14

BUT THE NEXT Saturday, when we go to Karen’s, I have the picture in my bag.

Leo hasn’t gone sailing today. He has some work to do. He joins us in the kitchen for a slice of Karen’s apple cake. I’m so happy to see him. It’s a gift, it’s what I hoped for.

Leo comes from the west of Scotland. He has an uncle who lives there still, in a low, rambling house on the coast. It’s miles from anywhere. The mail comes once a week. They visit him there sometimes, and Karen says it’s extraordinary, a place of mists, and seals, and moisture that seeps into everything, and silence that presses down on you so it’s hard to stay awake. It’s magical, but afterward, she’s always so glad to get home again to the clatter and vigor of London.

I take Sylvie’s picture out of my bag. Karen is suddenly still, transfixed, a slice of apple cake poised between her plate and her mouth. I can feel her eyes on me.

“Leo—I wondered—could you look at something for me?” I hold the picture out to him. “D’you know where this place is?”

He takes the picture from me in his ample freckled hand. I feel an urge to say, like Sylvie, Be careful, don’t crumple it.

“I thought it might be in Scotland,” I tell him. “I thought you might know where it was.”

He’s looking at it, mechanically smoothing out the corners with one finger. Karen has put her apple cake down. Her gaze narrows.

“That’s the picture you told me about, isn’t it?” she says.

“Yes.”

Her face is stern.

“Grace, just don’t. Let it go. You’re just making everything worse. For God’s sake, surely you see.”

Leo looks from one to the other of us, curious, amused, aware that something is happening that he doesn’t understand.

“I just wondered if you knew it,” I say. “I mean, d’you think it’s in Scotland?”

He shrugs. “Could be.”

“But it’s not near where you come from? You don’t recognize it?”

“No. But it’s not a lot to go on. It could be Brittany maybe. You could try Brittany. Round Mont-Saint-Michel, perhaps. There’s some fabulous coastline there.”

“Where else do you think?”

“Ireland, obviously—the west coast. The Atlantic coast of France, perhaps. Parts of Cornwall, even. Grace, there are an awful lot of places it could be . . . What’s this all about, anyway?”

I take the picture back and put it away.

“It’s just a place that Sylvie likes,” I tell him.

The minute he’s gone to his study, Karen puts her hand on my wrist. Her fingers are urgent, insistent. “Grace. Why are you doing this?”

“I thought I’d try and find out whatever I could about the place. You never know, it just might help.” I know I sound placating.

Her mouth thins. “Grace, you’re just encouraging her. She needs to let go of all that stuff, not just get deeper in.”

“But I’ve tried that. I’ve tried to ignore it . . .”

She’s quiet for a moment. She isn’t looking at me.

“Look, I’ve been thinking,” she says then. Her voice is delicate, cautious, placing the words like little stones between us. “You don’t think it’s some kind of wish fulfillment, do you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Grace, to be honest, I’m not sure quite how to put this. But you are on your own, and maybe that isn’t so easy for Sylvie. Perhaps she’s inventing a childhood where she has a father around.”

“But it’s not a big issue,” I tell her. “I think she just accepts it—her father not being part of her life. It’s how we’ve always lived . . .”

“Grace, I know you do your best for Sylvie. I mean, God knows, I wouldn’t manage at all. I’d be an absolute disaster without Leo. And Fiona said that to me after the Halloween party: ‘How on earth does Grace manage so well on her own?’”

I remember the woman with spiky crystal earrings, who seemed so worried because Sylvie wouldn’t call me Mum. I hate to think of people talking about me. It gives me a hot, shamed feeling.

“But, I mean, let’s face it, Grace,” she goes on, “there is something missing from her life. I mean, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t what you’d choose . . .”

There’s a bookshop around the corner from Jonah and the Whale. On Monday, in my lunch hour, after I’ve bought our baguettes from Just A Crust, I go there with the picture in my bag. It’s a hushed, rather solemn place. The owner sits at the desk reading a fat biography. He has long gray hair in a ponytail, and he gives me a ponderous smile.

