2000 Pieces of Sky

My first marriage lasted less than two years but was extremely eventful. Looking back now, one incident in particular stands out: a week in Aubigny-en-Artois in the north of France: a week when I realised that my husband couldn’t be trusted.

It is August 1988 and Steve and I are about to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. We are both twenty-one, both students, and we have a baby girl, Lily, who is six and a half months old. Our marriage was precipitated by my unplanned pregnancy, following in the footsteps of Steve’s parents, Mark and Lucy, who had found themselves in a similar situation in 1960s Stratford-upon-Avon. Steve and I met in an English lecture and spent the first few months of our relationship discussing literature and quoting poetry to each other; whereas his parents’ wild, teenage romance culminated in Lucy being pregnant at seventeen and the two of them marrying quickly for the sake of respectability. When it all fell apart within months of Steve’s birth, Mark ran away from his heartache, ending up in France. He met his second wife, Gisèle, when he was living rough in his car. When Steve and I started dating, he told me the story of how Gisèle had been walking on the beach with her friends when she’d seen this scruffy, unshaven man stumble across the sand and down to the sea where he’d proceeded to wash his face and then clean his teeth. She must have found it romantic because now, almost twenty years later, she and Mark are happily married with three French children whose names could have come straight from a school textbook, and the way his father speaks and acts, Steve says, you’d think he too had French blood running in his veins.

My story starts when Steve tells me we’re going to France for our first wedding anniversary. His father has offered us the use of his house while he and the rest of his family are away at Le Touqet. ‘You’ll love it,” Steve tells me. “It’s a converted farmhouse and the scenery’s breath-taking.’

So, instead of the romantic getaway in Paris that we might have had if we didn’t have Lily, we leave our student flat in Birmingham at the crack of dawn and take a taxi we can’t afford to New Street station, juggling a baby, a pushchair, nappies and a suitcase onto the train that will take us down to Dover. After two hours on the ferry – with Lily, who is just beginning to crawl, encountering a floor that tilts first one way and then the other – my father-in-law meets us at Calais, having offered to drive us the 70 miles journey to the farmhouse near Arras to save the expense of another taxi. I’m expecting him to at least stay for a coffee after driving us so far, but Chris disappears straight away, not wanting to miss any holiday time with his younger children.

The scenery surrounding the house is beautiful, but I feel disorientated in a location I don’t know, in a house with an unfamiliar layout and bewildering appliances. Take the toilet for example: it’s several days before I work out how to make it flush; and the controls for the shower and the jacuzzi bath are equally confusing – even the washing machine is determined not to co-operate with me. Still, the rooms are light and airy, and Steve and I are sharing the downstairs master bedroom with its wooden beams and large, antique bed. An empty chest has been turned into a makeshift cot for Lily who thankfully started sleeping through the night at a week old and continues to do so despite the change in her surroundings. I can’t help feeling that she’s more at home than I am.

Ignoring my discomfort, I try to make the best of things, taking Lily out in her pushchair every day to enjoy the sun. A tattered photograph I still possess places us against a background of lush fields and red poppies, the idyllic setting somewhat at odds with the agitation of being in a strange environment. The nearby village boasts a tiny shop which stocks jars of exotic baby-food so that Lily’s introduced to kiwi and passionfruit (foods I hadn’t even heard of until I was 11), and there’s a quintessential group of old men playing boules in what seems to be the village square – although it’s possible I’ve imagined that last bit.

We’ve been there for five days when Mark turns up unexpectedly, the day before our anniversary. Apparently, he has business to take care of in Arras and will be returning to Le Touqet at the weekend. He insists on cooking dinner: steak so rare it’s still bloody, fried in butter and garlic, with a selection of equally cholesterol-laden accompaniments. ‘You English murder your vegetables,’ he tells me when I express surprise that he is sautéeing the carrots instead of boiling them. I smile politely but feel uneasy. Mark doesn’t fit my idea of what a father-in-law should be like: strikingly similar to my husband in appearance with the same long, dark lashes and unusual golden eyes, he exudes the arrogance of someone in his twenties: it’s as if a much younger person has been squashed into a forty-year-old body.

We’re about to sit down and eat when the doorbell rings. Mark goes to answer it and returns with a pretty, blonde girl who can’t be much older than me. He introduces her as Fabienne and I wonder if she is a work colleague. I’m shocked when Steve whispers to me that this is his father’s mistress.

Fabienne joins us for the meal. It’s clearly something she and Mark planned in advance because she knocks back the wine at an alarming rate, despite having driven here in her own car. I feel uncomfortable at the thought that Fabienne doesn’t look like she’ll be going home tonight and I’m angry with Mark for making us accessories to adultery.

As the meal progresses, I stick to orange juice, even though Mark tells me the Beaujolais is a good one. I watch them drinking glass after glass until I’m no longer sure whether the slurred voices I hear are due to alcohol or accent. I notice, too, that Fabienne is both exceptionally pretty and exceptionally stupid – at least, that’s the impression that I form, even though she’s making the effort to speak English whereas my own spoken French is decidedly rusty. The conversation continues and I find myself longing for them all to finish eating so Steve and I can escape to our room and enjoy some privacy.

But once the meal is over, Mark opens another bottle of wine and the cigarettes come out. The smell of their smoke mixes uneasily with the lingering impression of garlic and red wine, making me feel queasy, so I leave them sitting around the scrubbed pine table and wander off to the family room, hoping to find something to do for the next twenty minutes until Steve can be peeled away from the wine and Gauloises.

