Page 23 of One Night With You

We fuss about with William making us cups of tea and JP supervising from his chair in the corner (‘Crack on, I’m powfagged!’ he says, with William retorting, ‘Any chance of you learning to speak the Queen’s English one of these days?’) and when we finally all settle there’s a pregnant pause of expectation, as if the big reveal can now finally come, where we all look at JP, waiting for him to speak and shed light on the calling of this meeting.

‘So you make films, I hear,’ he says, and we tell him that we do – or, at least, are learning to.

‘Documentaries, William says,’ he adds, and again, we confirm this to be true.

‘What’s the research like for that?’ he presses, and I can’t help but feel like we’re being interviewed for a job we haven’t even applied for. He wants to know an awful lot about the ins and outs of what we do considering this time yesterday he didn’t even know we existed, and vice versa.

‘It varies,’ I say. ‘Harry and I haven’t made anything together yet – this is our first project together, for our course. But I’ve done some short-form stuff before – you know, half an hour or less. I told the story of four male swimmers who volunteered at Hampstead Lido for twenty years together, and I did another piece on a friend of a friend’s bid for Eurovision. I like doing docs because people fascinate me. Harry and I were just saying, weren’t we, that life can be wilder than the made-up stuff.’

Harry pulls a face from which we intuit that, yes, we were indeed just saying that.

‘Well, I need helping finding somebody,’ JP says then, apropos of nothing: ‘And I’ve got a feeling you pair are the ones for the job.’

‘Okay,’ says Harry, slowly. ‘Who do you need to find?’

‘A woman,’ JP replies. ‘The love of my life, as it goes.’ He pauses dramatically again for his tea, slowly drawing his mug to his lips for an audible slurp. I glance down at my phone. Abe.You should let me come up for a visit.I turn my phone over, so I’m not distracted again.

In the space between JP’s words Harry says, thinking on his feet, ‘JP, do you mind if we voice-record this? I don’t know what you’re going to say, but if we can help you it would be nice to have this conversation to refer back to. If you don’t mind?’

JP looks to William, and William says, ‘That seems okay to me,’ and so JP nods. Harry places the voice recorder between us, JP has another gulp of tea, and the room is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I’m impressed with Harry for being so direct and getting the voice recorder down.

‘I need to find the love of my life,’ JP says, and I feel Harry look at me with a sense of victory, but I can’t take my eyes off of JP. The love of his life?

‘I’ll go back to the beginning,’ JP continues, his voice weary with age and nostalgia. Harry’s brow is furrowed, and William looks sanguine, as if he’s heard what’s about to be said multiple times. ‘If that’s all right?’

‘Go for it,’ I say. ‘You certainly know how to capture people’s attention.’

And with that, JP launches into his story: ‘I was barely eighteen when I got called up to fight.’ Immediately I understand that he means the Second World War. I’ve never met anybody who fought in the war before. My own grandad was a mechanic at Rolls-Royce, fixing engines for the planes. He never saw battle. I need JP to talk faster. He’s got me, hook, line and sinker already.

‘It was early spring when we shipped out, to France. Myconvoy – about twelve of us – ended up living in the barn of a generous, kind family – dead lovely they were – for about three months. Down near Limoges. It was in the middle of nowhere. Peaceful and quiet. Our presence was supposed to keep people safe, protect them. And the daughter of the family, Amelie, well … We fell in love. I didn’t speak a lick of French, she didn’t speak any English, but it was absolutely love. Besotted, I was. She’d sneak me extra bread in the mornings, and we’d take long walks down by the river behind the village. She had the face of a movie star. And then I had to leave. We were called out to the front line, and the only thing I was able to take with me was her photograph.’

‘Which I have here,’ William interjects, handing over a small black and white image, barely bigger than a passport photograph.

‘Whoa,’ marvels Harry. ‘She’s beautiful.’

I look over his shoulder. Amelie has high cheekbones and a thick, wide smile with the kind of teeth most people would have to pay money for. Her eyes are soft and encouraging, and there’s a sweetness to her, like she’s embarrassed to hold the gaze of the person taking her photo and will look down into her lap any second now. She’s wearing a dark-coloured blouse that covers everything, and yet it is entirely obvious that she is all boobs and hips. To be honest,Icould fall in love with her too, on that still image alone. Bless JP. His heart mustn’t have stood a chance.

‘And that’s not even the half of it,’ says JP. ‘In real life, she was a knockout. And so thoughtful, and sweet. I thought I’d be able to go back to her. I thought after the war, when it was all over, I’d be able to find her again …’

‘But you couldn’t?’ I say.

‘No,’ he replies, shaking his head sadly. ‘And I met Shelleytwo weeks after we got home,’ he concludes, as if the war and his French love were always leading up to that. ‘I was twenty-three, she’d worked on the factory line when we were all off fighting, and to be honest …’

He pauses, closing his eyes faintly. I wait.

‘I’m allowed to be honest, aren’t I?’ he clarifies again, but mostly to himself.

I feel compelled to make it clear: ‘JP, you only have to tell us as much as you want to. It’s okay. I know you want our help, but don’t get upset or anything.’ I find myself desperately wanting his story, but not at the expense of making him distressed.

‘She’d lost somebody,’ he says, plainly. ‘Shelley. Her Jonny never came home. I’m not saying we were second best to each other, but we had both loved before. And your first love never leaves you, does it?’

The Abe Thing flashes into my mind, a movie highlight reel of our best and worst moments. But as a first love … urgh. It can’t have been love! It wouldn’t have hurt so badly if it was. The right love makes you feelmorelike yourself – it doesn’t strip you of who you are. I’m lucky Abe has me out of his grasp, now. I’m so proud of myself for that – for knowing my worth and sticking to my values. Where I actively want to exorcise him from my past,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style, JP is still thinking of somebody from eighty years ago. That proves the point of what love really is, doesn’t it?

‘You talked about that with each other?’ I probe, as sensitively as I can. ‘You and Shelley talked about Amelie and Jonny?’

He shakes his head and looks at me like he feels sorry for my immaturity, for the folly of my youth.

‘We didn’t have to,’ he explains. ‘But that didn’t make itany less true. It might seem strange to you. Maybe it is. When William found Amelie’s photo in my wallet, he couldn’t understand how I’d been married for seventy years to his grandmother but still could think of somebody else. It hurt him, I think.’ He looks to William as he says this. ‘He loved Shelley so much, and I think he was protective over her, even after she’d gone. But the things we leave unsaid – unfinished – they haunt us, don’t they? That photo I carried in my wallet of her – it was a photo of a ghost, a sort of memento of who I used to be before …’

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