“I want to look at travel books,” I tell him.

He points me toward the back of the shop. “About anywhere in particular?”

“Not really. I’m just browsing.”

I pull out books on Scotland, Ireland, Brittany—anything with color illustrations. I flick through all the photographs. There are lots of places a bit like Sylvie’s picture, but nothing that’s exact: one stretch of photogenic coastline looks much like another. I flick through a French travel guide, briefly distracted, remembering my one trip abroad, the school trip to Paris my mother scrimped and saved for. Remembering how I loved it—the glamorous dark of the churches with their shimmer of votive candles, the smells in the markets of nectarines and rank goat cheese and wine. How it filled me with a longing to live a different life, to be one of the women who sipped their coffee in cafés on the pavement, their hair sleeked back and thin gold chains at their throats, to be elegant and entitled.

I put the guidebook back on the shelf. There’s nothing here to help me. I thank the owner and go out into the street.

Next to the patisserie there’s a travel agent. I look in at the window. It’s empty—just one woman at a desk. She’s dressed in a trim blue uniform, like a flight attendant, and her hair is expensively dyed in different shades of blond. She’s adjusting her lipstick in a mirror in her compact.

I go in, pull the picture from my bag. She snaps her compact shut. Her smile is glossy and poised.

“I know this sounds kind of silly,” I say, “but I wondered whether you possibly knew this place?”

She takes the picture from me.

“I can’t say I do,” she says. “Well, obviously, it’s a coastal location . . . Hey, you’re from the flower shop, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I tell her.

“I like that shop,” she says. “Though I never get why you sell all those things with rust on . . .” She looks back at the picture. “To be honest, most of our clients tend to head for the sun. This looks more kind of northern.”

“Yes, I guess it could be.”

“Somewhere in Scotland maybe?” she says. “Not that I’ve ever been there. Cute guy, though. I like the raincoat . . . Well, I don’t know who could help you, really. I could have a word with one of the others when they come back from their lunch. But it’s not a lot to go on. Would you like me to keep the picture and give you a ring?”

“No, it’s okay.” I’m too emphatic. I’m terrified of losing it.

“It’s somewhere you’d like to travel to?” she says.

I nod. It seems easiest.

“I’ll see what I can find you,” she tells me. “Something that might fit the bill.”

She finds me a brochure for a holiday in Scotland. You stay at Inverlochy Castle and visit a whiskey distillery. I put the brochure politely away in my bag.

The afternoon passes slowly. It’s a dark, heavy day with a little cold rain and a smell of smoke and petrol fumes—the sort of day when London seems gray and dirty and you notice all the litter in the streets. I don’t know what else I could try. Perhaps I could ring the manufacturer of the raincoat, but it seems unlikely they’d help. There’s nothing in it for them.

We don’t have many customers. I watch the intricate webs of wet where the rain runs down the window. Disappointment seeps through me like a stain. I’ve been so naive, so gullible, getting so excited about the things that Sylvie says. Karen was right—it’s all just Sylvie’s wish fulfillment. She’s inventing a childhood where her family is complete. I hated Karen saying that, it made me feel a failure, but I know there’s something in it. I decide I will put all this behind me, forget about the article and this whole strange past life thing. Resolving this, I have a flat, dulled feeling—but also a sense of ground beneath me, the everyday world restored.

At half past three I go to have a coffee in the back room. I take the picture out and spread it on the table as I drink.

Lavinia comes in search of a cigarette. She taps one out of her packet, she’ll smoke it in the street. She glances at me where I sit, my head in my hands, the photograph opened in front of me.

“Hey, what’s up, Gracie? You look a bit dejected. Is everything okay?”

She comes across and puts her arm around me. Her touch is comforting: you feel so cared for. She’s wearing her scarf from Gujarat with the gold thread woven through, and the silk fringe brushes my face. I rest my head lightly against her. She glances down at the cutting.

“Oh,” she says. “Coldharbour.”

I stare up at her.

