I changed tack. ‘This place? Where is it?’
‘I know it. My family used to go there when I was a kid. Sunshine. Beaches, bicycles. All that.’
Siri on her bicycle. There was a boy on a bicycle the day she went off with those boys. He had scattered the three of them as he charged down the road. But still they went, with their football, out towards the woodland. The police searched for this boy but he was never traced.
Now the blood drained from me and I swayed. Philip put a hand out, touched my shoulder. ‘I know, Estella. Siri would have loved it. I shouldn’t have said that.’
I threw off his hand as though each finger was a poisonous viper. ‘Don’t!’
‘But when Dot Smith made the offer, it seemed just the thing.’ He sounded wretched.
I connected at last to the despair in his voice. My anger evaporated and the blood thumped back into my face. I shrugged. Perhaps it would do him some good. If the doctor thought my stress was bleeding into him perhaps I shouldn’t stand in his way.
‘If that’s what you want, Philip, we should do it. If it’ll do you some good that’s fine. I’ll take my laptop. I can work anywhere, can’t I?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Could be our last chance,’ he said quietly.
I looked at him for a moment and for the first time in years allowed myself to be really sorry for him. Maybe this would be the last chance for him. And me.
My last chance with Siri was long gone, after all.
Wasn’t it?
FIVE
Beside the Great Middle Sea
Gaul 301 AD
In their early times together the boy called Tib was very much in awe of his Corinthian teacher Modeste. In his short life he’d never met any person who was cleverer than himself. From the very first time the Corinthian put a hand on his shoulder he was aware of Modeste’s power and intelligence. When he noted Modeste’s smile and the dimple dancing in his left cheek he knew the Corinthian’s great cleverness was imbued with humour and humanity. He liked Modeste’s voice – deep and soft, and kind of curling at the edges with his Greek accent. He thought that had Modeste not been clean-shaven with his hair smoothed back under a scholar’s band, he would have looked like many of the sailors down at the harbourside who came from all parts of the great middle sea beyond the mouth of their own wide river.
The day after Modeste’s arrival two sailors from the Imperial barge hauled two great boxes up the hill to the Governor’s villa. These were full of treasures that – though he did not know it – would eventually constitute Tib’s curriculum. At first his father Helée would listen approvingly, as Modeste taught Tib about Roman history and glory, about the great taletellers, and the myths of the gods who ruled the universe and the great emperors who in turn became gods. Then, deciding he could trust him, he left Modeste to it and went about the business of being the governor of this busy port.
On fine days Tib and Modeste would walk and ride together through the hamlets and villages out beyond the town of Good Fortune. As they travelled Modeste showed Tib how to find plants and roots and cure them, making them useful for the villagers and farmers they met on their travels. He also showed him how to make maps that were in proportion and could be followed by others.
But as the days grew colder and darker the two of them stayed inside Governor Helée’s fine house. Now was the time for Modeste to decant the contents of his boxes and talk to Tib about their magic. The first box was clearly a doctor’s box, with instruments rolled in protective linen, and strange dusts and mixtures, stored in horns and vellum packets, all neatly labelled in Modeste’s fine Latin hand. Modeste would say, ‘This is for . . .’ or ‘This is for . . ., but only when the moon is in the first quarter. This is for . . .’
Tib, with his extraordinary memory, heard, learned and never forgot. Ever after those early lessons, when he came across an illness or an affliction he need only close his eyes, and in his ears he would hear Modeste’s precise recipe for a cure. The admiration between them was mutual. Modeste was impressed by this skill of memory and even more with Tib’s ability to connect cause and possible effect.
After a month of being Tib’s teacher Modeste was called to Helée’s finely decorated chamber to report on the boy’s progress. He did so with enthusiasm. ‘The boy is as a sponge, Your Honour. But then, not only does he replicate what he has learned from me, the boy then puts it in that great thinking soup of his, and out comes intelligence, wisdom!’
