by Claire King
You hadn’t seen it at all. On the way home, still astonished by his revelation, you had remarked on how, compared to recently, your father had looked like a new man. There was colour in his face, his hair was combed, he had shaved and was wearing two thirds of a Sunday suit, his chest puffed out. ‘Papa, you look extraordinarily well,’ you had told him. ‘The fish must be doing you good.’
‘Pah!’ your father had exclaimed. ‘I’ve had enough of fish. Can’t stand the stuff. What’s the point of eating it just so you can live another day to eat more fish?’ He strolled into the kitchen to see what was cooking but returned with nothing but a kissed cheek and a boyish grin. ‘My wife says it is not ready yet and could I kindly get out from under her feet,’ he told me, with a shrug. ‘But there’s plenty of it, thank goodness. I’m famished.’
‘What is she making?’ you asked.
‘Quail I think, and some kind of an onion sauce. We had better take a robust red wine with it, it looks good and rich.’ He put his hand on my elbow. ‘Come and help me choose something, Amandine.’
Lunch tasted as delicious as it smelled. We ate in companionable silence, but for the soft scrape of knives and forks against the plates, all the while twin smiles playing on your parents’ lips. From my chair at the table I could see out into the hallway, where photo frames fluttered up the wall just as you had described them: you as a baby, a toddler, a boy and a young man. Different layers of you, somebody else’s memories, captured and pinned to the paper, safe under glass.
You laid your cutlery on your plate. ‘Are you not going to the chapel today, Papa?’
‘I wondered when you would ask,’ your father said with a foxy smile. ‘I thought today we could go together. I have something to show you.’ And so we drove out together into the wide expanse of golden sunflowers, the Citroën bumping over the rutted track and red dust billowing through the windows.
‘We still need to tidy up this track a little, to make it kinder on people’s cars.’
‘Would you like some help?’
‘Don’t worry, son, there’s a nice young man from the village going to do it, I only have to pay materials. People have been so helpful, it’s a miracle really.’
You weren’t sure what he was talking about, but I could see that you didn’t want to question him, unsure if you had forgotten something, wary of giving your secret away. Up ahead I could already see something else of a miracle. Rising up out of the sunflowers was a roof. No dome, no steeple, a simple slate roof, grey against the clear open sky. In the clearing were log benches and a path through the sunflowers to the forest beyond.
Your father’s hands shook as he took the keys out of the ignition. ‘Come on then, let’s see what you both think.’
There was a tidy paved area around the building. Each wall met the pitched roof and the roof met itself at the apex, sealed, finished, a small chimney rising highest of all.
‘A chimney on a chapel?’ you said at last.
‘It’s not a chapel.’
‘But …’
‘What would the village want with another chapel out here anyway? What would God want with another chapel? I don’t know what I was thinking, silly old man that I am. Did I think I could please God, thank him, keep you safe just by giving him another empty pile of stones?’
You smiled, confounded. ‘Well, Papa, it’s the thought that counts.’
A smile rippled over his leathery face. ‘Maybe, yes.’
‘What sparked it off, this change of heart?’
‘All that damned fish,’ he said with a guffaw. ‘What a price to pay.’
‘Seriously?’
Your father laughed. ‘Oh, son, I’m tired. I’m not going to live for ever, am I? Your poor mother living like a widow in that cottage while I’m out here for hours helping nobody but myself. I needed to wake up, and I suppose being ill like that … well, I realised that if I didn’t finish it, nobody would, and all my efforts of the last forty years would benefit no one. Not me, for I would regret it with my dying breath. Not your mother or you, who have had to suffer my absences and my pig-headedness. Not the village, who will have nothing on their hands but a half-finished ruin. And not God, who quite frankly has enough trouble filling the churches he already has.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m going to take care of your mother like the husband I should have been, and if there is a God, then I think that will please him just as much.’
‘May we go inside?’ I asked.
‘Ah yes,’ he said, pleased, ‘that’s the best thing.’