“You know it? You know this place?”

She nods.

“Sure.”

“I’ve been asking everybody,” I say. “I couldn’t find where it was. Nobody seemed to know it.”

“It’s in Ireland—Connemara. A fishing village.”

The room seems to lurch around me. My heart thuds. I don’t feel the way I expected to feel. I have a sense of shock—that this is an actual place, that it has a solid existence, just like Lavinia and me, the shop, the London traffic. That it’s real.

“You’ve been there?” I say again, stupidly. “You recognize it?”

She smiles at my insistence.

“I lived in a commune there for a while—well, a little way up the coast from there. It’s near where Teresa’s family come from. I mean, this is years ago, Gracie. When people did those things . . .”

“A commune? Sleeping with everybody?”

She grins.

“Well, yes, there was a bit of that, but mostly it was lentils and meditation. I didn’t stay long. It was all fantastically worthy, but I got so fed up with having to clean the loos. Plus I yearned for a choice of lipsticks and a proper cappuccino . . . Yes, that’s definitely Coldharbour. You can see the lobster boats. Why the interest?”

“I found this picture in a magazine. And Sylvie got so excited. As though she recognized it.”

She’s looking at me thoughtfully, but she doesn’t seem alarmed.

“You do hear these stories,” she says slowly. “Kids who seem to remember things that they couldn’t possibly know. You’re never sure what to make of them. I’d been wondering what was going on, to be honest. These hints you’ve been dropping—some of the things you’ve said . . .”

So I tell her all the things that Sylvie has said, and she sits and listens quietly, her clear gray eyes taking me in.

I’m excited when I pick Sylvie up from Little Acorns.

We drive through the slow rush-hour traffic. When we stop in a queue at a rotary, I look back at her surreptiously. In the amber glow of the streetlamps, her skin has a translucent look. She seems drained, worn out by the day.

My heart is pounding.

“That place in your picture, sweetheart—the place you like so much . . .”

She doesn’t respond.

“You know, the picture we stuck on your wardrobe.”

“Yes, Grace.”

The traffic edges forward. The heavy, smoky smell of the streets comes in through my half-open window. I glance at her again in the rearview mirror. She’s holding her Shaun the Sheep rucksack; she has it clutched to her chest as though for warmth or comfort. The rucksack seems too big for her, as though the day has shrunk her. The pale beams from the passing headlights move across her body.

“Can you tell me what it’s called—the place in your picture?” I say.

She doesn’t seem to be listening. She’s staring out the window, where a man and a big German shepherd are walking along the pavement, and the dog has all her attention. I should have chosen a better time to do this, a time when I could properly see her face.

“Does the place in your picture have a name?” I ask again.

Perhaps she doesn’t hear me. Her face is still and has no color.

“Sylvie. Your village, your seaside. Can you remember the name?”

I hear the edge of insistence in my voice. Perhaps I should just leave this, but I feel a kind of compulsion. As though so much depends on what she says. As though I’m just a few seconds away from understanding this mystery.

But Sylvie says nothing.

I don’t know what to do now. Frustration surges through me. I’m desperate for some response.

“Lavinia told me she knew the place. She says it’s called Coldharbour. Is that right?” I ask her.

Immediately I know I shouldn’t have phrased it like that.

The traffic slows. My pulse skitters off. I’m watching her in the mirror.

She smiles a small, quiet smile. She hugs her rucksack to her. She has a satisfied look, as though the name pleases her.

“Yes, Grace. Coldharbour.” She says it precisely, carefully, with gaps between the syllables, as though it’s something quite new to her, as though it’s a word she’s just learned. “It’s a nice name, isn’t it?” she says.

“Yes, sweetheart.”

But I kick myself. I posed the question wrongly, I shouldn’t have suggested it. I see now that I should have waited for her to tell me the name.

“I lived there, Grace,” she says. “And I had a cave and a dragon.”

I feel how she eludes me, like water leaking through my hands. There’s nothing to hold on to, it seeps and trickles away.