I COULDN’T SLEEP and I wanted a drink of water. But the French woman was lying on the floor in the lounge. She had insisted I take her bed when I came to visit. She would be fine on the floor, she said. And so to get to the kitchen I would have had to step over where she was sleeping.
I knew her when I was at college. But last year I found her again on Facebook, hugging her two daughters underneath the Eiffel Tower and petting a grey Connemara pony in some muddy paddock in Carlow. I phoned her, and that led to a visit, because she said so much had happened, and she’d love to talk, but you can’t say everything on mobiles. She had remained in Ireland and married, and had children but it was over now, she said. The kids were grown up and the man had fled with a younger woman. He phoned her one night from a zoo in Florida to say he was going to remarry and was it okay with her. “The bastard,” she said, with a French accent.
We had an Indian take-away on the sofa watching Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. But I never wanted to cross that space again. If I went for water she might wake up and think I was coming to talk to her. And we had talked enough. We had said everything there was to be said. We were exhausted from talking.
And yet I did want a drink. I couldn’t sleep. The wind moved the curtains and the full moon shining through the trees cast a silhouette on the gable wall of the stables across the yard. I told her earlier that those trees were a danger; too big and too near the house, but she only laughed.
“When I was a child in France,” she said, “there were many trees close to the house. I thought they were angels from heaven, there to protect me. But only God and I knew that the angels were disguised as trees.”
She was a very French kind of Catholic; high-minded in her politics and aristocratic in her imagination.
When I met her first I was still astonished by the very existence of women, and her long clean hair intoxicated me.
I was mesmerised by the way she smoked. She was a vast continent in herself; an interior I ventured towards, and every late-night conversation was like a journey without road maps which I hoped would end somewhere close to her heart. But never did. And we lost contact when she married, and I presumed we’d never meet again. That was, of course, before Facebook. And the amazing thing is that she had been living not 40 minutes away from Mullingar all the time.
But I wanted a drink; something to take away the dryness in my mouth left by the biryani. And if I went out, as sure as there is music in a fiddle, she’d wake and sit up on the mattress, and we would find the moonlight irresistible and we would begin all over again, in whispers.
No, I thought, it must not happen; after all the talk about how exhausted she was by marriage, the children, and calling it a day, and having closure, and moving on, and rationalising her husband’s selfishness with phrases such as, “He needed to find what was right for him.”
“I’m going back to Bordeaux,” she said. That’s why I couldn’t leave the bedroom, not even to slake my thirst. The consequences would be that for a glass of water I might have lost the entire thread of my life; or she might never have seen France again.
So I lay there parched, till morning, and by then the danger had passed. We parted with a hug that implied we might take things differently if we ever met in another life.
Last winter she finalised her divorce and legal matters, sold the house and stables, and returned to France, where I think she rents a cottage near her ageing parents outside Bordeaux.
And one night last week I couldn’t sleep. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, and I saw the moon, huge, outside the window. And I thought about her. And wondered where she might be now, or if she was watching that same old moon in France. And I hope that at least she has trees in her garden now, and that they enfold her with the tenderness of angels.