Children of Light

She took the letter out of her pocket and opened it. The frisson of anticipation coming from Jeanette was almost audible. She read it. There was a pause between her reading and relating the contents to Jeanette. Jeanette took this pause to be the translation from English to French, not Mireille’s attempt to alter it completely. ‘He says he’s very well. He wishes me a good holiday and he sends his love to everybody in St Clair. He’s been windsurfing recently and he had dinner with his girlfriend’s parents. That’s about it.’

‘Ah …’ said Jeanette, hoping for more but already creating a suave sophisticated young man having a candlelit banquet in a castle. The girlfriend’s parents were aristocrats, surely.

‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ said Mireille.

She was furious. Not with Jeanette. She crunched down through the woods like a wild boar. In her hut she threw the letter on to the table. It was some minutes before she could pick it up again. Perhaps she had misread it. Perhaps she had somehow mistaken what had been said and turned it into an insult.

Dear Mum,

What on earth do you think you are doing? I thought you were having a two-week break and now you say you’re staying there until the summer. What’s got into you, have you lost it completely? There’s plenty of things you should be sorting out here. What about the house? What about your job? I know you’ve been upset and all that, but staying in a hut isn’t going to make it better. I’m sure it’s idyllic but you must remember I have no memories about that place, so describing it in detail does nothing for me. When you next contact me please give me some definite arrangements.

Love,

Stephen

She screamed out of the door and across the valley as if her vehemence could be carried on the wind all the way to England and slap Stephen around the face. ‘I know you’ve been upset and all that.’ That bit got to her the worst. She sat down to write him an immediate reply but could get no further than the first sentence, which she changed many times. ‘How could you? How dare you. Why are you so arrogant?’ She sat with her arms on the table. Through the door she could see the sky, the clouds changing it from blue to grey to white. A band of sunlight falling on the floor, appearing and disappearing with the regularity of dance. She tried on another piece of paper. ‘You do not know what this place means to me.’ When she wrote this her eyes filled with tears, because no, he didn’t know. The distance between them was much greater than anything geographical.

Stephen. He was tall and blond, like Gregor had been, and with hazel eyes, also like Gregor’s. He was confident and well-spoken. He was the first to shake somebody’s hand. He liked windsurfing and rock climbing. He drove a red Astra. He liked fixing things. He liked the Lake District. He worked for a computer software company. He liked information. He liked facts. He liked order. Yes, she had to remember that, even as a little child he had collected snail shells and put them in neat rows by the hut. Other young men didn’t change their socks and lived happily in festering nests of used handkerchiefs and beer cans, she knew that. But Stephen was immaculate. The Heathers was like that now. Big bright prints. Black and chrome Italian lighting. Dark blue cups and plates. A red blanket on one arm of the sofa. We are alike, she thought, and looked round her own hut, although he might not have seen the connection. Pans hanging on the wall and the floor scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed. The loft swept and rid of unwelcome arachnids. Her sleeping bag on a red blanket she had found in the bottom of the trunk. By the sink a dark blue tin mug.

Dear Stephen,

I am not mad, but please accept that I need to be here. You do not know what this place means to me and yes, you are right, I can’t describe it to you. I will stay here until June, then I will let you know what I’m going to do.

It wasn’t enough, but she felt something final about writing it. She had sent her mother a postcard after she left home. ‘I will not be back for some time. Do not worry about me. Love, Mireille.’

She put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. She knew what she was saying. Leave me alone. It was something she had never said to him before. She started another letter.

