Mum must have been on the point of confessing the truth just now when Chantal knocked on the door. When Mum said she’d loved Domi a long time ago, it was her typically vague way of telling Rainbow that Domi was her father.
Rainbow repeated the words out loud. “Father. Dad.” She smiled to herself. There was kindness in his wrinkles and heat in his hands. She didn’t care about Mum’s lie. France was so far away that he might as well have been dead. The lie didn’t matter anymore. The important thing was that she’d found Dad.
She decided to act in the same way as Mum: she would keep this important discovery unspoken. It would be like Domi and Mum’s silent conversation earlier on. They must have been acknowledging that she was their daughter. Being grown-up was all about keeping quiet about important things.
Rainbow hugged herself in delight. She was still smiling when she woke the next morning.
Chapter 14
The following afternoon, Domi invited Rainbow for a walk in the woods. He’d spent the morning showing Mum the property while Rainbow helped feed the animals. She jumped at the chance of having some time alone with him.
They walked along the track under the canopy of leaves and he told her about Le Logis. Twenty people lived in the old Charentaise stone farmhouse Domi’s mother had left him when she’d died. Domi had lived in England for most of his life and used to come here for the holidays. Rainbow asked him how he’d met Mum.
He smiled at Rainbow and the wrinkles around his eyes multiplied.
“At university in England. She was interested in spiritualism and we became friends.”
“Like, special friends?” she said.
“Yes, very special friends.” He tweaked Rainbow’s ponytail.
“So why didn’t you stay together?”
“My mother died. I left university to set up a healing business here. Little by little, other spiritualists joined me. We built up a good reputation in the Charente. The French are more open to spiritualism than the English. They’re closer to the earth; more rural, more able to accept truths beyond those explained by science.” Domi’s eyes sparkled with enthusiasm.
“So why didn’t Mum come with you?”
“She had her music. Anyway, she did come – later.”
“In 1977.”
“That’s right.” Domi raised an eyebrow at her.
“And you were … um, together again?”
He frowned.
“Listen, it feels wrong for me to tell you what happened with Jasmine. You should ask her.”
She considered explaining that Mum never answered her questions, but it felt disloyal. She didn’t know him well enough yet.
He cleared his throat. “Why don’t we talk about trees instead?”
Rainbow looked at him in surprise.
“Yes, I know about your gift,” he said.
“Oh.”
He must be the guru, otherwise Mum wouldn’t have broken her promise.
He led her onto a small path and stopped in front of a tree. She recognised the smooth, lipped-up bark. It was a beech.
“She told me about the accident, too. Perhaps it’ll help to share what you know with someone you can trust,” he continued.
Fraser. Michael. Now Domi.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she asked. Perhaps he would tell her he was her father.
He raised his shoulders and arms and turned his palms outwards, in a French gesture that seemed to mean ‘who knows?’ “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s get to know each other better before we talk about trees.”
They turned away from the French beech tree. Rainbow, in an anticlimax of regret, answered his questions about her life at home. He didn’t mention trees again.
On the third day of their stay, Rainbow decided it was time to lead Domi back to the subject of trees. They were outside the house and Domi had just finished his espresso.
“How did you know you wanted to heal people?” she asked.
He put down his cup.
“I’ve always known. My mother was a clairvoyant and she encouraged me to heal. When I set up Le Logis for spiritualists, I realised that it was my destiny to save the world.”
She giggled. “Your arms,” she reminded him.
He had a habit of raising them in an all-encompassing gesture when he talked about the people who needed to be healed. She called it his Wild Fanatic look.
“Oh yes.” He lowered them. “Still, I do believe people need to be saved. Spiritualists can guide them towards an alternative to today’s greedy, materialistic society.”
She thought about the oak she’d communicated with outside Michael’s garden wall. Her first impression had been right: Domi really was like a human version of the oak.
“What about saving the environment? You know, trees and stuff.”
“That’s where you have a role to play.”
They looked at each other. Rainbow was the first to break the silence.
“Shall I show you?”
“If you’re ready.”
She nodded. “Can we go back to that beech tree? I want to touch it, but I may need your help.”
She’d felt the power in Domi’s hands. If the beech wanted revenge for its English kin, she’d feel less vulnerable with him beside her.
“Haven’t you touched a beech tree since your accident?”
She shook her head.
He laid an arm round her shoulders and squeezed her gently. “I’ll be right beside you.”
They left the commune and followed the path to the beech tree. It was dressed in lime-green spring leaves. He helped her climb into it and then waited at the bottom while she selected a slim branch. She wondered whether all French trees had the creepiness she’d felt in the silver maple tree by the house on the day of her arrival. Then sensation overran her thoughts. Her hands opened the beech’s spirit.
The beech knew what she’d done to its English brother, despite the geographical distance. Trees didn’t have a language barrier, unlike Mum and herself. They had a system much older than language. It was something in their roots: a current that travelled through the earth, rock and water of the planet. And it was something in the air: a current that travelled from leaf to leaf in the breeze. She felt warm generosity flowing from the beech. It responded to her silent plea for forgiveness. There was a slipping of fibre over fibre, a reaction to her embrace. She opened her eyes and felt tears on her cheeks.
