Children of Light

by Lucy English

  I sold the van. I felt awful about doing it because it was Gregor’s home, but I had no money. It wasn’t worth much. When the man towed it away I cried because I had grown up in that little yellow van and Sanclair cried too, possibly because I was crying but also that was the last bit of his daddy. He didn’t talk much about Gregor. He stopped asking me if I had any letters and if I ever mentioned him he would look at me impatiently until I changed the subject. Funny little boy, did you think your papa had abandoned you? I felt he had abandoned me.

  I got a job. I worked in a pub up Walcot Street. I worked some lunchtimes and most evenings and my mother looked after Sanclair. I swapped my peasant skirts and bohemian blouses for jumpers and jeans. I was twenty-three. I looked no different from any other hippy-type young girl. There was folk music in the pub on Fridays and sometimes I sang and played my accordion. I stopped singing the French songs because nobody could understand them but learned ballads and West Country tunes. All the troubadours travelled incognito, I told myself.

  Avelard dressed as a beggar and the princess dressed as a man and I was pretending to be a local barmaid, but I wasn’t, I was a troubadour looking for the truth. Travelling in my mind and in my heart, like Gregor.

  Even now when people start talking about what they did at college, or their teenage years, I keep very quiet. There’s a pool of experience I never swam in. There are no points of reference. Television programmes, pop groups, films. Even when I’m with people who have had children what can I say? Sanclair was brought up in the wild, he played outdoors in the rain, I cannot tell you what brand of nappies I bought. I know what an exile feels like, except I was an exile in my own country. It’s only here that I feel truly at home, but for everybody else, I’m the outsider.

  If it had been just me I would have come back here with or without Gregor, but it wasn’t just me. There was Sanclair. Five months is a long time for a little boy. Gregor’s next letter came at the end of March. It was a short letter on the thinnest of air mail paper. It said, ‘I have received the blessing. I know my path. I am to stay here and write letters for the Baba. You must understand how happy I am becoming. When you are ready, come to see me.’

  When I read this I couldn’t speak. I ran out of the house and down the lawn. My mother and Sanclair were in the garden looking at the daffodils. I ran over the bridge and up the canal. I was crying, I was so angry. The countryside was just coming to life again but I was so angry I could have blasted the lot away to its roots. I got as far as the Widcombe pond and I wanted Gregor to be there so I could shout at him, ‘Why did you let me go with you? Why didn’t you leave me alone?’ but there was nothing there except water and the bushes and the bushes reflected in the water and the depth of the water itself.

  I’m walking back to the house and I’m looking at it from the other side of the bridge. From down here it’s long and flat and all windows. I wish I hadn’t sold the van because now I want to jump in it and drive away, and the money I get from working isn’t enough to go anywhere as distant as India.

  Running down the garden comes Sanclair in his gumboots. He’s got a trick, he can slide down the last bit of garden, and here he comes, shouting, ‘Wayhey!’ He jumps on his mud slide and lands up right near the bottom of the bridge. ‘Did you see that, did you see that?’ he shouts to anybody. He stands up and sees me. ‘Mum, did you see that?’ We are standing on different sides of the bridge. ‘Grandma’s making biscuits, then we’re going to the shops. Aren’t you going to work today?’

  He’s my son and he’s happy here, I have to remember that. I cross the bridge to meet him.

  I’m on the hammock in my sundress and sandals, rocking it with one foot. When I was twenty-three I thought my life had stopped, but I had felt that when I was ten. I knew what to do. You just bury yourself. It was easy to be buried at The Heathers. I don’t feel like that now, I feel everything has just started. I’m going onward not backwards. I’m writing this because writing this is going onwards.

  It was easy living at The Heathers. My mother was delighted for us to stay indefinitely. I said we would eventually get our own place when I’d saved up enough money, but it was difficult to get to that stage. I wanted to go travelling but I didn’t want to go to India. I was still furious with Gregor. Sanclair started nursery school and loved it. He was always a favourite with teachers. He was witty and bright and loved to please, his boisterousness was forgiven. I kept working in the pub. I was twenty-three. I had never been to college. I had no training.

