by Sarah Lean
Frank said, “When d’ya think he will be?”
I mean, I got it. It was daft that Harry still thought they were moving on. But I found it harder and harder to watch the battle of wills as the sun got higher, the dust finer, while Harry swayed in the endless heat.
I wanted to stand up for Harry, to say to Frank, Why do you have to do it? Why, like this? But it felt like one of those conversations I had with my mother when I’d said, “Why are the vines blue in your painting?” and she’d said, “You have to stop looking at the green to see the blue,” and I’d said, “But they are green!” and she’d say something else, but all I could hear was Blah blah blah, adult things – Marianne things – things that didn’t make any sense.
I watched from the roof throughout the day while Frank told Harry over and over, “You have to let it go, Harry. You have to let it go.”
I knew Harry could hear Frank, the way he said those words again and again, and I knew that the way Frank said them meant something else I didn’t understand. But Harry wouldn’t back down.
The sun went down behind Canigou, making blue shadows everywhere. At last Harry stood still for a long time, head hanging down, tired and dirty from all the dust he’d kicked up. Then Harry breathed a big bellyful sigh and turned and headed to the meadow by himself. All I’d done was watch, but I felt exhausted and confused. Not because Frank didn’t let me do it, or because of how sad and beaten Harry looked when he changed his mind and slowly walked away from the trailer, but because I felt I would never truly understand what made Frank block Harry’s way all day.
I didn’t know who to go to first. In the end I held on to Frank and Frank held on to me and said, “He did it.”
And I said, “No, you did it.”
Marianne was on the porch holding out a glass of wine for Frank.
“I suppose Harry changed his mind in the end because he was hungry,” she said.
But I knew that nobody else could have changed Harry’s mind but Frank.
Under a blanket between Marianne and Frank on the porch, I was drifting with sleep, when Frank said, “You’d better take Harry in now, Hope.”
Marianne stopped me, which was extremely unlike her.
“After a day like that, don’t you think you ought to take him in, Frank? What if Harry’s in a temper, or tired and grumpy. He might not be his usual self.”
Frank looked troubled by what she said.
“He’s himself all right.”
“I don’t want Hope getting hurt.”
Frank looked at my mother as if he was disappointed that she’d ever think Harry would use his hooves or teeth to hurt anyone, let alone me, or that Frank would put me in any danger.
“He wouldn’t hurt me, would he, Frank? And I want to do it, it’s my job,” I said, throwing off the blanket and rubbing my eyes.
“Frank?” my mother said, in that way that makes you know there are lots of other words hidden.
Frank eventually said, “Hope knows what to do. Harry won’t hurt her.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, “You’ll see.”
They talked quietly as I walked away. I didn’t doubt how safe I was with Harry. Not even the tiniest bit.
Harry looked up as I got closer. He seemed as sweet as always, like he didn’t blame me at all. Unspoken, I knew we both had a strong feeling that something important had happened that day. It didn’t change anything between me and Harry, but somehow I felt that Harry was bound to me even tighter, that Frank had let a little bit more of Harry go and now that bit belonged to me.
I tapped Harry twice on his left shoulder and he followed me.
My mother had gone inside.
“Harry and me, I think we’re cherries and almonds now, Frank. We’re more when we’re together.”
He nodded.
I wished Marianne had stayed to see how good Harry and I were together. She didn’t get me, not like Frank did.
Harry went straight to Frank for his goodnight scratch and cuddle. Nothing changed what they had together, even if they’d disagreed all day long. Frank said the magic words, “G’night, Harry,” and I led him over to his shed.
“What about tomorrow?” I asked Frank, thinking of Bruno and our slow progress. “Do you think Harry will still go back to the trailer in the morning?”
“He’s made his choice,” Frank said, so quietly I wasn’t sure he’d meant me to hear. “And he’ll stick by it.”
The following morning Frank, Harry and the trailer were the first things on my mind because I wondered if yesterday’s battle had been worth it. Frank had been so sure Harry’s old habit had gone, but I wasn’t. All the other things I taught Harry to do had taken months; small steps, a little bit at a time.
I ran downstairs in my pyjama shorts and top, and let Harry out of the shed. Frank was in the doorway of the guesthouse, watching. I think we both needed to know.
Harry glanced at the trailer, his head low as he passed, but he didn’t stop. He walked all the way down to the meadow by himself.
To me, seeing him choose not to go to the trailer was as if Harry had won a race, or completed some big achievement, and I knew that he’d never have to go to the trailer again. I cheered, without really knowing exactly why it was so important that Harry was free from his old habit.
“Harry didn’t even look back,” I called to Frank.
Frank stood there for quite a while staring at Harry as if he was sad that Harry had given up hope of wanting to go for a ride in the trailer again, as if that wasn’t what Frank had wanted all along. I couldn’t even explain to myself how Frank just standing there made it seem as if Harry had done something wrong, but it did.
Frank went off with the trailer to sell it. He wasn’t going to need to drive a stubborn donkey up and down the lane pretending they were actually going somewhere any more.
