Melissa says, “We don’t know what she was like, before she had us.” She sounds plaintive, her voice floating up into the air between us.
“No, that’s always true of parents. What do you want to know?”
“Well, she’s always been our mother. She’s always been there.”
“But you knew that one day she wouldn’t be.”
“I knew she’d die, sometime, of course. I didn’t know she would just go off—and not tell us where she was going.” She is close to angry tears, I can tell. We pause at the end of the grassy orchard, beside a small olive tree that already has a few hard green fruits.
“No, of course not.” I make my voice gentle, although at forty, surely she knows that her mother is a separate person, that she cannot in the end be explained or accounted for? “None of us did. It’s a shock.”
“It’s fucking irresponsible, is what I think. She hasn’t thought about what it’s doing to Dad, it’s absolute torture for him.”
“Melissa, I think she probably has thought about him. You don’t live with someone for forty years without thinking about them.”
“How do you know? You’ve never been married, have you?”
Touché. “No. I’m guessing. It’s all I can do. I think she may have just gone somewhere for a little while, for a change. I don’t know, but I feel almost certain she will come back. She always has.” I reach to touch her shoulder, but she isn’t having it; my hand drops.
“That was when you were both young—fucking ages ago. It was another century. You all had these crazy notions of being bohemians, hippies, dropping out, all that. We can’t afford that now. That’s why I think she’s being irresponsible.”
That anger again, and a sob in her voice, the voice of a small child.
“Have you never wanted just to go away?” I don’t look at her as I ask. I look at the solid shape of the mountain behind us, where the wild boars roam, where a knotty pine tree sticks out at an angle from the rock face. The mountain that Philip has fenced off, in order to grow his garden without animals breaking in.
“Well, of course, everyone has these fantasies. But we just don’t get up and do it. It’s so self-indulgent.”
“Melissa, I think you just have to try to imagine a bit more what’s it’s like to be her. She’s not your age, after all. Perhaps there is something in life that has waited for her, that she just has to do alone.”
“But nobody would have stopped her. Dad’s always been very tolerant.”
Yes, she’s always been her father’s girl. Families are perhaps always divided up this way: you are his, or you are hers, and Hannah as a mother was perhaps too much competition for a daughter; who knows. I think, I have avoided all this, the complexity of family. Tolerant, she says. Yes, but who wants to be tolerated? I think, there’s something at the root of this that dominates this young woman’s life, and we aren’t going to reach it in an afternoon. I don’t answer. I watch the struggles in her face.
She pulls a gray-green leaf off the olive tree. “She has so much—Daddy, us, the house in Suffolk, this place, why would she just leave it all?”
“To go off with the raggle-taggle gypsies-oh? Just because of all that, maybe. Who knows? Remember the song—what care I for my new-wedded lord, and my sheets turned down so bravely-oh?”
“Well, yes, but she’s hardly new-wedded, is she?”
“Just so. Maybe that’s it. She’s been doing the same thing for a very long time, as a mother, as a grandmother, as a wife, as a member of society, as someone who has to answer when her name is called. Maybe she just wanted a break? Whatever it is, she hasn’t done this to hurt you, or Piers, or Philip. Mel, perhaps you could go and spend some time with your dad, I’m sure he’d like that. I’m going to walk a bit. I need to move. Okay?”
13.
There’s nowhere obvious to walk, except along the canal that runs between the house and the road, a track beside it that reaches the next village. I set off, after struggling with the electronic code for the gate, down the white path, stands of bamboo on one side, the canal fast-running on the other. I always wondered how anyone with small children could have bought this house, and dreaded to see a small body one day, carried along on the fast brown current. But here they both are, Hannah’s and Philip’s children, alive and well into competent adulthood. It is only now that the house has all these complicated locks and alarms and the gates have to be opened by remote control, and the shutters are impossible to open from the outside. Once, there was an old key under a flowerpot. Now there are these electronic combinations. People come through here, Philip says, gypsies, all sorts, and there have been burglaries. Relieved to have time alone, I set off in hat and sandals to walk in the stinging heat.
I’ve had the thought, of course I have, that she may have killed herself; and I have not shared it with Philip, who presumably has had it too. I walk beside the fast-flowing water and think of Hannah’s body showing up somewhere, an image of herself that bears no resemblance to her in life, yet is also irrefutably recognizable. Of ourselves, Philip and I, having to identify her. If this is the outcome, I don’t want it; anything is preferable. There’s the unpaved white road that turns off to the village, and a plank bridge crossing the canal. I stand for a moment on it looking down. There’s a crack, through which I can see the slither of the water. The children did not drown here, and neither, I tell myself, has she.
