Drawing with Light

by Julia Green

  Her voice sounds foreign. Perfectly good English, but with an accent. Has that happened over the years she’s been living in France? Or has she always sounded like that? It’s another shock, to find that I don’t know these simplest of facts. That I don’t remember, and no one has said. That no echo of her voice has stayed inside me.

  ‘Yes, outside. Thanks,’ Seb says. He nudges me, embarrassed by my silence.

  I’m still too churned up to speak.

  A dark-haired man with a beard is sitting at a large wooden table in the garden, hidden from the lane. He must have been here all the time; it was his voice we heard, before. He stands up. ‘Josep,’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘Welcome.’ But he doesn’t smile.

  Seb and he shake hands; I sit down on one of the wooden chairs.

  Francesca puts the tray on the table and passes round the drinks. She sits down next to Josep; he takes her hand.

  I stare at the two hands, resting loosely on the table together. She speaks to him in a language I cannot understand: not French, nor anything I recognise even one word of. ‘Eskuara,’ she explains to me and Seb. ‘The language of the Pays Basque.’

  ‘So, how was the journey?’ Francesca fiddles with her glass, moves the tray a little.

  I’m still searching for something – anything – that might pull up some memory from when I was tiny.

  Seb tells her about the trains, and the buses, and all of that. She pours us each a little glass of the spirit that flames and burns as it goes down my throat.

  ‘You can fly to Pau,’ Francesca says. ‘Or Nice. That makes it easier.’

  ‘We did it the cheapest way,’ Seb says. ‘And it was fun.’

  Francesca flushes slightly. ‘I’d have paid, if you’d asked, Emily.’

  There’s a long, difficult silence. I swallow down the rest of the orange liquid in my glass; it stings all the way down.

  Francesca tries again. ‘How long have you two been friends?’

  Seb looks at me. ‘Since October?’

  I could say exactly how long: nine months, twenty-one days, if I wanted to. But I don’t.

  Francesca tops up the glasses. The fiery liquid begins to thaw me out. Josep starts to talk in English to me and Seb; to Francesca he talks only Eskuara. ‘You have brought the sun, ‘ he says, and smiles. ‘The weather here is like England. It rains much. Which is why it is so green. But for a few days more we will have sun, I think. We are very lucky!’

  We watch the sun, low in the sky now, about to slip behind the mountain. The clouds have cleared from the tops. Shadows lengthen across the grass.

  ‘I’ll finish preparing the meal,’ Francesca says. ‘It won’t be long. You two can wash, or rest, or do whatever you want. There is no rush here. That is the best thing of all.’ She smiles at me, but with a hurt sort of smile.

  We still haven’t touched. I’ve hardly said a word to her. But then, what does she expect? Whose fault is that?

  Josep shows us the way to the bedrooms up the big oak staircase. The rooms on the first floor lead off a kind of balcony with banisters, open to the huge living room below and you can look right down on to the sofa and chairs and table we first saw when we arrived.

  Josep opens one door after another. ‘You can choose,’ he says. ‘This one here, or this.’ He opens another door. ‘One each, or one together, it is up to you. With a view of the mountain, or quiet at the front.’ He laughs. ‘It is all quiet.’

  He goes downstairs again, to let us decide.

  Seb and I go into each. It’s easy to choose. Seb closes the heavy door and pushes me playfully on to the big bed with its thick blue quilt. He presses his face up close to mine. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘how cool is this!’

  My body begins to melt beneath his. But my mind is still whirling. I slide out from under him, sit up. ‘She doesn’t like me,’ I say. ‘I can tell she doesn’t like us being here.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Seb says. ‘It’s hard for her, that’s all. It’s the same for her as it is for you, Em. Relax a bit. Stop punishing her. Stop being so cross.’ He puts his arms back round me, and I let myself lean into him. I’m tired to the bone.

  The smell of garlic and woodsmoke drifts up from the kitchen. A chair scrapes across a stone floor.

  ‘We’d better go down.’ I take his hand and trace the lines on his palm with my finger: the long life-line, right round under his thumb. I let it go again.

  ‘Not yet.’ Seb kisses me. ‘There’s no rush, she said. Wait a bit. Have a rest, then the meal together will go better. Lie down with me for a little while.’

