Saturday 7th May. Evening
The baker’s niece got married today. I went to see the end of it outside the church. The mistral is still raging. Her veil blew over her face and all the guests grabbed on to their hats and skirts. The happy couple looked like most young marrieds, awkward and bemused because the parents and in-laws were in charge. This was a Cabasson affair. The mayor was there, a short skinny man in a shiny suit, but you can tell he knows he’s important by the way he holds up his head. Everybody wants to talk to him. The baker’s wife looked splendid in powder blue. You would have thought she was the bride’s mother. I think the bride’s mother was another fat lady in a dress that looked suspiciously similar to the one Jeanette saw in the market. I sound like my mother, what a specimen. I didn’t join in. Who needs my congratulations? I sat outside the café with Jeanette and Auxille, who weren’t invited to the reception but were behaving as if they were.
I saw the Gregsons. I can spot British people. For a start they are usually taller than the villagers. They wear summer clothes when no one else does. Mr Gregson in a pale blue shirt and cream trousers. Mrs Gregson in a lacy blouse and long blue skirt hanging on to a straw hat. I didn’t like the look of them. Suave. Opulent. Smug. Their loud voices and bad French coming in snatches on the wind. Auxille and Jeanette wanted to follow the wedding party up to the mairie, perhaps they hoped they’d get invited at the last minute. Some chance, that lot are far too snooty. Instead I went to the graveyard to see Eugénie’s grave.
I’d forgotten about the graveyard. It can’t be that I never went there. It has a high wall around it and the entrance is through a metal door. It was sheltered from the wind. There were two cypress trees inside like sentinels. It felt like a peaceful place. The tombs are extraordinary. Big stone slabs like altars with whole families bunged in them and on the top, not real flowers, but china ones. In Britain they’d get nicked but here the china wreaths have stayed. Dark red, blue and purple stylised roses. Sometimes white for a young woman. Sometimes a single flower. I spent ages looking at the tombs. The oldest ones surrounded by metal fences, like hospital beds. Do they sleep peacefully in there, the Cabassons, the Gués, the Blancs, the Perrigues, the Cavaliers? Their bones mingling together, relatives who in life hardly talked to each other. Is there a feud going on under the slabs? The Villeneuves had what looked like a tiny chapel with engraved glass windows and inside were wreaths made of wire and tiny beads. All decayed. No Villeneuve has been buried in the village since 1952. Eugénie’s grave was a dug-out one on the ground, shared with Hilaire and next to them his brother Victor. The earth was piled on top. There were no ceramic flowers yet, but pots of geraniums and hydrangeas. Bright bold flowers. On Victor’s grave was a photograph behind glass. He was just a boy, dressed in his best suit with the same dark face of the youths who screech around on motorbikes. Old Man Henri was under the cypresses in a grave with five Cabassons. On top was a photograph of his wife and a woman who had died in her twenties. No explanation, but she looked pale and sickly. I didn’t feel sad in this graveyard. Most of its incumbents were well over seventy. It seemed a fitting place for them to land up. It was more personal than graveyards in England, not like a graveyard at all, more like an old people’s home and for once they’re all quiet, for once they’re not chattering.
I’m thinking about that wretched crumbling crematorium in Bristol. It rained the whole time and then it was sleeting. They put the gas heaters on but the chapel didn’t get warm. The graveyard outside was overgrown and untended, massive Victorian monuments covered in ivy. During the service I couldn’t bear to listen to the Christian stuff so I walked in the rain up behind the chapel. It was like a wood, bare winter trees and dark cedars, part of the original planting. I thought, yes, Felix would like this place, he could walk here and be invisible.
The wind is making the door bang and the lamp flicker. It’s hard to see what I’m writing. My parents are in a graveyard overlooking Bath, neat and municipal. The baby is up there too, in a corner with other babies. It’s a bit pathetic, rotting fluffy toys and other mementoes, all going mouldy. It doesn’t work in England, does it, leaving things outside? They always rot in the rain.
