The Reunion

didn’t mind saying so himself, the best work he’d done in a very long time. And it was flowing out of him – he’d been writing solidly for days, for weeks, without stopping, without wanting to stop. He honestly couldn’t remember feeling like this about work, not for years, not since – well. Not for a long time.
    The work was cathartic. Rejuvenating. He felt stronger than he had in ages, he was living better than he had in years: getting up early, running, drinking less, eating well. Eggs, milk and chickens from the farm up the road, game birds from the hunters.
    ‘This thing you’re writing,’ Lilah said, ‘I hope it’s not a year in fucking Provence.’ It wasn’t, but it could have been, the way he was feeling. He was in love with the countryside, with the quaint hilltop villages, with the broken-down stone farmhouses. He loved buying cheese and oil and wild boar sausage from the market, he was even trying to learn French.
    He bought the house on a whim. He woke up one morning, roughly four weeks after Claudia left him, walked around his flat in his boxer shorts, counted the empty bottles of Scotch in the recycling bin (four, with two days still to go until collection day), checked his phone and discovered that he had dialled her number eighteen times the night before between the hours of twelve-thirty and two. If things carried on like this, he was either going to fall drunkenly down the spiral staircase and break his neck, or Claudia was going to report him for harassment. Neither was an attractive prospect.
    So he rang Jen. She’d sent him an email when she moved to Oxford in January. He’d ignored it. Now, in late March, he dialled her number.
    ‘Have you sold it?’ he asked her. ‘The house, I mean. Is it gone?’
    ‘Not a chance,’ she said. She sounded weary. ‘There was one offer, 50,000 euros below the asking price. The weather’s been bloody awful over there, I don’t think the agent’s had more than three people to see it. I think they’re just going to forget about it for a few months, try again in the summer.’
    ‘I’ll take it,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it. I want to buy the French house.’
    ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not desperate for the cash, Dan. Not yet anyway.’
    ‘No, I want it. I want to live there. I’ll take it.’
    At first she refused. Perhaps she thought he was buying it out of pity for her, or perhaps she thought he had some other, darker motive. A way to get a piece of her, an unbreakable link to her. He upped his offer, which only strengthened her resolve not to give in to him. Then he told her, ‘This isn’t for you, Jen, I’m not doing this for you. I want it, I feel as though I need it. I’m desperate to get away. Please.’
    And she gave in.
    He moved into the house on 1 May. It was a different place to the one he’d left in December and so like the one he’d left sixteen or so years ago. The day of arrival was spent in a daze, walking from room to room, in shorts and T-shirt, bare feet on cold stone tile, gazing out of the windows. He kept expecting to see the others, to catch snatches of conversation, to hear laughter ringing out from upstairs. He understood what Jen meant now, when she’d talked of ghosts. It was uncanny.
    He found it so unnerving that he moved himself into the barn right away, a place that hadn’t existed back in those days, and so could not be haunted. It too had a completely different character in summer than it had in winter, flooded with warmth and light and the occasional waft of the farm yard. He moved into the barn and he started to write, and he’d barely stopped since.
    He was still required to go to London from time to time, to speak to his agent or to producers, to go to parties. He kept the socialising to a minimum, though; there were so few people he wished to see and so many he wanted to avoid. At the last thing he’d attended he’d ended up with a glass of champagne in the face and a two-inch scratch on his throat, courtesy of Claudia.
    And there were disruptions here, too. The biggest one was heralded three weeks after he moved in by a phone call from Zac of all people, asking for a favour. And that was how he found that the place he’d escaped to, to be alone, turned out to be the place he started to build something like a family.

 
     
    15 June 2013
    Dearest Dan,
    Ça se passe bien à Villefranche? I hope you’re all settled in. If there’s anything you need, Monsieur Caron is the