The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  Then her face sharpens. ‘Didn’t Élodie go around with the Lefèvre son’s crowd for a while?’ Her red lipstick has bled slightly, and I realize she’s quite drunk. ‘They were older, weren’t they? Pretty wild. Of course, there was that party, wasn’t there? Just before …’

  I give her another look and, unable to stay sitting, hurry to collect up the plates. She gives me a tiny nod. I brace myself, waiting for you to ask why Élodie’s name has come up, but you’re smiling shyly at Camille.

  ‘Has Luc got a girlfriend, do you think?’

  You’ve missed it. I let out a long breath.

  Camille turns to you with a smile, eyebrows raised. ‘Why do you ask, petite? Have you got your eyes on him?’

  You laugh and the shadows in the corners of the room still and settle.

  We play cards after dinner, Camille, to my astonishment, letting you win. When we go up to bed I kiss her impulsively at the top of the stairs, though we’ve never been very physically demonstrative, not like some sisters. She touches her cheek in surprise.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I say, and though she shrugs, I know she’s pleased. It’s not just that there’s a third person absorbing the hum of La Rêverie’s past, which seems to lessen the weight of the air. It’s because of Camille herself. I’ve never told her, and never will tell her, but my sister has always been better than anyone at chasing the darkness away.

  *

  Camille sleeps late the next morning, and we creep around so as not to wake her. After breakfast, you don’t go outside with your music and books as usual, though the weather has reverted to its previous brilliance and heat, the kitchen flagstones already warm underfoot where the sun strikes them.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I say, putting my hand to your forehead. It’s cool but your face is pale.

  ‘I got my period,’ you mutter, a dull blush creeping into your cheeks because les règles are still quite new to you. And not just new, but discomfiting. You cried last winter, when the first one came, not with a few drops but a dramatic rush, just as mine had. It wasn’t the blood or the cramps that had made you cry but the beginning of the slow farewell to childhood. You liked being a child. Élodie was quite different from you in that respect.

  ‘Do you know what French mothers are supposed to do when their daughters get their first period?’ I say, easing past your embarrassment.

  You shake your head, not quite meeting my eye.

  ‘They’re supposed to slap them on the cheek.’

  You look astonished.

  ‘Not to hurt. It’s a tradition. My mother did it to me and Camille, and her mother did it to her.’

  You half smile. ‘But why?’

  ‘No one really knows what the slap is for. One theory is that the red mark it leaves represents the red of the blood.’

  ‘That’s just weird.’

  I laugh. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Look, go back to bed if you feel rough. I’ll bring you some painkillers.’ You hesitate. ‘Go on, it’ll still be sunny later.’

  I watch you go slowly up the stairs. Élodie never told me when she got her period. I only found out they’d started when someone from the village pharmacy rang. Another customer had seen her shoplifting a box of pads, as well as a bottle of nail varnish. ‘Apparently she wasn’t even trying to hide it,’ said the woman on the phone. ‘She just dropped them into her bag and walked out.’

  ‘I’d have bought you a hundred packets if you’d asked,’ I said to her later, after I’d paid the pharmacy five hundred francs not to call the police. ‘Were you embarrassed to tell me you’d started?’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking at a point somewhere over my shoulder. ‘I just wanted to do it.’

  I wait until I hear the springs of your mattress creak as you lie down, then wander into the study. I’ve finished the books and my father’s paperwork but there’s still all of Greg’s stuff to do. He was always a hoarder, and the desk and an ugly old filing cabinet are stuffed full of receipts, auction catalogues and bills. There’s no system to any of it, and after a while I begin throwing things onto the rubbish pile without really checking. I wouldn’t have noticed the small key caught up in a packet of ancient invoices if it hadn’t clinked as it hit the floorboards. I recognize it immediately, slipping it into my shorts pocket. After an hour or so, my shoulders begin to twinge and I go outside for a break, resisting the temptation to pour myself some wine. It’s fiercely hot and windless, the soil visible through the parched grass beginning to crack. I’m close to the pool when movement beyond the side boundary of the garden catches my eye.

