The Things We Need to Say Read online

  After a while Elizabeth started to go to some of Fran’s other classes too and that’s where she met Constance. Constance rubbed Elizabeth up the wrong way at first. She was so loud and deliberately outrageous, but underneath she was solid gold and it was hard not to love her. She had been grateful for Constance’s friendship over the last few months. She was delighted they’d be sharing the experience of the Spanish retreat.

  Everyone had missed Fran last year when she had taken several months off. They’d sent her cards and flowers and hoped she’d be all right. When she came back to teaching in January she’d seemed fine on the outside, almost back to her old self, but something had shifted inside her. It was subtle, but Elizabeth had seen it many times before. Something shifts inside all of us after trauma or big life events, even the happy ones. And what Fran had been through hadn’t been happy. Elizabeth couldn’t imagine how she’d managed.

  ‘Yoga is such a powerful healing tool,’ Fran would say if anybody broached the subject with her. She didn’t want to talk about it.

  Elizabeth sees the same shift in Max now. What grown man wants to watch his parents’ acrimonious divorce?

  Elizabeth expects if she could see Ian she would see the shift in him.

  If she’s honest, she can see it in herself.

  Despite what she’d been through, Fran had still been there to support her students. One night after class Elizabeth waited around hoping to catch Fran alone. She’d pretended to be looking for something in her bag, emptying and repacking over and over, buying time as Fran patiently answered questions. Elizabeth was glad Constance wasn’t there interfering, and as she unpacked her bag again, she’d imagined Fran’s husband sitting downstairs in the café, waiting for her, looking up every time somebody walked in, disappointed it wasn’t her. His face lights up whenever he sees her. Elizabeth realised, the first time she saw it, that Tony had never looked at her like that.

  Eventually everybody had left, and Fran walked over to Elizabeth, squatting beside her.

  ‘Can I help you with anything, Elizabeth?’ she’d asked.

  ‘You mentioned your husband was a lawyer. I wondered if he knew of any good divorce solicitors.’

  ‘That’s his area of expertise actually – you should ask him,’ Fran had replied. And then her face fell. ‘Is everything OK, Elizabeth?’

  ‘My husband wants a divorce,’ Elizabeth had said. She’d started to cry then and felt the warmth of Fran’s hand on her back as she passed her a tissue.

  After a moment the students in the next class began to come into the studio and Fran had stood up, holding out her hand to Elizabeth.

  ‘Come on,’ she’d said. ‘Let me introduce you to Will. He’ll look after you.’

  Elizabeth hadn’t told Fran what had happened between her and Tony then and, when she had introduced her to Will, he just gave her his card and asked her to phone him the next day.

  ‘Make sure he gives the legwork to one of his assistants,’ Fran had said with a smile. ‘His hourly rate is astronomical!’

  Elizabeth watched them as they left, his arm around her waist. After Fran came back to work Elizabeth noticed that he met her after class more often than he had done before and that there was a fragility about both of them now. She’d wondered how they were coping. How did anyone come back from that?

  Elizabeth hears the beep of a car horn in the street outside, jolting her from her reverie. Only Constance would be so blatantly inconsiderate as to blare a horn at five a.m. in a residential street. She stands up, picking up her suitcase and yoga mat, and heads for the door.

  Fran

  She sits on the beach scrunching her toes into the sand. She tries not to think about Will, but sand between her toes always reminds her of their wedding day. They did elope in the end, just the two of them on a beach in the Caribbean promising to be each other’s for ever. How had everything gone so wrong?

  She takes big lungfuls of sea air and admires the beautiful beach in front of her. Salou has thirty-four blue flag beaches and people have been coming from all over Europe to enjoy them since the 1960s. Even though it’s still early the beach is already getting full, people are sunbathing, jet skiing, swimming, or just strolling along the Passeig Jaume I, which runs parallel to the beach.

