Talissa arrived in Tulse Hill at nine in the morning. From the heights of Alexandra Palace, via Underground and Overground, mile after mile of grey morning, tiled tunnels, shunting yards and terraces seen through unwashed train windows … She wondered how far, if she’d started out at her local subway station in New York, she would by now have travelled. Florida, pretty much.
She was a little afraid to admit that she had never been camping before; it was her anxiety about the bathroom and sleeping arrangements that preoccupied her as much as the thought of meeting Mary and Alaric. Here it was, though: number 25 on a glass-panelled front door up a paved garden path, beside which stood garbage bins on wheels. There were only two bells.
‘Talissa? Come on up!’
Her first sight of Mary. A smiling, homely person with a wary eye.
Mary hugged her. ‘Come in, come in. Put your bag down there. Did it take for ever? We should have come and picked you up but the thing is we’re already halfway to Folkestone here, so … Coffee. You must have coffee. Or tea.’
‘I hope I’m not late.’
‘Not at all. And we have a flexible ticket for the Tunnel anyway. Would you like something to eat? I’m making scrambled eggs. Alaric! Talissa’s here.’
Talissa sat down while Mary went in search of her husband. The living room had a bookshelf along one wall that was filled with history books and detective stories; on the mantelpiece were photographs of older people, Mary’s parents possibly, posing in front of what looked like paper screens.
A sandy-haired man in outdoor clothes and white sneakers came in. He looked at Talissa warmly as he held out his hand, though she saw some shyness in his eyes. Mary came back into the room with a tray she put down on a table.
‘Come on, you must have some,’ she said, handing a plate to Talissa. ‘Are we all packed up, Al?’
‘These eggs are great,’ said Talissa. ‘How’d you get them so—’
‘Trade secret,’ said Mary.
‘Butter,’ said Alaric. ‘Roughly half a pound. Have you got the checklist?’
‘Right here,’ said Mary. ‘Is that all you’re bringing? That little rucksack?’
‘Yes, I … I don’t have any … camping clothes,’ said Talissa. ‘And I wasn’t sure what the weather’s like in France.’
‘Same as England, pretty much,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll put another jumper in my bag for you. And a waterproof.’
Mary took the wheel and Alaric insisted Talissa sit alongside her in the front. Feeling like a child, Talissa relaxed and let the grown-ups take control. Her parents had never owned an automobile and neither had anyone else she knew in New York; almost every car she’d sat in had been a yellow cab.
On the train, a woman in a uniform urged their vehicle forward till it all but touched the one in front. Mary got out and opened the rear door, from which she produced a thermos of coffee. Alaric began to do a crossword. Once they were in France, Alaric switched his watch over to his right wrist, to remind him to drive on that side. Mary took the navigator’s seat and Talissa moved into the back. It was not long before they were in flat French countryside with incomprehensible signs.
‘Have some more Evian,’ said Mary. ‘You can get quite dehydrated in the car. Here you are. Then you can have a little sleep while we listen to one of Alaric’s interminable history books. Or podcasts.’
‘Sure thing.’
‘Otherwise you’ll have to hear his running commentary on the historical significance of the place on every signpost.’
‘Hey! That’s not—’
‘You’ll learn a lot, Talissa. It’s better than college.’
Talissa settled back on the seat. After a time, the early start did begin to catch up with her and she closed her eyes, letting the words of the audiobook and Alaric’s commentary merge in her head. Rouen: Joan of Arc on fire … Compiègne, a railway carriage in a wood …
She awoke to find they had stopped at a gas station. Alaric filled the car while Mary bought baguettes and cheese from the store.
‘The key to finding a good place to camp,’ said Alaric, restarting the engine, ‘is not to be in a rush. So we don’t drive after three o’clock. We should be deep in the parc naturel by then.’
The grey stone houses along the road looked primitive and the villages sullen or withdrawn. In one, a group of three young men with bicycles stood outside a shuttered café, smoking. Mary and Alaric chattered about sunset, streams and wind direction.
They turned at the church onto a narrow road and drove on for ten minutes into ever-deepening woods and quietness.
‘Do you need to get permission to put up a tent?’ said Talissa. ‘I mean, who does the land belong to?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Alaric. ‘France is a big country compared to England. Not so many angry farmers. As long as you don’t frighten any livestock and you pick up all your litter.’
‘What sort of livestock?’ said Talissa.
