The Crane Wife(24)
Author: Patrick Ness

The knock came a third time, along with a muffled call. She paused, a sticky action figure in one hand, a sticky fire truck in another. She debated whether to risk it, but that fish salesman had also been calling things as he knocked (‘Fresh fish!’ she assumed, but would it really matter?). She waited, but whoever it was didn’t try a third time. She dumped the toys into the toy box and, with a sigh, decided the room was clean enough and all she really wanted was to get her beautiful boy off to bed after his weekly call with Henri and watch crappy Saturday evening telly by herself with a cup of tea and some sarcastic tweeting to her sixteen followers.

‘Wriggle dance!’ JP shouted, leaping to his feet and commencing to wriggle vigorously.

Amanda’s mobile rang. She stepped into the kitchen to rinse the sticky off her hands before taking it out of her pocket.

The display read, to her mild surprise, Henri.

‘You’re early,’ she answered. ‘He’s–’

‘You are home,’ Henri said, his accent, as ever, a surprising combination of spiky and warm. ‘I can hear the television. Why do you not answer your door?’

‘It was unexpected,’ he shrugged over a cup of tea. ‘I am back on the Eurostar tomorrow evening, and we only come because Claudine’s mother got trapped in her hotel room.’

Amanda paused in her own tea-sipping. ‘Trapped?’

Henri made a dismissive Gallic wave. ‘For most people, this is surprising. For Claudine’s mother . . .’ He shrugged again, a burden he was willing to put up with.

(JP had been beside himself at Henri’s appearance. ‘Papa! Papa! Je suis tortillant! Tortiller avec moi!’ And indeed, Henri had been up for a bit of paternal wriggling. It had taken ages to get JP down to bed after that, but Henri had asked to do it himself, even giving him a bath and reading him a story – Le Petit Prince, of course – before JP finally drifted off. Amanda had even tried not to feel irritated at how pleased with himself Henri looked after completing the tasks she did daily to no audience whatsoever.)

‘So where’s Claudine now?’ she asked.

‘On her way back to France,’ Henri said, and Amanda thought there was nothing more French in the world than a Frenchman saying France. ‘Her mother is using my ticket. I could not get another until tomorrow.’

‘It took both of you to save her mother?’

Henri rolled his eyes as if asking for mercy from the gods. ‘You will have to believe yourself very lucky not to have met her. Your mother, so different, so English, so nice. I very much love Claudine’ – he was looking away so he didn’t see Amanda’s small flinch – ‘she is like the oboe playing Bach, but her maman . . .’

He took another sip of his tea. ‘Thank you for allowing this intrusion.’ His voice was without cynicism or hidden meaning. He really was grateful. ‘I really am grateful,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ she said, in a small voice.

There was a short, careful silence. ‘May I ask how are you?’ he said.

‘You may.’

He smiled back at her, in a way that made her stomach sink down to her toes. She loved him, she loved him, she loved him, she hated the French motherfucker, mostly for how much she loved him, but oh she loved loved loved him still, the handsome bastard. ‘So, how are you?’ he asked again.

She opened her mouth to say ‘I’m fine’, but what came out instead was ‘I can’t seem to stop crying lately’.

And to her surprise, it was true. She’d never considered herself much of a crier, but lately, oh, just lately. Crying when she talked with her father, crying at the slightest bit of TV sentiment, crying when a lift door closed before she reached it. It was infuriating, which weirdly only made her cry more.

‘Are you depressed?’ Henri asked, not unkindly.

‘Only if that means being angry all the time.’

‘I think the word for that is Amanda-esque.’ He raised his eyebrows in a way that only the French ever bothered with, but it was still friendly. This detente was still fairly new. Henri visited often enough to be sure JP kept his physical presence fresh in his memory, but it had, for the first couple of years, been like the exchange of nuclear secrets between hostile agents, with her, if she was honest, by far the more hostile. Over time, though, it had become too tiring to stay so constantly mad at him. She had thawed from strained to curt, from curt to polite, from polite to this almost friendliness, one which, in a way, was almost harder to take, because if she could be this calm with him, then that probably meant the spark had completely gone, hadn’t it? All that furious passion had at least been passion. The thought made her frown, and Henri mistook her expression.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, setting down his cup of tea. ‘I do not wish to offer you reason to shout at me.’

‘Is that all you think I did? Shout at you?’

‘There was quite a lot of shouting.’

‘There was quite a lot to be shouting at.’

He grinned. ‘And we are nearly there again. But please, I did not come for an argument. I came to see my son, and I would very happily do so in peace, if we can agree?’

Amanda said nothing, just swished the last bit of cold tea across the bottom of her cup as she looked at him. He was annoyingly tanned, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped very short to downplay a receding hairline. It only made him look sexier, though, as did the slightly French cut of his t-shirt and the slightly French wisp of chest hair over its collar.

‘This bothers me, the crying,’ he said, leaning towards her on the settee. ‘It cannot be good for you. It cannot be good for Jean-Pierre if his mother is sad.’

She thought for a moment. ‘I really don’t think they’re entirely sad tears. They’re more angry.’

‘These are not very different shadings.’

He was still there, leaning close enough to smell, an achingly familiar scent that was partly the honey soap she knew he was partial to, partly the cigarette he’d no doubt had on the walk here from the Tube, and partly just Henri, the individual smell that anyone had, made alluring or off-putting only because of the person who wore it.

Alluring. Or off-putting. Or alluring.

Goddamn him.

She reached up and ran a hand across his cheek. The stubble softly scraped her fingertips.

‘Amanda,’ Henri said.

He didn’t back away as she neared him, didn’t back away as she unquestionably entered his personal space, didn’t back away as her lips touched his.