The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  “Oh,” he remarked, feeling himself flush.

  “I didn’t go in to see.”

  “No.”

  They measured out the silence, negotiating terms.

  “How far is it to Asnois?” she asked, politely.

  Colin found himself back in the shallows, “Not far.” He was uncertain of what he had achieved, except perhaps to have been reprimanded by a nine-year-old. “Do you think you’d like to visit that junk shop?”

  Delphine regarded him, her innocence undiluted. “If I will be honest I would prefer to have a pet…”

  ~~~

  The three of them walked to the village in the loose embrace of the rain, which was fine yet persistent.

  “Is it far?” asked Delphine.

  “Not far,” he said.

  “A couple of miles,” said Tyler, who had never had children and was ignorant of the essential etiquette of half-truths and evasions, “but there’s a bridge where we can play Pooh sticks and maybe when we get to the market they’ll have a crêpe stall and we can eat crêpes with honey and chocolate,” she added, because she meant well.

  “And… guimauve?” asked Delphine. “I don’t know the name for it in English.” Amandine’s preferences, a feature of so many of these exchanges, resonated quietly between them.

  “Guimauve? Sure you can have guimauve. You can have double guimauve if you want. Whatever it turns out to be…”

  The market was all but closed when they arrived at the little town. A lad was whistling as he piled crates of unsold vegetables onto the back of a truck, scattering torn pieces of lettuce and the outer leaves of cauliflowers; the butcher was cleaning the pavement round his stall, sloshing water over it then brushing hard until filmy blue membranes were aggregated into fat and gristle, clogging the gutter. Someone was loading cheap trainers back into their cardboard boxes.

  “I probably need some trainers,” said Delphine in a speculative aside. “I cannot wear flip-flops in winter. It is not possible.”

  “Well it’s not winter yet,” replied Colin, robustly ignoring the rain spurting down on them. The smell of fried onions began to mingle with the wet weather whiff of the inside of his cagoule.

  “I love French cuisine, but andouillettes? I don’t get them, do you?” said Tyler, hurrying past the catering van.

  Delphine was holding out for her crêpe.

  They watched the raindrops plop into the empty buckets from the flower stall, disturbing the discarded petals of Sweet William. All around them they could hear the drag and snap of trestles being dismantled and the churn of engines as vans reversed. Leaving the market behind, they headed down the main street. The boulangerie shut up shop as they approached and the three of them stood under the overhanging roof of a haberdasher’s, dolefully eyeing some embroidery kits.

  “We could go and look at a lavoir,” suggested Colin, “The book says there are two of them…”

  “What’s a lavoir?” asked Tyler.

  “… and at least they can’t be closed.”

  “It is like a launderette,” answered Delphine in unreconciled tones of despair.

  “A mediaeval wash house,” explained Colin who, given that their options were currently limited, took it upon himself to lead the way.

  The lavoir offered little consolation. Its dark timbers, their grain an ancient and inaccessible text, supported a tiled roof that seemed to be entirely held together by moss. Loose spools of spider’s web trailed from the rafters and abandoned birds’ nests frayed in high corners. The pool itself, fed from an invisible spring by a dented leaden pipe, was a perfect oval, its limestone rim worn away by ancient knees. He contemplated the water, twists of green algae dispersing through it like washed blood. Tyler stooped to fish out a beer bottle. The air of neglect was as penetrating as damp.

  Sensing that if he didn’t do something radical the afternoon would become irretrievably steeped in melancholy, Colin seized Delphine by the hand, “Come on – we can’t get any wetter!” and he jumped in, pulling her after him, and started to run up and down. The water was shin deep and he kicked a sparkling arc up into the shadows and as it scattered and fell Delphine’s expression changed from disbelief to astonished delight and she started to scoop water into the air, whole armfuls bursting over her head, chasing him round and round.

  “Come on in, the water’s lovely!” he yelled as he went sloshing past Tyler.

