Sandrine and Henry

Amid all of the turbulence, upheaval and impermanence of modern life and troubled and destructive relationships, sometimes, there are people who were truly meant for each other. Our friends, Sandrine and Henry, are two such people.

They knew before they knew. They married without fuss or urgency, 5 months after meeting. There was always a ‘well, of course’ about them, as if they were simply reconnecting something that, through some minor mishap, had become detached, but was now restored to its natural place.

There was never any question that Sandrine would continue her humanitarian work which frequently took her to Africa, for many months at a time. To places more than 5,000km from Henry’s antique furniture business and the house they had saved from ruin and made their home in the French countryside.

Though they missed the luxuries of physical proximity and intimacy, of course, the couple were undaunted by their long periods of absence — each accepted that the other was pursuing the vocation which had chosen them, in which their identity was rooted and which nourished their spirits.

For years, Sandrine and Henry flourished as a couple, despite their frequent and extended physical separation, because their inner worlds were entwined. Being there, being limitless, they loved with a certainty of life already lived, of many lives lived, despite the distance.

This is not to say that troubles did not come. They did. Some time back Sandrine and Henry shared with us an account of a deeply troubled time for them both. This is their story.

Henry always had a passion for rescue. For seeing past the dust, the splintered breaks, tears and scuffs, for seeing distressed beauty in the turn or carvings of antique chairs, lamps, tables. He always felt that, in restoring these things, he was touching something precious and intangible, that he was restoring more than the item of furniture itself. For Henry, his shop was not simply a collection of inventory — it was the continuation of an art, a passion — he was preserving something that mattered to him as I did the artisans whose bodies had long since been laid in the ground.

But we join this story immediately after Henry’s business partner, who shared none of the romance of Henry’s connection to the art and the heart of the business, vanished, along with such money as had accumulated in the business account. The financial disaster was bad enough, but the betrayal of trust damaged Henry. Sandrine gave of herself as she always did, and eventually, with her love, Henry got to the point where he was dealing with the challenging consequences of the treachery, and less and less its upset.

Sandrine had her own troubles, however.

After an extended period in Africa, coordinating and conducting humanitarian work, Sandrine had been sent to Geneva for relief from the field in the form of twelve months of office work. Although the full comforts of modern city life were initially pleasant, before long, Sandrine began to struggle.

Her time in Africa had been tough, relentlessly so. What words or actions can speak to a mother holding a lifeless shadow of a child that has succumbed to starvation, can contend with the rage against politics and greed preventing the movement of rice and grain that would have seen the child fed? Trauma’s ripples and the tension of existential accountability were there, certainly, but that was not Sandrine’s agony. It was what she had left behind in Africa — the children, the need, the unbearable heat, the dirt and the rainy season, all the adversities, the poverty mechanisms, the lack of infrastructure and the obscene abundance of calamities. When there, dust in Sandrine’s eyes was the official excuse when accumulations caused tears to flow — It is so dusty, here in Africa, you would hear her say. Yet, despite everything she witnessed in Africa, in all her time there, she felt closer than ever to some essence, some truth of herself.

So, in Geneva, six months in, sick with European comforts, something broke inside Sandrine. Remorse-fueled nightmares, awake and asleep, plagued her — she’d not done enough in forgotten villages and slummy towns, she’d been too sick to help in Sudan, too helpless in Congo. Drifting in her neat apartment hell, her dustless tears burned like no others. Not knowing the problem herself, not wanting her already troubled husband to worry, for the first time in their time, she did not share her heart with Henry.

The loneliness of that was crippling.

One night, in desperation, she wrote to her husband, admitting that it had got too much. She could hold it in no more, and admitted to Henry that she had allowed another man into her Genevan apartment, another man into her life.

‘My Henry, my love,

This is hard for me to write. I have held off sending you this for longer than I can remember. I know how full your hands are there. I haven’t known what to do. I haven’t been myself.

I thought the break from the field would give me a chance to reset, to recharge, but I’ve been such a mess. I’ve been crying, all of the time, which just isn’t me. We have always shared everything. Though you were thousands of miles away but you never felt anywhere but beside me, and me beside you. But I have got myself in a terrible mess. I miss Africa, so. Knowing the enormity of what needs to be done there, being here, in this city, this apartment is breaking me. I have come unstuck from myself and, for once, I didn’t reach for you.

My love, don’t be angry, but I confess, I have allowed another man in my life, a Russian. His name is Nikolay Sergey — a butler. He exists only in my mind. Each night, as the 40 minute train has carried me home, I have pictured Nikolay is there, waiting for me. When he arrives, he opens the door of the minuscule flat and mooches in behind me. In my mind, he takes my jacket, pours us a drink and we play chess all night. He looks like Bukowski (!!), lacks courtesy, is irreparably high on alcohol so as to bear with my terrible defeats, in chess and beyond. He is someone who never judged. He was there, in all his gruffness. He had to be drunk to spend evenings with me. I was appalling company, after all.

I look back at us, at how we met, how you came to me asking if I wanted a drink. You were smiling at me and it was real. There was immensity, candor, light, happiness, a marine breeze.

That night you took my hand, started swirling like a dervish and I could only follow you.

I am sorry I have been so lost, so broken, I am sorry that I turned to another man, not you, my love — will we still swirl, after Nikolay, my Henry?’’

The next morning, Sandrine found an email from her husband:

‘My love,

I read your message and went out. I eventually found Nicolay, predictably in a bar in the rough side of town. Between long deep-eyed broody Russian silences and fearsome quantities of vodka, he told me about his dissolute life. He told me about you. He told me you are a god-awful chess player. He also told me, although he had never uttered such a word to your face, that you had more beauty in you than anyone he had ever met. He told me that it was your company alone that kept the razor from his own throat. He told me you have a place in your heart for every damn soul there is and ever was, that you were tougher than he had ever been. He also mentioned that he would empty my guts where I stood if I hurt a hair on your head. Although we parted with him grunting and keeping his hands deep in his pockets, I felt I had his approval to take you home.

You can’t walk away from Africa, it’s part of you. And I don’t want you to. You wouldn’t be you. You need to be there and, my love, you have to be you.”

Shortly after, Sandrine left Geneva before the expiry of her 12-month term. Unexpectedly, she returned, not to Africa, but home — to Henry, to her love.

Sandrine and Henry now live permanently together in Southern France. Sandrine runs outreach programs for schools in rural Africa and has changed the course of countless lives, including her own.

Sandrine’s heart beats with the rhythms of Africa still. Occasionally, only occasionally, it gets dusty in France.

Henry formed a partnership with a septuagenarian restorer from a neighbouring district. The hearts and dreams of long-dead artisans, rose up again.

Sandrine’s and Henry’s inner world, the place in which they met, fell irretrievably in love, suffered and healed, was larger than all of the world’s deserts. The dust that blew there blasted their skin, watered their eyes but their hearts flourished, still.

When love for another takes root deep in our inner lives, down where we are young still, down where our music plays — there, our love is limitless; there we are complete.

There, where all our alones are together, we are eternal. There, our essence is a part of it all.

The Writers give their profound thanks to Sandrine and Henry for sharing their life, love and wisdom with us — thank you both, S. and H. xxx

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