, you’re an exotic plant.”
• • •
After lunch, Harold rolled into the empty row of seats behind me for a snooze, and I read some more papers before dozing off myself. All in all, the time passed more pleasantly than it might have, and I found myself giving my parents’ landline to Harold on our arrival in Poole.
“It’s something, isn’t it,” I said, ripping off a piece of paper from my planner. “I haven’t lived there since sixth form, but I still remember the number.”
“It’s nice they live in the same place,” he said, passing me a slip of paper with his own cell-phone number written on it. “Not a lot of stability, otherwise, today.”
I nodded. I was happy to have met him, this great pelican of a man. I was happy to see how glad he was to return home to his wife and daughters. His wife had called while we were in transit to tell him she’d made his favorite: steak-and-kidney pie.
When we docked, I got a coffee before calling my own family to let them know I was arriving early. I apologized for not calling earlier, a last-minute situation, I said, with the London buyer. My mother was crestfallen to hear that Anne and Camille weren’t with me. I said I was, too.
• • •
My relationship with my parents is an odd one. Once they gave it to me, the Haddon seniors ceased taking an active interest in my life. In fact, the extent of independence I was given as a youngster could easily have been mistaken for negligence on my parents’ part. It’s not that my parents weren’t affectionate—they were—it’s just that they spent most of their time fundamentally distracted.
My father, a history teacher, would often come home after his classes and eat a bowl of cereal with his nose stuffed up the pages of the Scientific Observer. He used to balance the magazine against a vase we had on the kitchen table that my mother rotated once a month with various genera of plastic flowers. It never occurred to my father that most dads don’t eat Weetabix for supper.
My mother worked at the local library to which she commuted on an ancient green bicycle with a makeshift wicker basket that she’d fashioned herself. On Saturdays, when most left-leaning women her age were at home breast-feeding and baking carob muffins, Mum taught an art class at the local community center for a group of middle-aged women who, in between watercolors and felt collages, delighted in exchanging recipes and trading their secrets for removing underarm stains from their husbands’ shirts. My mother used to check out the latest self-help books from the library in order to find a theme for each class that would lend a certain “zest” to her students’ artwork. Judging from the yellow legal pad that my mother left in the family den one day, “You Can’t Love Your Husband Until You Love Yourself” and “Oral Sex: What If We Talked About It?” were just some of the creative catalysts for the Hempstead Women’s Art League in the 1970s.
I sat in my car with the other cross-Channel commuters, waiting for the drawbridge to go down. I hadn’t seen my parents since last Christmas, ten months earlier. It was inexcusable, really. Lamentable as a son, and as a father. How was it that Camille hadn’t seen her grandparents in ten months? Where had Anne and I been, as a couple? But I knew the answer. We’d been in the dumps.
• • •
It was shocking driving through Hemel Hempstead. All of the villages around ours had been improved with fancy shopping centers and river walks, but the Bennett’s End district still looked like total crap. Constructed after World War II as a “new town” development, Bennett’s End was mostly made up of dreary public housing: two-story single-family homes with detached one-car garages. Street after street, the red brick, the white shutters. The homes with novelty mailboxes and neon-purple perennials and whimsical garden sculptures, the bikes overturned on the front lawns. It wasn’t scenic, and it wasn’t charming, but it was home, and I could feel it in my shoulders as the stress started unwinding. I was happy to be back.
I parked the car in the driveway and checked the sky for rain. I’d have to ask my dad to swap out his beloved Vauxhall Chevette for my Peugeot so that the Bear didn’t get sopped.
Just outside the front door, I was stopped in my tracks by the smell of my mother’s one-pot cooking. Red wine, sherry, tinned tomatoes, meat, the perversely comforting scent of burned carrots and singed garlic. My mum has always been a terrible cook. She’s one of those people who doesn’t care what food tastes like; she eats because she has to. This had been a problem during my own family’s prior visits, until Anne finally invented a visit-salvaging tradition called “Duck in a Can.” Each time we came over, we brought a massive (and I mean silo-size) can of duck confit that would last us through two dinners. I’d forgotten it this time. It didn’t matter. Shitty food suited my shitty state of mind.
I rang the bell and immediately heard a scurry of footsteps behind the door. The little eye on the peephole slid open, then closed.
“Richy!” The door opened, and there was my mum, her dark curls frazzled, her hands in oven mitts. She threw her arms around me and I embraced her, running my hands along her birdy bones. Even when I was a teenager, she only came up to my shoulder.
“Oh, love, it’s so good to have you here!”
“Hi, Mum,” I said, pulling back to smile at her. “I brought you guys some treats.”
