Out of Sight (14 page)

The bill paid, they left the restaurant and Patrice sobered
up in the icy wind blowing off the sea, shaking off his odd mood. Taking her arm, he looked down at her as they rounded a corner. ‘Are you all right?' he asked. ‘We're okay, aren't we?'

Leonie nodded, forcing a smile, but, in truth, she felt unaccountably tired.

They came out onto the Promenade des Anglais and turned to walk along to their hotel. The freezing wind swept at them off the dark sea, tasting of salt, and Patrice laughed. ‘I love this biting cold, don't you?' When she didn't reply, he asked again: ‘We're all right, aren't we?'

She pressed his arm close against her side. ‘Of course we are!'

They did not make love that night, for which Leonie held herself to account. In the morning, determined to throw off her pique, she delighted in Patrice's pleasure at the birthday gifts she had chosen with such care. Audra had found them for her – proper Belle Epoque brass stair rods for the hallway, something Leonie knew he had been searching for, and an old Moroccan fruit bowl glazed in soft greens and browns. Unable to drag them on the train, she had photographed the rods laid out in a pattern around the bowl, then printed out the images to place inside his card. Eager to escape their slightly too cramped, slightly too hot hotel room, they went out, walked on the blustery beach, then spent hours chatting about nothing over the kind of brunch they never dreamt of eating at home,
complete with a celebratory chocolate
gâteau
which they were unable to finish.

Afterwards, the plummeting temperature and paltry light left little to do until their train left that evening except return to their hotel room where, enervated by the long winter afternoon, they lay side by side reading their books, inhibited from initiating sex by the strange bed and thin walls. Later, tucked up in their banquettes on the train, they held hands and dozed companionably as if they had indeed successfully accomplished the perfect weekend away.

They arrived back in Riberac around Monday lunchtime. Making the excuse that she wanted to fetch his gifts, Leonie went straight to her apartment. In fact she could wait no longer to try the pregnancy kit that she had managed to buy while Patrice had been occupied choosing a newspaper.

She locked herself in the bathroom, despite there being no one to spy on her, took the predictor stick out of its box and sat on the loo to pee. Then she counted off the seconds of two extraordinary minutes, staring sightlessly into the basin's plug-hole. Taking a deep breath, she dared to look: it was positive! The dream of many years. A child. A child with a man she loved more tenderly than she had ever imagined possible. She gazed at the stick. Life was growing inside her right now, a life they had created together. She grinned at herself in the mirror, mocking her own cliché-ridden thoughts, then danced through to
her bedroom to change her clothes. Nothing wrong with clichés, she told herself, not when they were so joyously, amazingly, miraculously true!

Distracted, she almost forgot to take Patrice's presents with her when she drove to his house. She rang the bell and stood in the gathering darkness, certain she would be incapable now of keeping her news to herself. Besides, she reasoned, what difference would it make
when
she told him? There was no such thing as the ‘right moment'. Okay, so it wasn't meant to happen now, so soon, but it had, and it had happened to both of them. When Patrice opened the door, she threw her free arm around his neck, kissed him, and presented his gifts. Back on familiar ground, he too was more composed and contented. He unwrapped and admired the glazed bowl, carried it through to the kitchen table, then returned to lay out some of the stair rods: they fitted precisely, enhancing the imposing hallway in just the way he wanted.

‘Thank you!' he kissed her. ‘They're perfect. Come and have a drink. Omelette okay? There's not much else in the fridge.'

‘Plenty! But actually I won't have any wine. Just water.' She followed him into the kitchen. ‘I've got something to tell you.'

When she did not enlarge, he turned from rinsing a tumbler at the sink to look at her. She grinned idiotically. ‘Can't you guess?'

He shook his head, a polite smile masking his thoughts.

Leonie took a deep breath. ‘You remember the night I twisted my ankle and you came over?'

He handed her the glass of water. ‘Yes.'

‘Well, I wasn't expecting you.' She paused. He still didn't get it. ‘I didn't use my cap that night.'