There was no door on the cottage, and we walked straight in, the cool air a balm on our hot skin. There were more benches, an old leather sofa like the one on Candice – you told me later it had come from your father’s study – shelves full of books and stacks of paper and pencils. In the corner a wood stove was surrounded by a fireguard, and a few small logs cut neatly in a pile next to it, incongruous with the birdsong beyond the window and the yellow light falling through the door. It was a perfect, cosy nook in the middle of a field of sunflowers.
‘I don’t understand, what is it?’ you asked, taking a seat on one of the benches and looking at the wooden walls, the wooden ceiling, already bearing a few children’s drawings, pinned up with tacks.
‘It’s a library,’ your father answered, ‘a refuge, a calm place. It’s anything that people want it to be, really.’
‘Who is it for?’
‘It’s for anybody who wants to come here. I was thinking particularly of the children in the city. I’m hoping word will get around.’
‘There’s not even a door though,’ you said. ‘Aren’t you worried that people will come here to sleep, you know, homeless people or teenagers? Aren’t you worried about it getting damaged, or the books stolen?’
Your father smiled. His hand shook on his stick, but he remained standing. ‘The door is coming, but there won’t be a lock. A locked door is the fastest way to make people resentful. If you leave doors open, trust walks in, don’t you think?’ His face was anxious, waiting for your approval.
‘Yes, Papa. You’re right. This is wonderful. Wonderful.’
He smiled broadly and sat down as though all the weight had been lifted from him. ‘There is one last thing, Baptiste. You should know that I spent most of your inheritance on this.’ Your eyes flickered. ‘I’m sorry about that but you’ve always insisted we benefit from that money ourselves rather than leave it to you. This way I hope it will make many more people happy, and’ – he turned to me with a wink – ‘you’ll still get the cottage.’
I loved that cottage. I could easily have lived there one day. Everything about the place was filled with love. The kitchen where your mother poured her heart into the meals she prepared. The way your parents looked at each other. The way they spoke to each other with so much kindness. The garden that your mother tended so attentively. You learned so much from her, I don’t think she ever knew how wise she was. For a long time, even after you began to neglect your own body, you continued to care for your garden on deck, down on your knees, bending over the pots of geraniums and lavender, picking through them with gentle fingers, watching over the marigolds and the multi-coloured succulents, the lemon tree and all those herbs. Something in your mother’s insistence was strong enough to fight the decline. Just as with your piano, it seemed to keep you focused, keep you you. Then one year not so long ago you simply stopped, and everything started to die.
Your mother had grown very frail by that time and I didn’t want to bother her. It was hard for her to see you struggling. I tried to manage it myself, but with my help the violets wilted in the hot August sun and I soaked the poor jasmine until her flowers all turned brown and shrivelled. In the end I gave in and called her. ‘It’s really time you learned to garden, Amandine,’ she said. She insisted that I brought her out to Candice so she could show me properly, and when we turned up at the cottage she filled the car boot with cuttings and bulbs and everything that could be potted up. She had given up on us
ever moving to the cottage and had decided she’d bring her garden to us. She spent hours with me that day, leaving me with sheaves of notes and instructions in spidery handwriting, and soon afterwards the deck of Candice was transformed, the most beautiful I have ever seen it.
I thanked her with all my heart. ‘You’re a mother,’ was all she said. ‘You understand.’
I held her for a moment. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. On board the boat and out of context you had not recognised your mother at all. You were polite with her, calling her Madame, but annoyed with me. If her heart was breaking she didn’t let it show. It had stopped her for the briefest of instants, her hand flying to her throat as though she were winded. Then it passed as quickly as it had come and she managed a smile and got on with the gardening, her old fingers slowly working the earth, caressing the little seedlings. Later as we drove her home in my car, your mother nodding off in the back, you turned to me and said, ‘Don’t hire her again.’ Her eyes were closed and her hearing was failing, and I prayed that she hadn’t heard.
