Without Her Read online

  When you are young, you can’t say what you have liked or disliked about a film. It simply swallows you whole, it becomes your life. Nobody could have asked me at that time what I thought about War and Peace. It had simply become a sacred object.

  It was not until I was older, and saw Bergman’s Wild Strawberries at the Arts in Cambridge, that I first thought, somebody made this film: it is connected with a person’s life.

  Hannah and I lived War and Peace for at least a whole school term. In dancing class, we conjured up the ballroom scene, in which Andrey asks Natasha to dance, at her first ball. We clicked heels, bowed over each other’s hands. We reenacted the balcony scene in the school cloakrooms, where you could perch on lockers and gaze up at the hanging gym clothes on hooks that were masking a Moscow night sky, and take turns to be Natasha on her balcony and Andrey standing smiling in the shadows, hearing her rapture. We played the death scene, over and over, Hannah lying on the narrow gym benches, expiring, “I saw a door …” as handsome Prince Andrey closes his eyes forever and distraught Natasha bends over him. We did the field at Austerlitz, and Pierre stumbling among the war dead; but at fourteen, fifteen, we preferred the love stories, the ballrooms, the Moscow nights. Much later, when I saw the long Russian version with its magnificent wolf hunt and its grimmer battle scenes, I knew that it was a far better film, and that the Hollywood one we had so loved was—well, Hollywood—but I could still not forget the poignancy of Henry Fonda wandering on the field of battle, and Hepburn herself searching for her love among the wounded.

  That was when Hannah announced that she was going to learn Russian. Her parents had written a letter, and they were going to have to fit the whole timetable around her Russian lessons now. And that winter, long before everyone else began wearing fur hats because of Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago, she sported a fine black one that sat upon her fair hair like a prize, and made me envious all over again, of how she not only had ideas, but acted on them. She was as Russian as she could be, in her own eyes; and so she was in mine. She had invented an elsewhere for herself, where nobody could follow.

  Was it here, the continuation of her need to escape? To have an alternative life? I can’t believe that she has gone to live undercover in Moscow, like Edward Snowden. Yet anything is possible.

  9.

  Philip and I move about in our solitary ways in this house that feels so empty without her; I hear him in the bathroom, his footsteps in the corridor. I’ve slept for eight hours straight when I come downstairs again to find him at the breakfast table. It’s as if he is waiting for her to come down, and for a moment I almost expect her, sleepy, in a dressing-gown, barefoot on the stairs. I wonder: if somebody trusts you absolutely, is there something they are unwilling to look at, to consider? I can never quite trust Hannah the way he seems to, because I know her, I know better. But I love her still, with her occasional flightiness, her bouts of secrecy, her refusal to name names.

  He sits opposite me at the table, unrolls his table napkin, and begins to butter a croissant, just as if she were not missing somewhere in Europe, with the police looking for her, and all the attendant possible danger this entails. He takes a big mouthful of coffee and says, “Marie-Laure brought the croissants. She always looks after us so well, I don’t know what we’d do without her.”

  I nod. It’s almost as if his losing Marie-Laure and her soup-making, croissant-buying abilities would be just as serious as having lost his wife.

  “Phil,” I say, “we should talk about Hannah, shouldn’t we? I mean, time might be vital. How many days since she went missing?”

  Does he, I wonder, assume that if he keeps the outer structure going—unfolding a napkin, drinking coffee, going through the ordinary motions of life—that this will bring her back to him? Apparently, it always has. He’s holding the stable door open, a stable full of dry hay and bran, so that the errant horse can return of her own free will.

  “Let’s see, I arrived on Tuesday, it must be, what, three days. Since she was due to arrive. She wasn’t on the train to Avignon. It seems she was on the Eurostar, though.”

  “Do you remember her doing anything like this before?” With you, I mean, not with me. She has left me in the lurch, and come back to me with a smile and no apology—how many times?”

  He goes on eating, as if all this were simply normal. “No, she hasn’t just disappeared before. I’ve always known where she was, even if she only left me a note. More coffee, Claudia? Try this apricot jam.”