  Fran remembers reading that it’s named after James I of Aragon who set sail from Salou to capture the Balearic Islands in the thirteenth century after which it became famous for its pirates. Fran finds it hard to believe that somewhere so peaceful was ever thought to be unsafe.

  As she sits there, the sun warming her back, the sand between her toes, she starts to feel better. Her day hadn’t begun well. She’d started it with her head over the toilet bowl, heaving up everything she’d eaten the previous evening. She couldn’t believe she’d managed to get food poisoning on the first day of the retreat; she shouldn’t have eaten the prawns. To make matters worse she was found in that unattractive and compromising position by Mia from housekeeping.

  ‘Senyoreta, senyoreta,’ Mia had cried as she’d come into the room to clean to find Fran sitting on the bathroom floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fran had replied, thoroughly embarrassed as she heaved herself up and headed towards the sink to get some water. Mia practically flew at her to stop her.

  ‘No no no,’ she’d cried as she went to get the bottled water from the fridge. She poured Fran a glass from the bottle. There’s nothing wrong with the tap water in Spain but Fran remembered from when she was in Barcelona that everybody drinks bottled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Fran had said again when she had drunk her glass of water and washed her face.

  ‘Mia.’ The girl pointed at herself.

  ‘Fran.’

  ‘Estas embarassada?’ she’d asked.

  Fran shook her head. ‘I don’t speak Catalan.’

  ‘Et-tu enceinte?’ she’d tried in French, but Fran still hadn’t understood.

  ‘Un nado, un bébé,’ Mia had said loudly pointing at Fran’s stomach.

  ‘Oh God! No!’ Fran had replied, alarmed. Where had Mia got that idea from? ‘No, it’s just food poisoning.’ She shook her head and mimed being sick again but that didn’t really help because Mia had seen her being sick and now had the idea that she was pregnant firmly lodged in her head.

  Mia had pulled a small bag of what looked like sweets out of her pocket and gave them to Fran.

  ‘Gingembre,’ she’d said. She’d seemed to be sticking to French and Fran knew that meant ginger, which was good for sickness. ‘Pour le bébé,’ she’d added with a grin. Fran had closed her eyes. She didn’t have the energy to argue.

  ‘Gracias,’ she’d replied, not knowing what language to speak any more. Mia had smiled again and turned to go, realising that this wasn’t the best time to clean Fran’s room.

  ‘À plus tard,’ she’d called as she left.

  ‘See you later,’ Fran had repeated quietly.

  Sitting on the beach now, Fran thinks about that conversation again. She thinks about how she’s been feeling nauseous for over a week now, and about how the ginger sweets made her feel much better. She remembers how ginger tea was the only thing that helped with her morning sickness when she was pregnant last year, and when she was pregnant before that. She knows the sickness always kicked in at around eight weeks.

  But she also knows that she can’t be pregnant. Will had been so careful, since their wedding anniversary. They hadn’t talked about it at all but from that night Will had always used condoms, carefully and meticulously. It felt as though he was protecting himself as much he was Fran, while at the same time leaving their options open until such a time as they were ready to talk. Not that they had of course.

  And then she remembers that night in May as the wind howled and the rain lashed down, the night they hadn’t been so careful. In another fumbled attempt to return to normality they’d booked a cottage for the weekend on the Norfolk coast – somewhere they’d stayed before. The weather had been terrible and Will had lock
ed the doors and closed the shutters, had cooked dinner and opened a bottle of wine. For a few hours everything had felt normal again; for a few hours they’d been able to forget.

  They’d curled up together on the sofa, half watching a film, finishing the wine, kissing. Later, in bed, as Will was leaving a trail of kisses down her stomach, he remembered that he’d left the condoms on his nightstand at home. Fran had told him she didn’t care, and right then in that one moment of freedom she hadn’t done. Will had paused for a second, as though weighing something up, before smiling his lopsided smile.

