by Kate Dunn
In a moment of inspiration Colin whipped his mobile phone out of his pocket and began thumbing through his list of contacts, “You can talk to her grandmother, if you like. She will explain.”
This was an eventuality that Delphine hadn’t costed into her escape plan. “Pas nécessaire,” she said swiftly to Denis. “I make a joke, une petite blague. Amusante, non?”
Ahead of them the lock gates were opening. Mister Calista said something to the child, then muscling up his shoulders he stared at Colin. He jabbed two fingers at him. The meaning was clear in any language: I’ll be watching you.
“And bon voyage to you, too,” retorted Colin, while the child, who appeared to have shrunk to about half her size, fiddled with the VHF for a moment and then put it quietly back in the locker.
~~~
They continued on their way in circumspect silence, with the reticence of those who sense they must be mindful of one another, without being certain how.
“Where are we going?” asked Delphine dully, at one point.
“South,” he answered, hedging his bets.
“South where?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “South until the butter melts, I suppose.”
A little while later she tried again. “What is a dragonfly?”
If Colin heard, he didn’t answer, and after this their efforts petered out, their unfamiliarity with each other too awkward to overcome.
The opening to the marina where they were to stay the night was screened by branches. The mooring consisted of a municipal leisure centre with harbour attached, full of fatigued yachts covered in plastic sheeting spattered with bird shit, houseboats undergoing a kind of Forth Bridge-style renovation that would never be completed, and bumptious little motor cruisers. They tied up near a jetty where two lads were attempting to deflate an inflatable canoe and cram it into an unfeasibly small holdall. The child regarded them with critical interest as they flattened and rolled and then lay on the canoe, to no avail.
“It’s a flying insect, actually.” Colin set a saucepan of water on the Primus stove. “A dragonfly. They look like little brown bi-planes. And there are damselflies as well. You see them all the time on the river, as blue as an August sky. If you sit very quietly sometimes they’ll settle on your hand.”
“The Dragonfly,” The child scrutinised her own small palm, rolling the dirt out of the creases with her thumb; “It’s a pretty name.”
“Some people call them the devil’s darning needle. There’s a legend that if you fall asleep by a stream the Dragonfly will sew your eyelids shut.”
“Like me,” she piped up, “I had my eyelid sewed!”
“Glued–”
“It’s the same thing,” she countered. She went back to studying her hand, flexing it, then cupping it and holding it out, tilting it this way and that. “I have a pretty name too,” she remarked, “but you never call me by it.”
He stiffened. The saucepan was coming to the boil and he turned off the gas. “Don’t I?”
She shook her head, “Never.”
He didn’t have to make a mental inventory, or check, or ask himself why. He sat there, watching splinters of lime scale spiral through the water to the bottom of the pan, contemplating the sadness which was like a shadow of himself: it rose in the morning when he rose, and moved through the day with him, and settled down with him at night.
“Pourquoi pas?”
He wondered whether it was easier for her to ask difficult questions in words that were more familiar to her.
“I don’t know why…” he answered, untruthfully. He thought of all the years of habitual denial, when her name had been unspoken. I don’t have a son anymore and he doesn’t have a daughter. I no longer have a wife. I am nothing and have no one. It was easier like that. It ruled out the prospect of further loss. He chewed on his lip, then opened his mouth as if now, prompted and put on the spot, it might be possible to speak. His mouth closed of its own accord. He was frightened of naming her. It would be an admission of something. It would acknowledge too much. “I suppose I’m scared of messing things up,” he muttered, as if that would explain it. “Grown-ups are hopeless at getting things wrong.”
She was taut beside him.
“You’re right, it is a pretty name,” he managed, hunching his shoulders forward. He found he didn’t want to let her down. He didn’t want to fall short. He cleared his throat in preparation, straightening his back.
She put a finger to her lips, but he was past noticing.
“Delphine,” he began; it was like learning a new word in a foreign language, he was trying to make sense of it in his mouth. “Delphine…”
“See?” she whispered, hardly hearing him. “See?”
The sound of her name spoken aloud took him almost to the brink and for an instant he thought that all his unhappiness would come tumbling out; he blinked and swallowed, aware of a congestion deep inside him. When he had got a grip on himself, he followed her gaze and saw that two damselflies, quivering blue, were coupling on her grimy hand.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s funny how the past can trip you up and send you sprawling. Michael sat with Laroche’s cellphone in his lap, the gnawing absence of his daughter twisted up with the guilt that never left him into a hard knot, a knot that had tightened as he’d listened to her talking; she was breathless with news. She told him that she was on a boat with her grand-père. It took him a moment to realise she meant his father, and the Dragonfly. He felt a twinge of jealousy at the thought of the two of them together, even though he’d agreed to it in principle. How dare he turn up, just like that, after – as if–?
“Do you mind if I make another call?”
Laroche pursed his lips together. He rubbed his thumb against his fingers, implying payment that Michael wasn’t going to think about.
“Just a short one. To my mother-in-law.”
“Conversations with mothers-in-law are never short.”
