Children of Light

by Lucy English

  Macon’s car was not large and it jolted every time the gears were changed. Jeanette drove, talking to Macon the whole way, who didn’t listen but fiddled with the collar on his shirt and held on to the strap of the seat belt every time Jeanette hurled the vehicle round another corner. Auxille didn’t like cars. She closed her eyes and folded her hands on her lap, but no amount of discomfort could stop her talking.

  ‘… and I said to Madame Cabasson, your tarte aux pommes is certainly as good as the one I bought in the best bakery in Draguignan and half the price, but there, of course, they put it in a little box with a ribbon, a little present. I suggested this to Madame Cabasson especially in the summer when we have the tourists … and her niece Martine is to be married to a policeman … I offered to do the flowers … in May …’

  Mireille looked out of the window. The villages of St Clair and Lieux were already disappearing as the car sped round another bend towards the road to Draguignan.

  In Draguignan it was sunny and noticeably warmer than St Clair, where the wind still had a sharp edge. It was also crowded. Draguignan has no grand buildings of renown, remarkable museums or many distinguishing features, but the old centre was quaint and still had a mediaeval feel to it. Serious attempts had been made to modernise the town, including paving over one of the main streets, putting in smart new lighting and restoring the façades of some of the old houses. But it remained provincial, attracting people from the outlying villages.

  The market was at the far end of town around some gardens. Pots and pans, leatherwork, African goods, cheap dresses, cheap shoes. Jeanette and Auxille held each other’s arms and inspected every item on every stall, comparing prices and tutting to each other. Macon had already sloped away to a nearby bar. It was going to be a long day. ‘What do you think?’ asked Jeanette, holding up a black and white spotty silky dress to her ample bosom.

  ‘I’m not sure of the quality,’ said Auxille, examining the hem. The stallholder reassured her it was of the finest quality and drew their attention to other ones, pink and white, red and white, orange and white, green and white.

  ‘I like the green,’ said Jeanette to Mireille. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’m going to buy a cannise. Shall I meet you in an hour?’

  ‘Make it two,’ said Auxille. ‘In the bar with Macon.’

  Away from the women she explored the lower end of the market, which sold more practical things like hedge-clippers, buckets, nails and, bizarrely, sausages and fresh country salami. Leading up one street was a flower and plant market. She could easily have spent the rest of the day among the oleanders, wistarias, lilacs and rose bushes. Whole bay trees in terracotta pots. Lavender plants. Orange trees, and buckets and buckets of early mimosa. Two gypsy women with faces like pickled walnuts and teeth full of gold were selling bunches of wild asparagus.

  Towards lunchtime the market filled up with younger people and became more rowdy. Music was turned up and the stallholders shouted out their bargains. Groups of young girls identically dressed in tight tops and jeans tried on cheap jewellery and looked as bored as they could. Young men watched them from the gardens, smoking and leaning on their motorbikes. Jeanette and Auxille were sitting outside at a table. Macon was inside, up against the bar, where in France the drinks are cheaper.

  ‘The dresses would fall to pieces. I could make her something for half the price,’ said Auxille.

  They were drinking coffee and eating sugared waffles out of a bag.

  ‘But look at this. What do you think?’ Jeanette unwrapped a large painting. It was an idealised Alpine scene complete with mountain goat and a patch of Alpine flowers. ‘To go over our fireplace. Maman saw it. Now, her mother’s father was a shepherd who used to go to the high pastures every June.’

  Mireille thought it was hideous but Auxille didn’t wait for her answer. ‘And what have you bought?’ she asked, having a good look at Mireille’s shopping. ‘A hunting knife? A cooking pot? A blanket? Nothing to wear?’

  ‘And this,’ said Mireille, and put a lavender plant on the table. She also had the cannise, rolled up like a carpet.

  ‘Maman, what does she need clothes for? She lives in a hut,’ said Jeanette.

  On the way home Jeanette insisted that Mireille stay with them for the whole weekend and whatever protest Mireille put up about orchids or not having enough decent clothes was loudly quashed. In the end she agreed. Jeanette and Auxille responded with the glee of two spiders finding a large fly in their web. Even Macon found the idea entertaining. They didn’t have many guests. Surely this was a reason to celebrate.

