Children of Light Read online

  ‘I’ll bring your coffee,’ called out Jeanette although Mireille hadn’t ordered any. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to open the letter there or take it back home. It wasn’t a thick letter.

  ‘Eugénie Gués was taken to the hospital last night. Madame Cabasson told me this morning. She went out to call her dog and fell down in the street right in front of Charles Perrigues, which was lucky because he’s the doctor’s son. It was a stroke and now she’s full of tubes.’ Auxille smoothed down her apron, oblivious to Jeanette being rushed off her feet inside the café. Two house martins swooped down, chasing each other over the tables.

  ‘And Hilaire only died in February. I remember when they were courting, they married a month after the end of the war. Hilaire’s brother Victor was shot in the head by the Nazis. He was only fifteen. They said he was in the Maquis but he wasn’t. Hilaire was. He never got over the guilt. Those Germans. You only had to look at them the wrong way and they shot you, and now they’re re-buying houses in the village. Two behind the church and on the road to the Col de St Clair, a grand place with a swimming pool as big as the café. I don’t want to serve them but Jeanu says we can’t blame the younger ones, they had nothing to do with the war. Mind you, some people have always served Germans.’ She was sitting with her back to Odette, who was now scolding her daughter about the newspapers.

  Mireille opened her letter. The envelope had indeed been written by Stephen, but inside was an air mail letter from India. There was no message from Stephen at all.

  ‘It’s from my husband,’ said Mireille.

  ‘He was a German, but he was sympa, he was gentil. He had nothing to do with the war.’

  It was on thin blue air mail paper. Tightly written as all Gregor’s letters were. She had last written to him in January. She had been very low then.

  ‘My little schoolgirl …’ he began, ‘I was so sad to hear your news. First you write and tell me how happy, then you write and say how full of sadness. Perhaps when you write now you will say how happy. It has been a long time I am in replying because I am just returning from a trip with the Baba to Delhi and he has been giving lectures …’ Over the years Gregor’s English had not improved.

  She read the letter rapidly. She was hungry for its contents, but it was the same as his other letters, mostly about the Baba. The Baba was a tiny old wrinkled man. Gregor had been in love with him for over twenty years. He answered the Baba’s mail and saw it as a privilege. The Baba and his devotees lived in an ashram in the hills above Bombay. It was supposed to be a place of extraordinary beauty and solitude, though Mireille had never been there.

  ‘Yesterday,’ wrote Gregor, ‘when the Baba was talking to us a sparrow flew down and sat on his head, it was indeed as if he was a piece of the country like a tree or a rock and the Baba did not stop talking. It was supposed to happen …’

  Gregor’s letters were full of little incidents like this, which he saw as terribly significant, but seemed to Mireille like everyday events that happen all the time. After reading his letters she always felt she had missed something. They wrote to each other infrequently now.

  Jeanette brought the coffee. ‘And how is your son,’ she asked, bursting with curiosity, ‘and his charming girlfriend?’

  ‘It was from her husband,’ said Auxille. She started theorising about Germans again.

  ‘Maman is so out of sorts!’ exclaimed Jeanette. ‘Eugénie is ill and she is her best friend, but when she is well, do they ever talk to each other? I have a pile of washing and people will want their lunch soon. But how is your husband?’ She wasn’t too busy to listen to Mireille’s news.

  ‘He’s very well,’ said Mireille.

  ‘Will he come here?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. His life is in India now.’ She knew she sounded disappointed. She had wanted the letter to be more personal.

  ‘So many years apart …’ said Jeanette with such a look of compassion it made Mireille want to sob or run away. ‘Perhaps you will go to him.’

  ‘To India?’ said Auxille, catching up on their conversation. ‘Who would want to go to India? He had religious fever, now that is different.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to India,’ said Mireille, clarifying things before Jeanette’s imagination got out of hand, but at that moment Dr Perrigues walked across the square.

  ‘Eugénie died this morning. I thought I had better tell you,’ he said cheerfully.

  Auxille threw up her hands and started to wail. So did Jeanette, the lunch and the washing all forgotten.