Helée, who had just returned from a very successful tax collecting and magisterial trek around his province, took the flattery personally. ‘It is in the blood, Corinthian, it’s in the blood. There is no doubt about that.’
Tib’s mother, Serina, when she had finished instructing the slaves in their tasks, would often come with her sewing to sit in the corner of the eyrie-like room at the top of the house where Modeste and Tib worked side by side. Their work table was the long plank brought by Modeste off the ship and laid on trestles.
Sometimes, as they were working, Modeste would consult and defer to Serina and her responses were always considered and informed. One day he told her, with some grace, that it was very easy to see where the boy got his gifts. Tib relished this comment. So much for his mother having a brain the size of a pea!
In time, at Tib’s excited urging, they got to the second box of treasures. This turned out to be full of scrolls and documents and measuring instruments. So as the winter became even darker and colder they began to pore over these great texts which recounted Greek history, myth and Greek scholarship, which came before that of the Romans. Tib began to make sense of the ideas and discussed them with Modeste with a wisdom much older than his eight years. And so he learned that all things did not begin with Rome.
One day he noticed that there was one set of scrolls at the bottom of the box his teacher left undisturbed. ‘What about these, Modeste?’ he would ask. ‘These look interesting.’
‘Soon, dearest boy. Soon.’
The days went on and the wind was swirling up from the sea and the sun seemed unwilling to make more than a transitory appearance. The howling seabirds were swirling off inland. But even in harder weather, on one day in each seven days, Modeste would borrow horses from Helée’s stables and travel with Tib further afield through the villages and hamlets with his bag of cures. Modeste would use these visits to test the boy, to see if he’d really learned his lessons. The villagers were amazed that a child so young could diagnose ailments with such accuracy and even cure them.
But on another day every week Modeste would don his hat and his heavy sandals, take his pack and go off on his own, walking from sunrise to sunset, returning with scratched and dusty feet. Tib was puzzled by this habit and asked his mother where his teacher went on these days.
‘I think he walks to think, Tib, to gather his thoughts,’ said Serina. ‘You bleed his thoughts from him and it seems he has no more left. You were the same with me. I felt sometimes you used to use me up. Modeste needs to gather himself up again.’
One evening, from the window of his eyrie, Tib spotted Modeste trudging his way back to the city. Tib ran out of the great gateway to meet him. ‘Where do you go, Modeste? Where do you go when you walk like this? I must know.’ He hung his head and sounded bereft.
Modeste laughed and took the boy’s hand in his. ‘I am searching,’ he said, striding on. ‘I go in search of something that was lost.’
‘What do you search for?’
‘I search for the truth.’
‘Is the truth in a place, Modeste?’
Modeste came to a stop and stared down at the boy. ‘The truth cannot really be in a place, Tib. It’s inside our bones, our flesh. We know it when we see it, when we feel it. It is not in a place.’
‘So why do you go and blister your feet and tire your legs in all this searching for a place?’
Modeste began to walk along again, pulling Tib with him. ‘Perhaps it’s a vanity, Tib. I know this truth. I’ve learned it. But I
wish, just once, to touch the truth-teller with my own hands. It may be possible here in Gaul. I’ve learned that this may be possible here.’
Now it was Tib’s turn to stand still. Then he spun round and round until the horizon became a single thing, a line in his head. ‘Here? Here in Gaul?’ he said. ‘You could touch the truth with your own hands?’
Then Modeste was laughing, his voice full of joy. ‘Yes, Tib, here in Gaul! This is why I persuaded her gracious majesty to send me here. To touch the truth. Is that not wonderful? One day, perhaps.’
The next morning at very first light Modeste called Tib up to the eyrie and asked if he’d slept and broken his fast well.
‘I have, Modeste.’
‘And are you full of energy?’
‘I am. I am full of energy.’
‘Then I will show you something!’ He reached into his second box, brought out the last scrolls and laid them on the big table.
