The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  ‘What about the animals?’

  I stroke your hair. Your tenderness always surprises and touches me. It relieves me as well: proof that I must have done something right as a mother.

  ‘They’ll move to another part of the forest before it takes hold,’ I say. ‘It’s huge up there, miles and miles of trees. They’ll be fine.’ I don’t know if this is true.

  ‘If it did come this far, what would we do?’ You scrabble under the bed and bring out your inhaler.

  ‘It won’t, darling,’ I say, as you take a couple of puffs. When your breathing is back to normal, I take your hand and lead you out to the hallway. It’s got darker while we were looking out of the window and I have to feel around for the light switch.

  ‘But what if it did?’ you persist. ‘We could get in the pool until the firemen came, couldn’t we?’

  I smile over my shoulder as you follow me downstairs. ‘That’s a clever idea, but we won’t need it. Don’t worry about the smoke – it’ll have gone by the morning.’

  *

  But the smoke hasn’t gone. If anything, it’s grown more intense overnight. By lunchtime, the pall of it is suspended above the garden, like dingy gauze, the usual painterly, pin-sharp light dimmed and vaguely nicotined. In the mirror that afternoon, as I smarten myself up for the viewing, my eyes look hollow. I haven’t slept well again.

  The Bernard family arrive precisely at midday. The two little girls are plainer than their parents and dressed in matching outfits. They say barely a word. Their father, on the other hand, asks a stream of the sort of practical questions I’ve been dreading: when was the heating installed, how much does the pool cost to maintain, does traffic noise from the main road carry into the garden during August?

  La Rêverie is threadbare and dated, but the kind of buyer I need won’t care about any of that. They will reach a hand through it, and grasp at what Olivier recognized as its inherent magic. Some houses are almost alive, hearts beating just under our hearing range, and however mixed my feelings for my childhood home are, La Rêverie is one of them.

  ‘And what about the fires you get down here?’ Monsieur Bernard says in the garden, fixing me with a look through his rimless glasses. ‘The smoke’s stronger than it was at the other houses we’ve seen. I suppose you’re quite low here, and the air doesn’t circulate much.’

  ‘Actually, this is unusual. It’ll have blown away by tomorrow.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He looks sceptical. ‘Peut-être.’

  They follow me back towards the house, none of us speaking because he’s run out of questions and I out of energy. You’re swimming your daily lengths as we pass the pool and I see the first kindling of interest in the Bernard girls’ stolid faces as they take you in, your body sleek and efficient as it cleaves the green water.

  ‘Is that your daughter?’ Madame Bernard asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken beyond her initial murmured bonjour.

  ‘Yes, that’s Emma. She loves it here.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t sell it, then.’ She smiles twitchily, embarrassed at how rude the words sound aloud. ‘Perhaps you should keep it for her, I mean. For when she has her own children.’

  ‘Don’t let her catch you saying that. I’ll never hear the end of it,’ I say, suddenly jovial, because in just a few minutes they will climb back into their city car and we’ll be alone again. I’ll be able to join you in the silken water.

  When they’ve gone, I do just that, glad that the awkward episode is over and Olivier is still to come. I wonder if part of my relief lies in the confidence I feel that the Bernards won’t be making an offer. La Rêverie is still ours for the time being. I want to leave as soon as possible. I do. But I also find that I want to stay, a hankering that has crept up on me stealthily. The coexistence of these absolutes reminds me of how I always felt about Élodie, love and fear so tightly entwined as to be indivisible.

  1977

  It’s high summer, a cloying August day when the heat seeps into the house like tar, turning milk and dazing flies, which gather in listless piles under the windows. I’m looking for Élodie, who has disappeared again. My T-shirt is stuck to me with sweat.

  ‘Élodie, s’il te plaît!’

  I have been calling her for a while but she doesn’t answer, though I know she can hear me, that she’s in the house somewhere. I always know if she’s nearby, as though we’re still attached, womb to navel, by a cord that can’t be cut.

  I find her in Greg’s and my room, where she is scratching a large E into my antique jewellery box with a metal nail file.

