The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  At the top of the terrace steps, I listen for voices, which carry easily in air that is both syrupy and smoky. I don’t want to be seen to be so obviously monitoring you both, which would annoy and confuse you. But as I hover there, I can’t let it go. I spent four years here in a state of hyper-vigilance over you and anything much less, especially after the barn episode earlier, feels like negligence.

  I cross the lawn, still hoping to hear you, but it’s quiet; dead quiet. Today is apparently too hot for the birds. Even the cicadas have fallen silent. I creep closer to the glint of the water, just visible through the trees, ready to retreat if I see movement. But there’s nothing when I get there except your damp towel, abandoned on a lounger. The water ripples slightly, as though I’ve missed you by seconds, which perhaps I have.

  Almost without conscious thought, I race round to the barn again but it’s empty, the door still standing ajar from earlier. At least it’s not that. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand because the sweat’s running freely off me now. Where would she have taken you? I go back to the house but it’s still empty when I call your name, the echo of my voice too loud.

  An hour later I’m ready to ring the police. I’ve checked Élodie’s room and her battered rucksack is still there. Nothing of yours is missing. It doesn’t seem irrational to me that I’ve jumped to abduction but I suppose it would to anyone else so I decide to wait another ten minutes before I raise the alarm. I know you’re not a tiny child any more but I can’t help it – I keep seeing those awful CCTV images that had haunted the news in February: two boys in a Liverpool shopping centre, the smaller one’s hand so trustingly in the other’s, as he was led away into oblivion. It had made me shake so hard that I’d had to take one of the pills I’d kept from the last months in France.

  The self-imposed time limit is almost up when I hear your voice out on the drive and rush to the front door.

  You’re talking animatedly to her, turning to check that she hasn’t grown bored. Both of you are holding carrier bags from the small supermarket in the village. Relief washes over me for a blissful second before anger crowds in.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I shout from the front step, though it’s obvious. I see Élodie glance down at the bag she’s holding as if to say as much and it makes me even angrier.

  ‘How dare you take her off to the village without telling me?’ I stride up to her. It’s strange because I’ve railed at her so many times in the past and I’ve always had to look down. This is the first time we’ve ever been eye to eye in an argument.

  ‘Mum, what are you doing?’ You’re outraged, dropping your bag to the dusty road. ‘We just went to get some stuff to make a cake. A cake for you. It was supposed to be a surprise. Why are you being so mean?’

  Élodie doesn’t say anything. We’re still looking at each other.

  ‘You don’t know anything, Emma,’ I say, not taking my eyes off your sister. ‘You have no idea about anything that went on here when you were little. If you did …’

  ‘How can I know?’ Your voice is choked and high and I know you’re on the verge of tears. ‘You’ve never told me anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maman,’ Élodie says. ‘I –’

  ‘Why do you keep calling me that? You called me Sylvie in that last year, do you remember? Never Maman. You knew I didn’t like it, that it made me look so cold in front of other people.’ It’s liberating to slide back into the old language of our fights, the words flying out of me.

  ‘I hate you for being like this,’ you cry. ‘And stop talking in French as though I’m not even here.’ You storm past me into the house, the bag of shopping forgotten. For once, I don’t even consider going after you.

  ‘That man who came to look at the house found some clothes in the barn loft earlier,’ I continue. ‘Some other things too. I wondered if they were Luc’s. Have you two been hiding up there together? Do you know what I think? I think you’ve been hanging around for a while, longer than you said by the pool, watching us on the sly before you were ready to announce yourself. I think it was you who set a fire and then put it out in the souillarde. You knew it would bring me back.’

  Still she says nothing. I watch as a single tear rolls down her cheek.

  ‘You don’t want me here, do you?’ she says, so softly that I automatically lean towards her to catch the words. ‘You never did.’

