All this is perfectly true, because Caroline has used the Argos shredding machine and has carried the shreds back to the bus, where she’s fed them to the pot-bellied stove. There is no longer any sign of a will at her mother’s house. The will, worthless as it may have been, has gone up in a curl of smoke.
‘Well, I guess it’ll be fifty-fifty,’ Janet says, and she mentions the word ‘probate’. ‘I’d really like to have those little Hummel figurines,’ she says. ‘They make such a lovely display.’
Caroline adores the Eurostar. She hasn’t been abroad in ages. She loves alighting at the Gare du Nord, where, on the concourse, she enjoys a café au lait and a fat croque-monsieur. She’s wearing the Betty Jackson trousers and one of the Joseph cardigans with a soft cashmere scarf and high-heeled ankle boots. Her face is enhanced and nurtured by a new range of French treatment creams that were sold to her, two weeks earlier, by the beautician who gave her a facial. In the large Mulberry handbag she has a change of underwear and a small travel pack of toiletries and cosmetics. Caroline is fully aware that she is turning heads as she makes her way to the Gare de Lyon, where she boards a second train. After that, she takes a cab to Zoe’s exchange house on the edge of the wood, where, standing at Maman’s rippled glass door, her six foot frame is towering over the twin dwarf conifers placed to left and right, while her hair makes contact with the overhead wind chimes, causing them a little burst of rainforest resonance. Then she presses the door bell. Ding-dong.
As luck will have it, Maman is on half-day so Caroline is soon confronted by the Brillo-haired Fury in backless mules, who reeks of cigarette smoke.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ Caroline says. ‘Je suis la mère de Zoe,’ and she extends her hand. ‘Je m’appelle Caroline,’ she says.
Then she tells her daughter’s host that Zoe’s grandmother is dead and that, sadly, she must fetch her daughter home. The Fury has granted her visitor admittance and has parked her on a kitchen chair. She lights a cigarette before heading for the phone, where she calls the school. But Zoe, of course, is not at school and neither is the Tall Merry Fellow. Zoe has la grippe, n’est-ce pas? She hasn’t been in school for over two weeks. As for the Tall Merry Fellow . . . well, where to begin? Caroline is not party to the school’s intelligence but she sees Maman bang down the phone and work herself into a frenzy.
‘Merde!’ she says and she knocks her hand harshly against her temple. It’s the hand that’s holding the cigarette, so it causes a shower of ash. ‘Zee girl,’ she says. ‘Your girl. She eez sheet!’
Next minute she has grabbed a large black bin bag from a drawer and she has made her way up the open stairs. Caroline hears thirty seconds of clanking and banging above, before Maman reappears with the bin bag in her hand; the bag that is now bulging and hat-box shaped, but with assorted extra items thrown in carelessly on top.
‘Allons,’ she says. ‘We get zee children. Ils pensent que je ne sais pas où ils vont!’
Maman, having hurled the bin bag into the back of her car, where it spills out its top layer of knickers and T-shirts, orders Caroline into the front passenger seat and reverses, hell-for-leather, like a teenage joy rider, and then they’re off – stop, start, stop, start – for the pathway into the woods. Maman ignores the concept of ‘footpath’ and drives, bump, thump and crash, over fallen branches and tree roots. Boughs make a sound like chalk on blackboard as they scrape against the passenger’s window.
Then Maman jerks to a stop, just short of a clearing. And there Caroline is suddenly witness to a split-second sylvan idyll that makes her soul sing. Because there before her, like two babes in the wood, are Zoe and her French exchange partner. Their arms and hands arch gracefully over their heads in sweet balletic attitude as they stand, face to face, as mirror images of each other. Both are in black T-shirts, their feet shoeless, but clad in socks. And then the moment crumbles. The children turn suddenly and stare, wide-eyed and frozen with fear, like young rabbits trapped in headlights. Her little ballet-mad daughter and the Tall Merry Fellow. Pas de deux.
Zoe’s Ballet Class book lies open on the ground at Lesson Four, because, day by day, Zoe has been instructing her French exchange, as she simultaneously instructs herself. And Gérard has been a quick learner, especially with regard to terminology, which Zoe finds quite a struggle. It’s not too difficult for him to take on board terms like ‘grand plié ’ and ‘jeté ’ and ‘port de bras’ and ‘pas de chat’ and ‘rond de jambe’ and his assistance with pronouncing them is giving Zoe’s confidence quite a boost.
