‘You shouldn’t have come,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair. You can’t . . .’
Even so, she didn’t expect him to go. Daniel never gave up without a fight. She turned away from him and put her key in the lock, preparing for the next round.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure. I’ll see you around.’
Wait, she wanted to say. Or did she? She stood facing the closed door while footsteps shaped themselves on the staircase. In a moment she heard the street door open and close.
Well, that was that, then.
Inside, she turned on the light and stood for a moment looking around, then she kicked off her shoes and threw herself down on the ancient, sagging sofa. Some nights she slept here, like a child in a den, hiding from the grownups and the real world. But tonight, despite her exhaustion, sleep felt a long way away. There was so much she didn’t understand, Kitty thought. So much she wanted to say, and ask, and rage against, and she had no idea where to start. Not that it mattered, because there was no one to say any of it to. She hardly knew her sister anymore, her mother was in France, and she’d sent her boyfriend away, cut off everyone else, because her father was dead. Her father whom she had adored and idolised and resented more than anyone in the world.
6
As the days unfolded, Flora’s instinct was confirmed: she didn’t need an itinerary to explore France. Any road she took was more than satisfactory, leading to a string of interesting towns and villages set in an attractive swathe of countryside. She moved on every day, sometimes following a lead she’d discovered the day before and sometimes picking a direction or a destination at random.
Meanwhile, the story of the tug had been polished for the benefit of her fellow travellers, the Germans and Belgians and Americans she met on the Somme battlefields and at the chambres d’hôtes she vastly preferred to hotels. Sometimes she told the tale wryly, implying that it had been a convenient excuse to indulge her whim of turning tail at Dover; sometimes she played up the dramatic intervention of Fate. Either way, having the story to tell meant she didn’t have to dwell on Henry’s death or her retirement, on anything that had come before the ferry and the vividly recaptured bobbing of the tug. It neatly sidestepped any enquiries about why she was travelling alone or where she was going.
By the end of the week, she had skirted Paris and was heading towards the Loire. The weather had been mixed, the early summer sunshine interspersed with sudden petulant days of rain, as though it were expressing on Flora’s behalf the uncertainty and reversals of mood she ought, perhaps, to feel. But as she moved steadily further from home, the sun seemed to have greater conviction each day. Latitude and the advance of the seasons were working together, she thought, to convey her from the temperate English spring towards summer in the heart of France. It was hard to believe so little time had passed since she’d packed her case for that half-forgotten week in Alsace.
‘You are making a visit today?’ asked Madame over breakfast one day, in a farmhouse south of Blois. Flora’s French was progressing slowly, but she was still relieved when her hosts spoke English.
‘Maybe,’ Flora replied. ‘Where would you recommend?’
Madame shrugged; splendidly Gallic, Flora thought.
‘There are many famous châteaux nearby. My favourite is Montallon. Not so famous. Not so visited.’
‘All right,’ Flora said. ‘Is it open today?’
‘Certainly.’
Madame proffered the coffee pot and Flora accepted a refill. She was growing to like this place. There was nothing especially attractive about the house, but there was something about the way it suited Madame Abelard, a kind of harmony about her occupation of it, that made Flora feel comfortable. Perhaps she would stay a little while, she thought. An idea of how the summer might unfold began to form in her mind: a week here, a week there, a series of stepping stones across France. A journey with a shape to it that she could describe to people. She imagined herself in September, suntanned and fluent in French.
‘How long is my room available?’ she asked. ‘Could I stay a few more days?’
Back in her room, secured now for the rest of the week, Flora took the last few clothes out of her suitcase and hung them in the linseed-scented wardrobe. She thought back to the weeks immediately after Henry’s death: the furious spring cleaning, the carloads of junk taken to Oxfam, the guarded expressions of her daughters when they came to visit. All to the good, she thought. What was left was almost anonymous: books stacked neatly in shelves, wardrobes half-empty. No more cupboards full of old china or boxes of ancient magazines. Someone could move in tomorrow, Flora thought, and the idea was strangely pleasing.