Dear Stephen,

And this time I shall call you Sanclair, because that is your real name and I named you after the village. I know you remember nothing about this place but I remember it. I wish you did remember. When you swam in the Ferrou, you were never scared of the water, you would have crawled right in if I hadn’t stopped you. You were so fearless. Nothing scared you. Even a late summer thunderstorm that shook the hut and the rain beating like boots on the roof. You sat there on the floor with big wide eyes and your mouth open, not afraid, but awed. Gregor said, ‘It’s the sky gods having a party,’ and he took you outside to see the lightning flashing in great forks across the valley, and you both came back wet and shivering. I had to stoke the stove up and you were chattering with cold. You said, ‘So big!’ and stretched your arms out. ‘So big!’ For days after you looked up at the sky, waiting for another storm. I wish you could remember. We all slept up in the loft and took it in turns to tell stories. Can’t you remember Gregor’s, about the man with the lame donkey and the boat to the Scottish islands? The blind woman in the Sudan who could tell her family’s history for generations? My stories were Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, Peter Pan, and the tale of Avelard, the troubadour. When it was your turn you told such funny things, big monsters, sky gods and the old woman with a lump on her nose. Your world was so small. The hut, the village, the Ferrou, your red shirt, your floppy rabbit. Then I would see you playing and I could see your world was endless. A tree was a wizard, a stone was a lump of the sky. You played by the Ferrou, talking to nobody, talking to somebody, a muddled up French and English. Sanclair. You started off here and I wish you could remember because it must have affected you, to be a child in the woods. I will not send you this letter.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_2c8365e7-6b69-5296-a89d-c8b62887019f)

Sanclair, this is no longer a letter for you but I want to keep writing. I want to go back to the beginning. My beginning. These are the facts. I was born in Charing Cross Hospital in 1954, on a Thursday in early December. I was born a month early and this inconvenienced my mother because she missed out on the Christmas parties. I weighed a little over 5lbs. There was some concern for my health, but not enough. My parents lived in Kilburn in a first-floor flat. My father was an architect. My mother was very beautiful. I had a nurse called Pammy. The pram wouldn’t go up the stairs so I used to sleep in the hallway by the back door. Pammy told me this. My mother never said much about Kilburn except that it was a low-class sort of area and she was pleased to leave it. I was a quiet baby, said Pammy. I used to lie in my pram and watch the ceiling. When I was six months old we moved to Bath and Pammy came too. We lived in a large house up the Lansdown Road, overlooking the city. There was plenty of space to entertain and my parents did this frequently. If consciousness is the beginning, then this is where I begin …

I’m in the nursery and my parents are having a party. The nursery is right at the top of the house. A little bedroom for me, a room where I eat and play and a bedroom for Pammy. The wallpaper is stripy, blue and white, like a mattress. There is an old-fashioned rocking horse. The curtains have yellow roses on. I’m sitting on Pammy’s lap and my mother is there. This is unusual, she doesn’t come up to the nursery much. She is choosing a dress for me. I have lots of pretty dresses, smocked at the front with tiny flowers on. I’m sleepy. My mother is saying, ‘She looks best in blue, pale blue,’ and she’s wearing blue too, a sleeveless shiny blue dress. She has sparkling shoes and shiny blonde hair. ‘This one,’ and she gives it to Pammy, who dresses me and ties up the sash at the back. I stand on the floor and they both look at me. ‘Oh, poppet!’ says Pammy, but my mother is scowling. She tries to smooth down my hair with a brush. I have curly black hair and it won’t stay flat. She rubs my cheek with pink-nailed thumbs. ‘Why isn’t there a lotion to get rid of freckles?’

I think about my parents and I think of film stars. My father is Dirk Bogarde and my mother is Grace Kelly, but she’s not tall, she’s tiny and delicate. She has that same icy cool. She smiles and turns her head. She is always being looked at. There are so many parties I can’t remember which one, but I remember the smell of wine and cigar smoke, jazz music and the mix of voices like at a swimming bath, jumbled and distorted. I hold my mother’s hand and come downstairs. Pammy doesn’t, she never does. The guests stop talking and say, ahh. My mother says, ‘It’s the best I could do.’ She has rings on her fingers and they are biting into my hand. We stop at the bottom of the stairs and she smiles and turns her head. Then my father rushes up and hurls me up high. I squeal and laugh. He kisses me noisily. I’m all crumpled and my hair gets messy. My best girl, he whispers in my ear and carries me round to the table of puddings and I can have a taste of any one I want. The music’s louder. Daddy’s laughing with Alan Crawford. I put my head down because I’m sleepy. Alan’s cigar makes my eyes itch and Daddy twirls me round and round and I can still see, near the stairs, my sparkling mother.