“Ah, love, you shouldn’t have.” She accepted the plastic bag of wine and tinned caramels I’d got from duty-free before nodding at my tiny suitcase. “Is that all you have?”
“That, and the painting,” I said, looking toward the car. “I’ve got to get it in the garage.”
“You’ve got to move the Vauxy, Georgie!” she yelled. “He’s got that painting on the car!”
My dad popped out in a fuzzy yellow sweater and ancient brown trousers.
“My boy!” he said, pulling me to him.
“Aww, lovely,” said my mother, watching us embrace. “What a shame that Anne and Camille couldn’t make it.”
“I know,” I said, frowning. “I shouldn’t be here either, actually. It’s a unique situation. A very special client.”
I put my stuff down in my childhood room, a robin’s-egg-blue box with a desk beneath a window that looked out onto the small backyard. A weathered poster of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry still adorned the wall above the single bed I’d slept in as a child, along with an Arsenal football calendar from 1979.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said to my mother, standing in the shadow behind me. She hit me in the back, playfully, her oven mitts still on.
“You want noodles or rice with the stew?” she asked. She did both terribly. She used instant rice and tended to slow-cook instant noodles.
“Noodles would be great.”
“Let’s give them a call, first!” My mum tugged on my sweater. “Tell them you’ve arrived! I want to say hi to my granddaughter!”
“All right,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Let me just get my things sorted, and I’ll call.”
Once she left the room, I shut the door and sat down on the bed. I checked my cell phone: no calls, no messages. Because I am a devious person, I called the Bourigeauds’ landline.
“Allô?” said a voice that was definitely my spouse’s.
“Anne?” I said. “It’s me.”
“Yes, well,” she said. “You arrived.”
“I have.”
Silence.
“Listen,” I said, “My mum really wants to speak to Camille. That’s why I’m—”
“Yes,” said Anne. “That’s fine.”
I listened to Anne call out for Camille and heard the phone drop, and then get picked up again by much smaller hands.
“Grand-maman?” went Camille.
“No, sweetheart, it’s me.”
“Oh, hi, Daddy! I caught sand eels!”
“Well done! Are you gonna eat them?”
“Yup. Mommy’s frying them now. Did you take the ferry all the way to Grandma’s?”
“No.” I laughed. “The ocean doesn’t go there. I had to drive.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
I took advantage of the sudden pause to decode the noise I heard in the background, to try to visualize the stiffness of Anne’s posture, to wonder if Inès was helping her or if she was cooking alone.
“How’s Mommy doing, Cam?”
“She caught some fish, too. Can I talk to Grandma now?”
My heart sank. “Of course, darling. Just a second.”
I opened up my bedroom door and found my mother standing in the hallway, wringing her now oven-mitt-free hands.
“Is that my little Cam-Cam?” she asked, all brightness, reaching for the phone.
I shut myself back inside the bedroom, listening to the cadences of their talk. She was happy, my daughter. Clearly, Anne hadn’t said anything yet about our fight. Fight? It was more than that. It was a deluge.
• • •
After dinner, while my mum did the washing up, I sat in the living room with my father on a couch so old, it merited its own page in the family encyclopedia.
Orange Floral Couch, circa 1953: understuffed and sagging, this vintage lime-and-orange couch is nevertheless a persistent source of delight and comfort for the Haddon family household, especially for George Haddon, who smokes cigars in it after victorious Arsenal games. Evidence of this tradition in the form of burn holes is viewable on the northwest arm of the couch, closest to the side table, where Edna Haddon keeps a dish of salted cashews at all times.
“Sherry?” my father asked, standing by the empty bookshelf he used as a bar.
“Sure,” I said.
“You want cheese or something, Frenchie?”
I laughed. “No, Dad.” He handed me a small glass. “This is great,” I said.
“So!” he said, settling down in the recliner near the TV. “What’s new? Anne told me you had a lot of success with your last show?”
Ever gracious, Anne was faithful with the Sunday check-in calls. When her parents weren’t in Brittany, we followed the French tradition of having long lunches with them each Sunday in the Parisian suburbs, and Anne would use the time between the meal and dessert to call my family, passing the phone from Camille to me. Because it was always Anne who made the phone call, she was usually the one who presented a summary of the past week, and a glimpse of the week ahead. She was astonishingly considerate, my wife.
“Yeah, quite a few of them have sold, actually, for pretty good prices. And then I’ve got that mess,” I said, gesturing to the garage, where my car was now parked.
“I see,” went my father, as if that explained everything. “So how long will you be here?”