Before she could change her mind, she clicked the email icon on her iPhone and looked up the address of a neighbour who ran an estate agency. Dear Neil, she typed. I wonder whether you could find a tenant for Orchards? I am thinking of a summer let, perhaps 3 or 4 months . . .
*
The reason the château of Montallon was not so visited became clear as Flora approached. It was twenty kilometres from the main road along twisting lanes, and the direction signs were half-hidden in the undergrowth. Once or twice Flora had to turn back and hunt down a missed turning. But at last the château came into view, straddling the top of a small hill. Its surroundings must hardly have changed since it was built, Flora thought, the wooded slopes and docile fields of corn and cows. She felt her spirits lift with the sudden exhilaration of the explorer sighting the object of her quest. Round the next corner was a pair of wrought-iron gates, their paintwork gleaming.
Flora parked next to a Volvo with English plates. Through the windscreen she could see a French road map and two child seats. Picturing these parents fretting over sun cream and juice cartons, Flora felt an unexpected failure of will – but she’d come all this way, she told herself firmly. She must go in, now she was here. She locked her car and made her way across the moat (moat!) to the ticket booth.
‘Un, s’il vous plait,’ she said; then, on a questioning rise, ‘une?’ and the teenage boy behind the desk grinned as he handed her a leaflet in English.
‘It begins there,’ he said, pointing. ‘You can follow the signs.’
Flora often found the inside of these places less interesting than the outside: something about what was promised by the sweep and curve of ancient stone, and the more mundane reality of the reconstructed interiors. She had limited enthusiasm for kitchens strung with polished brass pans, or four-poster beds with faded hangings. What she liked were the staircases, their steps sculpted by generations of feet, and the fall of light through narrow windows. She also liked seeing these things alone, she’d discovered. Henry had always dawdled or hurried; they had never found a pace to suit them both. She stood for a moment in the château’s broad, tiled hall, absorbing both the consolation of this thought and the stab of distress that followed.
She was gazing at the ceiling when the English family appeared – immediately identifiable as the owners of the Volvo. There was an instant of shock when Flora thought she had also recognised the mother as her companion from the ferry, and for that moment the instinct to run away did battle with the desire to greet someone she knew, even slightly, in the middle of a foreign country. But it wasn’t the same woman. Of course it wasn’t: that family had been on their way back to England. As she had been, Flora reminded herself – another little shock, remembering her audacity that day and how far it had carried her already.
She smiled at the Englishman as he approached, but he didn’t notice her. His wife had stopped to point out a suit of armour that stood incongruously against the rococo panelling.
‘Come on,’ the father said. ‘Let’s go outside. There’s a maze.’
‘I’m hungry,’ whined the younger boy. ‘I want an ice cream.’
‘They don’t have ice creams,’ the mother said. ‘I’ve told you, Joshua. We’re here to look at the château.’
‘It’s so old . . .’ Flora heard the child s
ay, as he was dragged out through the door. ‘Why do we always have to look at old things?’
*
Flora lingered in the château for longer than she might have done. She felt oddly diffident about following the Volvo family outside: she didn’t, now, want to be identified as English, certainly not to be suspected of taking an interest in them. Something about the way the man’s eyes had swept past her in the hall made her prefer to preserve her anonymity. She hoped they’d have left by the time she emerged, but as she approached the formal gardens she could hear their voices. Apparently they had found a place to buy ice creams after all: the boys brandished the empty sticks like swords while their parents remonstrated fruitlessly.
‘Come on,’ Flora heard the father say again. ‘Let’s get going.’
‘No no no!’ The boys circled, protested, pleaded, all energy and flying limbs. ‘Back to the maze! Back to the maze!’
Flora turned right along the terrace as the family headed off in the other direction, then descended the steps to the rose garden. Her mother had loved roses, and Flora could still recite the names of her favourite varieties. Could this pink one be Gertrude Jekyll, or this ivory beauty Glamis Castle? None of them had what her mother would call a proper perfume, though. They were beautiful but scentless – rather like Montallon’s carefully preserved interior.
