1993

The pizzeria is busier this time. The holiday season is in full swing now and I see that Olivier was right when he said things were changing. I hadn’t noticed before but the café that’s been there forever has invested in new umbrellas, huge square things in tasteful cream, lit from underneath by white lights. I feel a small pang for the old parasols, sun-bleached red and emblazoned with beer logos.

We get the last outside table, almost on the road, and as we sit down, all eyes are on us. I check but most belong to tourists and it occurs to me that they might be looking simply because Élodie is so arresting, dressed in a flared sea-green dress that brings out her tan and the golden lights in her hair, left loose and damp from the shower.

The meal passes without incident. I find myself in the unfamiliar position of being grateful to Greg for maintaining ceaseless conversation about nothing in particular. I have no idea what he’s said to Élodie about the years she’s been gone. Despite all my misgivings, I’m glad you seem so happy. Élodie is making a fuss of you, which in turn makes your father, who always took his lead from her, indulge you too. You’re glowing prettily from all the attention, and from the subtle physical contact Élodie is constantly making with you: her hand on yours, the other smoothing your wildly crimped hair, now loosed from its many plaits. My own hands itch in my lap to stop her, oddly like a jealous partner, but I can see—anyone can see—that you’re basking in it. Unconsciously you’ve angled your body toward her, like a cat curling around its owner’s legs.

There are stalls set up in the square again, most of them selling gifts: expensive linens, silver jewelry, and wine. After the pizzas, all of us in need of a break before we can contemplate dessert, you ask if you can go and look at them.

“Okay, but don’t go too far. We haven’t finished yet.”

“Will you come?” she asks Élodie.

An old reflex has me opening my mouth to object but she’s already pushing back her chair and holding out her hand to you.

“We won’t be long, Maman,” she says. “I’ll look after her.”

“Don’t go far,” I can’t help saying again. “Stay where we can see you.”

I catch your tut but then you turn back to your sister, all smiles again.

Greg turns to me with a raised eyebrow. “Surely even you can’t claim this hasn’t been a pleasant evening.”

I gesture at a passing waitress for another bottle of wine.

“What do you think, then?” I’ve been waiting to ask him this all night.

He gives me an uncomprehending look.

“Of Élodie, I mean. Do you… Do you think she’s different?”

Greg gets out his cigarettes with an exaggerated sigh. “I take it you don’t.”

“I honestly don’t know. I keep changing my mind. I think she is and then I remember what Morel told me about the twenty percent who don’t grow out of it. Remembering how she was, I don’t know if it’s possible for her to truly change. However much she might want to… However much we might want her to. Besides, if she’s grown out of it, why didn’t she come back sooner? We can’t afford to get this wrong, Greg. For everyone’s sake…” I tail off.

“Do you really think the way she’s being with Emma—the affection, the fuss, all of that—do you really suppose that’s for show? She was never like that before, was she? Emma barely existed for her. Apart from when…” He doesn’t finish.

I watch the two of you, farther off now, Élodie a head taller, her arm slung around your narrow shoulders. I’m sitting forward in my chair, as though to stay closer to you, if only by a couple of inches.

“I’m afraid that might be exactly what it is. A show. I know it sounds cold, but someone has to play devil’s advocate here. And don’t look at me like that. You can’t blame me for being so cautious.”

He finishes his wine. “No, okay. But isn’t it possible that some of it might be genuine? She was at the Institut for three years without any incidents. She told me about the ashram.”

“She told me about it, too, and you know what I think about those places. It’s not all peace and love. I mean, look at what was going on in Oregon with Osho.”

He doesn’t say anything. Greg was always more of a natural hippie than me. I know he still hankers after that sixties idealism he found briefly in Paris, which died a slow death the decade after. The world was a cold and dangerous place, after all, and perhaps his daughter was too. It always made me feel sad for him. Angry with him, as well. Because for as long as he clung to his naivete, I was forced into being the cynical one.

“Don’t you want her to have come out the other side?” he says softly now. “Don’t you want her to be okay?”

“Of course I do.”

He nods. He knows that, beneath all the fear, I do want that. Somewhere, a long way down, she’s still the baby we took home that day, the tiny girl we loved so much, the child who grew up to be such a painful mystery to us both.

Of course I want her to be better. I want it very badly. I just don’t know if it’s too much to hope for. And I owe it to you as your mother to be careful, not to let my guard down yet.

