by Kate Riordan
We are students ourselves, or at least we were until recently, the two of us renting rooms on the fourth-floor of a house in the sixth arrondissement, plaster peeling from its belle-époque bones. Greg has already graduated with a 2:2 in political science while I have given up my studies in London to be here with him, persuaded that a degree doesn’t really matter. It’s just a piece of paper, he says, when I worry about it, his long pianist’s fingers circling my navel, just another way the Establishment makes people buckle down to a conventional half-existence. What matters is this. He gestures towards the city beyond our tall, dust-streaked windows. Real life.
We came to Paris ostensibly for him to see more of my homeland. He’d enjoyed French at A level and had gone on holidays to France as a child: bracing weeks on the beaches of northern Brittany where he’d had his first erotic experience. I think about her sometimes, that long-ago Madeleine who bewitched a teenaged Greg in the early sixties. She instilled in him a weakness for French girls that steered him unerringly towards me as I sat sipping a half of mild in the union bar one winter-dark afternoon, trying to pretend I wasn’t cold and homesick in London, that I liked English beer. Without Madeleine, he might have walked straight past and gone on to marry an English girl instead. And me? I might have gone home and married a nice boy from my village, London washing off me as easily as grime in the shower. When I think about this, about Fate and its vagaries, and how we might have missed each other by inches, I feel dizzy.
Greg wanted to come to Paris partly because of the growing unrest. He’d heard about Nanterre, which had been shut down after trouble between the university authorities and the students. I tease him for trying to shake off his suburban background, be something more dangerous than he is. His poor parents are horrified that their clever son has gone off the rails, has run off to Paris with his foreign girlfriend.
Soon it’s July, and the city begins to swell with the usual tourists, to swelter with heat, and the riots run their course. We give up our digs and catch a train south so he can meet my parents. My mouth tastes of old coins as we rattle through the vastness of my country’s interior because I am almost three months pregnant. I reach out for my new husband’s hand, our fingers entwining. We have been married for twenty-two hours. I was surprised he suggested we marry when I fell pregnant. I’d expected him to say that such conventions didn’t apply to us.
I’m surprised again when he loves La Rêverie, the village, even my parents. I’d feared he would think them staid, conformist. I was secretly dreading that he would argue over dinner with my father about Catholicism. But he doesn’t, their exoticism, like the gentle enchantment of the house, seducing him effortlessly.
The months roll placidly by, and our return to Paris or London isn’t discussed. Instead, we stay on in my childhood home. As silver streaks my swelling abdomen and islets of darker skin rise on my cheekbones, I am in a sort of heaven, idling quietly through the days, a cotton-wadded, rainbow-glinting life. My mother knits tiny clothes from the softest wool and I paint jungle animals on the wall of the room that will be the nursery.
As summer fades to autumn and then winter, I can’t wait to meet her. I know without question that she will be a girl. When she kicks, I pull up my blouse and watch her heels rippling my skin. Excitement eddies through me at the thought that I will soon be able to weigh those tiny feet in my palms.
There is no apprehension, only anticipation. One night, too uncomfortable to sleep, I wish for her to be beautiful and clever, my fingers crossed under the covers. In the morning, I turn to Greg in the bed beside me, press my lips against his bare shoulder. ‘I’ve thought of a name for her,’ I say, stroking his long fringe out of his eyes. ‘I dreamt it. We’ll call her Élodie.’
1993
Perhaps it’s what you said about ghosts that lures me to her room after dinner. I’ve drunk too much today and, as I climb the stairs, I feel slightly off-balance. Butterflies take flight in my stomach as I reach the landing.
I’ve found an old cache of bulbs in the kitchen and replace the one in the hall that’s blown without mishap, light blazing from the bedrooms so I can see what I’m doing. It occurs to me that I should wait until morning to do the one that’s gone in Élodie’s room but I can’t keep away any longer, the alcohol spurring me on.
