time she heard Henri’s voice, it might have even been sweet.
They’d met her last year at university, seeing each other first in a shared tutorial, then overlapping at the same parties. He was stocky, and manly to the point of bullheaded. His hair was going saltily grey even at twenty, and out of every girl in the tutorial, she was the one he sat by, seeing – he eventually told her – a kind of kindred intensity, like she’d not only be able to kill an enemy, but eat him, too.
For her part, she got so giddy every time he was in the same room that she began to live in a state of almost permanent fury. She’d refused to even tell her parents about him for months, lest there be any hint of laughter at her falling so hard, though they would of course have been the last people to do so.
She took most of it out on Henri. ‘You’ve got fire,’ he said, and though it sounded ludicrous even in a French accent, they’d each been so turned on it hardly mattered. It was like a hurricane courting a scorpion. Objects thrown, unbelievable sex, months lived in a kind of constant, shivering fever. It had all felt so young! It had all felt so French! She’d been swept away, but in hindsight only in the sense that a landslide brings down a highway: unstoppable catastrophe, followed by rubble. They’d even argued at their wedding. During the ceremony.
One month into their marriage, she discovered she was three months pregnant and immediately began finding even more fault with him. He didn’t separate the knives into steak versus regular. He piled his fag ends in the potted camellia she’d hung out on their new balcony in a flat he never finished renovating like he promised. And then, one night, during still-rather-amazing seven-months-pregnant make-up sex, he had looked so angry that she’d spontaneously slapped him across the face, hard enough for her wedding ring to cut his cheek, an action that shocked her so deeply she’d stayed at her father’s that night, frightened of what she was capable of doing next.
Henri left the next day. ‘It is not the slap,’ he said, maddeningly calm. ‘A Frenchman can take a slap, Lord knows. It is how your face looked when you did it.’ He took her arm with a gentleness that told her it was over more brutally than any fight ever could have. ‘You fight your hatred for yourself, anyone can see, and you do your best, taking it out on people who you think will be strong enough to handle it. I understand this. I am the same. It is hard but it is bearable if your love for me is bigger than your hate. But it has tipped somewhere along the way, and there is no recovery from that, I do not think. For either of us.’
The pain of this made her anger blaze anew, and she’d swept him away in a torrent of vengeful promises that he’d never see his son, that if he didn’t disappear, she’d tell a judge he slapped her – and what English judge wasn’t prepared to believe that about a Frenchman? – so he’d better leave the country altogether or she’d have him arrested.
He finally believed her. And left.
Yet when their son was born, she named him after Henri’s beloved late uncle, like they’d once discussed. She’d immediately shortened it to JP, but still. Even now, she spoke French to him as much as English to make sure he stayed fluent and could talk freely to his father.
Henri had been the love of her life, and she’d never be able to forgive him for it. Or herself, it seemed.
In the meantime, he called, and the sound of his voice made her sad enough to turn up the telly while he spoke, haltingly, to JP, who answered everything into the receiver with a very cautious, ‘Oui?’
‘Look,’ Amanda said, shoving her fork back into the salad container and swallowing the tears. ‘I’m sorry for what I said about the Animals In War thing. I’m sorry for swearing. I’m sorry for fucking everything, all right? There’s no need to dole out more punishment.’
Mei’s eyes seemed to genuinely fill with surprised concern, but Rachel stormed in first. ‘It’s not the Memorial?’ she said. ‘It’s more like your overall vehemence?’
Amanda, who’d expected – foolishly, it now seemed – to be greeted with fast assurances that she had nothing to apologise for, got irritated all over again. ‘My grandpa Joe lost a leg in Vietnam,’ she said. ‘And then got spat on by peaceniks when he came back in his wheelchair. So forgive me if I think a monument to a carrier pigeon is in bad taste.’
‘Whoa,’ Mei whispered. ‘Your grandfather fought in Vietnam?’
‘That can’t possibly be true,’ Rachel said, her voice growing harder.
Amanda froze. It wasn’t actually true. Grandpa Joe had never been drafted and had died on a worksite when a digger accidentally severed an artery in his thigh. She could just feel the bad karma piling up for pretending otherwise even for a moment. But needs must.
‘Did he kill any Vietnamese?’ Mei asked, suddenly serious in the way she always was when anyone within hearing distance might have been disrespecting any Asian of any kind.
Rachel tutted scornfully. ‘British soldiers didn’t actually fight in Vietnam? Australians bloody well did, though. My father–’
‘My grandfather was American,’ Amanda said, because that part was true.
Mei looked at Rachel. ‘Was he?’
‘On your mum’s side?’ Rachel said, looking perplexed, in a way that was perplexing to Amanda.
‘No, my dad,’ she said. ‘My dad’s American.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ Rachel laughed. ‘Your dad’s British? I’ve met him? Like more than once? You’re such a little liar, Amanda. It isn’t clever? And it isn’t funny?’
‘Excuse me,’ Amanda said. ‘I think I know the nationality of my own father.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Rachel said, taking a sip of her coffee.
‘Maybe you’re thinking of your stepfather,’ Mei said, obviously worried they were being too unkind.
‘My stepfather is also American,’ Amanda frowned. ‘My mother clearly has a type.’ This wasn’t true either. Hank was American, yes, but he was big, strapping and black. He couldn’t have been more different from George if George had been a woman. ‘My mother is British, but my father is definitely American.’
Rachel just raised her eyebrows and carried on looking at Mr Three O’Clock.
‘Ask his new girlfriend, if you don’t believe me,’ Amanda said, but quietly, because she’d given up.
‘New girlfriend?’ Rachel asked, surprisingly sharply.
‘He’s dating?’ Mei said, mouth open. ‘At his age?’
‘He’s forty-eight,’ Amanda said. ‘Hardly even out of range for either of you.’
‘Eew?’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t be gross?’ She flicked another olive out of her pasta. ‘So what’s she like then? Your new stepmother-to-be?’
Amanda wondered that herself. George had been even more unfocused this week than usual. He’d first called her with a story she couldn’t quite follow about a bird landing in his back garden and then flying away, a story she’d eventually convinced him must have been a dream, before suddenly announcing this morning that he’d been seeing a new woman who’d wandered into his shop. He’d