  I can hardly bear it, the peacefulness, the calm. I put down my bowl. “No, no thanks. Phil—I don’t know, but shouldn’t we be doing something?” Yet I’m also thinking, if Hannah wants to go missing, then she won’t want to be found.

  Later today, his grown children are to arrive. We will not have the opportunity to talk about Hannah on our own. Piers and Melissa, her twins, must be in their forties by now: I haven’t seen them since they were kids, or at least since they left home to go to college and on into their apparently successful lives. He’s waiting, I see, for them to know what to do: to tell him, Dad, we must act. Until then we will hang about the house, eating meals that Marie-Laure has mostly prepared, although I say I’m quite willing to do some cooking. I will swim laps in the turquoise pool that sits in its flowery frame under the mountain. I’ll lie out with a hat and sun cream on, making up for the muggy heat of Virginia summers that makes you want to stay indoors in air-conditioned cool. I’ll behave as if Hannah hasn’t disappeared, but is about to join me, slopping out on to the terrace in her flip-flops and swimsuit, setting down a drink, a book, coming to join me with a sigh of pleasure in the cool water blued to perfection by the paint on the bottom of the pool. I’ll try, anyway. He too must be trying not to allow in the scenes that lurk so easily in our minds, from all the photographs and news items we have seen: murdered women, women gone missing, a bag, a shoe found, the dread implications accepted at last.

  He wipes his mouth with a napkin and says to me, “You’re right. Think, Claude. Please. Anything you can remember about her, anything she may have said, the smallest clue. Is there anything? I know you two write to each other.”

  Apart from a jokey exchange of Christmas cards, mine lazily online, and an email or two about summer plans, I haven’t been in touch with Hannah this year. I think back to a year ago, here, in this same house that seems so eerily quiet and uninhabited without her. I came for a few days only. I was going to Croatia, for a conference. Or was that when I went to Rome for the Cinecittà festival? Anyway, I was only in Europe for a short time. And yes, I stopped in Paris to see Alexandre. The summers have resembled each other, over the last few years: the times I’ve visited them in their house, the meals, the swims, the books, the talks, the growing anxiety—still then a small cloud on the horizon—about Europe, and refugees, and climate change, and distant war. Last time, what was different about last time? I remember going into Avignon with Hannah, sitting in a café—it was, must have been, after the theater festival there, as the streets were fairly empty. We faced the great red walls of the Palace of the Popes. We were going to see a film, that was it. The one about the two women in Switzerland, with Juliette Binoche. Philip had not wanted to come—no, you two go, I want to see the match, it’s the quarterfinals, anyway that’s more of a women’s film, isn’t it? I remember not saying what I wanted to, irritated once again at this division into films for women, films for men, it always seems so infantile, as if we aren’t all involved together in this huge event, called Life. But yes, Juliette Binoche and Kristin Stewart, and clouds coming down a valley. Hannah and I in a café beforehand, drinking Campari, watching the sun paint those famous walls. If it was the quarterfinals of the World Cup, it must have been before the festival. June? And what did we talk about? Hannah was thinking about getting an apartment in Avignon, I remember now. The house, all the way out there in the country, we’re too isolated, we have to use the car to go anywhere, what will happen wh
en we get too old? It’s too big for a holiday house, and it costs a fortune to keep it going when we’re not there. I remember that I nodded and agreed with her—I’ve recently found the house slightly imprisoning, with its automatic gates and alarms, its remoteness from other people and their lives.

  “But I thought you and Phil loved the countryside?”

  “Well, yes, we used to, but now we hardly go out into it. He has to put up taller and taller fences to keep out the wild boars, or they’d come in and eat everything, trample the garden to bits. Anyway, I’m thinking that if we had a flat, I could just come down sometimes on my own.”

  She said that, and now I wonder if I should tell Philip; or is it an open topic between them, have they talked it over, even made plans?

  “Did she ever talk to you about getting an apartment in Avignon?”

  “No? Whatever for? This house is quite enough for us to deal with.”

  “It was just something she said, last time I was here. One evening when we went to a movie. She thought it would be easier for you both as you got older.”

