Seventeen Months

I was the one who asked him up. I want that on the record, because later, when I called everything into question, when I went back over every day of that spring under the loupe like a scratched negative, I wondered whether he'd planned it all, even that. He hadn't planned that. It was me.

It was a Friday, the twenty-fourth of April. We'd had mussels in a brasserie in Het Zoute, where the waiter had recognised me and called me Madame Verhaegen, and where Adrien had seen my face close up and asked for the bill before dessert. We'd walked. It was drizzling, a fine rain that didn't really wet you, that settled on your hair like powdered glass. At the top of the steps down to the rue des Mouettes he stopped, as he did every evening, to say goodnight.

I said to him: come up.

He looked at me for a long time. He said: are you sure? I said: no. He said: then we'll wait. I said: I don't want to wait until I'm sure, I've spent a year and a half waiting to be sure of anything at all, I'm not sure of anything any more, come up.

He came up.

My flat is on the fourth floor of a sixties block, facing the sea, with a picture window that takes up the whole wall of the living room. Hugo had bought it before we were married. He'd had a partition knocked down so the sea would come in everywhere. At night, with the lights off, that's all you can see: the black sea, the lights of the cargo ships far out, the Westkapelle lighthouse turning over there, on the other side of the border, every three seconds.

I didn't turn the light on. He didn't ask me to.

In the hall, I took off my wedding ring.

I still wore it. I'd never taken it off, not even to sleep, not even in the shower, not even when I was working with the fixing chemicals, though I'd been told fixer tarnishes jewellery. I turned it round my finger, once, twice, and it came off, more easily than I'd have thought, as if it had been waiting. I put it in the ceramic dish on the hall table, where Hugo used to drop his keys. It made a small, clear sound.

Adrien saw. He said nothing. He waited for me to turn round.

He kissed me in the dark of the living room, against the picture window, with the sea behind me and the cold of the glass at my back through my blouse.

I hadn't remembered. That was the first thing I thought: I didn't remember it being like this. Seventeen months. You think the body forgets, that it shrinks, that it shuts up like a holiday house in winter, shutters closed, furniture under dust sheets. It forgets nothing. It waits. All it took was his mouth, slow, patient, and his hand flat between my shoulder blades, in no hurry, simply resting there, warm through the fabric, for everything to open up again at once, every room, every window, and for me to start trembling.

He felt me trembling. He stopped.

“We can stop,” he said against my temple.

“If you stop I'll throw you out of the window.”

He laughed, very quietly, and his laugh travelled down my neck.

I undressed him myself. I wanted to. I wanted it to be my hands deciding, this time, after a year and a half in which nothing had been up to me. The wool jumper that smelt of wood. The shirt, button by button. The body of someone who carries planks all day long, with another scar, a long one, down his left side, which I traced with a fingertip in the dark.

He let me. He stood still, arms at his sides, watching me with such attention that I felt I was the only thing lit in the room.

Then it was his turn. He undid my blouse the way he'd smoothed the notes on my counter, with a slowness that drove me mad. He kissed every inch he uncovered. When his lips closed over my breast through the lace I heard a sound I no longer knew I could make, a sound from deep in the throat, and I seized his hair in both hands.

We didn't make it to the bedroom. I didn't want the bedroom. The bedroom was Hugo.

There was the big sofa facing the sea, and the throw, and the lights of the cargo ships gliding very slowly past out at sea. He laid me down. He knelt. He took off my jeans, then the rest, unhurried, kissing the inside of my knee, the inside of my thigh, higher and higher, and I stopped thinking. There was nothing left but his mouth, his tongue, the heat rising, and the Westkapelle lighthouse turning, over there, behind my closed eyelids, once every three seconds, and I found myself counting the flashes without meaning to, and somewhere around the twentieth I could no longer count.

When he finally came into me, there were tears in my eyes.

Not sadness. Something else, too big, spilling over. He stopped, perfectly still deep inside me, his forehead against mine, and waited. I could feel his heart against my chest, pounding hard, as hard as mine. He said my name, just once, very low. Nobody had said it like that for a year and a half. Nobody had ever said it like that.

So I moved first. I wrapped my legs around the small of his back and drew him further in, harder, and he followed, and we found the rhythm together, slow at first, then not slow at all, the throw slipping to the floor, and the sea behind the glass seeing nothing, saying nothing, for once having taken nothing from me.

I came with a cry. I'd never cried out before. He followed me a few seconds later, his face buried in my neck, with a muffled sound, almost a moan.

We lay there a long time without moving. The throw on the floor. Our skin stuck together. His breathing slowing against my ear. Outside, a cargo ship went by, lit up from end to end, and I watched it cross the whole width of the picture window, from left to right, until it disappeared behind the frame.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I think I'm alive.”

He kissed my shoulder.

“That's a good start.”

Later he carried me into the spare room, the one I'd been sleeping in for a year and a half because I couldn't bear our bed any more. We made love again, more gently, almost asleep, in cold sheets that slowly warmed. I fell asleep with my cheek on his chest and his hand in my hair, and I dreamt of nothing. I hadn't slept without dreaming since Hugo died.

I woke at six. Day was breaking, grey and pink, as in the photo of the boat. He wasn't in the bed any more.

I found him in the living room. He was standing, dressed, barefoot, in front of the shelf where I keep the photographs. He didn't hear me come along the corridor.

He was looking at the photo of Hugo.

It's a print I made myself, in black and white, on fibre-based paper: Hugo at the helm of his yacht, in an oilskin, hair blowing in the wind, laughing at someone out of frame. At me. It was me, out of frame. I'd taken it the summer before he died.

Adrien was looking at it without touching it. His hands were at his sides, fists half closed. He was looking at it the way you look someone in the eye before you break bad news.

And he said, very quietly, so quietly I thought I'd misheard:

“I'm sorry.”

Then he turned round. He saw me in the corridor, in a T-shirt, arms folded. His face lit up. He crossed the living room, took me in his arms, said good morning into my hair, said do you want coffee, said I found the grinder but not the beans.

I didn't ask him who he was saying sorry to.

I told myself he was saying sorry to Hugo for being there, in his place, in his home, with his wife. It was a delicate thing to do. It was something only a good man would think of. I thought that, and I found him even more beautiful, and I went to get the coffee beans from the top cupboard.