It goes without saying that I didn’t tell Kate everything about that weekend in the countryside. I did tell her that it was the last time we spent together before Alice left the country and I returned to my final year at Oxford. She realized, when I told her about the picnic by the lake that it was where that drawing was made … the one that had led her to me.
As for the rest, well, it is one of those recollections that I only rarely allow myself. I have a theory, you see, that the most precious memories can be damaged with too much handling, as with all delicate objects. And there is something else, too. It is that, when I think about that night, it reopens a wound that even after all these years remains raw, hidden just beneath the thin layer of skin that covers it.
To counter this I focused my attention more intently than ever on the drawing I was making of Kate. It was going well. In fact, something extraordinary had happened. I had recaptured the urgency, the fluidity. Was it having such a face – so reminiscent of another – as my subject? I had resigned myself to settling for tranquillity from here on, but by some miracle my work had flamed into new life.
It made me nervous, this rediscovered thing, for two reasons. First, because it had arrived so suddenly, and with force; one must be suspicious of phenomena of this nature, the changes they may herald. You do not live on an island set dead in the path of the mistral wind and not learn that lesson. Second, because I feared I would wake up tomorrow, or the next day, and it would have fled from me as abruptly as it had come. Yet there it was, every morning as I set pen to the paper, guiding my hand.
I knew she was curious, but I had an almost superstitious fear of her seeing it before it was done. It was as though in doing so she might sap me of my new-found power. The logic of a fairy tale, I know.
It’s a funny thing, because in recent years my work had sold for greater sums than ever before. It seemed that no one but myself, and perhaps a handful of the greatest art critics, realized that the fire had begun to dwindle. But now it was as though some new fuel had been introduced, some stirring breath exhaled.
It pleased me to see Oliver being more civil towards the girl. My original decision not to tell him about her background had not endured. In my defence, my hand was forced when he came to me one morning before breakfast, to say that she was not to be trusted.
‘She has to go,’ he said, furious. ‘You are too kind, Grand-père – you are too ready to believe in someone’s good character.’
I looked at him and felt a great sadness. And you are too ready to believe the opposite, I thought. When did that happen to you? He had not always been that way, not even after all that awfulness when he was a small boy. This was a recent phenomenon.
I asked him what her offence had been. ‘I found her … poking around,’ he told me. ‘Early, when she probably thought no one would be about.’
Apparently he had discovered her looking at the photographs on the wall in the hallway. Hardly the great crime his tone implied, but it had clearly disturbed him in some fundamental way.
‘She’d actually taken one off the wall,’ he said. ‘She was … staring at it.’ I guessed immediately which one it was – none of the others would have elicited such a strong reaction in him. It was time for it to come down, I thought. Elodia had wanted it there – but I knew that it upset Oliver to see it every time he passed.
Oliver needed to know about the girl, I decided. He was at heart a kind man, and I loved him beyond all measure, but recent events had left their mark on him. I had seen the hostility with which he had greeted her arrival – the disdain that he showed towards her at mealtimes. I had to act, to bring it to an end. And so I told him about the girl’s tragedy.
‘She is suffering too,’ I said, ‘as much as you are. She has lost the two people she loved – the two people who were her only family, as far as I can discover …’
Oliver listened intently as I revealed her story. Though he knew nothing of ballet, he had heard of June Darling and had read about the tragedy. ‘I had no idea,’ he said, appalled. There was a long silence, and I could see him reconsidering his assumptions about the girl, exposing them to the light of this new knowledge.
‘So,’ I said, ‘a photograph of a mother and child will have interested her in a particular way. I don’t think she is a thief, or a snoop – merely lonely. Please,’ I entreated him, ‘treat her with kindness from now on. It will only be for a short while.’
‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said, clearly ashamed. ‘I’ll apologize.’
His reaction filled me with pride. Relief, too, because here, suddenly, was the Oliver I remembered. The old Oliver would never have behaved as he had done these last few weeks; he would have welcomed her from the beginning, without needing the knowledge of a tragedy to inform his behaviour.