I reached for my glass. “Well, it depends, actually. I’m supposed to deliver the painting on Tuesday, but I’m hoping that I can move the appointment earlier, as I’m already here.”
“I thought you came because they needed it earlier?”
“Right,” I said, gulping down the drink. “But then they, eh, moved the appointment back.”
My father frowned. “I see. Well, I can’t keep up with you. And how’s Anne?”
I scratched the back of my neck. “She’s good. Tired, overworked, you know. She’s got a new case. These new mums out in Lille who didn’t know that you’re not supposed to be slogging back wine while you’re pregnant, so they’re lobbying for a massive logo of sorts, right on the bottle.”
“Are they mental?”
I almost spit out my sherry. “What?! No, Dad, they’re not mental, they’re just . . . I don’t know what they are, actually. They’re just not informed.”
We drank our sherry and listened to the clanks and plunks of my mother putting away the dishes.
“So no more kids, then?”
“Jesus,” I said, getting up to pour us more sherry.
“You know, I think we might have had another, is all I’m saying,” said my dad. “But by the time we felt like it, you were seven. Camille’s what now, five?”
“Yeah, five.”
“Well, it’s now or never, I think. My siblings, we all have a two-year difference, which is no difference, really. But then you look at your mother. Five years between her and Abigail—and they hardly talk.”
“So it’s already too late for us, is what you’re saying.”
My dad knitted his brows together. “Possibly.”
I sighed and sat back down. The sherry had warmed me, as had the stew that was still settling in my guts. I wanted at that moment to come clean to my father, to ask him for advice. After all, he’d cheated on my mother all those years ago, and although I never really understood how far it went, it had probably gone far enough for him to have an opinion on what I should do. But then my mum appeared in the doorway, wiping down a plate.
“So if you’re free tomorrow, love, I was thinking we could show you the new things they’ve done around Gadebridge? It’s really the nicest little park.”
Claiming tiredness from the long journey, I kissed my parents good night and said that rain or shine, a trip out to Gadebridge sounded very nice, indeed. And then I shut myself in my small bedroom and sat down under the Dirty Harry poster, put my head into my hands, and endured the tight throat and nasal-drip condition that heralded a cry.
It was strange—or at least, among the people we knew, it was an anomaly—that I, an only child, had married another only child. It was even odder for Anne to be an only child, and French. Proper bourgeois families, especially if religious, get up to as many as five Barbour-jacket-wearing offspring. But Anne’s mother had suffered secondary infertility when she and Alain tried to conceive after Anne’s birth. It was a taboo topic, apparently a source of profound guilt and shame, as the two of them always wanted a large family. I’d asked Anne whether her parents had ever thought about adopting, and she said her mother was for it, but her father thought it embarrassing—like parading around a banner communicating to the public what did—and couldn’t—happen in your bed.
And it’s true that Anne and I had discussed having another child, about three years ago, but Anne’s career picked up, then mine did, and we lost time basking in the fact that we were busy and successful, with a child who kept us busier still. Despite the exemplary maternity-leave benefits for women in France, I don’t think Anne was ready, or could even envision slowing down. And time passed. And I met Lisa. And even more time was lost. And now, it’s true what my dad said, a five-year difference would be a lot. And plus, impregnation seems improbable. You have to have sex for that.
Much later, unable to sleep, I padded into the living room and—against my better instincts—pulled out Anne and my wedding album from the bookshelf. This second wedding, the one the Bourigeauds insisted on, took place about a year after our first one, at their place in Saint-Briac. Although both weddings were by the seashore, that is where the similarity between the two events ends.
Seeing as how we hadn’t invited any relatives to the Cape Cod edition, our French wedding was the first time that Anne actually met my parents. My father liked her the minute he saw her, but my mother seemed uncomfortable around her, ill at ease. It happens a lot with Anne—the dark hair, her boyish hips that make her endless legs look even longer, the way she carries herself with a dancer’s posture—a lot of people peg her for a cold person before giving her a chance. It’s true that she’s choosy socially: she’s economical with her words. I can see how other people find this haughty, but the truth is that she’s shy. And although she’s good with bourgeois small talk, when it comes to keeping up with someone awkward like my mum, Anne’s at a total loss. I remember after the wedding, when I asked her what she talked about with my mother, she covered her eyes with her hands like a little girl. “Oh my God,” she said. “The weather.”
