The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  1980

  She stands motionless, luminous in white, another finger of the moonlight that falls across your cot. The cotton of her nightdress is so fine that it floats around the silhouette of her body. It makes me think of a jellyfish propelling itself across a dark sea. A loose floorboard creaks under me and she spins round, long hair flying after her. With the window behind, her face is a dark blank.

  Truly it’s one of the most frightening moments of my life. As I move towards your cot, taking in the fact that the side has been lowered, that you haven’t yet made a single sound, my heart falters and skips. I lift you out, already certain you’re dead. But then you open your eyes wide and begin to wriggle and I have to choke back the screams that are almost out of me.

  She hadn’t made any noise getting from her bedroom to yours. As I take her back to her own bed, my fingers tight round her wrist, I notice how cool her skin is. She’s been in there for a while. I wonder if some ancient instinct alerted me to the danger, waking me with a silent alarm only a mother’s blood would hear.

  The next morning I ring around until I find a man who will fit a lock to your door today. Not a bolt or a latch, but a proper turning lock that requires a new handle and drilling into the frame. A lock with a key that I can have with me, that will keep you in and safe, and out of her reach.

  When Greg gets home that night, his eyes are red. John Lennon has been shot, and they’ve been playing ‘Imagine’ on the radio all day. He’s so upset and disenchanted with the world that I don’t tell him what happened with Élodie, but of course he sees the new handle that doesn’t match the rest when he goes up to bed. I brace myself for a fight but he doesn’t say anything. He rests his hand on it for a moment, the brass garishly shiny in the gloom of the hall, then walks slowly towards our bedroom. He looks so beaten-down, I don’t have the heart to repeat what Élodie said after I’d led her back to bed. ‘Je n’aime pas ça,’ she had whispered, a sharp little hiss in the dark. I don’t like it. I don’t want it here.

  1993

  Élodie turns in just after nine, saying she’s exhausted. I make up her bed with fresh linen, so tired myself that the strangeness of carrying out this mundane task in Élodie’s room, for Élodie, feels thankfully remote. We embrace awkwardly when I’ve finished and I close the door softly behind me. I stand there for a while, marvelling at the small sounds on the other side of it: the floorboards creaking under her feet, the sigh of the mattress as it takes her weight for the first time in a decade. She is here.

  When I tear myself away, I find you waiting for me in the salon.

  ‘Explain, then,’ you say flatly, mouth a hard line that makes me think of your father in the last years of our marriage. ‘You said you would.’

  I rub my scalp, which is tight and sore. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘So Élodie’s not dead.’ The words are blunt. You’re angry, and not sure who to direct it at. Not yet.

  I try to organize my thoughts. ‘What you have to remember is that everything your dad and I ever did was to protect you,’ I begin. ‘Perhaps we got it wrong, but …’

  ‘Because you lied about what she died of, you mean? When, actually, you didn’t even know for sure that she was dead at all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you look harder for her? She said she made you think she was dead, but what does that even mean? And why did she want you to think she was dead in the first place?’

  You’re much quicker than I am tonight.

  ‘I suppose we didn’t know, not for sure. But when you assumed, we let you because we thought it would be easier for you than knowing she might be out there somewhere.’

  What I don’t – what I can’t – add is that I hadn’t known how much you remembered of what she’d done to you. I didn’t want you to think she could come back and get you.

  ‘So basically she lied to you and Dad, and you lied to me?’

  I sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so. I’m sorry, Emma love, I really am. I know that’s totally inadequate.’

  You don’t soften. ‘So what about why she lied?’

  ‘I think she must have been angry with us, with everyone, because of the help she had to have. You know from the notes that she had to go to a special clinic where they treated children like Élodie. We didn’t see her much while she was there because that was what the doctors advised. I’m not sure they would do the same now.’ I shake my head. ‘I know it’s a mess but perhaps you’ll understand better when –’

  You get to your feet. ‘Don’t say I’ll understand when I’m older. That’s all you ever say. Anyway, it looks like being older just makes you into a better liar, if you’re anything to go by.’ And then you’re gone, thundering up the stairs. Your bedroom door slams, making me flinch.