Rain. Wet dripping trees and cycling through puddles up the tow-path. It’s July and I’m panicking because when school finishes I won’t have an excuse to see Gregor. Nobody knows. I see him on my way to school and on the way home. He works in the evenings. In the morning we have a cup of coffee together and in the afternoon, tea. We talk. We don’t kiss, but lately I’ve been thinking I want to. I like looking at his brown arms. Once he had his shirt off. He’s muscled and strong. He has blond hairs on his chest and a line of hair coming up his belly. Coming up from his trousers. I like his feet. He has bare feet often, and they look like feet that are used, not hidden away in socks. He says, ‘Here she is, my little schoolgirl, tell me what have you been thinking?’
I’ve been thinking I want to stay with you in your van. I want to put my head on your chest and listen to your heart beating. I want you to stroke my hair. I don’t tell you this.
I was seventeen and I had never had a boyfriend. I didn’t want one. I didn’t want to dress up and flirt. Caitlin and I, we both knew that in the tussle and tumble of the mating game we would be left last, like not being picked for the netball team. We discussed it often. We decided we were better off. We could wait until college then we would meet boys who were more mature. We liked that idea, ‘more mature’. I didn’t tell her about Gregor.
We kept doing the same things. Her coming to my house, me visiting her on a Saturday. Meeting after church on a Sunday. But I began to feel this was just the skin of me, the real me had wriggled out and was sliding through the grass towards Gregor. What I found most strange was that nobody seemed to notice they were talking to a discarded skin.
It’s August and the trees are heavy and green. The cows move slowly in the fields beyond the canal. St John’s wort and willowherb grow by the banks. When I say to my mother, ‘I’m going for a walk now’, she nods and smiles. She’s weeding the garden. She’s thinking about becoming a Catholic and Father Connelly from the church is giving her instruction. He’s tall and has an angular, craggy face. He’s vaguely handsome. I’m sure becoming a Catholic will take a long time.
I run down the garden to the bridge. I’m wearing dark green cotton flares and an orange scoop-neck blouse with drawstring sleeves. My mother hates it. She says it makes me look like a folksy bohemian. But I love this blouse, it’s soft, faded and comfortable. I’m growing my hair. I run down the tow-path feeling wild and messy and free like I used to when I ran down the path to the Ferrou. And there is Gregor.
When I leave it’s like stretching something that stretches and stretches until it snaps and there I am alone on the patio, looking for my mother. A few hours with Gregor. The other hours in the day have no meaning for me.
I’m in my bed and I can’t sleep. It’s two o’clock in the morning and Gregor will be back from work. It’s humid and the air feels like soup. I open my window and I can smell water, the water of the fountain, but I want to smell the canal water, especially at night. Cold smelling. Dark smelling. I want to smell Gregor. He smells of smoke and coffee. What does he smell like after a night’s work? Detergent? Onions? Bleach? I’ve never been to see him at night. I can’t sleep. The moon is huge and pink coloured like a blood orange. The sky is indigo and faded like tissue paper. I’m not used to going out at night, but I climb through the window. My orange blouse pulled over my nightie, my school shoes and socks. I look odd I know, perhaps I can pretend I’m sleepwalking. But no sleepwalker runs as fast as I do. The tow-path is dark and I can’t see where I’m going. The moonlight has turned the world to a grey silver and the water shines. It’s an eerie world, still and quiet. I think I can see people, but they’re only bushes and shadows. I’m frightened but I’m not going back.
Gregor’s van has no lights on, and now I’m worried in case he isn’t there. I tap on the window, whispering (I don’t dare to shout), ‘Are you there, are you there?’ Then the door swings open suddenly and he’s shining a torch at me. I shield my eyes, and now I think he’s cross, but he’s laughing. ‘What’s this, a nighthawk? A ghost? What creature is this?’
I sit on his bed and he’s still laughing. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I say apologetically.
