Elaine Bedell - About That Night

Elizabeth struggled to get to her feet and Jamie tried to help her, but she pushed him away angrily. Vic came running, with her husband Mark close behind her, and as they got to her, Elizabeth was feverishly shredding the flowers, a carnage of dismembered blue and yellow petals scattered around her like confetti. Vic lifted her by the arms and it was as if she was drunk, she couldn’t stand. Her mother appeared, crying, arms outstretched as if to catch her. Then Vic and her mum were steering her back down the town hall steps, her feet tripping crazily against each other. Mark was yelling for a taxi, and Elizabeth looked around, bewildered, for Jamie. But he was nowhere to be seen.

Elizabeth pulled her coat around her, feeling shivery. She had dawdled too long – she was late for Hutch. Café Cecile, at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, was a faded patisserie which served tired croque monsieur and stale pastries. Madame Cecile herself had also seen better days and she was more often than not to be found sitting on the back step of the kitchen, puffing on a cigarette and rubbing her swollen ankles. But she stocked a reasonable cache of very drinkable wine and being still mostly French, she allowed Hutch to smoke the odd Gauloise inside, at the table nearest the back door. But the main attraction of Café Cecile was that no one Elizabeth and Hutch knew would ever dream of going there. In the early, heady, getting-to-know-you days, she took to wearing a French beret and once presented Hutch with a copy of James Fenton’s ‘In Paris with You’:

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre,

If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,

If we skip the Champs Elysées,

And remain here in this sleazy

Old hotel room,

Doing this and that

To what and whom,

Learning who you are,

Learning what I am.

Their relationship had blossomed, along with Elizabeth’s astonishment that Hutch knew not a single poem, not even a limerick, resulting in her consequent determination to introduce him to the Romantics. And so his poetic education had progressed in tune with their affair, so that in time he became used to having not only Elizabeth in his bed, but also Keats, Byron and the Liverpudlians. Hutch liked her reading aloud to him and she liked to show off, and so they’d idle away hours over the poetry, the wine, and each other. It was almost as good as a dirty weekend in a backstreet hotel in Le Marais, a weekend they often talked dreamily about, but which had so far failed to materialise. Café Cecile would have to do.

By the time she arrived, Hutch was sitting at their usual table, an empty glass of red wine beside a plate of crumbs and a half-drunk bottle. She looked at him through the glass and the raindrops that separated them. His blue eyes were narrowed against the light, but they didn’t move from her face. His face seemed fuller; Elizabeth noticed his neck was creasing into the collar of his shirt. He’d had a haircut – it was clipped close to his head, like an army buzz cut. It seemed to make his features, his nose, his chin, more obvious. His forehead was furrowed, his dark, almost black, eyebrows raised in that familiar ironic expression, his mouth suggestively half open, those full lips inviting. She stood still, hands thrust deep into her pockets, her hair clinging limply to her face. He was wearing the pink checked shirt she’d once bought him and she wondered if he’d chosen it deliberately or if it was an accident of fate. Or maybe Sue had chosen it for him? Elizabeth imagined rows of freshly laundered shirts on padded silk coat hangers, his wife running her hands over them, lifting one down, laying it carefully on the bed for him. She clenched her fists in her pockets. There was still something unreachable about Hutch, some bit of him she couldn’t penetrate. She hesitated. She could run away, right now. But then Hutch half stood up, still not taking his eyes off her, and his arm was stretched out, his hand open like a supplicant, and she felt the familiar enticing pull. She shrugged as if to say, here I am, the old fool, back again. She opened the door and stepped inside.

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