“Rainbow?”
“It’s fine. I feel so … well, great. And so humble. They’ve forgiven me. I want to smile at everyone. This is all I need in the world.”
“Arms,” laughed Domi.
Rainbow smiled sheepishly and dropped her arms.
“Seriously, Domi. It’s amazing. This beech knows all about the one I hurt.”
The beech’s forgiveness broke a dam in Rainbow’s mind. Over the next week, waves of words poured out of her. She told Domi everything she’d learnt about trees – though nothing about Michael. He listened patiently and accompanied her around the woods while she learnt everything the French trees passed on to her.
To begin with, Domi simply watched. Then he started asking her questions while she was in a tree: Did the tree explain what it wanted? Was it looking for help? Did she feel a sense of the role the trees expected her to play?
“It’s not about wanting,” she tried to explain. “It’s about being and not being.”
When she wasn’t in the boughs of a tree, they studied the spiritual books in his library. They also researched tree diseases. She learnt about how insects bored holes in the bark, about fungi and about Dutch elm disease.
Domi encouraged her to heal diseased trees. She spent hours on branches, poking worms out of holes and then massaging bark over the wounds to seal them. Dutch elm disease was the most difficult because it weakened the tree’s spirit. She felt helpless when faced with this depressive illness. The trees were trying to cure themselves, but she sensed that their efforts to kill the fungus were killing thei
r own tissues too. The energy she guided through their bark was too feeble compared to the mass of the sick tree. A day spent on an elm left her distressed and flat. Domi said Dutch elm disease was like cancer.
One day, the stifling heat gave way to a huge storm. Domi seized Rainbow, settled her on the back of his motorbike and whizzed her off to the Dordogne. The storms there were more violent than in the Charente. On the storm-ravaged hills they found trees struck by lightning, and she soothed and smoothed ripped fibres back into place. Thanks to Domi’s guidance, she was at last doing something useful with her gift.
Chapter 15
A fortnight after their arrival, Rainbow was perched precariously in the dancing branches of a spruce tree when she had a disturbing thought. Suppose she wasn’t special at all. Imagine everyone had the same gift as her and hadn’t yet discovered it. Perhaps that is what the English oak had meant when it insisted that every human could help. She shared her thought with Domi, who was meditating with his back to the spruce’s trunk.
“It would be fantastic if everyone could heal trees in return for all that trees do for humans. But I think if that were the case, it would be documented,” he replied.
She thought of Michael’s warning about exploitation. The first person to mention it would have a hard time. But if he or she had the bravery to make their gift public knowledge, it would encourage others to come out into the open. Then it would become acceptable, even normal. And they’d be able to heal whole forests instead of one tree at a time.
“Why don’t you try, Domi?”
He placed his hands on the spruce trunk and followed Rainbow’s instructions to concentrate on feeling the interior of the tree. Nothing happened, even when he moved his hands elsewhere.
“I can’t sense anything at all,” he said. “It’s just as well: I’ve got plenty of work with my children.”
Parents came from all over France to bring their spiritually gifted children to Domi. When she’d learnt this, she’d asked if he’d met other people with the same gift as hers. But he hadn’t. No child had anything remotely similar.
She looked down at him leaning against the spruce.
“Why are you more interested in children than adults?” she asked.
“Because they’re our future.”
She’d heard this at school, and it was usually coupled with a monologue about the importance of exams and career choices.
“There are so many old spirits coming back,” he continued.
This was far more interesting than exams. She slithered down the trunk and sat beside him.
“What have old spirits got to do with children?”
“They’re born into children,” he said. “I help my children explore their spirituality and come to terms with it so they can apply their old-spirit wisdom to their lives. Many spiritualists agree there’s a collective spirit heaven made up of all the souls that aren’t currently on earth. From time to time these old spirits have missions to accomplish, missions to guide mankind. So they are born into chosen children. You know how sometimes you feel you’ve already been to a place, even though it’s the first time you’ve visited? This is one explanation for that feeling.”
“Really? Do you think I’ve got an old spirit?”
“Yes. That’s why I need to understand the scope of your gift. Then I’ll be able to interpret the meaning of it in the scheme of things.”
Now she understood why he spent so much time with her. It wasn’t simply because he was her dad. She wondered if he treated her specially, compared to the other gifted kids.
“What do you do with the children?”
“It depends. Mostly, they need to be reassured that they can trust their intuition. For children to grow up in spiritually healthy environments, their parents need to encourage intuition. Adults have spent years being trained to be logical, so it can be difficult to return to an intuitive state. To convince them, I heal their illnesses and show them science is only part of the truth. Then there’s more chance they’ll follow their intuition, accept situations they don’t understand and make the right decisions.”
“What happens if they make the wrong decisions?”
“Look around you. Anything that leads to destruction is the wrong decision,” he said. As if to prove his point, a Mirage fighter plane passed overhead. “It’s a universal truth, which means it’s true in all our parallel worlds.”