  There’s an old path that leads that way from the pool, running down the edge of the property to emerge by the barn, quicker from here than up through the paint-peeling gate. I haven’t been down it yet and it’s clearer than I expect it to be, clearer than it should be, the weeds well trodden down.

  I’ve never liked the barn, with its litter of discarded tools and air of neglect. As a child, I found its windowless bulk sinister and the events that followed years later only confirmed those early misgivings. Going closer, I see that one of the huge double doors stands ajar. I peer through the gap, but after the full glare of the sun it’s too dark to see much, to make out the old scorch marks.

  ‘Sylvie.’

  I turn, heart galloping, to find Luc behind me. ‘God, you scared me. What are you doing up here?’

  He lowers his gaze to his trainered feet, nonchalance replaced by furtiveness as he scuffs at the dry earth. ‘I needed something for the pool.’

  ‘Needed what? None of it is stored here.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry. I’ll try the shed.’

  He slouches away before I can ask him anything else and I wonder what I’ve missed. I nearly push the door open, drawn to see what might have interested him in there, but don’t feel equal to it. I’d once wanted the place pulled down.

  I pat my pocket for the key I found in the study, the metal unbending as I press it against my leg. The barn has set off something in me, a masochistic kind of hunger that isn’t dissimilar to the craving I feel for the wine waiting in the fridge. The push and pull Élodie always inspired in me.

  Back in the house, I can hear Camille in the shower as I approach Élodie’s room. I close the door softly behind me. I slip the key into the lock of the wardrobe door, trying not to catch my eye in the mirror. It’s an old-fashioned oak piece Greg picked up somewhere, with the clothes rail positioned from front to back instead of horizontally. Élodie had always complained about it, saying it didn’t give her enough room.

  When the door swings open, the first thing to hit me is the dust and mothball smell of the faded shot-silk lining. Then a whisper of her own scent, which I’m not prepared for after so long. It makes a sob rise in my throat that hurts to swallow. As I press my face to the clothes, they sway gently, the hangers creaking dully against the iron rail. At the very front is the short white sundress she’d loved and I’d hated, so of course she’d worn it to death.

  I can picture her in it during that last year as though it was yesterday – as though I’m standing at the window watching her cross the lawn wearing it. I close my eyes, seeing her luminous against the greens of the garden, the setting sun shining through the sheer fabric, outlining her shape, which is suddenly turning womanly, though her limbs are still slim and coltish. She is barefoot and slightly grubby and the combination, urchin and seductress, is deeply unsettling.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que tu fais, Sylvie?’

  I swing round. For an instant I’d thought it was her: she refused to call me Maman by the end. But, of course, it’s Camille, wrapped in a towel.

  She comes forward and fingers the dress, scarlet nails like blood against the white. ‘I remember this. I always thought of it as her Lolita dress.’ She gives me a searching look. ‘Why did you keep it all? Why were you always so intent on punishing yourself?’

  I don’t answer, stretching instead towards the back of the wardrobe, the clothes heavy against my shoulder as I push t
hem aside. My fingers close around a plastic Leclerc bag that crackles as I bring it out, brittle with the years it’s been left untouched.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  I put my hand in and pull them out, the tiny matinee jackets and bootees my mother had knitted her more than a quarter of a century earlier. The wool is still soft but the white looks grubby now. I remember dressing Élodie in them when we brought her back from the hospital; it was February and the house was freezing. I was so worried she’d be cold. I shake their creases out gently, as though they’re in danger of falling into rags, and another sob hitches in my chest. I can’t keep this one down.

  ‘Ah, merde,’ mutters Camille, as I press the jacket to my face. It still smells faintly of baby powder and Élodie’s own brand-new scent.

  She pries it gently away from me. ‘This doesn’t do any good, Sylvie. I’ve never understood why you’re so hard on yourself when it comes to her.’ She drops each small item into the bag and puts it carefully back.

