by Kate Riordan
You don’t reply but after a while you nudge my hand in apology. Quite suddenly, I want to cry.
The walk back from the village is dark. No, not dark: pitch-black. The stars have been blotted out so thoroughly by clouds that it takes until we reach the turn-off before I can distinguish the shadowed bulk of the hills from the sky.
Despite the lack of visible moon, La Rêverie seems to stand in its own dim pool of light as we approach. Or perhaps it’s just our eyes, still adjusting to the countryside after years of London’s perpetually thrumming glow. It looks bigger by night, a monster of a house rising out of its dark moat of garden. I don’t look at the windows as we go up the path, keeping my head down, pretending to hunt in my bag for the key I’m already clutching.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had shaken out my mother’s soft old linen, only a little musty, and made us up a bed each: the creaking mahogany double Greg and I once shared, which was my parents’ before us, and one of the narrow twins in the bedroom next to it for you. Your old room has only its small cot-bed and I don’t want you in there anyway.
‘I remember this,’ you exclaim, in the room that’s been a spare my whole life, pointing to the faded blue toile de Jouy wallpaper, which, in one corner, has begun to peel. ‘I used to sit on the floor and make up stories about the people.’ You go closer, tracing a finger across the men in stockings, the ladies with their pompadours and fans. ‘I remember them.’
*
I wake at exactly three in the morning, the dimly glowing hands of my travel clock a perfect L. Downstairs, at the very edge of my hearing, I hear the ormolu clock in the salon as it chimes the hour. The bright, metallic ting is a sound older than memory to me, one that marked a benign passage through all the nights of my childhood, and I turn over, comforted. I’m just slipping into a dream of my mother winding it when I sit up, the bed groaning with the suddenness of the movement. I haven’t wound the clock.
*
The next morning I find you at the bottom of the terrace steps, barefoot in the long grass. I shade my eyes against the startling glare of the sun, my head tight from lack of sleep.
‘I found the swimming pool,’ you call up to me, full of glee. ‘I didn’t know there was one. It’s so cool.’
You don’t remember it from before. I try to smile: this is a good thing.
‘Perhaps we can see about filling it, if the pump’s still working,’ I make myself say. You’re a strong swimmer; I’ve made sure of that. I paid for years of lessons at an over-chlorinated municipal pool near our flat in London.
You look at me oddly. ‘It’s already filled.’
I know it was emptied ten years ago, when we left for good. Neither Camille nor I have touched it since.
But of course you’re right. The water glimmers mysteriously through the row of parasol pines my conservative father planted in the fifties for the sake of his daughters’ modesty. It isn’t the blinding turquoise of resort swimming pools but deep, darkling jade. On overcast days I always thought it looked like green ink.
I kneel at the edge and dip my hand in. Hardly yet warmed by the sun, the water runs like chilled silk through my fingers. There are only a few leaves and insects floating on the surface, clustered at the far end. Someone has cleared it recently.
I wonder if Olivier Lagarde arranged it. Perhaps he wound the clock in the salon too. I have the strangest sense that these things are simply the house welcoming us back. And perhaps trying to keep us here.
I glance at my bare wrist. ‘What time is it?’
‘About half ten, I think.’
I get to my feet. ‘I have to meet the solicitor at eleven, in the village.’
‘I’m staying here.’
I pause. ‘I thought you wanted to go to the hypermarket. You’ll have to come with me if you do. I’m going there on the way back.’
You grumble as we walk to the house but I know you don’t mind, really. You’ve never been the sort to put up much of a fight. My lovely biddable girl.
*
Only one other table is occupied at the café in the village – a couple, Dutch most likely: all long legs and hiking equipment.
‘Darling, why don’t you go and look in the tabac over there?’ I hand you a crisp ten-franc note. ‘Buy some postcards. The solicitor and I will be speaking in French.’
You blink, slightly stung, but go anyway, just as the waiter arrives.
