She paused, and shared a smile with me. ‘Today is Aaró’s birthday. His twenty-first.’
‘He didn’t say!’ I burst out. ‘Nobody said,’ I tried to recover, though she looked amused by my slip. ‘That’s wonderful. Are we to have a party?’
‘Yes. I should have liked to make it a time to remember, with a grand dinner tonight, and a lunch tomorrow but …’ She sighed, and I saw her then as I rarely did: as the mother of one rather than many. ‘After the expense of Sant Joan we simply do not have the money. Not until there are more vegetables to trade. We shall have to make do with what we have.’
‘Wait.’ I stepped back from the table so fast that I scattered salt all over the floor. ‘Wait there.’
Wiping my hands on a rag, I ran upstairs two steps at a time and into my room. There, wrapped in paper on a high shelf, was my velvet travelling suit, the one I had worn the day I left Hallerton. I had not looked at it for months. It had been cleaned and folded, but as I ran my hand across it I felt a chill, a breath of the shadows that had plagued Emeline Vane, that still lived, buried deep within Emilie Fischer.
‘Here.’ I thrust the garments at Clémence, glad to be rid of the feel of them. ‘Can we not sell these? The embroidery alone should be worth something.’
Clémence turned the velvet, admiring its dull shine.
‘I thought you wanted to keep them.’ Her voice was careful.
‘For what? They are hardly suitable for Cerbère, you said so yourself.’
‘For … another time.’
For when you leave, she meant. For when you go back to where you came from.
I stepped closer. I felt no fear, no hesitation as we stood, holding the last remnant of my old life between us.
‘I have no more need of them,’ I told her, ‘and cannot envisage ever having need of them again.’
She held my gaze for a long moment then nodded briskly, turned away, so that I would not see how her eyes filled.
‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you had better come along to the market too. But go and do something with that hair, and for God’s sake wash your hands, or you’ll spend the whole day smelling of anchovy.’
We took the train to Banyuls with empty baskets, my travelling suit packed carefully in the bottom of one. I felt a flicker of apprehension as we waited on the scorching platform. The last time I had ridden a train, I had been a runaway. Not any more, I told myself.
The third-class carriage was packed to the seams, children shoving their heads out of the windows, getting soot in their eyes; women and men dressed in their best for market day, in clean neckties and wilting hats.
During the short journey, we chatted with our neighbours, squashed six to a four-person bench. I found myself perching on the very end with Agathe’s daughter Louise, who was taking a basket of their apricots to sell. They were beautiful, each a perfect sunset, luminous orange and red. She gave me one to try. Its flesh was downy and warm against my mouth, the juice like honey, but lighter. I would have to get some for Aaró. I could see him now, licking the juice from his lips as it mingled with the salt there.
All in a rabble, we poured off the train at Banyuls, trooped down the hill towards the marketplace and the sea. I told Clémence that I would try to sell the suit if she had chores, but she was having none of it.
‘They will take one look at you and,’ she snapped her fingers dismissively, ‘give you half what it is worth. They won’t try that with me, not if they know what is good for them.’
At the best haberdashery in town, the neat-looking proprietor sweated beneath the ferocity of Clémence’s stare. He was absent-mindedly stroking the nap of the velvet, back and forth, like the ears of a beloved dog, even as Clémence wrung every last centime out of him.
‘Are you certain of this?’ she asked me, when the price was finally to her liking and the haberdasher was looking a little pale.
I nodded and watched the last pieces of Emeline Vane disappear beneath the counter. The notes and coins we received in exchange made a bright day even brighter.
‘Keep it, please,’ I laughed when Clémence tried to press it into my hand. ‘I owe you that, and more.’
Judiciously, she counted out half and dropped it into a twisted napkin, gave the rest to me.
‘Aaró shall have quite the feast tonight,’ she said. ‘Now, I think we deserve something for ourselves.’
