The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  Delphine frowned and shot him a look. She opened another page by about thirty degrees. “That’s me.”

  He caught a glimpse of her face in close-up, sucking on a long string of spaghetti, moustachioed with bright red sauce.

  “And that’s me.” She was ice skating in the open air in front of some palatial Parisian building, one stubby leg stuck precariously out behind her. He thought he could see Michael’s figure gliding out of the frame.

  “And that’s me in Brittany,” she remarked, warming to her theme. This time she opened the page completely and laid it flat on her lap. “Where we went camping.” He could see a whole sequence of images of Delphine aged about three playing by a rock pool, squatting, gesturing, reaching out, totally absorbed. On her face was the expression he often noticed when she was talking to Amandine, although Amandine was nowhere to be seen.

  “Who’s that lady?” He nodded at a fair-skinned woman in the act of kicking sand at the photographer, the whitened grains curling upwards like spray, her laughter caught at that moment just before breaking. She was wrapped in a sarong and he was fascinated by the orange and red and cream colours.

  “Maman, of course.”

  Of course. He studied the picture, seeing what Michael, presumably the photographer, saw: her hair streaming blackly in the breeze, longer than he remembered, her face as pale as he recalled. The next photo, taken seconds later, showed her bending forward, as if hilarity had overcome her. Her head was twisted round towards the camera, the last notes of laughter fading to blue.

  Delphine flipped the page over. “That’s me in the swimming pool.” Flip. “That’s me on my bike.” Flip. “That’s me asleep in the tent. I like that one.” Flip. “That’s Maman.” Fl–

  “Let me see,” with his finger, Colin stopped the page from turning. The picture had been taken on long exposure, at night time, in what looked like the entrance to the tent. Charlotte was sitting at a folding table, one arm resting on the melamine surface, the other supporting her head. A gas lamp must have been lit just out of shot – he could almost hear the faint roar of the gauzy bulb burning and in the cadmium flare of the light that it cast, her face was soft and uncertain, as though she were about to suggest something, as though she still might. She seemed smiley, pliable, she could have been a little tipsy, the strap of her camisole had slipped down her arm, sleepily.

  She looked loving and lovely. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected to see in her the kind of tenderness that melts and flows. He leaned in to stare at her face more closely just as Delphine let the page fall shut.

  “That’s enough now,” she said, hugging the album to her and he could see that she was right; it was enough, for both of them. Enough for now. She put the album on the seat and sat on it. “We play cards, OK?”

  “OK. What do you want to play? Snap, or Damn It? Or shall I teach you Gin Rummy?”

