He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then grinned and fell upon the fish. Hesitantly, I tried a piece. It was good, but that was thanks mostly to the fish itself. I watched the pair of them chew, Aaró quickly, Clémence thoughtfully.
‘Well?’ I forced myself to say, when the plates were cleaned. Seeing my hopeful expression, Aaró deliberately tore off a piece of bread to mop up the oils from the dish, nodding his approval. I smiled at him gratefully. Licking the oil from his fingers, he signed something. Clémence snorted with laughter, and signed back.
‘What did he say?’ I couldn’t contain the impatience in my voice.
‘He said it wasn’t bad, for an Englishwoman.’
A smile lingered around her eyes as she leaned forwards over the table.
‘You have a lot to learn, girl.’
Hope, fluttering in my chest, too easily crushed.
‘You mean …?’
‘We shall have to serve more people in the evenings, to make up for another mouth to feed. And I have a few conditions. But yes, Mam’selle Fischer, if you wish to, you may stay. For now.’
June 1969
In the park everything is normal, but I feel like a fugitive. The ducks quack gently at the edge of the pond, children shriek and tear about in games of tag or leapfrog, watched with one eye by their mothers. Nannies, more like. It’s posh here. Their mothers are probably drinking sherry and eating turtle soup.
The thought of the three of them – Mrs Mallory and Remington and Hillbrand – makes my stomach squirm. How long did they go on eating before they realized something was wrong? Will they guess what I’ve done?
What have I done? I press my fingers into my forehead and try to make sense of it all. What will my parents say? I can see their faces now, flabbergasted and angry that I’ve blown my big chance because of some … instinct. But I can’t ignore it; the strange connection I feel with Emeline, the certainty that no one will be able to find her except for me.
Slowly, I take out the letter I got from Timothy Vane. Folded around it are a bundle of banknotes. The sight of them makes me feel even queasier. I didn’t want to take them, but he kept gesturing until I put them in my pocket. If the nurse from reception had arrived a minute earlier than she did, she definitely would have assumed the worst. As it was, she made it quite clear that if I didn’t leave immediately she’d have a pair of porters drag me out by my ears.
What was Vane trying to say as I left? He was red in the face with the effort. I nodded to him over my shoulder and he nodded back, twitched his fingers as if to say, I’ll be here.
The yellowed paper flutters in my hands like wings. Typewritten, dated April 1919. What’s this about? The sheet separates in my hands and I swear, thinking I’ve ripped it. But it isn’t one letter; it’s two. The first is thicker, worn at the edges, topped by a letterhead: Chemin de fer du Midi.
Master Vane,
Please forgive my English. This letter was wait for me when I return last week, with a note, ask me to send. It is late – please forgive. I been away. When you read, you will write and say, ‘Where is she?’ but I not know. I know your sister short time only, then we part. That is all I say.
A votre service,
Jean-Baptiste Gosse
Depot, Gare d’Austerlitz, Paris
I’ve never heard the name before, but whoever it was claims to have known Emeline. Quickly, I turn to the second letter. It’s written on cheap paper, the ink paled by time, but I know the writing. I know the loops of those ‘e’s, the curve of the capital ‘T’. It’s Emeline.
Dearest Timothy,
I do not know what you will think of me, or how much Uncle Andrew has told you about what has happened. Frankly, I am not sure I know myself. But I wanted to say that I am safe, somewhere a long way away, so far it might as well be the end of the world.
You must not worry about me. You must let Uncle Andrew and Aunt Olivia look after you, like Mama wanted, and be a good boy, and work hard at school and try to laugh again.
I wish I could tell you this myself. I wish we had been left alone at Hallerton.
Please try to keep this letter a secret. I cannot tell you where I am, or give you a return address, in case someone else does read it. I don’t know if I will still be here, in any case. I’ve asked a friend to deliver this for me: I hope it finds its way to you safely. I hope that you will understand, one day.
I am sorry.