  ‘Oh, no, no!’ I rush forward and wrench the file out of her hand, throwing it hard at the floor where it hits the skirting board with a clatter.

  The jewellery box is made of rosewood and inlaid with delicate mother-of-pearl leaves. Papa bought it for me when I was seventeen – the only present he’d ever chosen himself because my mother usually took care of that sort of thing. It wasn’t even my birthday. ‘I just saw it and thought of my Sylvie,’ he said, shrugging and embarrassed, after I unwrapped it.

  Grief and fury burning through my insides, I feel as though she’s taken that nail file to my own flesh. I pull her to her feet. She’s eight now and we’ve been back to Morel twice more, making four visits altogether. In fact, there’s little point in going. Morel’s opinion, however gently put, remains the same: You’ll just have to wait and see. She’ll grow out of it or she won’t.

  There’s no sign of her growing out of it yet and, while she’s often destructive, this particular incident feels deeply personal. She’s watched me carefully polish and rearrange the contents of that box so many times. Clenching my jaw against tears, I lift the lid. She’s slashed at the velvet lining, which is old and has frayed easily into ragged ribbons. My amber beads are missing, too. A present from Greg I’ve always loved, each one as big as a marble. He’d given them to me when I got home from hospital after giving birth to Élodie.

  ‘What have you done with them?’ I’m kneeling, my face close to hers, voice shaking with the effort not to shout the words. ‘Where are my beads?’ I point to the box. ‘Do you really hate me so much?’

  She won’t look at me, but it’s not as though she’s looking at her feet with contrition. Her odd eyes, warm and cold, follow a fly as it buzzes in slow circles around the overhead light.

  ‘Look at me,’ I hiss. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Where are they?’

  Her lips curl into a smirk. ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ I look desperately around the room, but she’s been upstairs a while. She could have taken them first, coming back to destroy the box afterwards.

  I wish she’d chosen anything but those beads, which I treasure not only because they’re from happier times, but for their colour: the darkest ones so closely match her left eye. It’s nonsensical but I feel as if she’s thrown away all hope of that other Élodie, as if she’s telling me she’ll never grow out of this. That the blue eye is the only Élodie after all.

  Something inside me snaps. I pick her up under her arms, holding her away from me because I don’t want to feel her hot, unyielding body against mine. She’s heavy, especially when she goes completely limp, but I make it down the stairs, half dragging her dead weight the last few feet, the muscles in my back screaming.

  It’s deliciously cool in the souillarde and I wish I could shut myself in there instead. My mother had used it as a place of punishment when Camille and I were girls, though it was hardly that during the stifling summers. It’s funny how we repeat our parents’ ways, even their stock phrases, with our own children. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a reflex but it feels like a comfort to me to pretend occasionally that I am my maman and Élodie is me. I always understood that relationship.

  ‘I don’t want to look at you so you’ll stay in there for ten minutes while you think about what you’ve done,’ I say through the door, cringing at the cliché and the quaver in my voice.

  I know it’s a futile punishment.
It was enough for me as a child to think I had fallen out of my mother’s favour, that, however briefly, she disliked or disapproved of me. Élodie won’t care, perhaps can’t care. I am well aware that this is going against Dr Morel’s advice, but it’s almost impossible to follow that when she’s at her most extreme. It goes against the human need for justice. I suppose the punishment is for my sake.

  Feeling weak, I rest on my haunches for a minute, forehead against the door, and I wonder if she’s just the other side, my mirror image, faces close enough to kiss if it wasn’t for the inch of wood between us.

  Back upstairs, I inspect the jewellery box properly. She’s scraped the varnish down to the bare wood, splintering the surface, which must have taken some force. I get into bed with it and pull the covers up over my head, though it’s much too hot for that. Curling into a ball with the box pulled into me, I let myself cry, the sobs loud in the dark little nest I’ve made. I am so frightened, I think, and my heart skips and stumbles as if to prove it; as though Greg is here giving me the look that says, You’re exaggerating.