  “Have you ever had campylobacter?” she answered doubtfully, “The germs in here probably go back five hundred years.”

  “At least,” he shouted, making flakes of plaster and grit and hardened mediaeval bird shit pepper down on them from the eaves. He held her gaze for a moment, asking her and then to make his point, reminding her…

  “What the heck!” she leapt in and started batting fat handfuls of water at him.

  Under cover of the grown-ups having gone stark raving mad, Colin grabbed her by the wrist and started to whirl her round. The two of them spun in drenching circles, creating spray as bright as sparks, a liquid Catherine wheel.

  “Stop, stop!” laughed Tyler and panting, he released her, unbalancing their small constellation, sending them off at unpredictable angles. They flopped down on the limestone rim with its patient erosions, catching their breath, a subversive glow keeping them warm. Staring at his saturated shorts, he gave a little snort of amusement and Tyler looked at him and giggled and then stopped herself. Without warning, a gale of laughter came soaring out of her and then he began to laugh as well.

  “What are you laughing at?” asked Delphine in a quiet voice. Deliciously helpless, Colin couldn’t answer her and though he wanted to get a grip on himself – needed to – he couldn’t for the life of him sober up.

  “Stop, stop!” gasped Tyler, clutching at her side, “Oh, stop!”

  But Colin didn’t want to stop, he wanted to go on laughing, laughing like this at nothing and everything, laughing until he was spent, he wanted to go on laughing till he cried.

  Like musketeers, the two of them swaggered wetly through the town, with Delphine trailing behind. By some fluke or oversight the boulangerie had opened up, but when he saw the state of them the baker came hurrying to the door, barring their way. Puddles formed around them as they chose cakes from the window.

  “I bring them to you,” he wiped his hands fastidiously on his apron. “Attendez.”

  They made their way back to the Nivernais, all the colours of the countryside running together. Colin started to sing snatches of a hymn – the golden evening brightens in the west – but neither of the others joined in.

  “You can’t sit under your umbrella in this…” said Tyler when they reached the canal, looking at the strumming rain, “You folks will catch your death and besides, I have radiators,” she played her ace with a gleam in her eye.

  “Radiators, eh?” With a twinge of guilt he looked at Delphine, whose level stare seemed like a small test. Then, contemplating the stern horizon, he told himself defiantly that Tyler was right, they’d catch their death in this downpour. “Well, maybe just for a little – while it’s so heavy – what do you think?”

  Delphine glowered at him long enough for him to understand that if this was a test then he had scored forty percent maybe, barely a pass, that he was in the could do better category of the grandparental league table. Yet to be in the league at all was rather mystifying, when he considered that a few weeks ago he had been living in the kind of sustained solitary confinement that solidifies the heart, makes mutton of it, and now here he was, a man who had a social circle – almost – and competing demands on his attention. He scratched his chin and water ran down his wrist inside the sleeve of his anorak. “I’ll just get some dry clothes for us to change into…” he said, as if the decision had been made on purely pragmatic grounds.

  Snug in the cabin of Sabrina Fair they filled the first few moments’ silence by discussing radiators, “I have a diesel boiler,” Tyler explained, “and they run off that. It saves draining the domestic
battery – God, I’m boring myself – am I being too much of a techie?”

  Colin was watching her making the tea with a sidelong sense of wonder: heating the water, filling the mug, putting the tea bag sachet on the side, but never mind that. I love it when you’re techie, he thought to himself, be as techie as you want, I can take it.

  Steam lipped at the windows; there was the scent of wet hair in the air and little by little he became aware that Delphine’s pout had settled in for the duration. “Do you want to play cards?” he asked, suddenly remembering his obligations, and he tweaked the brim of her hat. “We could teach Tyler Damn It.”

  She scowled at him. “Damn It’s boring…”

  “Or Spit?”

