by Kate Riordan
I’m still fighting the urge to herd you into the car and drive north before the sun burns through, sending its shadows long and dark across the garden again, and this excess energy galvanizes me into action in the kitchen. I’m pulling ancient jars and tins out of one of the cupboards when there’s a knock at the door.
I can see through the etched glass panels in the hall that it’s a woman.
‘Camille!’ I can’t keep the surprise out of my voice.
‘Thank God you haven’t gone home yet. I left my damn key in Paris.’
A dense cloud of perfume envelops me as she sweeps in. She’s worn the same musky scent for so long that it’s as much a part of her as her dark shining bob, and the tenacious way she enjoys arguing about everything.
She’s already halfway to the kitchen when, as an afterthought, she turns back to kiss me, her dry, lipstick-bright lips not quite making contact with my cheeks.
‘You look great,’ I say, because it’s impossible to break the old habit of trying to win over my imperious older sister. It’s also true: she’s a couple of pounds heavier than usual and it suits her. Her face has lost its pinched look and the lines around her mouth are softer.
She gives me a scornful glance that’s so familiar it makes me yearn briefly for the years I saw that expression all the time, when our parents were still alive.
‘What I look is fat,’ she says emphatically. ‘Work has been a nightmare.’
She doesn’t need to explain. I still know the way her brain makes connections without her having to fill in the blanks. She’d been too stressed and busy to keep up her usual starvation diet. Unless one of her admirers is taking her out for dinner, Camille generally subsists on undressed salad, plain omelettes and black coffee. But she was never meant to be skinny. As children, I was the slender one who ate what she liked, while my fleshier sister was put on a succession of diets by our mother. Camille has never quite forgiven me for it.
I smile gamely, dodging around the old rivalry. ‘I didn’t know you were coming. Emma will be so pleased. It’s a lovely surprise.’
She raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘I did ring, but no one picked up.’
‘We were probably outside. Emma practically lives in the pool.’ I gesture at the fridge. ‘Let me get you a drink. What would you like? Some wine?’
She smiles slyly. ‘Yes, I’ll have a small glass. If it’ll make you feel less guilty about having one so early.’
Who drinks the most, who eats the least – this is old ground, too. I swallow the retort that rises to my lips and fetch two glasses, automatically checking them for smears against the muted light filtering in from the garden. Camille never knowingly misses an opportunity to find fault.
‘Can you stay tonight?’
‘Would you rather I didn’t?’
I sigh. ‘Of course not. I just wondered if you were going to. You never do and you didn’t even mention you might come when we spoke on the phone. I’ll make up a bed.’
‘I can always book a room in Laussac. I stayed there before.’
I turn to face her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s your house too. It’s been almost two years since you came to see us in London. I’d like you to stay.’
As I say it, I realize it’s true. ‘Safety in numbers’ is the phrase that absurdly comes to mind.
‘Well, all right, then,’ she says, with a tight little smile. ‘It’ll only be for a couple of nights, though. I haven’t just come for you. I want to go through Maman’s china, and I’ll have to pay a call on Olivier Lagarde too.
‘You know, I think it’s the dangerous thing,’ she muses, as I hand her a glass.
‘What is?’
‘The difference between a handsome man and an attractive one. If there’s no edge, good looks aren’t enough. Olivier’s got it.’
I raise an eyebrow, a tiny gesture, but she still catches it, her answering smile full of mischief.
‘Oh, so you’ve seen him for yourself, then?’
‘Come on,’ I say, picking up the wine. ‘Let’s go outside.’
‘Anyway,’ she says, when we’ve sat down, ‘how’s it going? You’re not getting much sleep, are you?’
‘Look that bad, do I?’
She tuts. ‘Always so sensitive. You’re a bit hollow around the eyes, that’s all. No one in your position could be expected to sleep well here.’
‘It’s just a house,’ I say, though I know that’s nonsense. The place reeks of the past: all the years with Élodie, and when I was a girl, too.
She leans in and I know what’s coming.