Hugo is my hero. I’m his best girl, his darling. When he comes back from France he gives me a doll. I have a cupboard full of dolls with clothes as beautifully stitched as my own. He looks like me. He has dark hair, blue eyes and freckles which on him don’t offend my mother. When I think about him now I feel different. He could tell me about the history of France and how to put a drain in a house. How to play cricket and what was the best way to land a Spitfire on bumpy ground. But he never asked me what I wanted or if I was happy.

My parents went away on holiday and left me with Pammy. The house was quiet and we ate in the kitchen. It seemed huge compared to the nursery. There was a round wooden table with red chairs. The floor was black and white. The door led into the garden, a tiny town garden with a wall all round. A cherry tree with blossom like pink snow and red bark that peeled like paper. I watched the sparrows splash in the bird bath. I sat on the kitchen step. Pammy called, ‘Lunch!’ and we had sausages and mashed potato.

I can’t remember Pammy’s face, but she was pink and fat. She wasn’t a nanny but a nurse, and sometimes she wore a nurse’s apron with a little watch pinned to it. But that was when I was very little. I remember her in Bath wearing flowery dresses that squeezed across her stomach. Sandals with socks and a white cardigan with pearly buttons. Her bosom was enormous and her cardigan never fitted over it. She smelled of Coty’s L’aimant and Imperial Leather soap. She treated me with the briskness and matter-of-factness that nurses were supposed to treat their patients. I like to think that when I was a baby she sang to me and cradled me, because I’m sure my mother never did.

Pammy likes Elvis. When my parents are away we go into the lounge and play records on the stereogram. I’m not allowed in the lounge and neither is she, but we won’t tell. Pammy sings along and now I can see her face. Her face is round, her hair is short and mousy, she sings ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in a whisper, she knows all the words. My mother is beautiful and Pammy is not, but her lips tremble when she whispers, ‘They’ll make you so lonely you will die.’ Her eyes are closed. This is ecstasy. It looks curious and rather frightening but I want to feel it too. I close my eyes. The music stops and Pammy says, ‘Would you like some milk and biscuits?’ She looks embarrassed and pinker and smooths down the covers of the easy chairs. They are covered in yellow roses like the curtains in my room.

I remember these times, which in my memory stretch for months but were probably only weeks. We never visit anybody. She reads me stories in a flat voice. Cinderella. Little Red Riding Hood. Snow White. I try as hard as I can to see Cinderella’s glittering ball like one of my parents’ parties, the grinning wolf like Alan Crawford and Snow White singing as she makes sausages and mash for the seven dwarves.

Sometimes we go out, to the park I now know as Henrietta Park but I call it the pretty park. It’s filled with blossom and flowers and sunlight. There’s another park with swings and slides and a boating lake, but that’s too far, says Pammy. We sit on a bench. We sit in the sun and watch the people. She’s not a great one for talking. If I ask a question, she says, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ or ‘Don’t ask me that.’ Am I getting this wrong or was Bath quieter then? Now it’s so busy and in the summer heaving with tourists, but I remember warm late-spring afternoons in a park bursting with blossom. We watch a man walk right round the park. The shadows are getting longer. He passes by, raises his hat, and says, ‘Good afternoon, ladies.’ We walk back up the hill, slowly because Pammy puffs and wheezes. I see the paint on the doors. Peeling dark green paint, dark red paint. The windows of the houses are thick with lace curtains. The houses are a gold honey colour, all standing next to each other like old people in a church.

From my nursery window I can see right across the town and it frightens me. We live up so high we might fall down. Pammy sits by the window and looks out as if she has been put in charge of all the people and not just me. At night I want my curtains closed. I can’t sleep unless they’re closed. I don’t want to see how high up we are. In the night I imagine the house is balanced on a rock and any minute it’s going to fall down and we’ll all be buried. I start crying and screaming, ‘It’s going to fall down any minute!’ Then Pammy comes in, in a flowery nightie, and puts on the light. I want to tell her how scary it is, but I can’t. She tucks me in and sits next to me. She yawns and yawns and rubs her eyes. I say, ‘Leave the door open.’ She pads back to her room heavily, like a bear. I think I can hear her getting into bed. The springs bounce. I think I can hear her snoring. I feel comforted.

