Englishwoman in France

by Wendy Robertson

  When I got up in the morning I felt very unwell. Philip took my arm quite tightly and said, ‘You don’t want to be here when they arrive. I’ll get them settled in. I know it. You are going on this trip, Estella, if I have to carry you there. I’ll tell the people on the boat to take care of you. But I tell you, Estella, you’re doing that trip!’

  SEVEN

  The Boy on the Boat

  I feel a silent gliding in my body even before I get to the side of the canal. A crowd of people jostles around the landing place. Will they let me on? Philip has spoken to the captain. Make way for the invalid! The French respect the ill and the invalid. The way parts before me like the Red Sea divided. The Captain’s helper – a gamine in black jeans – sets me against the side of the boat like a pot plant. Even wedged as I am in this genial crowd it takes a mile or two of gliding for me to feel safe, stuck as I am in the here and now. The hubbub of the travellers fades, as one by one we’re hypnotized by the silver-green water and the trees standing to attention every ten metres, clawing the banks to make them safe.

  Now my mind slips backwards and I can see old men in dingy clothes about their business, steering their barges loaded with coal and tin, bales of cloth and racks of wine. Then there’s only the limpid beauty – silver, green, slate grey; gleaming water alternating between the elongate shadows of trees and the bright reflection of the southern skies.

  We’re one hour into the journey when I notice the boy: narrowly built with orange hair and eyes too wide for life. He’s leaning backwards, staring at the Wedgwood-blue helmet of sky, his long hair dripping towards the water like strands of fire. At his side sits a youngish man in a crew-necked sweater, his long nose in a worn black book. Even in repose the dimple on his cheek gives his face a benign look. His black hair is slightly long, but short at the front, combed across his broad brow. When he raises his eyes to gaze at the canal I see they are bright, cornflower blue. Now and then he puts out an absent hand to stop the boy tipping back into the water. These two are an odd pair. Father and son? No. The older one’s too young. Brothers? I have to settle for brothers. But there’s no resemblance. Absolutely none. The colouring is wrong.

  Suddenly I have this prickle of unease. I know when things are not quite right, in this and other worlds. I close my eyes and have another glimpse of them but now the boy has his hair tied back in a kind of cue and the man is wearing a hooded jacket.

  I blink. Now the boy’s sitting upright and leaning across to speak into his companion’s ear, making him laugh, bringing that dimple into full play. The man’s teeth gleam in a flicker of sunlight. The man cuffs the boy on the shoulder and they dissolve into conspiratorial giggles. I know now that things are all right with these two and the black cloud that has been sitting somewhere in my head all morning starts to shred itself.

  Oh! Now the boy has climbed up and is balancing on the rail, arms out straight, like a tightrope walker. He makes his way, dancing on light feet, towards the prow of the boat. A mutter ripples through the crowd and a woman nudges the arm of the boy’s companion, making him drop his book. He stands up, just in time to see the boy launch himself off the prow of the boat and sink like a stone under the grey-green water, creating ripples that surge towards the bank, swilling the roots of the great trees that hold the canal safe, soaking the bright yellow irises sitting there on the verge. The muttering swells into shrieking and the canal boat’s engine putters into silence.

  At last the boy’s head breaks the surface of the water and the shouts turn from panic to relief. Dieu merci! The boy swims to the bank and hauls himself out, water dripping from his whipcord muscles. He grins a crooked-toothed grin and holds his clenched fists above his head in victory. The people are cheering. Bravo! Everyone cheers the boy except me. And the boy’s companion. He shrugs, leans down to retrieve his book, and starts to read again.

  The sky darkens and rain begins to patter on the boat’s awning. Of course this is not like English rain. It does not cool the warm air. The boat’s engine starts up again. Now the boy is jogging on bare feet along the towpath. We race the boy the last half mile to the jetty. He’s fleet footed and wins the race, but the boat is not far behind.