He dialled Lisette’s number, ready to take her to task for letting Delphine go without consulting him, full of the righteous indignation that any father would feel.
“Allo.”
She sounded just like Charlotte. Any sense of righteousness that he might have had, evaporated. He hung up.
“That was bloody quick.”
Michael studied the blank screen of the phone in his hand. “It was a mistake,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called.” He leaned across and passed the handset back to Laroche. “Thanks, though. Thank you. I owe you one.”
“Two,” Laroche pointed out.
“Yes,” Michael said absently. There were too many voices – Lisette’s, Delphine’s and, whisper her name, Charlotte’s – sounding in his head. He replayed the conversation with his daughter to drown the others out. After telling him about the Dragonfly she clammed up. He remembered the difficult diplomacy that children of separated parents have to acquire: who you can tell what. It was a learning curve with a sharpened edge. Attempting to get any other information from her was like extracting teeth. He tried asking her how she was feeling.
“OK.”
“How’s – grandpa?”
“OK.”
“Are you having a nice time?”
“It’s OK.”
With mounting desperation, Michael asked her about Amandine instead.
“She’s been eating ice cream at Gautier’s and had some stitching done.”
Gautier’s. He bit his lip. It was Charlotte’s favourite restaurant. She was a regular there. The maître d’ always kissed her on the cheek when she arrived and showed her to a table in the window. For a moment, from wherever she was, she seemed to gaze back at him over her shoulder. Perhaps I was wrong about you after all, he wanted that look to say, and he could feel the smoulder of her which used to burn him so. “Poor old monkey always in the wars,” he said, swallowing. The realisation that for him, Delphine’s life would be lived at one remove came with a bitter taste. “Shall I ring you next week?�
��
“OK…”
~~~
“Wotcha thinking?”
At the sound of Laroche’s voice, Michael jumped. “What?”
With Charlotte’s backward glance still filling his thoughts he was unarmoured. “I was thinking about my partner.”
“The one you done in?”
He nodded.
“Woss the story, morning glory?”
“It’s not a story,” he said tersely.
“It’s always a story,” replied Laroche.
He didn’t answer that. “I loved her very much.”
“Yeah, right.”
“She was older than me, and wiser. And very beautiful, at least I thought so. And unpredictable. And undependable.” He took refuge in silence for a moment and sensing he was onto something, Laroche gave him the benefit of the doubt and said nothing. “And unfaithful,” he said, with the merest lift of his shoulders, not a shrug, a small flinch of incomprehension.
The bell for recreation sounded.
Michael dreamt about Charlotte that night. He thought it was Charlotte, but could have been his Mum, he wasn’t sure. She was carrying lots of china – plates and stuff – and she wouldn’t let him take them from her, even though she knew she couldn’t hold them on her own.
CHAPTER NINE
When Colin surfaced the next morning, she was gone.
He was lying in his berth, his dreamy half-sleep infused with the scent of cut grass, and the cabin washed with the unspoilt sunshine of early morning, when he opened his eyes, saw her empty bed, sat upright in a panic and cracked his head on the roof.
Holy God! He scrambled into his shorts, rubbing his forehead with one frantic palm, buttoning his flies, scootching on his sandals, remembering to tug on a T-shirt and realising too late that it was inside out. The hatch was already open and he lurched onto the deck, scanning the leafy port.
“Delphine?” he yelled, with none of the inhibitions of the previous day. He couldn’t see her anywhere. He leapt up onto the mooring, leaving the startled Dragonfly to right itself, the wooden planks crashing under his feet as he ran from one boardwalk to another. He could hear the creak and rasp of ropes as the boats he passed responded to his alarm, heaving forward and then falling back; he could hear the creak and rasp of his own lungs as he called for her time after time.
He skidded to a halt and stopped an oversized man with a newspaper and a baguette under one arm. “Fille?” gasped Colin. “Jeune fille?” An image of her slight body floating in the river filled his thoughts. If she wasn’t face down in the Seine, past saving, she’d be on the loose somewhere between Ivry and Paris trying to make her way home, crazy child who no longer had a proper home to go to. “Have you seen a girl, about nine years old, wearing a hat, with a–” He should have taken proper care of her, he’d injured her, he’d made her sick; whichever way you looked at it, he’d loused up.
“Jah!” Beads of sweat were breaking on the man’s upper lip.
“Where?” asked Colin, “Where is she?”
“Over there–” the man pointed to the far end of the enclosure where a row of neglected live-aboards sidled together.
Colin hacked his way across the marina. He heard his granddaughter before he saw her, and slowed to a lope, following the splash and ripple of her laughter to an overgrown corner of the port, where broad reeds stirred the slacking river, the planks of the pontoon were split from too much sunshine and wild flowers in pale throngs filled every gap.
Irritation and relief went coursing through him indecipherably. She was slinging chunks of yesterday’s bread into the water, leaning way back to give traction to her throw, which promised much in terms of effort, but seemed to deliver very little, the bread landing only a few feet from her. She was giving a running commentary and as he drew closer he could see the tiny figure of Amandine propped haphazardly, gazing with fortitude at her own knees. He couldn’t pick out a word that the child – that Delphine – was saying, but he understood the music of her conversation, the tone of wonder, the different pitches of delight, and amusement, and hardly-daring-to-believe…
He hung back, trying to catch his breath, while insects scatted through the air. After a moment, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wandered up, as if he were on his way somewhere and just happened to be passing.
