Children of Light Read online

  ‘So tragic,’ said Auxille.

  ‘And how kind of her to remember us and send the money. I bought a pretty little carpet.’

  ‘And Macon drank the rest,’ said Auxille. Macon growled and drank his wine.

  ‘And your son? He is well?’ Jeanette changed the subject.

  ‘My son is a successful young man,’ said Mireille.

  ‘How lucky you are to be blessed with a child,’ said Auxille, glowering at Macon.

  Macon ignored her. ‘Do you still play the accordion, the one my father gave you?’ He always remembered that his father had given it to Mireille.

  ‘I didn’t bring it with me. It was too heavy.’ She hadn’t played any music since November and this loss added to all her other losses. She desperately wanted to go back to the Ferrou.

  ‘What was that song?’ said Auxille. ‘How did it go?’ She began one of the old Provençal ballads. Mireille knew it and joined in. She had a splendid deep voice and eventually Auxille stopped her crackly accompaniment to listen. Mireille closed her eyes and sang to the end, a sad tale about lost love and forlorn, forgotten females. She finished. The others clapped. ‘I have to go back now,’ she said.

  She was glad to be in the solitude of her hut. The light was beginning to fade now and clouds were coming down from the hills, tucking up the valleys and telling them to be quiet. But Mireille was restless. Everything she looked at reminded her of something she still had to do. Get a mattress for the loft bed. Cut more wood. Buy another lamp. In the ceramic sink the one tap dripped on to unwashed plates. There was no hot water at the Ferrou. What water there was came from a spring in the woods and it flowed into the tap, banging and complaining along the pipe. There was no toilet either. That was another job to be done. Dig a pit in the woods.

  I am too old for this, thought Mireille, but she liked tiny spaces. Her houseboat in Bath had been tiny, but warm and tiny, and comfortable, with a bed taking up one end and padded seats by the table. In the hut there were no chairs, but a stone ledge along one wall. She was sleeping on this because the loft was littered with dead insects, mouse debris, and a huge spider had built a tunnel-like web under a tile and crouched in there sulking, waiting to creep over her face in the night. A gust of wind rattled the door and blew ash down the chimney. She felt completely alone.

  She put on her waterproofs and walked up into the woods. Behind the hut the land was more rocky and if it had ever been terraced, this had been long lost to the pine trees; but there was a path. It led to a gully thick with cherry and apple trees and a dense jungle of sarsparilla. In the summer this was the only green place when the rest of the land was scorched brown. The path followed the water up the hillside. She could hear it trickling over the rocks, the sides of the gully steeper here, the trees on each side taller and darker. It felt like the hill was crowding in. The path stopped in a clearing. There was a pool, a natural basin in the rock.

  It was a dark, cold place and unbelievably still. She had forgotten how still it was here, sheltered from the wind. The pool was about ten foot across and when she looked into the water it seemed shallow, but it wasn’t, she knew. It was deep enough to swim in, but swimming was the last thing she was thinking about. The water looked like liquid ice. Three worlds in one. A thin skin with leaves and pieces of twig floating on it. The rocky sides and the visible stony bottom of the pool. It looked so near, but it wasn’t. It looked so still, but it wasn’t. The water coming out of the spring was always flowing out of the pool and down the gully. And the third world. The sky on the water, her dark silhouette, the trees behind her perched up the hillside, and in front of her the massive, split, brooding rock that was La Ferrou. She looked up, out of the water, at the rock itself, creamy pale limestone, the cleft running down it as black as Satan’s foot. The head of the pool, the source of the water. She had dreamt about this place. When the water lapped against her houseboat in the night, she was here. At The Heathers, when the fountain outside her window dripped into her dreams, she was here. And over the last few months, when she couldn’t cry but lay on Stephen’s sofa under a travel rug. She was crying now because it was all water. The mist above the Roman baths and the clouds coming down the valley. This valley, and the valley in England by the river and the canal. That life was lost now, like her babies. The one who used to play here and throw stones in the water and her winter baby, who opened his eyes just once, and he had such dark eyes, like the bottom of the pool. He was lost and she was lost with him.

