The Seafront

The seafront at Knokke, in March, belongs to dogs, to pensioners and to people who have something to forget.

The café terraces have been taken in. The beach huts haven't come back yet: the sand is empty all the way down to the sea. The wind comes off the water and it never stops: it gets in under your collar, it makes you cry for no reason, it snatches your words away before they reach the other person, so that to talk to each other you have to walk very close. Maybe that's why I started walking very close to Adrien.

The first time was a Saturday. He'd dropped into the studio at noon, when I close. He'd said: I'm going for a walk along the front, do you want to come? He'd used vous, the formal you. I'd said no. I'd picked up my coat. We'd walked as far as Het Zoute and back, seven kilometres, hardly saying a word, and when we stopped at the top of the steps down to the rue des Mouettes, my cheeks were burnt by the wind and my heart was burnt by something else.

The second time, he switched to tu.

He was thirty-eight. He was a shipwright in Ostend, in a small boatyard on the edge of the dock, where they built and repaired wooden boats for people who had no need of wooden boats, who could have bought plastic and aluminium like everyone else, and who wanted the sound of oak in a swell all the same. He'd learned the trade from an old Dutchman from Vlissingen, he'd been working on his own for six years, and he had an apprentice two days a week. He lived above the yard, in two rooms that smelt of glue and wood shavings. He wasn't married. He never had been. He had no children. He had a mother in Ostend, whom he saw on Sundays.

He told me all this over three weeks, in small pieces, on the seafront, in the wind, and I filed it away in my head the way I file negatives: in order, in sleeves, with the date.

He didn't ask questions about Hugo.

It was the most restful thing in the world. For sixteen months, everyone had been asking me questions about Hugo: how I was, how I was holding up, whether I was sleeping, whether I was eating, whether I'd thought about selling the flat, whether I wanted to talk about it. Adrien asked nothing. When I talked about Hugo, he listened. When I didn't talk about Hugo, he didn't fill the gap with an awkward silence. He walked beside me, hands in the pockets of his work jacket, and looked at the sea the way you look at someone you've known for a long time.

“Sleep with him,” said Nora, “or I will.”

Nora Benali has been my best friend since university, in Namur, where she was studying pharmacy while I was studying art history, and where we shared a student bedsit above a kebab shop that closed at four in the morning. She runs a chemist's in Bruges, she has three children, a cardiologist husband and zero patience. She'd come round one Sunday evening with a bottle of white wine and a rice tart, and she'd made me tell her everything, and she'd listened while eating the tart with a spoon straight out of the tin.

“Nora.”

“What, Nora? You're thirty-six. You've got a man who brings you black coffee with no sugar and mends boats with his hands. You put make-up on, Camille. I've known you eighteen years and I've seen you wear make-up three times: for your final viva, for your wedding and for the funeral.”

“Four times.”

“Four times. See? You're counting.”

She put her spoon down. She looked at me with that expression she has behind her counter when a customer is describing their symptoms and she already knows what's wrong with them.

“Hugo loved you,” she said, more gently. “He wanted you alive. He didn't want you sitting in this flat facing the sea, staring at the water that took him from you.”

I looked at the water, as it happened. Through the picture window the North Sea was grey, heavy, with whitecaps very far out. I looked at it every evening. I didn't know whether I hated it or whether I was waiting for it.

Sophie noticed too. Sophie notices everything.

Sophie Verhaegen is Hugo's sister, seven years younger than him, two years younger than me. She works in the family group, in events, organising the weddings and conferences at the four hotels. She was the one who organised ours. She became my friend before she became my sister-in-law, and she stayed my friend after Hugo died, which was never a given, because in families like the Verhaegens a widowed daughter-in-law is a cumbersome object nobody quite knows where to put.

She dropped into the studio one Thursday with a bunch of tulips, on the pretext of asking me for a quote on some family photos. Adrien was there. He was fixing the wobbly leg of my light table, on his knees underneath it, with a screwdriver he'd taken out of his pocket as if it were perfectly normal to carry a screwdriver in your pocket.

Sophie looked at him. Then she looked at me. Then she smiled, a big smile, Hugo's smile, which they'd both inherited from their father.

“Hello,” she said to Adrien. “Sophie.”

He got to his feet. He wiped his hand on his trousers before holding it out to her.

“Adrien.”

She held on to his hand for a second.

“Haven't we met before?”

“I don't think so,” he said. “I'd remember.”

He smiled. His half-smile. Sophie laughed, flattered, and went off again with her tulips, which she forgot to give me, and I didn't think about that exchange again for months.

Marianne invited me to lunch the following Sunday.

Marianne Verhaegen is Hugo and Sophie's mother, and the chairwoman of the Verhaegen group: four hotels on the coast, including the flagship, the Hôtel Verhaegen, on the seafront at Knokke, built in 1926 by her husband's grandfather. She is sixty-seven. She looks fifty-five, in a cream suit, with pearls, short silver hair and a smile that has been photographed at every gala on the coast for forty years. She'd welcomed me into the family with flawless kindness, without a single misstep, and in seven years I'd never known whether she loved me or managed me.

We had lunch in the hotel restaurant, at her table by the picture window, the table where she'd lunched every Sunday since her husband died. Sole meunière, a Chablis, the maître d'hôtel calling her Madame and me Madame Camille.

Over dessert, she laid her hand on mine.

“People tell me you're seeing someone.”

I didn't ask which people. In Knokke, people means everyone.

“I don't know yet whether I'm seeing someone,” I said.

“Darling. You have to live. Hugo would want you to live.”

She squeezed my hand. She wore rings on three fingers and they were cold.

“Bring him to lunch, one Sunday. I want to meet him. One doesn't leave my son's wife in just anybody's hands.”

I told Adrien that same evening. We were walking along the front, it was almost mild, the first evening in April when you could unbutton your coat.

“My mother-in-law would like to meet you. She's inviting you to lunch at the hotel. One Sunday.”

He stopped walking.

It wasn't much. A step not taken. The wind going on and a man stopping. He was looking straight ahead, towards the hotel, as it happened, which you could see in the distance along the front, its white Art Deco façade and its sign in blue letters, VERHAEGEN, lit up against the evening.

“I don't think so,” he said.

“She doesn't bite. Well, not in public.”

He didn't smile.

“I'm not setting foot in that hotel, Camille.”

He said it softly. Not unkindly, not in anger. The way you say something that has been true for a long time and isn't up for discussion. And then he started walking again, and he took my hand, for the first time, in the pocket of his jacket, with his own, and he didn't explain anything, and I didn't ask him anything, because his hand was warm and mine hadn't been for sixteen months.

I should have asked him.