  “Teach me Gin Rummy,” she demanded, and they sat up late cheating at cards until the glitter went out of the river and night fell.

  ~~~

  “Colin! Colin!”

  “Eh?” He flailed his way up from the depths of sleep. Delphine was shaking his arm. “What is it?”

  “Something has happened!”

  “What time is it?” He squinted at his watch, wincing at the earliness of the hour and then pulled his sleeping bag over his head.

  “Look–”

  “Go back to sleep…”

  She leaned across and with her finger and thumb forced his right eyelid open. He started up, blinking.

  “Careful – you’ll have my eye out.” He rubbed it with his knuckle and shouldered his sleeping bag around him with disgruntled movements.

  “Look outside–”

  “It’ll be a miracle if I can see anything at all,” he grumbled, “Ever again,” then following her pointing finger, he said “I can’t! I can’t see anything.”

  “That is what I am trying to tell to you – doh.” In frustration she smacked her forehead with her hand.

  Crustily, Colin tried to wipe the porthole clear with his finger and when that failed, with his sleeve. It remained thickly smeared with white. He regarded Delphine. “Hmmm.”

  Shrugging a sweatshirt on, he looked at his watch once more, allowing his granddaughter plenty of opportunity to apprehend his sense of injury at the time it told, before he began opening the hatch.

  She barged her way out before him. “Regardez…!” she breathed.

  The mist lay in skeins on the surface of the water. The Dragonfly was buried deep beneath its fondant folds and when Delphine stood up, only her head and shoulders could be seen. Colin surfaced beside her. It was like entering a world of make-believe and the two of them stood blinking as if they’d just stepped through a wardrobe or fallen down a rabbit hole.

  Delphine began to giggle. “It’s meringue!” She tried scooping the mist into her mouth but the vapour went slipping through her fingers. The bright, white lightness of it made him think that, like shaving foam, he could put blobs on her nose and chin, but although their hands chased and swerved, the fallen cloud could neither be caught nor contained and the two of them stood laughing in the whitewashed world that the dawn had revealed.

  “You’re soaked through,” Colin observed, as the skin around her mouth turned blue. “We’d better get you warmed up.”

  As they dived down to find the entrance to the cabin an unearthly noise stopped them in their tracks. It was a carnal sound, rhythmic and urgent, a breathless sound of pursuit, questing, thrashing, reverberating.

  A hundred metres down river, through the mist and up into the sky, rose a swan, its muscular arc curving just above their heads. They could see, feather by feather, the line of its neck, ending with the strange hieroglyphic of its beak. Close to, its feet looked murderously black and the vast sweep of its wings seemed to violate the air.

  Colin tilted his head back and then further back, watching the fearful mechanics of its flight as the swan went straining higher and higher. He could feel the downdraught fierce against his face.

  “Merde…” breathed his granddaughter and he didn’t correct her.

  It was a moment of weightlessness, of disorientation, of perfect delight. On and on went the mighty bird, wisps of mist spilling from its plumage as it claimed the whole wide river for itself. They listened until the leathery rasping of its wings was no more than a sigh in the distance and its white shape was absorbed into the sky. After a second or two, Colin bowed his head; his neck was stiff from looking upwards and he felt chilly now the spell was broken and the swan was gone. Delphine shivered beside him.

  “Turn round,” he said, “and I’ll give you a hot potato.”

  “Quoi?” She stared at him, unable to keep the suspicion from her face. She turned around, craning her neck so that she could keep an eye on him.

  He breathed out hard between her shoulder blades then rubbed the warm air through her pyjamas and into her frozen muscles. “Can you feel that?”

  She nodded. “Do it again.”

  He did it again, and then again. “Better now?”

  She grinned at him. “Much better. Shall I give you a – what do you call it – a hot potato?”

  She turned him around and huffed and puffed into the small of his back and pummelled at his T-shirt, so that he was aware of a small patch of warmth seeping into his creaky bones.

  “Thank you,” he said after a moment, conscious that these days he bruised more easily than he used to. “Thank you very much.”

  Temporarily restored, the two of them stayed on deck a while longer, watching the mist dissolve, but as the morning was disclosed in all its purity, he couldn’t help remembering the pictures of Charlotte, laughing and luminous, and he was suddenly afraid of what they might reveal.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Michael couldn’t stop thinking about the sound of his father’s voice. He couldn’t quite believe that they’d spoken. He couldn’t get over how simple it was just to say hello, to
start a conversation.

  Since then, he’d been trying not to mind that his Dad was with Delphine and he wasn’t. Trying not to mind was a skill he had made his own. He had tried not to mind that his father let Étienne steal Mum from them. He had tried not to mind about all the things his father should have said and done, such as asking that Michael stay with him instead of going to France. His father had never once said that. He had never once put up a fight. Maybe he thought he should take it as read, but you can’t, when you’re a kid, read those kind of things. You don’t have the vocabulary.

  Laroche’s vocabulary was coming on no end, however. He’d read one whole paragraph today, from some paranormal gothic fantasy called The Monstrumologist, which had surely put his skills to the test.