Then my mother was calling me from the balcony of her studio, saying, “Peter’s coming!” and I ran to meet him.
My best friend arrived home in a stream of dust as his father drove him up the hairpin bends of the mountainside to stay with his grandparents for the summer.
I ran across the meadow, through the hole in the fence and all the way to the other side of the vineyard to meet the car coming around the corner. I shouted to Peter, “We’ve got the whole of the summer, Peter, every single day to spend together!” and he shouted back through the open window, “I’ll be ready in an hour!” Then his father said something over his shoulder, and Peter called again, “Make it two hours.”
“Meet me at the waterfall,” I said. “I’m bringing Harry. I’ve got something to show you.”
Sometimes two hours is a very long time to wait.
I wanted to show Peter all the things that Harry and I had learned together since he’d been away. To make him part of me and Harry too. I thought he’d love it, having Harry around us even more.
It usually took Peter and me a few days after he’d been away to find the place where we were easy in each other’s company, not talking about anything at first other than what we’d been doing since we were last together. But soon the sunshine made us dream and we’d end up making plans for every summer together until we were ninety-nine years old.
The sun climbed and shrank the shadows across the vineyards and the ground was blurred with haze. I called Harry up from the meadow and strapped felt pads over his back so he could carry my bags – towels, drinks, and a change of clothes, nothing heavy.
Marianne watched us from the balcony.
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. Later,” I said.
“Don’t be too long,” she said, but I didn’t ask why, and Harry and I set off to the waterfall because I couldn’t have waited a minute longer.
There was a new tyre on the end of the rope swing. New rope too. Bright blue, tied neatly around and around the branch in a different place, further along from the grooves of the previous swing.
“Look what Frank did, Harry,” I sai
d, because only Frank would have done that for us.
There was plenty of grass nearby, trees with some shade for Harry, so I left him to graze while I unpacked the bag, and waited for Peter.
I had no watch but it seemed a long time had gone past before I decided to strip down to bikini top and shorts and take the first plunge into the water, swimming down to the bottom.
The waterfall in summer was hardly a waterfall, but the smooth flat stone about three metres above my head was wide, and a thin spill of water trickled over it. Harry came around the side of the pool, to the shade near where I was, to drink from the clear shallows.
He blinked when I sent a small shower of water to cool his back, but of course didn’t look at me. I thought he’d like it, to feel the drops on his dusty fur. I watched him quietly wander back to the grass, his spindly legs holding up the barrel of his belly. Right then, floating on my back in the pool, avoiding the glints of sunlight between the leaves, I thought of another surprise for Peter. Something I felt tall enough to do now.
“What do you think, Harry?”
He looked up, still munching.
“I could do it now, couldn’t I?”
Barefoot, I climbed the side of the waterfall, clinging at roots and finger holes in the rocks. At the top the flat rock was slippery green, but I managed to make my way along the shallow spill. It felt good sitting on the edge of the waterfall, high above our place, ready to surprise Peter when he came.
The sun made sharp scorching rays and I was getting bored just sitting there. Peter should have been here by now and I hadn’t brought anything else with me to do.
“Where is he?” I said to Harry. “He said he’d be here. Why isn’t he here?”
I waited, planning my surprise.
Peter didn’t see me at first.
“I’m up here! Where have you been, Peter? You’re always late.” Which wasn’t true, but he had more family commitments than me when he was staying at his grandparents for the summer.
He’d been running. I knew he’d be surprised that I was up on the waterfall but he seemed more shocked than I expected, probably because he wanted to be first.
“Look!” I pointed at Harry. “Harry carried my bag. You wait until you see what else he’s learned.”
Peter took his time, stroking Harry, talking to him quietly.
“Water’s lovely, I already tested,” I grinned. “Get in.”
Peter hesitated, then dropped his bag and slowly took off his T-shirt, already wearing his long swimming shorts. He stood there for a second looking up at me, and I said, “You’re so serious! What are they teaching you at boarding school with all those boring boys? Everything’s the same as it always was. Me and the mountain and the vineyards. Have you forgotten us?”
He stood there, staring at the water like he’d never been here before.
“Come on, Peter!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming…”
At last he ran into the water, making as big an entrance as he could by turning and falling on his back with his arms out.
“Summer has officially started!” he shouted, leaping back up.
“It already started hours ago,” I said. “You need to catch up!”
“Watch this.” He climbed on to a small rock beside the pool and jumped in. Pathetic. Last year he would have run at full pelt, holding his knees to his chest, bombing the surface and sending a tall spout of water nearly up to the top of the waterfall.
“Watch this,” I said, carefully sliding my feet towards the edge.
“You’re not going to jump, are you?”
“I might.”
“Wait! Let me check for rocks underneath first.”
He swam under the water, was gone for a few seconds. It was just like Peter to do these things, but also not like this – not with a wobbly voice and in the panicky way he swam to the side.
“There’s nothing under there. It’s safe,” he said.
“I know, I checked earlier.”
“You really going to jump?”
“Think I’m scared?”
“You were before.”
“I’ve grown taller,” I said, laughing. “I bet I’m taller than you again.”
