You explain in French that your father was in the circus and you were passing and decided to see it, to remind you of old times.
The children nod but don’t seem to believe you.
Then one of them asks if your father was a clown.
You shake your head.
A ringmaster then?
One of the children, a little girl, explains that the circus will not perform for fewer than fifteen people. She is too old to be Rebecca’s child. You smile politely.
You are the twelfth person, another child adds—which means only three more people are needed to start the performance.
Circus music plays torturously on a loop through loudspeakers.
Children hold hands and dance.
The parents talk in a circle by the wall. Some of the women smoke. It’s a warm night. The air smells faintly of hay. The children’s faces are soft like cheese.
After a few minutes, the ringmaster appears from the trailer and checks his watch. He shakes his head at the children. They raise their arms to protest, and just when it seems that all is lost—three figures appear in the distance. A toddler out for an evening walk with his parents. He is wearing only a T-shirt, a diaper, and little shoes. His parents are talking and haven’t noticed the small big-top. The children start shouting at the toddler. Everyone is watching. As the child spies the small big-top, he stops and looks curiously toward it. Then he notices the group of children calling him over.
His parents call after him. They jog to catch him. The children explain that a circus has come to town. The couple are German and don’t seem to understand. Then the ringmaster counts the crowd and blasts an air horn.
The German family is swept into the tent with everyone else. The toddler is sitting with the other children. His parents watch anxiously from among the local parents.
But no sign of a small girl or an old man.
You are about to sneak away when a boy dressed in a clown costume approaches and asks how many tickets. You laugh. He smiles and asks again. He is about thirteen. You say that you were only looking. He explains that you must buy a ticket for the show to proceed—that you are the fifteenth person.
You give him some money, and he rips a stub from a roll of mint green tickets. Then he hectors you inside with an air horn.
As you enter the small big-top, you notice a wooden sign advertising the circus. It has been propped up against a First World War memorial, beside the names of those who fell long ago in a cold place of terror.
Chapter Fifty-Five
The ringmaster and his son begin by doing handstands. The music is much louder inside the little big-top. Everyone is watching them balance. The ringmaster’s arms tremble and his face turns red.
When the applause thins, the music becomes a drum roll and the circus duo leave the tent. In a few seconds the ringmaster and his son return with clubs of fire juggled by the ringmaster who almost sets fire to himself when a club lands on his shoulder. The son watches and claps in time.
When the clubs burn out, the ringmaster leaves the tent again. The air smells of sulfur and hay. The tension mounts—and then suddenly an old man holding a cabbage appears from under a tent flap. Everyone laughs and the children shout his name. He raises his arms as if to say, “Where am I?” Then he holds up the tent flap he came through to reveal his garden gate.
Then the ringmaster returns with flaming hoops and a dog. He is startled to see an old man with a cabbage standing in the ring. His son starts drumming again, and the old man disappears back through the flap into the safety of his vegetable garden.
Both father and son spin the hoops with long sticks. The tent fills with even more smoke.
A few of the children start coughing.
The German toddler is crying and wants his parents.
In all the confusion, a small girl enters the little big-top and sits next to you. Her teeth are very white and her hair is unbrushed. She’s wearing striped purple pajamas and sandals. You look down at her and she gives you a smile so false it’s funny and you laugh. Her little face turns back to the action inside the ring. You look around for her parents, and then a man enters and sits down next to her. He is in his late forties, dressed in an old T-shirt and blue jeans. A few of the other parents wave to him.
He is wearing tortoiseshell glasses and is unshaved.
And then Rebecca walks in.
The little girl beside you signals to her. The ringmaster seems to notice her because she’s beautiful. The man with the tortoiseshell glasses moves over and she sits down.
You cannot move any part of your body.
Her hair is much longer than you remember, but the same deep red that lightens in sun. She is wearing clothes you have never seen. Same freckles though—and each one exacts a breath from you.
The circus performers are riding tiny bicycles and carrying enormous cups on their heads.
Your eyes shoot backward as though your body is forcing you into sleep. Then your head starts to boil and you are sweating. Your stomach is churning. You are forced to turn away because your body is falling to pieces. And then thousands of remembered moments—like birds flapping their wings inside your skull.
The severed hand.
Dots of blood on the canvas.
Her body falling silently to the water.
You hover between the living and the dead.
But the dead cannot live again.
They cannot see, they cannot hear, they cannot breathe, they cannot talk. Their minds are empty, and they cannot have any thoughts.
Two clowns are standing in front of you, prodding your chest with a long sponge finger. The music is drowning everything, your eyes are rolling around and you can’t see anything. The smaller clown is trying to drag you out into the ring. People are shouting.
Rebecca is looking at you. She’s laughing and waving you out into the ring with the hands she once pressed against your bare chest.
Then you stand up, scream her name, and fall into a circle of waiting darkness at your feet.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Delphine jumps back in fright when the grown-up’s eyes open quickly.
He is no longer where he fell.
