by Kate Riordan
You sidle in behind her, slipping your headphones off, a biscuit in your mouth. ‘Let Élodie do your hair,’ you say. ‘She’s really good. We can do your make-up too. Maquillage. That’s right, isn’t it?’ Élodie and I nod at the same time.
I submit to it, though I expect to feel more self-conscious as she first dries and then twists my hair into waves like hers. When she does my eye make-up, leaning right in with the kohl pencil, our faces are so close that I can feel the warmth of her breath. I can smell her skin. Her touch is deft but gentle and when I look in the mirror, once she’s finished, I smile at her reflection, which, in its perfect symmetry, looks exactly the same. I take in the three of us – her, me and you perched on the bed behind – and it’s somehow easier to comprehend as an image reversed, this miracle of a normal family scene.
We lay out all my dresses. I feel leaner than I have in years; the silver lining that a short illness offers to the diet-conscious. Still, I shake my head when Élodie points to the bright yellow cotton dress I always take on holiday but never wear: with its full skirt and nipped-in waist, it’s the sort of thing I would’ve worn before I was a mother, when I wanted to draw attention. Perhaps I bought it for that reason.
‘That one,’ Élodie says mock-sternly. You nod from behind her. ‘If I’d seen it before, I’d have borrowed it.’
I laugh at this reference to the way she always stole my things, often ruining them in the process. Somehow it’s been recast as a harmless joke. A family in-joke, even. Is this how it could be? I ask myself cautiously. Is it possible for us to be that kind of mother and daughter? Hope shimmers in my peripheral vision.
‘Are you sure you won’t come?’ I say, when we’re downstairs. ‘Luc did invite all of us.’
‘No, thanks. I’d be shy in front of all those people. Like an … exhibit at a museum. I’ve been so nervous when I’ve gone to the village, though no one has said anything. I don’t want to push my luck.’
‘You didn’t seem nervous when we went out for dinner. I still can’t imagine you getting nervous. You never did as a little girl.’
‘I was a strange one, wasn’t I? It must have been so hard for you. I felt all of it inside but I didn’t show it. I don’t know why. I look back and it’s like watching a different person with my face. I’m open now, open to everything. Except maybe Annette Martin’s anniversary party.’ She smiles bewitchingly and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m going to have a nice peaceful evening instead. Have a bath, try the television again, perhaps.’
‘Oh, the news. I meant to check earlier about the fires.’
I go through to the salon but the television is no longer tuned in at all, nothing but static as I turn the dial. I can’t get closer than distant voices, which roll away, like the sea, when I chase them. I think the smoke might be stronger as I walk back outside, but perhaps I’m just imagining it now, nothing but a ghost scent. I don’t recall any more Canadair planes having gone over and that’s surely a good sign.
‘Perhaps we’re just getting used to it,’ I say aloud, because there’s still something unsettling about the thought of a fire burning on somewhere, out of sight. I can’t entirely grasp it, though, the concept fogged and distant, my mind strangely blank when I try to search it.
‘Are you ready, Mum?’
I’ve been lost in thought for a moment and suddenly it’s time to go. You stand before me, back in Élodie’s white dress, though it’s been washed now, the wine stain bleached away. You’re wearing make-up again, but it looks pretty in the glow of early evening and I find I don’t really mind. You’re fourteen. Didn’t I try out make-up at that age? I can’t remember. I’m sure my father wouldn’t have let me go out in it, but I’m not my father.
*
When we get to the Martins’, it feels as though we’re late, though we aren’t. Everyone is talking about the fires – I keep hearing snatches of excited conversation as I drift through the crowd that has already gathered. It occurs to me that the need to discuss the shared threat is probably what got them all here so promptly in the first place.
We greet Annette, whose eyes skim over your dress and then mine, mouth thinning as she smiles coldly in our general direction. ‘No Élodie?’ she asks.
‘She’s back at the house. She wasn’t sure she would be welcome,’ I find myself saying.