I went to school and Pammy left. This is a fact. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember saying goodbye or tears or presents, but I remember my school uniform. Grey and blue. A grey skirt, a blue blazer, a grey hat with a blue ribbon. Grey socks. It was one of those little private schools there used to be so many of but they got closed down because they were crap. We sat in rows and copied out letters of the alphabet. A,a,a. B,b,b. By the time I went to school I could already read, but nobody paid attention to that. The school had once been a house and the playground was the garden concreted over. The headmistress was called Miss Tanner. There were three boys, but the rest of the children were girls. I had never seen so many children before, shouting, skipping, singing, playing games I had never heard of and didn’t know how to play. The boys fascinated me. They had long grey socks, long grey shorts, and in between were plastered knees. They cut their knees and didn’t cry. Their shirts came untucked and they didn’t care. One had ginger hair and freckles, but orange freckles he wasn’t the least bit ashamed of. He stuck his arm next to mine and said, ‘I’ve got more than you.’ The other two boys were brothers, Desmond and Peter. They communicated by nodding to each other. Desmond got slapped on the hands with a ruler by Miss Tanner, because he was bold. He stood there, pink cheeked and defiant. It was Peter who wailed. Afterwards in the playground they plotted how they were going to get her. They were going to hide her chalk. They were going to piss in the girls’ toilets. They were going to get a black man to look up her skirt. I was silent and insignificant. They didn’t notice me. I heard it all.

My father took me to school and my mother took me home. She didn’t talk to the other mothers. After all what had she to say to the dowdy women with fat babies in prams, but my father smiled and chatted. They were respectable women, but marriage had made them sport tweedy skirts and cardigans of sludgy green, over-permed hair and unflattering footwear. My mother was as remote as a princess. Sunglasses, and her hair under a headscarf. A cream suit and little pointed shoes. She said the same thing to me every day. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ It wasn’t the sort of question that needed an answer. She held my hand not out of affection but so I wouldn’t get lost. She walked slowly, as if she had all the time in the world, turning her head to look at her reflection in shop windows.

I’m in my bedroom at night and I’ve had that dream again about the house falling down. I’m crying and crying, but then I realise Pammy isn’t there anymore. I also realise that no matter how much I scream my parents won’t come upstairs. It’s a strange thought and a horrible one and it quietens me. I lie there in the darkness but I can’t sleep. Then I do an odd thing. I get out of bed, open Pammy’s door, and run back into bed as fast as I can. Pammy isn’t there, but I can imagine that she is. I imagine I can hear her snoring on the other side of the nursery. I imagine it so much I can hear it. Then everything feels better.

I still do this, don’t I, when I’m by myself? I imagine somebody’s there when they’re not. It’s better than being alone.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_dd524e3b-4d64-5b52-a66d-5ef1c94645ea)

She woke up under the sloping roof of the hut to a wet, windy morning. The wind sang through the pine trees. The branches creaked and sighed. She had been dreaming of Felix. He smoked too much and wheezed in his sleep. She didn’t open her eyes. He was still beside her in her dream, where she was waiting for him to wake up and start coughing, but she didn’t want to wake him up. Dreaming about sleeping. It seemed a peculiar thing to do. She missed him. It was a physical ache that was difficult to smooth away, much worse than the baby, which was like being given a present and having it snatched from her. Missing Felix was worse because she knew him. He infuriated her. He went to bed far too late. He woke up far too late with a ‘Fuck! Is that the time?’ There was always something he hadn’t done, something he should have done two hours ago. Why hadn’t he seen a doctor about his chest? Why had he smoked so much and why was his life so bloody chaotic? But in the morning, when she was awake and he wasn’t, she felt tender towards him.

