by Claire King
I curled back around her and rested my arm over the valley of her waist. For a moment I thought I was still dreaming, I could feel Candice shifting in the swell, then I realised it was the rise and fall of Amandine’s breath. That was when I understood what Amandine had meant when she told me, ‘We’re here.’ The changes around me didn’t matter at all. It wasn’t important where we ended up. Wherever I was with her I was home. I rested my lips in the nape of her neck and exhaled.
The next morning everything was different. The light shifted, neither one thing nor another. The clouds were new; cirrus clouds high above, scudding broadly, slowly across our course. The unfamiliar sky stretched out, smoothing down the tall thick-set trees to the low silk trees and alders, pampas grass and the occasional pine. The thick red earth of the banks, still saturated from the April rainfall, was peppered with burrows like Emmental cheese. Black-headed gulls skimmed across the water and martins dived for insects. Only two locks remained before the sea.
Along the canal side we passed clusters of small shabby boats, coastal gypsies moored on the towpath going about their lives. We waved and called in the way we had become accustomed, but they didn’t respond, they barely seemed to notice us. Then I realised I was on the outside looking in. We were just tourists to them.
In the calm of the next lock we descended to sea level at last. ‘Only one more lock before the Mediterranean,’ I told Amandine as I guided Candice back out into the canal. I saw the thrill run over her. She was thinking of the Camargue, as excited as a girl by the prospect of the wild, galloping horses, their hooves pounding through the salt water, flashes of white against the blue just as she had seen in photos all her life. I felt her excitement as if it were my own. I couldn’t wait to see her face when we finally saw them. Soon after, we bisected a long stretch of grassy fields where well-muscled horses grazed, half hidden by swathes of bamboo, the copper sunlight bright on their coats, shimmering like asphalt. Their heads were bowed in the heat, their long manes draping to the earth.
‘Are we close?’ she asked.
‘Still a way yet,’ I said. ‘But we’ll be at the sea by noon.’
Amandine would often sit alone up on deck, or up front on the prow while I piloted, but for that last stretch of canal we stayed together, side by side at the helm, taking turns to navigate the limpid waters, passing ochre houses with tiny windows, half taken by climbing roses and bordered by marshmallow-coloured flowers on the oleanders. Down in the reeds and bulrushes nearby a fisherman cast his lines into the brackish water trapped between the two locks.
It was the faint salt smell of seaweed and – beyond the low bridge – the tall masts of sailing boats that announced the étang. The trees curling over the top of us evoked a passageway and I felt a swell of anxiety as I saw the light ahead, growing brighter, the blue white light of the open water. Amandine, standing beside me at the wheel, put her hand over mine. Then the trees parted and the sunlight glittered off the blue salt-water lakes, throwing Candice’s shadow back behind us, only the light ahead. I had been told we could expect flocks of flamingos and herons down there, but at the moment we arrived only a single heron stood, silent and still in the centre of the étang, looking off into the distance. The cry could have come from the bird or from my own throat. I am still not sure.
52
It was your birthday. Sophie was sitting on the floorboards at your feet, her sketchpad open beside her, the last image of Candice navigating through a tunnel of plane trees reflected in the water, with the canal stretching forwards into the distance. There have been no new stories to write down lately, but she will always draw for you, whatever you want to tell. Time flows through you now, evolving, iterative, degenerative, but always beginning with the story of your birth and always ending with the sea. Beyond that your stories are seamlessly stitched from the true, the uncertain and the imagined.
You leaned over to watch. Her illustrations still capture your attention, you gaze into them as though they had depth. On paper – a picture of Candice at her mooring, red banners flying outside the Capitol, sketched skaters on the frozen canal, a field of ripe sunflowers – and on her skin. On her right arm she has added to the vine. Now there are tiny, perfect bunches of grapes on there, and reflected in their surface, if you know where to look, you can find the even tinier silhouettes of a kingfisher, a little owl, and the sun itself. I went mad with her when she tattooed that first vine on her arm as a teenager but I think it played a role in bringing her home from Paris, plus she’s made a good business of it now; people seek out her designs.