All my love,
E
Later, I stand inside a telephone box, staring at the receiver. It’s the end of the working day and businesspeople stream around me, jostling towards home. I watch them through the little glass panes. A coin is growing clammy between my fingers. Who do I call? My parents? I can imagine my mum’s anxiety, telling me that she doesn’t know what I’m playing at, to get home this instant; my dad’s anger, saying that if this is how I intend to live my life, I can bloody well do it under a different roof. I dial the only other number I can think of.
‘Hello?’
The voice sounds harassed. There are kids shrieking in the background.
‘Hello, Mrs Johnson, is Steph —’
‘You’ve got some bloody nerve calling here!’
For a second I’m speechless. Does she know who I am?
‘Mrs Johnson, it’s Bill.’
‘I know who it is. She’s been crying her eyes out all afternoon over you, missed her shift at the chippy. I’ve a mind to—’
There’s a scuffling at the end of the phone, voices arguing, then footsteps before Steph says: ‘Bill?’ The word trembles and cracks.
‘Steph, what’s going on?’
A strange pause. ‘You know what, Bill.’
‘No, I honestly don’t.’
I hear her swallow. ‘Your dad called earlier, to see if you were here. Mr Hillbrand called him. He said you’d … that you …’
‘That I ran out of a meeting?’ My face grows hot. ‘That’s hardly a crime.’
‘No, that you stole money from one of your clients. An old man in a hospital. That you lied your way in.’
‘What? I didn’t steal anything!’
‘You didn’t?’ Steph’s voice quavers between hostility and hope. ‘Then why would they say it?’
My heart is pounding. This is Mrs Mallory’s doing. She’ll be furious that I’ve spoken to her father, told him about the developer, about Emeline. That I’ve run off with the evidence I collected from Hallerton – the diary and the doctor’s bill – just as she was about to sign with Remington.
‘Look,’ I wipe away a prickle of sweat from my upper lip, ‘I didn’t steal anything. He gave me the money, Timothy Vane.’
‘Who?’
‘Emeline’s brother. Steph, he wants me to find her—’
‘Emeline?’ She spits the word and I feel my hand tighten around the phone. ‘Bill, what the hell’s wrong with you? Why do you care about what happened to her? All you’ve done since Norfolk is go on and on about some mad, dead woman.’
‘Don’t talk about her like that!’
‘You see!’ Steph’s voice wobbles, higher than usual. ‘You’re obsessed! You care more about her than you do about me!’
‘That’s—’
How can I find the words to describe what I’m feeling? How can I tell her that, despite everything, I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now? That I don’t want the life I had before; that there’s something else waiting for me, something vital, if only I’m brave enough to look. The silence on the line stretches longer and longer. In the end, it answers for me.
‘Steph,’ I manage to say, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think this—’
‘I don’t want to hear it, Bill.’ Her anger is edged with tears. ‘Go and get yourself locked up for no reason. See if I care.’
‘Steph—’
The line goes dead. Now? the whining dial tone seems to ask me.
I already know the answer:
Depot. Gare d’Austerlitz. Paris.
Part Th
ree
March 1919
‘You want to cook for the people here, you’ll need to forget most of what you know,’ Clémence told me, tying an apron around her waist. I followed suit, already excited. ‘We work hard here, all day. We want food that fills our bellies and warms our blood, makes us forget our aching feet. You understand?’
‘Like that spice you used, in the fish?’ I asked. ‘The red one, that smelled of fire?’
‘Pimentón.’
‘Pimentón.’ I repeated to myself, remembering its taste. Hot like flames, sweet like sun-ripened fruit.
‘What else?’ I bumped into her as she stopped before a tall, wooden door.
‘Lentement, we start at the beginning,’ she said, stepping inside.
It was a pantry, dark and cool and lined with shelves. Every house had one, but this was like nothing I had ever seen. The light from the doorway caught upon hundreds of glass jars, upon the colours encased within: brilliant reds, sun-drenched yellows, even slivers of purple and bright, jade green. Strings of shrivelled peppers and tomatoes festooned the ceiling like party decorations; sacks of grain stood waiting in the corners. I ran my fingers across the top of a bag of beans to feel them, hard and cool and mottled.