  After the ten minutes have passed, I go to the door. I can’t face going down to her.

  ‘Élodie, you can come out now,’ I call.

  She doesn’t answer, but I hear the creak of the souillarde door as it opens. After a moment the television is switched on in the salon. I go back to bed and burrow under the covers again.

  The next thing I know Greg is shaking me roughly awake. My eyes feel swollen and crusted as I open them.

  ‘Get up,’ he says from above, voice cold. ‘Get the fuck up and explain to me why you locked our daughter in the souillarde for so long that she wet herself.’

  Disorientated, I twist round to look at the clock on the bedside table. Only about forty minutes have passed since I called down to her.

  ‘She was only in there for ten minutes, Greg, and you know there’s no lock on that door. She went to watch television, I heard her come out and turn it on.’

  ‘She says she tried to turn the handle but couldn’t get it to work.’

  ‘I heard her! I heard her come out and go and switch the television on.’

  ‘You didn’t go down to let her out yourself?’

  ‘I heard her come out, Greg.’

  ‘Do you really think she would have wet herself if she didn’t have to?’

  ‘Actually, yes, I do.’ My heart races as I let the words fall.

  He pauses, his gaze going to the damaged jewellery box on the bed, and I think for a moment he’s going to consider the possibility that I may be right, but then the shutters come down. It’s so much easier to be angrier with me. He shakes his head, face stiff with disgust, and slams out of the room.

  Later, when I look in on the two of them, they are watching television together – some old Monsieur Hulot film. He doesn’t see me but she does, another smirk lifting the corner of her mouth, that pretty little dimple. A muscular anomaly masquerading as beauty.

  We both know what Morel has said. Greg saw the aftermath of her nearly drowning that little boy. But he won’t agree, not out loud anyway. Morel was ‘stigmatizing a tiny child’. Jean-Claude ‘got a little fright’. ‘She’s wilful, I accept that,’ he said the other day. ‘But I actually think the main problem is that she’s so bright. She gets frustrated and it comes out in the wrong way.’ I didn’t reply, and where once he would have picked a fight about that, he fell silent instead. Oh, yes, he knows.

  After I’ve searched the house and garden for the beads, I go back upstairs and stuff some clothes and toiletries into a bag, along with the thousand or so francs I keep at the back of my sock drawer. Perhaps it’s unforgivably selfish even to contemplate leaving a child, but it doesn’t feel it, not in that moment. It feels like survival.

  I walk to the village because I don’t want the sound of the car starting to alert Greg. Along with the clothes and money, I’ve packed a couple of photographs of myself, taken by Laurent the summer before I went to study in London. Sitting in the village square waiting for a bus to take me away, I clutch them like talismans: proof that I once faced the world with equanimity. I don’t think about where I’m going. I’m not really thinking at all. The only place I want to go is back to my old self.

  After a long time, I don’t know how many hours, ancient Madame Perrot opens a window just across from the bench. Her curls bob in the warm breeze.

  ‘Sylvie Durand, is that you over there?’ she calls. ‘There are no more buses today, petite. You’ll be waiting till Monday.’

  I walk slowly back to La Rêverie, my feet scuffing the dry earth at the side of the road because I can’t summon the energy to lift them. She had called me Durand, instead of Winters, as though I’d fallen backwards through time to before I was a married mother, when everything was ahead and nothing frightened me.

  I let myself in and stand in the hall but no one comes. I’m like the runaway child who briefly leaves home after some unbearable injustice: neither Greg nor Élodie has even noticed my absence.

  1993

  Olivier arrives, only a little late this time, clutching two glass bottles: wine of palest salmon pink and Pschitt lemonade for you. You snort with laughter when you see the label and he grins back.

  I’m relieved. Earlier, as I’d got ready, your face in the mirror as I brushed my hair had been almost scathing.

  ‘God, Mum, you’re making such an effort. What’s even the point if we’ve got to go home soon?’

  Now, as I take the wine from Olivier, I see you witness the brief contact our hands make and roll your eyes. For once, I hope you’ll go upstairs, taking your adolescent contempt with you. I need this evening.