Around us people are talking about the fires. Les feux. I catch snippets. It makes me realize what I’ve been too preoccupied to notice—that the smell of smoke is still present, a dark bass note beneath the aromas of food and perfume.

“By the way, we’ve had an offer on the house,” I say to take my mind off it.

He turns to me in surprise. “That was quick. God, La Rêverie being sold. I can’t quite believe it.” He absently taps a cigarette on the table before lighting it and I wonder how many hundreds of times I’ve seen that little tic. Unexpectedly, he holds it out to me and I take it gratefully.

“Sylvie, what are we going to do about Élodie when you have to go back to London?”

I sigh. “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue how to approach any of this. What about you?”

He shakes his head. “When you were asleep this afternoon, I rang Nicole. I said I’d tell Élodie she would be welcome to stay at our place for a while, if she wanted to.”

“Oh. What did she say?”

He looks away. “She said she didn’t think it was a very good idea. Not with the boys so young.”

I check you’re still in sight. For a second, I can’t see either of you but then I spot Élodie. She looks as though she’s staring right at us, though it’s hard to tell from a distance. I crane to see better but she moves out of sight.

I can’t blame Nicole but I’m surprised too. I suppose I never thought he’d tell her everything. After all, he had never sat down with me and had a frank conversation about what had happened. I don’t know whether to be gratified, angry, or just sad.

“So what, then?” I say. “She said northern France didn’t feel like home so I don’t think she’d want to go to Paris anyway. Let alone London. I can’t imagine her somewhere without the sun. Perhaps she’ll want to go back to Spain.”

He rubs his temples. “I never did know what was best when it came to her. I know I left you with it all, Sylvie. I do know that.” He reaches out and briefly squeezes my hand. I nod, not quite able to speak. If he’d only done that more often back then. It would have made so much difference in those last years if he’d reached across the divide.

We lapse into silence and I finish my cigarette before you can come back and catch me smoking.

“I think she might have been sleeping in the barn, you know,” I say, as I stub it out.

He looks up, surprised out of his thoughts. “Who, Élodie?”

“Yes. There were clothes in the loft. I wasn’t sure, and I suppose I’m still not, but I think she was there, maybe with Luc. She used to hide up there all the time in that last year—do you remember? I think Luc’s been with her or helping her. I think she’s been around a while.”

“Haven’t you asked her?”

“She said it was only a couple of days and not at the house, but I’ve got a feeling. Both of us felt watched here before she came. Emma was beginning to think the house was haunted.”

He remains silent.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit worrying?”

He shrugs. “So she was too scared to approach at first. I think I can understand that.”

“You know why I came in the first place, don’t you?”

“The damage in the souillarde? Surely you can’t think… Why would anyone start a fire in there? It’s hardly more than a cupboard. It barely even got going, did it? I thought it was kids.”

“Perhaps. I thought it might have been a way of getting me to come back here. Maybe it was the only way she could, I don’t know.”

“Like she’s reeled you in. Jesus, Sylvie. That sounds a bit far-fetched to me.”

“And yet here I am. I’m back and so is she. We’re all here together. For the first time in a decade.”

I watch him take that in, and wait for the protests, the accusations of paranoia, but they don’t come and, for once, I wish they would.

I look for you again and see that you’re on your way back, rushing ahead of Élodie to show us something. Behind you, your sister is moving unhurriedly, languidly, hips swaying in time with her hair. As she passes an old couple, locals rather than tourists, I see the woman nudge her husband and nod in Élodie’s direction. They watch her progress, mouths pursed, backs stiff with disapproval, and I have no idea if it’s the amount of flesh she’s showing or because they know who she is. Brebis galeuse.

“Look what Élodie bought me.”

You hold out your arm. You’ve put all your neon bands on one wrist, replacing the ones on the right with a bracelet: a slender silver hoop clasping a small ceramic plate, pale pink with tiny blue flowers dotted in the opposite corners.

“She’s got one too.”

You lift her wrist to show me and she meets my gaze for a moment. I think there’s a glint of a challenge in her eyes but then she glances away and I wonder if I’m just looking for it.

Her bracelet is identical to yours, though the silver looks brighter against her butterscotch skin. In the center of the ceramic plates, between the flowers, and so recently painted by the stallholder that the black lines shine wetly, is a curlicued letter E, just like those she once graffitied on her door handle, just like the one she scratched into my beloved jewelry box. E for Élodie and now E for Emma.