A 5000-piece jigsaw lies on the table, semi-complete. I remember noticing it when we arrived and thinking that the fun part – the people, the street, the stained-glass windows in the cathedral – was already finished. Now only 2000 pieces of sky remain: light blue shapes, looking almost identical apart from tiny variations. And although some of them might seem to fit in several different places, there is only one correct position for each one.

For a moment, I hesitate, wondering if it is bad manners to finish someone else’s jigsaw. Then I remind myself that it’s equally anti-social to sit and smoke at the meal table – or to offer your son a holiday home simply to furnish yourself with an alibi when having an affair.

My fingers work busily, in tandem with my eyes. I’m enjoying the challenge. Soon I am utterly engrossed in trying to fit the fiendish pieces together.

As I work, I am vaguely aware of Mark and Fabienne heading up the stairs towards one of the empty bedrooms and wonder why Steve hasn’t come to join me. Surely he’s not still sitting in the kitchen, drinking on his own? Eventually, I decide to go and look. I’d feel less awkward if the two of us were ensconced in our own room, with the door shut, out of earshot of all the moans and groans floating down the stairs.

Returning to the kitchen, I freeze in stupefaction. Mark sits slumped over a bottle, out for the count. But if he is here, then who went upstairs with Fabienne?

I know that anyone else would march up the stairs and burst into the bedroom – and Mark will later ask me why I didn’t; but the idea of what I might see frightens me. I’m seven years old once more, hearing monsters under the bed; but if I put my fingers in my ears and squeeze my eyes shut, they might disappear. And so, no matter how loud the squeaking of bedsprings becomes, I force myself to continue with the jigsaw, now jamming in the pieces haphazardly – anything so that I don’t have to go upstairs and be confronted with the terrible truth.

Tears leak from my eyes and drip unbidden onto the flimsy cardboard shapes, making them as tarnished and spoilt as my marriage. I press on regardless – this jigsaw is currently the only part of my life where I can take control. But I’ve forced too many pieces into spaces they weren’t meant for, and the sky’s already looking distorted and uncomfortable.

Finally, I admit defeat and creep up the stairs, lurking outside the bedroom door, listening for every last scrap of damning evidence. The door opens and Fabienne stands there, with Steve zipping up his jeans in the background. The French girl’s eyes are wide with shock when she sees me. Steve says nothing.

After a few seconds, I find my tongue. “What the hell has been going on?” I ask.

“Je ne comprends pas...” Fabienne begins, but I’m not letting her – either of them – get away with it.

“You speak perfectly good English!” I accuse, remembering how the other girl had delighted in practising her conversational skills earlier.

“It was not my fault!” Fabienne weeps. “Steve made me do it!”

I dart a quick look at my husband. He’s sitting on the rumpled bed, stony-faced, not wanting to implicate himself.

I don’t ask what it was that Steve made Fabienne do – I feel sickened by the idea of it all. Instead, I turn and walk down the stairs, back to the bedroom where only fourteen hours earlier I had lain in my husband’s arms, thinking we were happy. Scrabbling around in my handbag for some paracetamol to ward off the headache that is now marching across my temples, my fingers brush against an envelope: the anniversary card I bought in the village a few days ago. The irony is exquisitely painful.

I’m lying in the dark, unable to get to sleep, when Steve tiptoes into the room some hours later, the scent of Fabienne still lingering on his skin, and silently begins to undress. I want to tell him to leave, but it’s not my house; so instead I roll over, away from him, when he tries to put his arm around me and pretend that nothing’s happened.

“Sophie ...” His voice is pleading, but the pain in my gut is now fiercer than the headache: my heart’s been bent out of shape and I don’t know if it will ever be the same again.

After a long time, I hear a voice that is tight and brittle and not my own ask him whether this is the first time he’s been unfaithful. The length of his pause before he answers confirms my suspicions so that I don’t really need to hear about the redhead he picked up in a bar six months ago – while I was in hospital with our new-born baby; and then I inch slightly further away from him and stare at the wall in silence until I hear his heavy, even breathing.

The next morning, I wake up with the stranger who used to be my husband. It is our first anniversary – in fact, our only anniversary, for this time next year, Steve will have left me, purportedly going to France on his own to visit his father but in actuality moving in with an Irish woman named Sîan and her two children, just a few minutes’ walk away from our own student flat. This will occur after several more instances of infidelity: a librarian called Bridget he will meet on a train and with whom he will have an affair lasting more than three months; and a student called Gemma, in our year and in my tutorial group, who, in a bizarre twist of fate will then sleep with Steve’s father when Mark visits some months later. In years to come, friends will comment that my first marriage sounds like some bizarre plotline in EastEnders, and I will be able to laugh it off and be grateful that it was over so quickly; but the present is raw and it is painful; and instead of the lazy morning in bed I’d envisaged, we’re sneaking out of the house at the crack of dawn before anyone else is awake, before Mark realises he’s been cuckolded by his own son.

Driving in a taxi to the nearest train station, unspoken recriminations fill the car. I know I should be angry, but I am still too numbed by hurt to let myself feel; and besides, there’s a baby on my lap who needs all my attention. It is our first anniversary – and like the 2000 pieces of sky, I realise that Steve and I don’t fit properly anymore. The picture is all wrong.

It will take another twelve months before I am brave enough to break the jigsaw apart and start a new one.