You still don’t remember that she came. The last memory you have of your mother is of her sitting in her chair in the kitchen, asleep. Her eyes were closed, you said, and the fire had gone out. And your father must have been at the chapel because the house was quite silent.
I wish now I could tell her how she left her echoes all around you. Sometimes now when you sit out on deck, breathing in the scents and casting your eyes over the colours, you believe that you are back home.
50
We were sitting on the deck under a canopy of stars, swatting away mosquitoes and supposedly sharing a bottle of wine, although neither of us was drinking. You had been silent for several minutes, your fingertip following the scar down from your knee. ‘Fell out of my bedroom window,’ you murmured under your breath. ‘Shutters. Bats.’ But something was bothering you.
We had spent the last hour naked on your bed, carefully tracing every scar, every crooked toe, the whorls and curves of our fingerprints, mapping out the unique bodies that held our hearts. I had told you the story of my broken feet and you had told me your story of your broken leg.
Later, your mother would tell me another story. The story of the boy in one of the photographs on the wall, standing on tiptoes on the piano lid, bracing himself against the wall, reaching down into the open box. It is evident from the photo that you have lost your balance and are about to fall. ‘Can you believe I took that photo?’ your mother said. ‘I still regret it to this day.’
You turned to me. ‘When I broke my leg,’ you said, ‘do you know what surprised me most?’
‘The ground?’
You laughed and put your other arm over my shoulders, kissing the top of my head. ‘Well, yes,’ you said, ‘but also the realisation that my body wasn’t me. That parts of me could break and yet I still stayed the same. That the real me was somehow separate to the flesh and bone I carried myself around in.’ You leaned back and looked up at the salted sky. ‘That’s what I thought I had learned. I thought it for a long time, but I was wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The flesh is me, there’s nothing more to it than that. Just this body, just these billions of cells. That’s who I am. That is who you are. We are made of nothing but elements and the stories they hold: the stories we have told ourselves and the stories we have been told.’ You reached for my hand. ‘I’m made of nothing but remembered feelings and they are the most fragile thing of all. Once you realise that, everything becomes clear.’
I couldn’t look at you. Every day we found new ways to philosophise, but when it came to it, no matter how many beautiful metaphors you made, in the end we had no answers. Keeping my eyes instead on the dark space above us, the stars and planets that appeared to shift across the sky as though we were fixed and everything revolved around us. Perhaps that’s how we rationalise it so as not to be overwhelmed by our insignificance.
I felt at that moment like my eyes were at the waist of a vast hourglass, the infinite universe expanding out and away from me in one direction and, in the other, the explosion of galaxies in my mind. Every grain of sand could be a star. Every grain a memory. This is why we hold stories so dearly, I thought. And this is why we cling to gods.
I’m an introvert at heart, so at times I found the instantaneous switch into such an intense relationship exhausting. Sometimes when we were on the move I liked to find my own space, taking myself away around the side of the boat to the prow where I could soak up the peace of our languorous drift through this secret tunnel, closing my eyes to feel the sun on my face. Nothing in my ears but the chirrups and callings and chatter of the birds and the rumble of the engine under my bare feet. When I felt rejuvenated again I would return to your side at the wheel as you guided Candice around the meandering canal.
I had quickly noticed that navigating the boat silenced your inner dialogue. You were at your calmest then, absorbed in the task. You would stand there with your hands light on the wheel and your eyes fixed on the middle distance. When I was in the mood for company I would stand at your side following your gaze, the space between us a breath of air where desire built.
One day we were standing like this, saying nothing, when you turned to me. ‘Take the wheel,’ you said. ‘It’s your turn.’
‘I don’t know how.’
You guided me into place. ‘Take it. We all start off not knowing how.’
I lay my fingers around the handles, the varnish worn from them. I wondered then where Candice had been, and with whom, before she was yours. You put your hands lightly over mine. ‘Feel it?’ I nodded. ‘Don’t look at the wheel. Look at the water ahead of you. She won’t turn like a car or a bike, she needs time, so you need to anticipate for her, OK? Try it.’