  “Spit’s–”

  “I know–” Tyler interrupted inspirationally. She picked up the beer bottle she had fished out of the lavoir, which she had brought home with her because she couldn’t find a bin to put it in. “Let’s send a message in a bottle. I’m going to draw a picture of the three of us in the rain and perhaps you could write the message,” she said to Delphine, “And there’s sure to be an old cork in the trash, so we can plug it up and throw it over the side when we’ve finished…” She produced paper and pencils from a drawer. “Here we go!”

  Stiffly, Delphine reached for a pencil. She stared at its sharp point.

  “What will you do, Colin?” demanded Tyler, now that her organisational blood was up.

  “I thought maybe I could watch the two of you – be on hand to answer any questions, that kind of thing…”

  “Or maybe you could be cork deputy…?”

  “Maybe I could…” But he did watch them – her – he watched her. He watched her sitting next to his granddaughter; he watched the swift movement of her hands as she sketched something, then rubbed it out and sketched again, chattering all the time to Delphine, relieving her of the awkward freight of conversation,

  “D’you know what? I find people really difficult to draw. I really do. I guess I’m not really a people person. I like landscapes. You look like a people person to me – I’ll bet you are. I’ll bet you draw really neat people. How’s that message of yours coming along? Have you thought what you’re gonna say…?”

  Her voice faded out as he focused all his energies on willing her to glance his way and when she did look up and smile, he jumped. She didn’t speak. Her smile widened, not flickering this time, and his mouth moved a fraction as if in answer, although he had no idea what he might say. Phrase by phrase, in stealth, a silent dialogue began. They talked of kissing, of the slow stroke of tongue on skin, of clothes sliding, of the delicate violence of touch.

  They never drew breath.

  “I’ve finished!” Delphine slammed the pencil on the table.

  Colin blinked as if coming into the light. He took in the child’s downcast face and the clench of her jaw. She appeared poised for action and yet withheld and as he clocked the danger signs, he wasn’t sure if it was rage or misery that was building in her.

  “I’d better find you a cork…” he said circumspectly and then, while they sealed up the bottle with the message and the picture inside it, “Will you tell me what you said?”

  She shook her head.

  “Is it to Papa?” he asked with a kind of lazy intuition that he recognised too late was a substitute for proper interest. He swallowed and found the imagined taste of Tyler was still in his mouth.

  Delphine didn’t answer.

  Quite right, he chided himself. She’s no fool. She knows when she’s been short changed. “You don’t have to,” he said awkwardly, “Even though I’d really like to know. Look–” he wiped some steam from the window with reluctant fingers, as if the cleared glass provided a view into his own shortcomings. He didn’t want to leave and yet he knew it wouldn’t be quite right for him to stay. “The rain’s easing up. It’s time for you and me to go.”

  He disciplined himself to keep his gaze neutral, to say goodbye to Tyler and take his granddaughter by the hand. Together, they wandered mournfully along the riverbank to the next bridge and he was conscious of the slight sounds of the countryside drying out: a single drop falling, a leaf shifting as it lost its weight of water. Along the wooded bank a silver birch was caught in the flare of evening light, its white trunk illuminated fleetingly, before being extinguished for the night.

  He had to lift her up onto the parapet of the bridge so that she could throw the bottle in.

  “Do you like being with me?” he asked her, all of a sudden. He could feel the small case of her ribs, her thinness. Her answer mattered to him.

  Delphine thought for a moment, weighing his question, making her choice. She cocked her head to one side. “What day is it today?”

  “Let me see, it must be… Saturday – yes, it’s Saturday.”

  She twisted round to look at him and then, with a generosity that made him feel ashamed, she said carefully, “Well, if it’s Saturday, then I like being with you very much.”

  “I’m sorry–” he blurted out. “I’m very – sorry.”

  She was watching the bottle, already collared with a strand of weed. “De rien,” she whispered, innocent of the extent of his transgressions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Michael was back in his cell. A medical orderly had removed his bandage, checked the stitches and discharged him. He’d had a migraine for two days, with bright razorings in front of his eyes. There was a provisional feeling to everything.

