Children of Light

by Lucy English

  The clocks are striking four and my mother comes in. She’s wearing something different and she smells of perfume. ‘You didn’t close the shutters,’ she says and looks out of the window. The men start to whistle.

  ‘Get dressed,’ she says and slams the shutters closed. She brushes my hair to try and make it go flat. Her hair is tied back in a scarf. We have a drink in the bar, lemon tea in glass cups. The dogs are lying in the shade and panting. My mother looks at her watch. It will be days before Daddy comes home.

  We go for a walk. There is only one walk, to the church. We walk in the shadows and the houses are like cliffs. A window opens and somebody flaps a duster. We walk up the steps, up the back of the rock.

  The church is at the top. There’s a small square in front of it with trees and benches but it’s boiling hot. The church is black and its door is open like a mouth waiting to swallow us.

  Inside it’s freezing. I can’t see anything even though the lights are on. We walk up to the altar and my mother starts to laugh. ‘God, it’s tacky in here.’ I’m sure you’re not supposed to laugh in churches. The altar is covered in statues of angels blowing trumpets, painted gold, and a huge picture of a man stripped to the waist being whipped. The blood is running into puddles on the floor. I hate this picture. It makes me feel sick, but it makes my mother laugh even more. I’m sure we’re going to get into trouble.

  ‘Can I have a franc?’ I ask her. ‘For the crib?’ The crib is at the back near the door. It’s under glass. It’s a model. When you put the franc in, the figures move. The three wise men and their camels start to walk to the stable. The shepherds, too, and the little sheep nod their heads. The star moves up and down. Villagers with baskets of bread pop out of their houses. A train steams out of a tunnel and down a hill and in the stable the baby Jesus waves his arm. I love it. There’s always something I didn’t see last time. It’s a grandpa wobbling on his stick and at his feet is a brown and white puppy. The model whirrs and creaks like an old clock. It’s all over too fast.

  The noise brings my mother over. She puts in one franc after another. The model makes her laugh even more than the picture. ‘A first-century train. Oh my God!’ The model creaks and creaks, I’m sure it’s going to break. The camels are jerking their legs much too fast. I’m sure the baby Jesus’s arm is going to fall off. I want to cry, but I don’t want to cry in front of my mother. We stare at the model until it finally stops with a big clunk. Then there is no sound in the church but me breathing and the door pulling on its hinges.

  There was a piece of land for sale in St Clair owned by the woman in the café. Jeanette was then recently married, it was Auxille who ran Le Sanglier. We waited for them, at the tables under the plane trees, my mother, dressed in pale green, with a patterned headscarf. She was yawning and fiddling with her sunglasses. Auxille came bustling out of the café.

  ‘Oh, the English architect, and this is your wife! Oh, she is so beautiful, she is so chic, and this is your daughter!’ She rushed up to me and put her bony hands around my cheeks. ‘Jeanu, Jeanu, come and see a little English girl.’

  Jeanette was curvy and healthy like a fresh peach. Her dress stuck to her curves. She had bare legs, brown but unshaven, and armpits full of dark black hair. ‘Oh, the little one!’ she exclaimed. ‘What beautiful skin, and such blue eyes, and such beautiful hair,’ and she too petted and fondled me, purring over me as if I were a kitten. I wasn’t used to such attention.

  ‘What a specimen. What a tart,’ my mother said in English.

  ‘You are such a lucky man to have such a fine family,’ said Auxille. Jeanette was now sitting next to me and patting my hand. I looked into her face. I decided I liked her. I felt comfortable with her like I used to with Pammy.

  Jeanette had dark brown eyes, darker than anyone I knew. ‘Do you like puppies?’ she asked. I could just understand her French.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘When we get back I shall show you six puppies, they were born yesterday.’ Her hand was rough but I didn’t mind.

  ‘And you will have more children,’ said Auxille. ‘Some fine sons, eh?’ She winked knowingly at my mother.

  ‘Heavens above,’ said my mother, smiling and nodding.