A kilometer or so down the road, I come into the village, and see a café open, with dark green doors and shutters, one table outside with an umbrella with “Ricard” written on it. It’s tempting to order a pastis, but I ask for coffee and a glass of water. The owner brings it out to me. Shade slices the table, as the umbrella tips. There’s a row of cypresses opposite. I’m struck by the ripple of shadow, and film it with my phone camera for a minute. In all the years I have been coming here, I’ve never sat down at this café; it is something that Philip and Hannah would never do. Why not drink at home, and be comfortable? The metal chair cuts at the backs of my legs, and I sip water and look out towards the trees. I film the trees, their dark slim presences. Their tips bend like the ends of cats’ tails when they are annoyed. There must be a breeze at that level, even if there isn’t down here. I think of Van Gogh, Cézanne, those obsessed painters of this light and landscape, of how they made it their own. I feel as if I have escaped, and that in my escape, however brief, I have the chance to think, to remember, to let my mind clear, perhaps to understand: Hannah’s fugue, the world without her, the way she has left us floundering in her wake. Those painters, they didn’t care what effect they had on people. (What did Theo van Gogh think about his brother’s departure from all norms?) They had their vision. Perhaps Hannah has hers, and it has driven her from us, to make her own way, to do what she has to do. Perhaps there is a completeness to her actions that none of us can see. For the first time I think, what has she made of us, by vanishing; what does her absence show?
An old man walks very slowly down the road towards me, heading for the café. I ask him, monsieur, may I film you? He gives me his smile of assent, sits down at the next table, lays out his tobacco pouch and papers, and I film him as he tells me that he has lived in this village all his life, apart from the war. “Yes, things have changed. You see foreigners all the time. But that’s life, isn’t it, change?”
He is missing a couple of teeth and his accent is thickly Provençal. He’s the first person I have spoken to in days who is not obsessed about what has become of Hannah.
“Yes. May I go on?”
“Ah, well, if you like. It doesn’t happen to me every day.”
“What else would you say about your life, monsieur?”
“It has been rich. That’s true. Not always happy, but rich. Not rich in money, you understand. Other things.” He gestures around him. “I am happy in where I live.”
“Are you married? Do you have children?�
��
“I was married. Forty years. We had five children. My wife died. But she’s never far away from me, now. It’s why I stay here, where she can find me, you understand?”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“And you, madame?”
“I am not married. I am a filmmaker.” I use the word cinéaste.
“Ah, yes. Hollywood?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“And you are here—why? In this place? I never saw you before.”
“I’m staying with friends.” I wave towards the mountain.
“Ah, the English people. It was my brother-in-law’s farm, that house.”
“Really?”
“Really. Long time ago. He sold it, couldn’t keep it up. Ah, the English, they love to do up houses, don’t they?”
The waiter has brought him a pastis, without asking. He pours water, enough to turn it milky white.
“I should get back. But thank you, monsieur, it was a pleasure.”
“Leblanc. Louis Leblanc.”
“Claudia Prescott.” We shake hands, his hand warm and rough.
I thank him and watch him begin to make a hand-rolled cigarette. Then I lay my coins in the saucer, pick up my hat, and turn to walk under ancient plane trees, back to the plank bridge that crosses the canal, and I feel his mild gaze following me as I go. People come and go here. Others stay, for their own reasons, to continue conversations with their missing spouses, knowing it’s possible, or choosing to believe it so.
I walk slowly back towards the house. There’s the scent of wild fennel, its dry stalky plants, seeds bursting, heated by the afternoon sun. The shape of the mountain shifts and comes closer. The swift-flowing canal water surges regularly in a way that river water never does, as if propelled. Now I’m walking in the same direction, but it’s faster than I am. I walk the straight white line of the path beside it, the movement of walking a solace in itself.
Coming in through the iron side gate, which I’d left unlatched, I hear a shout from the swimming-pool—“Claudia, come and join us!”—and see Melissa in a smooth black one-piece, her hair up high on her head in a ponytail, walk towards the pool and then dive, cutting the water, disappearing, appearing again, yards away, her paintbrush of hair soaked and dripping. Piers is already swimming laps; a white arm raised, then the other, slicing through the blue. Behind them the mountain is sharp and steep, all its planes flattened in shadow, as the sun moves round. One day I will film the changes of light on the mountain: that steady presence in our lives that yet seems to advance and retreat.
I drop my bag, throw off my clothes, dive in my underwear and swim a couple of laps, and surface breathless between them, shaking water from my eyes. There is no need to say anything; we allow ourselves just to enjoy it. I duck my head again and swim underwater, back to the far end. The chains of light snake across the bottom of the pool. A blue world, peopled only by white legs, thrashing feet. If we could only go on doing this: simply exist in the underwater glow, splashing our way around each other, made equal in the pleasure of cooled limbs and active bodies. The light of early evening changes the air around us, so that when we come out it seems thicker, denser, warmer than the water, closer to blood heat. We stand toweling our heads and bodies, freed for the moment. An owl calls from the mountain, there’s the silence-numbing chorus of crickets in the grass. None of us wants to go back in to the house; none of us wants to confront the conundrum of Hannah. We are rueful, ironic, regretful that the moment of freedom must pass.
“See you in a minute!” Melissa calls out to us as she runs lightly upstairs, leaving wet footprints on the tiled floor. She’s springy, her head wrapped in a towel, drops still flying off her, running up two steps at a time.