  Shutting the wardrobe door smartly, she turns the key and holds it up. I go to take it but she shakes her head. ‘I’m keeping this. Now, go downstairs to Emma. It’s her you need to think about now. Let the past rest.’

  1974

  Greg is setting up a tripod by the pool. He’s already taken a family portrait of the five of us: his parents, Margaret and Charles, are staying this week. I’m not convinced the visit is going well. Margaret is quiet, watchful, while Charles overcompensates, so hearty and appreciative of everything that it’s beginning to ring false, though I know it isn’t. The slightly strained dynamic is grating on Greg, who has already snapped like a petulant teenager a couple of times.

  ‘Papa, take photos of me now,’ Élodie said, after the group shots were done. ‘Just me, not the others.’

  When he’s ready, she perches on the very end of the low diving board above the deep end, the parasol pines a dark backdrop that makes her hair gleam palest gold, her toes just rippling the surface of the water. He wants to get her profile, first the left, then the right, and it takes longer than it should because she keeps turning to look straight down the lens of the camera, wanting to face it head-on.

  Catching sight of me there next to Charles, hovering in the background as I often find myself, a silent extra or a servant standing by for instructions, she pouts. This is a new face: I’ve seen her practising it in the mirror.

  ‘Arrête, Maman.’ She switches to English for her grandparents’ benefit. ‘Stop staring at me. You’re always staring.’

  Charles pushes out a laugh. ‘Come on, Élodie, sweetheart. Your mother is only thinking how pretty you are.’

  She flashes him a dazzling smile, her hair sparking as she shakes it back and poses again. I squeeze Charles’s arm in a silent thank-you and find myself remembering all those times Greg came back from a buying trip, when a tiny Élodie would throw herself into his arms. ‘Non, Maman, pas toi!’ she would say over his shoulder at me, little face set, hand batting me away. Not you. Don’t want you. Only Daddy. And he would turn and give me a sympathetic smile. It still hurt.

  I go back to the house. Margaret had said she was going in to find her hat but she’s been gone for a while now. I find her in Élodie’s room, holding up her white straw hat with an expression of disgust. It’s frayed and crumpled, grubby with small footprints, but there’s also something else on it I can’t immediately identify. I see it then, discarded on the floor: the used menstrual pad she must have got out of the small bin in our en-suite bathroom. The hat is smeared with drying blood.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ I say, the heat of acute embarrassment creeping up my neck. I can’t meet Margaret’s eye. ‘I don’t know what on earth made her think to do that.’

  We stare at the soiled hat between us and then I reach out to take it. There’s a moment when I think Margaret isn’t going to let go but she does. Her face is flushed too.

  ‘I really am so sorry. I’ll get you a new hat at the market tomorrow – there’s a stall that sells ones just like it.’

  She fixes me with her pale blue eyes. ‘It’s not just that,’ she says softly, and I follow her gaze.

  Élodie’s room is always a mess. I used to tidy it daily but it just feels so futile – she only pulls everything out again. Although, if I’m honest, it’s more that I have a deep aversion to the sight of her toys, not just unloved but often destroyed, everything seemingly smashed, kicked and pulled apart eventually. The violence unsettles me somewhere fundamental.

  I think it has the same effect on Greg. I caught him in here once, holding the broken sections of a kaleidoscope he had once cherished. He seemed crushed. ‘He always kept his things so beautifully when he was a boy,’ Margaret told me, when I first met her. I know he worries about it too, the destructive streak she has inherited from neither of us.

  So when I look to see what has stopped my mother-in-law in her tracks, I expect another destroyed toy. Instead it’s a sketchbook I bought Élodie ages ago, and which she had never opened as far as I knew.