  We all went in the car, Jeanette and Auxille in the back giving conflicting directions and me squashed between them. We drove back down the hill. Jeanette and Auxille smelled of garlic, sweat and rose water. Their speech slipped into a language I didn’t understand. We drove up a bumpy track. ‘It’s here!’ ‘No, it’s not.’ ‘It’s further down, it’s by the farm.’ We stopped and we were nowhere. Terraces of olive trees and, behind, the woods going up the hill. ‘Now we walk,’ said Auxille, and we did, up a tiny path winding round the terraces. Herb bushes and brambles scratched my legs. My mother guarded her dress, but Jeanette and Auxille strode on.

  ‘My grandfather lived here for twenty years and only last month we buried him. He was a shepherd in the old days and used to take his sheep up to Alpine pastures in the summer …’

  We were in front of a tiny hut, like a gnome’s house, with a tiny chimney and a tiny window.

  ‘God, it’s a hovel!’ said my mother. ‘Did the old boy die here?’

  ‘Shh,’ said my father. ‘We could knock it down. It’s a good spot. The view is terrific.’

  ‘Voici les montagnes!’ said Auxille and we looked, towards the snowy peaks and the clouds resting on them. ‘This is where my grandfather used to live.’

  Inside there was hardly room for all of us. ‘It smells of rats,’ said my mother.

  ‘See, there is water,’ and Auxille turned on the tap.

  ‘There is a spring,’ said Jeanette. ‘You will never run out of water.’

  ‘Where is the spring,’ asked my father, ‘in the woods?’

  ‘No, at the Ferrou,’ said Auxille.

  ‘What’s a Ferrou?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Auxille and we walked round the back of the hut through the woods and towards the gully.

  ‘Good God,’ said my father and even my mother was quiet.

  I’m standing by the pool looking up at the rock and the split down the rock, towards the great stone basin full of clear water like glass. The sun shines above the rock and into the water, dazzling me. I feel shivery and strange. I feel very young and very old. The water and the sun are all I can see. I put my hand into the water, thinking it’s going to be hot, but it isn’t, it’s cold. It makes me shiver more.

  Saturday. Early evening

  Today I walked to Rochas. I wanted to get moving again. I felt so stiff and old. I remembered walking there with Gregor once, with Sanclair on his shoulders. It seemed to take no time at all. We had a drink in the hotel and then walked up to the church to show Sanclair the crib. He was about two then. Didn’t he love it, pressing his face to the glass and saying, ‘Monster!’ when the train popped out. A sunny day, don’t I remember it, blue sky and wild flowers everywhere. It must have been May. Today it took me two hours, and I shall write this again in case I ever think about walking there in the future. It takes two hours to walk to Rochas. A tough walk along a barely visible track. Deep in the woods. There’s no view and the last bit is past the sewage works and a rubbish tip. I don’t like Rochas, with its big ugly church and the houses snaking up to it. It has stayed decayed. St Clair was always pretty, sitting in the clouds, and Lieux with its fountains and houses of flowers is in every guide book of the region, but nobody goes to Rochas. I sat in the hotel café and drank Pernod, not outside because it had started to rain, but in the dingy bar room. Was that the same group of men that used to pester my mother? It could have been.

  Rochas is dirty. I’d forgotten that. It’s not a picturesque decay but one of neglect. The young people have gone away. There are houses for sale, but they won’t become holiday homes. The streets are always in shadow because of the rock. It was worse in the rain. I walked up to the church and felt like I did with my mother. The church was being renovated. It
was a shell of stone with cement-mixers and scaffolding at the front and that smell of cement that makes me think of so many things: the building site at The Heathers, my father relaying the floor at the Ferrou, Stephen laying the patio in his new house, the bull-dozers and diggers on the by-pass. As the rain poured, brown rivers of mud ran down the hill. The great doors had been taken away and the church looked more like a tomb than ever. I was thinking about my father.

