by Peter May
He got a street map from the tourist office opposite the Police Municipale in the Place du 18 Juin, and walked through an arch in the old town wall to the Boulevard du Boramar. From here there was a view across the shingle beach and the bay to the diving school opposite, where boats rose and fell on the gentle pewter swell, tethered and covered over for the winter.
At the south end of the boulevard was the Eglise Notre Dame des Anges, with its golden domed bell tower. At the north end was the quay made famous by André Derain’s painting of garishly coloured fishing boats with canted masts and rolled up sails. A couple of them still remained, a reminder for tourists of what life had been like here in Derain’s day, nearly a century before. Collioure was a town rich in art and history. A refuge for Spanish and French artists fleeing war and persecution. A place where penniless painters had paid for food and lodgings with paintings alone. Desperate men who really had lived by their art. And innkeepers who had profited handsomely from their future fame.
He turned south and then north into the old fishing port which climbed the hill towards the fort. The Rue Bellevue, on its south side, was bounded by the remains of an ancient fortified wall. Enzo stopped to peer through a crumbling arrow slit down to the grey seawater breaking green and white over the black rocks below. Three-storey pink, and cream, and peach-painted former fishermen’s dwellings, dominated the north side of the street as it rose steeply to the top of the hill, where a row of stone cottages was built along the edge of the cliff. Red-leafed vines twisted around rusted iron trellises that in summer would provide a shady respite from the southern sun. A fleshy-leafed cactus looked tired and careworn. A cobbled passageway led to a flight of steps beside an arched gate, and Enzo climbed them to a small parking area that served the clifftop cottages.
Below him, the little brick-arched gateway led to a private garden full of flowering winter shrubs, a stone fish perched precariously on its wall. Off to his left, an area of coloured paving, filled with trees and terracotta potted plants, led to the first door in the row. An old wrought-iron sewing table and folding chair sat on a tiny, shaded terrace. Blue shutters were closed over square windows. There was an old, rusted ship’s bell attached to the wall beside the door, and Enzo pulled its rope. The sharp, resonant ring of metal on metal vibrated in the cool air, and after several moments, Enzo heard a lock turning in the door.
It opened into a long, narrow hallway, and beyond it Enzo could see into a sitting room with large windows looking out over the Mediterranean. A small lady with short cut white hair peered at him from the gloom. A lady in her late sixties or early seventies. Her skin was remarkably unlined, but her age was betrayed by the brown blemishes on the pale skin of her face and hands. She wore a knitted cardigan over a white blouse and a checkered tweed skirt and had a short, pink, silk scarf tied at her neck.
Enzo said nothing, and she looked at him for a long time with blue eyes so pale they were almost colourless. And then realisation washed over her, and she wilted visibly, eyes clouding suddenly as if by ripened cataracts.
‘You know, don’t you?’ Her voice was a whisper barely audible above the sigh of the sea thirty feet below. Enzo nodded and she said, ‘I’ve been expecting you for nearly forty years.’
* * *
She served them tea in bone china cups, pouring from a long-spouted teapot in the sitting room with the sea view. It was a small room, in which all her furniture seemed large. A walnut buffet against one wall, a Welsh dresser against another, and a big, soft, old sofa with two matching armchairs, hand-embroidered antimacassars on the arms. Every wall and shelf space was covered by framed photographs. A record of a life, a young boy in all his stages from toddler to teenager. A record that seemed to stop abruptly in midteens. In most of them he appeared to be scowling, but there was one that stood out from all the others, his face transformed by a radiant smile, blond curls tumbling across a wide forehead. He wasn’t smiling at the camera, but at something to camera left. An unusually happy moment caught in an unhappy life.
Elizabeth Archangel followed his eyeline. ‘Yes, it does stand out, doesn’t it? He was not a boy prone to smiling, or to expressing any kind of emotion. I often felt, during all those years, that he somehow knew, that he had always known, and resented me for it. But, of course, he couldn’t have. Sugar?’
She held out the bowl, but Enzo shook his head. ‘No thank you.’
‘Of course, it wasn’t me he was smiling at. He would never have smiled like that for me. It was Domi. His dog. Normally I wouldn’t have had animals in the house. Too big a risk of scratches or bites. But there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for Richard, even if he never did appreciate it.’
And Enzo realised that she had kept the boy’s name. His real mother had called him Rickie. The woman who had stolen him preferred the more formal Richard. So he had grown up as Richard Archangel.
‘Of course, it was me he blamed when we had to have the dog put down. Even though I wasn’t the cause of it. It had been alright at first, but he somehow developed an allergy to the animal. So bad my doctor felt it could be life-threatening. I had no choice.’ She paused, lost in sad recollection. ‘He never forgave me.’
Enzo looked again at all the pictures, and felt nothing but a simmering hatred for this child who, even then, must have borne the seeds of destruction in his soul. He had to force himself to remain objective. He turned to the old lady. ‘Why did you steal him?’ It seemed odd to speak of stealing another human being.