She has been dabbing his head with a cloth soaked in witch hazel. The scent makes her nose twitch. The visitor is very still under heavy sheets but looks at her. Then when he looks at Mama, he tries to get up. Delphine steps back even farther. Then suddenly Sebastian is upon him.
“It’s not Rebecca,” he says to the stranger. “It’s her sister, it’s Rebecca’s sister, Natalie.”
The man lies down again, breathing hard as if he had just run somewhere fast but did it without moving his legs. Delphine looks for the drawing she made of him. Perhaps it will cheer him up.
Behind the bed is a picture of her, and another picture of Sebastian and Mama.
“Rebecca’s sister is a twin?” he says as though he’s trying to believe it.
“Oh, yes,” Delphine wants to say. “A twin—oh yes—except that she is in heaven, with the angels and Napoleon.”
The sheets were yesterday blowing on the line—blowing like sails little Delphine ran through on the grassy deck of her ship bound for circus island. The sheets puffed and glowed with noon.
And then it was lunchtime. Sigh. Time to stop and eat.
The strange man is looking at Mama again.
Delphine watches his eyes because grown-ups play games of secrets.
Like little white animals the man’s eyes switch between old portraits that Sebastian found in the basement—and the face of Mama which is so still (like forgotten bath water) that it could be its own portrait if it wasn’t connected to a body and the world.
The man looks afraid.
Perhaps he thinks we have kidnapped him?
What if we have, by accident? Would we all go to prison? Probably not before lunch though.
The radiator starts clanging and soon it will be hot, and the room full of hiss, like some little girl dreaming of snakes.
&nb
sp; Delphine likes to pick the paint that peels in the corners where it gets damp, even though she knows it’s naughty.
She hides the tiny paint people in a box that once held bonbons and still smells like them (as if the box is remembering his lost friends).
Then she is distracted by the hanging chandelier.
All those cobwebs.
Maybe the visitor will think it’s a beehive. Delphine wonders if that’s where honey comes from and that it’s high up so she won’t get stinged.
She was stinged in the summer. Her arm has a mark that’s too small to see, but it’s there.
Then without thinking she steps toward the stranger and lifts her bare arm.
“I was stinged here,” she says.
“You were stinged?” the man says with a lulling sweetness.
Delphine nods, “Yes, right here—do you believe me?”
“You speak English,” the stranger says. “Just like Rebecca.”
“Yes, I speak English,” Delphine says. Then she points with her elbow to the man sitting at the foot of the stranger’s bed. “But Sebastian taught me, not my aunt.”
The stranger is being very nice—maybe he prefers children to adults.
Tucked up in the white sheets reminds Delphine of her baby, her very own child, in the mouse village of secret plops in the hedge that stretches up bursting with birds who fly out chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp—scaring everyone, especially the plastic mice who pretend tremble. Birds just don’t know where they’re going.
The man’s eyes are big and sad.
Plastic mice and their poisoning plops.
Delphine wonders if she is going to say: “I’ll be your mother, little lost boy.”
Then suddenly he says something to Mama.
“What’s happening?”
Then he says:
“Where am I?”
Mama doesn’t answer but glances at Sebastian.
“Our house,” Sebastian says. “Her name is Natalie, I’m Sebastian, and this is our daughter Delphine,” Sebastian says.
“Natalie?” The man says, exasperated, “Delphine?”
Will he cry?
Will he cry?
Sometimes grown-ups cry.
Sebastian steps over to the strange man’s bedside. “Yes, Natalie. She is Rebecca’s twin sister.”
Sebastian’s accent is sharp and heavy, East London, he told her once.
“Twin? Her twin?”
“You called her Rebecca,” Sebastian says to the visitor. “That’s why we brought you here.”
The stranger closes his eyes.
“Who are you?”
“Henry Bliss,” he says.
Delphine giggles but everyone ignores her. She is repeating his name in her head. She can’t stop herself:
“Awnree please, awnree please, awnree please, awnree please.”
She giggles again.
Sebastian turns to her with his finger held up to his lip, which means “I’m not mad but shush down now.”
“What’s happened?”
“You fainted,” Mama says.
The man stares at her.
Delphine steps under her mother’s arms and folds them over her little body.
“You knew my sister?” Mama says.
“She never mentioned that you were a twin. How could I not have known that?”
Delphine wonders who he is talking to. Should she say yes or no or oui or non? And then words just fall out of her small mouth.
“Maybe she forgot.”
They all look at her without laughing.
Then the radiator starts banging again. There is no talking for a few moments, and then the radiator stops and Sebastian asks the stranger another question.
“But you knew she had a sister?”
“Of course,” Henry Bliss replies.
Mama and Sebastian glance at one another quickly as if to pass a secret without saying it.
“Seems odd you didn’t know she had a twin,” Sebastian says.
“Do you know what happened to her?” Mama asks slowly. Her face is shaking.
“Yes,” the stranger says very quickly. “Do you?”