  “You should sign up with Education for an adult literacy course,” he said and Laroche looked at him as if he were something he’d trodden in.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They caught up with Tyler in Auxerre; or rather she caught up with them, since the Dragonfly skimmed along the Yonne as quickly as her namesake. Scenting shops behind the city’s exquisite mediaeval facade, Delphine announced that she absolutely must have new clothes as she had worn everything she owned and Colin pointed out that there wasn’t a millimetre of space left on the boat and as the two of them staked out their negotiating positions, the scarlet prow of Sabrina Fair came gliding towards the quay.

  “OK, I’ll admit that you could do with some shorts.”

  “Shorts?” Delphine couldn’t believe her ears. “Colin, I am in rags and you are talking to me of shorts.”

  “It’s Tyler!” he called to distract her. “Let’s go and help with the ropes…”

  She wasn’t going to be diverted that easily. As he went hurrying towards the space where Tyler was manoeuvring (with impressive skill, he noted) Delphine cantered along beside him, “If we are going south until the butter melts, then I am definitely going to need a dress for the sun – with shoulder straps, not like this – in this I will boil–”

  “One pair of shorts and that’s my final offer,” he lunged for the line which Tyler flung in his direction.

  “It is not possible…” she wailed.

  “Here, tie this off while I grab the other rope.”

  She tied and he grabbed and Tyler lowered her gangplank.

  “Wait a minute…” Colin went dashing back to the Dragonfly to retrieve the electric ring that she had lent them. “Thanks so much for this. It was a lifesaver – really, it was.”

  “Cool.”

  She was standing with the light behind her and staring into the sun he couldn’t clearly see her face, although from the easy tilt of her head he sensed that she was smiling.

  “So are you going to give it back to me?”

  “Oh yes – yes, of course.” Collecting himself, he leaned up and passed it to her. “I’m sorry; I thought we might have bumped into you sooner. I didn’t mean to hang on to it for so long. I hope you haven’t needed it.”

  “I stayed over in Sens. I wanted to do an interior of the cathedral.”

  “Yes,” he glanced over at Delphine. She was throwing gravel into the river, sowing gritty patterns over the surface. “We didn’t quite make it as far as the cathedral.”

  “It’s horses for courses, I guess.”

  “I guess,” he echoed.

  He could have left then. He could have said something about needing to buy Delphine some shorts, although God knows he didn’t fancy trailing round the shops in the heat, but he didn’t. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “The cathedral here looks pretty special too, now you come to mention it…” He shaded his eyes and gazed across at the imperious outline which dominated the far bank, its pale buttresses casting themselves upwards in the name of God’s good grace.

  “There’s the abbey as well…” Tyler nodded in the other direction where, like a matching bookend, the abbey sheltered from the sunshine under its terracotta roof. “Spoilt for choice,” she gave a gleeful shrug, “I’ll need to stay here for days.”

  “We’re not in any hurry either, as it happens…” he answered, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He stared upstream in the direction of their notional departure. When she didn’t answer, he found himself filling the silence, “That’s the beauty of it – the freedom. Being able to go with whatever takes your–” he cleared his throat, “With whatever interests you…”

  “The open river, instead of the open road.”

  “Yeah – the open…” he found that he didn’t know how to finish, or possibly where to start. He glanced at his granddaughter. She was evidently bored with filling the Yonne with gravel.

  “I need to get this child a pair of shorts…” he excused himself. Delphine shot him a look suggestive of deferred retribution. “Child!” she protested in a whisper which warned and don’t get me started on the shorts.

  “The town’s beautiful – real beautiful,” Tyler said in a flurry as he was turning to go. “Well worth a look round.”

  He hesitated, peering up at her. Her smile switched on and off like faulty neon. She had a now you see it/now you don’t kind of shyness.

  “It does get a good write-up in the book,” he answered circumspectly, aware of his own instinct for caution. Because of Delphine, he told himself. “Do you know it, then?”

  “I’ve been here a couple of times. On my travels…” Casually, she stretched up and began tugging at the dead heads of flowers in a window box on the wheelhouse roof, dropping them one by one over the side into the river. Colin watched the dying petals saturate and slowly retreat downstream. He looked sideways at her and could see the weather in her face, her skin faintly scored by sun and wind and rain.

  Delphine tugged at his hand and then with a quick twist of irritation, she made as if to load him onto her back and carry him away with her, nearly flooring the two of them in the process.

  “It’s a great place to buy shorts, that’s for sure,” she observed as he staggered and then recovered himself.

  “Col–in!” urged his granddaughter, her eyes pinned wide with terrifying messages.

  “Youguysfancymeetingupthisevening?” asked Tyler with such rapidity that neither of them could be sure what she had said and she had to repeat it, making her sunburn blush.

  “This evening? Well, that sounds…” He deliberately avoided Delphine’s eye. “It must be our turn. Why don’t you–? What about – supper? And perhaps a drink first? With us?”

  All three of them turned to contemplate the Dragonfly, which bobbed like a bath toy beside the gin palaces and barges moored along the quay.

  “Do you have enough…?”

  “Space?” supplied Colin, “Plenty. Well, just about. We’ll manage.”

  “If you guys are sure…” Tyler addressed her equivocation to Delphine, who appeared to be blowing imaginary smoke rings into the air. The child glanced speculatively at her over the end of her invisible cigarette, then looked away.

  “We’ll do a barbecue,” he said brightly, pleased with the idea.

  “Now can we go into town?” implored Delphine and started pulling him away.