The trains did suit her for a while, but in the end motherhood suited her more. She came back to Toulouse more determined than ever to change the future, but with her own point of view about how that should be done. When I see her with Lucas now I’m so proud of her. He slipped into her life as if he was always meant to be there. Easy when they’re together, easy when they’re apart. They have a garden full of rabbits and guinea pigs, bird tables and flowers, the love spills over and everyone is welcome. Your mother would have been overjoyed to see the cottage that way, safe in their hands.
Sophie had been the first at the door, grinning and wishing you a happy birthday.
‘Oh?’ you said. For a moment there was a chasm of incomprehension, an emptiness of tongues. I was about to step in, but Sophie spoke first.
‘We didn’t wake you?’
‘No, no.’ You turned to me, and your face was composed but uncertain, as though you were five again and wanted to reach for my hand. ‘Chouette, I was already up and about, wasn’t I?’
I smiled at you, but just a little. ‘Yes, of course. You’ve been up since nine or ten.’
You smiled back, reassured, turning sideways to let people through and opening your arms to our friends and family. ‘Come in, come in,’ you said, in that charming way you always have with visitors, but your face was wary as they filed over the walkway and down the steps. ‘Ah, look at the boy!’ Your hand reached out for him as he passed, but Sophie caught it gently. Lucas was slumped over her shoulder, much too big to be carried these days, but Sophie loves it and is stronger than she looks. ‘Hold on, Baptiste,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t wake him, he’s tired. He’ll come to eventually and say hello. Let him sleep for now.’
I took your hand from hers and whispered, ‘Baptiste, do you remember why everyone is here?’
‘Have they come for Candice?’ Your hand trembled in mine. No one else noticed and I pretended not to.
‘No, Baptiste.’ ‘They’ are the people who know what’s best for you. They came here and shook their heads at the boat, poked their fingers into our bathroom cabinets and regarded the stairs with suspicion, told you that you should move out to your parents’ cottage. That was the logical solution. When you told them that your bedroom there wasn’t big enough for the two of us they reminded you gently that your parents were dead. I saw the mixture of sorrow, disbelief and anger building in you like a held breath, stepped back as it exploded into the room, watched as they took this as confirmation of their prognosis. Can they not understand how cruel it is to make you live the loss of your parents over and over? Even Lucas understands that.
Lucas has your old room at the cottage. Every time we visit he grabs you by the hand and leads you upstairs to show you that the bats are still there, then he takes you down to the persimmon tree to show you how high he can now swing on the branches. Sophie tells me that later, when we’ve left, he goes back to the tree and chats to your mother about your visit. Your mother loved Lucas.
‘No, Baptiste,’ I said again. ‘It’s a party, remember?’
‘Ah yes, are there going to be sweets?’
‘There’s cake. I didn’t think you were too fond of sweets.’ I paused. ‘Would you like sweets?’
‘No,’ you said. ‘My parents wouldn’t like it. When are they coming?’
‘Your mother’s cakes always beat mine hands down,’ I said, ‘but it’s your favourite.’
D
ownstairs everyone had already made themselves at home, the Louis XV the only seat left empty. I sat on the floor by Sophie, who put her arm around my waist. In her other arm Lucas woke, wearing a slight frown and rubbing away the bleary stirrings of his eyelids, disrupted by the noise. He looked around at us, seeming to sense that we were all on edge. He has always been a sensitive child. You were the only one still standing.
‘Hi, Grandpa,’ he said.
‘Hi, Lucas,’ you replied, and I bit my lip.