  *

  I tiptoe into your room just before midnight and, as La Rêverie drifts along the dark seabed of night, I watch you sleep. Between the quiet sighs of your breathing, I listen for the tiniest sounds beyond the closed door. I wish I’d left it ajar like I found it, but I don’t want to risk waking you by opening it now. I don’t want to frighten you, a Gothic spectre in a white nightdress standing over your bed. I wish this room had a key so I could lock you in, just like the old days.

  My head pounds from too much sun at the gorge and too much wine on an empty stomach. The disorientation of standing in the near-blackness makes me unsteady on my feet. I creep to the far wall, halfway between you and the door, and lower myself carefully to the floor, back up against the cold wall. Outside, through the half-open shutters, I can see the dull glow of the forest fires in the distance.

  Sometime after one, an insistent tapping noise, like a fingernail on a door, makes my head jerk up. It stops and then starts again, my heart beating almost as loudly in each of the lulls. Then my thoughts clear, and I realize I know this sound. It’s a death-watch beetle in the wall somewhere close by, eating away at the old wood of La Rêverie’s fabric. Bad news for the house, and for whoever buys the place, but nothing that can harm you. Still, it chills me. They’re named for those who would sit up through the night, watching over a loved one who might not see morning. In the old days, people believed the sound heralded tragedy. Rationally, I know that’s just silly superstition. And yet.

  Before I got pregnant with you, Greg and I had relinquished the idea of having another child. Prior to Élodie, I think he had fondly envisaged a whole brood and I liked the idea too, in a naive sort of way. After, though. After I knew what it could be like, I told him Élodie was the only child we would have.

  ‘I just can’t risk it,’ I said, when Élodie was a few years old. My voice shook. ‘I couldn’t possibly cope. I can’t.’

  He wouldn’t talk about it but I knew what he was thinking – we were still close enough for that then. I knew that at some low frequency pulsing beneath his hearing he was already troubled by her, too, even before I took her to Morel. In the years since, I was sure he’d gone over the doctor’s words almost as much as I had, some of them sticking fast, impossible to budge. Callous. Unemotional. Cold. And, of course, psychopathic. That word like a siren echoing across the fields of my dreams.

  As it was, the issue of having another child was taken out of our hands and, oh, Emma, I’m so glad it was. It still makes me smile at the ridiculous irony of it, but it was Annette Martin who gave you to me. Annette and her badly prepared Coquille St Jacques.

  We hadn’t been invited to the Martin house since Luc had ended up in the pool, but Laurent must have overruled Annette so that Greg and I were among the numbers for his birthday party. Half of us went down with food poisoning the next day and I was one of the unlucky ones. I felt so awful I didn’t care about anything, even what Élodie might be doing, as I lay in bed with the shutters closed and a bowl at my side. It certainly didn’t occur to me that I might have thrown up my pill. And I’d almost forgotten that Greg and I had slept together when we got home the night before, when the scallops had yet to poison my system: a quick release that
might not have happened if we hadn’t drunk so much. When I finally realized – late because I was too busy getting through each day to notice something as mundane as my menstrual cycle – I was almost four months pregnant.

  Another irony is that, after feeling so ill with the food poisoning, you never gave me a single day of morning sickness. And how typical of you was that? You were always so easy on me, even when you were still struggling into existence.

  But I didn’t know you would be you then, and I was terrified. Before I told Greg, I went around in a daze of dread and disbelief, checking my knickers for blood a dozen times a day. In five months’ time, I told myself, there will be another one, another one like her.

  My head whirling with Then, I must have dozed off. The next thing I know the room has lightened to grey, the faintest blush in the eastern sky signalling that the sun is finally creeping up the horizon. The beetle has stopped. I jolt when I remember why I’m here and not in my own room.