  The next morning, in the cold light of day, it felt like a mistake. Fran didn’t know if she could ever go through it again; she didn’t know if Will could. They hadn’t talked about it, but Will went back to using condoms, carefully, meticulously.

  At the time Fran thought Will had bought condoms to protect them. She’d thought they were for her. It hadn’t crossed her mind that he’d been having an affair.

  Her stomach lurches again, but with the shock of remembering rather than nausea. Will has had an affair, nothing is ever going to be the same again, and being pregnant isn’t going to change that. She isn’t pregnant; she just has a mild case of food poisoning. She holds her head in her hands and rests her elbows on her knees and tries to remember when she last had a period. She can’t.

  Fran feels as though her life has revolved around her menstrual cycle for the last eight years. She has always known when she was ovulating, when her period was due. How could she possibly be pregnant?

  Slowly she stands up and starts to walk back towards the hotel. Her body has been through so much. She’s been so stressed, had such a shock that it’s no wonder her cycle is a bit off. She has a lot to organise before the retreaters arrive this afternoon. She can’t just hang about at the beach all day. She needs to keep busy, keep her mind off Will, off babies, off what might have been.

  MARCH 2006

  The more we talked about it, the more the thought of running away together to get married felt like the right thing to do.

  Will wanted to explain what we were doing to his family.

  ‘Isn’t the point of eloping to tell them afterwards?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t do that to them, Fran. You know the kind of expectations they have,’ he replied, his jaw clenching with worry. Mostly I loved Will’s family but sometimes I hated the pressure they put on him to do things the way they thought he should do them.

  His family were of the traditional British stiff-upper-lip variety; tall and robust with good bone structure – the kind of people who could drink all night without appearing inebriated and still be up at dawn to feed the dogs and shoot the pheasants. Jamie, with his anti-establishment attitude, his trendy marketing business, and his morbid fear of shotguns was quite the cuckoo in the nest. Even Will wasn’t exactly a chip off the old block. He might be a partner, but the firm was small and I’d always had a sense that his family thought divorce law was only a step up from ambulance-chasing. I still didn’t really know what they thought of me.

  We explained to Will’s parents that, as it was his second marriage, and as I didn’t have any family, we wanted to just go away and do this on our own. They looked disappointed, wanting to put a notice in The Times. They had been looking forward to the marquee in the garden.

  ‘We did all that last time,’ I overheard Will consoling his mother afterwards. ‘And look how that turned out. I don’t want to do it again, and more importantly Fran doesn’t want it.’

  The week before the wedding Will asked me if I was going to change my name.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I just wondered if you’d thought about it.’

  ‘I’m going to,’ I replied.

  ‘Really?’ He seemed surprised.

  ‘Didn’t you think I would?’

  ‘Honestly, no.’ He stood up then, pulling me into a hug. ‘And you really don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do want to,’ I said. ‘I’m the last Sullivan. There aren’t any more of us left now and I’d like to be part of your family properly if that’s all right.’ I wasn’t sure if Will’s parents would ever really accept me, but it was lovely to be surrounded by people again.

  ‘Of course it’s all right,’ he replied. ‘And maybe one day, in the not too distant future, we can have a family of our own.’

  I didn’t answer him then. I just stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

  Eight months after Paris we got married on a beach in St Lucia, just the two of us, barefoot and unable to stop grinning. It really had been perfect. We’d always agreed that running away to get married was one of the best decisions we’d ever made.

  On our wedding night, as we lay in bed, Will gently broached the subject of starting a family again. He was thirty-six by then – he wanted a family as soon as possible. I wanted some more time to just be Will and Fran. I promised him we’d start trying when I turned thirty. That night in the tropics, thirty seemed a lifetime away.

  Later, much later, as I was falling asleep he drew me towards him.

  ‘You always say I saved you,’ he whispered. ‘But I don’t think you realise that you saved me too.’ I’m not sure if he knew that I was awake, that I’d heard him.

