‘We are roaming, no, we are escaping … Too right,’ sighed Isabelle, lighting a cigarette that caused an explosion of coughing. ‘Ugh, these Spanish fags are dégueulasse, disgusting, dégoûtant.’
Luc, tightly packed into the rear of the vehicle, remained silent. Squashed between a household of belongings, he was sleeping fitfully, his head sliding from the window. He was dreaming of his old life, of riding his new bicycle, his granddad at his side, along the coastal paths to the Cap de Garde where the pair of them would sit in the sunshine, preparing their fishing tackle, their snorkels and masks, while watching the comings and goings of the boats, sailing yachts, fishing vessels and sometimes, when they were lucky, they’d spot one of the Mediterranean tankers, preparing to drop anchor a little further along the coast, readying itself to load up with barrel after barrel of the newly discovered desert oil.
‘Black gold.’ His grandfather would smile to him. ‘We’ll have a share in that, lad. Algeria’s future.’
It was after midnight, a warm starry night in not-so-peaceful Catalonia, Franco’s tightly bound Spain, smelling sweetly of ripening melons, when the Citroën approached the Spanish-French border, the hard dark outlines of the unknown Pyrenees peppered with slate-roofed villages to the left and before them. Isabelle, three passports in her lap, was dozing, gently snoring. Clarisse jabbed her sister-in-law hard in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Get out that sweet, red-lipped smile of yours, chérie. Here we go. La France.’
By September of 1962, back in Algeria, south across the Mediterranean Sea, the city of Bône, renamed Annaba by the recently installed Algerian government, was sinking into neglect. It was a decaying metropolis, its infrastructure in ruins. The richly fertile outlying farms lost to the French were being settled by bands of Bedouins. The nomads squatted on the lands, living in black, goat-hair tents and tended their flocks of sheep and goats, which fed off the planted vegetation. Those travelling tribes paid no attention to the crops tended until recently by the detested French. They drank no wine and, disinterested, left the unkempt vines to develop into jungle. On the abandoned Cambon estate, the great house was empty and forgotten. The bloodstains spattered across the walls in one of the downstairs rooms bleached in the heat to blotches of brown, then disappeared beneath galloping mildew and cobwebs. The shot fired by Clarisse Cambon that had blown open the face of Adrien Cambon, her husband, in the heat of disgust and argument, resounding through their homestead, faded to the ghost of an evocation on the coastal winds. Goats and birds drank from the swimming-pool while the grapes hung low, rotting pendulously on the boughs. A lost domain.
Meanwhile, in the Var department of south-eastern France, two young women and one small keen-eyed boy, the depleted Cambon household, were settling into their new bastide home. Les Cigales was a sprawling vineyard estate urgently in need of work and investment. Clarisse Cambon was its newly installed châtelaine and she walked its shabby floors with pride and expectation. She and her sister-in-law, Isabelle, purchased young mares and cantered the length and breadth of their new territory.
Clarisse, especially, ached to put the past behind her. She hungered for new beginnings, new friendships, assimilation, to turn her back on the bloodshed and nightmares of war and hurt and death. To turn her back on the sacrifice she had felt obliged to make for the sake of her son. Luc would have a new life. He need never know, need never be haunted by the shame of his father’s guilt.
The two women hired labour, men from the local communities, never Arabs, and set to work. The seasons turned. The land regenerated. Spring bloomed, heralding its arrival with the most delicate of almond blossoms. The scent of cedar resin, jasmine and cherry blossom imbued the warm April days. The two young women and the growing boy had much to do, challenges to occupy them, labour to blank out, to extinguish, the past. The vineyards rose forth like fluttering birds, producing lime-green leaves and exceptional wines, while the silvery olive groves promised decades of generous harvests. Yet the women remained isolated, distanced on their hillside. The past, the events of that forgotten summer, never quite let them go.
Acknowledgements
I am enormously fortunate with the team MJ, Penguin is putting around me. Maxine Hitchcock, publishing director at MJ and my editor, has shown such enthusiasm for this book. Thank you hugely, Maxine.
Thank you to my publicist, Gaby Young, copyeditor Hazel Orme and Clare Bowron, Eve Hall and Sophie Elletson.
As I am new to Penguin there will be many who will work on this book who I have not yet had an opportunity to meet, so I am thanking you all in advance! I am looking forward to our future together.
Special thanks to my splendid agent, Jonathan Lloyd at Curtis Brown, for hanging in there during the tougher days. Also at Curtis Brown, I want to thank (in no particular order) Alice Lutyens, Melissa Pimentel, Lucie Rae and Katherine Andrews. You are a wonderful team and I really appreciate all you do for me. A little thanks on the side to Sheila Crowley, also at Curtis Brown, not my agent but a powerhouse at retweeting and spreading good news.
Much love and gratitude too to Chris Brown, one of my longest-standing friends, for support and wise words.
A little shout of appreciation to Mary and Tom Alexander at Gloster House in Co. Offaly for their generosity and hospitality. Also, huge thanks to Pat Lancaster and Rhona Wells for being there when I needed that little bit of help.
As always a huge kiss to my husband, Michel, who is an inspiration and offers his love so generously. Merci, mon amour.
THE BEGINNING
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MICHAEL JOSEPH
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2016
Text copyright © Carol Drinkwater, 2016
Cover images: Woman © Joanna Jankowska/Trevillion Images; Vineyard © Danita Delimont/Getty Images
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-92415-3
The Forgotten Summer Page 38