Almost Life

In July 1978, Erica, an eighteen-year-old Englishwoman from King's Lynn spending her first summer abroad, approaches a woman reading on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur basilica in Paris. They are reading the same book: Roland Barthes' Fragments d'un discours amoureux. The woman is Laure, a doctoral student in Art Theory at the Sorbonne, a university in Paris. When a persistent man follows Erica out of the church, Laure scares him off by barking and growling. She invites Erica for a drink, and the next evening, to a reading at Le Divan, a bookshop where her friend Marie works.

At the reading, Erica meets Laure's circle: Michel, her closest companion; Marie and Agnès, a devoted couple; and Léa, Barbara, and others. Tension surfaces between Laure and Hilde, who is jealous because Laure has been sleeping with both her and a married older woman named Pauline. After the reading, Laure kisses Erica on a darkened street, and Erica reaches to kiss her back. Laure leads her to her squat on Rue Charlot in Le Marais, a former joinery strewn with bottles and dirty laundry. They make love, and despite Erica's inexperience with women, the connection is immediate and intense.

Erica moves into the squat after a chaotic escape from her pension's exploitative landlady. Over the following weeks, she transforms the space, scrubbing floors and sorting laundry, while accompanying Laure everywhere. A violent attack on Parade, a gay bar, forces Erica to confront the danger of being allied with a despised community; she calmly shields the injured Michel from an assailant, deepening her bond with both Michel and Laure.

The emotional center of their summer arrives when Laure takes Erica to L'Orangerie, the Paris museum housing Monet's waterlily paintings, Les Nymphéas. Laure instructs her to stand in the center of the oval room and simply look. The colors remind Erica of the marshes near her Norfolk home, and she perceives Monet as someone who understood the hunger for the present moment. Laure watches from the bench, feeling both peace and terror. This visit becomes a foundational memory for both of them.

Their final week brings conflict. Laure reacts with fury when Erica gives her a cheap poster reproduction of one of the paintings, though her real anguish is that Erica is leaving to study at the University of East Anglia (UEA). At the coach station, Erica boards in tears. Laure waves until the coach disappears, then bends in half and shouts into the darkness of her pressed palms.

At university, Erica takes male lovers, sometimes thinking of Laure. Months later, she writes a letter framing their relationship as a friendship. Laure, spiraling into alcohol addiction since Erica's departure, reads the letter as a rejection and sends a cold reply. Erica begins dating Donna, a history of art student, and for the first time says aloud that she "likes both" men and women. She invites Donna to Paris. The 1979 visit is painful: Laure tells Erica she does not want to be her friend, and Michel tells Erica she broke Laure's heart. At a canal, Michel tells Laure she needs to stop drinking. His words mark a turning point.

In 1981, Erica begins the Creative Writing MA at UEA, where she meets Anthony "Ant" Cowper-Gray, a Cambridge-educated writer from a wealthy Surrey family. At his lavish New Year's Eve party, Ant confesses his love, and they sleep together. For the first time, Erica says "I love you" aloud and means it. Meanwhile, Laure meets Gabrielle, a woman in her fifties in recovery, at a support group for alcohol addiction. Gabrielle nurses Laure through detoxification but becomes coercive, intercepting Laure's letters to friends and isolating her. On the eve of Laure's twenty-ninth birthday, she discovers the deception, and Gabrielle turns violent. Laure flees barefoot, her feet cut by shattered glass, and runs to Michel's community café.

Michel reveals Laure's father is gravely ill. They travel to Bois-d'Ennebourg, her father's farmhouse near Rouen, where Laure tells her father she is a lesbian. He responds with exasperated tenderness, hurt only that she thought he might reject her. Erica and Ant marry in July 1984. Laure's father dies that September, leaving her the farmhouse. Through cautious letters, Laure and Erica reestablish a fragile connection.

In the summer of 1985, Erica rents a Paris apartment to write her novel. Léa arranges drinks and invites Laure without telling Erica. Seeing Laure after six years, Erica feels an immediate, powerful attraction. They visit Michel, now shockingly diminished by undiagnosed illness, and begin spending time together. At L'Orangerie, overwhelmed by the paintings and their shared history, Erica flees in tears. Later, at Laure's apartment, she notices the cheap Monet poster, once discarded in fury, now hung on the wall. She crosses the room and kisses Laure.

Their affair resumes. Then Barbara calls with news connecting Michel's symptoms to AIDS. That same day, alone and resolved to leave Ant, Erica drinks too much. When Laure returns late, walking arm-in-arm with Barbara, Erica explodes with jealous accusations and shatters a wine bottle, a devastating trigger for Laure's sobriety. Laure orders her to leave. Before they can reconcile, Ant flies to Paris unexpectedly. Erica, unable to reach Laure, sleeps with her husband. When the women finally speak, both agree it is over.

Laure remains in Paris through Michel's illness and death, haunted by guilt for not being present at the end. She retreats to the farmhouse in Normandy. Erica publishes her novel An Inheritance to minimal notice, has two daughters, Sylvia and Elinor, and experiences severe postnatal depression. In 1992, Ant attends a lecture by Laure at the Sorbonne and, unaware of the depth of her history with Erica, befriends her. He arranges a family visit to Normandy. At Giverny, Monet's home and gardens, Erica walks with Laure and the girls while Ant stays behind. As the girls run across the bridge over the waterlily lake, Erica and Laure's fingers find each other and intertwine, a brief contact freighted with the weight of their unlived life.

Years pass. Laure and Barbara become a couple; Laure writes a bestselling memoir. Erica experiences a miscarriage and a long depressive episode. When Laure and Barbara visit Norfolk, Erica, drunk and destabilized, confesses on a coastal walk that she is still in love with Laure. In the warm shallows of the sea, after screaming underwater and collapsing into laughter, they make love for the last time. That night, Laure tells Barbara. Erica, feeling the encounter as an exorcism, resolves to choose her marriage.

Years later, Léa contacts Erica: Laure has had a severe stroke and cannot speak. Ant reveals he has known about the affair for years and urges Erica to go, but she decides she cannot. In 2010, on the balcony of the Paris apartment she shares with Barbara, Laure feels another stroke beginning. Unable to call out, she mentally composes a letter forgiving Erica, imagining a garden with willows over a lake. In 2013, Erica discovers an obituary online: Laure has been dead for three years. She retrieves from her dressing table a photograph from the Sacré-Cœur steps and a cigarette Laure rolled for her in 1978. On the beach at night, she tries to light the ancient cigarette, but it disintegrates. Laughing through tears, she releases the fragments into the sea. In her mind, she walks toward Laure on those steps, smiles, and says, "Bonjour."