I carry in a chair as though it’s a chore I do every day, humming while I clamber onto it because I’m nervous now, one hand groping in the gloom for the fitting. When my hand brushes against the old Bakelite and it begins to swing, I jump, and in trying to catch it again I touch an uninsulated section of cable, just for a fraction of a second. I feel it as a violent jolt inside me, a huge interior bang.
When I open my eyes, I’m lying on my back on the floor, the light fitting swinging above me and faint music playing from below. I’m just wondering if my electrocuted brain has manufactured it when you turn the volume right up. Of course it must be you, though for a moment I wonder.
I know this song like the planes of my own face, though I haven’t heard it in years. The plaintive opening verse of ‘Good Vibrations’. Sunlight and hair and perfume. I never listen to this one – I once walked out of a shop mid-purchase when it came on. It reminds me too painfully of her, she who loved it best of all. Now, when I’m hearing it for the first time in so long, the harmonies rise and entwine, like spirits wheedling to be let in. I run down the stairs and, in my rush to lift the needle, make it screech across the vinyl.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’ You’re caught between surprise and exasperation.
‘Sorry. I just –’
The telephone saves me. Its shrill ringing makes me jump. As I pick it up, my hand is shaking, my head beginning to pound. I’m hoping to hear Olivier’s mellow tones or even Camille, whose familiar brusqueness might shake me out of myself. But it’s your father, and he has never been very reassuring in a crisis.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘You sound a bit drunk.’
‘I just fell, actually. I was trying to change a light bulb.’
He laughs. ‘There’s a joke in there somewhere.’
‘Did you ring up just to imply I’m an idiot?’
‘No,’ he replies, stung. ‘I rang to see why you hadn’t been in touch. You said you would be when you arrived, which was two days ago now.’
Two days? It feels like weeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ I make myself say. ‘We’ve been busy. I meant to.’
‘So,’ he says, carefully. ‘How is it?’
‘It’s just as it was.’
‘And is it all bad memories, or have you managed to dredge up some good ones?’
I glance around but you’ve wandered into the kitchen. ‘You say that as though I only wanted the bad ones.’
‘That’s sometimes how it felt.’
‘It wasn’t us, Greg,’ I say softly. ‘We didn’t make any of it happen.’
I hear him pull in a long breath and I think he’s going to sigh with impatience but then I hear the tremor that means he’s close to tears.
‘Look, why don’t you have a word with your daughter?’ I say. ‘She’s here.’
There’s a beat of silence, and I know he thinks for a split second that I mean Élodie. I think that’s why I said ‘daughter’ rather than your name: a desire to transmit a tiny bit of what I’m feeling in this house down the telephone line, to hiss in his ear.
You take the phone from me. ‘Not much,’ I hear you say, as I wander over to the double doors that stand ajar, admitting a cool ribbon of night air. ‘Just lying by the pool, really.’
The garden, as I step out into it, smells of oleander flowers and hot dust. There’s a new moon, a narrow paring that makes me think of the scar that curved over Élodie’s right eyebrow.
I did my best, I say to your father in my head, where the conversation we’ve had so many times is continuing to play out, the old script unchanged.
I sit down on the third step and my fingers go automatically to the small bloodstain that no one else would ever
notice. How many other places here are inhabited by difficult memories? So many tiny hauntings that you can’t help treading on them, splinters of glass working their way under the skin.
Moonlight scatters across the swimming pool when I get there. I don’t look into the void under the oleander tree. Something of her is here, too, or has been very lately. The after-burn of a presence hangs like cordite in the air. ‘Élodie,’ I whisper. ‘Have you come back?’
The cicadas, which have been silent, begin to roar.
1969
She slips out of me, like a fish, after just five hours. Before I have time to absorb her arrival, she is borne away screaming, fists clenched so tightly they shake, and I fall into a padded black hole of sleep.