It felt decidedly odd to sit opposite Clémence outside a little café, with the sea glittering behind the market stalls that lined the front. We had never spent any time together in idleness, I realized. To anyone else we must have looked like two women gathering their strength for the day’s shopping, or perhaps even mother and daughter … I took a hasty sip of the eau-de-vie in my glass and coughed at its strength. It tasted of almonds and herbs.
‘What will we make, this evening?’ I asked to cover my awkwardness.
Clémence had her face turned up to the sun, her eyes closed.
‘A dish called es nui,’ she said, her voice slow and dreamy, ‘the nest. It is a rich thing, the stomach of the sea, the throat of the mountains, the earth between, bringing them together in an instant of pleasure.’ Cheeks colouring, she looked down at me. ‘I have made it only once before. For Aaró’s father.’
I had assumed that Clémence was a widow, but the opportunity to ask more had never arisen, or she had never let it. Aaró, too, told me he knew nothing of his father, save that he was long dead. Now, Clémence was looking at me, her face a strange mix of defiance and expectation.
‘A long time ago?’ I asked quietly, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
For a breath or two she held herself apart, still. Then something within her shifted; the tough exterior rolled aside, making way for the past.
‘Yes. A long time ago. In Perpignan.’ She swirled the eau-de-vie in its tiny glass. ‘My parents owned a brasserie there. They hired a man from Girona, as domestic help. He could do anything with his hands.’ She smiled at the memory, and I saw the shape of youth in her face, in her weathered skin that must once have been city-smooth. ‘I had a brooch,’ she was saying, ‘and the pin broke. He fixed it for me, just like that, with wire as fine as a hair. My parents treated him like a vagabond, had him washing dishes, mending pans, but he was a better cook than any of their chefs.
‘He taught me real food. About the flavours of the world, the senses. And I wanted more. The food on my parents’ table started to disgust me. It was food for the wealthy, dressed up and primped beyond recognition. So one night, when my parents slept above, I crept into the dark kitchen and started to learn on my own, to cook the food that he described. It would have made them shudder.
‘One day, he told me about a special dish, es nui, and I knew I had to make it for him. It took me a long time to find the right ingredients. I practised it in secret, over and over, until finally, I got it right. And then I took it to him, in his room beneath the old city walls, in the quarter my parents told me never to go to alone.’
She was lost in the memory, her face taut with longing. Abruptly, it came back to me, the question she had asked that first morning, when I stood in her kitchen as a stranger, a runaway.
Are you with child?
She had not taken me in through kindness alone, I knew then, but because twenty-one years ago she too had stood, empty-handed, at the end of the world. Impulsively I reached out and took her hand in mine, squeezed it hard.
‘We do not have to make it, if it brings you pain,’ I said softly.
She shook her head, and I saw the past retreating in her eyes.
‘No. That dish brought me Aaró, and he is my happiness. It is only right that I make it.’
She pulled her hand away and drained the rest of her eau-de-vie in one gulp.
‘Enough of this dawdling,’ she coughed, ‘we have a thousand things to do.’
With that, the moment was broken and I hurried away to one end of the market, while she trawled the other, searching for the ingredients she
needed. Alone, I wandered through the bustling stalls, lost in her story. Like me, she had left her home, come to a place where outsiders were mistrusted. No wonder she had wanted Mariona and Aaró to be married. He would be a true citizen of the town then, wed to a local. Yet she had forged a new life for herself, made Cerbère her own, even in the worst of situations. Who was to say that I couldn’t too? We were more alike than I realized.
I froze on the promenade, mid-step. A woman tutted and pushed past me, but I couldn’t move. A terrible thought was crawling down my neck and into my stomach, where it sat, prickling and clenching. I had been so caught up, so unthinking of anything else, that I had not considered … When was the last time I had my monthly cycle? Not this month, I realized in horror, or the last.
The prickling in my stomach became a rolling, then a wave that threatened to push me from my feet. I staggered over to a tree and braced myself there, the bright sea a blur through my flooding eyes.