It was just Stafford and I at the house for the day. Soon after breakfast Oliver had driven up to Bastia in the north to look at the interior of a cathedral there – as inspiration for the foyer of a new hotel, apparently. This was something of a relief: when Stafford had his nap I knew for once that I had the run of the place, with no chance of an awkward encounter with Oliver. And for most of the afternoon I managed to ignore the looming prospect of the evening ahead.
When I heard the distinctive rasp of the 2CV’s engine in the road below I went into the house to change into a linen dress, feeling not unlike a soldier dressing for battle. I studied the result in the mirror. My skin, having recovered from the sunburn, had picked up some colour and my hair appeared darker and glossier than usual against the pale fabric.
I was about to leave the room when I wavered: was the dress, despite its simplicity, too much? This indecision was foreign to me – I had never been one to care particularly about what I wore. This was not the time to start, I decided. Resolutely, I closed the door.
It was seven o’clock when Oliver and I set off for Bonifacio. We resorted to rather forced, formal small talk in the car – faultlessly polite with one another. Oliver felt as awkward as I did, I realized, and that knowledge made me more grateful for the effort he was making on my behalf. Still, it was a relief when we left the slightly oppressive atmosphere of the car for a few minutes, so that I could photograph the majestic Lion of Roccapina: a rock named for its resemblance to a giant version of the beast, gazing out to sea.
Bonifacio was even more astounding at close range: a city from a fantasy. We parked near the marina, and stood among the boats gazing up at the Old Town, where the buildings clung precariously to the top-heavy cliff face. It was hard to imagine how they had maintained their hold throughout the centuries, resisting the urge to plummet into the waves beneath. As if to reinforce the impression of a gravity-defying stunt, many of them were strangely elevated – perhaps five or six stories high, yet only one or two rooms wide.
I framed them with my camera, pleased with the shot. ‘They must be fairly impractical, from an architectural viewpoint.’
‘Actually, it’s the opposite,’ Oliver said. ‘They were once extremely practical. In a spot like this, your advantage is the view, you prioritize it – especially when your enemy might be lying in wait across the water.’ He pointed to the purple shadow on the horizon that was Sardinia. ‘There isn’t much room on this cliff, so they had no option but to cram tightly together, growing upwards rather than out.’
‘Like Manhattan,’ I suggested.
‘Exactly,’ he said, nodding.
‘Well, I suppose they’ve proved their endurance by not plunging off the edge.’
‘One did,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘In the sixties, one building slid off into the sea.’
‘Did anyone die?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, without conviction – leaving me immediately certain that he did know but preferred not to say. ‘It was a long time ago.’
I tried not to imagine what it would have been like to witness such a thing – the disastrous inevitability of gravity enacted on such a scale. Then, with another sort of inevitability, I thought of Mum’s plane. The dark earth below: beckoning, irresistible. I felt that familiar bleakness threaten, and willed it to retreat.
‘It hasn’t happened since,’ said Oliver, firmly. I glanced across and found him watching me, and I wondered what he had seen in my expression.
We made the steep, sweaty climb to the Old Town. My feet slipped in my impractical flip-flops and my breath was tight in my throat. We passed a prostrate family of scrawny tabby cats, almost camouflaged against the stone, who regarded us indolently. As I climbed I continued to force away the old dark thoughts that drifted inexorably towards me.
A couple of metres from the top I stepped clumsily, and the toes of my right foot shot forward, breaking the thin rubber thong that held the shoe on.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, pulling it off my foot and inspecting it. ‘It’s broken.’
‘Here –’ Oliver made his way back down the steps and took it from me. ‘It’s not; it’s only come through the base. See?’ He held it up. ‘I’ll fix it for you.’