He went very still. She saw his eyes lock down. But she was getting used to that now and refused to let it alarm her. Besides, almost as soon as she had registered it, the blankness was gone. ‘Wow,' he said, breathing again. ‘Go on, tell me.'

‘Oh, Patrice, I'm pregnant!'

‘You've known this all weekend?'

‘No. I only just did the test. I wasn't sure before. Just hoped,' she said, offering him a lead on her state of unambivalent happiness. ‘Though it is the reason I was a bit jumpy in Nice. Sorry about that!'

‘Gosh.'

He sat down at the table and ran his finger round the roughened edge of the Moroccan bowl. She waited in trepidation, watching him closely, but his face was in shadow. He lifted his head and looked once around the black-and-white-tiled kitchen as if committing it to memory one final time before his life changed for ever. He took a shuddering breath, then she saw his shoulders drop and he smiled up at her, his eyes clear: he had decided. He got to his feet and folded her in his arms.

In the morning Leonie had to leave early for work. The previous night had been the closest and sweetest they had
ever spent together. Patrice had been both tender and demanding, murmuring endearments he had never voiced before. She thought she had woken in the night to him thrashing and wailing in the grip of another nightmare, but her memory was hazy, lost in the depths of unconsciousness. Now they were in a weekday morning rush, both running late. Kissing him farewell at the door, she teased him: ‘I won't hear from you for days now, will I?'

‘Don't be silly. I'll call tonight.'

‘We'll see about that!' she joked, and went off as happy and carefree as she had been in years.

‘Bye for now,' he called after her.

Gaby looked over the top of her computer screen when Leonie walked in. ‘How was Nice? Good weekend?'

‘Magical!'

‘I'm so glad. I want to hear all about it over lunch.'

Leonie knew she could not yet say anything to Gaby, her employer, about the future: she was barely a few weeks into her pregnancy, and it was tempting fate to announce it too early. Not that her mind wasn't already leaping ahead to the contingency plans they would have to make in the office for next summer when the baby would be born. Meanwhile, she let her boss assume that her inability to concentrate was due to her romantic weekend away, and was rewarded by Gaby's evident pleasure in hearing about the windswept Promenade des Anglais, welcome proof that the older woman's attitude to Patrice was softening.

Leonie couldn't wait to get back to her apartment at the end of the day, bursting to ring Stella.

‘You're kidding? That's spectacular news!' was Stella's instant reaction. ‘Can I be godmother?'

‘Who else?'

‘How did Patrice take it?'

‘Pretty well, considering. Really well, actually. I suspect he's rather pleased. He was – we were together last night, and he was—Oh, Stella, I am ecstatic.'

‘Some Christmas you're going to have! I'm so happy for you, Lennie. If anybody deserves their dream-come-true, it's you.'

‘Thank you,' said Leonie humbly. ‘I still can't believe it's happening.'

‘So your weekend went well, obviously?'

‘I was in a bit of a state. Hardly surprising. But it was fine. I didn't tell him 'til we got home.'

‘I guess you'll have to start negotiating moving in together.'

‘Don't! I'm already fantasising about turning his old bedroom into a nursery. We'll have to do something to modernise the bathroom, too.'

‘And Patrice is truly on board with all this?'

‘Yes, I think so … after last night.' Leonie glowed at the warm memory. ‘Don't worry, I'm not going to railroad him. There's plenty of time.'

‘Good.'

‘Frankly, I won't be surprised if he wobbles. That's what
he's like. But he's said he'll be there for me, and however much he drifts off sometimes, he keeps his promises.'

‘Well, I want regular updates, okay?'

‘You'll get them. Bye, Stella.'

‘Bye, Lennie. Look after yourself.'

After she hung up, Leonie could hardly contain herself. She wanted literally to jump up and down with joy, but there was no one else to share her news with, not yet. Her family had grown too distant, other friends in London not close enough, and friends here, like Audra and Martine, while they would be thrilled for her, might spread the word before she and Patrice were ready for it to be common knowledge. Half of her wished he would ring and be unable not to see her tonight, but the other half knew him well enough to warn her that this was fairy-tale thinking. He wasn't about to change overnight. Her news was a shock, no two ways about it, and he would need time alone to digest and process this potentially seismic shift in his life. But she luxuriated in the certainty that he would call tomorrow. Or even the day after. It didn't matter in the great scheme of things. Time and parenthood would gradually alter his habitual reserve. She had only to be patient and to wait.