  Philip flinches, or it looks like that to me. “After all the work we’ve put into this house? Anyway, we aren’t in our dotage, exactly.”

  “I know.” I want to be calming, agreeable. I see how easily, now, he is upset. I see too, there have been cracks, there have been disagreements, and things not said.

  “What else did she say?” He’s on to it now like a detective; as if I have all the clues.

  “Nothing, really. What about this illness you mentioned? You said she had been unwell?”

  “Yes, just this last winter. She was seeing her doctor. You know how she hates talking about that sort of thing. Very private. Very discreet. She probably didn’t want to upset me. But I wish she’d told me, I really do.”

  “What sort of doctor did she see? Gynecologist, neurologist? Cardiologist? Osteopath? What?” I’m thinking, how peculiar their marriage is, really: these people live together for a lifetime and don’t talk to each other when they have been to the doctor?

  “Oh, I think just our GP. We don’t go to specialists all the time, the way you do in the States.”

  “You said she went to London, Phil.”

  “Oh yes. The one time, she did. Or maybe, once or twice.”

  “Do you have any idea what it was?”

  “Not really. Aches and pains. Used to keep her awake sometimes at night.”

  I imagine Hannah wrapped in a shawl like a Russian heroine, awake and staring into the night. And Philip, asleep in the bed she has just left. It’s unbelievable. I wonder if all marriages are like this, with dark areas like on the satellite map of the world seen from space, intense clusters of electric light in just a few places, linked by invisible power lines.

  “Phil, before the twins get here, I think it’s really important that you tell me what you know about this mystery illness.”

  He stares across at me, distress written across his face making him plainer than ever; but honest, caring, truthful to a fault. “There were some pills in the bathroom cupboard. Painkillers. Also stuff for epileptics, I think. Neo-something. I suppose that was what she was taking.” He sees and accepts my amazement at the dark spaces I have glimpsed in his marriage, in his long years with Hannah.

  “She seemed better, with the spring. I thought it might be seasonal. You know, we had a hard winter.”

  “And you never asked her, Phil? Why she was taking that drug? Do you think she would have talked to Melissa? Maybe a daughter would be an easier person to tell?”

  “Knowing Hannah,” he says, as if I don’t, “I don’t think she would have told anyone.”

  “But this might be a major clue. She could have gone off somewhere to—I don’t know. Be alone? Get over something?”

  “Without telling me?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  I’m thinking—do we know the same person? And what can come of this talk? He’s showing me a strange mixture of calm and desperation; I can see from his grip on his spoon how tense he is. But he has decided—yes, decided—that she will come back to him.

  “Claude, there isn’t somebody in France, is there? I mean, someone she might have gone to see. You know, and not tell me about?”

  “I don’t think so. I can’t think of anybody.” I watch him get up to make coffee in their incredibly high-tech espresso machine.

  He comes back with two tiny cups. “She’s been to Paris a couple of times in the past to meet writers we publish. I just wondered if she might have needed to—well, see someone without telling me.”

  “There was somebody she knew at the Sorbonne? Apart from her, her name was Simone someone—I don’t know.”

  I think, of course, Alexandre. But no, I’ve just seen him; both his initial surprise at news of her disappearance and his lack of interest in her whereabouts were evidently real. I put the thought away.

  PART II

  10.

  Hannah and I met Alexandre on a train. We were going to Italy, on our first trip away from our parents, she and I—our first foray into Europe. She was eighteen, I nineteen. We had finished our first year at university, it was the long vacation, we were facing outward at last into the world we had dreamed of through the years of our incarceration. This first summer of our freedom we had three months stretching ahead of us that would lead, we knew, into the rest of life: France, Italy, the future.

  He got on in Paris, after our train had made its long loop round from the Gare Saint-Lazare to the Gare de Lyon. As the train pulled out, as we faced south, really going into Europe now, no fear of being turned back, he leaned in the corridor, smoking a cigarette, a boy in a black leather jacket with shaggy brown hair. We had a way of sizing up boys in those days, with a lifted eyebrow, a moue of interrogation, copied from some sixties’ movie star. We exchanged a glance behind his back, as we slid past to go back to our compartment. It was evening, and Paris was settling into long summer dusk as the train moved out between the shadowy buildings, the pools of yellow light.