  We lie together on the top of the quilt. I close my eyes, but even though I’m so tired, my mind’s too busy to let me sleep. I listen to Seb’s breath: in, out, slow and steady as a purring cat. I open my eyes and watch his lovely, familiar face; the way his dark hair flops over, his dark eyebrows and lashes, the stubble round his chin and neck. The rise and fall of his chest. He sleeps for ages, innocent as a baby, and I lie and watch him, while the light outside fades and the room fills with shadows.

  ‘Supper’s ready!’ Francesca calls up the stairs. ‘Come on down.’

  ‘Seb?’

  He opens an eye. ‘What?’

  ‘Supper time.’

  He yawns and stretches. ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘A bit, I think. Dozed.’

  We smooth the creases from our clothes. ‘We haven’t even washed!’ I say.

  We rinse our hands and faces quickly in the little bathroom at the end of the balcony. We leave grubby marks on the white towels.

  Seb shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘She won’t mind.’

  Francesca has changed out of her linen trousers into a green silk dress. She’s pinned up her hair in a loose sort of bun. As she dishes out portions of meat and vegetables from a large enamel pan, I watch the way she frowns, concentrating. I do that.

  Her face looks thinner with her hair up, more angular in the light from the candles that Josep brings to the table from a dark wooden cupboard. Behind her, on a whitewashed wall, hangs a huge oil painting of a woman doing almost exactly what Francesca is doing this moment: serving food at a table, only the woman in the painting is large and rounded and wearing an apron round her middle, and there are children sitting at the table – two small girls.

  The ghost children.

  Josep sees where I’m looking. ‘An early Fran Davidson,’ he says. ‘You like it?’

  Francesca barely pauses, but she does, enough for me to know she’s listening.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s like the one in the catalogue, from that exhibition.’

  ‘Part of a series,’ Josep says. ‘Mothers and children.’

  Francesca drops the serving spoon, and it clatters on to the table. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, goes out to the kitchen to get a cloth to wipe up the spilled food.

  My face burns. She can paint mothers, but not be one.

  Seb squeezes my hand. I know he’s willing me not to speak, not to mess things up right now.

  Francesca takes her place at the table. She holds her hands out, as if she’s about to say grace, like a blessing in church, but she doesn’t say anything. Josep pours us all wine, even though neither Seb nor I like it much. He starts to tell Seb about the problems with the rural economy, second homes in the Pays Basque, local young people having to leave the land. Francesca joins in from time to time, helping to explain things, or to translate a word.

  I stop listening. I’m noticing how everything in this house looks as if it has been arranged, placed there like objects in a still-life painting. A bowl of peaches on a dark wooden chest; the cream candles on the table, the candlelight winking off the silver cutlery and throwing shadows. Perhaps that’s what you would do if you were an artist. It would matter to you, how things looked.

  I push my plate back. I’m too tired to eat anything. All I want to do is sleep.

  ‘How is Kat?’

  The directness of Francesca’s ques
tion throws me completely off guard. I just answer it, without thinking. ‘She’s fine,’ I say. ‘She enjoyed her first year at uni. She’s travelling this summer with her boyfriend, Dan. Cambodia and Laos.’

  Francesca’s eyes look shiny in the candlelight. She pours herself another glass of wine. ‘Did you – have you brought photographs, to show me? Of her, and you, and your dad?’

  Josep stops talking for a second, then he turns back to Seb.

  ‘A few,’ I say. ‘Mostly I brought photos from my project.’

  I don’t tell her how furious Kat is about me coming here, to see Francesca. How she wants nothing to do with her: Not EVER!

  ‘I’m so pleased you are here, Emmy.’ Francesca’s voice is so quiet I have to lean forward to hear her. Two red spots flame on her cheeks.

  Emmy. The word sings in my head.

  Josep clears the dishes, and brings out a glass bowl of fruit salad and a plate of almond cakes. He makes coffee.

  I can hardly keep my head up.

  Finally the meal is over. ‘You go and get some sleep,’ Francesca says. ‘We can talk and look at photographs tomorrow. Which room have you chosen?’