‘You don’t work, you don’t know what it is to be tired. So now I must talk to you, all night, yes?’ He makes coffee and we drink it, sitting on his bed. ‘So what shall we talk about my little traveller? What do you want this old man to talk about?’
‘I don’t mind if we don’t talk,’ I say with a dry throat and a voice squeezed to a whisper.
‘Now what is this?’ asks Gregor, turning to me and fixing his eyes on me, and when he looks at me like that I know I have no secrets.
‘I want to make love,’ I say and in saying it I feel daft because I have no idea how to.
‘Well, well,’ says Gregor and smiles in a bemused way, and we both look at each other. I hope he knows what to do because I’m shaking like a leaf.
He puts his arms around me and hugs me and my heart skips and does a cartwheel. It feels like I’ve just come home, to my real home.
This is strange. I can’t remember what it was like. I remember sitting in church the next day squeezing my knees together. Feeling blissful, feeling I loved everybody. Father Connelly, my mother, Caitlin, her family and the whole congregation. I was soaring up to the roof with the angels. I remember running back up the tow-path and the sun was just coming up soft golden and the fields were misty. I remember my bed smelled of me and was so soft I fell asleep right away. A candle flickering in Gregor’s truck, wax dripping down the side. He held my hand and we listened to nothing.
I’ve had sex since that was exciting and powerful, I felt like an animal. This was with Julian. With Alan and Tony it felt matter of fact, something grown-ups did, and with Felix it was magical, almost mystical, but I can’t remember with Gregor. At the hut in bed we talked a lot, we held hands. I suppose sex was part of it. It was friendly.
The lamp is flickering now, not because of the wind but because it has nearly burned down. There is less banging outside. I think the wind has dropped.
Sunday 8th May. Lunchtime
It’s warm. I’m sitting on the rock rose terrace. This morning I made a seat out of planks of wood and stones. This is the driest terrace and the sunniest. It also has the best view of the valley. The seat is reasonably comfortable. I found the wood some weeks ago behind a house that was being renovated in the village. Perhaps you could say I stole it. Living with Gregor made me more flexible about other people’s property. I would never call him a thief, but if he saw something he thought might be useful, he took it. I’m grateful to him for this attitude. On my walks to and from the village I have so far found a length of rope, a wooden crate, a frying pan and a broken candleholder.
Sunday is the noisiest day in this valley. At the farm below they’re cutting the grass with a loud machine, whining and whirring. Dogs are barking. Voices of people who sound like they’re having a large family lunch. Four cars went up there this morning. I can’t see anybody. The trees block the farm. They sound like they are just at the foot of my land although it’s more than half a mile away. If I shouted and sang would they hear me? Can they see me chopping wood? Surely they can see the smoke from my chimney. People are so nosy here I’m amazed nobody has come up to look but nobody has. Every time I’ve walked up to the village along the path I’ve not met a soul. People have more cars. The land is less cultivated. I’m living in a place that nobody wants to make the effort to discover.
I’ve lived in other houses, The Heathers, my boat, but this is where my heart is. I felt this when I was ten and that’s why I wanted to come back. This is where I asked Gregor to take me.
We’re walking to Bradford-on-Avon, up the old canal path. There is no reason to go other than to make the journey. It’s late August and the countryside is overblown and heavy. Some of the trees are beginning to turn yellow. Flowers are in seed, willowherb fluff blows on to the water. The clouds are heavy too, white with grey undersides like fat fish, not swimming but floating.
Gregor has shaved off his beard and this, I think, makes him look more majestic. He wears blue trousers and sandals and a red shirt. I love the colours he wears. Always bright. I have a scarf in my hair and beads round my neck. My mother thinks I’m at the shops. On the way, Gregor sings a Moroccan song he’s learned and I sing a madrigal. Then we get silly and I’m singing nursery rhymes, hymns and Christmas carols and he’s singing German drinking songs. We’re singing like this as we come into Bradford-on-Avon. Golden stone, sweet pretty houses and baskets of flowers. Oh dear, people are looking at us, what dreadful hippies we are, but we laugh more and go and have tea in an old-fashioned tea room by the bridge. We eat as many scones with cream as we can. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy. Every minute with Gregor is an adventure. But there’s things I don’t see, other people looking at us, other people judging us.
