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Last Summer
by
Máire Napier

‘I am one of those rare people who knows genuine contentment’, I wrote in my journal last year. ‘I am married to a man who loves me, and whom I love; we are healthy and have four wonderful children. We are financially secure, and have all the benefits which go with that. What more could I ask for?’

I pack for our summer holiday with a sense of sorrow. Fragmented pictures crowd my mind and flit in silent corners at the fringes of my consciousness with the untold strength of insects’ wings fighting windows. I think of other summers, our anticipation filling long winter nights, whole evenings spent around the table spread with maps, each moment’s pleasure planned. This time, I dread each moment without you, knowing I will have to confront the reality of my own misery.

We go to France every year. It started when the children were small, and we wanted them out, all of us out, away from Northern Ireland for the duration of the July ‘Troubles’. The children thrived on bread and cheese and tomatoes, and long days of walking while their father pointed out maize and wheat; the ‘cornflakes fields’, they called them. At night we all slept together, a jumble of limbs in a tiny tent. We built our little empire on French cheese and cheap red wine slugged from plastic glasses, drunk on our love of France and each other, our nightly love-making fierce and silent with the children beside us, too young to be anything but oblivious.

I am always surprised that the cottage is exactly as we have left it, even though it might be several months since our last visit. After a couple of hours, it’s as if we have never been away. The ritual of coming back never wavers – the children take their bikes out for inspection, and go to say ‘Bonjour’ to Grandmère and Grandpère, our elderly neighbours, while I make up beds, and wash the crockery which has gathered dust on open shelves. My husband goes to walk the land, and speak to old friends. I watch his retreating back, knowing things can never be the same again.

The temperature rises daily, the mercury heading inexorably towards 35°, a repeat of the 'canicule' of 2003. The sun is reflected off the old stone walls; it is cooler inside than out. Heat shimmers above yellowing grass, and crickets sing a hidden chorus in the orchard where we spread rugs daily to sunbathe. The news bulletins ask medical students to stand by in case the health service cannot cope. Clothes washed in the early morning are crisp dry by ten o’clock, smelling as if they had been laundered in sunshine itself. Sun scorches carefully sun-screened skin, its hot intensity matched by the constant ache of wanting you.

Last night I dreamt my husband was gone – dead, or perhaps he had left me -and I woke, soaked with sweat, believing my grief to be real. But he lay beside me, breathing steadily. Driven by sudden desire, I seduced him from sleep, his breathless shock arousing us both further into a frantic coupling that had little to do with love. Afterwards, propped on one elbow, I watched sleep reclaim him. But I could not sleep, and I read until the morning light filtered round the edges of the shutters. Later, I wonder if my dream was a lament for my dying marriage.

In the afternoons, we go to the café in the square, and sit at a rickety table on the terrace drinking sharp, icy Muscadet from glasses misty with condensation. We are the only customers. The silence is broken only by the sound of laughter from the children splashing in the nearby pool, and the incongruous roar of training fighter planes tilting and spinning across the endless Breton sky. An ancient Citroën, slung low to the ground, lumbers through the village.

The granite fireplace, boarded up now, rears behind the intricately carved headboard. The bedroom window closes in the French style, folding in on itself like the wings of a butterfly. Harvestmen, elegant on sculpted legs, scurry in unused, silent corners of the whitewashed room. Every morning, I make the huge bed. It is quite unlike doing it at home. The bottom sheet is flat, not fitted. I smooth it carefully, executing perfect envelope corners, and overlaying it with a delicate lace coverlet. There is something satisfying about the wide, immaculate expanse, and for a moment I long to lie down on its impeccable whiteness, close my eyes and float away. I light a lavender candle, inhaling its distinctive fragrance. I read once that men adore the scent, without knowing what it is. In the late afternoon, before the children come back from their swim, we will make love in this cool, shuttered room, moving slowly and wordlessly in the dimness with the familiarity of a lifetime together, until we are poised on a mutual cliff edge. The French call it la petite mort – little death.

I learn the deceits of illicit lovers. Late in the evening I leave the cottage, where the children are playing a board game with their father, and walk towards the hill that rises behind the house to phone you. It is only now, when I cannot have you, that I realise how much I want you. Your voice is low, as if you are afraid someone might overhear you. I look at the Plough, its outline just beginning to glimmer in a mauve sky, and wonder if you can see it too.

We walked in the park that first afternoon, under a kind early summer sun, watching teenagers on study-leave pull bottles from blue carrier bags. We sat on the grass, close and entwined. Fingers stroked skin, my hand lay on your thigh, rubbing the denim gently. We kissed for the first time. ‘Yes, please,' you said. I was afraid to touch you after that; I could sense your response, and was shocked at my own.

In the hotel room later, I pulled you towards me at last. Almost at once, I sensed rather than heard you sob, the sound catching in your throat, and felt the raining tears on my face as you cried out the barren loneliness of years. I knew your flight from lovelessness had just begun, and my journey from truth would tread a parallel path. I watched you dress, each movement taking you a little further out of my reach, gone from me from the moment I can no longer touch you. I didn’t want to let you go. As you left the room, you turned blue eyes upon me, and it seemed your gaze sought my soul.

The cottage walls, adorned with pictures and photographs, chart a history of family life, so that we leave a little piece of ourselves in France each time we go home. Small faces peek from under fringes, first days at school are regimented into strict hierarchy, surfing shots jostle haphazardly with images of swimming and tennis. Our lives are documented around the walls; a family, a marriage, a life. You thread through my thoughts, becoming part of the fabric of my life, a warp and weft that once upon a time held my very own fairy tale. My journal lies open on the table. I do not read the entries from last summer.

© Máire Napier 2007.

Máire Napier is a musician by training, and has taught for many years.
Having achieved a 'Distinction' in the Open University's Creative Writing course last year, she has recently given up work in order to write full time.
She is married with three children.

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