Page 9 of The Bordeaux Book Club
After they’d finished the soup and stacked the dishes in the dishwasher together, Leah wandered through to the living room and sank into their leather sofa, feeling the worn material creak beneath her. She tried to ignore the sound of Nathan removing and restacking the dishes in the way he called ‘doing it properly.’
Instead, she pulled a tartan rug over her knees and felt herself begin to relax as warmth flooded through her. Nathan had lit the wood burner earlier and it radiated a comforting heat. The shutters were still open and, despite the slight bite of draught she could feel from the single-paned windows, it was lovely to look out into the darkness. The rain had stopped now, the clouds cleared and the sky was sprinkled with jewel-like stars. The moon – almost a full-one, she noticed – glowed coldly in the blackness, giving just enough light to make out the fields that dropped away from their house into a small valley, then rose again, their tops decorated with dark fir trees.
She pulledGreat Expectationsout of her bag, noting that it was an old library book from the UK. The last borrower – if the piece of stamped paper in the front cover was to be believed – had been in 1993. She turned the pages, inhaling the scent of well-read book – that comforting, papery smell – and began to read.
3
To: Bordeaux Book Club
From: Grace
Subject: Confirmation
Dear all,
Lovely to meet you all yesterday!
Just wanted to confirm that the first meeting of the ‘Bordeaux Book Club’ will be on Friday 7th March. That gives us three weeks to enjoy Great Expectations! I’ll provide the wine for this one – I have a cheeky blend from the independent vineyard I was telling you about that will go wonderfully with my cheese straws.
Happy reading!
Grace
Grace pressedsendon her email and sat back in her chair, satisfied. Drawing her A4, leather-bound diary towards her, she wrote the meeting into its appropriate space, then allowed herself to smile a little at the fact there wasn’t a single day in the displayed week when she wasn’t doing something. No – more than that – when she wasn’t anintegral partof something.
Her hand hovered over her mouse and she paused for a second. The sharp, white winter sun shone through the window, making a patch of light on her vintage rug. Hector, her beloved white cat, had stretched himself out so as to maximise the resultant warmth magnified by the window. He was gloriously asleep, his little chest moving and – if she wasn’t mistaken – emitting a tiny snore now and then.
She really ought to go to the market. There was hardly anything in the fridge and she had her Canasta group this evening. She’d promised to bake some of her fabulous brownies for them all – ‘they are to die for’ she’d told them. They’d be ever so disappointed if she didn’t make them. So really, she hadn’t got time to scroll through social media.
But her hand crept, as if independent to her, it felt, to the mouse and clicked on her browser. She carefully typed ‘Facebook’ into the search bar and clicked on the social media site. She wasn’t going to go on his profile anyway, she told herself. But it was important to keep abreast of things in the groups. There’d been a lot of spam in the ‘Expats Survival Group’ recently and she didn’t want anyone falling for a scam on her watch.
Whenever an opportunity to be an admin came up in one of the online groups she favoured, she always volunteered. It was nice to support these little online collectives, after all – they were a lifeline for some people. Nice to feel part of things.
She quickly approved posts and rejected one advertising a water butt for sale. She messaged the sender:
Please move to the selling group.
But then, almost before she was aware of it, she was on his page. They weren’t friends, but really his security settings wereso terrible. Nearly every one of his photos was set to ‘public’ – he ought to be more careful. Anyone could be trolling his page.
There were a few new shots and she studied them, her heart leaping in recognition at his smile. His face was older now, but it was still recognisably him. The girl his arm was around looked all of thirty-five. Grace shook her head; he really had become a cliché.
There was a new picture, this time of him relaxing in a deckchair in a garden surrounded by a stone wall. Was he in France? She peered at the snap, but it was one from last summer – only recently uploaded – of a trip to Bath.
She knew she shouldn’t scroll back too far, yet she found her finger pressed on the left-hand side of her mouse, sending time shooting backwards one year, two, six, ten, more. And there it was. The picture of this house – in need of a paint and a jolly good tidy up, but recognisably this house. Her: younger, slimmer, innocent of what was to come, standing triumphantly on the doorstep with an enormous set of keys. At one time she’d wondered whether his keeping that picture in his online albums meant something, but she’d concluded long ago that all it symbolised was the fact that Stephen didn’t move with the times – and was still as internet incompetent as he’d always been. Probably, his PA handled that sort of thing at work.
She didn’t envy him, his new life, in the slightest. If anything, she felt sorry for him.
She’d always been the one to keep up with things, she thought, clicking on the photo to enlarge it. A scroll of emojis appeared in a floating box and she moved her mouse away quickly. The last thing she wanted to do was ‘like’ anything on his page. She didn’t want to give him the wrong impression.
Instead, she forced herself to click on the x in the corner and the photo, the Facebook page and her email inbox disappeared in one fell swoop. She clicked her tongue against the roof of hermouth. She’d meant to upload the picture she’d taken of the book group – all triumphantly holding theirGreat Expectationsbooks.
She’d do it later.
She stretched her legs out and pushed back on her chair until her thighs emerged from under the desk, then stood up and took a breath. Hector opened a lazy eye and looked at her. ‘You’ve had your food, mister,’ she told him, crouching down and giving him a stroke. He rolled and revealed his tummy – a tangle of white hair – for her to rub. ‘You really do take the biscuit,’ she said, rubbing it nonetheless. He purred triumphantly.
Then, out of nowhere, that sudden feeling she sometimes got when the house was silent flooded over her. The feeling that she ought to open the door, step into that room again. But no. She just needed air. Decisively, she got to her feet and went to remove the shopping list from the pad she kept in the kitchen. She grabbed her keys from the bowl on the powder-blue dresser she’d painstakingly restored last year, and slipped them into her handbag.
‘Market,’ she said to the indifferent Hector as she passed the open door to the office. She grabbed her white, woollen coat from the hook and buttoned it up, checking her hair in the mirror before slipping on a red beret and grabbing her organic tote bag.
