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.
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