  ROCHAS

  CHAPTER ONE

  A letter had arrived. Jeanette practically ran out of the café when she saw Mireille. She had not been seen much over the previous two weeks. Studying the orchids, Jeanette told anybody who would listen. But there she was by the largest plane tree, putting her shopping into her rucksack.

  ‘A letter! A letter!’ panted Jeanette, waving it in the air. ‘From England. Your son? Your husband?’ Mireille looked up, her expression that of somebody who hadn’t expected to be spoken to. She was dirty. She had mud on her hands and bits of twig in her hair. In fact she resembled Macon after a day’s work, which was so rare now that Jeanette had forgotten how dirty a person can get.

  ‘For me?’ said Mireille.

  ‘Four days ago it arrived, and we were waiting for you. You were not at the Tuesday market and I said to Macon, do we deliver it to her? But who can find La Ferrou these days, it is so overgrown.’ She handed over the letter reluctantly. It had been the source of much conversation in the café. If it had been in French she might well have been tempted to open it. ‘From your son? A relative?’ Mireille looked at it and put it into her pocket.

  ‘What about lunch? Today it’s a good piece of chicken with wild mushrooms.’ At the café door Auxille was shaking out a cloth and looking obviously in their direction. Odette and her daughter were arranging newspapers outside the shop and doing the same.

  ‘I won’t stop, thank you,’ said Mireille. ‘I’ve been making my hut more habitable. It’s taking up a lot of time.’

  ‘On your own? You should have asked Macon. No wonder you look so tired.’

  ‘Do I?’ and Mireille smiled, a pale version of her usual dazzling one. ‘It’s finished now, but thank you.’

  ‘On Saturday we go to the market in Draguignan. They have everything there. There would be room for you.’

  ‘I do need a cannise,’ said Mireille slowly, ‘and some cooking pans, and some rope …’

  ‘Then it’s settled. Meet us by the café at eight. When we come back we shall have lunch.’ She still didn’t go but stood there smiling furiously in her navy and pink dress, like a sturdy, gaudy, hot-house plant. All this for the contents of a letter, thought Mireille.

  She took the letter out of her pocket and opened it. The frisson of anticipation coming from Jeanette was almost audible. She read it. There was a pause between her reading and relating the contents to Jeanette. Jeanette took this pause to be the translation from English to French, not Mireille’s attempt to alter it completely. ‘He says he’s very well. He wishes me a good holiday and he sends his love to everybody in St Clair. He’s been windsurfing recently and he had dinner with his girlfriend’s parents. That’s about it.’

  ‘Ah …’ said Jeanette, hoping for more but already creating a suave sophisticated young man having a candlelit banquet in a castle. The girlfriend’s parents were aristocrats, surely.

  ‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ said Mireille.

  She was furious. Not with Jeanette. She crunched down through the woods like a wild boar. In her hut she threw the letter on to the table. It was some minutes before she could pick it up again. Perhaps she had misread it. Perhaps she had somehow mistaken what had been said and turned it into an insult.

  Dear Mum,

  What on earth do you think you are doing? I thought you were having a two-week break and now you say you’re staying there until the summer. What’s got into you, have you lost it completely? There’s plenty of things you should be sorting
out here. What about the house? What about your job? I know you’ve been upset and all that, but staying in a hut isn’t going to make it better. I’m sure it’s idyllic but you must remember I have no memories about that place, so describing it in detail does nothing for me. When you next contact me please give me some definite arrangements.

  Love,

  Stephen

  She screamed out of the door and across the valley as if her vehemence could be carried on the wind all the way to England and slap Stephen around the face. ‘I know you’ve been upset and all that.’ That bit got to her the worst. She sat down to write him an immediate reply but could get no further than the first sentence, which she changed many times. ‘How could you? How dare you. Why are you so arrogant?’ She sat with her arms on the table. Through the door she could see the sky, the clouds changing it from blue to grey to white. A band of sunlight falling on the floor, appearing and disappearing with the regularity of dance. She tried on another piece of paper. ‘You do not know what this place means to me.’ When she wrote this her eyes filled with tears, because no, he didn’t know. The distance between them was much greater than anything geographical.

