I’m surprised again when he loves La Rêverie, the village, even my parents. I’d feared he would think them staid, conformist. I was secretly dreading that he would argue over dinner with my father about Catholicism. But he doesn’t, their exoticism, like the gentle enchantment of the house, seducing him effortlessly.
The months roll placidly by, and our return to Paris or London isn’t discussed. Instead, we stay on in my childhood home. As silver streaks my swelling abdomen and islets of darker skin rise on my cheekbones, I am in a sort of heaven, idling quietly through the days, a cotton-wadded, rainbow-glinting life. My mother knits tiny clothes from the softest wool and I paint jungle animals on the wall of the room that will be the nursery.
As summer fades to autumn and then winter, I can’t wait to meet her. I know without question that she will be a girl. When she kicks, I pull up my blouse and watch her heels rippling my skin. Excitement eddies through me at the thought that I will soon be able to weigh those tiny feet in my palms.
There is no apprehension, only anticipation. One night, too uncomfortable to sleep, I wish for her to be beautiful and clever, my fingers crossed under the covers. In the morning, I turn to Greg in the bed beside me, press my lips against his bare shoulder. ‘I’ve thought of a name for her,’ I say, stroking his long fringe out of his eyes. ‘I dreamt it. We’ll call her Élodie.’
1993
Perhaps it’s what you said about ghosts that lures me to her room after dinner. I’ve drunk too much today and, as I climb the stairs, I feel slightly off-balance. Butterflies take flight in my stomach as I reach the landing.
I’ve found an old cache of bulbs in the kitchen and replace the one in the hall that’s blown without mishap, light blazing from the bedrooms so I can see what I’m doing. It occurs to me that I should wait until morning to do the one that’s gone in Élodie’s room but I can’t keep away any longer, the alcohol spurring me on.
I carry in a chair as though it’s a chore I do every day, humming while I clamber onto it because I’m nervous now, one hand groping in the gloom for the fitting. When my hand brushes against the old Bakelite and it begins to swing, I jump, and in trying to catch it again I touch an uninsulated section of cable, just for a fraction of a second. I feel it as a violent jolt inside me, a huge interior bang.
When I open my eyes, I’m lying on my back on the floor, the light fitting swinging above me and faint music playing from below. I’m just wondering if my electrocuted brain has manufactured it when you turn the volume right up. Of course it must be you, though for a moment I wonder.
I know this song like the planes of my own face, though I haven’t heard it in years. The plaintive opening verse of ‘Good Vibrations’. Sunlight and hair and perfume. I never listen to this one – I once walked out of a shop mid-purchase when it came on. It reminds me too painfully of her, she who loved it best of all. Now, when I’m hearing it for the first time in so long, the harmonies rise and entwine, like spirits wheedling to be let in. I run down the stairs and, in my rush to lift the needle, make it screech across the vinyl.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’ You’re caught between surprise and exasperation.
‘Sorry. I just –’
The telephone saves me. Its shrill ringing makes me jump. As I pick it up, my hand is shaking, my head beginning to pound. I’m hoping to hear Olivier’s mellow tones or even Camille, whose familiar brusqueness might shake me out of myself. But it’s your father, and he has never been very reassuring in a crisis.
‘What’s wrong?’ he says. ‘You sound a bit drunk.’
‘I just fell, actually. I was trying to change a light bulb.’
He laughs. ‘There’s a joke in there somewhere.’
‘Did you ring up just to imply I’m an idiot?’
‘No,’ he replies, stung. ‘I rang to see why you hadn’t been in touch. You said you would be when you arrived, which was two days ago now.’
Two days? It feels like weeks. ‘I’m sorry,’ I make myself say. ‘We’ve been busy. I meant to.’
‘So,’ he says, carefully. ‘How is it?’
‘It’s just as it was.’
‘And is it all bad memories, or have you managed to dredge up some good ones?’
I glance around but you’ve wandered into the kitchen. ‘You say that as though I only wanted the bad ones.’
‘That’s sometimes how it felt.’
‘It wasn’t us, Greg,’ I say softly. ‘We didn’t make any of it happen.’
I hear him pull in a long breath and I think he’s going to sigh with impatience but then I hear the tremor that means he’s close to tears.
‘Look, why don’t you have a word with your daughter?’ I say. ‘She’s here.’
There’s a beat of silence, and I know he thinks for a split second that I mean Élodie. I think that’s why I said ‘daughter’ rather than your name: a desire to transmit a tiny bit of what I’m feeling in this house down the telephone line, to hiss in his ear.
You take the phone from me. ‘Not much,’ I hear you say, as I wander over to the double doors that stand ajar, admitting a cool ribbon of night air. ‘Just lying by the pool, really.’
The garden, as I step out into it, smells of oleander flowers and hot dust. There’s a new moon, a narrow paring that makes me think of the scar that curved over Élodie’s right eyebrow.
I did my best, I say to your father in my head, where the conversation we’ve had so many times is continuing to play out, the old script unchanged.
I sit down on the third step and my fingers go automatically to the small bloodstain that no one else would ever notice. How many other places here are inhabited by difficult memories? So many tiny hauntings that you can’t help treading on them, splinters of glass working their way under the skin.
Moonlight scatters across the swimming pool when I get there. I don’t look into the void under the oleander tree. Something of her is here, too, or has been very lately. The after-burn of a presence hangs like cordite in the air. ‘Élodie,’ I whisper. ‘Have you come back?’
The cicadas, which have been silent, begin to roar.
1969
She slips out of me, like a fish, after just five hours. Before I have time to absorb her arrival, she is borne away screaming, fists clenched so tightly they shake, and I fall into a padded black hole of sleep.
On French maternity wards, routine is everything. Babies are fed at set times and then whisked away, so that the mother can recover and get used to the fact that life has utterly changed. For eight days and nights, I am a model patient, doing exactly as the nurses order. I don’t beg for extra feeds or longer holds with my baby. I eat all the food I am given and sleep the rest of the time. Ironically, it’s like being a cosseted child.
They are pleased with me. ‘Such a sensible one,’ the sister says to Greg, when he comes to collect us. During the journey home, I sit on the back seat and watch her sleeping. I am a mother, I think. How is it possible? She is so perfectly contained, her shell-pink eyelids so unmoving that I lean in to check she’s still breathing.