by Camilla Way
She understands only that she’s very far from home, that her old life and everything familiar and loved is far behind her now. This bedroom has sloping ceilings and a pattern of rose buds on the walls. Each night she dreams of the silent man, the stone cottage, the forest. Each morning she wakes in this strange, new bed and waits for the woman to lead her down to breakfast.
The woman is very tall and has yellow-white hair tied tightly back from a face that’s long and pointed as a whittled stick. Her pale eyes are rimmed in pink as if perpetually sore and sometimes the girl will catch little glimpses of the skin on her arms, patches of flaky redness. It’s this tenderness, this rawness that Elodie at once and will always associate with the woman whose name she understands is Ingrid long before she can say the word.
And from the beginning she understands that Ingrid is all she has now: the one constant amidst the strangeness, the one link to her old life and her only means of navigating this new one. Ingrid’s hands are very white, cool and dry to the touch, and in those first few days, the girl, Elodie, clings to those slender fingers as if to a twig dangling from the highest branch.
The house has many rooms filled with soft, elegant furniture very different from the few crude pieces left behind in the cottage. On the gleaming wooden floors lie thick, muted rugs. Slowly, under Ingrid’s patient, pink-eyed gaze, the child begins to explore her new surroundings. The shelves full of books, the strange box that fires shockingly into noisy, colourful life at the touch of a button, a large blue bowl filled with dead, perfumed leaves. Each new object she explores tactilely, sniffing and touching until it’s known to her. And wherever she goes she takes the little carved bird with her, her fingers always circling its smooth round head or tracing the delicate grooves of its wings.
On the kitchen table where they eat their meals, a large silver eagle stands, its half-raised wings perpetually poised for flight. In the window, a glass mobile throws squares of blue, green and red light upon the floor. There’s a framed photograph of a little boy hanging upon the wall. Nothing escapes Elodie’s careful examination. Even Ingrid must sit patiently while the child explores her with slow and careful fingertips. Every day, fastened to her blouse or sweater Ingrid wears a broach. It’s in the shape of a cat and Elodie likes to trace its sharp, sparkly edges, to touch the eyes made from clusters of shiny red stones that glint and twinkle in the light. She notices that a few of them have come loose, leaving behind black, sightless craters. She wonders what became of them – those tiny lost specks of red.
At High Barn, meals are eaten from large white plates three times a day at the kitchen table. Elodie and Ingrid sit opposite each other, always in the same chairs, and as the small neat portions are doled out to her, she thinks about the man in the forest, of the steaming rabbit stew they would make together then eat from chipped bowls. Afterwards, she would wash them in the river, returning to find the man smiling, waiting for her to sing to him. She sees again his thick fingers nudging tobacco into flimsy squares of paper while he listens. The pain slams into her. On the long, polished table the reflection of the silver eagle gleams.
One evening when Elodie has been at High Barn for over a week, she follows Ingrid to the kitchen for dinner as usual but stops in her tracks to see a stranger sitting there, a large glass of wine in front of him, a suitcase by his feet. Ingrid’s husband Robert is a thickset, stocky man with curly brown hair only lightly touched with grey. They consider each other for a moment or two and then he raises his eyebrows and smiles, an easy grin that pulls Elodie at once across the room towards him. Ignoring her usual place setting she takes the chair beside him, staring up at him with wide-eyed curiosity, while the man gives a short burst of laughter and Ingrid, her lips pinched into a tight, thin line, slides Elodie’s plate across to her.
As Elodie eats she takes in the man’s thick wrists, the heavy features of his face, the incongruously small chin. She watches the way he drinks with large rapid gulps, the way he bites at his bread; how when he finishes his meal he drops his cutlery with a clatter, stretches and gives a loud, satisfied sigh. She feels a nip of disappointment when he takes his plate to the sink and then, with a brief word to Ingrid and a smile and a wave to her, takes his suitcase and disappears up the stairs. Left alone Elodie ponders this surprising turn of events. She had thought that only she and Ingrid lived in this large, many roomed house, and is intrigued to discover her mistake.