  The Blancs lived in a flat above the café. In St Clair the old houses were divided up in strange ways, like interlocking puzzles. People’s kitchens jutted into other people’s bedrooms and, once inside, it was difficult to make out who or where the neighbours were. The Blancs’ flat was no exception. The main living area contained the dining table, the sofa and the television. It overlooked the square and was the most pleasant room, although it was small and overstuffed with furniture. A sideboard was positively littered with photographs of nephews and nieces, silk flowers and china ornaments. There was a massive old fireplace surrounded by brown glazed tiles. It was never used as a fireplace, but Jeanette kept her copper cooking pans hanging there. They were never used either, but had once belonged to Auxille’s mother. A small patch of old Provence among the spanking new. The kitchen, at the back, seemed to be cut into the rock and had no natural light. A huge beam ran across the ceiling and looked as if it could carry the weight of three houses, not one. The bedrooms were down winding stairs, Jeanette and Macon’s with a large bed, a quilted shiny pink bedspread and a brown tiled floor, Auxille’s no larger than a cupboard, with one tiny window and an airless lavender smell of old woman. Mireille was to sleep on the sofa, which, when Macon tugged it enough, creaked itself into a bed. During the day the Blancs lived in the café. It was only at night they sat upstairs.

  Macon, in front of the television, was nodding into a post-dinner stupor. Auxille and Jeanette washing up, both talking loudly about unconnected topics and Mireille straining to hear them above the noise of the television. Outside young men shouted to each other across the square. A dog started barking, then another, then another. Macon’s old hound momentarily twitched its ears.

  On Easter Sunday they went to church. Jeanette dressed up in twice as much jewellery as when she went to market. Auxille in black, Macon in a suit, and Mireille with backache and a headache. The church was cold and badly lit. It had been recently painted but still managed to look faded and crumbling. Large ugly paintings of gesticulating saints hung above the side altars. In a chapel the statue of the Virgin Mary held a bright pink Jesus in front of a wall crammed with votive paintings depicting various tiny miracles. A runaway cart that didn’t squash anybody. A wheel falling off another and nobody hurt. A baby in a wooden cot and its equally wooden mother praying to the statue in the sky. 1808. 1854. 1873. 1902. Mireille read the dates. The priest, youngish and vigorous, was doing his best to rouse the congregation with his sermon, but they were there, he knew, only to look at each other and gossip afterwards. 1865. 1918. Plenty of those. A soldier returning up a track to be greeted by his family. 1926. 1935. But whoever had painted that one still hadn’t learned about perspective. The last one was 1945 and showed the village decked out with flags. They were in the middle of the offertory now. Jeanette was craning her neck to see who had made it to church and who hadn’t. Macon was nearly asleep. Auxille was the only one who was holy, whispering through her rosary prayers with a look of detached peace on her face. Mireille looked at the paintings again and one caught her eye. The rock at the Ferrou, badly painted but recognisable by the black split down it. The sun above it and underneath the words: ‘Thank you. 1942.’ Thank you for what? She would ask Auxille.

  But after mass there was no time for questions. Jeanette introduced Mireille to the rest of the villagers, who stayed outside the church shaking hands with the priest and
complaining about each other. She described Mireille variously as ‘an expert on orchids’, ‘a journalist’ and ‘the daughter of the famous British architect’. Having a guest had given Jeanette an exalted sense of status, and, despite her orange and pink dress, bare legs and those red shoes, she still managed to look like an important guest at a garden party.

  Then it was lunch! And that was going to take all afternoon. A gigot of lamb, hard-boiled eggs and a salade sauvage. Local red wine, coarse but not unpalatable, and Macon even turned the television off. They ate in the closed café, the tables pushed together and covered with the best linen.

  ‘… and did you see Madame Cabasson’s niece …’ said Jeanette, serving up. ‘Pink cheeked, and how plump she looks. I’m sure she’s pregnant.’

  ‘And he’s a policeman,’ said Auxille.