Serina slipped into the room. Tib was worried. Perhaps Modeste would not open the scroll with his mother there. But Modeste ignored her. ‘You know I come from Corinth, Tib? Before I was in the service of the Empress?’
‘I do. My father calls you the Corinthian.’
‘Well, hundreds of years ago, in my country, we were once visited by a great man, a philosopher and thinker.’ He paused and said the words very distinctly. ‘He was a follower of the Nazarene.’
Serina stirred in her chair but said nothing.
‘This great scholar stayed with us a while and taught my forefathers many things. Then he left us, but afterwards he sent messages to us about the good way to live and how the way of the Nazarene was the right way to go.’
Tib touched the nearest scroll with the tip of a finger. ‘And these are his messages?’
Modeste laughed. ‘No, they are copies made by my many-times great grandfather from the original messages. They are my family’s treasure.’
So it was through Modeste the Corinthian that the boy, Tib, son of Helée the Roman governor of Good Fortune, read the letters of Paul of Tarsus with his teacher and became a heretic, preferring the virtues and the legends of the charismatic Nazarene and his burgeoning church called the Way, to the obligatory propitiation to the old Roman gods and the worship of the Emperors made gods.
SIX
Starr at the Maison d’Estella
It was when we were pulling our cases to the house from the market square up through the crowded, narrow alleyways of Agde old town that it dawned on Philip that we were not so close to the cherished beach of his childhood memories. Instead we were making our way to a bulky house behind a high black-stone wall, with a massive door that looked as if it had been hammered by Richard the Lionheart. I looked along the narrow street and shivered. The high wall was pierced with smaller doors and other windows, which seemed to have been carved into the walls with a random hand. But I knew this doorway on the high ridge of the town had at one time been an important place. I could see the pediment of an arch with an eagle at its point before it melted again into the high wall.
The door creaked open on to an irregular courtyard set around by windows and walls that rose up into a bowl, cradling the blue southern sky. To one side was a stone balustered staircase that led to a blocked-off doorway, going nowhere. Seagulls chirped, chattered, shrieked in French and posed on the topmost ramparts. I breathed in deeply.
The place smelled of time, of layers of life and people. Around me in the deserted courtyard tumbled a whirling smoke of people going about their eternal business of survival, commerce and politics. Their gauzy layers welcomed me. I breathed out. For the first time in months – in years – now, I felt comfortable.
A leaflet on the old heavy table in the big kitchen informed us that the stones on the boundary wall of our house are part of the ancient town wall, built, like many buildings here in pockmarked black volcanic stone, quarried throughout the millennia from the slopes of an ancient volcano.
Philip turned to me. ‘No beach then!’ he said, making every effort to be cheerful.
I amazed myself by smiling faintly. ‘No beach,’ I said.
‘No matter,’ he said heartily. ‘We’ll hire a car. Beaches only a few minutes away. Dozens of beaches. Great family beaches.’ He went red. I guess by now he was really sick of putting his foot in it. ‘Sorry, Estella, I didn’t mean . . .’
We settled in. I set up my laptop in a top bedroom and spent my nights up there weaving my astrology charts and forecasts as usual. I had to bank them on the laptop ready to take to the town library to file them through the internet. No broadband here in the house. I sat in my eyrie and listened through the day and through the night to the kids playing in the alley outside, yelling at the top of their voices and careering round on motorbikes and mopeds. Late one night I peered through the window to see the spin and spark of fireworks celebrating the new Miss Agde (on her way to the world title, the poster said) down at the quayside. The smell of sulphur was in the air. The fireworks crackled and banged, lighting up the night sky in playful echo of the charts I had carefully pinned up on the walls of my eyrie. These bright lights certainly blanked out the real thing. The stars in the sky, on my maps and in my head paled at their brightness.