It was almost two o’clock by now, and hotter than she’d bargained for. There was a little café near the entrance, Flora remembered. Madame Abelard’s breakfast suddenly seemed a long time ago.
The maze was on the left, halfway to the car park. As she passed it, the sign snagged at Flora’s imagination. How often did you find yourself at the entrance to a maze? Why not have a look? Before the impulse faded she turned down a narrow corridor of trees, passing through a welcome band of shade before emerging again into sunlight.
The maze was bigger than she’d imagined, and cleverly positioned so there was no view of the château from inside it: no external landmarks to navigate by. Flora was soon surrounded by high hedges, wandering along blind alleys and facing sudden doublings-back. It was strangely disconcerting, and the heat was stifling now. The sun was directly overhead, and the breeze that brushed the tops of the hedges didn’t stir the air beneath. From time to time people passed her, and were lost again. And then she heard familiar voices: the English boys were running along a path not far from her, arguing excitedly about the route.
Flora halted. She felt again an inexplicable reluctance to run into the family – or to be caught wandering alone in the maze. It was as though having to account for herself would spoil everything. She pressed on, hoping that if she put her mind to it she’d find her way swiftly back to the entrance, but it wasn’t that easy.
After a few more minutes, triumphant shrieks from the little boys announced their arrival at the centre. Perhaps they would leave now, Flora thought. But then she heard the mother’s voice, drifting through the thick air.
‘Joshua! Josh, where are you?’
‘You go that way,’ Flora heard the father say. ‘I’ll try down here.’
Despite herself, Flora felt – what? Afraid? Excited? It was as though she was implicated somehow in the family’s game of hide and seek – or at least playing out her own subplot, avoiding being seen. Ridiculous, she told herself, but even so, as she wound her way along the narrow passages she scented the thrill of pursuit, the delicious terror of childhood. She was a little girl again, chasing her sister, desperate to catch before she was caught. This way or that? Back to the last turning or round the next corner?
‘Excusez-moi,’ she said, as she squeezed past a gaggle of teenagers.
And then she heard another shout, more urgent than before. ‘Joshua? Come back now, Joshua! Where have you got to?’
Staring along an empty alley, Flora felt the beginnings of a sneaking doubt about the situation. There was an echo in the back of her mind of another occasion, another lost child. What had she been thinking of, playing games? She turned abruptly, intent this time on finding the child rather than keeping out of sight.
The convolutions of the maze felt more sinister now. The smell of yew, resinous in the hot sun, reminded Flora of gloomy English churchyards. She stopped for a moment at the next corner, looking about her. She’d been in the maze for long enough now to feel dislocated from the day she’d left behind outside. For an absurd moment she feared that she’d be lost in here forever: she and Joshua, swallowed up by whorls of malevolent evergreen.
‘Avez-vous vu un petit garçon?’ she asked a French couple, the wife puffing along behind her lean-faced husband, and they shook their heads.
After a while Flora found herself at the centre of the maze, but she didn’t stop to savour her success. She should go out by a different route, she thought. She blundered along more channels, into more dead ends, round more corners.
Another doubt was rising in her mind now. It was a while since she’d heard the parents calling. Perhaps they’d found the boy and bustled him back to the car park. Perhaps she was being ridiculous, continuing a search that was already over. When she got to the exit, she thought, she’d head for the nearest town and treat herself to a nice lunch, or perhaps . . .
And then there was the exit, and there were the parents and the older boy and, conjured up from somewhere, a gendarme with a pistol holster at his waist.
Flora stared at them. She felt something flood through her, making speech impossible but essential.
‘Have you lost your son?’ she managed to say. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
There was a flicker in the other woman’s eyes that Flora recognised, with a shock, as suspicion. She felt her heart thud and tumble. I’m a doctor, she wanted to say, as if any of them would care.
And then, before the woman could reply, there was a shout – ‘le voilà!’ – and the lean-faced Frenchman lumbered out of the maze, carrying the child in his arms. The look of terror on the boy’s face dissolved, the instant he saw his mother, in a torrent of tears.