Felix was beautiful in an odd way. He had long fair curling hair, masses of it. His face was angles and hollows. His eyes, which were slanting, were grey-blue. He didn’t look like an angel because angels don’t growl when they’re angry and forget to wash. He looked like a spirit from fairyland. A changeling, furious to be living with humans. He would disrupt them whenever he could. He would turn up at her narrowboat and sit by the stove, warming his hands. Long and bony, a philosopher’s hands. She knew he hadn’t eaten anything and he was tired. He would say, ‘Can I read you something?’ and out of his pocket came a crumpled bundle of paper, and he read one poem, then another. Strange poems with not much sense, like thoughts don’t make sense but have images and words which connect. This planet, love and community, and the goddess, something he saw on the street the week before, something he felt at a party, in a dream. But when he read he put so much into it, it seemed to make him flicker and glow like a candle at night. The closer she stood the more warmth she could feel.

She opened her eyes and she was looking up at the terracotta tiles, lapped over each other, holding out the rain, which was coming down now in a torrent. It would keep her inside. She turned round to the imagined Felix, still sleeping. ‘I won’t wake you,’ she said, because she wanted him to stay peaceful in her mind. She crept down the ladder and lit the stove. She put the pot of coffee on and a pan of water so she could wash. The hut was gradually getting warmer. She lit the oil lamp and it gave out a soft light over the floor and the rough-cast walls. The coffee began to bubble and the smell of it filled the hut. She poured the liquid into a bowl, sat at the table and dipped in bread. Dark bitter coffee and chunks of baguette. A peasant breakfast. Tomorrow she would go to Draguignan.

Friday morning

Felix, this is a letter for you. There’s so much I never told you. You needed to talk about yourself. I was going to tell you so many things but in the end there wasn’t time. I’m glad I told you about the Ferrou. Do you remember, I said to you, ‘You must find a place to go to in your mind,’ and you said, ‘Like where?’ Sad, and grumpy and hopeless. And I said, ‘I know this place in France,’ and when I told you, I could see you could see it. You were walking up the track and towards the great rock and the pool. I could see you looking into the pool and holding your breath. Afterwards you said, ‘Take me there.’ I was cautious because this is my special place, but I knew you needed some sort of vision, some sort of future and I said, yes.

You are here with me now in this room, so I will take you to the Ferrou.

I want to find the beginning of this place. I can think of events, but they seem so random. When I first came here I felt, I am meant to be here. I was nine. Vivienne and Hugo were here and Jeanette, chattering away, but they have disappeared in my memory and there is only me standing with such awe and such fear. I looked up at the cleft in the rock, at the sun shining above it and into the pool dazzling me. Firewater. When I touched the water I thought it would be hot, but it wasn’t, it was cold.

Here’s a memory. I’m in the top class of the prep school. The children in the first class look like babies and I can hardly believe I was that small. I’m as tall as my mother and I feel like an oaf. Felix, you once said to me your mother couldn’t see you for what you were. I don’t think my parents saw me at all. I was dressed. I was washed. I was given food and talked to, but I wasn’t a person. I was a pet, sometimes irritating, sometimes delightful but most of the time forgotten about. When I left home I was angry about this. I was so angry I wanted to forget about them. I wanted to eradicate them. Especially my mother.

My mother sat there at social functions like a sorbet, but afterwards tore each guest to pieces. They were fat, ugly, badly dressed. My father laughed because she was funny; she was a great mimic, she could capture a person’s tone of voice, or their posture, and she found it funny too. It sent her into shrieks of laughter. When she laughed like that it terrified me. One day she would laugh about me, I knew it. I could already hear her: ‘That Mireille, with the freckles, that beanpole, darling, socks with sandals, did you ever, have you ever seen such a specimen (people were always specimens to my mother)? Have you ever seen such a frump!’ I felt ashamed. By my mother’s shallowness and also by my father being taken in by it.

Hugo was ambitious. With Alan Crawford he became involved in property development in the south of France. After St Tropez had become fashionable the whole coast from there to Nice was gradually submerged under ugly holiday apartments. My father’s name was Devereux, and his grandparents were French. He spoke French, he understood French ways. He saw a way to make money and didn’t hesitate. I used to believe I was like my father because I knew I was entirely different from my mother, but now I know I was so different from both of them. What they ate, what they wore, what they bought was of paramount importance. My mother was so status-conscious she would throw away her curtains, have a baby, move house, if it would improve her standing in the eyes of other people. She was an excellent acquisition for my father.

