*
We follow the slower, narrower D roads after Lyon, sunlight slanting through long lines of poplars. I’d forgotten the meticulous commitment to signposting every minor village and hamlet, not just when you enter but when you leave too, the name slashed through with red. The countryside around us feels endless after London: age-softened farmhouses and the occasional shuttered restaurant marooned at the margins of vast fields. I glance over at you, drinking it all in. It must be so exotic to you, yet it’s where you spent your first four years.
The sun climbs as we drive, the car growing steadily hotter. You fiddle with the radio, snorting with derision at the terrible French pop songs but stopping when you find a station playing Edith Piaf. I wind down the window and, in the first blast of air, I smell the past. It’s indescribable. The closest I can get to it is hot stone, lavender and a distant note of something like panic.
Half a mile from the house, we almost get lost, which seems absurd given that I’ve lived more of my life in this part of the world than any other. A petrol station has appeared on a corner once occupied by a peach stall we used to stop at, and this throws me enough to miss first the turn and then the sign. It’s only when we’re suddenly in the heart of the old village – the dappled shade of the plane trees, the café’s round silver tables and the dusty awning of the boulangerie all utterly unchanged – that I realize where we are.
I turn the car around with a screech, not yet ready to be seen by anyone who might know me, and soon we’re bumping down the dirt road to La Rêverie.
Quite abruptly, more quickly than is comfortable, we reach the rutted track that winds down to the ramshackle barn where logs for winter fires were stored, along with the rusting rollers and ancient farm tools my father pointlessly hoarded. I don’t look at it, driving round to the front of the house instead.
I turn off the engine. You’re silent next to me. I reach out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear: English mouse and a little ragged at the ends because you’re always trying to grow it longer. You’ve made me promise you can have it streaked when you turn sixteen. I want it blonder, you’ve been saying all spring. Not this nothingy colour.
‘Mum, I don’t think I remember this,’ you say now, your voice high and young. ‘I thought I did, when we turned off, but …’
‘It might come back,’ I say, hoping it won’t, that everything from that time has been permanently erased. You were so young when we left, and I tell myself, as I have so many times, that that’s why you’ve apparently forgotten everything.
We get out and the ticking under the car’s bonnet echoes the cicadas that fill the bushes around us. Their cries will get faster and more frenzied as the day wears on, the sun steadily climbing, the temperature rising. ‘Écoute, chérie. Écoute les cigales,’ my mother used to say when I was little, in a bid to stop me running outside and getting overheated. They’ll tell you if it’s too hot to go out today. I’d forgotten that.
The house is exactly as a foreigner would picture a maison de maître in the South of France: thick grey stone and a steeply pitched roof, tall symmetrical windows concealed by mauve-blue shutters, the paint powdery with age and the ferocity of the sun. The garden that surrounds it is walled at the front and topped with railings. I push back the metal gate, whose letter box still bears my maiden name in faded letters, and it swings in easily, as if used every day.
Inside, the bougainvillaea spills over the grass and the lavender bushes have gone woody and sparse, but it isn’t as unkempt as I imagined a garden abandoned for a decade would be. It still looks like the place I remember. Weeds grow up through the path to the door, but the dense column of cypress that casts one side of the house into deep shadow always needed cutting back, even in my earliest memories. I glance up at the furthest bedroom window, the one most obscured by the cypress’s deep shade, and see that one of the shutters has slipped its hinges.
By my side, you crackle with something: anticipation, mostly, but also a little fear. Perhaps you’ve caught it from me.
‘Was that her room?’ you ask.
I look sharply at you. ‘That’s right. Do you remember?’
‘Just a guess.’
You look at it hungrily then, as if the braver part of you wants to believe someone is up there now, watching you through the gaps in the shutters. The cicadas have stopped, and the silence is unnerving. Then, in miraculous unison, they start up again, even louder than before, and I stride determinedly towards the front door, fumbling in my bag for the key, knowing that if I don’t go in right now, I might drag you back to the car and drive straight home.
The church-cool air of the darkened hallway smells of mingled damp and smoke from the recent fire. Beneath them, faint but bone-deep familiar, I can just discern La Rêverie’s older scents: beeswax, butter-softened garlic and my mother’s olive soap.
I’m so struck by this that it takes me a while to notice that your breathing has changed. I scrabble in the inside pocket of my handbag, praying that the inhaler I carry from habit rather than necessity is still there. At last my hand closes around plastic. I pull it out and shake it.
You’re fine after a couple of puffs, though your hands are already beginning to shake – a side-effect of the drug seeping into your muscles.
‘Okay now, darling?’
You nod, just once.
‘It must be all the dust and damp,’ I say, and you nod again, though both of us know that your asthma is triggered by stress and not by allergies.
While you’re unpacking, I wander around the house, methodically opening each door, except the one I’m not yet ready for. The shutters scream as I push them back, revealing fat black flies in sinister piles on the windowsills. As the light floods in, dust swarms.
Last of all, I steel myself to go and look at the fire damage. I know it’s in the scullery off the kitchen – la souillarde – a small space housing little more than a sink, draining board and a couple of curtain-fronted cupboards that remains dark and cool however stifling it gets outside. Its window is no bigger than a sheet of paper, with chicken wire instead of glass in the frame.
Though the smells of fresh damage are strong when I open the door, it’s not as bad as I’ve been imagining since I received the letter. Two of the whitewashed walls are now marbled with black. In places, the marks are as high as my head. It’s hard to tell what is scorched and what is mould, the evidence mingling darkly. But whatever happened here, water must swiftly have followed fire. Otherwise the whole house would have gone up.
*
As evening begins to thicken around the house, you ask if we can go and eat in the village. We walk the ten minutes in, the tarmac soft under our feet, legs shiny with insect repellent in preparation for the evening’s emerging mosquitoes. The sun has already dipped behind the hills by the time we sit down at a table outside a pizzeria that wasn’t here before. We’re overlooking the tree-shaded patch of earth where the old men always played boules in their caps and braces, and doubtless still do, though they’re not out for the evening yet.
You ask me to ask the waitress for a Coke, too shy to try speaking in French, and I order a beer instead of my usual wine. When it comes, so cold that droplets of condensation have formed on the glass, I gulp it down like water and gesture for a second.