  ‘But I did!’ I cry, a beat late because now I’m closer she smells of smoke, but it’s cigarettes, I tell myself. It must be cigarettes. ‘I so wanted you. But then it got impossible to keep you here, to manage your behaviour. Maybe you’re sorry for what you did now. Maybe you’ve changed. But how can I know that? You come here out of the blue and charm Emma, like you’ve always been able to charm anyone when it suited you, and you know I can’t tell her the truth because it will break her heart. How can I ever tell her that you wanted her gone?’

  ‘I didn’t, I never … It was an accident. I never meant …’

  ‘You think I don’t want to believe that? I want it more than anything. You’re my daughter, I’m your mother. I love you whatever you did. But you must be able to see how difficult it is for me to take you at your word when, as far as I know, you’ve never done anything by accident in your life.’

  We continue to stare at each other, faces inches apart. I’m breathing hard, my hands curled into fists, and I look down to see that hers are too, though she unclenches them as soon as I notice. I watch as different expressions cross her face like clouds and I can’t honestly say which are real and which have been rehearsed in a mirror: deep, profound sadness or something very like it, then cold fury, then blank exhaustion, which, as the last of my anger ebbs away, looks exactly how I feel.

  I don’t know how to navigate this and I’m so terrified of making a mistake I won’t ever be able to take back – not just in terms of you but Élodie, too. Everything I do and say feels critical, like a surgeon easing a scalpel past arteries ready to bleed out. I can feel how easy it would be to lose you both. I’ve come so close before.

  When I go back inside and into the salon, you’re shoving a cassette into the tape deck. And when you turn to me, hovering in the doorway, you look as hostile as I’ve ever seen you.

  1983

  I am at the hospital visiting my mother, who has been diagnosed with advanced heart disease. I have been driving back and forth to Toulouse to see her since before Christmas, buckling you into your car seat each and every time because I’m the only person I trust to look after you.

  On the way back from taking you to the toilet, Maman’s doctor catches my eye and beckons me into a small, overheated room. He tells me she probably won’t last much longer. Though he hasn’t yet said anything to her, she seems to know this intuitively, asking me when I get back to her bedside if I would mind going to pick up her rosary from the flat she still shares with Aunt Mathilde.

  Outside the plate-glass window at the end of the ward, the night is bearing down hard on the day, though it’s not yet four o’clock. Machines hum and beep; nurses glide past on rubber-soled shoes. I sit on a plastic chair moulded for someone wider than me and know that I will soon be an orphan. The existence of my own family – Greg, Élodie, you – doesn’t make this any less frightening.

  Maman regards me anxiously, even apologetically, and at first I assume it’s because of all the driving she knows I’m having to do in order to see her. She never learnt to drive and has always viewed it as an enormous, stressful undertaking. But it’s not that.

  ‘I should have stayed,’ she says. ‘I should have been there when you needed me most. I’m sorry, Sylvie.’

  I tell her it doesn’t matter, that she has nothing to apologize for, but her hands reach for mine across the starch-stiff sheets, stroking them tremulously. It’s such a familiar feeling from childhood, but the bones of her hands feel sharper now, the skin like fine old paper.

  ‘I knew something was wrong,’ she says, unable to let it go, though I shush her. ‘I r
emember when she was only three, maybe four, and you asked me if I thought she was all right, if I could remember you or Camille being like that. You asked if I thought it was just a stage she was going through, and I said yes.’

  Tears course down her cheeks, and I wipe them away gently.

  ‘I’m sorry, chérie. I was a coward.’

  ‘No, no. You mustn’t say that.’

  But she keeps on, and I let her because she’s so agitated; because this is an apology stretching back years. She needs to say it before she dies, which she does a few weeks later, just after Élodie turns fourteen. She does it quietly and without fuss, much as she lived.