Lucas stood and crossed to give you a hug. At seven he could pass for ten or eleven. Tall and reedy, with puppyish hands too big for his young body and a Moorish look about his dark features, he could easily be your blood grandson. He wasn’t at all moved by your recognition of him. As far as he is concerned, some days you know him and some days you don’t. Either way he is happy to potter about Candice, getting on with tending your plants – a passion your mother passed on to him before she died – or playing the piano if you let him. He has already learned the pieces that please you best depending on your mood. He accepts your illness as a fact of life, loving you in that detached way that children can when they have not yet learned to grieve – either for those who die, or those who leave us while they are still alive.
‘Hey,’ he said, spotting the cake from the corner of his eye, ‘birthday cake!’
‘Is it someone’s birthday?’ you said. Grief fluttered around the room, followed by an adjustment, as though a bat had entered through a window, flit about seeking a long echo, and left. Sophie got to her feet and cut you a slice. ‘It’s your birthday, old man,’ she said, winking at you. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘You’re a funny girl,’ you said, winking back as though the two of you were complicit in some kind of a joke.
Sophie still instinctively knows how to talk to you where most people don’t. They don’t know quite how to approach you any more. Everyone tries to be kind but it rarely works well. Some talk to you as though you were an infant. Others tiptoe around you as if you were so brittle they could break you with their very existence. The worst is when someone uses nothing but past tense, as though you were already gone, like an obituary.
The lemon in the cake reminded you of something, set you off talking and we sat around for a while listening to your stories, Sophie sketching in her notepad, until you lost patience and got to your feet. ‘Who would like some breakfast?’ you asked. From the cupboards you brought jam, mustard, tins of asparagus spears, crackers. You laid them on the table and the others all joined in, adding the bread, croissants and juice that they’d brought. Jordi knocked up an omelette and Sophie made coffee. The table was too small for so many of us, so we ate our midnight breakfast in shifts, coming and going from the wheelhouse while you sat at the end, pushing the food around your plate, refusing a drink, accepting our attentions with a blithe smile, your fingers reaching out to keep contact with the wheel.
Lucas found the idea of breakfast exciting but bizarre. ‘I’m not hungry, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘Please can I play the piano?’
‘Be my guest.’
As the sound of his neat rendition of Bach reached your ears you closed your eyes for a moment, rubbing them with your knuckles. There are freckles on your eyelids that I had never noticed before. Have they always been there or are they arriving with age? There’s so much about you I’ve yet to learn.
While Sabine tidied away, Etienne and René washed the dishes together, playing up to their role in the charade with tender little touches and loving glances so authentic that even I was almost fooled by their artifice. When everyone left you leaned back against your chair, looking contemplative. ‘I think I might go out for a walk,’ you said.
‘Baptiste, it’s late.’
‘I’ve only been up an hour or two.’ You crossed to the window and recoiled at the blackness beyond, the only light the hazy glow of a waxing moon under cloud. I waited to see if you needed an explanation. I could see that expression on your face. You knew there must be something you’d forgotten. You were searching, searching. You rubbed condensation from the windowpane, to see if that helped. ‘I’ve got a baby owl up on the deck,’ you said. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
By the time we were outside, wrapped in blankets, thankfully you had forgotten about the owl. I sat beside you as you gazed out into the night, our bare toes meeting on the roughness of the deck. The blossom is thick on the acacia trees now, its scent honeying the air and filling my heart. ‘Can you smell that?’ I said. Your eyes followed the shadowy curves of the trees down to their roots and over to the water, where white petals waltzed across the moonlit surface. ‘It must be nearly my birthday,’ you said. ‘It must be May.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I was born on a train, you know?’
You stretched out the fingers of your right hand and moved them softly on my thigh as though you were playing the piano, your breath deepening. You looked tired but calm. I waited to hear your story, wondering how it would have changed this time.
You must have played an entire concerto before your fingers came to rest. When they did, as though there had been no pause in the conversation at all, you said, ‘Yes, on a train.’ You became animated, using the full span of your arms as you recounted the rattle of the train, the woman’s fear, the blood spilling on the carriage floor and the midwife sucking the fluid from your lungs with her own mouth. Your descriptions were so confident and vivid, the irony was not lost on me. And then you told me how the woman had been wearing green springtime shoes.
