Children of Light

‘My family are in the oldest graveyard.’

‘Go and join them. God, I hate old women!’

‘Don’t insult my family,’ said Macon, loudly, and everybody looked at him. Even balding and with a paunch he was a head and shoulders higher than the driver. The man was quiet.

Auxille stood up ‘Quel miracle! Quel drame! What was it? One soup?’

‘With extra bread like hers.’

After lunch Jeanette closed the café. She wiped the tables, washed up, swept the floor and folded up the table cloths, unaided because Auxille hadn’t stopped talking once and Macon had gone into the cellar to find some celebratory wine.

The café was warm and moist and filled with a garlicky fish aroma now being attacked by bleach and cleaning fluids. Mireille rested her head against the window and listened as Auxille filled her in on the last twenty years’ gossip. The topics were the same as ever. Fecundity, hunting dogs and who had married whom. Family connections were important in St Clair.

The top family were the Villeneuves, who owned the château. They were respected but not loved. In the war they had been collaborators. They had very little to do with the village. The next family were the Cabassons, who owned the bakery. The current mayor was a Cabasson. They also owned several farms and ran the cave, the wine cellars, and the olive press. Auxille’s husband had been a Cabasson. He was a hero of the Resistance. He had been shot trying to steal wine from the cellars of the château when it was occupied by the Germans.

There were four strands of the Blancs. The best Blancs had moved away years before and now lived near Nice. The next best Blancs were Auxille’s family, who had owned the café for several generations. The third best Blancs were farmers at the château. The worst Blancs were Macon, his drunken father, his Italian mother, his no-good brothers. Other families were the Cavaliers, the Aragons, the Perrigues and the Gués. Auxille’s mother had been a Perrigues, and her mother a Cavalier. Odette, who ran the shop, was also a Cavalier, her mother a Gués, and so it went on, the whole village woven together into a knotty carpet of rivalries and jealousies. Bottom of the heap and the subject of much rumour were the people who lived in the social housing behind the mairie. Half gypsies, the unemployed, half Moroccans, and Algerians. When anything was stolen or broken, they were blamed.

Macon brought in the wine and glasses and finally Jeanette sat down.

‘So …’ she said, ‘when did you become a botanist?’ She had a habit of believing her own fantasies.

Mireille did not want to tell her or anybody else in the village why she had come. She wanted to be left alone and now she was wondering if it had been a good idea to reveal who she was. ‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘but I am interested in wild orchids. In fact, I’m making a small survey.’

‘Doesn’t Madame Cabasson’s niece’s husband-to-be know a scientist at the university?’ asked Auxille. ‘Perhaps I could introduce you.’

Mireille thought quickly. ‘How kind of you, but it won’t be necessary. It’s only La Ferrou I’m interested in, it’s just for … a nature magazine in England … it’s not scientific … but I do need peace and quiet.’

‘You’ll get that at La Ferrou,’ said Macon. ‘That’s all you’ll get.’

‘And you have no car. Can you stay for two weeks without a car?’ asked Auxille.

‘I’m going to be here until the summer.’ Mireille wanted to go back immediately to the stillness of the hut. Three pairs of incredulous eyes were already picking holes in her story. ‘The habits of wild orchids are very strange,’ said Mireille.

‘Of course,’ said Auxille and they all nodded.

‘And …’ said Mireille, definitely thinking fast now, ‘I need to rest … I need fresh air and stillness … the doctor said so.’

At the mention of a doctor Auxille and Jeanette moved close, like birds of prey. ‘You have been ill? No? You look so well.’

‘Mental …’ said Mireille, groping around for an explanation that would satisfy them. ‘Fatigue … brought on by stress … depression.’

They all stared at her. Mireille said nothing else. She hoped Jeanette’s fertile imagination would fill in the gaps. It did. ‘Your poor mother,’ said Jeanette.

‘My poor mother,’ said Mireille and her sigh of relief could have sounded like an exclamation of sadness.

‘How tragic to lose your mother. I thank the blessed Virgin that dear Maman is so well for her age.’ Auxille was in her seventies but she looked about ninety.

‘So tragic,’ said Auxille.

‘And how kind of her to remember us and send the money. I bought a pretty little carpet.’

‘And Macon drank the rest,’ said Auxille. Macon growled and drank his wine.

‘And your son? He is well?’ Jeanette changed the subject.

‘My son is a successful young man,’ said Mireille.

‘How lucky you are to be blessed with a child,’ said Auxille, glowering at Macon.

Macon ignored her. ‘Do you still play the accordion, the one my father gave you?’ He always remembered that his father had given it to Mireille.

‘I didn’t bring it with me. It was too heavy.’ She hadn’t played any music since November and this loss added to all her other losses. She desperately wanted to go back to the Ferrou.

‘What was that song?’ said Auxille. ‘How did it go?’ She began one of the old Provençal ballads. Mireille knew it and joined in. She had a splendid deep voice and eventually Auxille stopped her crackly accompaniment to listen. Mireille closed her eyes and sang to the end, a sad tale about lost love and forlorn, forgotten females. She finished. The others clapped. ‘I have to go back now,’ she said.