  In the bleak, purposeless days after the funeral, a strange and secret part of me hopes that she will now be returned to La Rêverie and to me – that I will have a sense of her in the kitchen behind me, or in the chair she liked to doze in at the end of the day when Camille and I were growing up. But it isn’t like that. It’s the very opposite, in fact: a more acute sense of loneliness than I have ever experienced before. You’re my great comfort in this, of course – my only comfort, or so it feels.

  ‘If you’re not careful you’ll suffocate her,’ your father says, one sullen day in late March. He’s packing to go away again. I lean against the window as I watch him move around the room, opening drawers and picking things up, and I can feel the chill fingers of the mistral at my back. La Rêverie was built to keep out the heat of summer and is never really warm enough when the temperature dips and the wind gets up, the old radiators ticking and trickling like empty stomachs.

  ‘Can’t you just be glad that I’m so close to my daughter?’

  ‘Our daughter.’

  ‘You take no notice of her. She tried to show you one of her paintings the other day and you barely glanced at it. She looks so like you too, Greg. I’m amazed you’re not more interested.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I don’t bother answering. Apart from the dense pit of anxiety that always yawns at the root of me, I feel entirely flat and numb, as if nothing could penetrate. My mother has been dead for exactly two weeks.

  ‘Sylvie, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘What?’

  He sighs. ‘You just want me to hurry up and go, don’t you?’

  It’s true. I’m planning to get into bed once he’s gone. I’ve just put you down for your afternoon nap so I’ll have at least an hour to lie in silence and think about my mother, gaze fixed on the dull white sky outside. Élodie is out and hasn’t said when she will be back. I’m not entirely sure who she’s with and that feels wrong, but it also feels entirely beyond me to do anything about it. Besides, Élodie can take care of herself. She always has.

  Greg has not long driven off when Laurent knocks at the kitchen door. I can see the top of his head from the bedroom window. I wonder whether he’s been watching from an upstairs window at his own house, waiting for Greg’s car to go past.

  I hesitate before going downstairs to let him in. I want to be on my own. But then I think how nice it might be to spend some time with a man who isn’t waiting to challenge or catch me out. In a peculiar way, and despite our romantic past, Laurent has become the closest I can get to a parent: someone who has known me for almost as long as I’ve known myself, and who feels something close to unconditional or at least familial love for me.

  I lead him into the salon. He’s brought a bottle of good red wine with him and opens it to breathe.

  ‘I wanted to check you’re all right. She’s only been gone a little while.’ He lays a large, tentative hand on mine, completely covering it.

  I lean my head against his shoulder, knowing that I’m breaking one of our unspoken rules, which I began to enforce when I returned from Paris with Greg and found Laurent engaged to Annette.

  As the wine begins to work, the effort of holding myself together finally starts to catch up with me. Laurent puts on some music – something classical: a piano played in a minor chord – and I allow myself to cry as I haven’t yet, not even at the funeral. And it’s such a relief, and I am so grateful to him, that eventually I sit up, clamber into his lap and begin to kiss him.

  I don’t really expect him to tell me to stop and he doesn’t. It’s a nice kiss – a comfortable kiss, the angles and sensations of it completely familiar, as though we never stopped. I remember then what I knew when I applied for university in another country without telling him: that I love him much more than I want him. And that my wanting him – what there is of that – is really about how much he wants me. It’s a perverse kind of egotism and suddenly I’m appalled by myself.

  I get up and, for a split second before he opens his eyes, his face is naked with longing.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Laurent. We shouldn’t do this.’

  ‘Salut.’

  The voice, melodic and rich, makes both of us swing round. Élodie stands in the doorway, a smile playing on her lips. Her hair is loose, like it always is, gold and caramel rippling over her shoulders.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ I say, voice sharp.

  She twirls a length of her hair as her eyes dart between us. Laurent, who is hopeless at deception, looks at his feet. I know the expression on her face so well – I’ve been familiar with it since she was a tiny child. She’s weighing things up, working out how this new situation can best serve her. She’s got better at hiding it over the years, but I can still spot it.

