Part One
* * *
July 1993
The letter is there when I get home from work. I know it’s French immediately. The handwritten number 7 in the postcode gives it away: crossed and curled, so un-English. La Rêverie is finally calling me back.
The summer sun is relentless in the place I come from. There, the hard earth absorbs all the heat it can, leaving the rest to hang in the air, heavy as swaddling. On the hottest nights, I would lie awake in damp sheets, the windows and shutters flung back, and listen to the cicadas whirring and the frogs belching and the thunder rolling around the hills, like marbles in a bowl.
I didn’t miss France when we left. I was grateful the two of us could hide away in north London, safe among the streets of red-brick houses and trees that lift the paving stones. I don’t even mind that I’ve become a permanent foreigner, despite my excellent English, the accent always giving me away. ‘Oh, you’re French,’ people say, smiling. ‘All that lovely wine and cheese.’
I think in English now. I even dream in my adopted language. But as I put down the letter and begin to digest what it means, I do so in my native tongue. It happens automatically – the old language so easy to inhabit that it’s like a shirt you no longer want but still fits better than anything else.
At the telephone in the hall, I open the address book to G. I still don’t know your father’s number in Paris by heart.
‘Oui?’
His accent is good, better than when we were still married, when I would tease him, saying, ‘Greg, it’s not “wee”. You have to move your mouth with French. Use your lips.’
‘I’ll use my lips, all right,’ he always said, pantomime-raucously, and then he would kiss me. We were forever kissing in the early days. Kissing and laughing. We always spoke English together, despite living in France – and not just because my grasp of his language was so much surer than his of mine, but because it balanced things, somehow. A house full of English with the whole of France outside.
‘Oh, Sylvie, it’s you,’ he says. His voice, low and slightly hoarse, is still capable of piercing the softest parts of me. ‘Is Emma all right?’
‘Emma is fine.’
I can picture him as if he’s standing in front of me, the hand that isn’t holding the phone turning over a crumpled pack of Gitanes, a soft chambray shirt, ironed by someone else now, impatience in the deep groove between his eyebrows.
I swallow, wishing I’d thought about what I would say before I’d rung. ‘Look, I need you to take Emma for a few days, maybe a week.’
‘We talked about the end of August, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, but I need you to have her now. As soon as possible.’
‘What? Why? Where are you going? The schools haven’t even broken up yet, have they?’
I can see the letter on the table from where I’m standing, its sharp white corners.
‘They break up on Friday. She’ll only miss a few days. I can drop her off in Paris on my way south.’
‘South? Sylvie, what’s going on?’
‘Something happened at the house. The solicitor wrote to me about it. There was – there’s been some damage.’
‘What sort of damage?’
‘A small fire. It was probably accidental, but it’s going to cost. The house has been standing empty for ten years now and this kind of thing is only going to crop up more. It needs to be sold and I have to go there in person, sign some papers. You know how it is in France, how complicated they make these things.’
‘Well, we’d love to see Emma, of course. But I don’t think it’ll work.’
‘You know I don’t want her going back there. Besides, I’ll be stuck with the solicitors half the time.’
‘Sylvie, I’ve got a buying trip and Nicole is taking the boys to her mother’s in Normandy. It’s all arranged.’
I don’t reply. I had known, really, that he would say no. In the silence that follows, both of us lost in our own thoughts, the line hums between us.
‘So you’re finally going back,’ he says eventually, and takes another long drag of his cigarette.
*
Though it’s early when we leave the flat and begin the journey south to Dover, the day is almost gone by the time we drive off the ferry in Calais, the men waving us impatiently down the ramp, neon jackets garish against the sky that’s always grey and brooding here. You’re quiet beside me, but a mounting excitement is leaking out of you, like the noise from the Discman earphones you’re hardly without these days.
I follow the car in front of us into the right-hand lane, blue motorway signs flashing overhead. As we drive on, deeper and deeper into the darkening mass of France, the voice in my head that hasn’t paused since I got the letter grows louder, more insistent. I find I’m gripping the wheel so tightly that it’s slippery with sweat.
I glance at the dashboard clock. It’s late. Up ahead, the sign for a budget hotel glows out of the dark. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding and pull off the road. In the fluorescent-lit reception area, silent except for the hum of a vending machine, it doesn’t feel like the country I left behind – the sleepy France of my childhood or the place where we were once a normal family. No, that’s disingenuous. Whatever we were, we were never normal, not even from the start.
*
In the morning, I pour you a second cup of chocolat chaud in the breakfast room and gesture to the packets of dry biscottes piled high on the buffet table, the round pats of pale Normandy butter.
‘Have some more, darling,’ I entreat, smiling to make up for the strain in my voice. ‘It’ll be a long day.’
But you’re much hungrier for the scene’s foreignness than your breakfast: not just the deep bowls of coffee and thin slices of cheese layered in ripped-open croissants but the children with their perfect table manners, their brightly coloured spectacles.
You lean forward and drop your voice conspiratorially: ‘There’s a man over there who keeps looking at you.’
‘No, there isn’t.’ But my eyes are already searching the room because it’s impossible not to.
You’re grinning, which makes me smile too.
‘He just did it again,’ you say. ‘He’s so obvious. Over by the window in the green shirt. He’s on his own. He’s probably divorced too. You should go and say bonjour.’
‘For God’s sake, Emma!’ though I’m laughing now.
‘You’re really good for your age, Mum.’
‘Ah, I love a backhanded compliment.’
You roll your eyes. ‘No, but you are. You’re really pretty. Men always look at you. That Nick who asked you out at work was basically obsessed with you.’
I spot my admirer then, our eyes meeting for an instant. There’s something of Greg about him: the way he holds his knife and the unconscious flick of his head because his fringe is too long. I used to cut Greg’s hair for him when we were married, newspaper spread under the stool in the kitchen.
I stand, my chair scraping on the hard floor. One of the children has begun to sing-song, ‘Maman! Maman!’ and I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.