She closed her eyes and her head trembled a little. ‘Be careful what you wish for, lest it comes true. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’ She opened her eyes again. ‘I had a difficult childhood, Mister Macleod. I couldn’t take part in any of the games the other children played. I was wrapped in cotton wool and kept safe from the world. There can’t be anything much worse that watching life slip by your window and never be able to participate in it.
‘My parents were paranoid. That it was their fault never seemed to occur to them. My mother always claimed she didn’t know she was a carrier, but I’m certain now she knew and wanted a child anyway.’ She added quickly, ‘Not that I blame her. I didn’t understand then. But when I became a woman, I knew what it was to want a child of your own. And when you know you can’t have something, you want it more than anything in the world.’
She sipped her tea and gazed out over water reflecting a leaden sky. The wind was rising, banishing the mist, and raising little white crests on the ruffled surface of the sea. ‘I don’t have the worst form of hemophilia, Mister Macleod. My blood was always possessed of at least a few clotting agents. And with obsessive parental care, I made it through childhood almost without incident. But they couldn’t protect me from puberty. That’s when the real nightmare began. With menstruation. There were times it simply wouldn’t stop. I had repeated transfusions, and then they put me on drugs, hormones, to try to control it. They kept me alive just long enough for the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. I was one of the very first to take it, prescribed and paid for by the good old British health service. Estrogen and progestin to make my body think it was permanently pregnant, to make it stop producing eggs, and to hold my endometrium together so I wouldn’t bleed. The irony being, of course, that I could never get pregnant in reality. Not without facing almost certain death.’
‘So you stole someone else’s child.’
‘Oh, no, Mister Macleod. I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. And I did something much worse before I resorted to that.’
Enzo frowned. What could be worse? ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I fell in love. Met a man who stole my heart, and all my reason and married me. Not that any of it was his fault. He knew, right from the start, that we couldn’t have children. He knew that making love to me would be a tentative and dangerous thing. That he would have to take the utmost care never to make me bleed. And he never did. I’ve never known anyone so gentle and caring. It was always me who wanted to throw caution to th
e wind. I had a passion in me, don’t you see? I needed to live, after all those years of deprivation, even if it meant I would die in the process. Which is why, in the end, I stopped taking the pill.’
She exhaled deeply.
‘Of course, I didn’t tell him. He had no idea why I was making such sexual demands of him night after night. Not that he objected. But I knew, that if I could get pregnant in reality, then I would survive stopping the pill. The only question then, was whether I would survive giving birth.’
‘And did you? I mean, get pregnant?’
‘To Reginald’s absolute horror, yes. He couldn’t believe I had put myself at such risk. He had always accepted that we would never have children. But I couldn’t. And I was prepared to die trying. He just couldn’t comprehend that.’
Enzo looked at the little old lady sitting in the armchair across the coffee table, and realised that she must have been driven in a way that he, just like her husband, would never comprehend. What instinctual urge could possibly motivate you to want children more than life? He found himself drawn into the horror of the Archangels’ lives, empathising with the distraught husband who had unwittingly made her pregnant, and who lacked any real understanding of his wife’s obsession. ‘So what happened?’
She sighed heavily, draining the last of her tea, and placing the cup carefully in its saucer. ‘You may remember a plane crash near Manchester in March, 1968. No doubt you were just a teenager then, so maybe not. It was a flight from London to Glasgow. A hundred and thirty-three people died. My Reginald was one of them. I was three months pregnant, and the love of my life was gone. Somehow, then, it was all the more important that I go through with it. That I have my baby. It was all I had left of him.’
She was becoming agitated now, wringing her hands in her lap, unfocused, almost unaware of the presence of the big Scotsman sitting opposite. ‘The doctors did everything they could to prepare me for the birth. But it is almost impossible to avoid even the smallest tear. And I very nearly bled to death. It was touch and go over several days and many transfusions. The bleeding was internal, you see. Very difficult to stop. But they did, and within a week I was holding my own baby boy in my arms, the only surviving part of his father.’ Her face darkened. ‘But that’s where all resemblance between father and son ended. He owed too much of himself to his mother. I’d given him my curse. A fifty-fifty chance. But for him the coin had landed the wrong way up.’
Her focus returned, along with a certain calm, and she looked at Enzo as if she were surprised to see him. ‘More tea?’
‘No, thank you.’ He laid his cup and saucer in the tray. ‘What happened to your son, Mrs. Archangel.’
‘Why, he died, of course. Just eighteen months old. I had taken such care, Mister Macleod, to protect him against any possibility of injury. Worse than my own parents with me. I never let him out of my sight. I was planning, when it came time, to educate him at home.’ She shook her head. ‘Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, it was better for him. What sort of life might he have had, isolated from the world in the bubble I would have built for him?’
She turned towards the window, biting on her lower lip. ‘I was with him when it happened. Saw him go down, and couldn’t do a thing about it. The exuberance of a toddler learning to walk, the lack of coordination. Clumsy feet. We were in the kitchen. A stone floor. Very unyielding. He tripped and pitched forward. Landed right on his face. I almost heard his nose burst. And then there was the blood. And I panicked. Oh, God, how I panicked. Because I knew, you see. I just knew. I phoned the ambulance straight away, but it was never going to get there on time. I did everything I could, but the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. Such a tiny body. Just a little person. Not that much blood to start with. He was dead within minutes.’