‘And when would that ever have stopped her?’
She moves away, and you ask me in whispers what she said. I shake my head. ‘It’s not worth it. She’s just an old cow.’ You giggle and it makes me laugh too. I wonder if Annette is watching us but don’t bother looking back to check. At the drinks table, I pour you a Coke and pick up a glass of champagne for me.
‘There’s Luc,’ you murmur in my ear, your sweet breath tickling me. I look over. He seems to be marshalling a gaggle of children younger than you, organizing them into some sort of game. He looks tired, drained. One of his hands is bandaged.
‘Can I go over?’ you say, and I haven’t the heart to say I’d rather you stayed with me.
There’s a small jazz band setting up in one corner of the garden and I see Laurent nearby, talking to a couple of men I don’t know. When I reach them, they’re talking about the fires. Of course.
‘Sylvie,’ Laurent says softly. He leans over to kiss me, warm hand heavy on my shoulder.
‘What’s the latest about the fires?’ I ask when the introductions have been made. ‘I’ve been in bed with sunstroke and now the television’s broken so I have no idea what’s going on. I thought they were almost under control?’ I smile round at the men. Someone has refilled my glass.
One of the men, introduced to me as Nicolas, shakes his head censoriously.
‘Things are serious, like nothing we’ve seen for years. There’s a new fire just north of the Pelletier farm. If the wind gets up again, I think they’re going to have to evacuate the whole village. The pompiers have been going door-to-door. Didn’t they come to you?’
Unease begins to penetrate. I try to remember hearing a knock at the door. ‘Evacuate this village? Really?’ I can hardly believe it. He’s right, this man who is regarding me as though I’m an idiot. Nothing like that has happened for years and years. Not for decades. In my childhood, old people had talked about a fire that burnt down a couple of farms on the edge of the village, but I don’t think that was even in their lifetimes.
Laurent gives Nicolas a look. ‘Well, they’re not near enough to panic quite yet.’
‘Didn’t you see the flames in the dark last night?’ the other man says. I can’t remember his name already. The champagne has gone to my head. ‘They turned the moon red.’
Laurent puffs out his cheeks. ‘Actually, Luc had a near miss with his friends. Someone dropped a cigarette and the place is such a tinderbox it went up immediately. He said they put it out, but he burnt his hand, had to get it dressed.’
‘I’m telling you,’ says Nicolas, ‘we might all have to go. They said on the news that it can jump if it’s intense enough. It can outrun a car.’
The hairs rise on my arms and I automatically glance around for you. But even as I do, I try to tell myself that this is a clean sort of anxiety I’m feeling, not personal but elemental. We are all in this together, you, me, everyone crammed into the Martins’ garden to drink and listen to the band, like we’re aboard the Titanic. Élodie too.
Something about this strange, slightly apocalyptic atmosphere is making the wine flow fast. I allow my glass to be topped up again. I don’t feel drunk exactly, just pleasingly blanketed from reality. The champagne, the laughter in the garden, the warm scented air – that’s what feels solid, not the fires.
It’s Nicolas who wakes me up from this daze. I happen to pass him as he’s repeating to others what he told us earlier, clearly gratified by their murmurs of horror. It can jump if it’s intense enough. It can outrun a car. The second hearing penetrates properly, and a delayed warning bell goes off in my mind.
Moving entirely by ins
tinct, I hurry to the edge of the garden that adjoins the one-hectare field that once belonged to La Rêverie. The parasol pines that guard the pool have grown since I last saw them from this angle, tall enough now to obscure even the tops of the chimneys. Now, next to them, rising even taller, as if pointing a finger to the heavens, is a thick plume of smoke. I look behind me but I can’t see you or Laurent or Luc and I can’t wait either.
I wrench the gate open and begin to run.
I have to stop to get my breath when I’m halfway across the field. The smoke catches in my lungs and the news about the fires comes back to me again, amplified and etched in horror.