He repaired it in seconds, and I thanked him. For the first time that I could recall, he smiled. It was surely a reflexive thing, so quick that I almost missed it, but not before I noticed that one of his canine teeth was crooked, overlapping its neighbour ever so slightly. Whenever I had looked at him before I had seen an impenetrable mask, a symmetrical arrangement of bone and shadow; I was strangely pleased by my new-found knowledge of this imperfection.
Wiping the sweat from my eyes I looked towards the sea. Beneath the lip of the promontory was a vast squat rock like an overgrown mossy boulder, washed on all sides by the green sea and dwarfing the grandest of the yachts that sailed beside it.
‘It’s called the Grain de Sable,’ Oliver said. ‘The best way to see it is by boat. You can’t get a sense of its true size from up here.’
‘That’s an odd choice of name. It looks more like … oh, a giant’s footstool, I suppose.’
‘That’s quite good,’ he said. ‘The domestic and epic together. I prefer “grain of sand’ though; I think it must have been someone’s idea of a joke. The coastline is dramatic here. There are sea caves, too, that can only be accessed from the water.’
‘Perhaps you could take me to them,’ I said, suddenly carried away, ‘in the fishing boat?’
‘Yes,’ Oliver said, ‘if you’d like.’ But he did not seem enthused by the idea. No doubt he viewed this evening as apology enough – a one-off concession that he did not intend to repeat. And why should he? After all, I had told him I did not need babysitting.
Clearly I was not the only one who had been dreading this excursion. I looked quickly away, back out to sea, so that he could not see my embarrassment.
As evening fell, a festival atmosphere began to prevail. A boat in the marina below us was lit, suddenly, with a garland of white lights, and a cheer went up from the people drinking along the waterside. Laughter and talk from the bars and restaurants swam through the streets and somewhere a band began to play – a tinny, tuneless sound from where we stood, but spirited, nonetheless.
‘We should go and eat,’ Oliver said. ‘If we leave it too long there won’t be a free seat left in the place.’
The restaurant was in the medieval heart of the Old Town, and the streets we walked through to reach it were serpentine walkways, sunk in shadow. Everywhere one looked there was some detail that caught the eye: a plaque commemorating a famous inhabitant or historical event; buttresses above our heads that created an arbour of stone; shrines to various local saints. It was perhaps a good thing that it was too dark to take any photographs, because I would have lingered there for some time.
‘I’m sorry,’ Oliver said, when we got to the restaurant, ‘it’s only pizza – but the best I’ve ever eaten.’
‘Pizza’s fine.’
The place was certainly charming: an outdoor eating area overhung with espaliered vines, with a view straight down the cobbled street and on to the sea.
A waiter led us through the throng to our table, bidding us sit down and choose from our laminated menus. Looking about me, I wondered what the other diners would think if they glanced our way. They would see a young couple. The idea disturbed me, but wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Oliver certainly wasn’t bad looking, especially when his face wasn’t twisted by dislike. All the same it was a pointless – not to mention bizarre – line of thought. I looked for some snippet of small talk to distract myself.
‘How was Bastia?’ I asked, remembering the trip he had made that morning.
‘Exactly what I was hoping for,’ Oliver said. ‘My grandmother took me into Lucciana Cathedral as a child. I was worried I might have remembered it wrong, but it was just as I recalled. There’s something almost modern in the cleanness of the lines … even though the place was built in the twelfth century.’
‘So is that what you intend for this project?’ I asked. ‘To marry the old and the new?’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘There’s a tendency nowadays to completely do away with what’s gone before, but we can learn a lot from the past.’
‘Your grandfather told me that you built his studio for him,’ I said. ‘You’ve combined it there – the modern and the historic.’
‘That’s exactly what I was trying for.’
‘Well, I think it’s brilliant,’ I told him.