  Stephen. He was tall and blond, like Gregor had been, and with hazel eyes, also like Gregor’s. He was confident and well-spoken. He was the first to shake somebody’s hand. He liked windsurfing and rock climbing. He drove a red Astra. He liked fixing things. He liked the Lake District. He worked for a computer software company. He liked information. He liked facts. He liked order. Yes, she had to remember that, even as a little child he had collected snail shells and put them in neat rows by the hut. Other young men didn’t change their socks and lived happily in festering nests of used handkerchiefs and beer cans, she knew that. But Stephen was immaculate. The Heathers was like that now. Big bright prints. Black and chrome Italian lighting. Dark blue cups and plates. A red blanket on one arm of the sofa. We are alike, she thought, and looked round her own hut, although he might not have seen the connection. Pans hanging on the wall and the floor scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed. The loft swept and rid of unwelcome arachnids. Her sleeping bag on a red blanket she had found in the bottom of the trunk. By the sink a dark blue tin mug.

  Dear Stephen,

  I am not mad, but please accept that I need to be here. You do not know what this place means to me and yes, you are right, I can’t describe it to you. I will stay here until June, then I will let you know what I’m going to do.

  It wasn’t enough, but she felt something final about writing it. She had sent her mother a postcard after she left home. ‘I will not be back for some time. Do not worry about me. Love, Mireille.’

  She put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. She knew what she was saying. Leave me alone. It was something she had never said to him before. She started another letter.

  Dear Stephen,

  And this time I shall call you Sanclair, because that is your real name and I named you after the village. I know you remember nothing about this place but I remember it. I wish you did remember. When you swam in the Ferrou, you were never scared of the water, you would have crawled right in if I hadn’t stopped you. You were so fearless. Nothing scared you. Even a late summer thunderstorm that shook the hut and the rain beating like boots on the roof. You sat there on the floor with big wide eyes and your mouth open, not afraid, but awed. Gregor said, ‘It’s the sky gods having a party,’ and he took you outside to see the lightning flashing in great forks across the valley, and you both came back wet and shivering. I had to stoke the stove up and you were chattering with cold. You said, ‘So big!’ and stretched your arms out. ‘So big!’ For days after you looked up at the sky, waiting for another storm. I wish you could remember. We all slept up in the loft and took it in turns to tell stories. Can’t you remember Gregor’s, about the man with the lame donkey and the boat to the Scottish islands? The blind woman in the Sudan who could tell her family’s history for generations? My stories were Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, Peter Pan, and the tale of Avelard, the troubadour. When it was your turn you told such funny things, big monsters, sky gods and the old woman with a lump on her nose. Your world was so small. The hut, the village, the Ferrou, your red shirt, your floppy rabbit. Then I would see you playing and I could see your world was endless. A tree was a wizard, a stone was a lump of the sky. You played by the Ferrou, talking to nobody, talking to somebody, a muddled up French and English. Sanclair. You started off here and I wish you could remember because it must have affected you, to be a child in the woods. I will not send you this letter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sanclair, this is no longer a letter for you but I want to keep writing. I want to go back to the beginning. My beginning. These are the facts. I was born in Charing Cross Hospital in 1954, on a Thursday in early December. I was born a month early and this inconvenienced my mother because she missed out on the Christmas parties. I weighed a little over 5lbs. There was some concern for my health, but not enough. My parents lived in Kilburn in a first-floor flat. My father was an architect. My mother was very beautiful. I had a nurse called Pammy. The pram wouldn’t go up the stairs so I used to sleep in the hallway by the back door. Pammy told me this. My mother never said much about Kilburn except that it was a low-class sort of area and she was pleased to leave it. I was a quiet baby, said Pammy. I used to lie in my pram and watch the ceiling. When I was six months old we moved to Bath and Pammy came too. We lived in a large house up the Lansdown Road, overlooking the city. There was plenty of space to entertain and my parents did this frequently. If consciousness is the beginning, then this is where I begin …

