*
The garden is losing its colour to the dusk. We’ve just finished eating a drawn-out supper of tomatoes, cheese and bread. Someone spying on the scene would see a mother and daughter relaxing into their holiday, but my shoulders are stiff with tension.
Fortunately, you seem not to have noticed. Or perhaps you have, because you stretch your arms and yawn noisily. ‘I could get used to this,’ you say, in the old-man voice that always makes me laugh. ‘What do you think, love? Shall we stay?’
It’s a favourite game of ours, this pretence we’re a long-retired couple who take pleasure in small things; we do it in the flat while I’m making dinner. You’ve been less willing lately, and I’ve missed it, an eccentric side you don’t reveal to anyone else.
‘If you like it here, dearie, then so do I,’ I say, trying not to sound too eager.
‘You’re a good girl. I couldn’t have asked for a better wife all these years.’
We get the giggles then, made abruptly helpless in the intense way that veers close to tears. I pull down my sleeve to wipe my eyes as we lapse into an easy silence.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ you suddenly ask, and the switch in mood pulls me out of my happiness like a slap. I reach for the pale Bandol rosé I’ve been drinking since this afternoon. I only drink occasionally in London.
‘Ghosts?’ My voice quavers slightly. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why, have you seen one?’ I intend this to sound lighthearted but it doesn’t quite succeed, the question mark too loud.
‘No, I just wondered.’
‘Did you hear a funny noise? Remember, it’s an old house and it’s summer now, too. When the temperature changes, everything creaks.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘What, then?’
You shrug. ‘Just some places are … I don’t know. Like this place is. It’s old and stuff but it’s not just that. Our flat’s Victorian but I can’t imagine seeing anything there.’
‘And you can here.’
You shrug again.
‘Are you going to start sorting out our old things tomorrow?’ you ask after a while. ‘I can help if you want.’
‘You’re good to offer, sweetheart, but it’ll be boring and dusty, I expect. I thought you wanted to get a tan.’ I keep my voice casual because I don’t want you going through everything. I don’t know what you might stumble across, or how to answer your questions if you do.
You poke at your arm. ‘This pasty skin will never go brown. It’s already pink, like Dad’s.’ You look straight at me. ‘Don’t you want me to help?’
You’re testing me, which is so unlike you. By unspoken agreement, we only talk about her obliquely. I’ve caught you enough times, though, gazing at that photograph in the hall at home, the only one of your sister that’s on display. I presume you keep quiet because you don’t want to make me sad, and I’ve let you believe it’s as simple as that. Here, though, things might be different. Perhaps this is the beginning, tectonic plates shifting just enough to trigger the first tremor.
‘You can help if you want to,’ I say woodenly.
‘Is there much left that was hers?’
You aren’t looking at me but off into the darkening garden. You’ve poured yourself a dribble of the rosé, I don’t know when.
‘I – I’m not sure,’ I say honestly. I can’t remember exactly what was cleared and what wasn’t. While so many of my memories from ten years ago are pin-sharp, others have blurred.
‘I know you don’t like talking about her, Mum,’ you say, drinking your unasked-for inch of wine in a single gulp. ‘But I don’t see how we can’t. It would just be weird, wouldn’t it, now we’re here? She was my sister but I know barely anything about her. She died, you and Dad split up and we moved to London. That’s it.’
I don’t reply. I can’t think straight because my blood is suddenly loud in my ears.
You get up and put your arms round me. ‘Please don’t be upset,’ you say, breath hot in my ear. ‘You can tell me things, you know. I’m older now.’
‘You’re not an adult, though, are you?’ I say, more abruptly than I mean to. What I really want to say is, You’re still my little girl. Your sister at thirteen was so much older than you.
You straighten up, offended, and pull your hand away when I try to take it.
I know I should explain everything properly. People always assume there’ll be a better time and then it’s too late. But I don’t think I’m capable of it, not right now.
Neither of us says anything for a while and I listen to the small sounds of the garden preparing for night.
You consider me for a moment, your finger circling the rim of your glass. ‘Do you think her ghost might be here, at La Rêverie?’
The loosed words swirl in the gloom, bright and unearthly, like phosphorescence. Around us, only perceptible if you know it as I do, the garden lets out a soft sigh.
1968
I conceive her in Paris, in the middle of the student riots: the glorious chaos of Mai 68. Her father says that our first child will be all fire and spark, forged as she was in the bonfire of old, conservative France.
We are students ourselves, or at least we were until recently, the two of us renting rooms on the fourth-floor of a house in the sixth arrondissement, plaster peeling from its belle-époque bones. Greg has already graduated with a 2:2 in political science while I have given up my studies in London to be here with him, persuaded that a degree doesn’t really matter. It’s just a piece of paper, he says, when I worry about it, his long pianist’s fingers circling my navel, just another way the Establishment makes people buckle down to a conventional half-existence. What matters is this. He gestures towards the city beyond our tall, dust-streaked windows. Real life.
We came to Paris ostensibly for him to see more of my homeland. He’d enjoyed French at A level and had gone on holidays to France as a child: bracing weeks on the beaches of northern Brittany where he’d had his first erotic experience. I think about her sometimes, that long-ago Madeleine who bewitched a teenaged Greg in the early sixties. She instilled in him a weakness for French girls that steered him unerringly towards me as I sat sipping a half of mild in the union bar one winter-dark afternoon, trying to pretend I wasn’t cold and homesick in London, that I liked English beer. Without Madeleine, he might have walked straight past and gone on to marry an English girl instead. And me? I might have gone home and married a nice boy from my village, London washing off me as easily as grime in the shower. When I think about this, about Fate and its vagaries, and how we might have missed each other by inches, I feel dizzy.
Greg wanted to come to Paris partly because of the growing unrest. He’d heard about Nanterre, which had been shut down after trouble between the university authorities and the students. I tease him for trying to shake off his suburban background, be something more dangerous than he is. His poor parents are horrified that their clever son has gone off the rails, has run off to Paris with his foreign girlfriend.
Soon it’s July, and the city begins to swell with the usual tourists, to swelter with heat, and the riots run their course. We give up our digs and catch a train south so he can meet my parents. My mouth tastes of old coins as we rattle through the vastness of my country’s interior because I am almost three months pregnant. I reach out for my new husband’s hand, our fingers entwining. We have been married for twenty-two hours. I was surprised he suggested we marry when I fell pregnant. I’d expected him to say that such conventions didn’t apply to us.