  ‘Eugénie! Eugénie!’ cried out Auxille. ‘I gave you my best crystal earrings when you went for your first dance with Hilaire. Now, who will remember that when I am gone?’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sunday 1st May. Midday

  It’s the beginning of May. Today is the celebration of the end of the war and in the afternoon Eugénie’s funeral. I shall go to neither event. I am sick of death. Today the sky is that blue blue. I remember it was always like this in the summer. There isn’t a single cloud. I’m sitting under the tree by the front door. Just an occasional breeze through the pines in the woods behind me. On the track to the village the wild flowers are spectacular now. Blue anchusas, dark pink gladioli, blue cornflowers, purple irises. Here on the terraces, clover, wild thyme, marjoram, sage, and the grass is as green as it ever will be.

  I wrote to Gregor but I didn’t say what I wanted to say. It feels I can only say what I want to in here. When I wrote to Gregor I said how beautiful it all was and how I feel so much better. It sounded like pap. We have been writing pap to each other for years. Him telling me about the Baba and me writing I did this, I did that, Stephen did this, Stephen did that. I wish I could write to him honestly. When I was writing I thought, I don’t even know what you look like anymore. I’ve seen a picture of the Baba and I imagine you look like that. A bald head, long white hair, long white beard. Brown wrinkled skin. In my mind you have become the Baba. I want to write and ask you, are you still Gregor?

  I feel so many things when I think about Gregor. We were only together five years, but even five minutes with him felt like a long time. So much could happen in five minutes. I’ve never missed him, which is strange because I’ve missed so many people, but I suppose with Gregor I felt I had had more than my share. When he left, sometimes I was glad he had gone. Life was quieter. Life was simpler. His intensity wore me out and I had Sanclair then. I’m trying to find a way of describing how it was with Gregor. Things went fast, my mind went fast. I didn’t feel that again with anybody, I didn’t think I could until I met Felix.

  It doesn’t feel like time has been even. There have been patches when I felt more, when colours were brighter, the times I remember most accurately. Pictures have stayed so clearly I can step into them again. Suddenly here I am and there is Gregor walking up from the road with a crate of oranges on his shoulders. Oranges, why has he bought oranges? So we can have fresh orange juice for a week, of course. Going to the cafés in St Tropez when Sanclair was still little, and singing for money. Gregor could sing so loud and I’d dance round and round. People did give us money, not to send us away but because they liked it. Encore! Encore! And I’d sing too and Sanclair laughed and clapped his hands.

  Singing in the square by the café to the British tourists who never guessed I was British too. Singing to Badouin and Julian, Jeanette standing by the door, and even Macon came outside to listen. I played the accordion, Gregor sang and Sanclair banged a little drum. Sanclair, dressed in a gold Indian tunic, like a sun god, and me in bright green with a red scarf in my hair. Gregor wearing white trousers and no shirt, no shoes. Three gypsies, three vagabonds, three troubadours.

  There have been patches when time went so slowly it felt like nothing happened. After my father died my mother’s life became very small. There were no more parties. There were no more holidays. She spent more time on the sofa. She smoked more. She spent more time in the garden. My life shrank as well. School and hom
e. I cycled to school up the tow-path. I hauled my bike over the wooden bridge and at the top wondered if I would ever cycle to Bradford-on-Avon. I had extra French lessons on Wednesdays. I had piano lessons on Saturday mornings. We started going to the Catholic church, possibly because my mother liked putting on her best clothes, possibly because she wanted to impress the parents of the other convent girls. She didn’t become friendly with them. She was too proud to become friendly with anybody.

  I found the convent dull. They were fussy about manners and uniforms. I had to wear white gloves and boaters in the summer. White ankle socks and bright blue dresses. In the winter a navy skirt, a yellow shirt and a navy hat with a yellow trim. It was not a school for the well-off. The buildings were old-fashioned. The toilets leaked. The science labs were archaic. The tennis courts needed resurfacing. The nuns had names like Sister Christopher, Sister Dominic, Sister Sylvester. They were androgynous, peculiar beings. I never understood them. To me they were badly educated, ridiculously sentimental and pious to the point of insanity. But I liked what they said about Heaven. My daddy was in Heaven.