As I cross the part of the stream that always dries to a trickle by June, I see through the ranks of pines what is alight. The oleander tree. As I run towards it, I can see the heavy heads of the deep pink flowers crisping and curling into nothing, swiftly as a match thrown on celluloid.
‘Élodie!’ I cry, and I don’t know for sure until the sound comes out of me, more of a howl than a shout, that I’m terrified. And it’s not of her, but for her. There’s something so right and pure about that that it makes my voice ring out stronger.
‘Élodie, please!’
But there’s no answer, only the roar of the fire, the pop and hiss of old wood giving in to its own destruction. I run part way across the lawn but she isn’t in the house. I know it at a glance because although the windows and doors stand open, there are no lights on inside, giving the place a look of stupefaction.
I turn back to the tree, trying desperately to decide what I should do next. Ring the pompiers. Try to put it out myself. Run back to Laurent’s for help. And then: it’s so dry, it will undoubtedly spread. It will burn La Rêverie to the ground.
I cover my face with my hands, rooted to the spot while all these thoughts trample over each other. Where is she?
When I lower them, my eye is snagged by something in the pool that’s been turned orange by the fire reflected in it.
For a moment I think she’s floating, her singular eyes fixed on the heavens, body cradled and lifted by the water, hair spread out saint-like. But as I run to the edge, avoiding the molten missiles now exploding off the tree, I see it’s all wrong this time, that where her face should be there is only hair. She’s floating face down.
I try to call her name again, but it doesn’t come out or I don’t hear it over the fire. In that moment, the moment I understand that she’s dead – not missing, not disappeared, but truly gone – I feel something black crawl into the heart of me and it’s grief, deep and true.
When I lost her on the beach that time I felt the gossamer brush of relief, and I was ashamed. Now I know, for the first time since she was a few months old, that the rest of it is irrelevant. Élodie is my child and I cannot bear for her not to be alive. I love her and it’s uncomplicated and infinite – just as it always was for you, Emma. As I kick off my shoes and jump into the water, I have the clear thought – crystalline blue among the raining fire and ash – that even if Élodie isn’t cured then I am.
I launch myself towards her, my arms thrashing through the water, but I can’t quite touch the bottom where she’s floating. She is heavy, so unbelievably heavy, and I have nothing solid to brace against. I pull aside the heavy hanks of her hair to get to her face and there is so much of it, endless weeds that tangle around my clumsy fingers. Her face, when I find it, is so perfectly made. I turn it towards me and lift it clear before I go under myself. Struggling back to the surface, I try again and manage to turn her properly but her eyes are still closed, as I knew they would be. It’s impossible when I’m also kicking to try to keep myself afloat so I loop one of her arms, chilled and leaden, and push out towards the shallow end, dragging her with me.
And then I feel her move. As I twist to take her face in my hands, a raw joy punching through me, her arms go around my neck and I’m pushed under. No, no, I say in my head. It’s me, Maman. I’ve got you. Let go or …
But she doesn’t let go and her body feels different now, not slack but tense with life. With cool determination. My eyes open wide, the water stinging them, but she’s behind me and I can’t see any part of her except her arms pinned around me, one round my neck and the other braced against my shoulders. As my chest begins to burn, disbelief turning to terror, I start fighting her, twisting back and forth to try to free myself. Precious air bubbles foam around us and I hear my own distorted cries. But she clings on, like she’s part of me, like we’re joined again, as we haven’t been since the day she was born. The truth barrels hard into me. You’ve always been incidental. It’s me she really wants to hurt.
In a featureless place beyond the panic and certainty that I will die, there’s a deep, gnawing sadness. For those seconds that I simply loved her, and wanted her to be all right more than anything, I felt freer than I have for twenty-four years. But that’s gone now and there is no exultation in being right that I should never have trusted her, to have known from when she was tiny that she wasn’t made like other people, that where her heart should have been there was nothing but muscle and sinew.
I keep fighting because somewhere across a field, where the world isn’t just fire and water, is you. And you need me. But though I keep kicking and writhing as hard as I can, even though there’s no breath left inside me, I do allow myself to close my eyes.