I am silent and shy. I read in my spare time. I am learning to read French and I can speak it. I pray every night. Please God, can I have a friend? I want a friend but I don’t know where to start. It’s nearly the end of the summer term, it’s hot and we have lessons outside in the playground, but Miss Tanner is lethargic and the pupils are half asleep. She tells us we will go on a trip to the Roman baths and all the class go, ‘Oh no, not again!’ But I have never been. My parents have never taken me. They only take me to places where they want to go. I have been to France more than seven times. I have been to Nice, Cap Ferrat, Toulon, Menton, Grasse, Cannes. When I say these names to my schoolmates their eyes widen. They have been to Torquay, Weston-Super-Mare, Dawlish, Paignton.

When we go to the baths Miss Tanner gives us a long speech about Romans, watercourses, hydro systems. Underground and indoors it’s hot and sticky. I can make no sense of the stones. Then we are herded out to the great baths, and there they are. The golden pillars, the greeny water. The steam rising. The water pouring out from the spring into the basin, a constant gush of water. I have seen this before, of course I have, at the Ferrou. Again I feel that shiver. I put my hand into the stream of water, expecting it to be cold, but it isn’t, it’s warm. Not hot like a tap, but warm like a pond of water on a beach, like a cup of thé citron left on a café table. The temperature of tears.

Here’s another memory. Going back now. I’m wearing a white cotton dress, white socks and black sandals. I’m sitting on a wicker chair outside a café. The chair has a band of green around its edge. It’s an uncomfortable chair and sticks to my legs. I’m drinking citron pressé out of a long glass, trying to keep the spoon out of my nose. I’m so hot. I’ve never been as hot before and we are in the shade. The café is in a street. There are people everywhere, talking, and I don’t understand because it’s French. A smell in the air of fish and scent from the purple flowers that trail over the wall. All colours are brighter. Hugo is in white, so bright I can hardly look at him. He is laughing. His sleeve is rolled up and his arm is brown. He is talking French. My mother is in the shade, dressed in mint green like an ice cream but one frozen so hard it won’t melt. She is wearing dark glasses. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. She is smoking a cigarette, slowly, like somebody who wants to enjoy all of it. Then Hugo jumps up and comes round the table and kisses her forehead. Her expression does not change, but they hold each other’s hands and squeeze tight. I can see their knuckles becoming whiter.

My parents are dead now, but they stay young in my mind and I think I now understand their passion. It was about owning. Each wanted to possess the other. Without my father my mother was half a person, bored, flicking through magazines, telling me to sit up straight and not slouch, but when he walked into the room a look came over her face of complete radiance. Suddenly the way she sat and the way she talked was aimed, I can see it now, at dazzling and overwhelming him. In the end there was nothing he could see but her and nothing she could think about but him.

We are due to go to France for nearly all of the holidays. My father is working on a project on the coast. The previous summer they bought the Ferrou and it stays there. One dark pool. One unmodernised hut. They want to build a holiday home, with a swimming pool feature under the great rock. I have seen the plans. I know about building plans because when we return from France we will be moving into the new house my father has designed. He talks about this new house, how it will bring him a great deal of attention. It has a fountain courtyard and a garden, sweeping down a hill. It’s all my parents talk about these days. New houses. My mother’s going to sell the furniture in Bellevue. It’s old-fashioned and that is bad. Everything in my room is also old-fashioned.

It’s Sunday morning and I come down for breakfast. My father’s up and dressed in his cricket clothes. He’s going to play cricket later. They have been discussing the new house. He looks at me thoughtfully, which he rarely does because my mother usually diverts his attention. He says, ‘Why don’t I take her to see the site? It would be good for her education.’

‘Trampling about in mud?’ says my mother with a sneer.

‘I won’t get dirty,’ I say, because spending time alone with my father is a treat.