‘Oh – thank you.’ He seemed pleased by this, surprised by the compliment. He cleared his throat, then he added, awkwardly, ‘I still feel I owe you some sort of explanation, for how I behaved before.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘You were just being protective of your grandfather.’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t that. If I am completely honest, I could see from the start that Grand-père trusted you. That should have been enough for me. Whatever it is you’re talking about, it seems to be good for him. I don’t think I’ve seen him so happy in years.’ He sighed. ‘It was selfishness. I came here to get away from things …’
I nodded.
‘I don’t know if Grand-père has said anything to you …’ Even though Stafford had alluded to something, I shook my head. Oliver seemed relieved. Perhaps he, too, hated being pitied.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the thing is, not so long ago, my marriage fell apart.’
‘Oh.’ So that was it.
‘I came down here after all the paperwork had gone through, hoping to take some time away from it all. Corsica has always been somewhere I could come when things were tough.’
I remembered now my first impression of him – that he looked like someone recovering from an illness. It must have been a bad split.
‘We were young when we married,’ he said, speaking quickly, as though now that he had started he might as well get it all said, ‘and stupid, I suppose. Too young or too stupid, anyway, to recognize infatuation for what it was.’ He raked a hand through his hair. The movement revealed a slender meniscus of shockingly pale skin at his hairline that had not been touched by the sun.
If he had come to Corsica to be alone with his grandfather then I had shown up at precisely the wrong time. I could see why he had resented the sudden appearance of a stranger in his place of refuge.
Our pizzas arrived then, and were just as good as Oliver had promised they would be. Suddenly ravenous, I ate mine with great speed. I had also managed to drink a whole glass of wine almost without noticing. Maybe it was the influence of the alcohol that allowed me to give rein to my curiosity, though politeness dictated I should leave the subject alone.
‘How long were you married?’
‘Six years. I was twenty-four.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know that you could say we were actually together for that long though.’
I expected him to stop there, but to my surprise he went on: ‘Looking back, we should never have married in the first place.’
Then he gave a laugh – but not a proper laugh, rather a painful, humourless sound. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Why?’
‘For not having realized sooner that I was with someone exactly like my mother.’
The woman in the photo. I waited for him to go on. Instead he stopped, looking bemused. ‘Why am I telling you all this?’
I had wondered too. Especially as, unlike me, Oliver had only had a little to drink. He shook his head, as though to clear it. ‘I haven’t even spoken to my friends properly about it.’
‘Maybe that’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s probably easier because you don’t know me.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But you don’t want to hear all that.’
Yet I did want to hear it, I realized. And not merely out of curiosity – I felt a need to discover precisely what had been the cause of the expression I’d glimpsed on his face in that unguarded moment on the terrace.
But then the waiter appeared with our bill, and Oliver stood up as if galvanized by the intrusion of the everyday. ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘There’s still quite a lot for you to see.’ And just like that, the unexpected, confessional understanding that had existed between us seconds earlier was lost.
We left the restaurant and walked down towards the barrier that overlooked the new town and the inky sea. A family were there with us, the three young children arguing with their parents, tiredly, to let them stay out a while longer.
Suddenly there was a riot of noise and colour … the sky was exploding in flame and the stone of the buildings around us flared back, as if alight. I started in alarm before I realized what it had been: a firework. Next to us, the smallest of the children let out an anguished siren of a wail, while the elder two whooped and shrieked with delight.
The dark water below had been completely transformed by the reflection of the sky-borne spectacle. Oliver pointed out the source, a huge yacht moored at the mouth of the harbour. ‘Some millionaire having a party,’ he shouted.
‘And we’re getting a free show.’
In between the booms and clashes of sound we could hear the whoops of onlookers from the marina. For the briefest moment I was aware of something unweighting me. It was a kind of euphoric lightness – a pure, brief, childlike exhilaration.
Then I glanced up at Oliver. As he watched the fireworks I studied the proud lines of his brow, nose, chin as they were washed in colour; the reflecting gleam of his dark eye. I wondered, in the light of my new knowledge, what he might be feeling. Remembering standing here with her, perhaps? They must have been happy together once.