‘No, before you ask,’ I say, as she goes to speak. ‘I haven’t told her yet. I need to do it in the right way.’
‘God, Sylvie. Are we going to have to fall out over this again? She’s a teenager now and you’re still keeping her in the dark. What does she think happened, then?’
I swallow. I can feel my temper rising but it’s only because she’s right. ‘She thinks what she’s thought since she was little. That Élodie died because she was ill. A girl in her class in London when we first moved there had a little brother with leukaemia. She thought it was something like that.’
‘She assumed, and you were only too happy to let her. That time I came to stay she kept asking questions about Heaven …’ Camille shakes her head. ‘I’ve never understood how she squared that with her memories of Élodie.’
I fall silent but Camille knows me better than anyone alive. Not the mother, not the wife: me.
‘You’re hoping you’ll get through this without saying anything, aren’t you? That now you’re here, her memory will come back and do the hard work for you.’ She gives me the Camille look that has always driven me mad: triumph masquerading as disapproval.
‘You know, if we’d just sold the house years ago, I wouldn’t have been put in this position with no warning. But we’ve never been very good at coming to an agreement, have we?’
‘Ah, I should have known. It’s my fault you’ve been keeping secrets from your daughter all her life. No, I’m not taking the blame for this, Sylvie. You’ve had years.’
Of course she’s right. I’ve had a decade. Countless days mounting up when it was just the two of us at home in London, you looking sidelong at her picture with that hungry expression in your eyes. I can’t think now why I didn’t just take your hands in mine. There are some things I need to explain to you, darling, I might have begun. About what happened in France. Why we had to leave.
The scrape of Camille’s metal chair leg on the terrace brings me back to the present. Very slowly, by tiny increments, the cloud is dispersing. As the sky brightens to white, areas of shade begin to darken, crosshatchings on stone and grass. Sitting up from where she’s been rooting in her bag, Camille puts on a pair of oversized sunglasses and lights a cigarette.
‘Well, I suppose it’s a blessing if she really doesn’t remember anything.’ Her tone is gentler now. ‘Christ, it’s hot down here. You forget.’
I put up a hand to shade my eyes. ‘Unless she’s not telling me. I don’t think so, though, beyond finding the place a bit creepy at night. The only thing she’s really recognized is the wallpaper in the blue room. She used to make up stories about it, do you remember?’
Camille blows out a cloud of smoke. ‘Memory is a peculiar thing. But maybe it’s self-preservation. The brain is clever like that. And she was only four when you left, wasn’t she? Has she gone anywhere near the barn yet?’
She reaches forward to knock ash into a saucer as I shake my head.
Camille knew a lot of what was going on back then. There was a period when I regularly rang her late at night and she would let me offload what had happened that day. She didn’t visit as much as I’d have liked but she was a support in her own way. I suppose it was the closest we ever were. Since London we’d grown apart, perhaps because I needed her less there.
‘Is it me?’ I would ask her, almost every time. ‘Have I created this?’
And she would always say
no, in her wonderfully emphatic way. ‘That girl was born different. There was nothing you could have done.’
For all our temperamental differences, she kept me sane during that time, her and the bag I had secretly – and guiltily – packed for you and me, stowing it behind a pile of spare blankets at the very back of the linen cupboard.
Now, I looked pleadingly at Camille. ‘Remember how Emma used to wet the bed when we left France? Those terrible night terrors? Her asthma was awful.’
‘Yes, but moving away is one thing. I understood that. That’s different from not telling her …’
I turn my palms up. ‘I didn’t know how best to help her back then. I hoped it would all miraculously sort itself out when we were in England, and some of it did. She loved her school, her asthma was suddenly under control. She still talked about Élodie but it was like she’d invented a completely different person, some composite girl based on her friends’ older sisters. She wasn’t pretending either. I know she wasn’t. You saw it for yourself when you came. All the bad memories had just … gone.