  ‘So, how did the viewing go?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be expecting an offer any time soon, but I’m still opening this. It looks expensive. Thank you.’

  He shrugs. ‘It’s their loss if they don’t buy. What did they say?’

  ‘Not much. He asked about the smoke, of course. Are the fires getting bad this time?’

  ‘Oui, ils sont très graves.’

  You stop pouring lemonade. ‘How serious? You’re talking about the fires, aren’t you?’

  I send Olivier a pointed look.

  ‘There’s no problem, Emma,’ he says haltingly. ‘They will send planes tomorrow. You know, with water? They take it from the sea. If the wind –’

  ‘Darling,’ I interrupt him. ‘I promise you that we are not in any danger. Do you honestly think I’d let us stay here a minute longer if we were?’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ you say, with a shrug like Olivier’s. But for all your nonchalance, your eyes are too bright. You’re a little frightened, and you’re also excited. You duck your head so I can’t see your face. ‘I’m going upstairs now.’ I resist the urge to ask if you’ve got your inhaler. It’ll only make you cross, so I let it go.

  When you’ve gone, taking the lemonade bottle with you, Olivier and I wander through the garden, ending up at the pool. The smoke is slightly stronger here, as though the pines are hemming it in, though the proximity of the water makes it seem less intrusive.

  Olivier lies back on one of the loungers and lets out a long breath. ‘Ah, that’s nice.’

  I smile and hand him a glass. ‘I think I could have been friendlier to them, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people who came to see the house.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t want to sell after all. Maybe you should just stay for ever.’

  I laugh and sit down on the lounger next to his, kicking off my sandals, sensing him watching as I do.

  ‘What was it like?’ he says, when I’m leaning back like him. He angles his body round to face me. ‘Growing up round here, I mean? Everyone knowing everyone else.’

  ‘It was exactly as you’d expect. Horribly incestuous because it was impossible to keep any secrets, but strangely comforting for the same reason. In London, you don’t feel like you make any impression on the place. It’s like you move so l
ightly over it that it wouldn’t miss you if you went away and never came back. Here, for good or bad, you mean something. You’re someone.’ I hadn’t meant to say so much and I look down at my hands, embarrassed.

  ‘Maybe that’s why I’ve stayed on here for so long,’ he says. ‘To be someone.’ He tops up my glass. ‘Now, tell me about these teenage secrets you were trying to keep.’

  I smile and sip the wine. His eyes are on my mouth. I can feel the alcohol in my bloodstream now.

  ‘Come on, Sylvie. Didn’t you break Laurent Martin’s heart when you went off to England?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I wonder if he’s asked about me and the thought makes my heart speed up.

  ‘His is the next property over, isn’t it? Did you smuggle him in here after dark?’

  I raise a disapproving eyebrow but I’m laughing. ‘That’s none of your business. There are lots of shadowy corners in this garden, though.’

  He smiles. ‘For the first time, I think I’m regretting being sent away to school. I could have been here instead, doing my best to woo the beautiful Sylvie Durand.’

  There’s a long beat when we look at each other without speaking.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says eventually. ‘I’ve only got one meeting tomorrow, early. Why don’t I come and pick you both up afterwards and we’ll go out for the day. The three of us could go to the gorge in the Ardèche.’

  ‘That sounds lovely. But tomorrow is Emma’s birthday.’

  ‘Oh. Well, of course you’ll want to do something with her.’

  ‘No, I … Look, let me talk to her. I think both of us could do with a change of scene.’

  We sit quietly, not needing to say anything, and I think how natural it feels to be close to him. Natural but charged at the same time, like it was with Greg in the early days.

  ‘They think it might have been started deliberately, you know,’ says Olivier, jolting me out of my thoughts. For a moment time warps and kinks, as it sometimes does here, and I half expect to see Greg in the lounger across from me. I can almost hear the splash of Élodie in the pool as she turns somersaults in the water. Regarde, Papa! Regarde-moi!