Page 3 of The Bookshop Ladies

Her thoughts were a jumble. Yves had had a heart attack. He might have died. He might still die. He had a daughter. She’d wanted to correct him,no, no, we had a son. Claude. Claude Bachand, named after your father. He was the most precious thing in the world. Don’t you remember, he died and losing him almost broke us?The familiar weight settled on her shoulders like a shawl weaved of icy lead, still after all this time there was no shrugging it off.

Yves had a daughter.

Joy gripped the mezuzah she had pinned to her dress. She wore it everywhere, a diamond and pearl talisman that had brought Yves’s grandmother safely from Poland during the war. It protected them, kept them safe. It was the most precious thing Yves had ever given her. Now, it felt as if it was the only thing tethering her to reality. How could she not have known this about her own husband? And where was this daughter? Tucked away in a little flat on the other side of the city? Getting on with life, oblivious to the deep wound the very mention of her existence opened in Joy’s soul? Or maybe the girl was still at school, sleeping soundly at this very moment, unaware that her father was on his way to hospital, maybe dying. That would be so much worse. Joy prayed he’d fathered the child before he met her, when she knew she should be praying for his recovery. And she hated herself for that.

By the time they arrived at the hospital she was a nervous, disconnected wreck. It was as if someone had pulled the power lines to her sanity.

They rushed Yves into the bowels of the hospital, out of sight, while a junior administrator tried to get some sense out of his distracted wife. Joy vaguely took in the mixture of cinnamon walls and blood-red non-slip floor covering, the tower of paperwork teetering across the woman’s desk and, finally, a mole on the woman’s cheek, sprouting three long hairs. Joy found herself zoning in on this, something she would normally have looked away from, tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed. Tonight, she just wanted to focus on anything except the reason she was sitting here, answering uncomfortable questions.

To Joy, it felt as if it was all happening to someone else.

Yves had a daughter. That was the only thing she was conscious of as she followed the blue line on the floor to the lifts and then the ward.

‘There is a bed prepared for your husband.’ A matron took her by the arm, led her into a private room. Later, she would wonder if she had caught the matron’s name, but really, she could hardly remember her own name at this point.

‘He won’t be coming up just yet.’

‘Oh?’

‘There are tests and…’

‘Of course.’ Joy shook her head. She knew there would be expensive drugs pumping into his system. Yves was not the first of their circle to have ended up in cardiac care as a result of a stressful career and a fondness for red wine, good cigars and taking taxis instead of walking. There would be decisions to be made about stents or bypasses and then, healthy lifestyle changes. No more cigars, only a little red wine, a little cream, but not too much. No stress. Well, that wasn’t going to be a problem now. After all, Yves had just retired. Their only plan was to live the good life. She didn’t say any of these things, because as she sat there, holding tightly onto her ridiculously small purse as if by doing so she might manage to hang onto her place in the world, her place next to her husband, she couldn’t find the words. In her sparkly dress and frivolous high heels, she knew she had automatically begun to slip into a part. Hers was the part of the discombobulated relative. It was what happened in hospitals. Everyone had a role to play, the doctors and nurses, that’s how it all worked. They all looked after you; it turned out, even if you weren’t sick, they still looked after you.

‘I’ll get you a cup of coffee, maybe a croissant?’ a woman was saying, concern written all over her face. Joy wondered what she would say if she told this woman exactly what was going through her mind. Not that her husband had just had a heart attack and she had spent a demented half hour in the back seat of a car believing he was already dead, but rather that she had just learned he had a daughter. A child, the one thing they couldn’t have together; the one thing that would have made everything perfect. Would this middle-aged woman in cotton scrubs and ugly shoes blame her for feeling this?

Yves had a daughter Joy knew nothing about. And he’d had the nerve to wait until now to tell her. She wanted to cry out in anguish and kick out the plate glass windows. She would never have imagined it was possible to feel such turbulent opposites all at once.