It’s some time before she sees Robert again. Every day he leaves early in the morning, often not returning until after she’s in bed. At the weekends he keeps to his study and the only sign of him is the faint rumble of the radio or television seeping from under his door. Often he will disappear with his big suitcase for weeks at a time. And mostly she and Ingrid keep to the top floor of High Barn, in the little room full of mysterious equipment that she will one day refer to as ‘the schoolroom’. Sometimes a whole month can pass where she doesn’t see Robert at all.
On the rare occasions that the three of them do eat together, Elodie begins to sense something in the air between Ingrid and Robert that troubles her. Although their voices are calm and quiet when they speak, there is nevertheless a strange, shivery tension that hovers in the gaps between their words. Sometimes Elodie will wake in the night and hear angry, raised voices, the slamming of doors. Gradually she begins to sense that the raw tenderness of Ingrid, the sadness she sometimes sees in her is somehow worse when Robert is at home, and that there’s a subtle loosening of tension when they hear his car disappearing down the long, gravel drive each morning.
But she has little time to dwell on it. Her new life is too full of new experiences, too overwhelming and all-consuming for Robert to feature very heavily in her thoughts.
‘Cat.’ ‘Sky.’ ‘House.’ ‘Tree.’ Elodie understands that everything in the world has a corresponding sound, and that everything she and Ingrid do together is with the aim of helping her decipher them. The instinctive hunger that had begun to take root in her at the hospital returns and gathers strength, and it’s Ingrid, she understands, who holds the key. Wherever they go, whatever they do, whatever they see, everything is labelled for her. ‘Chair.’ ‘Window.’ ‘Elodie.’ ‘Ingrid.’ ‘Bowl.’ A constant stream of words accompanies their daily walks together. ‘Car.’ ‘Tree.’ ‘House.’ ‘Man.’ ‘Cat.’ She understands that the games they play in the room next to her bedroom – the picture cards, the puzzles, the books – are all somehow linked to this endeavour. And she sees, too, that Ingrid’s determination to teach her is as intense as her own desire to learn.
‘Eeeee.’ ‘Ooooo.’ ‘Essssss.’ ‘Tuh.’ ‘Puh-puh-puh.’. Over and over she tries to mimic the shapes Ingrid makes with her mouth, to produce the same sounds that come from her teacher’s throat. Over and over she fails.
At night in her dreams the silent man waves to her from the window of his rusty blue pick-up truck, before slowly driving away, disappearing between the trees. Sometimes she half-wakes in the darkness and believes for a moment that she’s back there, in the cottage in the woods. For a moment she hears the sound of the wind in the trees outside, the man’s low snores. In her half slumber she smiles and thinks how, in a moment, she will rise and go to listen to the birds’ dawn song. And then she wakes and even as the stone walls of the cottage melt away, she’s reaching for the little wooden bird, clasping it tightly in her fist as if to squeeze what comfort she can from it.
Occasionally Ingrid will take Elodie with her on her errands to the nearby town. On their first visit to the food store while Ingrid pays at the checkout Elodie slips away to wander alone through the aisles, stopping now and then to marvel at the neat, colourful rows of boxes and tins. At the fruit counter she picks up a banana, biting into the hard, rubbery skin before throwing it to the floor with a grimace. Next she trails a bunch of grapes across her face, first sniffing and then nibbling at the little purple fruits, rolling her eyes at the sweet explosions on her tongue. She spies an elderly man staring at her, amazed,
across the aisle and going to him she circles her arms around his waist and rests her head upon his belly. Moments later she finds herself being pulled gently away, and while a dozen astonished customers look on, Ingrid leads her quickly out of the store.
Every week Ingrid takes Elodie in the car to the big, red-bricked building in the middle of the city. As they drive she stares out of the window and marvels at what she sees. What shocks her most about this new world is all the people in it. There seem to be as many people as there are blades of grass or stars. Everywhere she looks, there they are: smiling and talking and frowning and laughing, and each of them, somehow, connected, connecting.