  I know I should leave now, before you wake. I get to my feet, body stiff from the hard floor, hips clicking as I move towards the door. I used to hanker after the past all the time when I first became a mother but I haven’t felt such a visceral craving to reverse time for years. Now, as I tiptoe along the hall towards Élodie’s room, the force of this desire almost undoes me. Not that I know when in time I would go back to. To my own childhood? Perhaps. It would be nice not to be in charge: as I learnt when Élodie was small, it’s hard to assume responsibility when you don’t feel in control. But, then, if I went back to being a little girl, I wouldn’t have you. And I could never wish you away, Emma. I couldn’t wish your sister away either. Perhaps it’s a biological impossibility. The thought of either constricts my throat.

  Élodie’s door is shut and there is silence behind it. My logical brain knows she is sleeping just like you are – the heavy slumber of dawn – but I have an unnerving vision of her sitting bolt upright in bed, eyes fixed on my shadow under the door as I hover there. There was no answer when I rang Greg last night. My hands had still been shaking so hard that I’d had to dial twice.

  ‘You were never there, Greg,’ I’d muttered aloud, as I slammed the receiver back into its cradle. ‘And you’re still not.’

  From downstairs, the ormolu clock chimes five, and I’m hurtling back to our first night here, eight or was it nine days ago? Resisting the urge to go back and resume my vigil over you, I make coffee for something to do, taking it out on the terrace to drink. The sun is growing stronger all the time, the lemon-rind sky turning blue by imperceptible degrees. I’ve made the coffee strong and I drink it fast, aware that I’m creeping around, already on eggshells.

  I’m clenching my jaw so tightly that my teeth hurt. I make myself breathe out slowly, counting up to five before I allow a breath in. But then I hear the creak of a shutter and tense again, gooseflesh rising despite the sun. I look up at your window but I know that it came from the other side of the house. I brace for more noise but everything goes quiet again.

  ‘Maman.’

  I nearly drop my cup because she is suddenly there beside me. I probably never told you how light she was on her feet. Is. I almost never heard her approach when she was growing up.

  ‘Do you mind if I go for a swim?’ She is already dressed in a turquoise bikini that brings out the coppery lights in her right eye, the rich gold of her hair.

  I let out a startled laugh, at a loss to know how else to respond to such a normal request in such abnormal circumstances.

  She turns to go and I call after her. ‘I tried to phone your father again but he’s obviously away.’

  ‘He was always away, wasn’t he?’

  I look at her in surprise. I can’t remember her ever criticizing Greg. She’s looking thoughtfully up at the house and I wonder what she’s remembering. My eyes flick over her half-naked body. The skin of her midriff is only a shade lighter than her legs and arms. On the right, just above the line of her bikini briefs, is a neat scar, silver scoring the gold.

  ‘Did you have your appendix out?’

  She regards me from above, head on one side. She’s a different Élodie today, this one far more self-contained than she was last night. ‘My appendix?’ Her finger trails back and forth across the scar. ‘Yes. I’ll swim now, I think.’

  I watch her go. She is still utterly without self-consciousness, though she must know I’m watching her. The sight makes old memories fire painfully in my brain so I get up and go inside to the phone again.

  The line connects after only a couple of rings. ‘Camille?’

  ‘Who else were you expecting on this number?’ she says with her usual bite but then, when I don’t say anything: ‘Sylvie? Ça va?’

  ‘She’s back,’ I manage to get out.

  ‘Who’s back?’

  ‘Élodie.’

  ‘Oh, my God. Are you all right?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what I am.’

  ‘Did she … How was she with you? And, oh, God, what about Emma? I hope you told her before …?’

  ‘She had an asthma attack from the shock. I stayed in her room most of the night.’

  ‘Where is Élodie now?’

  ‘In the pool. It’s as though all this is completely normal.’

  ‘Merde.’

  In the background, I can hear the rumble and spit of her coffee machine and wish I was in her light-filled Paris apartment with her.