Olivier Lagarde turns up just as you disappear into the shop across the square. He’s much handsomer than I’d expected from my dim memory of his father. It’s already hot and he’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, his arms burnished against blinding white cotton and the chrome of his watch. His grip when he shakes my hand is firm and warm. As he sits down, the Dutch woman’s eyes rake over him and I feel a little jolt that she might assume we’re together.
‘Madame Winters, thank you for meeting me today.’ He smiles easily, appreciatively, his eyes intent when I meet them.
‘Please, call me Sylvie,’ I say, looking away first. ‘And it’s Durand again, actually. I’m divorced.’
‘Bien sûr. Sylvie, then. You’ve seen the damage now, I gather, and that it’s really quite superficial. I hope that was clear in my letter. I didn’t want to worry you unduly. You were lucky, though. It could have been …’ He spreads his hands. There’s no need to say how it might have turned out.
‘Do the police know who did it?’
He shrugs. ‘Kids with nothing to do, who else? It happens all the time in the countryside. Especially when people know a house is standing empty.’
‘Have they arrested anyone?’
He shakes his head. ‘To them it’s a small thing. They couldn’t find any signs of forced entry. I’m sorry, Mada– Sylvie, but they weren’t very interested. One of them said it was probably the Gattaz boys.’
I nod. It’s a name I haven’t thought of since childhood. That and the French that comes so effortlessly is both liberating and rooting. No, confining. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be: the inexorable descent into the past; the years in England flickering and fading at the horizon.
I take a sip of my coffee: tiny, bitter and delicious. ‘I don’t remember you. From growing up round here, I mean.’
‘No, I went to school in Avignon. Stayed with my aunt during the week. My father insisted, but look how it turned out.’ He smiles wryly. ‘I ended up here anyway.’
‘Monsieur Lagarde,’ I begin.
‘Please, if I’m to call you Sylvie, you must call me Olivier.’ He smiles again, as though we’ve shared something intimate. It occurs to me that he might be flirting but I’m so rusty I can’t be sure.
‘D’accord,’ I say, inclining my head. ‘Olivier. I said to you on the phone that it might be time we sold La Rêverie. We’ve been putting it off, my sister and I, and I’m not sure why any more. Maybe what happened is a sign that we should get on with it.’
‘I can help you sell, if that’s what you want. I can put you in touch with someone at Century 21. Martine. She’s good. But you should know that it’s a sluggish market. The old Pelletier farm has been empty for two years now.’
He catches the waiter’s eye, then looks back at me. ‘Stay for another?’
I find myself nodding and he holds up two fingers.
‘It’s the best time of year for the tourists, at least,’ he continues easily. ‘There’s a chance someone like them’ – he nods at the couple in walking gear – ‘might decide they want their own piece of France. Five good-sized bedrooms, a big garden with a pool: it would make an excellent holiday home for a family. Though we’re slightly off the beaten track here, of course. Now, if it was an hour closer to the coast things would be easier … I said the same thing to your sister when we spoke.’
The sun has moved so it’s beating down on my head. I shift slightly towards Olivier to escape its glare and knock against the table. He puts out a hand to steady it.
‘Désolée,’ I murmur, aware of the heat rising
in my cheeks.
Absurdly, I find myself wondering whom he would judge to be the more attractive of Camille and me. Your aunt was the archetypal Parisienne even before she was one. She always looked down on the ageing housewives in the village for their thickened waists and badly dyed hair. I hadn’t seen her without an immaculately made-up face since she was eighteen. I run my hand through my own unbrushed hair, then make myself stop.
Across the square, you sidle out of the tabac and stop to turn a carousel of postcards.
‘May I say, Sylvie?’
I wait, hoping he isn’t going to say what I think he is.
He looks uncertain for the first time. ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I was for your … loss. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but after what’s happened at the house, I felt it would be strange not to.’
