by Kate Riordan
‘I think she might have been sleeping in the barn, you know,’ I say, as I stub it out.
He looks up, surprised out of his thoughts. ‘Who, Élodie?’
‘Yes. There were clothes in the loft. I wasn’t sure, and I suppose I’m still not, but I think she was there, maybe with Luc. She used to hide up there all the time in that last year – do you remember? I think Luc’s been with her or helping her. I think she’s been around a while.’
‘Haven’t you asked her?’
‘She said it was only a couple of days and not at the house, but I’ve got a feeling. Both of us felt watched here before she came. Emma was beginning to think the house was haunted.’
He remains silent.
‘Don’t you think that’s a bit worrying?’
He shrugs. ‘So she was too scared to approach at first. I think I can understand that.’
‘You know why I came in the first place, don’t you?’
‘The damage in the souillarde? Surely you can’t think … Why would anyone start a fire in there? It’s hardly more than a cupboard. It barely even got going, did it? I thought it was kids.’
‘Perhaps. I thought it might have been a way of getting me to come back here. Maybe it was the only way she could, I don’t know.’
‘Like she’s reeled you in. Jesus, Sylvie. That sounds a bit far-fetched to me.’
‘And yet here I am. I’m back and so is she. We’re all here together. For the first time in a decade.’
I watch him take that in and wait for the protests, the accusations of paranoia, but they don’t come and, for once, I wish they would.
I look for you again and see that you’re on your way back, rushing ahead of Élodie to show us something. Behind you, your sister is moving unhurriedly, languidly, hips swaying in time with her hair. As she passes an old couple, locals rather than tourists, I see the woman nudge her husband and nod in Élodie’s direction. They watch her progress, mouths pursed, backs stiff with disapproval, and I have no idea if it’s the amount of flesh she’s showing or because they know who she is. Brebis galeuse.
‘Look what Élodie bought me.’
You hold out your arm. You’ve put all your neon bands on one wrist, replacing the ones on the right with a bracelet: a slender silver hoop clasping a small ceramic plate, pale pink with tiny blue flowers dotted in the opposite corners.
‘She’s got one too.’
You lift her wrist to show me and she meets my gaze for a moment. I think there’s a glint of a challenge in her eyes but then she glances away and I wonder if I’m just looking for it.
Her bracelet is identical to yours, though the silver looks brighter against her butterscotch skin. In the centre of the ceramic plates, between the flowers, and so recently painted by the stallholder that the black lines shine wetly, is a curlicued letter E, just like those she once graffitied on her door handle, just like the one she scratched into my beloved jewellery box. E for Élodie and now E for Emma.
No one wants anything else so Greg pays the bill and we start to cross the square. At the far edge, the boys we saw on the night of the circus are back. Their mopeds are propped up in a ragged line next to the bench they’re draped over, smoking and laughing, though without real enjoyment. I catch you scanning their faces for Luc but he’s not there. They see us a beat later or, rather, they see Élodie. This has been happening all evening: married fathers, waiters and old men staring, apparently unable to help themselves.
‘Élodie!’ they call. ‘Viens ici, Élodie!’ They watch her ignore them as one, and the calls get more frenzied, though they don’t quite have the nerve to approach. Greg gives them a look, which makes them laugh again, but it’s even more mirthless now. One gestures at you, nudges the boy next to him and says something I don’t catch. I pull you towards me.
‘They seem to know you quite well,’ I say to Élodie, as we walk on, but she doesn’t reply, which makes Greg frown again. Far off in the distance, I can hear sirens. I look for the glow on the hills, but there’s nothing. I can smell the smoke again, stronger now.
*
Although your father could sleep in Camille’s old room, or even the cramped little room opposite Élodie’s, I decide to give him the blue room, you coming in with me. I feel safer that way.
With you next to me that night, I sleep like I used to back in London, deep and mostly dreamless, released for the time being from perpetual sentry duty. And then it’s morning and I wake up refreshed and reasonably calm.