‘But at night she was still wetting the bed, still screaming out in her sleep, having nightmares. When she asked if Élodie was the same as her friend’s little brother who’d died of leukaemia, I thought it might close some door in her brain. And maybe it did, or maybe it was just time, I don’t know. But over the next few months, things got slowly better, didn’t they? God, I was so relieved. I played along with this made-up idea of Élodie during the day. I think I came to half believe in it myself eventually – and at night, Emma was okay. She stopped looking so tired, so constantly cowed and frightened. She put on weight. I would have told any lie for that.’
I stop because I’m about to cry, my throat aching with the effort of holding back the tears.
Camille drinks the last of her wine and pours us both another glass.
‘Élodie was always so much worse for me than for Greg, wasn’t she?’ I say eventually, after I’ve lit one of her cigarettes, checking for sounds of splashing from the pool first.
She shoots me a wry look. ‘Her beloved papa.’
‘Come on, Sylvie,’ she says, taking off her sunglasses and rubbing between her eyebrows. ‘You know why it was easier for Greg. He was hardly ever around. He could be in denial longer than you, even though he still had to face it in the end, didn’t he? Élodie couldn’t help but show you all sides of herself, not just the charm she turned on for other people. Most people want to be known, be understood, but Élodie …’ She shakes her head. ‘I’ve never known anyone as self-contained as that child, as single-minded. Sometimes she frightened me, too.’
1972
I’m lying perfectly still in the heat of the garden. There’s no breeze and above me the spears of the oleander leaves are unmoving, their shadows marking my bare legs with spike-fingered bruises. Like the air, I can’t seem to make myself move. The day is already searing, the gossamer cloud of early morning long scorched away.
From the house behind me, a Charlie Parker track has been playing for a long time. Or maybe it’s John Coltrane. I can’t tell which, it’s Greg’s music, but every note of it finds me easily in the inert air. He hasn’t spoken to me yet this morning. These days, we perform a strange dance around the house, both of us moving from one room to another, occupying the space the other has just left, mindful to avoid contact if possible.
On days like this, I wish I could sleep for ever. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to feel refreshed and alert. The coffee I make in a daze doesn’t do much good, making my heart skitter but unable to penetrate the featureless fog in my head.
Sometimes I think about the only London winter I experienced before Greg – freezing rain, dark by four, fingertips numb and reddened. I would be able to think clearly there, my thoughts as sharp as the wind. Here the sun is stupefying, a powerful canicule this year. Canicule for heatwave. The dog days. The news is full of Watergate, Nixon’s shifty-eyed belligerence flickering on the black-and-white screen. Greg can’t stop watching, swearing about fascists, but I can’t seem to take in the particulars. I spend most of my days outside, waiting for the sun to begin its descent again, another day crossed off. My father’s garden is turning brown and desiccated, though it’s still early July.
A lizard brushes the hand I’ve let drop to the warm stone and I flinch, the first movement I’ve made in a while. Half an hour, an hour, I have no idea how long I’ve been lying here. I can feel the flesh of my legs beginning to cook. It must be close to midday.
It strikes me dimly, like the dull ting of a fork on cracked glass, that I don’t know where Élodie is. Her hair grazes the tops of her shoulder blades now: sun-bleached at the ends, pale caramel at the roots. The gentlest of breezes ruffles the surface of the pool water, the movement reflecting on the dark underside of the oleander tree, ripples in every direction. I begin mentally to search the house and garden for my daughter, the worry of what she might be up to beginning to scratch at my insides.
At the edge of the parched lawn, I spot her at the top of the steps leading up to the terrace, crouching in the dark, dry earth of a flowerbed where nothing much ever seems to grow. Armed with a sharp stick, she’s so intent on something behind a large stone that she doesn’t notice my approach.
I open my mouth to ask what she’s doing just as the stick comes down hard, once, twice and then a third time, like a spear, the movements precise and utterly focused.
‘Élodie?’ I say, as I run up the steps. ‘What have you got there?’