  It was the last summer I spent with my parents in France and the one I remember most clearly. Do we all have a time we remember, that holiday, that special holiday when the world becomes magic and exciting and there we are, alone, exploring it? My parents bought the Ferrou but they didn’t stay there. They rented a flat in the village. It was the ground floor of a large house owned by the third best Blancs. A sun terrace ran the whole length of it. Grapes grew up the walls and on to the roof of the terrace. Green bitter grapes with large floppy leaves, I was told they would be ripe in October, but I ate them anyway. Below the house was a small swimming pool, which my mother sat by all day long and occasionally slipped into like a lazy snake. If I talked to her she smiled as if she had just woken from a blissful dream. The Blancs upstairs were an elderly couple who did all our washing and cooking with the energy of people who had been energetic all their lives. Only illness or death would stop them. I watched them as they hoed the garden, hung out the washing, and wondered what they thought of my mother whose biggest decision of the day was whether to wear a green or a blue bikini.

  My father spent most of the day at the Ferrou. He was relaying the floor of the hut, which was to become part of the new house, he imagined. This was the year of the new houses. The Heathers would be ready for us to move into when we returned. The plans for the Ferrou kept changing. The modern building became more traditional. The mock pool feature more natural, the terraces of olive trees more unaltered.

  I walked from the flat down to the Ferrou. Down the track and through the woods. At first I had left markers in case I got lost, white stones, twigs pointing like arrows, but now I knew the way I didn’t hurry. I had a picnic lunch for myself and Hugo in a little rucksack. I skipped and told myself stories. I hid under trees and waited to pounce on passers-by, but there were none. I put snail shells in my pockets. I listened to the cicadas in the woods and, far away, the churchbells.

  I’m running down the track because I’m late and Daddy hasn’t had his lunch yet. He sees me bouncing along the top terrace. I’m wearing red shorts and a white T-shirt now very dusty, but I like it, I feel wild and ferocious like a pirate. He’s waving at me. He’s dusty too, with trickles of sweat down his face, and his shirt is sticking to him. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I say, but he says, ‘Are you, my special girl? I didn’t notice.’ He has made a table out of a few planks. We sit on the ground and eat. He looks at the bottled water I’ve brought and laughs, ‘Here is the best water in the whole valley but they think I still need some in a bottle,’ and he pours the lot over his head. We both laugh. He says, ‘Go into the hut and fill it up with real water.’ I turn on the tap. The water comes out with a gurgle then a gush. I fill the bottle to the brim and take it to him. He drinks it. He says, ‘It tastes like nothing on earth,’ and he hands the bottle to me. I drink it as well and it’s true, it doesn’t taste like ordinary water because it has a taste, a strong taste, a bit chalky, a bit fizzy. I look at Daddy. His face is brown from the sun, not brown like Mummy but darker, and the freckles are getting bigger like mine do. His hair is dusty. His eyes are blue like the sky. He has a dirty mark on his cheek I don’t want to rub off. He shows me the floor he has done. One half is tiled, the other half is still mud. There’s a pile of wet cement outside and he must go back to work or it will get too hard. I don’t go back to the flat. I go through the woods to the pool. It’s a hot day but the water is still cold. Nobody is looking. I take off my clothes and slip into the water. It’s so cold it makes me gasp. The bottom is stone and falls away suddenly, so I have to swim fast and panicky. The water gets up my nose and I kick my legs. Then I stop panicking because I’m floating. The water is holding me up. I lie very still and stretch out my arms and legs. I’m floating on the pool. I put back my head and the water sings in my ears.

  It was there I learned about water, how it can hold you up, how it can fill you, how it can sink you. When I felt brave I held my breath and sank down with my eyes open. What did I see? What strange shifting half shapes did I see in the twilight of the few seconds I plunged under?

  It’s early evening now. There are no spectacular sunsets here because the sun sets behind the village. But it rises over the mountains. If I get up early enough I will catch the pink and the gold. I like the evenings. The valley becomes still. Did I imagine it or was that two swallows? It’s definitely becoming warmer. The sky is cloudy, holding in the heat, and for the moment there is no wind. For dinner I made omelettes with wild asparagus.

