Children of Light

by Lucy English

  She put her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh Mireille, you’re so tall. You’re so like Hugo!’ and she burst into tears.

  We sat in the sitting room. The view hadn’t changed at all. Not one tree. ‘I’m sorry I ran away,’ I said and I was crying too.

  ‘It was all my fault,’ said my mother. ‘After Hugo died, it was so awful … I just couldn’t … I just couldn’t …’ and her tears fell on to her silk blouse like raindrops. She was still elegant, she would be that until the day she died, but the spike and the steel in her that had hurt me so much had crumbled. ‘When you left, it was like the end of the world …’ she sobbed. ‘There was nobody at all … The Costellos have been very good to me.’ She dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. I had expected her to slice me up with some curt remark about my peasant skirt or my walking boots, but she was squeezing my hand and gazing at me with wet eyes. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve prayed for you so many times. How long can you stay? I’ve made up a bed for you in your old room …’ I was the object of my mother’s affections. It was strange and overwhelming.

  ‘And where is your baby?’ she asked, composing herself slightly.

  ‘He’s asleep in the van.’ I went to get him. Sanclair was wrapped up in a red blanket. I shook him gently. ‘We’re here,’ I said, ‘at Grandma’s.’

  He woke up and blinked, then he smiled, jumped up and looked out of the window. ‘Is this the house? It’s so long and flat. Does Grandmère milk goats like my other grandmère? Will I sleep in a big bed like at the château?’ I held his hand and we walked into the house.

  My mother was standing by the window. She had made an attempt to tidy herself. With the light behind her she looked like my remembered mother, stiff and proud and poised and on edge. When she saw Sanclair she exclaimed, ‘Oh, he’s not a baby, he’s a little boy!’ and for a moment I thought she was going to rush forward and hug him.

  Sanclair walked right up to her and looked her up and down. ‘Are you my grandmère?’ he said in French. ‘You don’t look like a grandmère. Have you got presents for me?’ Then he saw the view out of the window. ‘Is that your farm? It’s so big, and you’ve got cows, can I help you milk them, and I can make cheese. My mama and me, we sing and when we sing you must give us money. Shall we sing for you now?’ He pressed his nose to the window ‘Your farm is very big,’ he said thoughtfully.

  I was looking at Vivienne. I thought she would be horrified by his manners, but across her face was the same enraptured expression she used to reserve for my father. Seeing it again made me feel peculiar, like I was shrinking and disappearing to a far corner of the room.

  My mother sat on the sofa. ‘Sit next to me,’ she said to Sanclair, in French, and he did, as fearless as he could be, and how much I loved him then.

  ‘I had to leave Dou-dou behind, you can’t have dogs in England. But when I get back I’ll take him hunting. At the château I had a huge bed and I went swimming every day. I can jump in backwards. Papa went with the château people to India and that’s much further away than England, it’s the other side of the mountains. India’s hot all the time, so hot even in the night …’

  My mother very gently stroked Sanclair’s hair as if she had forgotten how to be tender. He didn’t stop talking, he was used to women fussing over him. I watched them. I felt tearful and emotional, not just because Sanclair had completely won my mother over but because I knew, from then on, I would never be her favourite.

  It’s later and we’re sitting on the patio as the autumn day becomes a translucent crystal evening. A mist is forming over the fields and there’s a smell of wet and water coming up from the canal. The sky has turned from blue to pink to almost greeny blue. I’m playing my accordion and singing the old songs, singing down into the river valley and up the canal to where I first met Gregor, to where it all started. Sanclair is singing too, he hasn’t got his drum, so he’s clapping his hands, and my mother wrapped up in a travel rug is tapping her elegant foot. And I’m singing, hoping that somewhere on the other side of the world, Gregor is singing too.