  Why is it always winter when I think about that time? Sitting by the picture window looking out over a frosty garden, the little zig-zag footprints of sparrows on the patio. Cycling to work down the tow-path and the canal is being renovated, scooped out, relined, but it’s raining and the machines are like dead monsters, frozen and skeletal. Taking Sanclair to school, watching him run off and join the other children. He disappears in a mass of coats and woolly hats. I can’t pick him out. In my room at The Heathers there’s an embroidered blouse I don’t wear anymore and a string of amber beads. I take them out and look at them. The blouse is faded, perhaps I should throw it away. I smell it, it seems to smell of pine needles. The necklace is valuable, Gregor gave it to me in Turkey. Perhaps I should sell it. In each bead is a broken insect forever fossilised in the golden resin.

  I’m sitting by the picture window watching the evening coming up in a mist from the river valley. I’m playing my accordion. My mother is at a prayer meeting. Sanclair is on the floor drawing a picture. He likes drawing. He draws the insides of cars and imaginary machines. He’s eight. He’s wearing a red cable-knit sweater and maroon corduroy trousers. His hair is still blond but more golden now. The light from the lamp falls across his face on to an expression of intense concentration. I stop playing. He looks up and says, ‘Oh, don’t stop. I like that one.’

  ‘You used to sing it when you were little,’ I say.

  ‘Did I? How did it go?’ and I play again and sing the words.

  Sanclair listens, with his head on one side, listening hard. ‘It’s not proper French, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s Provençal.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Daddy and I used to sing in cafés. You used to sing too and bang a drum.’

  Sanclair laughs. ‘I don’t remember. Was I a baby?’

  Surely he must remember. It can’t be that long ago, can it? ‘Don’t you remember France?’ I ask.

  Sanclair wrinkles up his nose. ‘I had a dog …’ He looks at his picture. It’s the cross-section of a spaceship, he’s going to start drawing again.

  ‘What do you remember?’ I ask him in French, anxious now, but I don’t want to show it.

  ‘I remember … I remember …’ When he talks French to me it’s as if he’s talking in a dream. I’m glad he doesn’t learn French at school yet, because when he does I’m sure this will go.

  ‘… There was a big house with candles … some ladies made me a gâteau … and an old man was painting …’ he continues drawing, ‘and a big swimming pool…’

  ‘That was the château. We didn’t live there. We lived at the Ferrou, a little hut. It had its own pool, a rock pool.’

  ‘Yes, and the water ran out of the lion’s mouth.’

  He doesn’t remember. It feels as if that part of my life has been rubbed away. ‘What did your daddy look like?’ I’m close to tears, but Sanclair isn’t upset at all. He’s drawing spaceships.

  ‘Oh … Papa? … He was … he had … he had a yellow van and we sold it.’

  I start playing again.

  – O Magali, se tu

  te fas

  La pauro morto,

  Adounc la terro

  me farai,

  Aqui t’aurai!

  ‘O Magali, and if cold clay

  Thou make thyself, and dead,

  Earth I’ll become, and

  there thou’lt be,

  At last, for me.’

  – Aro commence enfin


  de crèire

  Que noun me parles

  en risènt.

  Vaqui moun aneloun

  de vèire

  Per souvenènço

  o bèu jouvent!

  ‘I half begin to think,

  in sooth,

  Thou speakest earnestly!

  Then take my ring of glass,

  fair youth,

  In memory of me.’

  – O Magali, me fas

  de bèn!…

  Mai, tre te vèire

  Ve lis estello,

  O Magali,

  Coume an pali!

  ‘Thou healest me, O Magali!

  And mark how, of a truth,

  The stars, since thou did’st

  drop thy veil,

  Have all grown pale!’

  Outside it’s dark. I can’t see the garden. I can’t see the river or the fields. I can only see us reflected in the window.