“Time for a glass of something!” Piers calls after her. “Tell Dad!” They are both freed for the moment from anxiety, and I can like them better, as I go to my room to shower and change. Life rescues you sometimes with the slightest things: a plunge into water, a walk through countryside, a good night’s sleep; a small hope to greet you as you close up shutters for the night.
Philip has driven back into town during the afternoon to speak to the police again, and sign more documents that prove to his relationship to Hannah. “God, French red tape, you’d think that with all that, they would be more efficient at actually finding someone.”
I think, but don’t say—You think the English police would have been any better? To soothe him, I say, “They are probably doing everything they can, don’t you think?”
Piers says, “You should have told us. One of us could have come too.”
“No, no, I was fine. Better alone.”
“So?”
“They seem to think people have a right to disappear, unless they are minors or have been kidnapped. I don’t know.”
“So you didn’t get any new info?”
“He said he’s done everything he can for now. They are checking with the hospitals, here, in Marseille and in Paris.” Philip sighs. He’s exhausted by this; by driving in the heat, by trying to explain himself in French, by his own rising panic. He looks pale, worn. “They’ll check the frontiers too. She’d have had to use her passport if she left the country. If she hasn’t, she must be still in France, they said.”
Piers says, “Dad, you really have to let us help you. You shouldn’t have gone off on your own like that.”
“Well, I didn’t want to bother you.”
“It’s what we’re here for. To be bothered. Now don’t go off without telling us again, will you?”
I sense Philip’s annoyance, at not being allowed to “go off” and look for his wife on his own, as if he were incompetent. “I think I should go back to England,” he says. “There might be a clue among her things, on her computer. I’m not doing any good hanging about here.”
“But, if she got off in Paris? If she’s in France, as you said? Shouldn’t that be where we start?” I see Piers and Melissa glance at each other, then at me. We know each other a little better than we did only hours ago.
“Dad, you don’t have to rush back anywhere,” Melissa says.
“But who does she know in Paris, these days? Where could we start?”
“If the police sound calm,” Piers says, “it’s probably because they don’t think it’s very worrying. They think she will come home.” He wants, I can hear it, to believe this; that normality will reassert itself, because he wants it to. His mother has always come home before, she has always been there. (Wives come back, mothers come back.) Perhaps this is just a brief aberration, a blip, a hiccup in the smooth progressions of life that he has always been led to believe in. Melissa nods. They don’t want another evening of anxiety, having to deal with their distraught father; they want to be allowed to enjoy the pool, the drinks outside, Marie-Laure’s cooking, the beauty of the sky under which we sit, its pallor punctuated by swallows flying after gnats. The house that Philip has made for Hannah, who is not here; for their family, this continuity, parents and children, summer vacations, the right to their untrammeled lives.
I say, “Maybe we should just take a day or two here to calm down, Phil. At least let’s wait to hear if they find out anything from the hospitals. You rushing off to England won’t solve anything; and if the police do find something, they’ll need to find you here. Meanwhile, I can ask a couple of old friends in Paris if they have any news, okay?”
After a lifetime of having escaped the bonds of family, I seem to have taken on the role of mother; the one who soothes, explains, makes rational suggestions. The role that Hannah can’t stand anymore, or perhaps never could stand—I don’t know. The words sound strange to me, as if I’m acting, reading from a script. They sound effortful, even to me. But they seem to work.
I come downstairs an hour or so later, after a shower, to find Melissa marinating lamb chops while Piers has started up the gas-fired b
arbecue. The grill is heating up, and we’ll eat outside. This is now, this is the present. It is where I am and where Hannah is not, it is the reality of this summer of all the many summers in our lives. Once again she is eluding me, as she eludes her family. I have to accept it—as I had to when she let me down, didn’t show up, missed dinner, wasn’t in her room at college, when she was officially “in love” with that boy in the Sailing Club who had a car—“a car, Claude, and he took me out to a real dinner, three courses and wine, imagine”—and so missed a film date with me; only now I am older, and have until today forgotten just how it felt. Accept what you cannot change: it is one of the mantras of today, borrowed from twelve-step groups. Can anybody really do it? I wonder. Are we not all under the illusion that we can change things and even people, if only we try hard enough? Hannah is demanding this near-impossibility of us: perhaps to find out, once and for all, if we can accept her, just as she is? Absent, irresponsible, uncaring, not thinking about us at all?
The story I am telling myself about Hannah is full of gaps and holes: of course it is. There are the gaps of memory, the times between our meetings, times when our lives went their separate ways, details she will have remembered and I have forgotten. Between two people, always the third thing, the story; neither will ever have the whole picture. All I can extrapolate from is what I already know. There will not be any new evidence. In this house, there are four people who each have a different view of her, as husband, daughter, son—and friend. Her children are the angriest. Aren’t our parents the people we know least well, even though from babyhood on we watch them intently from day to day, like spies, sensing their moods, noticing their habits, because we need them in order to live? We can’t know who they were before we were born; we don’t know who they become when they leave us, tiptoe out of the bedroom, sigh with relief as they drive away for an evening out.
Without Her Page 10