‘We cannot afford to waste anything here,’ Clémence was saying. ‘We eat skin to bone, nose to tail, and everything in between, understand?’
I nodded, trying to take everything in.
‘Where did all of this come from?’
‘We are lucky,’ she said. ‘We have some land in the hills, where we grow vegetables. Aaró will show you. And neighbours bring what they can spare in the summertime, for us to put away.’ She smiled mischievously. ‘They know they’ll eat better in winter if they do.’
The smell inside the pantry was making my mouth water. I picked out spices and the faint tang of fruits and vegetables dried in the hot sun. If it was like this at the end of winter, I couldn’t imagine what summer would be like, brimming with the fresh produce of the Mediterranean.
‘What are we making?’ I asked, as Clémence prowled the shelves, seizing jars and packages.
‘Suquet de poisson,’ she told me without hesitation, ‘fish stew.’
‘The same as yesterday?’
She snorted at the question.
‘No. That was a picada, with a little pimentón for spirit. Onions, garlic, parsley, nuts. Today, we need something different.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Bring a handful of those,’ she told me, pointing to a string of dried tomatoes. ‘Yesterday, we needed to remember that spring is here. There’s planting to be done, winter gloom to shake off. Herbs, nuts, they remind people of the harvest. So today, people will have been outside, in their gardens or on their land.’
I followed her out of the pantry. She dropped the jars and bottles and ingredients on to the table, like a robber’s hoard.
‘La Tramontana will make people cold,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘They will ache from digging, they will need comfort and warmth and sweetness to remind them that their work is worth it.’ Her hands were sorting through the jars, confirming everything she had chosen. ‘Fetch the fish from the scullery. There’s a basket of potatoes there, bring those too.’
The fish made the small stone space smell of the sea, as though the tide had crept under the door. It made me think of Aaró, working in the waves day after day, fulfilling an ancient agreement with the ocean. I picked up the crate with difficulty, my hands still sore. Perhaps one day he would take me with him on a fishing trip, so I could watch him pull these treasures from beneath the water.
The thought of him, smiling at me from across a small boat, our knees touching, made my cheeks warm.
‘What’s la Tramontana?’ I asked as I dropped the crate next to the stove. Not for the first time, I felt as though I only understood half the conversation in Cerbère.
‘What?’ Clémence was already focused on cooking, rapidly slicing an onion without even looking at it. ‘Pass me that head of garlic.’
The fish scraps from yesterday, including the heads, were back on the stove. I tried to stop my nose from wrinkling in distaste. I was here to learn, after all.
‘La Tramontana?’ Clémence tipped the chopped onion in. ‘You must have felt it. It is the wind that comes down from the mountains and tastes of snow, all year round.’
I remembered the icy breeze that morning on the beach, snatching at my shawl and making me shiver.
‘Your best friend in summer, your enemy in winter, la Tramontana,’ she said decisively. ‘Now, shall we cook?’
The fish heads and bones were soon simmering away with garlic, onions, pimentón, wine and herbs, cut from pots on the kitchen window sill. Before, I would never have eaten old fish scraps, but now, it was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing a spoon and scooping up the fragrant broth.
Next came the jars of preserved vegetables. Many of them I had never eaten, even in London. The slices of dense pale flesh with an outside strip of purple were aubergine, Clémence pointed out; the bright yellows and reds were peppers. The jade green ones were courgettes, preserved with basil.
I sliced them up, and soon my hands were glistening with herb-infused oil. I sucked some from my fingers and the taste stopped me in my tracks: peppery and smooth and pungent all at once. I licked every finger clean, like a child scraping a pudding bowl, until Clémence laughed at me, and sent me to wash my hands in the scullery.
When I came back, the vegetables had gone into another pan, their aromas mingling. Clémence was reaching for a small wooden box.