Over the past couple of weeks, having survived the regular early-morning sick-bag experience between the dwarf-conifer house and the tarmac playground, she has made her way back to the small woodland hut by bus, where Gérard, having burgled his mother’s kitchen in her absence, is usually to be found proffering basic foodstuffs to his bleary-eyed, unshaven male parent, who will be washing it all down with his second bottle of beer. Gérard’s dad, thanks to his drinking habits, has lost his job as forest ranger some two months back and, no longer able to stand the ensuing wrath of the Brillo-haired Fury, is now decamped in the woodland hut; a highly impractical expedient, of course, except in the eyes of a maudlin alcoholic and a protective twelve-year-old – or two protective twelve-year-olds, since Zoe has become very fond of Gérard’s dad, who has a kindly, tolerant smile, albeit somewhat toothless.
And, since he spends most of his days asleep, he has never intruded on their balletic efforts to master the arm and feet positions, one through five. And, while on their agreeable nature walks, where Gérard is a mine of information on all things animal and vegetable, Zoe has told him stories of The Sleeping Beauty and Giselle and Coppélia and The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. So he knows all about wicked Carabosse, the thirteenth fairy, with her chariot pulled by rats, and the Blue Bird, and the Lilac Fairy. He knows about poor Albrecht and the nightly dances of dead brides, summoned from their cold graves, and the lifelike, wind-up clockwork dolls in the Magician Coppelius’s house, and little Clara’s Christmas dream of the handsome soldier who is really just a nutcracker, and the huge scary Mouse King and the Arabian dancer in the Coffee Dance and the luscious Land of Sweets.
And now, suddenly, Maman is right here, in the clearing – their clearing – in that horrible car, just like the wicked Carabosse. Nobody drives into the clearing and why on earth has she come? And – oh my God! – in the passenger seat. That other person. It’s her mother. Her mother with different hair.
Before Caroline has managed to unclick her safety belt, Maman is already out of the car and hurling herself upon her son. She has clouted him twice across the face. Then she grabs both children by the scruff and frogmarches them to the car.
‘Entrez!’ she screams and throws them into the back, alongside the spewing bin bag.
At the door of the hut her husband has managed to appear, blearily scratching his head and just in time to observe Maman as she reverses at speed, zoom, screech and bump. The bump is quickly followed by a more significant bump, which in turn is followed by an agonising yowl.
‘Merde!’ she says, because Gérard, quick as lightning, has flung open his door and has hurled himself out on to the path. Before Zoe can follow him, Maman has clicked the central locking system, so that both Caroline and her daughter are imprisoned.
‘It’s Mimi!’ Zoe is screaming. ‘Mum! Make her stop! It’s Mimi! She’s hurt! Mum! She might be DYING!!’
But the Brillo-haired Fury drives on. And on. Zoe pukes into the top of the bin bag and wipes her mouth on a T-shirt. Maman dumps them at the access to the railway station.
‘Prend le sac!’ she says. ‘C’est fini!’ And, screech, zoom, she’s gone.
‘We have to go back!’ Zoe is screaming. ‘Mu-u-um! We have to go back!’
Caroline discards the puked-on T-shirt in a litter bin, before mother and daughter jump into a taxi and return at once to the footpath, where Caroline, liberated by a wallet full of the Witch Woman’s petty cash, now implores the dr
iver to wait. Then, pausing only to strip off the high-heeled ankle boots, Caroline sprints impressively after Zoe; Atalanta in Calydon, but with a bin bag, along with the Mulberry bag, bouncing at her shoulder. In the clearing, it’s a relief to find that Mimi is not dead. She is whimpering softly in Gérard’s lap as he sits, cross-legged, on the ground, stroking her chocolate-brown head.
‘Her leg, it is – cassée,’ he says.
‘Take her to the car,’ Caroline says. ‘She needs a vet.’
‘It’s a taxi,’ Zoe says. ‘My mum’s got us a taxi. It’s all right, Gérard. It’s not your mum.’