This is why I hadn’t wanted to see anyone who knew me from before. Though it feels like Olivier is coming from a place of genuine concern, I know what people in this village are like. Always hungry for more gossip, they’re perfectly capable of filling in any gaps with speculation and guesswork. I wonder what they came up with about us, which rumours persisted, and firmed up over time into hard truth.
‘Thank you, it’s kind of you to say so,’ I say. ‘Though …’ I pause ‘… I would prefer you not to mention anything about it in front of my daughter. In front of Emma. She doesn’t know everything about … what happened here. About the fire – the old fire.’
He nods and we finish our coffee in silence. I’m glad when you come sauntering over, hair shining in the sun, a paper bag in one hand and a chocolate ice-cream in the other.
‘It’s not even midday,’ I exclaim in English. Olivier laughs, probably grateful the tension has been broken. I smile at him and, just like that, the awkwardness melts away. I can’t help it, I like him.
‘I love it here,’ you say, eyes bright and imploring. ‘I hope the house stuff takes ages.’
Olivier grins at you. ‘Pas de problème, Mademoiselle.’ He switches to heavily accented English. ‘In France, these things always do.’
*
Drained by the sheer size of the hypermarché, the two of us are lying prone next to the pool by two o’clock. The sun is fierce, like a physical weight pressing down, its effect almost like a sickness. I know I need to get on with things but my limbs have turned watery. I feel as if my hope to leave by the end of the week is spooling away, out of reach.
I drag over the only working parasol so it covers you and pull my own lounger into the dappled shade of the oleander tree. When I shut my eyes, patches of brightness bloom pale red through the lids. I’m just drifting into sleep when I hear screaming. I leap up and towards you without conscious thought, heart galloping, but you haven’t moved. You’re still sleeping, the headphones clamped over your head continuing to buzz.
I must have imagined it, teetering on the brink of dreams. I lie down again but can’t settle, the echo of that phantom noise still reverberating in the heavy air. I recognize that scream. It’s the same voice that murmured in my ear as I drove south. A girlish voice, melodic but threaded through with steel.
I go back to the house and find my eyes drawn to the souillarde door. Behind it, the cold tiles under my bare feet are a shock after the sultry garden. The air is like wading through river water, my arms goose-pimpling as I inspect the mould again, as if I might find clues written in its patterns.
I’m sure it’s got worse overnight, the black marks beginning to spread around the small window like a dark, blurred-leaf creeper. I bought a spray that should bleach it away but I don’t want to be in here. There’s a prickling at the back of my neck, the kind that says you’re no longer alone, though I know I am.
I’m just pulling the door shut behind me when I catch movement through the window. It’s so brief that it’s not even a shape, more a shift in the pattern of light out there by the barn.
An old gate is tucked into the overgrown hedge at the side of the lawn. It’s rusted shut when I get to it, white paint blistered, and it screeches as I wrench it open. It doesn’t look like anyone’s used it since we left, which should be reassuring but isn’t. It only adds to the dream-like strangeness I can’t shake, of a place simultaneously abandoned and alive, like pockets of heat and cold in the sea.
The patch of earth between the house and the barn is palpably hotter and drier than the garden. I don’t go into the barn. I already know what the damage looks like in there.
I shade my eyes to check the path snaking away towards the drive. There are no footprints but, further away, something has raised a cloud of ochre dust. Out on the main road, the wasp drone of a moped engine fades out of hearing. Once the air clears, everything is still, baking in the afternoon glare. The only movement is the heat shimmer that warps the distant blue hills.
*
The garden is losing its colour to the dusk. We’ve just finished eating a drawn-out supper of tomatoes, cheese and bread. Someone spying on the scene would see a mother and daughter relaxing into their holiday, but my shoulders are stiff with tension.
Fortunately, you seem not to have noticed. Or perhaps you have, because you stretch your arms and yawn noisily. ‘I could get used to this,’ you say, in the old-man voice that always makes me laugh. ‘What do you think, love? Shall we stay?’