‘Il est blessé?’ the gendarme asked – ‘he’s hurt?’ – but no one took any notice.
‘Why didn’t you shout?’ the mother was saying, cradling the child in her arms. ‘Why didn’t you call us, Joshie?’
‘Tout va bien?’ the gendarme tried next, looking at Flora.
‘Je ne sais pas,’ she said. But suddenly she’d had enough. The tableau of the little family had closed in on itself; there was nothing for her here. She was overwhelmed by the sense that she’d made a fool of herself, exposing something she had never meant to reveal. If no one had noticed that only made things worse: it made her invisible as well as absurd.
June 1996
Flora takes a deep breath. She feels her ribcage lift and fall like an unwieldy structure she has no control over, and the terrifying thump of her heart inside it.
‘How did it happen?’ she asks.
Henry is standing near the window. She recognises his stance almost by instinct. They have played this scene many times before: Henry refusing to commit to conflict, and Flora so paralysed by anger and distress and appalled admiration for his sangfroid that she can hardly speak.
‘She just ran away,’ he says. He’s completely still, not so much as a shrug or the twitch of a frown to give him away. ‘I turned my back for a moment, and when I looked for her she’d vanished.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Clarence Park. Near the pond.’
‘She’s four.’ Flora reaches for the back of a chair, then lets her hand drop. Beside her, on the dressing table, rows of unopened bottles mark the years of Christmas presents, expensive face cream and eau de parfum. She shuts her eyes, trying to imagine herself at the hospital, icy calm, but her voice slips and skids. ‘She can’t run that fast, Henry. It’s open ground. How could she get so far away that you couldn’t see her anymore?’
He sighs, and she knows what he’s going to say. There’s a tiny moment of triumph, just a flicker of it, as he speaks.
/> ‘I was with somebody. I was talking to somebody. I took my eyes off her.’
‘Who?’
She knows the answer to this question too: not the name, but the meaning of it. This time it’s not triumph she feels, but humiliation. She has spent so long not asking, and now she’s lost the little piece of dignity that forbearance gave her. And she’s risked her child’s life, too. It seems clear to her suddenly that this is her fault: she has turned a blind eye, and now Henry has done the same, and Kitty has been put in danger. The beating of her heart is painful; her ribs constrict around it, crushing the turmoil of emotions into a pulp of something so primitive that she can’t identify it. My Kitty, she thinks. My precious Kitty. The fact that the child is safe now, sleeping peacefully upstairs, makes little difference to Flora’s feelings.
‘Her name is Elizabeth,’ Henry says. ‘She’s a cellist.’
He meets her eyes as he speaks, and she can tell there’s something for her to read in them. Does he want her to know, or not? But she does know. She knows this woman has been in the shadows for a long time – five or six years now. She knows she’s different from the others, the passers-by. For the first time it occurs to her that Henry might leave her; that admitting to Elizabeth’s existence might be the first step. Perhaps that might even be the right thing. Perhaps this might be the spur she needs to come to her senses.
A breeze stirs the curtains, and Flora’s gaze flicks towards them. Outside the window the light is golden, the promise of a rich sunset foreshadowed in the glow of the terracotta tiles on the barn roof. Something swoops past, close to the sill; a swallow or a bat. At this time of day they are hard to tell apart, similar darting shadows flitting and dipping in pursuit of insects. Other people, she thinks, will be having drinks on the lawn now, entertaining friends, watching their children play.
She nods: the smallest gesture she can manage, and the largest. She says nothing, and Henry says nothing. Then he takes a step towards her, and she can see them both as if from outside the window, lit as clearly in the evening light as the barn and the curtains and the swallows. She starts to cry before he reaches her, because she knows that she won’t resist his touch, and that it means nothing will ever change. Even the boiling passion of her love and fear for Kitty isn’t enough to alter the terrible, shameful, insoluble tangle of their marriage.
The Things You Do for Love Page 5