  ‘Élodie? I’m talking to you.’ Being in the wrong makes me sharper than I’ve a right to be.

  A small cry sounds from upstairs. You’ve woken from your nap and want to come down, your hand reaching up to rattle the handle. I feel for the key in my pocket and, without looking at Laurent or your sister, head for the stairs to unlock the door and let you out.

  Laurent has gone by the time I come down with you in my arms, though you’re getting too heavy for me to carry you. You’re still sleepy, your cheeks hot and pink, your eyes unfocused. I love it when you’re like this, curled around me, your head lolling and heavy, like a rose on its stalk. In the kitchen I sit you down on the table and give you some weak grenadine. You swing your legs as you drink.

  ‘I bet you’re hungry too, aren’t you, ma petite?’

  You nod and yawn, making me yawn too.

  I feel slightly intoxicated from the wine and what just happened with Laurent, as well as Élodie having witnessed it. I move around the kitchen on automatic pilot, peeling a banana to slice, and picking out a couple of the tiny plum tomatoes you love, cutting them lengthways so you can’t choke on them.

  It’s only as I reach for a plate from the draining board that I see her. She’s sitting on the stool in the corner. She’s been there the whole time, watching me without saying a word.

  ‘Merde, Élodie, you frightened me.’

  She stretches like a cat, lifting her arms and arching her back. ‘Laurent left.’

  ‘I gathered that.’

  ‘Why were you doing that with him?’

  I carry on slicing fruit. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  She hops down from the stool and sidles over. Beneath the perfumed oil she has taken to putting in her hair, she smells of something else. I can’t quite disentangle the different scents, but it’s something earthy, almost sour.

  I’m just about to ask her when she picks up the uncut half of the banana and takes a bite. I watch her wander back to the stool. Your eyes, like saucers, don’t move from her because you’ve been fascinated by Élodie from your earliest days. Even when she makes you cry you never take your eyes off her.

  ‘Where have you been today?’

  ‘Around. Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it matters because I’m your mother and I’m asking you where you spent the day.’

  ‘I went to Marseille.’

  I stop what I’m doing. ‘Marseille?’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘That’s over a hundred kilometres away. Who with?’

  ‘No one.’<
br />
  I can feel my temper beginning to fray, as it always does. My mother has just died, I want to scream. My mother has just died and you want to play these stupid games.

  ‘Did you hitchhike again?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘You know your father and I don’t like you doing that. It’s dangerous. Élodie, are you listening to me?’

  I hate the tone I always use with her, flint-hard and shrewish. I’m not like that with anyone else, even Greg. She has the knack of bringing out the worst in me, though I feel guilty even thinking in these terms, as her parent. Still, I can’t help believing our relationship and our ages are irrelevant sometimes: a pair of magnets that were always destined to repel. Mother and daughter, adult and child, but also equals, forever pitted against each other.

  ‘Laurent looked like this when he left,’ she says, pulling the upside-down mouth she did as a child when she was pretending to be upset. She’s moved on to different methods now. These days, if Greg is there, and one of us has crossed her, or refused her something she wants, she weeps – big tears that well up in those mismatched eyes and slide prettily down her cheeks. What is it they say in English? Don’t turn the waterworks on. That’s exactly what it looks like: no more emotion than an opened tap, though Greg is taken in every time. He finds her crying almost unbearable to watch. The first teardrop has scarcely rolled off her chin before he is by her side, his thumb brushing away the tears tenderly, his wallet out if money is what she’s after.

  ‘Poor Laurent,’ she says now.

  I ignore her, popping a tiny tomato half into your mouth. You like holding them on your tongue, waiting until they’ve warmed up before biting down.

  ‘Does Papa know about him, Sylvie? Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie. Are you listening to me, Sylvie? Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes?’

  She echoes my own nagging words – Are you listening, Élodie? – but the sing-song tone is her own, and it grates on every nerve. ‘Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes? Tu m’écoutes?’