Pierre

Carrie learns of Pierre’s death

‘gas not made’

I thought Marie had texted the wrong person a correction. I thought that she’d texted someone something where she needed to say ‘gas’ not ‘made’ and waited for her to realise her mistake. She did realise her mistake.

‘Pierre has not made it,’ she texted 15 minutes later.

I sat there, with my phone in front of me, stupidly. Numb. Poor Marie, I can hear the howl from here. In five words, I can feel the black tunnel of her despair.

I remember him when he was 16, arriving with my parents, who’d gone to collect him from the school. My brother was ridiculously proud that he’d got a cool penfriend, not one of the awkward ones with glasses who hung around the back of the bus breathing wetly. No, Pierre was all glamour. His hair flopped around his eyes, and his voice was like a film star.

‘Hello Carrie,’ he husked at me, and I fell in love with the intensity that only a 14-year-old virgin can manage.

‘Stop following us!’ my brother would hiss at me, as I obviously stalked them to the park, to school, or simply hung out outside my brother’s room with a gaggle of giggling friends.

‘Leave her alone,’ Pierre smiled at me. And my friends and I swooned and clamoured to sit next to him at the cinema.

‘God, you’re so embarrassing!’ Marcus huffed, desperate not to let his cool penfriend down, desperate not to discover that he was actually the uncool one for once. ‘I’m sorry mate, I don’t normally hang out with them.’

‘I love your sister, she is a beautiful person,’ Pierre held my hand all the way home.

‘He loves me!’ I screamed to Jenny and Etta later. ‘Did you hear that, he loves me!’ and we danced all the way home from school for a week, twirling around lampposts and laughing at the rain, in that way which feels so risky and wild when you’re a child, but just makes grown-ups think you’ve been at the alcopops again.

Pierre is probably the reason I studied French, though it took me years to admit that to myself.

I completed my degree in Nice. Pierre lived there, and shaming as it is to admit now, all my boyfriends until then had been Pierre imitations. But how can you expect a nice boy from Nailsea to live up to a suave French boy? Pierre would know about the need for flowers, for pastries in the morning, and kisses as the sun set. Pierre would know that a long weekend spent watching your boyfriend try to fix the engine of his burnt-out Ford Escort wasn’t going to cut it. Pierre would know that ‘Hey, Carrie, get me some more WD40 and a nice cuppa tea, would you?’ wasn’t the way to a girl’s heart.

I set the bar for Pierre painfully high.

‘Are you ok?’ Dan looks at my frozen expression from the other sofa.

‘Pierre’s dead.’ I tell him.

Dan gets up and hugs me. He wants to say the right words but doesn’t know what they are. There aren’t any right words.

‘Are you homesick?’ Pierre asked me, as I sat in the squalid bedroom of my shared flat in Nice, weeping about my housemate’s inability to wash up.

‘No!’ I couldn’t admit it. ‘Nailsea’s a dive, how could I possibly miss that?’ But I did. I missed the ease of my mother’s conversation, I missed not having to put effort into talking. Even the doors had started to shut in French now, the cars said ‘ça va’ as they clanked past on the manhole cover outside, and, though I’m ashamed to say it, I just wanted to hear a good old ugly Somerset accent. To take my brain out and rest it in the comfort of a language I didn’t have to try so hard at.

‘It’s ok,’ he hugged me. ‘I was terribly homesick in Portsmouth.’

‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ I laughed, creating an unseemly snot bubble and having to try to hide it with an already used hanky. ‘Portsmouth is where hope goes to die!’

He recognised my attempts at humour and gamely laughed along, before whisking me out for a coffee and a walk on the beach.

Pierre nursed me through those first few months, putting up with endless tears and tantrums with good humour, waiting until the summer before he asked me out.

‘I’m going out with Pierre!’ I wrote in letters to Jenny and Etta. ‘My dreams have come true!’