By Wednesday night she was cross and irritated. He wouldn't be able to go on being quite so self-absorbed once he had a child to look after! At some point he would have to learn to take other people's feelings into account. Around
ten, before she went to bed, she called him. He didn't pick up, but he often ran a bath at this time and might not have heard the phone. At lunchtime the next day she called his office, but got the answering machine – he never employed a receptionist – and decided there was little point leaving a message. When she got home that evening she called his house again, where the phone rang and rang. She tried his mobile, but it was turned off. The first cold fear that this was going to be a more serious wobble than she had anticipated began to creep into her mind, but she rejected it robustly. She had been here before, and all had been well in the end. She just had to allow him to absorb the bombshell in his own peculiar way.

On Friday at the office the ringing phones all day were torture; she prayed each time she picked up that the caller would be Patrice. As she put the key in the lock of her apartment door at the end of the week, panic began to set in. How could she be so foolish as to let herself imagine so easily that, at forty, he would welcome the prospect of fatherhood with a woman he had known for a mere few months, had not even yet lived with? To what depths of self-delusion was she letting herself sink? She could hardly blame him for avoiding her! But while she braced herself for a dose of reality, she also knew that time was on her side. The baby was not due until August. Even if, as after Gaby's dinner party, it was a few weeks before he came back to her, did it honestly matter? He was a decent man who would never turn his back on her,
of that she was sure. She pushed from her mind all memory of Didier.

After she'd climbed wearily into bed, another buried recollection surfaced and clutched at her: when she'd rung his office number the previous day, she'd not listened attentively to the out-going message. Now, certain that out of hours no one would be there, she dialled it again: she was right, the message he'd left had been changed from the usual one. Patrice's voice sounded neutral, bland, but announced that he wasn't booking any new appointments at present. If the matter was urgent, he recommended a colleague in a nearby town. She pushed down her infernal misgivings. It would soon be Christmas. He probably wanted to delay all new appointments until after the New Year, that was all. Make some time for himself. Maybe create more free time to spend with her, for all she knew. She must not over-react, not allow hormonal changes to drive her to panic. And even if he had cleared the decks so he could think things through in peace on his own for a little while, he'd be back in touch eventually.

All that night she fought the urge to get up and dressed and drive over to his house. How ridiculous she would look if she turned up, dishevelled and maddened with anxiety, and then found him calmly reading beside a cosy log fire in the salon. But in the morning she showered and dressed with care and went over there, determined not to upbraid him, to act as if five days' silence from the father of her child were the most natural thing in the world.

As she turned off the ignition outside his house and opened her car door she took in the unusual fact that all the shutters were closed. Trembling in the winter cold, she went to the front door and rang the bell. She could hear it pealing in the empty hallway but there was no sound of his approaching footsteps. She went around to the side door, but found the garden gate padlocked. The padlock was brand new. She stared at it, uncomprehending. The gate was never locked. Full of dread, she returned to the front door. Every window was shuttered, she could not see in, and there was no answer to her increasingly frantic ringing of the bell.

It took Gaby and Thierry some time to chip away at Leonie's disbelief. She had driven straight to their house and burst in on them as they were reading the Saturday newspapers. In complete shock, she told them everything. Failing to notice Gaby's disappointed shake of the head at the unhindered revelation of her pregnancy, she castigated herself soundly. How could she have been so naïve, so self-obsessed, so carried away with her own fantasies? Patrice was a dear, beautiful man, trying to recover from past difficulties, and she had just barged into his life, trampling over his most delicate feelings, considering only herself and what she wanted, and expected him to adjust instantly to the idea of parenthood. Hardly surprising he'd felt suffocated, unable to explain himself, in need of some space! It was all her fault.