On French maternity wards, routine is everything. Babies are fed at set times and then whisked away, so that the mother can recover and get used to the fact that life has utterly changed. For eight days and nights, I am a model patient, doing exactly as the nurses order. I don’t beg for extra feeds or longer holds with my baby. I eat all the food I am given and sleep the rest of the time. Ironically, it’s like being a cosseted child.
They are pleased with me. ‘Such a sensible one,’ the sister says to Greg, when he comes to collect us. During the journey home, I sit on the back seat and watch her sleeping. I am a mother, I think. How is it possible? She is so perfectly contained, her shell-pink eyelids so unmoving that I lean in to check she’s still breathing.
‘Do babies dream?’ I whisper to Greg, in the front, and he smiles.
Although my joy is laced with fear, it’s the kind every parent feels, the kind that hurts your heart and makes the world seem as amazing as it is hazardous.
I am a mother.
1993
You creep into my bed just after two. As you cuddle in closer, cold feet twining around mine, I notice the wind has picked up. Somewhere, a loose shutter is creaking. It’s the one in the room at the end of the hall.
‘I had a nightmare,’ you whisper, ‘and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s so dark here.’
I put my arms around you. Your skin is cool and smells slightly of the musty sheets. ‘It was only a dream,’ I say, hoping you won’t want to tell me about it.
The shutter bangs and you jump. ‘I think that’s what woke me up.’
‘I’ll go and fix it.’ I push back the bedclothes and the air of the room feels chilled. It will rain soon. I used to love it as a child when the temperature abruptly dipped like this, in the deepest trench of night. The rain always cleared the air, the sky the next morning a dazzling crystalline blue, the garden bristling with new vigour.
I try the light in the hall, but it doesn’t work, despite the new bulb. The whole house probably needs rewiring – it hasn’t been touched since the fifties. Feeling my way along, I experience another attack of déjà vu. It’s like being tipped headlong into the past, the waxed boards under my feet and the precise angle of the black stairwell to my right so utterly familiar that I feel as if I’ve invented the years in between.
I hesitate on the threshold of her room and the shutter bangs again. The door creaks loudly as I open it. The only light comes from the storm outside, flashing intermittently as the shutter swings back and forth. In the distance, thunder rolls.
At the window, I twist the handle and a sudden gust shoves the frame hard into me, thin glass shuddering in loose putty. I have to lean right out to get hold of the shutter, trusting the wooden bar across to take my weight. I’ve almost grabbed it when some base instinct makes me rear back into the room and away from the drop, convinced that someone is behind me.
On the second attempt, I grab the shutter’s catch as it blows back in, breathing hard as my fingers fumble to fasten it. As I push the windows together and turn the handle to lock them again, the rain is coming down harder, the thunder answering, louder now. I hear you call me from the other end of the house and I rush out, eyes averted from the shadows where the bed stands.
‘What is it, chérie?’ I say, when I get back to you, trying not to show I’m out of breath. You’re over by the window. Outside, the rain ratchets up another notch, a hiss rising from the stone terrace. Lightning flashes for a blinding moment.
You turn to me, eyes wide. ‘There’s someone out there. I saw them.’
The garden is full of swaying movement: water and wind pummelling leaves, bending branches. I peer hard into the dark voids between the shrubs and trees, but there’s nothing.
‘It’s okay, it’s just the storm. No one’s there.’
I turn back to the window just as a perfect, pink-tinged fork of lightning illuminates the scene, like someone taking a photograph with a powerful flash. As the thunder cracks over us, directly above the house now, I think of the camera Greg bought for her when you were born, and the last film developed from it. Those horrible photographs, the same small face featured in every one, pinprick pupils red from the flash. The single word that had crept into my mind: proof.
The storm moves on, the gaps between the lightning and thunder stretching out until I lose count of the seconds. You’ve already fallen asleep, and I’m drifting away myself when I hear it – the revving of moped engines, four or five at least, all overlapping, as though competing. The noise, amplified by the wet road, gets louder and quieter, then louder again, and at first I think the wind is buffeting it to and fro. But the wind has dropped away to nothing. I understand that they’re riding up and down the same short stretch of road.