“What parallel worlds?”
Rainbow was intrigued. The Amrita conversation she’d had with Mum when she was younger came into her mind. Mum had mentioned parallel worlds and suggested that Amrita’s soul had split into two, creating an Amrita who lived and an Amrita who died.
Domi continued. “My mother believed that spiritually sensitive people had a capacity for dividing. In fact, I think she said everyone could. When she looked into people’s futures she would see several versions of the person, each doing different things. She called these versions ‘parallels’. According to the decisions her clients made, they became one of the parallels. The other versions still existed, but in parallel worlds.”
Rainbow looked around and shivered. She half-expected to see a host of parallel Rainbows floating behind her shoulder.
“Where are the parallel worlds?”
“I don’t know. It’s not a concept I’ve ever studied. Maybe science will stumble on the answer one day. I do remember that parallels should never meet, though.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. They were my mother’s theories, not mine. I don’t remember what else she said, though she probably wrote more down in her memoirs. I’ve got her notes somewhere in my office. She did tell me a story once about someone being destroyed because they’d touched their parallel. That was when she was old and suffering from senility. She told lots of dramatic stories then, and people stopped listening to her.”
Domi looked sad. Rainbow took his hand.
“Let’s do something fun together,” she said. She pulled him to his feet. “Let’s go to the beach.”
Rainbow loved the seaside. They were an hour away from the Atlantic coast, with its long, empty beaches and powerful waves. It was hard to imagine them crowded with holiday-makers, as they apparently were in summer. She’d be home in Dorset long before the summer.
Domi had already taken her to the coast several times on his motorbike, to the envy of the other commune children. They would speed along the smooth roads dotted with late-spring beachgoers, Rainbow gripping Domi’s solid back. When they arrived at the Côte Sauvage, they’d park in the shade of the pine forest and walk on the cool, sandy path to the dunes. They raced barefoot up the steep dune and down the other side to the splendour of the sea.
They always swam. The sea was cold: freezing cold. The shock of icy water on sweating skin made Rainbow hyperventilate and gulp the warm air like a fish. She and Domi shared a sense of exhilaration in the sea. The energy of the great mass of living water was phenomenal. She loved the battering of the waves as they thundered into her and bowled her over in a sandy wash. If she had a gift to communicate with waves, she’d make them huge and powerful every time she came.
Domi became a boy at the beach; a boy without worries for mankind or the planet. He flung her into the waves, rolled her in the sand, chased her through the sea foam and raced her along the dunes. At the beach he was no longer her guru; he was her dad.
Beach days were always rounded off with a crêpe, spread with Nutella for Rainbow and sprinkled with icing sugar for Domi. The more time Rainbow spent with her dad, the more she saw they had lots in common. It was all evidence. She stocked up the proof inside her head and let it float out at night-time when she stretched out in her sleeping bag and waited for sleep, or for Mum – whichever came first.
When Mum arrived before sleep, they would whisper together until she fell asleep. Mum was discovering vegetarian cooking. She spent hours experimenting with the herbs and vegetables planted in the garden or stocked in glass jars in the cellar. She hel
ped Céline, a middle-aged French woman who’d travelled all over the world as a cook. Céline, who had an eccentric grasp of English, had taken Mum in hand. When she wasn’t contributing to work on the commune, Mum would wander off along the tracks, often with Virginie, the commune clairvoyant. Sometimes she disappeared alone. She’d started to come back with songs in her head that she would tease out of the old piano in the evenings.
There were few musicians in the commune. Only Gérard and Lilas played an instrument – the guitar. Aziz played an African drum, which didn’t count as a musical instrument. The commune people liked to assemble in the living room when Mum was giving birth to a song. Rainbow kept out of the way. It turned her stomach upside down with worry when she heard Mum work here. They were supposed to be on holiday, not settling into this way of life without Bob.
While she waited in bed for Mum, a froth of thoughts about Bob and Acrobat would bubble in her mind. She missed Acrobat’s fluffy dimness, and the kittens were growing up without her. In her memories, Bob’s grumpy side disappeared. He called her ‘Rainy’. She helped him in the garden. She would hold the other end of planks of wood and fetch the tools he asked for. He would hammer and whistle, and talk about jazz festivals while they rebuilt the leaking woodshed. Acrobat and the four kittens played around their feet, and the woodshed became an ornate house for the cat family. There would be embroidered cushions. The cats would eat dinner in five silver bowls and curl up on her lap. She would stroke them and they would purr her to sleep.
Three weeks after their arrival, Céline’s son Christophe let slip that he knew how to speak English. Up to this point he’d either ignored Rainbow or glowered at her from a distance. He kept the other children firmly by his side, as far away from her as possible. At fifteen, he was the oldest and the only teenager. The others ranged from ten down to two years old. His role in the commune was to keep the little ones out of mischief, supervise their games and make sure they fed the animals. He’d do this from a chair, where he would lounge and give them orders. Rainbow was sure he hated his duties. She would have offered to take his place if he’d been friendlier towards her.
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