I drove. South. Straight south.
I drove my flimsy 2CV so hard and so fast that it moaned and rattled and expelled fumes in my face that smelled of overheated wiring, but I did not take my foot off the pedal for a second except to refuel. I cursed the grey tin-can’s lack of pace a thousand times. It may have been fine for around the city, but a top speed of 65kpm was not exactly greased lightning with a journey of 750 kilometres to drive.
The South was pulling at me. I could feel it. Drawing me to it like a magnet, as though there was something hard and metallic lodged inside me that was powerless to resist and yet I felt a softening of my sinews, a loosening of my bones as the hours crawled past. The sun played hide-and-seek with the ladybird-shaped shadow of my car on the N6 and I passed the towns of Auxerre and Avallon, barely aware of them. The tedium of the pancake-flat landscape lulled me into a false sense of passivity where too many memories from the past could sneak in, such as André’s arm tight around me when he told me goodbye and to be strong, as he departed for Paris. I was twelve years old, he was eighteen. Losing him was like having my right arm ripped off.
My father’s face had turned a strange shade of grey that wasn’t grey because it was also purple. I knew then it was the colour of an anger so deep it burned away the words I’m sorry. Their words were hurled at each other like grenades.
‘He’ll be back,’ Papa had growled into his beard, as André strode off down the gravelled track to the road with no more than a small pack on his back.
Papa’s hand lay heavy on my bony shoulder, holding me there in a grip of iron. I longed for André to turn and wave but he kept his sandy eyes fixed on the road to freedom.
‘He’ll come back,’ Papa reiterated, ‘because this farm is in his blood.’ His fingers dug deeper. ‘I tell you, Eloïse, Mas Caussade is in that boy’s soul whether he wants it there or not.’
But he didn’t. He never came back.
*
The trees told me I was nearly home. They were the first. Instead of shady avenues of the pale trunks of plane trees peeling like lepers at the roadside and the silvery shimmering poplars, there were bold stands of dark cypress trees and pines stretching tall to the sky. Vineyards with a haze of green shoots started to spill around me on both sides of the road, worker-bees humming, as I rubbed shoulders with the mighty Rhône. All I had to do was hurry down its broad valley and I’d be in Arles. I had grown up with the Rhône river, it flowed in my blood. I’d learned to swim in it before I could walk, dived for catfish in it, paddled a homemade raft on it. Almost drowned in it more than once, and I still heard the sound of its dark waters coursing through my dreams at night.
*
The heat hit me. I had grown soft. Four years in Paris and I had forgotten what a humid August in the Camargue felt like and how monster mosquitoes set your bare skin on fire.
I pulled over and climbed out of the car, stretching my limbs, and drew great lungfuls of the breeze that smelled like nowhere else on earth. It carried in it the salty earth of the Camargue, the wide delta of the Rhône, the rustle of the tall reeds and the warm musky scent of the hides of the wild bulls and horses that roamed the landscape here. I gazed out across the flat marshy fields and watched a pair of white egrets rise into the crystal-clear air, weightless as ghosts, as they drifted south towards the salt lagoons. I felt my heartbeat slow. It knew it had come home, even while my mind insisted I was now a hardened Parisian, here for one purpose only: to find my brother and the person who tried to kill him, and to put my family back together again.
I heard a noisy snort and a sturdy white stallion emerged from the shade of a cluster of tamarisk trees, while his harem of eight mares hung back in the shadows. He tossed his cream mane at me, pawing the ground with his wide front hoof, designed to thrive on marshland.
I started to cry. Silent relentless tears because of what I’d done and what I’d not done. In this familiar landscape my failure lay all around me, because in every tree, every velvety stretch of grassland and in every splash of sunlight on the glassy surface of the cool ponds I saw the pale ghosts of us children. Flitting in and out of sight. I caught glimpses of my brothers everywhere. When the crying was over I climbed back into the car and drove to the Mas Caussade.
Nothing had changed while I’d been gone. I’d turned my back on the Camargue and it hadn’t even noticed.
*
The house hadn’t changed. It stared back at me. Square, solid, part of the landscape. It stood in the middle of nowhere, flanked by my father’s fields that stretched out of sight in every direction.
I drove up the long dirt drive in a cloud of dust, chest tight, heart racing, terrified of what news awaited me. It was a traditional Camarguais mas or farmhouse, built of local stone, two storeys, facing south. Its back was squarely facing north to offer protection from the cold ferocious blasts of the mistral wind that could rip your roof off if it put its mind to it. No windows on that side of the house, just a blank wall to keep out the danger.
Was I a danger?
Did the house need a blank wall between its occupants and me?