‘No. No. I’m fine, really, you must be busy enough already, I’ll just stay here and wait, if that’s okay.’ God, how was she managing this pretence?

‘Of course,’ the matron said, but her eyebrows told their own story and she left the door slightly ajar as if planning to check in again in a little while.

That night, or what was left of it, seemed to stretch across lifetimes for Joy. She didn’t sleep, instead she paced the tiny room manically. Later, having worn her thoughts out crossing the floor, she threw herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillow and cried. Sometime after five, she did close her eyes and drift off to a place that was as disconcerting as it was a welcome relief.

It was six thirty-three exactly when she woke to find the matron standing at the foot of the bed that had been assigned to Yves. Joy had curled up on it, pulling the cover over her when the air conditioning proved too much. The matron cleared her throat, gently at first and then a little more loudly.

‘What is it?’ There was an edge to Joy’s voice that she had never been conscious of before. ‘Where’s Yves? Is he okay? Has he had surgery? Is he…’ she stopped. Perhaps she knew, deep down, this woman had come to give her the worst possible news.

‘I’m afraid it’s not good news.’ The matron bent down, took Joy’s hand in hers. ‘You will have to be strong,ma chérie.’ She paused, perhaps hoping that Joy might connect the dots. ‘I’m so sorry. They tried everything they could, but your husband lost consciousness an hour ago and passed away…’

‘Oh no. NO. There must be some mistake.’ Joy was wailing, sounding more like a banshee than the reserved middle-aged woman she had always known herself to be (even as a child, she’d been an old soul). She gripped the sheets, digging her fingers in as if by holding on it would stop the world from spinning away from her.

‘I know it’s a shock, but he didn’t suffer. In the end, it would have been like falling asleep,’ the matron said kindly, although they both knew there was nothing peaceful about dying in a hospital with an oxygen mask over your face, a catheter in your arm and a parade of strangers trying their best to save you from the allegedly welcome sleep.

‘I can’t…’ Joy stood up, she had to find Yves. She had to make sense of this, he couldn’t be gone. She had talked to him only a few hours earlier. They had been enjoying his retirement party. They had made plans. They were going to go for lunch in their favourite restaurant later today after a long walk by the Seine. This was going to be the first day of their new lives together. Joy felt the warmth of the matron’s firm hands on her shoulders. ‘I have to find him; we have to sort this out.’

‘Why don’t you sit here for a little while? I’ll get you some coffee and maybe you can call for someone to come and collect you. Or is there anyone I can call for you?’

‘No. No. Of course not, Yves is my…’ she was going to say next of kin. But suddenly she knew, with some sort of awful certainty, that he was gone. The world yawned with a new emptiness she had never felt before. ‘Can I see him?’

‘I…’ The matron checked her watch, as if trying to calculate something, and Joy didn’t want to think about what that might be. Maybe, the best thing to assume was she was about to finish up her shift and wanted to get home for breakfast to seeherhusband before he left for work. Then she looked at Joy, her head tipped to one side in a mixture of pity and defeat. ‘Of course you can see him, if that’s what you want; I’ll take you along to him now.’

*

There was so much to do. Three weeks since Yves had died and Joy wasn’t sure where to begin. There had been a ceremony; a private elegant affair. She thought it was what he would have wanted, but it was dismal in a way that funerals didn’t have to be and it felt as if she had missed the mark.

Joy wasn’t sure how she managed it, but she had moved through the whole ordeal as if she was driving her little Citroën, changing up and down gears, foot on whichever pedal was needed. The pity of others was the worst part. She was glad, if that was the right word for it, she was glad that she was wrapped up in a mixture of shock and sedatives.

The truth was, she was quite certain Yves should have died out there on the journey home. Hehaddied in the car; she was convinced of it. When she rang the emergency services, part of her had been certain he was already gone. She believed now the only reason he had hung on was to say those words, the last words before he left her.I have a daughter.

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