The cab driver is not best pleased to accommodate a canine passenger, but Caroline promptly offers him double rates out of the dead woman’s stockpile. At the surgery, they wait on little hard chairs. Then Mimi is checked out for internal injuries and she’s taken off for some X-rays. After that, they all watch anxiously as she has her leg set in plaster. Caroline dips into her stash to pay a significant bill. Then she arranges for another cab and, while they’re waiting, she avails herself of the vet’s handy chairs to undertake a swift repacking job on the black bin bag, so that all Zoe’s items are, once again, neatly accommodated within the pretty antique hat box, once the property of Lottie Kirschner, who, before the war, in happier times, had taken it with her to the Kaiser Hotel in Baden-Baden.
And all the way in the back of the car, buoyed up by the Labrador’s improved condition, Zoe is chattering to her mother about ballet and Mimi and Gérard, and how his dad got sacked and is sleeping rough in the forest, and how Gérard is taking care of him, which is why they couldn’t possibly be at school, and about revolting Véronique and the dwarf-conifer house and how she’s even run out of sick bags by now, because of the horrible car, and how Véronique and her even more revolting friends stole her black Moschino jacket and then they dumped her in this repulsive sort of nightclub, but she made her way back, all on her own, on the bus, in the dark, and got lost, until – oh bliss; oh joy – she found Gérard and Mimi in the forest, alongside one of the ‘forest hats’, just like it said on Caroline’s map, except that this one was not an ‘inaccessible forest hat’, which was just as well in the circumstances, when you came to think about it.
‘Gérard is my new best friend,’ she says. ‘And when he comes to stay next year, please can Mimi come as well?’
‘You’ve got your jacket back, I see,’ Caroline says, stalling. ‘Well done, my darling.’
Caroline doesn’t usually say ‘darling’, but she seems in a very good mood and there’s something a bit weird and glossy about her, like she’s holding back on a secret.
‘Mattie found it for me,’ Zoe says. ‘She was fab. She saw it on a coat peg at school and she just went up and stole it back.’ Then she says, ‘But, Mum, what are you doing here? I mean, haven’t you come two days early? And wasn’t I going to come back on the coach?’ She’s not actually all that pleased to have her mother invade her territory – even if Caroline’s been so brilliant about getting Mimi to the vet – but she’s trying hard not to let her disappointment show.
‘Your grandmother died,’ Caroline says. ‘Zoe, I’m afraid we have to go back.’
‘I don’t really want to go back,’ Zoe says, after a pause to take this in. ‘I mean do I really have to? Gosh. Mum, I’m sorry. I mean I’m sorry that she’s dead. I mean, that’s horrible. Like, when, Mum? Like, how?’
Caroline explains how, day after day, she’s been trying to get Zoe on the phone and Zoe’s dad as well.
‘I decided that the only thing for us to do is to fly to South Africa and tell him, face to face. And, gosh, we do need a holiday, don’t we? We’ll be leaving almost as soon as we get back. For a fortnight – which means you’ll miss a week of school, but I dare say that won’t bother you?’
Meanwhile Zoe’s thinking, Is this really my mum, who has never let me skive off school? Never, ever. Not once. And what’s she done to her hair? Then suddenly she takes note that the taxi is turning into the tarmac playground, where Mrs Caroline Headmistress is right in her natural element.
‘Come along, children,’ she calls out, as they do their best to scurry after her, still in their stockinged feet; Zoe with the hat box and Gérard cradling the dog. Caroline, as if by radar, is striding towards the head’s office.
‘Mum,’ Zoe is saying. ‘But I don’t think we ought to be here. And I really don’t want to go home. Please, Mum, I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay with Gérard. We’re learning how to do ballet together and it’s all so fun and Gérard knows all about trees as well, and, anyway, his dad really needs us and . . .’
And then they are ushered into the office. Caroline does lots of teacher talk and, mostly, it’s all in French. She’s head to head with the head. She’s apologising for the children’s truanting. And then she switches to English so that Gérard won’t understand. She’s doing a bit of sotto voce with regard to Gérard’s situation. A very decent boy, she says, who is struggling to do his best within a patently dysfunctional family; a drunken, unemployable father for whom the boy feels responsible; a mother at the end of her tether with a bit of a penchant for violence; a troubled older sister. The situation is in need of urgent attention.