The next day after church one of the convent school mothers comes up to me when I’m talking to Caitlin and says, ‘Mireille, isn’t it? Didn’t I see you yesterday in Bradford-on-Avon having tea with a strange-looking man?’ and she has that smug interfering smile of the perfectly righteous. I’m struck dumb and afraid because I have been lying to everybody all summer, committing the sort of sins they believe I will burn in Hell for.
‘Oh no, Mrs Davenport,’ said Caitlin, who never lies and couldn’t believe that I could. ‘Mireille was in town all day in the bookshops and came to see me in the evening with a book of poems she’d found. Mistral. All in French, which we translated together.’ Sweet Caitlin, she was so pure, of course Mrs Davenport believed her.
‘What would you be doing with a strange man anyway?’ said Caitlin.
I shook my head. Gregor had given me the book. One of the poems was called ‘Mireille’.
‘On Monday let’s translate some more,’ said Caitlin.
I nodded. I looked around for my mother. She was by the church door talking to Father Connelly, who looked patient and weary like he wanted to run away.
I was afraid. Not just because Mrs Davenport had seen us. Not just because school was starting in two weeks and I didn’t want to go back, but because Gregor started talking about going to India. It was one of the places he had never been to. He had mentioned this many times. The summer was ending. He started tinkering with his van. When I went to see him I sat and watched, handed him spanners, made him cups of tea, tried to understand car manuals, but inside I was shrieking, Don’t go, don’t leave me. It was the first of September and we were sitting by the canal looking into the water. I was so full up with words and emotions I hadn’t spoken all afternoon. Gregor turned his bracelet around on his wrist.
‘Now, it is time for you to go,’ he said.
‘Mother doesn’t start cooking until seven,’ I said. ‘She won’t expect me.’
‘No, it is time for you to go, because it is time for me to go.’
I opened my mouth but no sound came out. It felt like water was pouring into my mouth.
‘I am a traveller,’ said Gregor, ‘and now it is time for me to go. You must not be unhappy, little schoolgirl. You will forget this rough, crazy German, yes. A few months and you will meet a crazy English boy who will suit you.’
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘You can’t go!’
‘And stay here? What shall I do, little schoolgirl, talk to you all winter? Make love to you? Amuse you?’ I hated what he was saying because I didn’t see it as amusement. It was my real life, the rest was peripheral.
‘We can … we can …’ But of course I had no answers. I hadn’t got that far. I burst into tears. He left me there by the canal and went back to the van.
It feels like when my father died, it feels the same. The death of dreams. I remember sitting on the wooden bridge that day looking at the fish and the clouds and my reflection and I didn’t know it but my daddy was dying. But this is different, surely, because Gregor isn’t dying he’s going away, and I’m looking at the water, the three worlds inside the water, the leaves on the surface and the clouds and I’m thinking, this is different because I can choose.
I stand up and walk to Gregor. He’s sitting by the fire, solemn and serious, not sad, and for the first time he looks old. He’s thirty-five, he has wrinkles around his eyes, creases when he smiles. He suddenly looks very very old, like a wise man.
He looks up at me and his eyes seem to have three depths in them as well. I’m tiny on the surface, but I want to be in the furthest depth.
‘Little schoolgirl, you do not seem anymore like a girl who wants a man to amuse her.’
‘I want to come with you to India,’ I say.
He thinks about this. He puts his head to one side and smiles. It’s a challenge. He likes a challenge.
‘If you change your mind I won’t bring you home,’ he says.
‘And you must tell your mother.’ This makes me wince. ‘Oh yes, you must tell her you want to leave home. You must be honest. I told my mother.’