For a moment I was caught off guard. ‘A coat,’ I corrected you without thinking. ‘A green springtime coat?’
Your eyes flickered. ‘She had green shoes,’ you said. ‘I remember it clearly.’
You looked at me hard as I tried to keep my composure, and then your face crumpled. You covered your head with your hands. ‘Chouette?’ It was a question, but I had no useful answer. Instead I just sat there, listening to my own breath, the way it mixed with the slosh of the water, the waking call of the starlings, the frogs on the banks and the thrum of the cicadas.
You regarded me miserably. ‘Chouette,’ you said, ‘I can see you’re unhappy. Don’t stay if you’re unhappy. I couldn’t bear to watch her stop loving me.’ I looked up sharply and saw confusion flit across your eyes. There are echoes within you, I’m sure. Something that tells you you knew something significant about me, although you have no words to describe it and no reason to explain it. You frowned. ‘I’ve told you this before. I can’t make you happy,’ you said.
‘Baptiste,’ I said, resting my foot on yours, ‘you can.’
Dawn was breaking. Beyond the trees the world had rested and was setting in motion for another day, the rhythm already defined, the hours planned out. I had a sense of being in the wrong place or time. Disjointed, as though I had forgotten something important. I wondered if this is how you feel now. You yawned. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s go to bed.’
As we passed the piano you stopped, your gaze drawn to the open piano lid, to the score that Lucas had left there. It’s years since you played from a score, but you seemed to be reading the music. Do you still hear music when you see the notes, I wondered. Or is it nothing more than ink on the page? Quavers and semi-quavers, rising and falling like the sea.
53
The wind carried us down to the sea. It seemed to me that it had been many years since I last saw that water, and I couldn’t remember why I had left it so long.
The sea I saw as a man was not the same sea I saw as a boy, although it had not changed. I had remembered it in the sound of breaking waves and their wash upon the shore, the colour blue, the reflection of light, the salted crests of white foam and the cry of the gulls, the scoop of it filling buckets and the way I could entice it slithering down freshly dug channels into paddling pools and castle moats. As a man I was drawn not to any of this, but to the shift in colour where the darker waters began out beyond the shore, the border between safety and wilderness.<
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I don’t remember how long we stayed by the coast. I remember how the wind blew across so many grains of sand, and the horizon was as wide as a smile. How, at dusk, the grey silhouette of gulls passed overhead in the dimming light, the bamboo and pampas grass and proud bulrushes dulling into erratic shadows. There were nights where I laid awake for hours while Amandine slept, my fingers tracing the marks on her belly where the sea had washed over her, the moon pushing and pulling and dragging her skin into the shape of the waves, leaving its mark. The salt was on her skin, warm and damp. I would taste it as she slept. Wake her with my lips.
In Amandine I found more bliss and more sadness than I had ever known. This is what happens when you let happiness slip out of your grasp and attach itself to something beyond your control, something so intoxicating that you ache to keep it although you know you cannot. We choose to bargain with pain because what alternative is there but regret? Under that soft, salt-water sun every day dawned bright with intoxicating desire, but heavy with fear. All I could do was to plunge in and swim, smiling and accepting that the tide could carry me away any time it pleased.
There was more than one day when we simply sat in silence for hours, staring out across the unfathomable deep, the clouds casting vast shadows of teal and royal blue across the turquoise shallows until night fell and we raised our eyes to a shifting sky studded with stars. When talking makes no difference at all, it’s better to welcome silence. Words give our tiny tragedies more importance than they merit. If you feel overwhelmed one day you should try it: nothing but the sea, the sky and the silence. If you are like me, eventually you will feel your self shrink away. There where my safe waters tumbled off the edge of the world I became perfectly small again, perfectly light, still in love, but with the scale of the universe restored. And all the while she held my hand.
