‘Do babies dream?’ I whisper to Greg, in the front, and he smiles.
Although my joy is laced with fear, it’s the kind every parent feels, the kind that hurts your heart and makes the world seem as amazing as it is hazardous.
I am a mother.
1993
You creep into my bed just after two. As you cuddle in closer, cold feet twining around mine, I notice the wind has picked up. Somewhere, a loose shutter is creaking. It’s the one in the room at the end of the hall.
‘I had a nightmare,’ you whisper, ‘and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s so dark here.’
I put my arms around you. Your skin is cool and smells slightly of the musty sheets. ‘It was only a dream,’ I say, hoping you won’t want to tell me about it.
The shutter bangs and you jump. ‘I think that’s what woke me up.’
‘I’ll go and fix it.’ I push back the bedclothes and the air of the room feels chilled. It will rain soon. I used to love it as a child when the temperature abruptly dipped like this, in the deepest trench of night. The rain always cleared the air, the sky the next morning a dazzling crystalline blue, the garden bristling with new vigour.
I try the light in the hall, but it doesn’t work, despite the new bulb. The whole house probably needs rewiring – it hasn’t been touched since the fifties. Feeling my way along, I experience another attack of déjà vu. It’s like being tipped headlong into the past, the waxed boards under my feet and the precise angle of the black stairwell to my right so utterly familiar that I feel as if I’ve invented the years in between.
I hesitate on the threshold of her room and the shutter bangs again. The door creaks loudly as I open it. The only light comes from the storm outside, flashing intermittently as the shutter swings back and forth. In the distance, thunder rolls.
At the window, I twist the handle and a sudden gust shoves the frame hard into me, thin glass shuddering in loose putty. I have to lean right out to get hold of the shutter, trusting the wooden bar across to take my weight. I’ve almost grabbed it when some base instinct makes me rear back into the room and away from the drop, convinced that someone is behind me.
On the second attempt, I grab the shutter’s catch as it blows back in, breathing hard as my fingers fumble to fasten it. As I push the windows together and turn the handle to lock them again, the rain is coming down harder, the thunder answering, louder now. I hear you call me from the other end of the house and I rush out, eyes averted from the shadows where the bed stands.
‘What is it, chérie?’ I say, when I get back to you, trying not to show I’m out of breath. You’re over by the window. Outside, the rain ratchets up another notch, a hiss rising from the stone terrace. Lightning flashes for a blinding moment.
You turn to me, eyes wide. ‘There’s someone out there. I saw them.’
The garden is full of swaying movement: water and wind pummelling leaves, bending branches. I peer hard into the dark voids between the shrubs and trees, but there’s nothing.
‘It’s okay, it’s just the storm. No one’s there.’
I turn back to the window just as a perfect, pink-tinged fork of lightning illuminates the scene, like someone taking a photograph with a powerful flash. As the thunder cracks over us, directly above the house now, I think of the camera Greg bought for her when you were born, and the last film developed from it. Those horrible photographs, the same small face featured in every one, pinprick pupils red from the flash. The single word that had crept into my mind: proof.
The storm moves on, the gaps between the lightning and thunder stretching out until I lose count of the seconds. You’ve already fallen asleep, and I’m drifting away myself when I hear it – the revving of moped engines, four or five at least, all overlapping, as though competing. The noise, amplified by the wet road, gets louder and quieter, then louder again, and at first I think the wind is buffeting it to and fro. But the wind has dropped away to nothing. I understand that they’re riding up and down the same short stretch of road.
I tiptoe to a window facing that way and, as if they know I’m watching, one of the bikes peels off the road and on to the drive that leads to the house. Leads to us. I can’t move as it approaches slowly, frozen in place. At the moment it looks as though it will surely collide with our car, it veers away, accelerating back towards the others with a roar. I don’t know how long I stand there, the cold white light of their headlamps strafing again and again over the dark fields, over the house, over my hands, still clutching the windowsill.
1969
Although we are living with my parents, the three of us – mother, father and child – might as well be the last people on earth. We are inseparable, even at night: Greg has brought her cot into our bedroom. My mother disapproves of this in her gentle way, says we are making a rod for our own backs, but we simply smile. We know best, is what Greg and I secretly think.
There is so much love inside me that I feel permanently replete. I have to remind myself to eat, to drink a long glass of water after I’ve expressed my milk. If there is a single tiny cloud on the horizon, it is this: I can’t seem to feed Élodie on the breast. She won’t latch on. She turns her face away, even when her tiny stomach is fizzing with hunger. I’ve wept about this in Greg’s arms a couple of times, and he hushes and rocks me as though I am the baby. He reminds me that it’s still my milk, even if she’ll only accept it from a bottle.
I watch him when he’s with our child and, though I would never say for fear of offending him, I’m surprised by how good a father he is. I knew he’d love her but assumed he would do it from arm’s length. I’ve seen it with friends of his who have had children: these sixties men with their hair long over their collars, their radical ideas, who insist they’re nothing like their own fathers, until it comes to doing anything domestic.
But he’s not like that. He’s fallen in love with her, I suppose. I never thought I could bear for him to love anyone as much as me, but it’s her so I don’t mind at all.
1993
When I wake the next morning the bed is empty beside me, a single long hair coiled on the pillow. I sit up and turn the clock round. It’s late again.
Outside, the weather is glorious, a few dead branches on the grass the only traces of the storm. Everything seems revitalized, the garden virtually humming with life. I remember the mopeds but the menace of them in the night, like encircling wolves, feels diminished in the sunshine. They become bored teenage boys again.
I can hear you talking as I head towards the pool and it throws me because no one but us is here. For an uncomfortable moment, it takes me back to our first months in London, when one afternoon a supply teacher had beckoned me into the classroom. ‘Emma has an imaginary friend she speaks to,’ she said, as we sat awkwardly together at a child-sized table. ‘She says her name is Élodie.’ I had to explain there’d been an older sister and the poor woman had flushed to her roots.
As I approach the swimming pool now, I see you’re talking to a boy. Both of you have your backs to me and he’s armed with a net on a long pole. He’s taller than you by a head and, though lean, he’s obviously older: probably eighteen or nineteen. Sensing my presence, he turns round, his face strikingly familiar.