  ‘The blue one,’ Seb says.

  ‘You will wake up to the view of the mountains.’

  I push back my chair. ‘Thanks for the meal and everything,’ I say.

  ‘Sleep well. See you in the morning. As late as you want.’

  * * *

  Seb follows right behind, helping me up the wooden stairs. Neither of us is used to eating so late, or to drinking red wine, or brandy or whatever it was in the little glasses. We giggle softly: too much wine, too much everything.

  I wash in the bathroom; by the time Seb comes back to the room I’m already in bed, flopped out against the pillows. ‘It’s so soft! Everything’s so squishy and luxurious and comfortable! And I’m sooo tired.’

  Seb tugs his T-shirt over his head, steps out of his jeans, climbs next to me on the bed. He strokes my face very gently. ‘You’re exhausted. It’s not surprising. That journey, meeting your mother for the first time . . .’

  ‘Not the first time,’ I start to say, although sleep is already creeping through my body, slurring my speech. Just before I let myself go completely, I hear Seb whisper very softly in my ear.

  ‘I love you, Emily Anna Woodman. Know that?’

  3

  Love. The word turns me over. Especially in Seb’s soft, deep voice.

  I wake up to find him already out of bed, tugging on shorts. ‘Going for a run,’ he says. ‘Won’t be more than a hour.’

  He closes the bedroom door behind him. I drift in and out of sleep. The sun gets higher; it creeps into one corner of the room, lighting the wall into a brighter blue, glancing off the brass handles on the chest of drawers and the mirror glass. The beam of sunlight strengthens and broadens.

  When I next surface from sleep, the sun is shining directly on the little painting on one wall: the only one in this room, and on a very different scale to the rest of the artwork hanging elsewhere in the house. The small square seems to come more sharply into focus in the sunlight, so that I notice it properly for the first time. The painting shows three trees, though more an abstract idea of trees than real ones. The dense, dark green around them suggests a bigger, dark green forest surrounding these three. As the sun shifts across the room, it lights up the smallest tree in the centre so that it glows, a vibrant emerald, as if it’s alive, a flame almost. It’s as if I can see the spirit of the tree, or its heart. It’s hard to explain, but I feel a sudden deep connection with it. I love this little painting. It seems familiar, as if I’ve seen it somewhere before: a postcard of it, or a picture in a book, perhaps? Because how can I have seen it for real, when it’s hanging here, on a bedroom wall, in a Pyrenean farmhouse?

  I lie in the bed, half awake, half dreaming, and suddenly filled with happiness. It’s the little tree, working a kind of magic on me. A tingle of excitement dances up and down my spine.

  My mother is someone extraordinary.

  Yesterday’s anger has been washed away by my night of deep rest, wrapped round by Seb’s tenderness. Today, anything might happen.

  The house is silent. Outside, birds are singing their hearts out, the way they do in the early morning before the day heats up. The strip of sun gets wider, until the whole room is flooded with it. I drift back into sleep, and out again, hardly knowing which is which. The painting glows. The trees look as if they are moving, swaying in the breeze that stirs the muslin at the window. I can smell their deep resinous pine branches. The air hums with insects. Under my feet the old pine needles are thick and soft. Sunlight slants between rows of trees and makes patterns: dark, light, dark, light – zebra stripes. I’m walking in the forest between the trees. It’s getting lighter, as if we’re almost at the edge, where the trees are spaced out and grass and moss grows in thick patches. There are two of us, walking together, getting closer . . .

  I open my eyes. I’m back in the blue room. Nothing has changed but the light, and the sounds. Voices from downstairs, a door creaking open, feet tapping across a hard floor. Laughter.

  I slide off the bed and go to the window. The mountains look sharp in the morning light: it brings them closer. Everything has come into focus; between the hills and the garden are the series of small fields we walked through to get here, yesterday. In the nearest field just beyond the garden a man in blue overalls is cutting the clover by hand with a scythe, a small dog leaping and running along the swathe of cut clover he leaves in his wake. It’s like a scene in a film, and so strange to see it for real, just outside the window. I almost go and fetch my camera, still unpacked in my bag. The colours are good: the bright green clover, the blue overalls, the black and white dog.