‘Hippopotamus. Giraffe. Wild buff—’
‘Stop it, Alaric!’ said Mary. ‘He’s teasing. Sometimes there are sheep or cows. But not here. We’re in woodland, not grazing country.’
Alaric took the car off the lane and down a track into deeper woods. ‘I think this is as far as we can go,’ he said.
They got out and stood beneath a canopy of leaves. Apart from the ticking of the engine as it cooled, there was no sound. Alaric put his finger to his lips and all three of them listened to the silence. It was as if the branches above their heads had sucked not just the light from the sun but the noise of the world through the trunks from the earth below.
‘Did you hear that?’ said Mary.
‘Hear what?’ said Alaric.
‘A trickle of water.’
‘Well, the stream should be close. Just over that way. Let’s get the tent up in this clearing and then we can think about a fire. And dinner. It’ll get cold soon.’
‘Can I help?’ said Talissa.
‘No, thanks,’ said Mary. ‘We’re old hands. You go and stretch your legs after that long journey. By the time you come back we’ll have everything sorted out.’
Talissa moved off, reluctantly. She had on some hiking boots she’d borrowed from Mrs Gopal, her daughter’s cast-offs, but was aware that her jeans and sweatshirt, bought from a barrow on Canal Street, were too urban for the forest. Still, Mary and Alaric obviously wanted some time alone, so she’d put some distance between them.
She walked for five minutes, then clambered up a bank to find a place to sit. She could still just see a reflection of the sun in the windshield of the distant car. As she looked round, she noticed a fir tree that was taller than the others and stood alone. It would make a good landmark, she thought, as she walked towards it. From its shade, she could still see the mound on which she had sat and she knew that from there she could safely find the car. In the other direction, there was a passage through the undergrowth that led out into a more open space. It looked worth exploring. Once there, she found that the woods thinned into a field. While there was still cover, she squatted behind a tree and emptied her bladder of all the Evian that Mary had wished on her. Pulling up her jeans and checking that she could still see her lonesome pine, she set off again.
On the far side of the field there were signs of a terrain less wild, something like a park. Talissa tramped on, her black hair blowing out behind her. She was usually aware of landscape and nature only in so far as they had academic interest, as habitat or hunting ground; her own existence had been spent in a numbered city grid. Beyond the hedgerow was an iron fence, after which the ground fell away to a lake. At the edge of the water were some fallen beechnuts in their hairy shells. She bent to pick one up and levered out the brown mast, whose tip she nibbled in her front teeth. Just like a Homo vannesiensis, she thought. The sun was going down and she decided to make her way back.
As she turned from the waterside, she saw a building on the rising ground: a grey stone place of innumerable rooms that even her French was good enough to know would be a château. It was about five minutes’ walk away, too far to risk in the fading light, and anyway, she might be shot as a trespasser. Did French landowners keep guns, like Texans? She was sorry not to explore further, though: the building was decrepit, exuding, even at this distance, a tantalising sense of history and absences.
When she got back to the clearing, she found that a tent had been erected. The khaki colour of the canvas blended into the trees and someone had moved the car itself out of sight. Thin smoke was rising from a circle of gathered stones. Mary was setting out some collapsible canvas chairs; Alaric came out of the trees, dragging a couple of dry branches, which he began to break up and feed into the fire. It was starting to grow dark, and from the inexhaustible rear section of the estate car there came gas lamps and battery-powered torches.
‘Right, Talissa,’ said Alaric. ‘Your job’s to hold this lamp over the pan so I can see what I’m doing.’
Talissa did as she was told, occasionally stealing a glance through the tent flap to see what awaited her at bedtime. From his pocket, Alaric took out a piece of polished wood, from which he unfolded a blade. ‘Opinel,’ he said. ‘French carbon steel. The best.’ On a flat piece of bark, he chopped an onion and put it into a pan with leaves of thyme he shredded from their stalks and some oil from an old tonic water bottle. Then came the sausages, separated with a few lethal cuts of the knife, and the scent of fennel as they hit the oil. Mary unscrewed a bottle of red wine and passed it round in some enamelled cups.
‘You look frozen,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get you that extra jumper now.’
Talissa swilled down some of the wine and tried not to cough. Alaric moved the pan to a cooler part of the fire to let the sausages cook through and sprinkled in a little of his wine to stop them burning. Talissa found the aroma quite exciting, as the overtones of alcohol mixed with the onions, herbs and charred skin of the sausages. When he was happy that the meat was cooked through, Alaric poured in a tin of cannellini, added some salt and a squeeze of garlic paste, stirred it in and moved the pan to one side, till it bubbled as gently as he wanted. Then he settled back in his chair to watch.