  I push aside the wax crayons so I can see the pictures properly and they roll across her little desk and loudly drop to the floor, one by one. At first glance, they look like any childish drawings: stick people with round, bulbous heads. But then I look again and details begin to emerge: one figure lying along the bottom of the picture, black scribble where their stomach should be, a tongue lolling out. Another figure poking a disproportionately large knife into someone else. I turn the page, see a rudimentary cupboard with a bottle on its shelf. Drawn on the bottle, more carefully than anything else, is a skull and crossbones she must have copied from somewhere – a bottle of bleach on the highest shelf in the souillarde, perhaps. Pages and pages of fires follow: people, animals, trees, houses, all consumed by flames of vivid red and orange. In places she’s pressed so hard the paper has torn. And then I realize that the same two figures crop up again and again: a man in a blue shirt and a woman in a long skirt, hair waving over her shoulders.

  Later, I show the book to Greg. He’s quiet for a long time.

  ‘I used to draw guns and explosions all the time when I was a kid,’ he says at last, voice straining to be light.

  ‘When you were five?’

  ‘Oh, God, I don’t know. Probably.’

  ‘Your mother seemed quite –’

  ‘Quite what?’ He cuts across me. ‘Why are you bringing her into this?’

  ‘I’m not. She found them. You saw what happened to her hat. She was worried. I’m worried. I think it’s different from drawing explosions and monsters. I think these people might be us.’

  He rubs his eyes. ‘Let’s just get through this visit and then we’ll talk about it, okay?’

  We don’t, though. The next day, I pull the pages out of the sketchbook and press them down to the bottom of the bin. I don’t want to delve any deeper into it either.

  When the film from that day is developed, I flip past the group shots to find the pictures of Élodie by the pool. I study them for hours. The girl with the amber eye looks to me like a different person from the one with the blue, in spite of the symmetry of her features, and the identical backdrop. It’s the amber one I get framed. The blue I put into a drawer.

  I have a secret theory. The girl with the amber eye is the daughter who got lost somewhere along the way, but who comes to me very occasionally in my dreams. ‘Maman!’ she calls. And I turn to find her smiling, her hands reaching out for me.

  1993

  You’re still pale by evening, when we’re due to leave for the circus. You’ve hardly eaten any dinner.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go?’ I stand behind your chair and smooth your hair back from your face. ‘Why don’t we just go another night? It’ll be here for a week.’

  ‘But Luc said …’ You shake your hair so it half covers your face again. You’re beginning to colour. ‘Just that he might go tonight.’ You get up, pushing back your chair. ‘I’m going to get changed.’

  Camille fixe
s me with a look when you’ve disappeared up the stairs. ‘I told you she’d like him.’

  ‘Yes, it seems she’s got a crush. I saw him today, you know, hanging round the barn. He said he was looking for something for the pool.’

  ‘Well? Maybe he was just killing time before he had to go back to his mother. Wouldn’t she keep you out of the house?’

  I half-smile. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t think I’ll come with you tonight,’ she continues. ‘I want to carry on going through those things of Maman’s in the attic. Besides, I don’t like those provincial circuses. There’s something creepy about them.’

  ‘I’m not too keen either, but Emma wants to go.’

  We can hear the music from the circus as soon as we step out into the twilight to walk to the village. After the quiet of La Rêverie, evidence of so much life down the road is jarring. It gives me butterflies, the lurch of the innards just before walking out onto a stage.

  The whole village seems to have turned out for the first night. Just as when I was a girl, the circus has been set up in an open space now used as a car park, to the north of the main square. The street leading to it is lined with market stalls manned by dashiki-wearing Senegalese men selling sunglasses, belts and knock-off designer handbags.

  You’re drawn like a magpie to one in particular, offering friendship bands woven from nylon in every colour imaginable. They’re ten francs for three and you take ages to decide which combinations you like best, holding them against your wrist and rejecting the ones you say make you look pale.

  While you deliberate, I glance furtively at the faces around us. A few seem familiar, a particular set of mouth or timbre of voice making me tense, but no one seems to notice me. I realize that your English chatter, your pinkened shoulders, have rendered us invisible. The villagers dismiss us as tourists and don’t bother to look closer.