  Here’s another memory. This is our first winter at The Heathers. It’s February, freezing cold, icy and sharp and I take Sanclair to the Roman baths. He’s bored with it. Lumps of Roman stones mean nothing to him but then we see the great baths and Sanclair says, ‘Oh!’ Our breath hangs in the air like the steam rising from the hot water. ‘Oh, it’s a bath. It’s a bath swimming pool!’ and he rushes up and puts his hands in the water. ‘It’s hot!’ He laughs, a bright laugh of joy. ‘Maman, our pool wasn’t hot was it, our pool was brrrr.’ He stands up and looks around. ‘Where are the trees? Our pool’s got trees.’

  When he was older he forgot about our pool. It’s strange I minded more about that than that he forgot about Gregor.

  Gregor kept writing. At first I didn’t reply because I was angry. Then he wrote, ‘I have found my happiness here. I am so happy I cannot tell you, but the only thing that is making me sad is that I do not see you and Sanclair for so long.’ He had never promised consistency or commitment. He had met plenty of people in his life and left them behind without a thought. He did think about us. I started writing back.

  This is me in my twenties. A job in a pub. A job in a café. A job in a bookshop. A young mother at the school gates. A singer at the folk night. A red bicycle and a stripy woollen hat. Summer holidays with my mother in Teignmouth, Dawlish, Torquay. Sanclair making sandcastles on the beach. Sanclair playing football with Dermot in the Costellos’ garden. Me cycling up the tow-path as the canal is slowly restored and the water comes back. It’s now navigable all the way from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon.

  Sanclair got a scholarship to the Catholic school up the hill. I decided to become an English language teacher. I studied hard. I had to take the course in Cheltenham. There are plenty of language schools in Bath and I think I’ve worked in most of them. I had a boyfriend called Alan. He said if I played my cards right I could eventually become a course director. But I wasn’t ambitious.

  Alan was ambitious. He owned a second-hand bookshop, not the sort with piles of paperbacks on the floor but the sort with rare illustrated books with gilded covers. He called himself an antiquarian book-dealer. I met him because for a while I worked in the bookshop next door, and this did have piles of paperbacks on the floor. Alan had a house in Freshford. He had an ex-wife called Melissa he couldn’t stand. He was a serious man. He was older than me and I suppose that was the attraction. I didn’t have any time for men my own age who just wanted to smoke dope and drink beer. Alan was passionately interested in books, food and cycling. We went on long bike rides together and had a cycling holiday in Wales. He cooked exquisite dinners, little parcels of fish in exotic sauces. He only ate tiny portions. He wasn’t much taller than me, and like me lean and wiry. He had curly black hair, going grey, brown eyes, olive skin and a big nose. He said he was fitter than a twenty-one-year-old and he was probably right. We went out for a year.

  There were two things wrong with our relationship. He didn’t like me singing and he couldn’t get on with Sanclair. He came to the folk club, once. He liked opera, which I can’t stand. He tried with Sanclair but he was so stiff with him. He lectured to him all the time about how to look after bikes properly. I tried to keep them apart.

  My mother thought he was ideal. ‘What a nice man, polite and so knowledgeable, not good-looking, but I suppose that doesn’t bother you, Mireille, and good quality clothes, proper leather shoes, not something cheap.’ She encouraged it. She let me go and stay at his house while she looked after Sanclair. Committing a sin was acceptable if you were going to find a husband. I had to describe every single room to her.

  When I stayed at his house I could understand why his wife left him. Everything was precious.

  Even the food in the fridge was rationed. The books and the furniture were too valuable to be used. I liked him best when we were cycling, racing each other up hills and then freewheeling fast down the other side. Having a picnic in a field far from anywhere on a Welsh hill, with the wind blowing up underneath us.

  We split up after a row about Christmas. He wanted me to spend Christmas with him, but I wanted to be with my mother and Sanclair. He’s still in Freshford. He got married again and his new wife helps in the bookshop. They haven’t got any children. He says hello if he sees me, but he’s distant. I think he thought I was an odd-ball. I haven’t had many boyfriends. I’m not like my mother. I don’t feel incomplete if I haven’t got a man. In the end she had Jesus and she had him for ever. I didn’t want married bliss like Caitlin, washing machines and wall-to-wall carpets. I wanted to be inspired. But inspiration doesn’t mean stability. I discovered this with Gregor.