She lifted the teapot. ‘Are you sure I can’t help you to more tea?’
Enzo shook his head, and she poured another cup for herself, concentrating on the minute processes. The single sugar cube, stirred till dissolved. The splash of milk. The swirl of the spoon. The cup brought slowly to the lips for the tiniest of sips. Then she lifted her eyes again to the sea, that seemingly endless, ever-changing expanse of water that she must have gazed upon during untold solitary hours.
‘And so I was alone. My baby and my lover both dead. My whole world in ruins around me. I felt truly cursed, Mister Macleod. You can have no idea. I would never be with another man. No one could ever replace my Reginald. But I could give nurture to a child. Bring some meaning to a life that had lost all purpose. Although I knew that even if there had been someone to make me pregnant, I would never have survived another birth.’
She took several small sips of tea before replacing the cup in its saucer. ‘You know, everywhere I looked, all around me, women had children. Women who didn’t deserve to have children, or even want them. Women who got pregnant at the drop of a hat. A night of fun, a moment’s carelessness.’ She looked at Enzo, an appeal for understanding. ‘And I could never adopt. Not back then. A single woman. A hemophiliac. It was so unfair.’
‘And you thought it was fair to steal someone else’s child?’
‘Oh, I chose very carefully, Mister Macleod, I can assure you. It wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. I took several months to prepare. Reginald had left me well provided for in his will. I sold the house in England and came to France. I had no living relatives, so I had no ties, no one to know my history.
‘I found this house here in Collioure. I bought and furnished it. When, finally, I moved in, I would be the grieving English widow, escaping tragedy in England, bringing her young son with her to start a new life. I’d had Richard put on my passport, you see. I still had his birth certificate. The people at the passport authority had no way of knowing he was dead.’
A sudden understanding dawned on Enzo. ‘Richard. Your own son was called Richard?’
‘Oh, yes. Actually, that was what clinched it for me in Cadaquès. I had already selected the boy before I discovered that his name was Richard. It was too great a coincidence. I thought that it was fate. That it was meant to be. Although now I realise that, if anything, it was meant to be a punishment, not a blessing.’
Her smile was wistful and distant, full of pain not pleasure at the process of recollection. ‘I was staying at another hotel, just around the bay. I’d been there for a couple of weeks, and I would spend my days sitting around the pools of other hotels, watching families and their children. Sometimes following them. Sometimes striking up conversations. No one ever saw me as a threat, you see. A young woman on her own, a ring still on her wedding finger. If anyone asked, I told them the truth. My husband had been killed in a plane crash, and I was escaping the horror of it all for a few short weeks.
‘That’s when I first saw Richard. At the poolside with his family. And then later, on the beach. I even took a photograph of them and got a studio in town to develop it for me. He was such a beautiful boy. Fair, like my own Richard. But what made it so perfect, do you see, there were two of them. Identical. Whatever the pain of losing one child might be, his mother would always have the compensation of the other. And there was another sibling, too. An older sister.’
‘And that made it alright?’ Enzo couldn’t keep the disapproval from his voice.
She responded as if pricked by a pin, stung to self-justification. ‘She already had three children, and could have had more if she wanted. She was a Catholic, so she probably would.’
‘So you took him.’
‘Yes. I could give him so much more. And my attention would be undivided, not spread thin across a whole family. I spent several days devising a way of doing it. But in the end it was almost too easy. They made it that way for me. Leaving their children alone in the hotel room each night while they ate and drank and laughed with their friends in the restaurant. And that stupid girl who was supposed to check on them, too busy flirting with a boy from the kitchen. A rendezvous each night out by the bins. Adolescent groping. Disgusting. Taking Richard shou
ld have been so very simple.’
‘And it wasn’t?’
‘It was a disaster. As I lifted him from the cot, he was still half asleep, and his little hand came up to hang around my neck. As it did, the sharp corner of a fingernail tore the skin of my cheek and I started to bleed. Such a stupid, silly little thing. But I couldn’t stop it, do you see? When I bleed, I bleed. I’d been going to take his little panda as a comforter, but in the end I had to let it go. It was all I could do to carry Richard and try to staunch the blood at the same time. I nearly abandoned the whole thing. I was out in the corridor, in two minds about putting him back, when I heard someone coming up in the lift. So I ran. The die was cast. There was no going back.’
She lifted her teacup again, but the tea was tepid now, and she pulled a face and laid it down again. ‘It took just two hours to get him back here. But we’d crossed a border, and in those days the media was not as all-pervasive as it is now. There was virtually no coverage of the abduction in the French press. I knew the police would search the immediate vicinity, Cadaquès and its environs. And they’d probably search far and wide. Throughout Spain, and no doubt in the UK. But two hours up the coast, in France? I was fairly certain that no one would ever think of looking for us here.’
She smiled a strange little smile, full of bitterness and irony. ‘And so we were free to begin our dream life together. Except that the dream turned into a nightmare, and I only had him for sixteen years. Sixteen long, difficult years.’