  ‘And wasn’t that the Villeneuve’s youngest daughter near the back in green with a smart hat? She must be getting married soon but she will get married in Paris for sure. Did I hear she became a lawyer? Mireille, more salad, it’s good for the digestion.’

  ‘Was that picture of the Ferrou given by Old Man Henri?’ asked Mireille, but neither Jeanette nor Auxille could remember such a picture. The church fittings were not the reason why they went there.

  ‘During the war there were many miracles,’ said Jeanette. ‘Our Lady spared many lives,’ and she blessed herself to revere this fact.

  ‘But not your father’s,’ said Macon into his wine glass. ‘Your parents were married five years before they had you. Now that is a miracle.’

  ‘Hold your tongue on this holy day!’ snapped Jeanette, but Auxille hadn’t heard. She was telling Mireille about her grandfather. ‘Old Man Henri was a shepherd from the Maures and every year he used to take the sheep up to the Alpine pastures.’ She looked fondly at the new painting now balanced above the fireplace. ‘But one year he was resting with the flock near the river at Lieux and a village girl came down to wash the clothes (they did that then), and what a picture she was, dark hair, rosy cheeks, a true Provençal, and just fifteen …’

  Mireille had heard this story before and so had Jeanette and Macon, hundreds of times.

  ‘That’s the carpet I bought with your mother’s money,’ said Jeanette, pointing to a patterned rug on the floor. ‘Your mother, I remember her so well. What a lady. Très gentille. Très sympa. Très élégante …’

  ‘Of course he had to give up being a shepherd, because my grandmother’s father said he would never let his daughter be married to one … he became a carpenter but he liked the open air too much, he walked for hours in the hills … but when she died during the war, an appendix complication and they couldn’t get a doctor, he wouldn’t live in the village again. He bought the land at the Ferrou and lived like a hermit.’

  ‘Of course, if they had built that house, that mansion, you might have married a French boy, a cousin of the Villeneuves’, but that wasn’t to be and now the Ferrou is a wilderness. Who can find it? It is forgotten.’ She was becoming poetic.

  ‘… and he lived like a hermit until he died and he didn’t want company, and he didn’t want anybody to visit him, but I did sometimes with some goat’s cheese and anchovies in season …’

  Mireille listened to both of them. Perhaps the painting made sense now. Thank you for peace and quiet. Thank you for a life away from the rattle of the village. Thank you.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wednesday. Afternoon

  I didn’t get back home until Easter Monday and even then Jeanette was pressurising me to stay another night. But I couldn’t. I wanted to get back here. I love the smell of this place, wet earth and plaster and always the pine trees. Opening the door is like smelling a lover when you first embrace him. At Jeanette’s I could hardly sleep. The room was so stuffy and the bed wobbled when I turned over. God! Am I so hardy again I need to sleep on wooden planks with a hefty draught under the door? I like Jeanette and Auxille and even Macon. They drive me nuts, but I know they are honest and kind and I appreciate it. I’m writing this in bed because when I got back I was sick. I’ve had a bad stomach since. I wasn’t used to all that food. It seems a shame that Auxille’s cooking should land up so rapidly in the pit in the woods. I didn’t want it that way. I wanted to feel that their generosity could at least linger in my body and do me good. I’m now on a diet of bread and a herbal brew I made out of lime-flower tea with lemon and celery leaves. It’s pretty revolting. I’ve been too ill to saw up wood and the hut has become cold again. I must remember not to leave here for too long because once the stove goes out the temperature drops rapidly. I want it to get warmer outside because then I can bathe in the Ferrou. I’m longing to do this. Even in the hottest summer the water makes me gasp. I’m thinking about Old Man Henri. He lived here until he died. Is that what’s going to happen to me? I have made no plans to do anything else. I’m thinking about history now. Every place has a history. Every person has a history and this place is part of my history and I am a part of this place, with Henri and before him with whoever was the first person who stood by the Ferrou and touched the water. It’s a history impossible to trace, but I feel part of the line when I stand there. And I felt it when I was nine.