Sebastian nods. “We got a letter from the French embassy in Greece. She had registered with them when she went to live there—all French nationals have to.”
“When did you know her?” Mama asks.
“When?”
“Yes.”
“In Athens.”
“You weren’t with her then?” Mama says.
Delphine looks at her mother to explain it all carefully, but her mother is purposefully ignoring her as if to say “Don’t ask now because even though I’m not talking, it’s still interrupting.”
Henry Bliss doesn’t answer.
“As I said, we brought you here,” Sebastian said quietly, “because you said the name Rebecca before you fainted.”
Delphine imagines Mama and Sebastian’s questions softly raining down upon his head like pillow feathers.
“Were you in Athens for the earthquake?” Mama asks softly.
Delphine feels her mother’s whole body behind her.
Her eyes have begun to take in light.
“I couldn’t get to her in time . . .”
“In time?” Sebastian asks without moving his head. His eyes study the stranger carefully, as though waiting for the right moment to pounce on the truth.
“Before her building collapsed.”
Mama starts crying.
“How long did you know her, Henry?” Sebastian says, but gently.
“Long enough to love her.”
Then Mama runs out, but Delphine is rooted to the spot.
Sebastian sighs and puts his hands in his pockets. After a long silence, he says: “If you’re up to it, Henry—why don’t you get dressed and come down for lunch. Delphine will get you a towel and there’s a bath down the hall.”
“How long was I sleeping?”
“Almost fourteen hours. We even had the local doctor examine you while you were passed out.”
“What did he say?”
“He said you probably needed a good kip and that you should probably drink more water, but all French doctors say that.”
Delphine rushes off to find the towel.
“Why did you come here, Henry? To tell us?”
Henry sighs and turns to the window.
Outside it’s very green. The whistling of birds across the panes, a song only slightly muted by the uneven squares of glass.
“To see—” Henry says.
“Go on,” Sebastian says.
“To see, if she had a family. Where is her grandfather?”
“He died about a year and a half ago. Natalie was living in Paris. It was before I met her actually.”
Then banging from upstairs.
“It’s Delphine,” Sebastian says chuckling. “The towels must be on a high shelf and she’s trying to get them. Let’s take a walk after lunch, Henry Bliss.”
“Okay.”
“Be nice to get out in the fresh air.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
You sit opposite Natalie and sip green soup. There is a clock ticking loudly from the mantelpiece, as if counting down to something. Natalie keeps looking at you. Her beauty is breathtaking. She’s a little bigger than her sister, or an older version, but the eyes and cheekbones are the same. She holds her spoon with the same delicacy, between finger and thumb. You want to set your spoon in the bowl and grovel at her feet. You have to keep telling yourself that it’s not her, it’s not Rebecca, and that you must go on. You feel the sudden urge to leave, to stand up and run out. Watching Natalie eat is a strange form of torture, as it reminds you how wonderful your life will never be.
On the table is a shopping list. The handwriting is almost identical to the handwriting in the diary, but they were twins after all. It could still be Rebecca’s child.
Then Sebastian asks where you are from, and you’re telling him when suddenly Delphine bursts in wea
ring a bathing suit and ballet slippers. She’s also carrying a plastic whale.
“Delphine, go upstairs and change,” her mother says.
Sebastian smiles and puts down his spoon.
“Am I fancy enough for the circus?” Delphine says, looking at you.
Then Delphine begins to dance.
“Delphine!” her mother cries, and the little girl dances out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Sebastian laughs and Natalie glares at him.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais, Sebastian?”
He nods and then gets up.
“Your soup is getting cold, circus girl!” he shouts up the stairs. “Vite, vite.”
Then Sebastian looks at you. “Funny, eh? Kids.”
“You got any brothers or sisters, Henry?”
You set down your spoon.
“I had a brother,” you say. “But he died when he was a baby.”
“Sorry,” Sebastian says.
When Delphine comes down Sebastian is washing lettuce.
“The soup is cold now,” her mother says.
“I had to pee.”
After lunch, Natalie stacks plates in the sink. Sebastian takes a pack of cigarettes from the drawer. Delphine sees them.
“Non, non, non, non, Sebastian! No smoking, remember?”
“In the house, Delphine—no smoking in the house.”
“You shouldn’t smoke, Sebastian!—it could make you die.”
“Let’s take a walk,” he says, touching your arm. “I’ll show you around.”
Sebastian steps into a pair of Wellington boots and hands you a heavy black walking stick with a silver owl at the top.
“Found this in the house when I was renovating.”
Delphine wants to come but her mother takes her upstairs.
You step out the front door into a country lane. The hedgerows rise up on each side. Blackberries stud the leaves and branches. There are birds flying high above you.
“So you were Rebecca’s boyfriend in Athens?” Sebastian says.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Natalie still gets upset about it.”
You nod in understanding, then walk in silence for a kilometer or so.
“Forgive me for asking this,” Sebastian says. “But is there another reason you came here?”
A few white cows on the hillside eat their way across pasture. The air smells of grass and manure.
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