‘What did she say?’ I can’t imagine.
Gregor laughs, ‘She threw a shoe at me. She said I was ungrateful and she never wanted to see me again. So she hasn’t.’
I’m going to meet Gregor at ten o’clock in the morning. It’s a Monday. It’s a wet September morning. I’m standing on the patio looking at the fields, the black and white cows, the misty hills. My mother is in the kitchen, washing up.
‘Mireille, don’t stand outdoors, it’s too wet, you’ll bring the damp in. When I’m out don’t forget to change your sheets. They’ve been on that bed too long. No wonder your room smells. Open the window and air it. Mireille, are you listening? The Davenports are having a bring-and-buy. I thought I’d take some of your old dresses, you don’t wear them, they might do for some of those Costellos. Heavens above, what does she dress them in? I saw the oldest – what’s her name, Vymura? Fenicula? – wearing, can you imagine, a yellow trouser suit and she’s ginger. What a sight, and Mrs Costello, she’s always in a maternity frock whether she’s enceinte or not, it seems to make no difference. Mireille are you listening?’
Yes, Mother, but what is there to listen to?
‘… and you’re off to the Costellos for the week? How you can stand it there, I don’t know, but that Caitlin is unobtrusive, I suppose. Have you packed enough bras?’
Yes, Mother, I have packed all I need.
I turn and watch her flit across the sitting room. She’s wearing a navy and cream suit, a handbag over one arm. Her hair is wound up in a bun. She pauses by the mirror to put on some lipstick. Crimson red. She looks at herself in the mirror from various angles. Satisfied, she picks up the bags of my old dresses. ‘I suppose I’ll see you at church on Sunday.’
Goodbye, Mother.
I sit on the sofa and wait until quarter to ten when my mother, Mrs Costello and everybody else is at the bring-and-buy.
I phone up Caitlin. ‘I’m sorry I can’t come over after all.’
‘What a shame. I was hoping we could go to the library and find some more French poems.’
‘I’m going away …’ My voice starts to get shaky. ‘Caitlin, can you keep a secret?’ I want to tell somebody now, I do, I want somebody to say goodbye to me. ‘Caitlin, I’m going away with a man. Mother thinks I’m staying with you.’
‘Oh no, oh dear … oh, Mireille, you can’t … oh no!’
‘Caitlin, I am. Please don’t tell anybody.’
‘Oh, you’re not going to do anything sinful are you?’
This almost makes me laugh. ‘Caitlin. Don’t tell anybody. Please promise.’
‘I promise. I promise. But your mother will find out, won’t she? What shall I do?’
‘Do nothing,’ I say. I want her to say goodbye to me. ‘Goodbye, Caitlin.’
She is very upset. ‘Which man?’ she says. ‘When did you meet a man?’
I want to go now. I have to meet Gregor.
‘He’s a gypsy. He’s a German. He was living in a van on the tow-path. Goodbye, Caitlin.’
I run down the garden and over the bridge. I have a small holdall with a few clothes and my passport. I’m running down the tow-path, splashing in the puddles. I’m running away.
We’re on the ferry between England and France. There is no land to be seen. Nothing except water. The ferry lurches and rocks. I start to feel sick and I start to cry.
‘So leaving is not so easy, is it?’ says Gregor. ‘I told you if you change your mind I won’t take you home.’
‘I didn’t tell my mother,’ I sob. ‘I lied. I told her I was going to Caitlin’s. I couldn’t tell her. I thought she would stop me, but I wish I’d said something now.’
Gregor is angry. ‘You must not lie! You must never lie! You must tell people what you want to do. So what do you want to do now?’
I think about this. ‘I will write to her,’ I say. I go to the shop and buy a postcard. It has a picture of the ship on it. Blue and white and red with a fake-looking sky and an even faker sea.
I sit down and try to write, but what can I say? ‘Dear Mum, I’ve gone to India with a man named Gregor. I love him. Please don’t worry about me. Love, Mireille.’