  By the time I was thirteen I was quiet and studious. I was not shy but I didn’t make friends. I suppose I didn’t know how to. Home and school. School and home …

  Cycling home in the rain along the tow-path. Summer rain and the banks are green and white with cow parsley. I’m cycling through the puddles, under the bridges, through the tunnels, past the stagnant water of the old canal. The pond near Widcombe lock. The gardens of Sydney Sussex Buildings falling to the canal. My father’s old office, still an architect’s studio but now owned by somebody else. Then the long stretch where the railway runs near the canal and sometimes I’m racing against a train. The long bumpy stretch, splashing through the puddles, and my blazer is getting wet and my hat is in my satchel, although I’m supposed to wear it all the way home or I’ll get a detention, but who can see me in my bit of wilderness, my only bit of freedom? I push my bike up the garden path and there’s my mother on the sofa waiting to scold me because my socks are muddy.

  I was fifteen. I sat next to a girl called Caitlin. She was so shy that it wasn’t until the Easter holidays on the school trip to Paris that we talked to each other. She could read French but she couldn’t speak it. She knew nothing about France. We shared a room in the shabby hotel. In the day the nuns took us to the Louvre, Versailles, Notre Dame, Montmartre, but in the evenings we had to stay in our rooms. Some of the other girls managed to sneak out and meet boys in a nearby café and there was much discussion about what the nuns wore in bed, but Caitlin and I opened the windows and looked out over the rooftops. I told her about St Clair, the hilltops, the pine trees, the blue sky. It seemed like a different country from wet Paris. Caitlin had a pale face, greeny eyes and brown hair, not as dark as mine. She had a whispery soft voice. She had long beautiful fingers. She was one of ten children. She thought I made most of it up because I included troubadours, seven-foot-long snakes and witches in caves, but she wanted to hear more. I told her about Jeanette, Auxille and the Ferrou, she definitely thought I made that up. She was my first friend.

  At school we revised together. Girls from the Convent of the Good Shepherd were not noted for their academic achievements, but we were going to go to university. I was going to study languages, be an interpreter and go travelling, and she wanted to study literature. She loved the Romantic poets, she wanted to write about Coleridge. She wanted to go to the Lake District. Her family hadn’t been on holiday for years. There were too many of them.

  They lived in a large Victorian house up the London Road. It was untidy and scruffy. Caitlin had three older sisters who were always arguing, four younger brothers who were always fighting, and two baby sisters. A toddling one and a crying one in a cot. Her mother was plump and tired-looking, the babies seemed to be stuck to her all the time. The food was mostly stew and potatoes. The children had Celtic names, Fenula, Siobhan, Aisne, Finbar, Collum. Caitlin shared a room with Fenula who wore make-up and chucked her clothes on the floor.

  Her father was the bursar at the Catholic boys’ school. He was a dapper little man and spoiled his family shamelessly. He let the boys climb all over him. He gave his eldest daughters money to go to the pictures. He gave the babies sweets. He kissed his wife and called her, ‘My darling.’ He said all her cooking was delicious. He said Caitlin was a genius. I thought about my own home. My mother’s complete lack of interest in anything about me. The way my father used to promise to take me places and never did. I watched Mr Costello playing football on the balding lawn with his sons, the toddling girl getting in the way, the older sisters screaming with laughter out of an upstairs window and Mrs Costello sitting in the garden bouncing the baby on her lap. It made me feel peculiar.

  But Caitlin thought The Heathers was wonderful. The silence, the clean floors, the beautiful unmarked lawn. My mother’s clothes, so stylish and so expensive, and my clothes, I had a wardrobe full. My mother never stopped spending money on clothes. I gave Caitlin a huge bag of dresses I didn’t want and she pored over them as if they were jewels. Could she really keep them, oh could she? She only wore hand-me-downs from her sisters. And the piano! And the fountain! And my mother! My mother loved attention and here was this young girl, what a specimen, in the most dreadful dress, probably bought from a catalogue, goggle-eyed because she had never seen a gold-topped perfume spray before. I hated my mother for laughing at Caitlin, dazzling her with gold jewellery, Pierre Cardin suits and Bally shoes. She gave Caitlin French patisseries on bone china and Earl Grey tea. She showed her the house, ‘designed by my late husband’, and the garden, ‘landscaped, of course’. Caitlin went home starry-eyed, as if she’d been taken to a fairy palace, but I could hear my mother shrieking with laughter like I hadn’t heard her laugh for years. ‘Oh do invite your little bog peasant again. Perhaps I’ll give her coffee next time. Do you think she’s ever tasted real coffee before?’