No one wants anything else so Greg pays the bill and we start to cross the square. At the far edge, the boys we saw on the night of the circus are back. Their mopeds are propped up in a ragged line next to the bench they’re draped over, smoking and laughing, though without real enjoyment. I catch you scanning their faces for Luc but he’s not there. They see us a beat later or, rather, they see Élodie. This has been happening all evening: married fathers, waiters, and old men staring, apparently unable to help themselves.

“Élodie!” they call. “Viens ici, Élodie!” They watch her ignore them as one, and the calls get more frenzied, though they don’t quite have the nerve to approach. Greg gives them a look, which makes them laugh again, but it’s even more mirthless now. One gestures at you, nudges the boy next to him, and says something I don’t catch. I pull you toward me.

“They seem to know you quite well,” I say to Élodie, as we walk on, but she doesn’t reply, which makes Greg frown again. Far off in the distance, I can hear sirens. I look for the glow on the hills, but there’s nothing. I can smell the smoke again, stronger now.

Although your father could sleep in Camille’s old room, or even the cramped little room opposite Élodie’s, I decide to give him the blue room, you coming in with me. I feel safer that way.

With you next to me that night, I sleep like I used to back in London, deep and mostly dreamless, released for the time being from perpetual sentry duty. And then it’s morning and I wake up refreshed and reasonably calm.

Out on the terrace over breakfast, the temperature is already intense, though it isn’t yet nine o’clock. I can feel my skin beginning to burn. I think the smoke is incrementally heavier too. I don’t want to mention it in case it frightens you.

After breakfast, you and Élodie go to the pool and Greg shuts himself in the study to make another phone call to Nicole. Suspended between these factions, I decide to do some gardening. There’s no real need—the Johnsons have already seen the house—but the possibility of the fires getting worse has rendered me incapable of staying still.

As it is, there is plenty to keep me occupied. Everything in the wide borders needs hacking back and clearing, years of leaves and sap-coated pine needles clogging the beds and stickily carpeting the margins of the pool area. Once I start, I can’t stop, the nervous energy that has been trickling back all morning, bolstered by a good night’s sleep, seemingly in danger of bubbling over.

I should have worn a hat. I know that by early evening. As the sun slides below the pine trees, I sit shivering in a tepid bath, the tiniest movement of air on my goose-pimpled skin as sore as if I’ve been whipped, my head thumping like it’s been in a vise.

I know it’s sunstroke because I had it once as a child. I can clearly remember lying on my back in bed, which made me feel marginally less awful than every other position, and thinking it a shame that I was going to die before my ninth birthday. I felt so desperately ill—the relentless nausea, the way the room lurched when I tried to sit up, my heart galloping in my chest, mouth as dry as dust—that I didn’t even consider the possibility I might survive.

In fact, people can die from too much sun. When the body’s internal temperature exceeds forty degrees centigrade, the organs start to cook. I had read up on it afterward, in my mother’s huge old medical tome. There were three whole pages dedicated to insolation.

I stand shakily at my bedroom window. The three of you are out by the pool, and I can see glimmers of movement as the trees move in the wind. The wind. It takes me a moment to absorb that there is definite movement in the air now, and that that’s not a good thing when forest fires are already burning. It’s not a gentle breeze either, but something quarrelsome, buffeting the trees in spiteful gusts. I wonder if any of you will think to check the météo report. If you’ll think to check on me.

I don’t remember much about the evening or subsequent night. I’m sick a few times, only just managing to crawl to the bathroom in time, freezing sweat giving way to a minute or two of bliss, my skin drying on the cold tiles before the nausea starts to slosh back in. At some point, one of you brings me a bowl so I don’t have to leave the bed. Later, I hear a murmured conversation about calling a doctor, silhouettes against the lit doorway, but then I slip out of consciousness again. Sometime in the middle of the night I understand you aren’t next to me in the bed but I can’t do more than register the fact.

The next morning, I feel almost as bad, but my temperature must have come down a degree or so because my thought processes are more orderly. I realize I must have been delirious in the night. You slip in soon after I wake, your breath smelling sickly-sweet of croissant and chocolate, a glass of what looks like iced tea in your hand.