She turns at my voice, and there’s something both wild and empty in her little face that stops me dead. Under the point of her stick is a small lizard, its belly ripped open, mushed innards spilling out. I step closer and see the clutch of pale eggs she has already smashed to pieces.
‘Oh, Élodie,’ I say, keeping my voice as steady as I can. ‘Why have you done that? It’s – it’s not right to hurt things, to hurt creatu–’
But she’s already turned back to the skewered lizard. It twitches grotesquely, and I can’t help snatching the stick and snapping it in half, throwing the pieces away.
She squawks with pure outrage, eyes blazing, and stands, tensed, I think, to run at me. But to my surprise, because she is never clumsy, she misjudges where she puts her feet and almost falls down the steps at her side. I see her sway, then right herself, but just as I’m reaching to pull her out of danger, she stills and, holding my gaze, very carefully steps sideways into nothing.
‘What were you doing?’ Greg shouts at me, as he scoops her up, her cries having brought him out of the house. ‘For God’s sake, you should be keeping an eye on her. It’s not like you’re doing anything else.’
He leaves the terrace without looking back, Élodie rigid in his arms, blood from her elbow seeping into his blue shirt and turning it purple. She is still holding my gaze as she continues to scream, her mouth a small round O, her eyes not screwed up or wet but unblinking. I try to remember the last time I saw her cry properly, with real tears, but I can’t.
I would die for her, without hesitation; I am her mother. It’s just that, sometimes, I wish I wasn’t. There is no paradox in those statements for me. Both parts run in parallel through my head, twin convictions I find myself whispering, like a strange mantra.
1993
At Camille’s insistence, we have dinner in the dining room, Maman’s beloved chandelier – dull with dust, a couple of the bulbs blown – illuminating us in a flattering glow. The rest of the room, with its dark wood and marble fireplace, has faded into deep shadow. Moths bat softly against the windows.
‘I’ll tell you another one who’s going to be dangerous,’ my sister declares in French. She’s had a few glasses of wine and is on good form, making a fuss of you and even eating a decent amount of the omelette I’ve made. ‘Luc Martin.’
You perk up at his name.
‘It was strange seeing him,’ I say. ‘He turned round and looked so much like Laurent before I left for university in Lond
on.’
Camille tuts. ‘He’s nothing like Laurent. Laurent was a puppy, following you around with his tongue out. I can’t see Luc doing that for a girl. No, there’s just enough of Annette in him to keep it interesting.’
‘What are you saying?’ There’s a slight whine in your voice.
‘Boys, of course,’ says Camille, giving you a wink. ‘Did you like the look of Luc?’
Your eyes drop to your plate but you’re smiling. ‘Yeah, he’s nice.’
Camille turns back to me. ‘Sylvie, do you remember Julien Lefèvre? His father owned the Citroën garage out on the Alès road.’ She can’t help herself, reverting back to quick-fire French. ‘I saw him on the Métro looking ancient. He’s lost all his hair. God, I adored him.’
I laugh and something in my chest loosens. ‘I haven’t thought about him in years. He looked a bit like Alain Delon with those big blue eyes, but didn’t he know it.’
‘Ha, yes, I didn’t stand a chance. I used to walk past his classroom with my skirt rolled up so high you could almost see my knickers. Papa would have had a fit.’
I lean towards you. ‘Camille’s saying she had a crush on a boy called Julien. He was gorgeous, everyone liked him. He played guitar.’
‘How old were you when you went out with Laurent?’ You’ve never really asked me about when I was young, when I was your age. There’s a strange pleasure in having elicited your curiosity – in having shown you that I’m more than your mother.
‘Only a bit older than you, I suppose.’
‘He married that dreadful Francine, do you remember?’ Camille interrupts. ‘Julien. The size of her backside. She only got him because she opened her le–’
She stops as I glance pointedly in your direction, though you can’t understand her. I regard her affectionately as she reaches for the wine. She looks younger in the soft light, and I think of all the meals we’ve eaten in this room together. Both of us had automatically taken the same seats we’d occupied as children.