Anne was disappointed by her first encounter with my mother, and she didn’t know how to carry forth with such an outcome. Being a traditionalist, she’d hoped to get on splendidly with Mum, because that’s what daughters-in-laws did. She’d filled her head with visions of weekend visits to my parents’ and long walks with Edna, the two of them exchanging giddy little intimacies, my mother telling her an indicative story about me when I was younger, and Anne smiling and saying that I hadn’t changed at all. Walking arm in arm back into the house, like queens from different countries, teasing their menfolk who would, of course, be chatting around the fire. Lunch would be prepared. We would all break into song.
Anne’s debut with my father went a great deal better. He and Anne had already spoken on the phone several times while I was still at RISD, and Anne had even sent some postcards from Cape Cod after our first wedding, sprinkled with phrases like I can’t wait to meet you and your almost-daughter, Anne. After the reception in France, my father yanked me aside and whispered, “Good God, Richard, she’s gorgeous.” He let out a faint whistle as he watched my new bride interact with his own wife on the deck. “And you know, she’ll stay that way, too. It’s in their constitution. Not like the English, God help us.” By this time, Anne had come up between the two of us and was standing at my father’s side. He threw his arms out and gave her an embrace in the French tradition, kissing her eagerly on both sides of her face, twice.
“I’m so happy for the two of you,” he exclaimed, ratcheting things up to a bear hug.
“I know!” she said, slightly crumpled. “So am I!”
It was a lovely dinner, carried out mostly in English, which Alain and Inès spoke with accents made even more attractive by the copious amounts of wine served. My parents, of course, were completely smitten by the house, and also by Anne’s family, whom they found just as warm and hospitable as could be. I remember that meal well, much better than the reception, which was a whirl of handshakes and embraces and too much white wine. I remember how happy Anne seemed to have us all together. I remember thinking, At some point, this will be us. We’ll have a child and the child will marry, maybe in this very house. And I remember feeling real love for my parents, real love for my mother in her ridiculous turquoise tunic and my father in his favorite silk bow tie, which, I knew from watching him tie it as a child, had a small hole in the back of it, near the tag.
The guests started filtering out around four in the morning, but rather incredibly, my father was still up, gesticulating over a final glass of port with Alain de Bourigeaud. I went up to the two of them, raised my glass to Alain, thanked him for the perfect night. My father suggested a stroll, just a wee walk to get the bad stuff moving through him before he called it a night.
“You two go,” said Alain, smiling. “I’m going to do a tour of the border there, make sure no one’s fallen off.”
My father tossed his arm around me, and we headed for the back of the house, toward the country road. He was heavy-footed, his arm leaden on my shoulder. It had been some time, a decade, maybe, since I’d seen him that lashed. But it was a good drunk, a joyful one, and I was glad to be there with him, glad he liked my wife. Glad that I was entering the type of family that he could be proud of.
“Ah, Richard!” he cried. “What a night. What a party! I’ll tell you something, I think she’s just great.” He chucked me under the chin with his free hand. “A little frosty in the beginning, but that’s the French in her! And God, but she is clever! But listen, son,” he said, pulling me closer as we stumbled onto the road. “She’s most terribly in love with you. You can feel it when you talk to her, it’s lovely. But listen, I want to tell you something.” He clutched my shoulder. “Listen. Don’t forget her.”
Somewhere beyond the torchlights that were still burning and the buzz of the alcohol and the music and the gorgeous guests, something inside of me wakened to this comment, wakened in the way you do from a dream that is unsettling, not right.
“What do you mean, forget her?” I asked. Behind us, I could hear cars crunching their way out of the gravel driveway and Anne’s parents crying merci and à bientôt into the dark.
“I don’t know, Rich. I’ve made some mistakes with your mum, you know. And there were times when I wanted to go off and leave, to find something better. But you know what? It doesn’t get better. If you really love her, if you really, really love her, it won’t get any better than this. But just try to remember that you do love her, you know, because it gets so easy to forget. I’d like to tell you that it’s all a romp in the hay and that you’ll never want another girl, but I know you, and of course you will, but just, just try to remember . . . okay?”
“Remember what, Dad? Why are you telling me this?”
He stumbled over a sprinkler head and grabbed on to my arm. “Richy, just remember that what you have is good. And even though you don’t think that matters, it does. Everything else comes after. And like I said, she’s French.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, not knowing whether to thank him or fetch him aspirin. I rewired my brain to send his comments to the starboard of my cerebral cortex, where they could be harbored, and forgotten, and not ruin my night.
We made it about halfway up the road before my dad got sick. I rubbed his back as he heaved against the neighbor’s bushes.
“Good Lord,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “I haven’t done that in years!” He turned around with a big smile. “Do we need to do something with it?”
I flinched at the celebratory pile in the dark. Then I started kicking clumps of pine needles onto it with my dress shoes until the noxious mound was out of sight.