  The bitter taste of my mother, like the blackest of coffees. When Caitlin complained about her rowdy family, her tumbledown house, her mother’s awful cooking, I said, ‘At least your family love you,’ and she said, all green eyes and innocence, ‘Mireille, surely your mother loves you?’

  She knew nothing else. She had only experienced love.

  Monday 2nd May. Morning

  I thought summer was coming, but early yesterday evening the wind started blowing down the valley. In the night the shutters and the doors were banging. This is the mistral. The cold wind from the mountains. It’s a harsh wind that hurts your eyes and whistles in your ears. It’s not a wind I wanted to be outside in. I chopped up more wood earlier and when I came back I was raddled. I was blown to bits. I’m annoyed, I was planning a long walk to the top of the Col de St Clair. That will have to wait. Today will be a quiet day then. The crackle of the wood in the stove. The creak of the door on its hinges. Me, wrapped up in the red blanket with two pairs of socks on.

  Caitlin. She was my friend but she annoyed me. She never wanted to do anything. She had spent all her life surrounded by her family and any independent activity set her in a panic. Walk to Bradford-on-Avon? Oh, we couldn’t. Go to the shops in Bristol? Oh, we couldn’t. Go for a day out to Weston-Super-Mare? Oh, Mireille, we couldn’t. My teenage years were like this. Me staying at her house for the weekend and she staying at mine. We read books, listened to music on the record player, not the progressive rock of the late sixties but Debussy, Handel, Mendelssohn, Chopin. After my mother died I helped Stephen clear out her things at The Heathers and in a drawer by her bed were two photographs. One was of my family outside the Sanglier, the last summer we stayed in St Clair. A black and white snapshot taken by Jeanette. My mother smiling brightly in a patterned dress. My father, as I remembered him, white trousers, white shirt, looking older but still handsome and me, as I remembered myself. Tousled hair, skinny legs in shorts and scuffed sandals. Summer 1964. The other photograph was a school portrait. Summer 1971. ‘My darling Mireille’, it said on the b
ack. I looked at this photograph and was disconcerted because I was beautiful. When I was seventeen I was beautiful and I didn’t know it because I thought beauty meant having sleek blonde hair and designer clothes. I had dark curling hair down to my shoulders, shining eyes and an uncertain smile. The freckles I hated just made me look more charming. I was bursting with beauty.

  I’m seventeen and I know I’m clever and I know I’m musical. I’m tall and I like cycling and walking. I can speak French and I’m learning Italian and Spanish. I know some German too. I like D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, the poetry of Eliot and Auden and I’m passionate about Shakespeare. At school I’m a swot and I’m not fashionable, my mother despairs of my dress sense. Clothes bore me. Most of the time I am bored. I want to travel. I want to go on aeroplanes. I want to go up mountains. I can’t wait to finish school and go to college. I can’t wait to leave home.

  This is May and along the old canal the elderflower is out, cow parsley lines the route. The countryside is lacy, frothy, strong-smelling like cats or unwashed underpants. The choked up canal smells stagnant, but I like these smells. To me they are fertile. I’m cycling to school fast because I’m late, because I stayed for too long on the bridge for no reason other than to look at the grey-green fields and the slow-moving clouds, white-grey, grey-white, hanging over the valley. I’m cycling fast, as fast as I can, and just as the path turns by the Widcombe pond I have to jam on the brakes because a man is standing in my way. I don’t hit him but I nearly do. ‘Didn’t you see me?’ I shout. He turns, he has long hair, blond and straight, and a beard under his chin. He has a suntanned face. Stupidly, I think he looks like Jesus. This thought makes me confused and I blush. His eyes are calm. He has hazel eyes. He says, ‘Did you not see the heron?’ He has a foreign accent. He has wide shoulders and is wearing loose trousers and an embroidered shirt. I stare at him. I don’t know what to say. At school we are always being warned about strange men and he is strange. ‘I have to go. I’ll be late,’ I say. After school when I cycle back I’m worried and excited in case he might still be there. I know that what I’m doing could be dangerous but I want to see him again. I want to ask, who are you? I get off my bike and walk slowly past the Widcombe pond. I can’t see anyone. Then I see that there’s a yellow van parked to the side in some bushes. In front of it is a small fire with a kettle over it. The kettle starts whistling. The man comes out of the van and says, ‘So you would like some tea? Yes?’