  “We’re off, then,” Hannah said, bouncing back on to her seat, crossing her legs in their tiny skirt. “Life, Claude. Life is a big adventure.”

  We said things like this to each other, then. Statements about Life, Love, Loss. One of her favorites was, “Here is a girl who has lived, loved, lost, and lived to love again.” She had it pinned up over her bed in college; if it sounded tragic and solemn, I privately thought that Hannah’s loves were never long-lasting enough to deserve such an epitaph—but then, whose were?

  We smoked, and swigged from a bottle of water. The train lurched and rattled, swaying along the track of our future, which, unknown to us then, contained this shaggy young man we had just passed in the corridor. A man in uniform came in and began to pull down the blinds quite violently, but as soon as he had gone, we pulled them up a foot; we were not going to miss a single view that this journey offered. Later, he came round, scowling, to turn the seats into couchettes, and we and the four others in the compartment began shuffling and hitching ourselves and our belongings around, to fit us to the narrow shelves on which we would spend the night.

  “Let’s find the bar,” Hannah said. “It’s far too early to go to sleep.”

  A big Frenchman in shirtsleeves who seemed unlikely to fit into a couchette, headed out in front of us, smelling of Gauloises. We followed him along the swaying corridor, in the direction of where a bar might be. There in the corridor, staring moodily out into the growing dark of eastern France, was Alexandre. Perhaps he was being a movie star too: Alain Delon turning a pure profile; Belmondo running his thumb along his upper lip.

  I said in my schoolgirl French to him, “Where is the bar?” It was the first sentence I ever spoke in what was to be our life-long friendship. He sometimes reminds me of that.

  He says he had always known that English girls were both lesbians
and alcoholics, and I say, you were wrong about one thing, at least.

  He jerked his thumb down the corridor. “But it will be full of mauvais types. Why don’t you join me, I have a not-bad bottle of wine and some saucisson, a sandwich if you like.”

  He fetched his bottle and we passed it back and forth, filling our mouths with red wine as if we were gargling. Then he passed the sandwich, a whole baguette in which we all left teeth-marks. It did have some very good peppery sausage in it. Then he passed his cigarettes. We all stood in a row, peering out, in the train corridor, while behind us large people seemed to be getting into various stages of undress to pass the night with strangers both above and below them. Couchettes were six to a compartment, with the sexes unsegregated, so there was some pretty loud and intrusive snoring, as well as the smell of feet and cigarettes. We hung out in the corridor with our new friend as long as our legs would hold us up, and we all laughed increasingly loudly until the guard came and told us to shut up and go to our compartments. Since there was a group of French soldiers, en route for Algeria, just up the corridor doing exactly what we were doing, only louder, this seemed unfair. People want to sleep, the guard said. It’s late. Then Alexandre said, “Oui, faut dormir …,” so we all cranked our doors open—he was in a compartment two doors down—and slunk in past the snoring sleepers, tripping over our feet and various parcels and bags in the dark, to find our ladders. Hannah and I had the top bunks, and climbing drunkenly up the ladders made us giggle and snort, and I put a foot on the prone body, or perhaps face, of the person below me and heard an angry protest, ça alors, before I tumbled face down on my bunk. The train clattered and roared through darkness, only a flash behind the drawn blinds showing where a station passed; then it slowed in a series of bumps, with an unbelievably long-drawn screech of brakes, and we all banged into the wall beside us and a collective rumble of alarm spread through the train, as if we were caged animals woken to some trauma in our jungle past. What had happened? Were we stopping in a station? We heard shouts in the corridor. The man below me sat up, banged his head on the bottom of my bunk, swore, putain de merde. I looked down on a bald crown surrounded by ruffled hair. A woman was clutching her breast as if she was having a heart attack. The big man on the bottom bunk sat up in his undershirt, hairy shoulders and broad furred back. “Ils ont arreté le train.” They have stopped the train.