Mostly I slept till noon, then came down to the courtyard to eat a tray of ‘finds’ from the fridge in the kitchen and drink the wine Philip had opened. Then I would lie back and try not to think of Siri, allowing the sounds of the alley outside to wash through the door and flow over me. Alongside the sounds of clamouring women and children and the grind of motor scooters I could hear the clatter of horses’ hooves and the faint cries of street-sellers from other ages, the urgent murmur of townspeople from other times. They crowded in on me. I dreamed them and saw them, night and day.
Most days Philip hired a car to go to the beach and drive up into the hills of the Languedoc but I encouraged him to do that on his own. He made acquaintances in the town: English people who had packed up and come to live here; French business people he met in bars who spoke his pragmatic language in more ways than one. He read biographies of British comedians, histories of France from the revolution to the Second World War. He watched international rugby in the sports bar, drank coffee and brandy, and played poker with an old soldier he met there.
He would return to the house from his own journeying about five o’clock, having done his marketing. Then he would become absorbed in his elaborate preparations for our evening meal.
All the while I knew he was waiting, waiting for me to get better. Waiting for me to become calm, to lose my madness. He waited for me to forget Siri dying. For him I should only remember her living. He was so very anxious. I knew it was not for nothing that his boss had given him compassionate leave, to cure his wife of madness and save his marriage. Or not. Even through my perpetual fog I knew that this was our last throw of the dice, our last chance to stay together. Still, the way I was, I found it very hard to focus on this.
My nocturnal habits were blighted a bit by the fact that I had to get out of the house at some time during the day to go to the Maison des Savoirs – the rather grand library – to file my columns to London, Australia and South Africa, do my emails for my online consultancies, and rake cyberspace for . . . what? Notices of sightings of Siri? I looked all the time but I didn’t know what I was looking for.
Then one day out of the blue I had this rambling email from Mae in response to some jokey card Philip had sent. Who knows? Perhaps he had sent out some coded cry for help. Anyway it seemed Mae had decided to come and stay with us. The children needed a break. Hubby (as she called him) Billy needed a break and seeing as we had all this room she had decided they would come to help us out.
I told Philip when he came back from a ride out to a monastery in the hills. He was delighted at the news. Relief bled from his pores and danced in the air. He’d got on so well with Mae right from the beginning. Her openness and forthright pragmatism appealed to him. As she got older Mae had become more, not less attract
ive. She watched her diet, became toned and tough. She ran a slimming support club at her doctor husband’s surgery. She laughed when Billy told us gravely she was a pillar of the community, but still she believed him. I always asked about Spelk but their lives had diverged. He was now working for some charity, directing the building of a school in Africa.
When we lost Siri, Mae came down to London and flurried around us quite a bit. She let Philip feed her and in return she cleaned the house, which had gone downhill a bit. She tidied Siri’s bedroom without my permission. She tried to approach me with comforting assurances but I wouldn’t let her inside my grief. In the end she went home. The last day she looked at me. ‘I did what I could, Starr,’ she said. ‘I tried.’
‘I know,’ I said. I managed to touch her arm.
‘But it would never be enough, would it?’
I shook my head and almost pushed her through the door.
And now here she was in France, trying again. One call from Philip and she was here.
Philip was disappointed at my lack of enthusiasm for Mae’s visit. So he set to work himself, sorting bedrooms and buying new sheets in the Thursday market for her and her brood. He swept the courtyard and stocked up the kitchen with things like Diet Coke and crisps ancienne et naturel. As he was a stickler for healthy food and authentic cooking, this was quite a concession. He spent all that week marketing, chopping, planning and fettling.
As it happens I’d had a very bad night the night before their arrival. I’d sleepwalked down the steep wooden stairs and ended up on my back in the courtyard babbling to the stars.
So, the next day Philip decided that it might calm me down to take a boat trip on the famously beautiful Canal du Midi. It would take the best part of the afternoon, so he could finish his shopping and get some decent food on the table for Mae and her family.
Somewhere, fogged up in my soul, I think I agreed with him. My sign was Pisces after all. From water we came and to water we shall return. The water of the canal might just dissolve the lava lump of pain that sat inside me.
Englishwoman in France Page 4