  ~~~

  The barbecue and the Primus stove were perched on dry land and Colin, Tyler and Delphine were bunched up together on the Dragonfly with their knees crammed under the cabin door table. Tyler had brought a vast salad with several different types of lettuce, endive, artichoke hearts, roasted peppers, ribbons of carrot, crumbled goat’s cheese, pine nuts and torn basil all slathered in a home-made herb mayonnaise – I’m not much of a cook – which took up most of the available space.

  “I really like that dress you have on, it’s so cute. Did you tie those straps yourself, or are they stitched that way?”

  “They’re stitched, I think,” Delphine squinted down at her sundress.

  “It’s a great effect. That shade of… what is it, fuchsia…? really is your colour.”

  Importantly, as one who has no time for idle chatter, Delphine
stretched right across Tyler and turned the chicken legs over on the barbecue, just as her grandfather had shown her. She then put the tongs down in the dirt on the quay as an added touch, on her own account. Colin said nothing. He was struggling to peel the potatoes by the flimsy light of a solar lamp dangling from the flagpole. From time to time a lick of wind blew the red ensign over it, causing a tiny power cut.

  On the other side of the river the avenue of trees lining the bank was spangled with fairy lights. They could hear the murmur of conversation coming from a hotel boat moored close to the footbridge, the attacking sound of cutlery on china plates. The kitchen faced outwards and they could see the white shadows of the chefs moving in greasy intimacy, in a space that was almost as small as their own.

  “Blast!” Colin dropped the knife and held his thumb up to the lamp; a rind of skin was hanging loose. “It’s nothing,” he tried not to look at the small punctuations of blood that were already rising to the surface of the wound. “I’m so cack-handed.”

  “Let me see, let me see,” Delphine yanked his hand towards her, “Yuck – that is dégôutant.”

  “It’s nothing, really,” he said whitely, thankful he was sitting down. He was about to dunk his hand over the side into the river,

  “DON’T do that,” cried Tyler, “Have you had your tetanus?”

  He pulled a face.

  “Hold your hand above your head,” she gestured with her own hand, as if to show him how.

  A trickle of blood wound round his thumb and onto his palm, following his lifeline, or the line of his heart, or the other one, he couldn’t remember what it was called. He looked away woozily.

  “I’m not very good with blood…”

  “That’s OK – blood is my forte. I’m fantastic with it. I really come into my own when there’s blood around. Have you got a first aid kit?”

  “It’s in the everything locker. We’re sitting on it.”

  They had to take the table down in order for them all to stand up, which involved putting the huge bowl of salad on the quay.