“Wait! No, wait!” he shouted, scrabbling out and climbing up the rocks. “I’m coming too.”
“I’m going to jump! I’m going to jump!”
“Please wait, Hope!”
“OK, OK, hurry up then!”
Beside me on the ledge, he held out his hand and I took his.
When I think about it now, I can still remember how he looked at me, how he held on to me with his brown eyes, as if he wouldn’t let me fall without him.
“Ready?” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Sometimes, Peter, you just have to jump.”
It was me who moved first to jump, but we rose and fell together, sinking with a whoosh and a gurgle into the cool water and the bubbles of air, touching and bouncing off the bottom. We came to the surface, face-to-face and, close-up like that, he didn’t look like Peter from a few months ago at all.
“What’s wrong, Peter?”
“You have to go home, Hope.”
The sun was falling out of the top of its curve but it was still early.
“Why?”
“Before I came here I went to your house to…” I waited, watched him turn away from what he was about to say. “Well, it doesn’t matter why, but I heard them talking. I didn’t mean to listen but I heard anyway. Everything isn’t the same as it was.”
“You’re right, it’s better, wait until you see what Harry...” I trailed off, looking at his shocked face.
Peter shook his head, as if Canigou had turned to dust.
“I saw Frank with his travelling bag. He’s leaving. He’s waiting for you and Harry.”
While I ran, I thought of all the crazy village dogs barking because of the snow that time on the mountain. I saw it in Peter’s eyes too. Maybe bruno had actually been barking because he knew the avalanche was coming. Maybe, like me, he’d felt canigou shift. In the end there was nothing even a mountain could do about keeping Frank, Harry and me together.
Even though Peter wasn’t supposed to know before me, I felt weak with being the last to hear. The last to know. The last to see Frank outside the guesthouse, his packed bag at his feet, his passport in his hands.
Half a meadow between us, the distance when Frank saw me too, when I couldn’t run any more, when he walked to meet me and to leave me, when what was about to happen couldn’t be stopped. I turned away, as if that would change things. I ran again to circle around him because I wanted to get to the house to go up to the roof where all the things were as I expected them to be.
Canigou.
Meadow, vineyards, plane trees, roofs.
Humming bird, the letter H, mermaid, donkey, cherries, knot.
All of the things I fitted together with.
When our paths crossed, and I couldn’t avoid what was heading towards me, I couldn’t find the words to say what I was feeling inside, wanting to hold on to Frank and hating him for leaving.
“Let me go,” he said softly, holding me tighter. “You gotta let me go.”
I shook my head and shook my head and the words didn’t come out and he didn’t apologise for anything and I couldn’t let go and what else could I say but, “No. Never.”
“Something in me I can’t change. I’m sorry, Hope.”
I pulled away and punched him but it was nowhere near hard enough to match what had hurt me, and I suddenly felt like he was holding me too tight, so I shouted, “Let me go!”
And he said, “I’ve been trying to,” and then he looked at my hands and I followed his eyes to his shirt, all screwed up in my fists, and I realised it wasn’t him holding on any more at all.
The muffled clop of hooves tripping across the gravel reminded me that it wasn’t just Frank who was going to leave. All the pairs would be broken, everything undone. How could he have let me get so close to Harry and th
en take him away too?
“Hope!” Frank called as I ran. “Talk to me!”
“Leave her, Frank,” Marianne said.
I ran from them both, up to the studio, because I knew Frank wouldn’t follow me there. I wanted to be with him. But I also wanted to be as far away from him as possible. I curled on the sofa but even the cushions wouldn’t soften the blow.
Soon, I felt my mother lie down and curl around my back. I slept so I didn’t have to feel anything, say anything. I felt her leave and come back again.
“He’s gone,” she whispered. Her words went into my ear and fell the whole way down my insides like a cold, heavy avalanche.
I slept so it would be dark and I’d forget who I was; that I was Hope Malone, aged twelve, with stupid ideas about mountains and cherries and people who fitted perfectly together. So I would feel less me. Less Hope. Hopeless.
My mother once told me that when she first flew over the snowy pyrenees mountains she thought they looked like a safe place high up for us to live and that’s what made her move us here. We’d be untouchable by anyone else, she’d said. No clocks or hurry, deadlines or commitments, or anything else other people might want her for. Although we were both born in england, my mother and I moved to france when I was eight. Artists do things all of a sudden like that.
I hadn’t really fitted in well anywhere, or had many friends, because we had moved quite a lot before that too, so I never got much chance. It was easier to be Hope Malone, alone, than always leaving people behind anyway. Here in France was the longest we’d stayed anywhere.
Most of the girls at my new school didn’t take much notice of me at first, as though I was just like one of the tourists on a coach trip to the vineyards and would be leaving again soon. I learned to speak French quickly and after a while they got used to me being there, but they still hardly noticed me. And then I had Frank and Harry and Peter and they were all the friends I wanted.
My mother began to sign her name on her paintings – Marianne M – with the strokes of the Ms like mountain peaks, as if Canigou had become part of her because she had looked at it for so long. I got that. We felt the same about the mountain.