  Josep walks across the garden. I draw back so he doesn’t see me at the window. I hear a car engine start up, and not long after, I see a car going along the lane through the fields to the main road.

  I get dressed quickly. Not the hot black jeans and creased T-shirt, but a thin cotton skirt, and a sleeveless top, and flip-flops. I run my fingers through my hair, splash my face with cold water, brush my teeth. I go downstairs quickly, before Seb or Josep get back. It seems very important that it’s just Francesca and me, alone in the house.

  I can’t find her at first. She’s not in the kitchen or the living room. I think of calling out her name – but Francesca sounds wrong, and I can’t yet bring myself to call her Fran.

  I help myself to a peach from the bowl, and take it outside to eat at the garden table. And there she is: pouring coffee into a blue china cup, talking to a small tortoiseshell cat.

  Francesca looks up. ‘This is Marthe,’ she says. The cat weaves round her legs, rubbing its head against her cupped hand. ‘Sometimes she lives in the house, sometimes not. She goes off to have her kittens. She doesn’t like to have them in the house.’

  ‘She’s not much more than a kitten herself.’

  ‘No. But she’s two, nearly three. Three litters already, and she must have another lot: she’s got milk, see? She’s feeding them.’

  Francesca pours milk from the jug on the table into her saucer and puts that on the grass. We watch the cat lapping furiously, purring at the same time; her whole body quivers with delight.

  ‘I saw Seb on his way out,’ Francesca says. ‘You slept well? I thought you’d be later than this. At your age I’d sleep until midday!’

  At my age. Francesca, at seventeen. I try to imagine her. One year before she met Dad.

  ‘The sun woke me up.’

  ‘You can close the shutters, if you like. It’ll get hot in there. We close the shutters to keep the house cool when we get a hot spell, like now. In the winter, the shutters keep the warmth in. It gets miserably cold.’

  She’s talking about the weather, and time is ticking away. Any moment, and Seb will come back!

  ‘Coffee?’

  I shake my head. ‘Let’s talk. Properly.’

  She goes still. />
  I plunge in. ‘It’s weird. I thought about meeting you such a lot. But it isn’t like I imagined. It’s a shock, that we don’t know each other at all. I thought I might see you and memories would flood back, but I don’t remember a thing. If I’d passed you in the street I’d never have known it was you.’

  Francesca frowns. She sips the coffee from the blue cup cradled in both hands.

  I keep talking. ‘I want you to explain it to me. Why you went. How you could do that. I want to hear what you say.’

  She swallows hard, puts down the cup. The cat mews for more milk, and when Francesca doesn’t immediately oblige, jumps right up on the table.

  ‘Off! Shoo!’ She shoves the cat hard. It stares back at her, indignant, and stalks off.

  ‘It’s unthinkable, isn’t it? Looking at you now . . . I know it was crazy and terrible. The act of a mad woman.’

  She doesn’t look mad.

  ‘I’ll have to tell you the whole story,’ she says at last. ‘It will take a while. And maybe you still won’t understand, or forgive me.’

  It’s as if I’m the one in charge, I think then. I feel as if I’m older than her, like I do with Cassy sometimes. Francesca looks crumpled and defeated, not the breathtakingly selfish woman who gave us up, according to Dad and Kat.

  ‘But you’ve turned out so well, without me . . . perhaps it was the right thing to do, after all . . .’

  I can’t believe she said that. As if it could ever be right, what she did. It leaves me numb. I turn away.

  She knows she’s made a mistake, saying those words. When I finally look at her again, I see tears in her eyes.

  Crying isn’t going to help, I nearly say. What right have you got to cry?

  But I can hear Seb’s voice in my head, softly persuasive. You’ve come so far. Em. It’s hard for her too. Anyone can see that. Seb, with his generous heart, talking to me in the dark.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I say instead. ‘Tell me.’

  4

  ‘It starts – where? Your dad and me, I suppose, meeting when I was in my first year of art school in London, and he was doing his architecture degree: first part of a long training. We moved in together. I got pregnant: unexpectedly, too soon in our relationship, really, though we were pleased too. We loved each other. We were happy, as well as scared. And broke. That was Katharine.