  I wake up in my little room at The Heathers to the sound of the fountain. Early morning and I must get up soon and go to school, but surely that’s not right, surely I’ve done all that. And I was dreaming I lived at La Ferrou and I had a baby, and it felt so real, but if it was, then why am I here? I look round the room and it’s all the same. I’m seventeen again and I’ve got to get up and if I’m late my mother will snap at me. Then the door opens and Sanclair creeps in, half asleep, and I remember it all. I’m so relieved I start to cry and Sanclair says, ‘I want Papa,’ and he starts to cry too. He gets into my bed and we sniff and sob over each other and I say comforting things like, ‘When we go back, Papa will be there, and he’ll be by the hut waving at us, and after supper he can tell us about India and we’ll tell him we went to England and stayed in Grandmère’s white house, and she gave us chocolate cake and showed us photographs of Maman as a baby, and Dou-dou will be there when we get back, and he’ll be so big he’ll jump up and knock you over …’ Sanclair is nearly asleep and so am I, listening to the fountain trickling outside the window.

  When I think of The Heathers I always feel sad. It’s the place of disappointments. The happy family that never was. The mother and daughter who could never talk to each other. The short stay that turned into half a lifetime. I stayed twenty-one years in Bath.

  Sanclair got used to it. There was so much to learn about. Mud on carpets, toothbrushes, how showers worked, English winters, buses, clean clothes, haircuts, knives and forks, keeping quiet in church and speaking English all the time, except sometimes to me the last bits of French. My mother explained things to him, patiently, never once raising her voice like she used to with me.

  No, Sanclair, we don’t wear our gumboots in the sitting room because of the mud.’

  ‘Can’t you brush it away like Maman does in our hut?’

  ‘No, Sanclair, mud doesn’t brush off carpets … Let me show you where you can leave your boots. On a piece of newspaper in the kitchen.’

  My mother had lost her harshness, but it was Sanclair who transformed her into a loving being and I suppose that was his gift. Everybody loves Sanclair. I have to remember this when I’ve been so angry with him. Everybody loves him. He cares about them too, but nobody gets much time. He does remind me of Gregor.

  At The Heathers I wrote to Gregor. I said we would stay there until he returned and he wrote back, the first of many letters. How wonderful the ashram was, how remarkable the Baba was, how beautiful that part of India. His love to me, his love to Sanclair. I’ve kept every single one and they’re in a drawer at The Heathers. One day I will give them to Stephen. The first few I read out to Sanclair, but by Christmas he was so absorbed with Christmas trees, presents and candles, and the shops lit up, Papa in India was a faraway concept.

  It was strange to be back in Bath. Sometimes it felt as if I’d never been away, but sometimes it felt I had been away for a hundred years and there was nothing anymore I could connect to. My mother had become a Catholic, and if anything her life was even smaller than I remembered. She took cuttings of her garden plants for the church shop. She went to a prayer evening at the Costellos’ on Thursdays. She had tea in the Pump Room on Tuesdays. She helped in the church shop on Fridays. She went to church on Sunday. I went too, not because I’m a Christian but because I liked to sing. The snootier members of the congregation treated me with cold politeness. I had left my mother to disintegrate in her own misery and I was never forgiven, but the Costellos accepted me.

  The Costellos were disturbingly unaltered. They had had one more child in my absence, a last little boy called Dermot, and he was the same age as Sanclair and, like Sanclair, immensely spoilt, but he was as tearful as Sanclair was fearless. We went to tea there. Dermot had every toy under the sun. It was Star Wars then and he had two spaceships and all the figures. Sanclair in France had played with sticks and shells. I think Dermot was scared of him. Derm
ot was a head shorter than Sanclair. He was pale and thin. He cried if he didn’t get his own way, which wasn’t very often, and was frightened of Sanclair trying to get him to jump down the stairs. Mr Costello called Sanclair the Sun King and recited poetry at him, which made him shriek with laughter, and Mrs Costello gave us scones and soda bread and fruit cake until we were so full we couldn’t eat dinner if we tried. My mother sat there in her little suit as if she were in a tearoom and not the Costellos’ dirty kitchen with washing hanging up near the ceiling and the inevitable stew bubbling on the cooker.