  We found the cracks in each other’s armour that night and wiggled inside. I thought we’d never let go.

  JULY 2016

  Fran

  David is at the hotel waiting for Fran when she gets back from the beach, much earlier than everyone else. She groans inwardly when she sees him sitting in the atrium of the hotel, straight-backed and eager, and she immediately chastises herself. Just as you aren’t meant to have favourite students she thinks, her mind flicking momentarily to Elizabeth, you aren’t meant to have least favourites.

  David could be a bore and his friend, who had booked a place on the retreat too, hadn’t been able to come at the last minute, so Fran is stuck with him until the others arrive. But David is also good and kind and a distraction from the thoughts running through her head right now, even if she hasn’t had a chance to wash the sand off her feet.

  She greets him with a smile and he insists on her joining him for lunch, even though she still can’t really face the thought of food. He takes the pressure off her for a while by talking, almost continually, about the Yoga Sutras, the Rig Veda, the Gita and other great works of yogic philosophy that Fran is usually passionate about but, today, can’t seem to find the energy for, the cogs in her brain moving too slowly; still rusty from underuse, sadness, betrayal.

  After the meal, she extricates herself and disappears to her room, which has now been cleaned. She feels better for having eaten a little bread and hopes her stomach has settled down. She needs to pull herself together. The flight on which the rest of her retreaters are arriving has already landed at Reus. They will be here in less than an hour.

  When she comes back down to the atrium, freshly showered and scented with patchouli and lemon, they have arrived. It feels like a sudden rush of bodies and warmth and distraction, a tumble of silver jewellery and designer handbags and hair loose and long and it’s wonderful. Elizabeth, Constance, Katrin, all regulars in her classes, and the friends they have brought with them. Fran feels a weight lift from her, a new and steely determination filling the place in her heart that the events of the last few days have emptied. She can do this, these are her people and this is her place in the world. This is somewhere she can be herself, unequivocally. This is somewhere she can start to heal.

  Constance is the first to hug Fran. Taller than her teacher by a good six inches, she almost lifts Fran off her feet.

  ‘This is Joy,’ she says eagerly, as she releases a breathless Fran and pushes a shy, mousey woman forward. ‘My sister.’

  Where Constance is tall and elegant and walks with ethereal grace, Joy is more downcast, stooped, distant. At first glance, they appear nothing alike but when Joy looks up, when Fran smiles at her and holds out a hand and Joy takes it, slowly smiling back, Fran noti
ces the similarities. The same eyes, the same smile, the same height if only Joy would embrace her full stature as her sister does.

  Fran knows that Joy and Constance’s elderly mother died in the spring after a long illness. She knows that Joy had been living with her, nursing her through it, and feels a sense of solidarity already with this woman she has never met before. She also knows that both sisters have taken the death very hard, even if Constance refuses to admit that.

  ‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ Fran says.

  ‘I haven’t done any yoga for years I’m afraid,’ Joy replies quietly.

  ‘It’s OK, you let me worry about that.’ Fran smiles.

  Elizabeth catches Fran’s eye then and a look passes between them as though they are both checking that the other is all right, both knowing how hard the last year has been for each of them and acknowledging that they will catch up with each other later. The feel of Elizabeth’s hand on her arm as she passes almost makes Fran want to break down right there in the middle of the atrium in front of everyone and tell her everything, but in her head she hears the voice of her old teacher telling her to hold it together, to be there for her students.

  As Elizabeth and Constance move away taking Joy with them, Fran hears Constance muttering to Elizabeth about David, who hasn’t moved from the sofa since the rest of the group arrived, hasn’t stood to greet them, hasn’t raised a smile.

  ‘God, I’d forgotten he was coming, in his bloody blue tights,’ Constance says. David had a tendency to practise yoga in blue leggings and very little else. It didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  Fran smiles to herself, making a mental note to try not to let David get too left out among all this female energy, as she turns to Katrin.