I turned the wheel left a little, pointing the prow into the canal. Nothing seemed to happen. ‘More?’ I said.
‘Patience.’ Beyond the trees I saw farmers were ploughing deep furrows in the rich soil, readying to sow their sunflowers. And then slowly she began to turn; she was more responsive than I had thought, we were turning too far. Instinctively I began to turn right again and you tightened your fingers over mine, slowing the turn. ‘Steady on,’ you said, ‘not so fast. It’s all about making tiny adjustments and keeping your eyes on the horizon. If something is right in front of you it’s already too late, so you always need to be thinking about correcting your course for a bend or another boat as soon as you see it. You have to visualise your path along the water.’
‘It all makes sense now,’ I said.
‘What does?’
‘When you’re here at the wheel, apart from when you’re playing the piano it’s the only time you’re fully present, completely in the moment.’
‘Not the only time,’ you whispered. I felt your breath on the back of my neck. Not a kiss, but enough to make the hairs stand on end. ‘Keep concentrating,’ you said. ‘Return the wheel before she has finished the manoeuvre or you’ll go too far.’ There was something dreamlike about looking out at the water, feeling Candice respond under my touch. ‘Good. You’re on your own,’ you said gently, lifting your hands from mine.
‘Not yet.’ The boat began to veer towards the bank. ‘Take the wheel back, I’m going to crash.’
‘No you’re not.’ You adjusted our course again. ‘You’re going to be fine.’ You stepped forwards, leaning over me until I could feel your heart pressed against the curve of my back. ‘I’m going to fetch you my old notebook,’ you said, your voice soft and sad. ‘If you want to get to know my ghosts, we’d better start now.’
51
I could say something trite like, ‘Those days on the canal were some of the happiest in my life’, but if I am honest even perfect memories like these are tinged with a haunting sadness. When we look back on things we tend to magnify the strongest emotion; it makes it simpler if we can distil time down to just a single essence. For me it was the bitter-sweet taste of a last meal.
After a few days
on board it was clear that Amandine was falling in love with Candice, and I began to feel optimistic that our lives could converge for however long we had. One morning when I emerged from the shower I found her out on the prow, ducking under the flapping towels on the laundry line, dusting away the cobwebs caught up with dandelion seeds and poplar fluff and the fractured scraps of brittle oak leaves. She looked up at me, pointing at some rust spots on the prow.
‘She could use a lick of paint.’
‘It’s been a hard winter.’
‘Let’s spruce her up again when we get back home.’
She had her eyes on the horizon, I thought. She was steering me. She steered me through the rise and fall of the birds over the fields, where a piping of mortarless stone wall ran along the crests of the distant hills. Through the clutches of spruce and silver birch huddled in stands of low yellow light and the distant wind turbines standing proud on the smooth curve of the horizon, and on and on to glades of pine, their scent syrupy in the baking afternoon air. We were nearing the coast.
I knew where we had to go, but even I was surprised when we eased along the spur canal and out through close-knit trees into a wide open sky and into the path of a great expanse of river busy with boats, its surface rippled by thousands of tiny waves.
‘Where are we?’ Amandine called from up on deck.
‘It’s the Hérault. We have to go across.’ I smiled up at her, but inside I felt nauseous. Candice, just the right size for the quiet, shallow canal, suddenly felt so small on this flow. I could sense the depth of it beneath us. It didn’t feel safe. ‘Come down if you want,’ I said, and she came.
That night I dreamed we took Candice down to the sea, but instead of sailing into harbour we pushed out past the oyster beds, past the rocky outcrops and out again into the choppy waters, then further into the heart of the Mediterranean, where we hit a storm so wild that the boat was tossed about like a child’s dinghy. The dream broke as we capsized and were sinking into the blackness. The water was cold but I was happy for the end of it. I woke to find Amandine had taken all the bedclothes.