  Laroche, returned from his first stint in the library, was all for playing another list game. He started making a list of all the list games they could play. The A to Z of sexual positions, the A to Z of criminal offences…

  “How about countries or birds, or characters from Shakespeare?” Michael asked wearily. He sat on the edge of his bed, gripping the mattress, his knuckles gleaming. He was conscious of the unkind light. The conversation with his father still bothered him. Parents sometimes have to make difficult decisions. Asking Charlotte to have an abortion? Not wanting to see Delphine when she was born? There were two, for starters. For difficult, read wrong. He took a breath, and then another, to give himself ease. He released his hold on the mattress and flexed his fingers.

  “Birds?” said Laroche. “Ones you’ve pulled? I could go several times through the alphabet with that, though you,” he eyed Michael quizzically, “would probably be stuck at C. Am I right or am I right?”

  “Let’s not do birds,” said Michael with a sigh. As an afterthought he covered his mouth with his hand, but there were thoughts he couldn’t stifle: how much he loved his father; the bewildered ache for him when he was gone. The disbelief – that was it – that such a thing could happen: that his Dad could let him go. No fight. No court case. No righting of wrongs. No bitter custody battle. A nod and a wave and a see you in the holidays. Brave faces all round, but Michael never felt brave, he felt bereft. He glanced up, conscious of Laroche’s eyes upon him. “What about films set in prison? – The Shawshank Redemption, Midnight Express – that’s two for starters.”

  Laroche pulled a face. “Busman’s holiday – no thanks.” He thought for a moment. “We could do escape films, I s’pose…”

  “Chicken Run?” Michael said doubtfully. The divorce had robbed him of the certainty that he was loved. In their different ways his parents tried to make things up to him, have an ice cream, I’ve got tickets for the footie, I’ll take you to the cinema, let’s go fishing, compensations that only left him feeling wary. “…I’m sorry?”

  “I was saying,” said Laroche, as if he were fed up with talking to a halfwit, “that we didn’t really watch films when I was a kid. Or if we did, they were ones bought down the market with more crackle than picture. Which might give you the edge.”

  “Right,” said Michael, who was struggling to listen.

  “Which we wouldn’t want, obvs. We could do ways of escaping…”

  “If you like…”

  “Except I’m stuck on A. I don’t suppose you�
�d let me have arse licking, although I guess that might sometimes do the trick.”

  “What?”

  “Farkin fark, Rosbif. I’m workin’ really hard at this. Ways of escaping beginning with A. Or we could try something else. You could ask me if I’d had a nice day at the office.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. The library. It was your first day.”

  “And I could say, thank you, dear Rosbif, for asking, except I’m bored of this already. This is definitely not a good game for passing the time. You could help me out here.”

  “I’m sorry. My head still hurts and I’m worried because my daughter’s been in hospital–”

  “Yer gotta man up–” said Laroche irritably, going over old ground.

  “And I know I’ve not been very good company. OK then, I’m on the case: ways of escaping beginning with B – boring, as in tunnels.

  “Boring, as in boring.” Laroche did that thing with his spine, that quick collapse of vertebrae. “Alright then, here’s some news: I’ve got a conjugal coming up – not that kind of conjugal, a family one. My missis is bringing in the kid. Little ickle Marianne. Though talking of conjugals – have you ever played that game where you wank onto a biscuit?”

  “No… Let’s do the A – Z of birds.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Colin awoke in the morning with a sense of discomfort that wouldn’t go away: he was feeling guilty about Delphine, guilty about Tyler and he lay there worrying until he was filled with the inescapable certainty that he must tell her everything.

  When she popped round first thing, “Isn’t it just the most beautiful morning? I was going to walk into the village. I wondered if you’d like some croissants…” hooking her arm behind her head in a way that he had come to know meant that she was feeling ill at ease, he understood the subtext of her offer.