Dan rustles the pages of his book on the other sofa. ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’

’Yes, please,’ I say. We head out, arm in arm, for a socially responsible stroll around the park, masks in place, nodding politely at people who walk past in the road to keep well out of our way.

In my head, I try to find the words to tell my friends, my work, anyone. ‘My friend’s dead. Pierre’s dead.’ It’s simple enough, how hard can that be to say? But it is. I keep nearly crying and am pulling the strangest faces at the pavement as I try to get my emotions back under control. It feels so melodramatic, weeping all over the place like a wilting Victorian maiden. I don’t want to make a scene. I’ve not even seen Pierre for nearly a year now, how upset can I be?

‘I’m getting married!’ he sounded overjoyed.

‘Congratulations!’ Phones crackled in those days, you’d get moisture in the lines or something, and you’d end up with this call where the noises on the line were louder than the voice itself. ‘When am I coming over to celebrate?’

‘Next June! Bring Dan!’ Dan and I hadn’t been together long then, but Pierre already adored him.

The wedding was a riot, held at the grounds of a chateau outside the city, the drive lit up with candles, fairy lights wrapped around the trees twinkling in the humid night air, the mosquitos kept away with the scent of citronella, and the band played till dawn. Marie looking like a model in her slimline dress, Pierre charming and dancing his way around the room. Dan and I looked very British by comparison; our clothes tended to rumple no matter how recently we’d ironed them.

‘Carrie, come and dance,’ and Pierre swept me off around the floor while Dan chatted to Manu and Luc about the latest disgraces of their respective rugby teams. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. Do you remember that first time in England, when I wore a suit to the school dance and everyone else was in jeans? I was such an idiot!’ and he fell about in fits of giggles.

‘We all thought you were the bee’s knees,’ I told him. ‘Honestly, Jenny made all her boyfriends wear suits for about a year afterwards!

Pierre howled with laughter.

Poor Marie. She must be so lost. I think Pierre was the only man she’d ever loved. ‘We’re a team,’ she told me as they dashed around preparing for their son’s wedding. ‘He’s the only person who knows what needs doing without me saying anything.’ I send her flowers and a card, with words of condolence which I know won’t touch the sides. We can’t even go to see her, to hug her and hold her close, with all the restrictions in place.

We got the text from Anton. ‘Mama and Papa have Covid. Mama is in hospital and has oxygen, Papa is fine, just a mild temperature.’ We felt incredibly grateful that Marie had got to a hospital. In some places, they call an ambulance and nothing comes for ten hours. And then there are no beds.

How did Pierre go from fine to dead in three weeks?

On Monday morning I’m sat at my computer at the kitchen table, where I’ve worked since the offices shut last March, watching the emails come in. Mrs Hunter’s sofa has arrived without legs, there’s a stock shortage where a lorry got stuck on the wrong side of customs. But what does it matter.

‘How was your weekend?’ colleagues emails ask.

‘Hideous, Pierre is dead.’ But I can’t type that. ‘Lovely thanks, we watched films and read books. How was yours?’

And they tell me, and I want to scream. Why can’t I just say? What’s stopping me? If I say it then it’s true. But it’s true, anyway. Maybe I don’t want to make them feel awkward. Maybe I don’t want to hear them say ‘Oh I’m sorry to hear that,’ and then move on, as if Pierre was just another dead body. Another number with no face.

‘Our bathroom refit’s had to be stopped, with this latest lockdown,’ they say. ‘We’ve no shower!’

Pierre is dead.

‘I can’t do this anymore!’ I screamed at Pierre, throwing my wine glass at his head. It missed and shattered on the wall behind, leaving me picking glass out of the carpet and the soles of my feet for weeks afterwards. I was in my ‘Love means Drama’ stage. What can I say? I was twenty-two.

Pierre looked at me sadly, and then, picking his way across the soggy carpet, held my hand. ‘You’re right, my love,’ he said. ‘I can’t make you happy.’