Out on the terrace over breakfast, the temperature is already intense, though it isn’t yet nine o’clock. I can feel my skin beginning to burn. I think the smoke is incrementally heavier too. I don’t want to mention it in case it frightens you.
After breakfast, you and Élodie go to the pool and Greg shuts himself in the study to make another phone call to Nicole. Suspended between these factions, I decide to do some gardening. There’s no real need – the Johnsons have already seen the house – but the possibility of the fires getting worse has rendered me incapable of staying still.
As it is, there is plenty to keep me occupied. Everything in the wide borders needs hacking back and clearing, years of leaves and sap-coated pine needles clogging the beds and stickily carpeting the margins of the pool area. Once I start, I can’t stop, the nervous energy that has been trickling back all morning, bolstered by a good night’s sleep, seemingly in danger of bubbling over.
I should have worn a hat. I know that by early evening. As the sun slides below the pine trees, I sit shivering in a tepid bath, the tiniest movement of air on my goose-pimpled skin as sore as if I’ve been whipped, my head thumping like it’s been in a vice.
I know it’s sunstroke because I had it once as a child. I can clearly remember lying on my back in bed, which made me feel marginally less awful than every other position, and thinking it a shame that I was going to die before my ninth birthday. I felt so desperately ill – the relentless nausea, the way the room lurched when I tried to sit up, my heart galloping in my chest, mouth as dry as dust – that I didn’t even consider the possibility I might survive.
In fact, people can die from too much sun. When the body’s internal temperature exceeds forty degrees centigrade, the organs start to cook. I had read up on it afterwards, in my mother’s huge old medical tome. There were three whole pages dedicated to insolation.
I stand shakily at my bedroom window. The three of you are out by the pool, and I can see glimmers of movement as the trees move in the wind. The wind. It takes me a moment to absorb that there is definite movement in the air now, and that that’s not a good thing when forest fires are already burning. It’s not a gentle breeze either, but something quarrelsome, buffeting the trees in spiteful gusts. I wonder if any of you will think to check the météo report. If you’ll think to check on me.
I don’t remember much about the evening or subsequent night. I’m sick a few times, only just managing to crawl to the bathroom in time, freezing sweat giving way to a minute or two of bliss, my skin drying on the cold tiles before the nausea starts to slosh back in. At some point, one of you brings me a bowl so I don’t have to leave the bed. Later, I hear a murmured conversation about calling a doctor, silhouettes against the lit doorway, but then I slip out of consciousness again. Sometime in the middle of the night I understand you aren’t next to me in the bed but I can’t do more than register the fact.
The next morning, I feel almost as bad, but my temperature must have come down a degree or so because my thought processes are more orderly. I realize I must have been delirious in the night. You slip in soon after I wake, your breath smelling sickly-sweet of croissant and chocolate, a glass of what looks like iced tea in your hand.
You smile and put the straw to my lips. ‘You’ve got to drink lots of fluids. It says in the big medical book. Élodie looked it up. She made you a tisane.’
You pronounce the word perfectly. She must have taught you that.
I try to sit up but it’s too much
effort. I slump back down on the pillows.
‘Dad says he’s going to come up and see you before he leaves,’ you say. It takes me a moment to comprehend the words.
‘Before he leaves? What do you mean? He’s only just got here.’
You shrug. ‘He has to go back to Paris.’
It turns out he’s been summoned: Nicole has clearly had second thoughts about him disappearing to the south for an intimate reunion with his ex-wife and daughters; his first family. Even as ill as I am, I can’t help feeling a grudging respect for her. He had never done my bidding, had never come back for me, even when I’d begged him.
‘What about Élodie?’ I say, when he appears at the door a couple of hours later, sheepish and defiant at the same time, like a naughty boy.
‘I’ve told her to ring me tomorrow, so we can arrange to see each other soon. She’s got my number.’
‘But not your address.’
He can’t meet my eye.
‘Greg, please, don’t go.’