Over dinner, Talissa asked them what they hoped the baby’s life would be. She was surprised by how much of it seemed to consist of hoping for the best.
‘And you feel the world is all right for another child?’ she said. ‘You don’t worry that we’re burning up the planet? Another mouth to feed? And human beings apparently by nature so violent?’
‘Well, I do worry,’ said Mary. ‘I worry that the child might be unhappy and that we won’t be able to care for it in some way. I’ve seen how wretched life can be. All over the world. In our own country, too. But somehow … I don’t know. For me, I think it’s a way of saying yes to the world. I don’t understand what we’re doing here, in this life, but then nor does anyone else. But I feel fortunate to have been given a chance to breathe this air, for a short time. I want to be a part of nature, of the process. Especially since I so nearly wasn’t.’
‘I understand,’ said Talissa.
‘And you?’ said Mary. ‘Do you worry?’
‘No. I wouldn’t be a part of this scheme if I did. I have thought about it, though. And I think in the end it’s … insignificant. It’s just an act of love.’
‘What more can you do?’ said Alaric. ‘Not have children? Sign out and say, That was not for me, that Life thing. Here comes the darkness again. Goodbye, everyone. Or hope to make a small addition. A good person, well loved.’
‘I like that,’ said Talissa. Emboldened by the wine, she almost squeezed his arm.
‘Will you have children of your own one day?’ said Mary.
‘Oh boy. I don’t know. I’d like to, I think. But only if I was sure of the father. I think a dad should stick around.’
‘Tell us more about you,’ said Mary.
‘What?’
Mary laughed. ‘Your life. You know. Who you are!’
Talissa smiled back, as she gave an edited version.
‘And were you always a bit of a brainbox?’
‘I was a slow starter. Then it took me a while after Dad died to focus again. But I got there. It’s a question of finding something that interests you. Then the work’s not work at all and you find you’ve done twice as much as you were asked.’
‘And do you do much in the lab?’
‘No, the DNA stuff is very specialised. I’m more of a big picture girl. Tools, art. Family trees. How they fit together. Which is why this new French find is so important. I do have to understand the basis of genetics, but the detail of what those guys do with their machines is beyond me.’
It was nearly ten when they made a move towards bed.
‘We’ve cleared you a space here,’ said Mary. ‘And we’ve given you the air mattress and this super-warm sleeping bag. I hope you’ll be comfortable.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I’ve got this foam thing and Al likes to sleep on the ground. It’s his Inuit blood.’
‘So we’re all in here … together?’
‘Yes. Is that OK? We only have one tent, but it’s quite roomy. Here, have some of this.’ Talissa felt some tissue paper being pressed into her hand. ‘Take this torch and just … You know. The woods are your friend.’
Talissa went off into the darkness, in the same direction as before, and squatted behind a tree. Emptying the bladder was one thing, but what about the bowel? She brushed her teeth and hoped that she could last until they reached a town with plumbing. And how was she to change her underwear the next day? Would she hide in the woods or wriggle in the sleeping bag? Dear God, please let them not be ‘naturists’. There had been no talk of showers and clearly she’d be sleeping in her clothes. When she got back to the tent, she found that Mary and Alaric were already bedded down. They called out a friendly goodnight as she climbed over them and unzipped her bag. The wine seemed to numb her senses and she found herself drifting off with the smell of canvas in her nostrils.
The sound of a creature a few inches from her face awoke her. She was separated only by a layer of fabric from … A hippopotamus. No. But some large snuffling creature. A wild boar perhaps. A wolf. They’d reintroduced wolves, hadn’t they? Like Montana. It had not disturbed the even breathing of the others. Talissa lay there for some minutes until her heart returned to normal. For a further hour she lay unmoving, all thoughts of sleep now gone. She looked at her handset to find it was still only 02:17. They would doubtless have a campers’ early start, but there were still hours of the night to get through. Soon after three, she decided to get up. Taking a battery torch and Mary’s thermal jacket from where it hung outside, she tiptoed away from the tent and up her previous path into the woods.