It wasn’t his fault. I had this image of him as a perfect man, but I didn’t know what a perfect man was then. I thought it was all high drama, fights and then making up. I thought if they didn’t fight back, it meant they didn’t love you. It wore us both out.

Pierre stopped messaging when he went into hospital. I thought Marie would be the one in trouble, she’d smoked for almost her whole life, I was bracing myself for the bad news about Marie, not Pierre. I wasn’t prepared. I should have been prepared.

‘They will remove Papa’s helmet in two days,’ Anton texted. ‘He will have the mask.’ I thought that meant he was out of the woods. Marie had been released a week previously and was safely back at home, being looked after by Anton and his wife, so I thought we were OK. I took my eye off the ball, I didn’t see his relapse coming.

I miss Pierre’s texts. I miss the jolly ping with a photo of a river they’d been to walk along or an invite to visit next summer. Something he’d seen which he thought would make us laugh. How can we help Marie from here? And how will she cope without him? Not that Marie’s weak, far from it, but we’re not young anymore. New habits are hard to learn, particularly when you don’t have your partner to learn them with.

‘What can I do to help?’ Dan asks.

‘Give me a hug,’ I say.

So he does.

Ages ago, when the children were young, we all went camping near Lake Como. Dan was in his element, teaching the kids to fish and row the little boat, organising barbecues for dinner. Marie and I went for walks to catch up on each other’s lives and to buy more wine from a nearby vineyard, the smoke from her cigarettes hanging in the air. Pierre, crisp in cream linen, read books in the shade of a cypress tree, moving his chair frequently to keep up with the ever-shifting shadow.

When our children went to bed, snuggled up in sleeping bags, safely zipped away in their tent, we’d sit making plans for the future, swapping holiday tips, and watching the moonlight on the still waters of the lake, the landscape reduced to grey-blues and silver.

‘Remember Lake Como,’ Pierre texted me four weeks ago, with a photo he’d clearly dug out from an old album. ‘Let’s go again when all this mess is over. The four of us.’

‘Fabulous!’ I replied. ‘Looking forward to it.’

Did he know how bad things were at the end? I’ve heard that people think they’re drowning in their own lungs. A friend’s daughter is a nurse. She holds the hands of the dying patients. She tries to soothe the look of terror out of their eyes and then goes home to cry alone at night. Did Pierre think he was drowning? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

‘Come on, darling,’ Dan plumps down next to me on the sofa and puts his arm around my shoulder. ‘Let it all out. I’m here.’ and I give in and weep, huge snotty ungainly sobs like I used to on Pierre’s shoulder all those years ago in Nice. I wonder when Dan will cry. If he’ll cry, or if he’ll just remodel the garden, or convert the attic to an un-needed spare room. Anything to keep busy. We must keep busy.

‘Do you think we’ll still know each other in ten years’ time?’ Pierre asked me, back before we were dating as we sat side by side on the pebbles of the beach at Nice, pouring us more wine as the sun set and turned the waves pink and pastel blue.

‘Of course! Gosh, where will we be then? We’ll be ancient!’ Ten years is a long time when you’re nineteen, but even then, I couldn’t imagine not knowing Pierre.

‘I think we’ll have nice houses in the city,’ he said, sketching it out with his hands. ‘We’ll have season tickets to the opera and be married with two children each.’

‘Imagine us with children!’ We both started laughing.

I want to imagine him there now. Sat on that beach, or in the shade of the cypress by Lake Como, reading a book and sipping wine, in a world where this couldn’t happen. Because he can’t be gone, it’s not possible.

I’ll hear a ping on my phone, and that’ll be him, sending us a funny photo of the garden, and we’ll make plans for the summer. Back at Lake Como, when all this is over. Barbecuing fish and drinking wine as the reflections gleam on the unruffled waters of the lake, and the slow evening heat drifts into night.

Svetlana Smith 2021

For Marco