I open them again when my hip meets something solid and unyielding – the bottom of the pool. There’s still a struggle going on and I can’t work it out because I don’t seem to be part of it. Everything I have left is resisting the animal urge to breathe in.
Hands grip me under my arms and I think Élodie has changed her position, but the hands are pulling me up and up, and then I’m at the surface and I open my mouth and suck in as much air as I can, and it’s no less sweet for being as much smoke as oxygen. The same hands push me towards the edge and I use my last bit of strength to haul myself out. I roll on to the stones and lie there splayed and spent, chest heaving.
‘Élodie,’ I say, no louder than a whisper. With a huge effort, I turn my head towards the water. There’s movement among the reflections of fire and it takes me long seconds to untangle the limbs in my head. The realization when it comes hits me like a brick. It’s you, Emma, your still-pale legs kicking so strongly out in the middle of the pool. It’s you who pulled me back out from under. All those lessons in a London pool and now you’ve saved me.
You break the surface. ‘I can’t, Mum,’ you cry, and I can’t distinguish the tears from the pool water streaming down your cheeks. ‘I can’t get her. She’s stuck.’
I don’t have time to answer before you fill your lungs and go down again. I stand on shaky legs and try to make out the shapes at the bottom of the pool but you’re obscuring her.
‘It’s her hair,’ you scream when you come up again. ‘It’s caught in the filter.’
I stand there dumbly.
‘Go,’ you shout, the adult to my child. ‘Go to the house and get scissors. Now.’
I run, frantically pulling out drawers in the kitchen until I find my mother’s old pair. I race them back to you, and you go down again, frog-kicking to the bottom. I can see her, held there by that beautiful stream of hair. And then she’s suddenly free and you have your arms around her chest, bringing her to the surface.
You’re so brave, Emma. So sure. You couldn’t have done any better. But I know before you break the surface that it’s too late for her. I know this because something has gone out of the world and I felt it go: a lost charge, a light dimmed; the exact reverse of when she had fluttered inside me for the first time. The fear has gone, but so has some essential part of myself.
Afterwards
The letter is there when I get home from work, in our metal box in the communal hallway. I know it’s French immediately, not from the postmark, which has been smudged during its journey from the place of my birth. It’s not because of the handwritten number ‘7’ in the postcode either. It’s the handwriting, strong and
sure, black ink on decent paper. Olivier’s.
I don’t have your telephone number in London and it seems that you are ex-directory. So forgive me for writing with this news, when it might have been better to speak on the telephone. I chose not to contact Camille because she would have wondered why I needed to get in touch with you, and you only, so urgently. I thought you should know first.
I scan on down the page and then read it again, from top to bottom, more slowly this time.
When you’ve had time to digest this, please would you call me, Sylvie? Please will you do that? Let me help you sort this out. Remember I am here. I still think of you.
Olivier
Initially, the Spanish authorities had got in touch with the corresponding French departments. Through Élodie’s old records from the facility, they acquired her registered home address, which was Greg’s old apartment. No one knew him there, but then they noticed a reference to the family solicitor; found Olivier.
It seems that when the commune was disbanded, no one knew what to do with her. She was left with the old woman who’d rented them the land in the first place. She was apparently dirty and slightly underfed but was – and is – otherwise healthy. The woman, who had been under the impression that somebody would be returning, waited for a couple of weeks and then contacted the police. She said she was too old to bring up a young child on her own, especially one who had been allowed to run so wild.
She has been examined and is thought to be about three years old. There is no record of an Élodie Durand or Élodie Winters having a caesarian section at the right time in Spain or France, as far as anyone has been able to trace. The old woman had no idea who the father might be. Besides, as you’ll see from the photograph I’ve included, her mother’s genes dominated. I have never seen a picture of Élodie when she was a little girl, but if I can see the adult woman so strongly in the child, I can only imagine how powerful the resemblance might be for you.