  My parents were bored with the coast. The phenomena of St Tropez did not interest them. My mother would never have been seen dead in bare feet, hipster jeans and a shirt tied in a knot to show off her midriff. She called them ‘dirty bohemians’ and Brigitte Bardot was a ‘silly, dirty bohemian’. I think it was more that they realised they were not young any more. Hugo Devereux, the brilliant young architect, and his beautiful wife. They believed this even though they were in their thirties. They believed it at their parties in Bath. They believed it when The Heathers was being built. But that summer they couldn’t believe it because the young had all gone to a little fishing village and were hanging out on the beach.

  We went inland in a hired car. It started out as day trips with a picnic packed by the hotel. I had only seen fashionable resorts and I thought all of France was like that. Hotels with shutters. Large houses with tiered gardens and swimming pools. All French people were like my father’s clients, who were mostly British anyway, with skin the colour of polished pine and manners as well tailored as their clothes. But we went inland to tumbledown villages perched on the tops of hills, where old women wore black and shuffled by in worn-down espadrilles. A man in navy workclothes and a peaked hat was followed by a small dog. Where the bars were smoky and the only food they served was croque monsieur. My mother hated it. She fanned herself with the map. She sat in the car for the picnic because of the ants. She remained conspicuous, with her pastel clothes, golden blonde hair and tiny frame, where all the other women were sturdy, busty in cheap floral dresses. My father loved it. He was an architect and he loved buildings. Squashed-up stone houses. Dark cavernous churches. Forgotten eighteenth-century mansions with crumbling façades and that shabby, shabby grandeur that’s impossible to imitate. It was his idea to go further north.

  I remember this journey in fragments. It was August and although the heat wasn’t as stifling as it was by the coast there were no swimming pools to dip into. The car was an oven and I was a currant bun cooking on the back seat. Wherever we stopped was dry. Even the leaves on the trees were dry and the grass snapped when I stood on it. The ants marched over my shoes and up my legs. The ground smelled strong and aromatic. There were pine trees with huge cones and I collected them. I kept them on the back seat and poked my fingers in between their smooth wooden spires. We drove through canyons and gorges. Past cliffs of gnarled grey rock. Past huge boulders. Past ravines that fell to fast rivers hundreds of feet below. Round scary hairpin bends and up hills to small towns, dusty in the evenings. The smell of cooking filling up the streets. The golden light making the fronts of houses look like gilded books. The hotels were empty. Big uncomfortable beds with stiff white sheets. Huge creaking furniture and shutters with heavy iron clasps.

  We’re in Rochas. It’s a vill
age on a hill where everything is on a hill. We’re staying in the only hotel. It’s a flat building with sixteen windows. I’ve counted them. The bar downstairs opens on to a square with a fountain. The fountain doesn’t gush but trickles water out of four spouts into a basin thickly green with weed. Do not drink this water, it says. Eau non potable. But I did yesterday and now I wonder if I will get ill. The chairs and tables are under a blue and white canopy and that is where my mother is sitting, reading Vogue and drinking Pernod. My father is not here. He is looking at land because now they want to buy some land and build a holiday home so we won’t have to stay in hotels. He’s been away nearly all week. There is one shop that sells postcards and ice creams. There’s another that sells bread and cakes, but it’s only open in the morning and the afternoon. Rochas is built on a rock. The houses are on one side and the rock is on the other. The streets go round and round like a maze. People hang washing out of their windows and lines go right across the street.

  They have windows full of geraniums and canaries in cages. Everything seems to be up in the air. On the ground hot dogs flick their tails in puddles of water from the washing.

  I want my father to come back. I have breakfast with my mother, hot chocolate and croissants, then we sit in the square. She reads her magazine. I play jacks and look at the fountain. She drinks Pernod, which smells like aniseed. The men in the bar look at her but she doesn’t look back. She smokes a menthol cigarette and drinks more Pernod. We have lunch, a toasted sandwich, and my mother doesn’t eat hers. She says the sun takes away her appetite. Then we have a siesta because the sun gives her a headache. I stay in my room and draw pictures. I can’t sleep. I open the shutters. There’s an iron rail across the window and I lean on it. The men in the bar look up at me now. I go back to bed. The bed’s all white. The sheets are the sea and my finger is a boat sailing up and down it. It’s getting hot because I left the shutters open. I will get told off.