You smile and put the straw to my lips. “You’ve got to drink lots of fluids. It says in the big medical book. Élodie looked it up. She made you a tisane.”

You pronounce the word perfectly. She must have taught you that.

I try to sit up but it’s too much effort. I slump back down on the pillows.

“Dad says he’s going to come up and see you before he leaves,” you say. It takes me a moment to comprehend the words.

“Before he leaves? What do you mean? He’s only just gotten here.”

You shrug. “He has to go back to Paris.”

It turns out he’s been summoned: Nicole has clearly had second thoughts about him disappearing to the south for an intimate reunion with his ex-wife and daughters—his first family. Even as ill as I am, I can’t help feeling a grudging respect for her. He had never done my bidding, had never come back for me, even when I’d begged him.

“What about Élodie?” I say, when he appears at the door a couple of hours later, sheepish and defiant at the same time, like a naughty boy.

“I’ve told her to ring me tomorrow, so we can arrange to see each other soon. She’s got my number.”

“But not your address.”

He can’t meet my eye.

“Greg, please, don’t go.”

His face softens and he starts to move toward me but then stops. “You’ll be okay now. You’re probably through the worst of it already. Élodie and Emma will look after you. Élodie’s been checking on you every fifteen minutes. I’ve been watching her, Sylvie. She’s not like the girl from back then. I know she’s not.”

But you don’t know that for sure, I want to say but I can’t marshal my words.

He shakes his head slightly, and it makes me think of someone warding off a persistent fly. “Emma’s not a baby anymore. You know I wouldn’t go if I thought there was even the smallest chance… Anyway, you’ll be up and about in a few hours. Everything will be fine, Sylvie. Sometimes things are. Usually they are.”

“What about the fires? The wind…”

“They’re barely getting any closer. I got a paper in the village. The wind should die down later, too. They think the fires’ll be under control by the end of the week.”

“But, Greg, please, listen—”

“Look, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry but I have to.”

And then he’s gone. I hear your goodbyes in the hall downstairs and then the front door closes. After that it’s quiet.

When I next come to, I’m not ready to be “up and about” at all. Greg had been wrong about that and I wonder what else he might have misjudged. I’m shivering again, and I know I’ll be sick soon. I have no idea what time it is. When I swing my feet to the floor to go to the bathroom, I sway, the blood booming in my ears, like water rushing into a cave. I call but no one answers. I feel afraid for you, somewhere alone with your sister, but like a wounded animal too hurt to run, I’m also afraid for myself.

I half crawl downstairs to the phone and ring the emergency doctor’s number on Olivier’s note, almost weeping at the sound of his calm, capable voice at the other end. He arrives within the hour and prescribes me a tranquilizer to stop the shivering, which is only raising my body temperature. The rest of the day blurs after that, though I have a dim memory of shadows looming over me like the previous night, briefly blocking out the bright light from the hall I don’t have the wherewithal to turn off.

I remember your voice, Emma, sounding far away and too young, and I wonder if I’ve been catapulted back in time. I wake every few minutes, or so it feels like, disembodied except for the crushing weight of fear on my chest—fear that somewhere beyond the bed, something bad is going to happen to you, may be happening to you already.

Hearing music at some point, I stagger in my confusion to the window. The sun has slunk away for another night and the air reeks of hot things: earth, flowers, and, most of all, fire, despite what Greg said about it not being close. The music gets louder as I strain to push the windows wide, and I think the doors to the salon must be open, the volume on the old record player turned up, the speakers moved to face outward. I recognize it then: “Hotel California.”

I push myself up so I can see down to the terrace, and what is there is such a strange spectacle that I have to blink and blink again. There are three of you dancing. I peer again, my head ringing, and see that Luc is there with you and her. You’re spinning on your own, laughing as you do it, your hair flying out and your feet nearly stumbling over each other as you grow dizzier. Élodie and Luc are pressed together, moving more slowly, not an inch of space between them. Dancing to remember, perhaps. Or is it to forget?

The scene makes my stomach churn. I think they must have given you something because I haven’t seen you so entirely unselfconscious in years, not since you were a tiny girl.

I decide I must go downstairs. I must somehow get between you and them, and I promise myself that I will in just a few seconds, when I feel less weak and watery. I lie back on the bed, chilly nausea sluicing inside me, and start counting. I’ll go when I get to fifty.