  My Philip is standing under a big golf umbrella in the rain at the jetty. He searches my face anxiously. I take a deep breath. As I’ve said, my state of mind these days is Philip’s big nightmare. He’s always been so afraid of my agitation. His myth is that I just need to calm down for me to get better. His recipe is afternoons in shaded rooms; platefuls of his gourmet food; more wine than is good for me – anything to calm me down. You’d think a murdered daughter was an illness visited on a person by natural processes. And by similar natural processes you will eventually become calm and thus be cured of her death.

  He’s well intentioned, is Philip, but he’s the mad one, when you think of it. But he wouldn’t know, would he? Not knowing could be a sign of his delusion.

  When we moved into the Maison d’Estella two weeks ago I tried to tell Philip I actually liked the house – not least because it had presences. I mentioned the people walking through the rooms.

  ‘Ghosts?’ he said. ‘Sweetheart! You are so funny. Imagination getting the better of you again!’ Then he smiled in that special inward way he has, complimenting himself on his tact with this woman whom he loves, but who is rather inconveniently crazy. What he first thought charming he now finds wearying.

  And now today as we splash our way through the traffic across the bridge and up into the old town, he scoffs at my tale of the red-headed boy. ‘I was there at the landing, sweetheart! No saturated boy, no man with a black book got off the boat! I assure you.’

  But there was. The people on the boat cheered the boy’s safe emergence from the water. The woman nudged the man. I saw them.

  And I’ve seen the boy since. Walking on top of the town wall, and then in the alleyway behind the Promenade, legs astride, standing upright on the pedals of his mountain bike.

  Now I’m getting ahead of myself. First I must go home to the Maison d’Estella and greet my guests.

  EIGHT

  Entertaining Mae

  I look up at the old door, a solid and safe haven even after living here only two weeks. As usual Philip struggles with the key. The door is massive – heavy hinged, peeling and weathered with time. I stand for a second out in the narrow alley and reflect how the house has grown on me. I’ve felt safe in this house, roaming the rooms at night, standing on the terrace after Philip has gone to sleep, looking across the shadowy, eternally crimped roofs to the black mass of the cathedral and then – always, always – on up into the sky, dense as blue-black ink. Virgo is so alluring, so seductive that I feel I can put up a hand and very nearly touch the constellation. Some nights I come down from there making my way down the wooden staircases to the courtyard where I lie on the ground and look up through the cupped hand of the old building into the night sky. As I’ve said sometimes I do this in my sleep and end up in the courtyard still unconscious, which rather upsets Philip.

  Today we open the door to the sounds of Norah Jones singing ‘Feelin’ the Same Way’ and to the sight of Mae dancing around the courtyard, a glass in her hand. Her husband Billy is at the wooden garden table, the Observer close beside him and a beer beside his hand. The geraniums are nodding in their pots. Surfboards and beach chairs are tumbling from the space under the grand escalier which leads to nowhere.

  ‘Stella!’ Mae puts down her glass and flies across to me. I hold myself stiff as she hugs me to her. Her body feels like a bunch of sticks. She smells of Coco by Chanel, of cigarettes and of that stuff people use to dispel the smell of cigarettes. I must smell of . . . what? The air? Wine? The garlic in the cassoulet that Philip made last night? Misery? What does misery smell like? In my experience we all smell of our feelings – right through from desperation to elation, unhappiness to euphoria. This fact used to help me a lot when I used to do personal readings. People would clap their hands at my insight and say ‘How
did you know? How did you know?’

  Mae strokes my upper arm. ‘Phil was saying you’ve been down the canal on a boat. I don’t know how you could do that, me! Go on a canal in this foreign place, among strangers. You might catch something.’ She hugs me tighter – wanting, I know, to say more than that, to call up our early days, before she was thin and before I was crazy. In my head I can hear Mae say it. ‘Things were so much simpler then, Starr.’

  Her accent has smoothed off through the years, evolving into that middle-England speak that echoes a person’s home region but has rounded itself out, become more distinct, more articulated. It happens to us all, I suppose.

  I stand away, rescuing myself from her close clasp. ‘I’m as you see, Mae. Here and in one piece.’ The words come out more crisply than I intended.

  ‘Estella!’ Philip says sharply.

