Page 22 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘Un,’the woman corrects her.‘Un croissant et un pain au chocolat.’
‘Oui,’Wendy says, missing the point.‘C’est ça. S’il vous plait ?’
As she steps back outside, she’s feeling pleased with herself. It’s only the smallest of victories, but it’s a victory all the same.
As she climbs back into her car, the postal van pulls up beside her and the post lady jumps out with a handful of letters.‘Bonjour !’she says brightly. ‘How you are today?’
‘Très bon !’Wendy replies, emboldened by her success in the bakery.
‘Très bien,’the young woman corrects. Then, faced with Wendy’s silence,‘Moi, ça va aussi.’
Wendy frowns as she tries to decode individual words.
‘It means, I’m OK too,’ the girl says, as Wendy manages to work it out.
‘C’est bon,’Wendy says. ‘Um,non… c’est bien ?’
The girl laughs. ‘We need to make work on your French,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ Wendy says. ‘Oui. I agree.’
‘Have a good day. I must…’ And then she waves the letters at Wendy and skips off in the direction of the bakery.
Back home – so, she’s starting to think of the cabin as home! – she eats the bread with the remainder of yesterday’s soup. The baguettes from the supermarket weren’t bad, especially when compared with the baguette-shaped pappy mush they sell back home. But this bread is on a whole different level. There’s a complex yeasty sourness to it that is so delicious she has to force herself to stop otherwise she could easily munch her way through the lot.
Lunch over and the dishes washed, for want of a more worthwhile project, she returns to the car park at the foot of the hiking trail from where she starts to make her way back up to the sphere.
Her legs are stiff and achy from the last time but it is this stiffness – and the lack of fitness the stiffness implies – that motivates her. Perhaps she’ll do this walk every day. Imagine how fit she’d be then!
As she reaches the final rise to the radar, she crosses paths with a couple coming down. They say,‘Bonjour,’but without making eye contact, and she can tell that they’ve been arguing. There’s something in the atmosphere around them – she canalmost see the purple haze. Their little terrier, Samson, would rather walk with her, too, and who could blame him for that? He has to be sharply and repeatedly called to heel before, looking sad, he waddles off down the track.
The view from the top is obviously the same as yesterday, but in a way it’s completely remade by this different day. The atmosphere is more transparent than yesterday, making the blues of the sky and sea that much deeper.
She starts to take another photo, but then imagines how cool it would be if she could take identical photos from the exact same spot every day. She could get them all printed up on a big poster, the panoramic strips shifting tint from top to bottom as the seasons progress. So she checks the previous image and then chooses a landmark so she can stand on a specific rock every time.
It’s a pointless project in a way, and she can imagine how Jill or the kids would cynically roll their eyes if she told them. Only Harry would get it. In fact, Harry would be positively enthusiastic about her venture. He’d probably buy her an expensive camera and a tripod, just so she could do it properly.
Oh, Harry… We used to see eye-to-eye on so many things.
Anyway, enough of them, because it pleases her, this little project, and she’s not going to be put off by the fact that the right people wouldn’t like it, nor that the wrong person (Harry) would approve. She’s going to do it every day.
By the time she gets back to the car she’s cold – in fact, she’s positively chilled to the bone. She needs a different kind of coat, something breathable but warm – something midway between the draughty duffle coat she has chosen today and her boil-in-the-bag puffer jacket. Perhaps she’ll buy one when she’s out with Jill.
As she drives, she thinks about the reality of Jill’s impending visit, and she’s at a loss as to how it will go.
She can imagine Jill hating the remote cabin andcomplaining twenty-four/seven as easily as she can picture her falling in love with it and refusing to leave.
As she locks the car door, her phone buzzes in her pocket and once she’s indoors in the warm, she pulls off the duffle coat and perches on the back of the sofa to read it.
Harry: Can you give me a call this evening? I want to hear how it’s going. If I’m honest, I’m a bit worried about you. Haz xx
Two kisses, she thinks.That’s a turn-up for the books.
Perhaps this is going to turn out to be a good strategy after all. Perhaps it’s not absence but distance that makes a heart grow fonder.
‘A good strategy,’ she murmurs, echoing the thought out loud. Is that what she’s doing here? Is she strategising to get him back?
She shakes her head and sighs as she rises to make tea. Because once she knows the answer to that one, she’ll know the answer to everything.