  Alan Crawford came to stay and my parents became busy with poolside drinks and barbecues. I wasn’t allowed down to the Ferrou on my own, so I sulked in the garden. Alan Crawford had sandy hair and eyelashes. His face was red. I didn’t like the way he smelled. I didn’t like the way he dived into the swimming pool with a splash. I didn’t like the way he and my father were always laughing. I didn’t like the way he called my mother ‘Viv’. I went to the village. I walked round the streets, looking up alleyways and over walls into gardens. I peered into the church. I hung around the square, kicking dust with my sandals. It was Jeanette’s dogs who saw me. She had kept two of the puppies, shaggy spaniels with high-pitched barks. They rushed up and started sniffing me.

  ‘Bas les pattes, bas les pattes!’ shouted Jeanette, but the dogs didn’t scare me. ‘Oh, the little English girl. Where are your parents?’

  ‘They are having a party,’ I said. ‘For grown-ups.’

  ‘Oh, the poor little one.’ She sat next to me and squeezed my hand. ‘Let us go and see Maman and see if she has any bonbons.’ She wore an apron dusty with flour. The dogs licked my knees and made me giggle. All of a sudden I felt happy.

  Auxille was sitting outside the café darning a sock. The café was empty. It was late afternoon. The air was droopy like the leaves on the plane trees. They gave me sweets wrapped in coloured paper, lemonade in a long glass and slabs of dark brown nougat. Jeanette brushed my hair and put a red ribbon in it.

  ‘When I was a girl,’ said Auxille, going back to her sock, ‘my grandfather told me the stories of the shepherds.’

  She told me stories all afternoon. Stories I’d never heard before, of princes, love-sick shepherds, saints with strange names, lost princesses and troubadours …

  There was once a troubadour called Avelard and he was the finest minstrel in the region. Princes would pay a fortune to have him sing at their courts. But Avelard belonged to nobody. He came and went as he pleased.

  There was a prince married to a beautiful princess and they lived in the grandest palace in the Maures. Now, this prince had the best of everything, the best food, the best wine, the best company at his tables, but he did not have Avelard. And this is what he wanted most of all. One day a thin-faced shabby man appeared at the palace gates and asked to sing at the prince’s tables. Grudgingly the guard let him in. After all, perhaps he could at least make the prince laugh. But there was something else about this man, his confidence, his sense of purpose, his piercing blue eyes, that also persuaded the guard.

  That night at the banquet the man sat with the servants, ate the poorest food and said nothing. There were plenty of entertainments, musicians, clowns, jugglers, story-tellers. At the end of the feast the prince said, ‘Where is this man who has asked to sing for us?’ and without a word the man stood up, took up his mandolin and started to sing.

  What silence fell over the banquet, for the man sang such sad songs, played such touching melodies that every person down to the meanest kitchen boy was moved.

  The prince and the princess were enthralled. They urged the trou
badour to sing on late into the night. Finally the prince said, ‘Please, please, tell me your name,’ and the man said, ‘I am Avelard.’

  Wasn’t the prince overjoyed! He showered the man with gifts and money, but all the man wanted was food and a quiet room. His insistence on simplicity unnerved the prince because he realised he could not buy this person. As the months passed, the reputation of the prince’s court grew. The finest minds, the most learned people were to be seen there, and at each banquet Avelard sang to them.

  Then one day the time came that the prince most dreaded. Avelard went to see him and said, ‘I have enjoyed your hospitality but now I must leave. I am a troubadour and I cannot stay in one place for long.’ The prince tried all he could: reason, offers of the most lavish gifts; but no, the man was insistent. He had to leave. This time it was the prince who was unnerved by Avelard’s steady gaze.

  That night the prince couldn’t sleep. He knew if Avelard left, his court would deteriorate, and for his pride and vanity he couldn’t let this happen. He devised a plan to keep Avelard in his palace.

  The next day, as Avelard tried to leave, the guard stopped him at the gates and said that the prince wanted to see him most urgently.

  ‘I can’t let you leave,’ said the prince, ‘until you have taught me all your songs.’ Now, the prince had his own army and the castle was a fortress on a hill. Avelard realised he was a prisoner.

  ‘I have no choice. I have to accept,’ he said.

  Weeks passed and Avelard tried to teach the prince. The prince was an efficient musician but he had not the understanding or the skill to sing like a troubadour. It would take months, possibly years, to teach the prince all he knew.