  ‘Great to see you, Mae. Really.’ I make amends. My eye moves across to the table. ‘And you, Billy!’

  Mae’s husband holds up his glass in a toast. ‘Now, Starr.’ Billy always called me by my nickname since the time I told him (having drunk too much) that my mother called me Starr. ‘I fear we’ve brought our northern weather with us.’ Billy always starts his conversations with the weather.

  I smile at him. ‘Perpetual heat here in May is a myth. But Nyrene, the lady who owns this house, tells me she loves this time of year. There might be rain, but because it’s cooler and greener the flowers by the canal are a spring miracle. She’s right. I saw them today from the boat. Flag irises, clover, carpets of vetch, lovely grasses. And birds.’

  I wonder what Billy would think if I say I saw ghosts on the canal today. I want to keep talking to him because I like him, and also for some respite from Mae’s attention and Philip’s surveillance. ‘Nyrene rides along the canal path every day on her bicycle. She knows about flowers. And birds. She says there are nightingales in the evenings. Rossignols in French,’ I add.

  His eyes brighten behind his round glasses. ‘Bicycles? Can we get bicycles?’

  ‘Yep!’ I say. ‘You can borrow them from the landlord. He’s a good sort.’

  Billy puts his head on one side and looks at me. His eyes are much kinder, less searching than Mae’s. ‘Sea air’s doing you good, then?’

  I like Billy. Sturdy, uncomplicated GP. Ex rugby player running to fat; easy-going and quite content to let Mae push him around. I’ve also thought that’s how he manages her. He has this chubby face and wears round glasses; he smells of cornflakes and, very faintly, of that antiseptic wash doctors use. I think the cornflake smell is because he’s around the children a lot.

  Suddenly there is shrieking and a strange thumping inside the house.

  Mae laughs, her bright white, well capped teeth gleaming. ‘Terrors on board!’ she says easily. ‘Playing trampolines on the beds.’

  I wonder what my stylish landlady would think of that. The beds are big wooden carved wonders from the last century. Philip tells me the brocante shops here and in Pezenas down the road are full of them. Visiting them is one of his regular lone jaunts.

  Come to think of it, these antiques will probably survive the bouncing better than the Ikea beds at home.

  Mae catches my thought. She lights another cigarette. ‘Go and get them, Billy. Can’t have them getting into Madame here’s bad books, can we?’

  Billy vanishes through the glass doors into the house and at last Philip comes to my rescue. ‘Estella needs a bit of a rest, Mae.’ He gives me a gentle push. ‘Go and lie down, Estella. I’ll sort the meal.’ He usually calls me by my Sunday name. I’ve never asked him why.

  Billy comes through the glass doors, hung about with George and Olga, four and six years old respectively. George is a small roly-poly version of his dad. Olga is tall for her age, just into little-girlhood. Designer jeans and tee shirt. Bare feet. Hair up in bunches and round red-framed glasses. She holds out her hand. ‘Hi Auntie Starr.’

  Oh Siri!

  ‘Olga!’ I fold her small hand in mine and feel the shadow of the thousand or so times I had done this with Siri. I feel sick.

  ‘Hi Auntie Starr,’ squeaks George just behind her.

  I take his hand too and smile. ‘Hello, love. Haven’t you grown!’ My voice is crackly like a bad record.

  I hurry past them and, looking back, I catch a knowing glance between Mae and Philip, before charging through the glass doors and up the wooden stairs. I throw myself on the day bed in my top-floor eyrie. I’m angry at their knowingness – knowing that I am sliding away to some place where they can’t reach me, exasperated because they can’t help.

  I close my eyes and concentrate. Now again I can feel the slight sway of the canal boat. I can hear again the chatter of the people as the boy jumps, his hair streaming behind him. The dark man is there and he leans down again to pick up his dropped book. This time, though, he looks at me directly, his eyes locking on mine. ‘Travelling through, just like you.’ His tone resonates in my ear. Manchester? Edinburgh? No. That doesn’t seem right. His voice is accent-less. Timeless.