His face softens and he starts to move towards me but then stops. ‘You’ll be okay now. You’re probably through the worst of it already. Élodie and Emma will look after you. Élodie’s been checking on you every fifteen minutes. I’ve been watching her, Sylvie. She’s not like the girl from back then. I know she’s not.’
‘But you don’t know that for sure,’ I want to say but I can’t marshal my words.
He shakes his head slightly, and it makes me think of someone warding off a persistent fly. ‘Emma’s not a baby any more. You know I wouldn’t go if I thought there was even the smallest chance … Anyway, you’ll be up and about in a few hours. Everything will be fine, Sylvie. Sometimes things are. Usually they are.’
‘What about the fires? The wind …’
‘They’re barely getting any closer. I got a paper in the village. The wind should die down later, too. They think the fires’ll be under control by the end of the week.’
‘But, Greg, please, listen –’
‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry but I have to.’
And then he’s gone. I hear your goodbyes in the hall downstairs and then the front door closes. After that it’s quiet.
*
When I next come to, I’m not ready to be ‘up and about’ at all. Greg had been wrong about that and I wonder what else he might have misjudged. I’m shivering again, and I know I’ll be sick soon. I have no idea what time it is. When I swing my feet to the floor to go to the bathroom, I sway, the blood booming in my ears, like water rushing into a cave. I call but no one answers. I feel afraid for you, somewhere alone with your sister, but like a wounded animal too hurt to run, I’m also afraid for myself.
I half crawl downstairs to the phone and ring the emergency doctor’s number on Olivier’s note, almost weeping at the sound of his calm, capable voice at the other end. He arrives within the hour and prescribes me a tranquillizer to stop the shivering, which is only raising my body temperature. The rest of the day blurs after that, though I have a dim memory of shadows looming over me like the previous night, briefly blocking out the bright light from the hall I don’t have the wherewithal to turn off.
I remember your voice, Emma, sounding far away and too young, and I wonder if I’ve been catapulted back in time. I wake every few minutes, or so it feels like, disembodied except for the crushing weight of fear on my chest – fear that somewhere beyond the bed, something bad is going to happen to you, may be happening to you already.
Hearing music at some point, I stagger in my confusion to the window. The sun has slunk away for another night and the air reeks of hot things: earth, flowers and, most of all, fire, despite what Greg said about it not being close. The music gets louder as I strain to push the windows wide, and I think the doors to the salon must be open, the volume on the old record player turned up, the speakers moved to face outwards. I recognize it then: ‘Hotel California’.
I push myself up so I can see down to the terrace, and what is there is such a strange spectacle that I have to blink and blink again. There are three of you dancing. I peer again, my head ringing, and see that Luc is there with you and her. You’re spinning on your own, laughing as you do it, your hair flying out and your feet nearly stumbling over each other as you grow dizzier. Élodie and Luc are pressed together, moving more slowly, not an inch of space between them. Dancing to remember, perhaps. Or is it to forget?
The scene makes my stomach churn. I think they must have given you something because I haven’t seen you so entirely unselfconscious in years, not since you were a tiny girl.
I decide I must go downstairs. I must somehow get between you and them, and I promise myself that I will in just a few seconds, when I feel less weak and watery. I lie back on the bed, chilly nausea sluicing inside me, and start counting. I’ll go when I get to fifty.
1983
Greg and I have been sent to the coast to save our marriage. His parents have paid for us to get away from the house and spend our fifteenth-anniversary weekend in a luxury hotel we would never have contemplated ourselves. I am taking tranquillizers, just a couple a day to get me through, but I’m not used to them yet and their effect is different from the wine I’m trying to give up. It distils Cannes down to just a handful of images: white-jacketed waiters in the hotel restaurant; a green marble bathroom in which my cheap items of make-up look pathetic; skinny old women out on the Croisette with Jackie O sunglasses and tiny dogs at their heels.
Once I would have relished this short foray into glamour but everything seems tinged with melancholy. I feel haunted by other people’s lives, even by times I was born too late to know. The beauty of the Martinez sign on the roof, 1930s neon against a rose-coloured sky, makes me cry on the Saturday night. Greg gets angry, thinking me ungrateful for his parents’ generosity.