  One girl was at art school. Fenula was a model. Two were working as teachers. The boys and the younger girls were all doing well at school and Caitlin was just married. She had never left Bath. She had trained to be an English teacher but before her first job she’d met Simon. They had got married in June. It was Caitlin I was most embarrassed to see because I had left her to pass on the news of my disappearance. She had been blamed for not telling anybody sooner. She was my friend and I had abandoned her. I went with Sanclair to visit her and her husband. They lived in a new house near Combe Down. Caitlin was just pregnant. Her appearance hadn’t changed but her house was full of spanking new everythings she had to show me. New curtains, washing machine, a fitted kitchen, carpets throughout. She still had the same soft voice. I used to talk about art and poetry with her, but now she was showing me the inside of her fitted wardrobe. Sanclair jumped on the beds and ran round the house shouting, ‘I’m Darth Vader!’ He dropped most of his lunch on the floor and showed her how he could do a double somersault. Caitlin had been brought up with rowdy children but not in her house. She started to feel queasy and had to lie on the sofa, so Sanclair sang her a song to make her feel better. At one point when everything was quiet she said to me, ‘Mireille, why did you run away, were you really that unhappy?’ and I saw a glimmer of the Caitlin I used to know, but what could I say that she would understand? She had never wanted to go anywhere, so I just said, ‘It was impulsive. I never meant to hurt anybody.’ I hoped she would understand that.

  Simon came home from work. His opening line was, ‘So, you’re the hippy.’ He barraged me with questions like, what was my moral stance about marriage? and was I ashamed to have an illegitimate child? and was it right for me to be living off my mother when I had caused her so much distress? and was a liberal upbringing of children a complete mistake? At that point it did look like it because Simon said to Sanclair, ‘Shh, you be quiet when grown-ups are talking,’ and he said, ‘Why? Grown-ups don’t say anything interesting,’ and sat on the floor and glared at Simon. Simon was the assistant manager of a bank. He was used to getting more respect. Caitlin started to feel worse and Simon said perhaps she ought to eat something because in pregnancy it was important to be well nourished, and after this we left. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing a lot of Caitlin.

  I’m glad now I did go back to Bath. The things I had found so awful when I was seventeen I realised weren’t so awful. They were just normal. Normal people. Little lives. Even my mother. If I’d never gone back I think she would have stayed a monster in my mind, but now I saw her as somebody weak. She was vain and petty and insecure and proud and a snob, but she wasn’t a tyrant. I could see how much she needed people. She was generous and accommodating to us. She didn’t want us to go. I could see why. She was lonely.

  Several times she asked me, ‘Why did you run away? You had everything here.’ She accepted she had been an inadequate mother but to her, material stability was as important as human relationships. When I described to her travelling with Gregor and living in the hut she asked questions like, ‘Where did you wash?’ She wasn’t angry that we had been at La Ferrou, and that surprised me because I thought she would be. She said, ‘I think Hugo would have liked you to be there. He loved that place …’ and she went very quiet. La Ferrou was the future she never had. I suppose we were her future.

  My mother with her wound-up hair, her elegant clothes, her cigarettes, her television, her religion. These were all props distracting her from her great big emptiness. I know this feeling. The feeling of being hollow, of being a vacuum. I felt this when I moved back to Bath. Clothes I didn’t want to wear, a life that didn’t fit me anymore. Part of me didn’t want to go back to France. I could see we had outgrown the little hut but I didn’t know what the next step was. I was waiting for Gregor.

  Just before Christmas he wrote to me, the longest and most informative letter he has ever written. Badouin had gone back to France with Shula. Shula had decided she was a Christian after all. Their time in India had been a holiday, an interlude, nothing more. Julian had got dysentery, spent some time in hospital and had been flown home at his father’s expense. He had hated India. The heat, the flies, the poverty distressed him. But something had happened to him, said Gregor. After he came out of hospital he went to one of the Baba’s lectures, which he had previously refused to do, preferring to hang around with prostitutes smoking hashish. Julian had fallen out with Miriam. She called him a parasite, probably an accurate description, and his lifestyle was getting on everybody’s nerves. But when he was ill, said Gregor, he thought he was going to die and it scared him. ‘When he went to the Baba he was like a little boy going to his father, and after the lecture we went and knelt in front of the Baba and he blessed us, and the Baba looked at Julian, who was still weak and said to him, “Go home now, young man, back to your farm.”’ Gregor thought this was fantastic. Go home back to your farm. Did the Baba really know that Julian’s father was a pig-farmer? It sounded like good sense. It sounded like a metaphor, go back to nature, look after yourself. Gregor thought it was the most outstanding thing he had ever witnessed and it convinced him that the Baba was indeed a spiritual teacher of the highest order. And Julian, too ill to be cynical, did as he was told for once and went back to Norfolk. When I read this it made me laugh. The prodigal son and I was the prodigal daughter. Just a few months ago we had been the decadent lords, the sex-gods, drunk bodies stuck to each other, as pagan and careless as satyrs on a frieze, and now we were back with our parents, saying, ‘Look after me, love me, forgive me.’ I thought about Julian then, thin and weak, I couldn’t imagine how he could be thinner, languishing in his velvet suit in front of a log fire. Wondering what on earth to do next. I wanted to write to him but I knew I had been nothing for him, an experiment, an experience and he had been the same for me.