The Mas Caussade farm was arranged as three sides of a rectangle around a central cobbled yard. One side was formed by the farmhouse itself and the other two by the thatched stables and long sleepy barns where the hens liked to annoy the farm cat dozing in the straw. All around, as far as the eye could see, lay the wide-open pastureland owned by my father, green and glossy, except where the bright emerald carpet of glasswort had adopted its scarlet summer colours, soaking up the sun. The constantly high level of the underlying water-table made the plant-life rich and vibrant. A thousand different greens tumbled over each other and shimmered with papery butterflies and gaudy tree frogs.
I never tired of this landscape. It stirred things in me that got lost and trampled in the city’s daily hustle and bustle, but which I could feel coming alive again. Squeezing their way into my heart once more.
With a roar, a fighter aircraft streaked low overhead, shattering the peace as I skewed my car to a halt in front of the bull-yard and raced to the house, but someone was there before me. Outside the front door stood a car, its chrome gleaming in the bright sunlight, its black wings bulbous and glossy. My heart tripped over itself. We all knew who used black Citroën Traction Avants.
The police.
*
I knocked. I could have lifted the latch and walked in, but I didn’t. I knocked. I heard one of the dogs barking in the yard at the back – it sounded like old Lyonette – and I felt childhood memories brush against me, making my skin prickle, like walking into cobwebs.
The door swung open and my father filled the doorway. It was hard not to reach out a hand to him, but I kept it tight at my side. He was not that kind of father. Aristide Caussade was not a tall man but he was built of solid muscle like his bulls. His hair and beard had turned white years ago but his bushy eyebrows and his deep-set eyes were still as dark as old oak.
‘Hello, Papa.’
He nodded and his stern gaze fixed on my cheek. He showed no flicker of emotion. ‘Come in, Eloïse.’
As he moved back to allow me entry, I didn’t let the moment slip by, and before he could stride away down the hallway and vanish into one of the rooms, I seized his arm. It was like seizing a tree trunk. He looked at me, surprised.
‘Is he here, Papa, is he? Tell me quickly. Is he alive? Have you heard from him? How is he? Where is he? I’ve been sick with not knowing or hearing.’
‘André is alive, if that’s what you mean.’
A low gut-wrenching sob broke loose from me and relief coursed through me with such force that my knees buckled and only my grip on my father kept me upright. I clamped my other hand over my mouth to stop the sounds that threatened to come out of it. I didn’t realise that the pain inside me had to come out somewhere and it flooded out in my hold on my father’s arm. My fingers sank deep into his muscles, digging in between his tendons, gripping with all my strength until our Caussade flesh for that brief moment merged together again.
‘Eloïse,’ Papa said and I could hear an odd hitch in his deep voice.
I forced my fingers to release him. Somehow I stayed on my feet. ‘Is he here?’ I asked.
‘He is.’
I pushed past my father in the hallway, running for the stairs, but he halted me with an abrupt, ‘André is not in his room.’
‘Where then?’
He walked away into the living room. I followed him, impatient, into the room where the ancient sideboard had stood on the same spot for three generations and where the floor tiles were the exact same colour as my father’s eyes.
‘Papa,’ I started, but halted.
A figure rose politely from one of the chairs and I became aware of his dark uniform and gun holster on his hip. A gendarme. What were the police doing here?
My father gestured at the officer. ‘You remember Captain Roussel.’
But I didn’t hear the name. Instead my eyes were fixed on my father’s hand. It was covered in dried blood.
‘Bonjour, Eloïse.’
I regarded the police officer with surprise. ‘Of course, Léon Roussel.’ I held out my hand. ‘I apologise for not recognising you. You look different in uniform.’
He smiled and I noticed that he didn’t fight to keep his eyes off my scar the way most people did. He looked at it openly but without pity and I liked him for that. Léon Roussel and I had been at school together, though he’d been in André’s class six years ahead of me. I was surprised to see him in uniform now, as he had always been something of a hell-raiser. He was tall with brown hair clipped short like a GI and calm eyes, not exactly good-looking, but there was something about his face that held my attention. A quiet authority that had certainly not been there the day he set fire to our geography teacher’s desk.
‘I’m here about the attack,’ he said.
‘What attack?’ I swung round to my father. ‘On André?’
To my horror, his eyes filled with unshed tears. I had never seen my father cry, not once in my whole life. Not even when my mother died giving birth to Isaac. He snatched up a porcelain statue of Saint Genesius, the patron saint of Arles, which had stood on the sideboard eyeing us sternly for as long as I could remember, and hurled it with a bellow of rage at the tiled floor. Without a word he strode out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the plaster on the wall cracked.
‘What is it?’ I said urgently to Léon Roussel. ‘What has happened? Is André worse?’
His expression had grown sombre, his police captain face firmly in place.
‘Goliath,’ he said, ‘has been hacked to death.’