  My heart stops, then falters on. Siri!

  I can’t sleep. I jump off the daybed, go to my work table and check my list. I bring up a chart on the screen and start to make notes. This work is the thread that has kept me this side of the sanity gap since Siri was taken from me. It can fulfil its sanity task for me today and all this week while we’re entertaining Mae and her family. How can I relax or sleep with the sound of a small girl’s laughter in my ears? I know that if I sleep I’ll dream again of Siri kicking around a football with her friend Kerry then waving goodbye. Smiling.

  NINE

  Healing Processes

  One day, in the spring of the year after the Corinthian came to Good Fortune to teach Tib, when he was off on his regular wanderings, a woman with running scabs all down one side of her face came to the great iron gate of the Governor’s house and sent a child running, asking for ‘the boy doctor’.

  Tib picked up his leather pack (a new gift from his father) and went to see her at the gate. He put his hand on the woman’s shoulder and smeared her face with ointment from a horn he had in his bag. Then he said the prayer Modeste had taught him and made a mark of the fish on her forehead. He told the woman to keep the ointment on her face for five days and afterwards wash her face in running stream water from above the town twice a day for twenty days.

  ‘Above the town!’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t forget!’

  Within two days the whole district knew the woman’s face was clear of these chronic sores for the first time in five years.

  There was another time, down by the harbour, when Tib came across two men holding down another, whose arms and legs were flailing around like a windmill. Small as he was, Tib hauled them off the man. Recognizing their assailant was the son of the Governor, the men stood back. The madman leapt to his feet and began to set about Tib, who tried in vain to keep him at arm’s distance. Suddenly the flailing stopped and the man stared at the boy. Then he smiled and knelt at the boy’s feet. Tib put one hand on the head of the man, then, with the thumb of the other he made a sign on his forehead. The man sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Then he stood up straight and strolled away, a picture of calm.

  After that people started to trickle to Good Fortune from all across the region to be cured by the boy doctor. Tib applied all he had learned from Modeste in terms of both medicine and method. But the Corinthian observed that, in addition, the boy had this strange ability to calm people down, to right their disordered brains, to reduce their inner torment – all with a touch of his hand. The more observant patients and onlookers noted that his cures were always accompanied by some kind of invocation and a special touch on the forehead.

  But Tib’s growing reputation was not a total success. He failed to cure the harbourmaster’s son, who was suffering from a throat infection that seemed to have closed off his throat entirely. Despite Tib’s and Modeste’s efforts over a whole week, the child died, and the harbo
urmaster was heartbroken.

  At first Governor Helée looked on his son’s emerging healing powers with benevolence. It was his job to keep the local population settled and happy, safe from brigands and not too upset about the taxes. Things were going well – after all, he himself still had Imperial ambitions. There were whispers of a move to Rome itself. He was in the habit of discussing this with eminent visitors long into the night, urging them to plead his cause to the Emperor. His wife Serina, in her quiet way, suggested that perhaps Helée might be seen as too keen on preferment. He should not pin all his hopes on such a vague possibility, she said. This extreme agitation was not good for him.

  Then, one day, Helée woke up and couldn’t see. He rolled out of bed and charged around his room, bumping into basalt columns and carved stools that stood by his bed. He roared for his servant, who went running for Serina. Serina calmed her husband down and got him back to his couch where he rocked backwards and forwards, praying to Jupiter to give him back his eyes. Had he not made the sacrifices? Had he not given the gods respect? Had he not made libations to the Emperor Gods? What reward was this for a man who had shown valour in the field of battle, to take away his eyes?

  Serina sent the servant running for Modeste and Tib. She held his hand while Modeste did his usual thorough examination. Modeste shook his head in her direction. ‘There is nothing here, Madam. There is no sign on his body that His Excellency may not be able to see.’

  Helée moaned out loud.

  Serina and Modeste both turned to Tib, who came forward nervously. He put both of his hands, first on the crown of his father’s head, then over his ears, and then on his brow, and then over his closed eyes. As he repeated this series of actions, under his soft boy’s hand Helée became calm.