‘You’d know all about that!’ Hilly stood up, stretching. ‘Coming, Mum?’
Rose glanced towards the gates. ‘You go with Dad. Don’t think I will. I’ll wait with Zoë.’
Zoë reached for her magazine, slammed the car door and moved into the shade of a silver birch, settling herself on the grass. ‘I hope you’re not going to take ages—I’m starving! Can’t we start on the lunch, Rose?’
Zoë had recently taken to calling her mother by her first name; although Rose didn’t mind, Hilly couldn’t do it without feeling self-conscious. She noticed, too, that Zoë always called their father Dad, even Daddy: never Gavin.
‘We can’t picnic here.’ Rose nodded in the direction of the sign that urged Silence and Respect.
‘No one’s going to tell us off, are they?’
‘We’ll wait for Dad and Hilly,’ Rose said firmly. Zoë sighed, rolled over onto her front and flicked open her magazine with the martyred air she was so practised at conveying; Hilly gave her a disparaging glance, which went unnoticed.
‘Get a shift on, then, if you’re going,’ Zoë said, while Hilly hesitated about whether or not to take her camera. ‘Great choice for your birthday outing, Dad.’
‘Take as long as you like.’ Their mother was delving in the glove compartment for her paperback. ‘There’s no rush. We’ll be fine here, reading in the shade.’
Walking towards the ticket office, Hilly had the sense of stepping out of the sunshine and into cold shadow. Her father nudged her and nodded towards a sign in French: Entry free to children under sixteen. ‘That’d put Zoë in an even worse mood,’ he remarked, sorting Euros, ‘being classed as a child. Deux adultes, s’il vous plaît.’ The woman in the booth glanced behind him to see where the other adult was, before realizing he meant Hilly; quickly she covered up her mistake. ‘Voilà.’ She handed them their tickets. ‘Bonne journée.’
They passed through gates into a large wire enclosure, surrounded by a high double fence with watchtowers at intervals on the perimeter. It was incongruous, high on the hillside: rather like coming across a floodlit football pitch in the middle of a forest. The area inside, on a downhill slope, was terraced steeply; there was one barrack-style building at the top, with a sign saying MUSÉE, and two others at the lower end. Hilly felt a constriction of fear at her throat, and her heart beating. But I can walk out again, she thought, whenever I want to. She felt all wrong, dressed for the heat in cut-off jeans, a purple T-shirt and wide-brimmed hat; but everyone else was similarly clad. She saw crop-tops, painted toenails, sun-dresses; men in shorts, with hairy legs. We might be on a beach, she thought, or visiting a theme park. But this was real. And in spite of their holiday clothes, people were subdued, speaking to each other only in whispers. Seeing a woman in front remove her straw hat as she entered the museum, Hilly did the same.
TU N’ES QUE VISITEUR DU PALAIS DE LA MORT, she read on a framed card inside: YOU ARE ONLY A VISITOR IN THE PALACE OF DEATH.
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Copyright © 2002 by Linda Newbery
“Water” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.
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