Two Clocks at Once

Hannah rang on the first of March, and this time she didn't ask whether I was alright. She had a news item and she delivered it like a woman who has been carrying a full cup across a crowded room.

"The board has moved things forward," she said. "Director of Client Strategy. It's yours to lose, Ellie, and I say that as someone who very much wanted it herself. They'd like a panel on the fourteenth, in person, and a decision by the thirty-first. London base, three days a week from May. The rest can be remote."

I was at the kitchen table again, with the laptop propped against the fruit bowl, and I looked at the fruit while she talked. A lemon was going soft at the bottom of the pile. I made a note to do something about it.

"Ellie?"

"I'm here. That's a very serious offer."

"It's a serious number too. I'll send the details." A small, decent pause. "I know the timing is difficult. Whatever it is that's keeping you in France. But I'd be doing you no favours if I let you hear about this from the grapevine."

I thanked her. I closed the laptop. I put the lemon in the bin.

Then I did what I had done with Copenhagen a year before, which was nothing at all, with great concentration.

***

There were two calendars in that house now, though only one of them was on the fridge.

The one on the fridge was Julien's. Maître Dubois had called in the second week of February to say that the family judge had set the hearing for the ninth of May, and Julien had written it on the grid in black pen, in the small square letters he used for things he didn't want to read. The other calendar was in my head, and it had a date on it too, and the two dates sat in my mind like a pair of trains approaching one junction from different directions.

The thirty-first of March. The ninth of May.

I knew I should tell him. I knew it in my bones, the way I'd known it a year ago, with the same sick, specific clarity. And I knew all the reasons I wasn't going to, which were also the same: that he was drowning, that it was unfair to hand a drowning man another stone, that I hadn't decided anything yet. But there was a new reason this time, one I didn't like to look at. Julien had stopped telling me things. If I handed him mine, I'd be the only one of us still keeping the account open.

So I said, over breakfast on the twelfth, "The London office wants me in for a couple of days. Some meetings."

He was reading the post. He looked up, and something moved behind his face and was put away. "Of course. You should go."

"Will you be alright?"

"My mother can take Lucas. Madame Roux will manage the house."

"That wasn't what I asked."

"I know," he said, and smiled, and there was nothing in it at all.

Lucas gave me his present at the door. It was a drawing, folded in four, on paper he'd evidently been saving. A tall figure with a suitcase, an aeroplane, a small house with an enormous chimney, and a dinosaur in a scarf holding a sign that read THIS WAY. Underneath, in uneven capitals: SO YOU REMEMBER THE WAY BACK.

"I'll remember," I said.

"You have to put it in your bag, not your pocket. Pockets are where things get lost."

I put it in my bag. I held on to the strap all the way to the airport.

***

My flat was cold and smelled of dust and the last of someone else's life. It took me a minute to realise the someone was me. The plant on the windowsill, the one I'd sworn would survive anything, had died in its pot, and the radiator clanked its familiar apology as I turned it on. I stood in the middle of my own sitting room with my coat on and felt like a guest at a very old party.

The panel was on the fourteenth. I'd been afraid I would be rusty. Instead I walked into that boardroom and heard myself talking, fluent and quick, with the sharp, clean pleasure of a muscle remembering its job. I found the weak joint in their client proposal inside ten minutes. I made the chair, a silver-haired man named Anselm Hartley who had once told me I reminded him why he'd joined the firm, laugh out loud. When I stopped, nobody said anything for a moment, and I understood with a lurch that I was good at this. I was very good at this. It had simply been a long time since anyone had been in the room to see.

"We want you," Hartley said, afterwards, in the corridor. "May, three days in the office. We would, of course, work around whatever you need." He looked at me with kindly, shrewd attention. "But we do need to know by the thirty-first. The board won't hold it longer."

"You'll have an answer by then."

"I rather hoped it would be yes."

I smiled and said I knew. In the lift, alone, I pressed my palm flat against the cool steel wall and stood very still, because for the length of three floors I had wanted it so badly I could taste it.

That was the part I hadn't expected. I'd thought the choice would be between a thing I wanted and a thing I owed. It was between two things I wanted, and wanting both was so much worse.

My sister texted as I came out onto the street. Well?? Then, before I could answer, a second one: You've got that look. I can feel it from here. Have you told him yet?

It's not that simple, I typed.

It's exactly that simple. It's just not easy.

I stared at the screen until the little dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again. Then, finally: You're holding two tickets for the same train, Ellie. Sooner or later someone checks.

I put the phone in my pocket and walked to the river, to the bench where I used to do my thinking, and found that I had nothing at all to think with.

***

Julien rang at nine that night. I was sitting on the floor of the flat with a mug of tea and Lucas's drawing propped against the dead plant.

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Well." I closed my eyes. "It went well."

"Good." A beat. In the background Lucas was singing, loudly and without key, something about a diplodocus. "I'm glad."

There was a pause. I could have filled it. I opened my mouth, and I had the first word ready, the real one, when his phone buzzed against the receiver with a second call and his voice shifted away from me.

"It's Dubois," he said. "I should take this."

"Go."

"I'll ring tomorrow."

"Julien."

"Yes?"

I love you. I'm frightened. I've been offered something I can't stop thinking about, and I don't know if I'm allowed to want it.

"Sleep well," I said.

He rang off. I sat on the floor with the cooling tea and the dead plant and the drawing of a dinosaur pointing the way home, and I did the arithmetic of the next six weeks, and every answer I reached was a different kind of loss.

I fell asleep on the sofa in my clothes.

It was ten to seven on Friday morning when my phone began to ring. I woke with a start, with the cold grey light in the window, and I knew the name on the screen was wrong before I'd properly read it. It wasn't Julien.

It was his mother.

"Ellie." Hélène's voice, always so composed, was high and thin and very fast. "Ne t'inquiète pas. Listen to me first. He's alive. He's alive, he's talking, he's alright. But you must come."