“Morning,” he managed.
“Colin! Colin! Look, oh look–” She clapped her hands together, sending a spray of bread crumbs everywhere. “I don’t know the word – c’est des loutres – regardez!”
Twisting through the current, turning and weaving amber and gold, were two otters. His granddaughter snapped off a piece of bread and passed it to him, without taking her eyes off them. The crust felt rough between his fingers and he held it for a moment, hesitating.
“They like this so much,” she whispered and to encourage him she lobbed a stale chunk in their direction. With lazy grace, the smallest otter fielded it, rolled over onto his back, held it to its mouth with scratty claws and started chewing at one corner. Colin stared at its white staccato teeth. His granddaughter gazed up at him and a warm contagion began to melt his anger and his panic, and grinning back at her he pretended to spit on the bread and polish it on his shorts, before bowling it into the air, a perfect Yorker, which the largest otter caught at the boundary, before diving down and away, until he was out of their sight. With a flip and a slip the other one disappeared.
Delphine stood staring at the last of the ripples.
“Let’s walk to the shops and get some breakfast, shall we?” he said, as the wrinkled water spread and settled.
She broke up the last of the bread and threw it with unreliable aim at a pair of geese. She was still smiling and in that instant, Colin found himself wondering if he would ever dare to let himself love her like he had loved her father, and felt stricken at the thought.
~~~
“No, not like that, hold it up a bit – that’s it.”
They were sitting almost knee to knee in the freckled sunshine, while Delphine held his shaving mirror at an angle which reflected the fenders on the boat behind them and Colin tried to shave himself in the brief seconds when he caught sight of his chin. He dipped his razor into the bucket and rifts of foam swirled round the blade.
She was watching him intently, making a study of him and every time she regarded him from a different angle, the mirror moved.
“You’ve missed a bit.”
He pulled the skin along his jaw line taut and shaved where she had indicated. She nodded in a tolerant way that suggested she would have made a better job of it herself.
“And there–”
He scraped away at his upper lip, under her scrutiny. “If you could hold the mirror still for a moment…”
“Don’t you have an electric razor?”
“No.”
“Papa has an electric razor.”
“Does he?” Colin schooled himself to be casual. It wouldn’t do to allow his heart into his mouth every time Michael was mentioned. At the same time, he found it strange to think of him as a man who shaved, who had a job, a wife, a life in Paris which he knew nothing of, when he was fixed always and forever in his thoughts at about the age of ten, before the family exploded into smithereens. His stomach knotted at the thought of all that Sally had taken from him. He cleaned his razor in the water once again.
“Yes. And one day he was late for work so he took it with him in the car and the battery ran out and he went into a meeting with half a – what is it?”
“Beard.”
“Beard,” she repeated. “In French it is barbe,” she told him in an informative, important little voice.
“Le barbe?”
“Non, non, c’est feminine – la barbe.”
“French is a crazy language.” He rinsed his face in the bucket and patted it dry. “How do I look?”
“Old,” she answered, unsparingly.
“That’s OK, I am old.”
A breath of sadness fli
ckered across her face. Her hand reached subconsciously for Amandine, who had been left sitting in the cabin with the phone on her lap. The child contemplated herself in the mirror, staring into her own eyes as if there was something she couldn’t quite understand.
“What happened to Sally?” she asked without looking at him.
Colin was emptying the bucket over the side. He watched the stream and tumble of the dirty water. “She died of breast cancer the year after you were born.”
Delphine, who seemed to be disappearing inside herself, didn’t answer. He shook the drips from the bucket and wiped it round with his towel. After the horror of the divorce, Sally’s death had caused a secondary grief to spread insidiously through his system, settling in his organs, eating at the vital parts of him. He put the bucket back in the locker, closing the lid quietly. The towel was damp in his lap. He folded it in half and then in half again, his watch strap catching on a thread. He yanked the loose thread taut and snapped it off, turning to his granddaughter – Sally’s grandchild too. She was wiping her arm across her face and the very thought that she might be smudging away a tear had him on his knees beside her, “Are you alright?”
She nodded.
After a moment or two she shook her head.
Then she nodded once more.
“Where are we going today?” she asked shortly.
“South,” he said.
“But of course–” she didn’t smile, although for a moment she looked as though she might.
“Until the butter melts,” they said together, making a raggedy chorus, a tattered pledge of good intent. She jumped up and put her arms around his waist which momentarily flummoxed him, and then she gave him a wheedling grin,
“And is it possible for me to drive?”
~~~
He did let her drive; some of the way, on the straight bits when there was no traffic. She had two speeds: fast, and heart-stoppingly fast.
“Where are the brakes?” she squealed as two Canada geese streaked past the Dragonfly’s bows, heading helter-skelter for the bank.
“There are no brakes.”