No, I thought over and again, no, it is nothing, it is your imagination, running away with Clémence’s story, that is all. But an instinct told me otherwise, one that spoke with Mariona’s voice, saying, What does a wife need to understand about her husband beyond what their bodies can tell them?
Not my husband … my lover, but not my husband. How could I have been so foolish? Clémence had been right, all those months ago; she had spoken from experience. I was ignorant. I had not given the consequences of being with Aaró a moment’s thought. Or perhaps I had, but pushed them away, living all the more for the risk. Had he done the same?
A woman from one of the stalls was asking me if I was all right, but I could not answer her. I walked blindly away from the seafront, pushing through the crowds and paying no heed to motor cars or carts until I found myself on a quieter street. A deep doorway offered shade and I pressed my forehead against the cool stone, feeling my heart pound and knowing that within me, another heart was doing the same.
June 1969
I wait for the phone to connect, imagining the shrill noise echoing from thick stone walls, from threadbare rugs, maybe even reaching out into a green garden …
‘Hello?’ a voice says blearily.
‘Jem?’ I can hardly believe that I’m hearing her voice, a thousand miles away from Saltedge.
‘Bill Perch?’ Her voice has a faint Norfolk twang that I hadn’t noticed before. I hear her swear at the other end.
‘Yes! Hello! Are you all right?’
‘I stubbed my toe. Where the hell are you? You sound like you’re at the bottom of a well.’
‘I’m in France.’
‘France?’
‘Yes, I sent you a postcard, guess it isn’t there yet. Anyway, it’s—’ The landlady of the bar, whose phone I’m using, has clocked that I’m on an international call, and has started to tap her fingers impatiently. ‘It’s a long story. Listen, Jem, I think I’ve found her.’
‘What?’ Jem’s voice is hesitant.
‘I’ve found Emeline.’ Those words bring the same shiver of disbelief, of elation. ‘At least, I think I know where she went, all those years ago. I’m on my way there.’
‘Where?’
‘A tiny place called Cerbère. At the end of the world.’ The phrase makes me smile.
‘Look, Bill —’
‘I know, I know. There’s no reason she should still be there, but I have to try. I have this feeling …’ I give up. ‘I just have to go. I can’t explain it.’
There’s a pause, a sigh. ‘You don’t need to, man.’
‘Thanks.’ I would never receive that answer from anyone else.
Briefly, I try to tell her as much as I can about what has happened, while Javi attempts to distract the landlady.
‘What a trip!’ Jem laughs. ‘So what do you want me to do? I’m guessing this isn’t just a courtesy call.’
‘I need you to get a message to Timothy Vane,’ I say hurriedly, leaning backwards as the landlady makes a grab for the phone cord. ‘I need you to tell him that I think I know where Emeline went. That he has to hold on. He’s at the Royal Cromwell, in London. You might not be able to talk to him—’
‘I’ll get through to him somehow, don’t worry.’
‘You’re the best.’
‘What’re friends for? Anything else?’
The landlady is swiping like an angry cat, Javi jumping about in front of her.
‘Keep an eye on Hallerton!’
‘I went past the other day, you know it’s—’
Her voice snaps into silence. The landlady’s hand is pressed triumphantly over the telephone.
Outside in the bright morning sunlight, a pick-up truck stands juddering and wheezing, belching out diesel fumes. Luci and Matti are sitting in the back, among grimy tarpaulins and farm equipment, sharing a morning cigarette. They look more dishevelled than ever. I can’t look much better after a sleepless night in the barn.
‘What’s this?’ I yell over the noise.
Matti pats the side of the truck.
‘All aboard the Manou Express to Mende!’
Any remaining shreds of William Perch, Solicitor, are blown away by the dust of that journey, left behind on a country road in the rugged, green heartland of France. That day, we hitch and hike and blag our way south. By the end of it we look like a bunch of desert explorers, grit-blasted and sunburned but happy.
We camp for the night on the shore of a green river. An old bridge arches over the water, its reflection forming a perfect circle, disturbed only by the tremor of insects across the surface. My shoes lay abandoned near our camp fire. Were those the same soles that raced to catch the bus every day? That first walked up the front steps of Hallerton in trepidation?