‘This is only for certain dishes,’ she told me, lifting the lid and taking out a small, stoppered bottle. ‘You know what it is?’
Saffron. In better times at Hallerton, Cook had made saffron cakes or buns, which we ate buttered at teatime. I watched as Clémence took a doll-sized skillet, and began to toast the threads. It smelled exotic, almost medicinal, and brought with it the memory of home, a pang of sorrow.
But the feeling ebbed away. There was stock to be strained, the liquid poured into the vegetables. The leftovers went into the slop bucket, ‘for Oriol’s pigs’. Soon, we were preparing and filleting the fish Aaró had brought in earlier. I was nowhere near as fast as Clémence, but I was learning.
The stew smelled intoxicating; powerful and salty from the fish, sweet from the vegetables, heady with wine and spices, earthy with potatoes. This is how food should smell, I thought. I hadn’t noticed the time passing as we cooked, and it was with alarm that I heard noises from the front of the house, the bell on the door tinkling over and over as the townspeople began to pile in.
I peeked through the curtain. Clémence was right, they looked chilled to the bone, hunching coats around themselves and wrestling the door closed when la Tramontana howled across the seafront. Even Aaró looked glum when he appeared, his hair windswept, but his face brightened as he stepped into the kitchen and inhaled deeply.
He wrapped his arms around himself and cupped his hands, signing eating from a bowl.
‘He says it is comfort food,’ Clémence translated, smiling. ‘It will be done soon; help Aaró with the dessert there.’
He had brought a large basket with him. From it came tumbling oranges, impossibly bright against the old, scrubbed wood.
‘Where did these come from?’ I asked Clémence, fetching a clean knife to copy Aaró’s peeling and slicing. ‘I haven’t seen any groves.’
‘Spain. They are why this town exists. Buy an orange or a lemon anywhere in France, or England for that matter,’ she slid a look at me, ‘and it will have come through Cerbère.’
‘How so?’
The air around me was a spritz of juices, fresh and sweet.
‘The trains,’ she said. ‘Oranges have to travel somehow. Some idiot made the tracks in Spain and France different sizes, so all the freight must be unloaded and reloaded on both sides of the border. Still, we can’t complain. It keeps the women of this town in work.
Les transbordeuses, they’re called, the women who work the citrus freight.’
Aaró’s eyes were flicking from his mother to me, even as his hands cut off an orange’s skin in four deft movements.
‘How do I explain what we’re talking about?’ I asked Clémence. It must have been strange for him not to know, I realized.
Her smile was crooked as she stroked the side of her face with the back of her fingers then moved her flat palm in a circle against the other one. Though small, in her movement I saw wheels, the might of a train moving along a track.
Aaró watched as I turned to him and repeated the movement. He nodded seriously, laying his hands together in a cross and pushing them down.
‘He said they have a hard life, les transbordeuses,’ Clémence told me, as I went back to slicing. ‘His sweetheart Mariona is one.’
My hand slipped, sending the tip of the blade slicing into my finger. For an instant I didn’t move, then the blood welled to the surface and with it came the pain.
‘Damn!’ I dropped the knife. Instinctively, I put my finger in my mouth. Stupid, I told myself, as the sweet, cold citrus juices stung and mingled with the taste of warm iron. Of course he has a sweetheart.
Aaró was looking concerned. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and before I knew what was happening, he had taken my hand, and wrapped my finger in the cloth. I winced as he knotted the ends, but managed to smile apologetically.
‘I am sorry,’ I told him, and he must have been able to decipher the words from my lips, or my expression, for he smiled too and shook his head minutely as if to say, It is nothing.
Then he reached out and ran his thumb along the edge of my lip. It came away streaked with the blood I had obviously smeared there. For a breath, I felt as though the heat of the stove was inside my body, spilling out towards him. Did he hesitate too, his eyes on mine, before he stepped away? Or did I imagine it? He was wiping his hands on a rag, picking up his knife to continue slicing, as though nothing had happened.
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