  Bored Julian. He got into the organic movement. He took over his father’s farm and now runs it as a show-case for these methods. He’s become a spokesperson for organic farming and I’ve heard him on the radio several times. He was featured in a Sunday newspaper. He still looks rakish. He wears country-gentleman clothes, waistcoats and pocket watches. He has the same voice, fluid and velvety like a brandy chocolate pudding, and the same blue, blue eyes. He’s married now with children. I wonder if he hires pretty farm girls and makes suggestive comments to them behind the compost. I’m sure he does.

  At the end of Gregor’s letter he said he was so impressed with the Baba he was going to stay with Miriam and take the blessing. During this time he was allowed no communication with the outside world, so this was the last letter for the next three months. He hoped I was well. I was to tell Sanclair his daddy still loved him. I read this letter after breakfast. There was a Christmas tree in the sitting room. Sanclair had helped Vivienne make the decorations. Little silver stars and golden moons. They had strung up paper chains across the room and all sorts of other baubles I knew my mother thought ‘terribly vulgar’, but she wanted Sanclair to enjoy himself. They were playing snap. She had been showing him new games in an attempt to keep him indoors because he preferred to be in the garden all day whatever the weather. It distressed her to see him soaking wet and muddy.

  ‘So how is your boyfriend?’ asked Vivienne. She referred to him as if he were a reckless youth and not a man capable of knowing his own mind.

  ‘Snap!’ shouted Sanclair. ‘Snap! You didn’t see it!’ He was wearing all new c
lothes and he had a new haircut, but his hair was still white blond and shining in the light. I wanted to tell him first. ‘Papa’s not coming back just yet.’ I said to him in French. He always listened when I spoke to him in French. ‘He’s staying in India for another three months.’

  I hoped he wouldn’t ask me, ‘What are we going to do?’ because I didn’t know. I had told Vivienne we would be leaving after Christmas. Sanclair looked at me. He was waiting for more information, but Vivienne had understood. ‘Mireille, what are you going to do?’ she said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’ she asked quickly, as if she had rehearsed this answer.

  ‘Can we, can we?’ said Sanclair.

  ‘I think we should think about it a bit longer …’ I said.

  My mother did think about it for a bit longer, two minutes. Then she said, ‘Well, of course you can stay here another three months, but, Mireille, I think you’ll have to get a job.’

  Sanclair picked up the pack of cards and was looking through them. He had his back to me. ‘Why doesn’t Papa want to come back?’

  The clock has just struck four. My bus will be here in twenty minutes. That’s just enough time for another coffee. The waiter has been watching me all afternoon. He’s lean and dark, a young man with an insolent scowl. Perhaps he thinks I’m a rich American. Another time and I would be flattered, but I feel immune to the attentions of young men.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sunday 22nd May. After lunch

  Hammock time. I didn’t want to do anything today but enjoy the sunshine. This morning I picked herbs on the rock rose terrace and then had lunch. The valley is unusually quiet for a Sunday. Perhaps the people from the farm have gone visiting, I’ve not heard a sound.

  Last night I was thinking about Bath and that winter. We were heading into the depths of a British winter and I’m still thinking about it, which is odd because here I am heading towards a southern French summer. Hammocks, sundresses, sandals and long drinks of lemonade, but I’m thinking about frost, woolly jumpers and gumboots. Hot chocolate last thing at night and porridge for breakfast. The canal freezing over and a light dusting of snow over the garden at The Heathers. Snow, sleet, slush, mud …