It was a relief to be away from the intimacy of others, as they rustled and grunted like creatures in a cave. The air outside was cold, but not unbearable; the trees and the undergrowth were reassuringly lifeless. She felt a stab of homesickness for the sidewalks of Harlem, but the night, now that she was walking briskly through it, held no fear. From the solitary tree, she struck off towards the field and the park beyond. It was only when she reached the lake that she knew where her feet were taking her. She crossed an overgrown lawn and came to a side door into the building. It was barred by two wooden planks nailed into a cross, but a minute later she found that the main entrance at the front of the house was jammed open. A chain with a padlock hung loose and weeds were growing up through the worn stone of the threshold. She shone her torch inside and pushed open the door. The double-height hallway bore the signs of having been partitioned into what might have been offices. It was hard to tell from the state of disrepair, with paint in blisters and wallpaper hanging like dry bandages peeled from a wound.
She felt the excitement of her vocation: the scent of humanity in a mysterious habitat, with something waiting to be understood. Her torch beam washed the walls and showed two staircases, one with smashed banisters and missing treads, but the other looking strong enough to take the weight of a slight, inquisitive American. The building had been converted, that was clear: from a once majestic residence to an institution. But what kind? And how many layers were there to dig?
Down a long corridor she came to rooms with numbers stencilled on the doors. Some seemed to have been dormitories, with the remains of iron bedsteads; others were more like narrow cells. The air was pungent and damp. Most of the walls were painted green up to a line at waist height, with flaking white above. In one of the larger spaces an old invalid chair stood alone beneath a broken window, with bent spokes protruding from the wheel.
A normal house, with its owners regularly out at work or on errands, was empty half its life, even before it was abandoned to the weeds. But this place was not normal. It felt as if some catastrophe had emptied it. On the second floor, there was a warren of smaller rooms, some missing their floorboards, showing joists that supported only air; there were internal windows in the corridors as if the inhabitants had needed to be watched. A small butane cylinder lay on the floor of one such room, and next to it the cardboard package of what looked like pizza. On the wall were spray-canned graffiti, in words she couldn’t understand. Were they French or simply meaningless, like the swollen Esperanto of the subway? In any case, these vandals had obviously come later, after the place had been deserted.
She went out onto the landing, where a half flight of stairs led to a closed door. As she went up towards it, she heard a muffled banging from the other side. It seemed too random to be someone trying to communicate, but too rhythmic to be a window unfastened in the breeze; and anyway, it was a windless night.
The door was stiff, and Talissa had to put down the torch while she pushed at it with both hands. She took half a pace back. A man was in the room, broad-chested, quite short, unkempt.
She felt no fear: more a sense of pity, a desire to help.
Bending down quickly, she grabbed the torch and pointed it into the gloom, but there was nothing left to see: only another empty room, with a narrow bed and bars on the window. A china lampshade hung on a flex from the ceiling.
The darkness must have misled her. The torch was powerful, the batteries new. Its beam showed nothing. Pulling the door shut behind her, she went back down into the hall. In a corner were some stone steps leading to what must be a basement. To prove to herself that she had not been frightened by what she’d seen, that she was still Fearless Frieda, scientist, she went downstairs.
Much of what was there had previously been stores and cellarage. There was a honeycomb of small rooms with stone wine bins, now empty, their openings closed over with cobwebs. Behind a door with stencilled markings, she found a room of shelving units. Some rotted cardboard packaging bore just discernible markings of a red cross, as if they had been medicines. There was a pair of large electrodes, shaped like the mouthpiece of an antique telephone. She could make out the words ‘Ministère’ and ‘Santé’. There was a loud bang behind her.
A door slamming, she was fairly certain. Clearly, some air pressures had been altered by her opening and closing of other doors … It was time to get back to her new friends asleep in the tent. But as she was leaving, she saw that the corridor dropped half a level into a lower passageway, almost a tunnel. It was too intriguing to ignore, and she went down into it. The brick floor was wet and the walls were sweating a grey moisture. The darkness, even with the torch guiding, was intense. The tunnel seemed to reach a dead end with a metal door. As she came closer, Talissa saw that it belonged to an old elevator. She had seen such things in hundred-year-old buildings in New York.
What was odd was that she had seen no elevator shafts in the building higher up, no sign of any access on the first or second floors. Her torch picked out a small metal square in the elevator frame. She put her face close to it. It was grimed over with moss, but when she rubbed away the dirt with her finger, she saw the shape of an upward arrow. She pushed it. At once there came a clank and grinding, then a hungry whirr as though the mechanism had grabbed some source of power.
Something was coming down into the basement, and coming at speed. This time, she didn’t linger, but turned and ran back up to the hall and out of the front door into the park.