My skin smells glassy with river water. My clothes are dripping dry from a tree branch and nothing seems further away right now than London, with its triplicate forms and Steph’s chip shop and Hillbrand & Moffat … They’re like names from a film I saw a long time ago and can barely remember.
What about Emeline? Did Hallerton fade for her, and Saltedge with its marshes and memories of better times, memories that now feel like my own? I lay back, arms behind my head, and try to sleep, but my head is full of tomorrows, full of the past and one name that keeps repeating.
July 1919
I do not remember what came next. I went to meet Clémence, as arranged, but I couldn’t focus on the array of food stalls that passed before my eyes, the samples she gave me to taste or the meats she haggled over. I tried to make the right noises, ask the questions I would have done had my world not shifted on its axis, with the barely formed life inside my body as its centre.
Luckily, she was distracted by her purchases, by the money in the handkerchief that she weighed and weighed again. She bought quails and doves, a brace of young pigeons, their soft feathers ruffling in the sea breeze. Finally, she had a fervent discussion in Catalan with a man who had just one basket on his stall. It was full of what looked like long, fleshy white flowers. Cod innards, dried and salted, Clémence told me, placing the newspaper-wrapped package carefully in her basket.
‘What for?’ I managed to ask, trying not to let my hand stray towards my stomach.
‘You will see,’ she said, pleased. ‘This dish will be like none you have ever tasted, believe me. But what about you? What have you been doing? You haven’t bought a thing.’
‘I was thinking of a cake,’ I said, trying to cover my uncertainty, ‘in England we make them for birthdays.’
‘Does it sound like I shall have time to bake, girl?’ Clémence said, though her eyes were amused. ‘I dare say you’ll do as you like, though. The sweet stalls are down that way.’
It was after lunch by the time we returned to the café. With so much to prepare for the evening, there was no time for Aaró and me to be alone. What would I have told him anyway, with only my hands and my face, out there in the intense heat of the maquis? How would he have answered, with joy or dismay? I did not know and was almost glad for the reprieve, f
or a chance to think before I had to share the knowledge with him, or his mother.
When he appeared in the kitchen, I copied Clémence’s sign to wish him happy birthday and when he kissed my cheek as well as hers, she pretended not to notice. But soon she sent him away, to round up his guests for the evening. There was much to be done. We plucked and cleaned the birds, skinned the rabbits, sliced dark botifarra sausage, soaked the dried fish, gutted the squid that Aaró had brought in that morning. I stared at the wildly different components, my mind reeling. I had no idea how anyone, even a cook like Clémence, would be able to make it all come together.
She pushed me away when I tried to help further, saying that this was her dish now. I could see the memories rising in her as she went back to the stove. I did not try to interfere; I had my own dish to see to. Slowly, I unpacked the items I had bought in a daze at the market.
They told a story, I realized. A bottle of golden wine was the night of the calçotada and a sweet, burning flavour on my lips. A twist of aniseed and a bag of pine nuts were the Feast of Sant Joan, the taste of sugary coca and a leap of pure joy. A tiny bottle of brandy was the study at Hallerton, and my cold train journey with Puce through the darkness of France. A jar of honey was the night with Aaró in our secret cove. A single pale cheese, almost cream, wrapped in layers of muslin was as pure and white as a christening gown.
Lost in thought, I began to bake, the way Cook had taught me a lifetime ago in the bustling kitchen at Hallerton. Only I had no recipe, no restrictions, no one to disapprove. I folded into the mixture the flavours that had given me life again. I poured myself into it, as did Clémence at the stove, both of us filled to the brim with memories.
The cheese was fresh and white as new milk. It tasted like the curds I had eaten as a child, sitting with Albie in the nursery. He used to keep me company there, though he was a boy of ten and old enough to be playing with soldiers. He chose to sit with me instead and I loved him for it. I was lonely, when he and Freddie were sent away to school, before Timothy was born.
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