Inside, the red-bricked building is exactly like the hospital she left behind in France and sometimes they spend the whole morning there. Often she must lie perfectly still while a white dome glides noiselessly over her head. She notices that the men and women who lead her down the long white corridors to this room and that, and who put her on this bed or that chair, who shine lights in her eyes and stare and point things out to each other on the flickering screens, all share the way in which they behave towards Ingrid. She sees how keenly they listen to her when she speaks, how careful they are to do as she asks. She sees that they are a little afraid of her. And a part of her recognises this nervousness, this fear of displeasing, of disappointing, of provoking that brief, flash of impatience in those pink-rimed eyes.
She has been at High Barn three weeks when Colin and Yaya arrive. Two strangers who walk into the schoolroom next to her bedroom one morning while she and Ingrid are looking at a picture book together. Later, she will understand that they are graduate students, handpicked by Ingrid to assist her in her work, to make the endless reports on her progress over the coming months. But on that morning she knows only that from the moment they arrive, with the smell of the wind on their coats, their arms full of boxes and files and their faces lit with curious, excited smiles, that they bring a sudden warmth and light to High Barn that hadn’t been there before.
The man, Colin, is quiet and always busy setting up cameras or writing things down or fiddling with the tape recorder or laying out the games and books and cards, but he smiles at her a lot and pulls faces to make her laugh. It’s Yaya she loves the most. Yaya with her soft, tinkling voice like rain on the river, her glowing, dark-brown skin the colour of the earth, her long skirts and the rainbow scarves wrapped around and around her head, her bracelet of little silver bells that jingle when she walks, the warm, natural ease of her. When Elodie makes a mistake Yaya smiles and says, ‘Never mind, little one. Never mind.’ And even before Elodie knows what these words mean, she understands the kindness of them.
Over the following weeks the four of them settle into a routine. Every day, after breakfast, Elodie watches eagerly from the schoolroom window while Ingrid sets up the equipment for the day. She notices that whatever they do is led, always, by Ingrid, and that Colin and Yaya treat her with the same careful respect as the people in the hospital.
The days pass, and then the weeks, the months. She has got better at mimicking the sounds the others make, of pushing her lips into the correct shapes. She understands that this is a picture of a cat, this is a bed, and that a chair. She understands, but still the words will not come. The sounds she offers are not right, she can tell by the almost imperceptible tightening of Ingrid’s lips, the increasing disappointment in her eyes.
Each week, she and Ingrid make the trip to the hospital and every visit there is someone new to meet, some new stranger to be stared at by. Sometimes these strangers come to the house, and watch silently while she plays with Yaya and Colin. She knows that they have come to see her, that they, like everyone else are waiting for something. Once she tries to sing to them, the old calls and noises from the forest, hoping that they will make them happy, but they are not what’s wanted now.
And then, a year after arriving at High Barn, it happens. She is standing by the schoolroom window when she sees Yaya approaching across the lawn below, carrying her big red bag with the tassels and laughing with Colin. Suddenly, something in that moment fuses in Elodie’s brain. The image of Yaya and the sound of her name. ‘Yaya.’ It escapes her mouth before she’s even aware what her tongue and lips are doing. ‘Yaya.’ As effortlessly as a breath.
She turns to Ingrid, who is staring at her open mouthed, the pen that she had been writing with poised in mid-air. ‘Yaya,’ she says again, pointing through the window to where she stands in the garden below. And seconds later she’s in Ingrid’s arms, being hugged so tightly it takes her breath away.
From that moment words grow and multiply on her lips like leaves on a vine. It’s pure joy to her, this sudden mental unbolting and now that it has begun, she cannot, will not stop. Her hunger for new words is limitless. ‘Sky.’ ‘Chair.’ ‘Me.’ ‘Ingrid,’ she says. ‘Table.’ ‘House.’ ‘Balloon.’ The four of them work harder still, and even after Yaya and Colin have left for the day she and Ingrid will often continue until supper. As the words multiply and become sentences – ‘Elodie go there’ – as she begins to master plurals – ‘One spoon, two spoons’ – and negations – ‘No! Don’t want that’ – and questions – ‘Where Colin?’ – as her grasp of grammar and syntax becomes ever more accomplished, she begins to let go, a little, of her old life.