‘You don’t understand me at all,’ I say. ‘Not any more.’ And he stands and leaves me alone on the terrace.
We leave early on Sunday, neither of us wishing to dwell on the failure of what was an unspoken last-chance saloon. That’s not the only reason I want to go home. I am feeling increasingly jittery about you, even through the soft haze of the pills. A couple of weeks ago Élodie gave you wine sweetened with lemonade while I was at the supermarket. I was out for less than an hour and Greg hadn’t heard anything unusual, but then he was ensconced in the study with his headphones on. I only left you with him because Élodie had gone out for the day, or so I thought. You were staggering around the garden by the time I got back, so that for an innocent moment I thought you’d been spinning and were only dizzy. Then you were sick and I smelt the alcohol and I knew.
I didn’t bother to say anything to your sister, who was lying on a towel on the grass in a neon-pink bikini. What would have been the point?
After that, I agreed to the hotel only because your grandmother promised me she wouldn’t take her eyes off you. She’s never said anything to me directly but I have never forgotten her face when she saw those drawings Élodie did all those years ago. Even before that, I think she had her concerns. Women are always better at spotting it than men. Of course she would never have dreamt of taking my side over Greg’s, but I believe she and I are in silent agreement over this. It’s why we’ve not seen much of them over the years, I’m sure of it.
If I’d ever doubted Margaret’s instincts about her eldest granddaughter’s difficulties, the relief in her face when I mentioned that Élodie would be away at a friend’s house while we were in Cannes would have chased away any uncertainty. I don’t know this friend – one of the older kids Élodie has somehow fallen in with. Greg and I gave her a lift to this girl’s house on the way to the coast. I made him wait until I saw her go in. She’s hardly ever home at the weekend now.
When we turn into the drive at La Rêverie, it feels wrong immediately. I couldn’t have articulated why: some unusual tension in the air, perhaps, or the profound silence of the cicadas and birds? I’m not sure. All I know is that I get out of the car so fast I almo
st lose my balance.
‘Sylvie?’ Greg calls after me but I’m already shoving the key into the front door.
His mother is asleep in the salon, her neat grey chignon slipped and her mouth open, making her look years older. One of your Richard Scarry books lies open on the floor.
I shake her awake, not particularly gently, but I’m so full of foreboding I feel I might scream.
‘Where is she? Where’s Emma?’
She comes to slowly, blinking dumbly at the empty space beside her, now occupied only by your little blue teddy.
‘She was just here. We were reading her book together.’
I think back to myself on a beach, waking to find Élodie gone. I know how easily this happens.
‘It can only have been for a moment,’ she says defensively. ‘She must be with Charles. He was upstairs …’
I run into the hall just as Greg comes in.
‘Charles!’ I shout, as I begin to race up the stairs. ‘Are you up there? Emma!’
He emerges from the bathroom, his face half covered with shaving foam, an old-fashioned brush in hand.
‘Is Emma with you?’ I run along the hall, checking the bedrooms. All empty.
‘No, she was with Margaret. In the salon.’
Greg has followed me up. ‘What’s the big panic? She’ll be in the garden.’ Our eyes meet and I know what he’s not saying in front of his father. It’s okay. Élodie isn’t here.
‘I need to find her. I’ll go outside. You check the house properly.’
I run back downstairs, kicking off the high heels that are slowing me down, and rush out into the garden. The terrace is empty. The lawn is deserted. You’re not by the pool or in it, and the huge relief of that, at least, allows me to sink to my knees for a moment, to catch my breath.
And then I smell it, a yellowing of the atmosphere, curling down to this part of the garden, where the air is always caught and held by the tall pines. It’s smoke, faint but real. I get to my feet and then I see it for the first time, a spiral of dirt rising from the barn beyond the garden. I cut my foot on the path that’s the quickest way round but barely feel it.