  I’m swinging on a hammock in a patch of sunlight and a warbler has started singing in the woods. A fluid, floaty tune, it sounds wistful. There may be warblers in England but I’ve never heard them. I’ve heard robins and blackbirds, wagtails down by the canal and sometimes seagulls over the valley. Magpies, chattering in the conifers and the cooing of wood pigeons, not shabby ragged things like feral pigeons but glossy handsome birds with a sheen to their feathers. I once saw a goldcrest and there were greenfinches and linnets.

  It’s autumn and there’s a squirrel on the lawn at The Heathers. Sanclair is watching it through binoculars. They’re Tony’s binoculars.

  I went out with Tony for four years. That sounds like a long time, but he was hardly ever there. Tony was also a TEFL teacher and that’s where I met him, at the second school where I worked. I saw him in the coffee break after a bad morning with a group of Spanish girls. He said, ‘Look, they don’t want to learn English, they want to go dancing and get laid.’ We were friends after that.

  Tony was good-looking. Short hair, blue eyes with a twinkle in them and one of those rugged chins with a cleft. He took nothing seriously. His job, his life, it was all one big gas. He had worked all round the world, but mainly in the Far East and he kept going back there. Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia.

  Tony lived in a friend’s flat up the Newbridge Road. He had few possessions. I liked this about him. He borrowed things and kept them, but he was also generous and he gave things away. He gave Sanclair the binoculars and they weren’t cheap ones. He gave me his hi-fi when he left for Australia. Our relationship was like this … He’d come and work in Bath for about six months, save up enough money and then go travelling. When he was away he never wrote but then I would get a phone call. ‘Hey! Guess what! I’m in Amsterdam/Paris/Prague, and I’m coming home!’

  I liked Tony. Wherever he had just been he was always full of it, then he would get caught up with life in England and the holiday was forgotten. He liked bike-riding and football, drinking and playing pool. He liked films and we went to plenty of those. He came to the folk club and played guitar.

  My mother said, ‘He’s not the marrying sort,’ and no he wasn’t. We got on best if we saw each other infrequently. More often than once a week, and we’d both get snappy. He was a restless man and I love silence, but he liked Sanclair. Within minutes of meeting they were outside playing football. We had a holiday together in the Gower an
d they were out all day surfing and in the evenings jabbering on about surf-boards and wet-suits. I left them to it. I walked up the long beach where the wind sweeps the sand stinging across the sand dunes and the wild ponies shelter in hollows. Tony had no love of nature, the elements were to be conquered and the world was full of entertainments. I wonder what he found in the East, but it wasn’t beauty.

  He left for Australia the year Sanclair went to university. When they said goodbye it wasn’t like father and son. It was more, ‘Yeah, see you around one day.’ Like brothers who like each other but never remember birthdays and always forget to write.

  Tony’s playing the guitar in the folk club. He plays well, not just strumming. He’s playing the John Martyn song, ‘May you never’. He’s wearing a blue check shirt and old jeans. He looks good in faded blue. His face is calm and although he’s performing, for once he’s not performing and is almost unaware of the audience. I have never seen him look so peaceful, not even when he’s asleep, not even when he’s having sex, because even then he’s judging my response to see if I’m entertained enough. Asleep he has that half smile as if he’s thinking up another joke. Tony’s playing the guitar. I’m looking at a private side of him he will never share with me.

  Autumn. Sanclair has gone to London to study computers. Tony has gone to Australia for an indefinite length of time and I’m at The Heathers. It’s raining. My mother’s at church. I decided not to go this time. I wanted to sit here by the window and play my accordion.

  Mireille put down her notebook and lay back on the hammock. The sun was shining on her now, warming her, like the touch of a hand, and she lay there and let it. This was the hot afternoon sun with the bite of summer in it, getting unbearably hot as she lay there swinging.