She was glad to be in the solitude of her hut. The light was beginning to fade now and clouds were coming down from the hills, tucking up the valleys and telling them to be quiet. But Mireille was restless. Everything she looked at reminded her of something she still had to do. Get a mattress for the loft bed. Cut more wood. Buy another lamp. In the ceramic sink the one tap dripped on to unwashed plates. There was no hot water at the Ferrou. What water there was came from a spring in the woods and it flowed into the tap, banging and complaining along the pipe. There was no toilet either. That was another job to be done. Dig a pit in the woods.

I am too old for this, thought Mireille, but she liked tiny spaces. Her houseboat in Bath had been tiny, but warm and tiny, and comfortable, with a bed taking up one end and padded seats by the table. In the hut there were no chairs, but a stone ledge along one wall. She was sleeping on this because the loft was littered with dead insects, mouse debris, and a huge spider had built a tunnel-like web under a tile and crouched in there sulking, waiting to creep over her face in the night. A gust of wind rattled the door and blew ash down the chimney. She felt completely alone.

She put on her waterproofs and walked up into the woods. Behind the hut the land was more rocky and if it had ever been terraced, this had been long lost to the pine trees; but there was a path. It led to a gully thick with cherry and apple trees and a dense jungle of sarsparilla. In the summer this was the only green place when the rest of the land was scorched brown. The path followed the water up the hillside. She could hear it trickling over the rocks, the sides of the gully steeper here, the trees on each side taller and darker. It felt like the hill was crowding in. The path stopped in a clearing. There was a pool, a natural basin in the rock.

It was a dark, cold place and unbelievably still. She had forgotten how still it was here, sheltered from the wind. The pool was about ten foot across and when she looked into the water it seemed shallow, but it wasn’t, she knew. It was deep enough to swim in, but swimming was the last thing she was thinking about. The water looked like liquid ice. Three worlds in one. A thin skin with leaves and pieces of twig floating on it. The rocky sides and the visible stony bottom of the pool. It looked so near, but it wasn’t. It looked so still, but it wasn’t. The water coming out of the spring was always flowing out of the pool and down the gully. And the third world. The sky on the water, her dark silhouette, the trees behind her perched up the hillside, and in front of her the massive, split, brooding rock that was La Ferrou. She looked up, out of the water, at the rock itself, creamy pale limestone, the cleft running down it as black as Satan’s foot. The head of the pool, the source of the water. She had dreamt about this place. When the water lapped against her houseboat in the night, she was here. At The Heathers, when the fountain outside her window dripped into her dreams, she was here. And over the last few months, when she couldn’t cry but lay on Stephen’s sofa under a travel rug. She was crying now because it was all water. The mist above the Roman baths and the clouds coming down the valley. This valley, and the valley in England by the river and the canal. That life was lost now, like her babies. The one who used to play here and throw stones in the water and her winter baby, who opened his eyes just once, and he had such dark eyes, like the bottom of the pool. He was lost and she was lost with him.

ROCHAS (#ulink_19c44c89-8611-5169-9ac1-9453b8d57089)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_56319c60-5b31-53f1-b837-7b2e7e4964bc)

A letter had arrived. Jeanette practically ran out of the café when she saw Mireille. She had not been seen much over the previous two weeks. Studying the orchids, Jeanette told anybody who would listen. But there she was by the largest plane tree, putting her shopping into her rucksack.

‘A letter! A letter!’ panted Jeanette, waving it in the air. ‘From England. Your son? Your husband?’ Mireille looked up, her expression that of somebody who hadn’t expected to be spoken to. She was dirty. She had mud on her hands and bits of twig in her hair. In fact she resembled Macon after a day’s work, which was so rare now that Jeanette had forgotten how dirty a person can get.

‘For me?’ said Mireille.

‘Four days ago it arrived, and we were waiting for you. You were not at the Tuesday market and I said to Macon, do we deliver it to her? But who can find La Ferrou these days, it is so overgrown.’ She handed over the letter reluctantly. It had been the source of much conversation in the café. If it had been in French she might well have been tempted to open it. ‘From your son? A relative?’ Mireille looked at it and put it into her pocket.

‘What about lunch? Today it’s a good piece of chicken with wild mushrooms.’ At the café door Auxille was shaking out a cloth and looking obviously in their direction. Odette and her daughter were arranging newspapers outside the shop and doing the same.

‘I won’t stop, thank you,’ said Mireille. ‘I’ve been making my hut more habitable. It’s taking up a lot of time.’

‘On your own? You should have asked Macon. No wonder you look so tired.’

‘Do I?’ and Mireille smiled, a pale version of her usual dazzling one. ‘It’s finished now, but thank you.’

‘On Saturday we go to the market in Draguignan. They have everything there. There would be room for you.’

‘I do need a cannise,’ said Mireille slowly, ‘and some cooking pans, and some rope …’

‘Then it’s settled. Meet us by the café at eight. When we come back we shall have lunch.’ She still didn’t go but stood there smiling furiously in her navy and pink dress, like a sturdy, gaudy, hot-house plant. All this for the contents of a letter, thought Mireille.