Sometimes, alone in her room at night, she will allow herself to wander beneath the forest’s ceiling, will linger in the cottage by the fire and smell the embers burning in the hearth. Sometimes she will let herself rest for a while by the man’s side, smiling up at his sad, grey eyes. But then she will rouse herself, and push the memories away. More and more often now she will leave the little carved bird behind in her bedroom when she goes to the schoolroom each morning.
Each of Elodie’s successes and accomplishments binds her closer to Ingrid. Day by day, a new warmth grows between them. Often she will look up and find herself the focus of that pale-blue gaze and sees a new softness there. Now, when Elodie takes her hand or puts her arms around her, the tiny resistance, the barely perceptible tension she used to sense has gone. Now, Ingrid returns her embraces freely, takes her hand with a brief, reciprocal squeeze.
One morning the two of them take a trip to Oyster Bay. Although they’ve been there many times before, the sight of the ocean never fails to amaze the child. As soon as they arrive she heads as usual straight for the water, impatiently shedding her shoes and socks as she runs to jump in the shallow waves. Usually Ingrid watches from the beach, calling her in too soon to return to the house to work, or to keep an appointment at the hospital. Today however Elodie looks up in amazement to find her standing next to her in the surf, her shoes and socks dangling from her hand, an unexpectedly shrill laugh escaping from her lips.
And Elodie works hard to keep Ingrid’s affection, anxious not to provoke the flashes of displeasure that her mistakes can sometimes bring. At night, when she’s woken by the sound of slamming doors or raised voices, she awaits the next day’s lessons unhappily, immediately scanning her teacher’s face for the familiar, tell-tale swollen eyes and creeping redness on her arms.
One afternoon she comes to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water when she finds Robert sitting at the table eating a sandwich.
‘Hey, Elodie,’ he says.
‘Hello.’ Shyly she sidles up to him and watches him eat for a while. One of his hands rests next to his plate and she silently admires how square and large it is. Somehow, Robert’s broad shoulders, his scent, the stubble on his chin, the deepness of his voice seems focussed in that one hand lying so innocently upon the table top. On impulse she takes a step closer and rests her own upon it, comparing her pale, slender fingers with his. Quick as a flash he slides his hand out from beneath hers and brings it neatly down on her fingers, trapping them on the table. She giggles and does the same. Quicker and quicker they take it in turns to pounce upon the other. But, ‘You win,’ Robert says at last, ending the game with a smile. Abruptly he rises and puts his plate in the sink.
Disappointed, Elodie gazes around the room, anxious to keep him from leaving. At last she spots the picture of the little boy on the wall and carefully reaches up and lifts it down. Robert is still standing with his back to her when she brings it to him and taps him on the arm. ‘Picture,’ she says.
He turns to her and when he notices the photograph in her hand a look of such sadness falls upon his face that Elodie takes a step backwards in surprise. Wordlessly they stare at each other for a moment, and then, taking it from her hands, Robert crosses the room and gently puts the picture back on the wall.
At that moment, Ingrid comes into the room. ‘We’re waiting for you, Elodie,’ she says, a hint of displeasure in her voice, and obediently, Elodie follows her from the kitchen.
The way the words multiply is mysterious, organic. Her understanding seems to work on a level below her consciousness, where language spreads instinctively like wild fire. But for all the natural ease with which she learns, she cherishes every new word, marvelling and crowing over them when she’s alone at night. Each one a hard-won treasure.
The more she learns and the wider her vocabulary grows, the happier she becomes. From the moment she wakes until she goes to bed, she talks. Alone in her room she will name every object she can see, or open her window wide and call out to the trees. ‘Come on now, chatter box,’ Ingrid will say as she takes her down to breakfast. ‘Hurry up.’ But Elodie will notice that even as she scolds her, Ingrid’s face shines with pride.