It’s a favourite game of ours, this pretence we’re a long-retired couple who take pleasure in small things; we do it in the flat while I’m making dinner. You’ve been less willing lately, and I’ve missed it, an eccentric side you don’t reveal to anyone else.
‘If you like it here, dearie, then so do I,’ I say, trying not to sound too eager.
‘You’re a good girl. I couldn’t have asked for a better wife all these years.’
We get the giggles then, made abruptly helpless in the intense way that veers close to tears. I pull down my sleeve to wipe my eyes as we lapse into an easy silence.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ you suddenly ask, and the switch in mood pulls me out of my happiness like a slap. I reach for the pale Bandol rosé I’ve been drinking since this afternoon. I only drink occasionally in London.
‘Ghosts?’ My voice quavers slightly. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why, have you seen one?’ I intend this to sound lighthearted but it doesn’t quite succeed, the question mark too loud.
‘No, I just wondered.’
‘Did you hear a funny noise? Remember, it’s an old house and it’s summer now, too. When the temperature changes, everything creaks.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘What, then?’
You shrug. ‘Just some places are … I don’t know. Like this place is. It’s old and stuff but it’s not just that. Our flat’s Victorian but I can’t imagine seeing anything there.’
‘And you can here.’
You shrug again.
‘Are you going to start sorting out our old things tomorrow?’ you ask after a while. ‘I can help if you want.’
‘You’re good to offer, sweetheart, but it’ll be boring and dusty, I expect. I thought you wanted to get a tan.’ I keep my voice casual because I don’t want you going through everything. I don’t know what you might stumble across, or how to answer your questions if you do.
You poke at your arm. ‘This pasty skin will never go brown. It’s already pink, like Dad’s.’ You look straight at me. ‘Don’t you want me to help?’
You’re testing me, which is so unlike you. By unspoken agreement, we only talk about her obliquely. I’ve caught you enough times, though, gazing at that photograph in the hall at home, the only one of your sister that’s on display. I presume you keep quiet because you don’t want to make me sad, and I’ve let you believe it’s as simple as that. Here, though, things might be different. Perhaps this is the beginning, tectonic plates shifting just enough to trigger the first tremor.
‘You can help if you want to,’ I say woodenly.
‘Is there much left that was hers?’
You aren’t
looking at me but off into the darkening garden. You’ve poured yourself a dribble of the rosé, I don’t know when.
‘I – I’m not sure,’ I say honestly. I can’t remember exactly what was cleared and what wasn’t. While so many of my memories from ten years ago are pin-sharp, others have blurred.
‘I know you don’t like talking about her, Mum,’ you say, drinking your unasked-for inch of wine in a single gulp. ‘But I don’t see how we can’t. It would just be weird, wouldn’t it, now we’re here? She was my sister but I know barely anything about her. She died, you and Dad split up and we moved to London. That’s it.’
I don’t reply. I can’t think straight because my blood is suddenly loud in my ears.
You get up and put your arms round me. ‘Please don’t be upset,’ you say, breath hot in my ear. ‘You can tell me things, you know. I’m older now.’
‘You’re not an adult, though, are you?’ I say, more abruptly than I mean to. What I really want to say is, You’re still my little girl. Your sister at thirteen was so much older than you.
You straighten up, offended, and pull your hand away when I try to take it.
I know I should explain everything properly. People always assume there’ll be a better time and then it’s too late. But I don’t think I’m capable of it, not right now.
Neither of us says anything for a while and I listen to the small sounds of the garden preparing for night.
You consider me for a moment, your finger circling the rim of your glass. ‘Do you think her ghost might be here, at La Rêverie?’
The loosed words swirl in the gloom, bright and unearthly, like phosphorescence. Around us, only perceptible if you know it as I do, the garden lets out a soft sigh.
1968
I conceive her in Paris, in the middle of the student riots: the glorious chaos of Mai 68. Her father says that our first child will be all fire and spark, forged as she was in the bonfire of old, conservative France.