I tiptoe to a window facing that way and, as if they know I’m watching, one of the bikes peels off the road and on to the drive that leads to the house. Leads to us. I can’t move as it approaches slowly, frozen in place. At the moment it looks as though it will surely collide with our car, it veers away, accelerating back towards the others with a roar. I don’t know how long I stand there, the cold white light of their headlamps strafing again and again over the dark fields, over the house, over my hands, still clutching the windowsill.
1969
Although we are living with my parents, the three of us – mother, father and child – might as well be the last people on earth. We are inseparable, even at night: Greg has brought her cot into our bedroom. My mother disapproves of this in her gentle way, says we are making a rod for our own backs, but we simply smile. We know best, is what Greg and I secretly think.
There is so much love inside me that I feel permanently replete. I have to remind myself to eat, to drink a long glass of water after I’ve expressed my milk. If there is a single tiny cloud on the horizon, it is this: I can’t seem to feed Élodie on the breast. She won’t latch on. She turns her face away, even when her tiny stomach is fizzing with hunger. I’ve wept about this in Greg’s arms a couple of times, and he hushes and rocks me as though I am the baby. He reminds me that it’s still my milk, even if she’ll only accept it from a bottle.
I watch him when he’s with our child and, though I would never say for fear of offending him, I’m surprised by how good a father he is. I knew he’d love her but assumed he would do it from arm’s length. I’ve seen it with friends of his who have had children: these sixties men with their hair long over their collars, their radical ideas, who insist they’re nothing like their own fathers, until it comes to doing anything domestic.
But he’s not like that. He’s fallen in love with her, I suppose. I never thought I could bear for him to love anyone as much as me, but it’s her so I don’t mind at all.
1993
When I wake the next morning the bed is empty beside me, a single long hair coiled on the pillow. I sit up and turn the clock round. It’s late again.
Outside, the weather is glorious, a few dead branches on the grass the only traces of the storm. Everything seems revitalized, the garden virtually humming with life. I remember the mopeds but the menace of them in the night, like encircling wolves, feels diminished in the sunshine. They become bored teenage boys again.
I can hear you talking as I head towards the pool and
it throws me because no one but us is here. For an uncomfortable moment, it takes me back to our first months in London, when one afternoon a supply teacher had beckoned me into the classroom. ‘Emma has an imaginary friend she speaks to,’ she said, as we sat awkwardly together at a child-sized table. ‘She says her name is Élodie.’ I had to explain there’d been an older sister and the poor woman had flushed to her roots.
As I approach the swimming pool now, I see you’re talking to a boy. Both of you have your backs to me and he’s armed with a net on a long pole. He’s taller than you by a head and, though lean, he’s obviously older: probably eighteen or nineteen. Sensing my presence, he turns round, his face strikingly familiar.
‘Je suis Luc,’ he says as I stand there mutely. ‘Luc Martin.’ He pushes his hair out of his eyes and steps forward to shake my hand the British way.
‘It was Luc who did the pool,’ you say jubilantly. ‘His English is really good.’ You glance furtively at him to see if he’s gratified, but he’s still studying me. I wonder what he’s been told about the neighbour who left her house abandoned for so long.
‘Luc. Of course. You’re grown up now. You were a little boy last time I saw you.’
He smiles, slightly abashed, and you look from me to him, trying to work out what I’ve said.
‘It was very good of you to do the pool, but how did you know we were coming?’
His smile slips. ‘Oh, it was my dad,’ he says, after a pause. I notice for the first time that his hair is damp, his shorts too. He must have been swimming before you got down here. I don’t know whether I mind about that or not.
‘Yeah, it was him,’ he says, more definitely. ‘He heard you were coming back. He thought we should get it cleared out and filled up.’ He ruffles his hair, and the gesture is so like Laurent at the same age that I inwardly sway, thrown out of time again.