  I’m in the nursery and my parents are having a party. The nursery is right at the top of the house. A little bedroom for me, a room where I eat and play and a bedroom for Pammy. The wallpaper is stripy, blue and white, like a mattress. There is an old-fashioned rocking horse. The curtains have yellow roses on. I’m sitting on Pammy’s lap and my mother is there. This is unusual, she doesn’t come up to the nursery much. She is choosing a dress for me. I have lots of pretty dresses, smocked at the front with tiny flowers on. I’m sleepy. My mother is saying, ‘She looks best in blue, pale blue,’ and she’s wearing blue too, a sleeveless shiny blue dress. She has sparkling shoes and shiny blonde hair. ‘This one,’ and she gives it to Pammy, who dresses me and ties up the sash at the back. I stand on the floor and they both look at me. ‘Oh, poppet!’ says Pammy, but my mother is scowling. She tries to smooth down my hair with a brush. I have curly black hair and it won’t stay flat. She rubs my cheek with pink-nailed thumbs. ‘Why isn’t there a lotion to get rid of freckles?’

  I think about my parents and I think of film stars. My father is Dirk Bogarde and my mother is Grace Kelly, but she’s not tall, she’s tiny and delicate. She has that same icy cool. She smiles and turns her head. She is always being looked at. There are so many parties I can’t remember which one, but I remember the smell of wine and cigar smoke, jazz music and the mix of voices like at a swimming bath, jumbled and distorted. I hold my mother’s hand and come downstairs. Pammy doesn’t, she never does. The guests stop talking and say, ahh. My mother says, ‘It’s the best I could do.’ She has rings on her fingers and they are biting into my hand. We stop at the bottom of the stairs and she smiles and turns her head. Then my father rushes up and hurls me up high. I squeal and laugh. He kisses me noisily. I’m all crumpled and my hair gets messy. My best girl, he whispers in my ear and carries me round to the table of puddings and I can have a taste of any one I want. The music’s louder. Daddy’s laughing with Alan Crawford. I put my head down because I’m sleepy. Alan’s cigar makes my eyes itch and Daddy twirls me round and round and I can still see, near the stairs, my sparkling mother.

  Hugo is my hero. I’m his best girl, his darling. When he comes back from France he gives me a doll. I have a cupboard full of dolls with clothes as beautifully stitched as my own. He looks like me. He has dark hair, blue eyes and freckles which on him don’t offend my mother. When I think abo
ut him now I feel different. He could tell me about the history of France and how to put a drain in a house. How to play cricket and what was the best way to land a Spitfire on bumpy ground. But he never asked me what I wanted or if I was happy.

  My parents went away on holiday and left me with Pammy. The house was quiet and we ate in the kitchen. It seemed huge compared to the nursery. There was a round wooden table with red chairs. The floor was black and white. The door led into the garden, a tiny town garden with a wall all round. A cherry tree with blossom like pink snow and red bark that peeled like paper. I watched the sparrows splash in the bird bath. I sat on the kitchen step. Pammy called, ‘Lunch!’ and we had sausages and mashed potato.

  I can’t remember Pammy’s face, but she was pink and fat. She wasn’t a nanny but a nurse, and sometimes she wore a nurse’s apron with a little watch pinned to it. But that was when I was very little. I remember her in Bath wearing flowery dresses that squeezed across her stomach. Sandals with socks and a white cardigan with pearly buttons. Her bosom was enormous and her cardigan never fitted over it. She smelled of Coty’s L’aimant and Imperial Leather soap. She treated me with the briskness and matter-of-factness that nurses were supposed to treat their patients. I like to think that when I was a baby she sang to me and cradled me, because I’m sure my mother never did.

  Pammy likes Elvis. When my parents are away we go into the lounge and play records on the stereogram. I’m not allowed in the lounge and neither is she, but we won’t tell. Pammy sings along and now I can see her face. Her face is round, her hair is short and mousy, she sings ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in a whisper, she knows all the words. My mother is beautiful and Pammy is not, but her lips tremble when she whispers, ‘They’ll make you so lonely you will die.’ Her eyes are closed. This is ecstasy. It looks curious and rather frightening but I want to feel it too. I close my eyes. The music stops and Pammy says, ‘Would you like some milk and biscuits?’ She looks embarrassed and pinker and smooths down the covers of the easy chairs. They are covered in yellow roses like the curtains in my room.