  ‘You haven’t said what you told Emma.’

  I peep into the hall to check for you but it’s still quiet upstairs. Softly, I close the salon door, taking the phone with me.

  ‘Élodie took the blame. She said she made everyone think she was dead.’

  ‘She did? Why would she do that?’

  Something loosens inside me. Tears well up from nowhere. ‘Christ, Camille. I don’t think I can cope with this.’

  ‘You were probably always going to have to at some point and, actually, I think you’re as ready as you’re ever going to be. I think that’s precisely why you’re there after avoiding it for a decade. Why did you go back now? Because you heard about that damage in the souillarde and you thought it might be her.’

  There’s truth in this. Camille had always been completely clear-eyed.

  ‘Look, maybe she’s changed, grown up,’ says Camille. ‘Grown out of it. That’s what the psychologist in Avignon said, didn’t he? Things were going in the right direction, weren’t they, at that place, before she took off?’

  ‘You honestly think we can be a normal family?’ It comes out facetiously but I want her to convince me of it, too. ‘I can’t help it, Camille. I’ll always be afraid of what she might do. I didn’t sleep last night. I sat on the floor in Emma’s room, keeping watch.’

  ‘And what happened? Nothing. She’s swimming in the pool. She’s probably got her own life now to get back to, once she’s made up for lost time with you and Emma. Did you think of that?’

  I contemplate her leaving and I don’t know how it makes me feel. Relieved, of course; I can’t deny that. But also empty, hollowed out in some crucial way.

  ‘You’re still going to have to tell Emma the truth, though,’ Camille says, softly for her.

  ‘Which part? It’s so complicated.’

  ‘All of it. Tell her why you don’t trust Élodie. That she had to go away for good reason.’

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t do it to her. I can’t tell her that her sister hated her so much she tried to hurt her. I’ve spent ten years protecting her from that.’

  She sighs. ‘Look, Sylvie, I would come, but I really can’t take any time off work this week and –’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say dully. ‘I understand.’ And I did. There was a limit with Camille; there always had been. It was enough that she hadn’t said I told you so.

  ‘Greg should be there. This is on him too. Ring me back if you need me to go and knock on his damn door.’

  ‘I will. Wish me luck.’ I can feel tears starting again.

  ‘
Bonne courage, Sylvie. You know you can ring again.’

  I take the phone back into the hall. The air is cooler than it is in the sun-steeped salon, and among the familiar smells something potent and heady is suspended in its particles, like the smoke that stains the breeze. Patchouli and sea salt.

  I have to say it aloud. She’s really back. And though an old version of myself screams at me to get us both in the car and drive away, I am just about able to ignore it. Partly because I want to believe she may have changed; and partly because I don’t think that’s possible, and that something will happen soon to force my hand. I don’t want to think about what this might be. I know I’m backing myself into a corner but feel helpless to stop it. And there’s another reason I’m trapped. Just as I have something on Élodie that could spoil her for you for ever, so she has something on me. And I can’t ever let you find that out. You would never look at me in the same way again. I wonder if we’re already in an accident unfolding in slow motion. I wonder if I’ll recognize the last moment we have to jump clear.

  1980

  Élodie has always been something of a loner at school. It’s one of the things her teachers brought up, right from her earliest days at the village crèche. ‘Élodie doesn’t seem to have many friends,’ they said, though I knew they really meant ‘any’. Only one teacher, young and earnest, in her first year of the job, made a slightly different observation, but for me it was a crucial one. ‘Élodie doesn’t seem to need friends,’ she said, and that was much more like it. I could never imagine her as the girl sitting alone, wistfully looking on as the others played. She simply wasn’t interested.

  And then she was.

  I don’t know what changed, possibly just boredom, or else a growing awareness that there is pleasure or at least interest to be had in playing with others. I don’t mean playing only in the straightforward sense, of course. In French there’s only jouer but in English there’s toying. That’s more apt.