I catch your disapproving look and smile. ‘I saw that, my little puritan. It’s not like I’ve got to drive.’
‘It must be strange being back,’ you say cautiously, when you’ve finished your food. You’re swirling a plastic stirrer around your Coke glass.
I nod, though the second beer has made it less so.
‘Do you miss it now that you’re here?’
I look up, surprised at your perceptiveness. On leaving for London when you were four, I bundled everything into a deep drawer marked ‘France’ and slammed it shut, forgetting there was so much to love about home.
‘I’m sorry I’ve kept you from the house for so long. You were born here too. It’s as much yours as mine.’
You glow. ‘It is?’
I smile and squeeze your hand.
‘Mum, are you sure there’s no way of keeping the house? It’s such an amazing place. We could come here every summer. We could.’
I bat away a moth as it dances close to my eyes. ‘It’s impossible, chérie. I would need to buy out your aunt Camille and I can’t afford it. You know what she’s like.’
You frown, pulling your hand away, and for a split second you remind me of your sister. ‘I don’t think you’d do it even if you did have the money.’ And then, as if you’ve heard my thoughts. ‘It’s because of her, isn’t it?’
I dig my fingernails into the table edge. ‘Emma, do you have any idea how hard it is for me to be back here?’ The alcohol makes the words sharp and I regret them immediately. ‘Look, let’s not argue. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you before, but we’re here now, aren’t we?’
You don’t reply but after a while you nudge my hand in apology. Quite suddenly, I want to cry.
The walk back from the village is dark. No, not dark: pitch-black. The stars have been blotted out so thoroughly by clouds that it takes until we reach the turn-off before I can distinguish the shadowed bulk of the hills from the sky.
Despite the lack of visible moon, La Rêverie seems to stand in its own dim pool of light as we approach. Or perhaps it’s just our eyes, still adjusting to the countryside after years of London’s perpetually thrumming glow. It looks bigger by night, a monster of a house rising out of its dark moat of garden. I don’t look at the windows as we go up the path, keeping my head down, pretending to hunt in my bag for the key I’m already clutching.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had shaken out my mother’s soft old linen, only a little musty, and made us up a bed each: the creaking mahogany double Greg and I once shared, which was my parents’ before us, and one of the narrow twins in the bedroom next to it for you. Your old room has only its small cot-bed and I don’t want you in there anyway.
‘I remember this,’ you exclaim, in the room that’s been a spare my whole life, pointing to the faded blue toile de Jouy wallpaper, which, in one corner, has begun to peel. ‘I used to sit on the floor and make up stories about the people.’ You go closer, tracing a finger across the men in stockings, the ladies with their pompadours and fans. ‘I remember them.’
*
I wake at exactly three in the morning, the dimly glowing hands of my travel clock a perfect L. Downstairs, at the very edge of my hearing, I hear the ormolu clock in the salon as it chimes the hour. The bright, metallic ting is a sound older than memory to me, one that marked a benign passage through all the nights of my childhood, and I turn over, comforted. I’m just slipping into a dream of my mother winding it when I sit up, the bed groaning with the suddenness of the movement. I haven’t wound the clock.
*
The next morning I find you at the bottom of the terrace steps, barefoot in the long grass. I shade my eyes against the startling glare of the sun, my head tight from lack of sleep.
‘I found the swimming pool,’ you call up to me, full of glee. ‘I didn’t know there was one. It’s so cool.’
You don’t remember it from before. I try to smile: this is a good thing.
‘Perhaps we can see about filling it, if the pump’s still working,’ I make myself say. You’re a strong swimmer; I’ve made sure of that. I paid for years of lessons at an over-chlorinated municipal pool near our flat in London.
You look at me oddly. ‘It’s already filled.’
I know it was emptied ten years ago, when we left for good. Neither Camille nor I have touched it since.
But of course you’re right. The water glimmers mysteriously through the row of parasol pines my conservative father planted in the fifties for the sake of his daughters’ modesty. It isn’t the blinding turquoise of resort swimming pools but deep, darkling jade. On overcast days I always thought it looked like green ink.
I kneel at the edge and dip my hand in. Hardly yet warmed by the sun, the water runs like chilled silk through my fingers. There are only a few leaves and insects floating on the surface, clustered at the far end. Someone has cleared it recently.
I wonder if Olivier Lagarde arranged it. Perhaps he wound the clock in the salon too. I have the strangest sense that these things are simply the house welcoming us back. And perhaps trying to keep us here.
I glance at my bare wrist. ‘What time is it?’
‘About half ten, I think.’
I get to my feet. ‘I have to meet the solicitor at eleven, in the village.’
‘I’m staying here.’
I pause. ‘I thought you wanted to go to the hypermarket. You’ll have to come with me if you do. I’m going there on the way back.’
You grumble as we walk to the house but I know you don’t mind, really. You’ve never been the sort to put up much of a fight. My lovely biddable girl.
*
Only one other table is occupied at the café in the village – a couple, Dutch most likely: all long legs and hiking equipment.
‘Darling, why don’t you go and look in the tabac over there?’ I hand you a crisp ten-franc note. ‘Buy some postcards. The solicitor and I will be speaking in French.’
You blink, slightly stung, but go anyway, just as the waiter arrives.
Olivier Lagarde turns up just as you disappear into the shop across the square. He’s much handsomer than I’d expected from my dim memory of his father. It’s already hot and he’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, his arms burnished against blinding white cotton and the chrome of his watch. His grip when he shakes my hand is firm and warm. As he sits down, the Dutch woman’s eyes rake over him and I feel a little jolt that she might assume we’re together.
‘Madame Winters, thank you for meeting me today.’ He smiles easily, appreciatively, his eyes intent when I meet them.
‘Please, call me Sylvie,’ I say, looking away first. ‘And it’s Durand again, actually. I’m divorced.’
‘Bien sûr. Sylvie, then. You’ve seen the damage now, I gather, and that it’s really quite superficial. I hope that was clear in my letter. I didn’t want to worry you unduly. You were lucky, though. It could have been …’ He spreads his hands. There’s no need to say how it might have turned out.
‘Do the police know who did it?’
He shrugs. ‘Kids with nothing to do, who else? It happens all the time in the countryside. Especially when people know a house is standing empty.’