‘Ah oui,’ says the French head. ‘La soeur. Thank you very much, Madame. We will look into it at once.’
Finally, Caroline explains that Zoe needs to return home right away. Her grandmother has just died. Then they take their leave.
‘I don’t need to go home yet, do I?’ Zoe says in the car park.
But Caroline isn’t listening to her. They all get back in the cab. Caroline tells the driver to take Gérard home. Not home to the forest hat, but home to the dwarf-conifer house, with horrible, smug Véronique and the Brillo-haired nicotine addict.
‘Mu-um!’ Zoe says. ‘It’s a mistake! The driver’s made a mistake. Tell him not here. Gérard doesn’t want to be back here.’
‘Don’t be idiotic,’ Caroline says. ‘Zoe, the boy is twelve years old. He can’t camp out in the woods all his life, taking care of a drunk. He needs to eat properly. He needs to go to school. The head now has the matter in hand. They’ll get the appropriate help. I’ll follow it up myself.’
Zoe has started to cry. Even Gérard is crying a bit now – just the merest moist eye – but their mothers have all the power. For a while, the children cling to each other in the back of the cab as Zoe’s tears fall on to Mimi’s soft brown head. Gérard pulls out a Bic and hands it to Zoe. He indicates that she should sign her name on Mimi’s plaster cast. Zoe writes ‘Gérard, Mimi, Zoe. For ever Friends’ and she gives him back the pen.
Gérard gets out of the cab and shakes Caroline by the hand.
‘Merci beaucoup, Madame,’ he says politely, ‘for the dog.’ Then he reaches in and takes Mimi. ‘Au revoir,’ he says.
They watch him carry her carefully along the path to his own house, until he’s standing in the doorway. He turns and manages a wave and a smile, burdened as he is by the dog. Then he goes inside.
Caroline and Zoe travel on to the station with Zoe weeping all the way. She’s trying not to make a sound in case her mum gets cross. Neither says a word. Not until they are through the gate and standing on the platform.
‘Darling,’ Caroline says. ‘I know this is very difficult for you, but it’s all for the best, I promise. In half an hour we’ll be in Paris. Won’t that be super? I’ve booked us into a dear little hotel. And tomorrow we’ll have a really lovely day. Just you and me. We can do whatever you most want to do. I’ll take you to the ballet, if you like.’
So they’re not even going straight back to England! They’re going to dawdle around Paris when she could’ve been with Gérard and Mimi in the wood. Zoe has always tried to be a good child, but right now her mother is being so weird. She knows that she’s making an exhibition of herself, just standing there crying and crying – right there on the station platform, with other people watching – but she can’t seem to make herself stop. Fo
r a moment she thinks she might stamp her foot and scream; scream at Caroline that she’s horrible, horrible, because it’s true. She’s being really horrible and Zoe can’t understand why. And then she simply feels worse than ever, because how can you think like that about your own mother? And especially when Gran has just died? Maybe it’s me who’s being horrible, Zoe thinks, but I really, really don’t want to go to Paris. I really, really don’t. Not now. Not any more. Because everything’s gone and got spoilt. For me and for Gérard. Just everything – and I don’t see how either of us can ever be happy again.
After a while she looks up furtively at her mother. Then she quickly looks away. Because why is Caroline wearing all those modelly-looking clothes? And why does she look so different? Like her face and her hair and everything? And why is she talking about treats and shopping and holidays, when she’s never been like this before? And isn’t it especially weird when her very own mother has just gone and actually died?
Chapter Eight
Caroline Meets Herman
Zoe can’t get to sleep on the long-haul flight to Johannesburg, though Caroline, beside her, is sleeping like a baby. She squirms all night and tries intermittently to reread her latest Lola book in the dark. That’s because there’s this really fat man to her left who has made her switch off her light. He is spilling over into her space like bread dough rising in a bowl, his huge legs spread wide, his right arm flopping all over her armrest so she has to have her elbows tucked in all night. Zoe could swear that there’s ever more and more of him as the hours crawl by, like in that story of the magic porridge pot that keeps on cooking more porridge until it covers the whole town. She can’t even get to the loo, because his body has blocked her access to the aisle and the only time she tried to climb over him she got stuck, straddled across his great thighs, which was so embarrassing, because he grunted and woke up.
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