They set off the following morning with Amandine, who had been soaked overnight in a bucket of disinfectant, lashed to the flagpole to dry out, and her owner curled up in her sleeping bag in the cabin, turned away from her grandfather, staring into nothingness.
The evening before they had washed their clothes and their bedding and themselves, hosing down the deck and lockers just for good measure and now, as they crept back onto the Seine at a sober pace, Colin’s nostrils were full of the ferrous smell of river water and the faint whiff of Gauloises that was always in the air.
The child was holding her grey tweed hat in both hands, pressing it to her mouth, breathing in and out through the material. Her hair strayed over the pillow in brittle curls. Wordlessly, she’d declined the croissant that he’d bought her for breakfast.
“You won’t be sick again today, I promise. The wind’s dropped, it’s as quiet as a millpond out there and we’re going where no Bateau Mouche would dare to go…”
She didn’t answer.
“Would you like some orange juice? Or some tea?” I can’t give her Coca-Cola at half-past eight in the morning, he thought. “Or some Coca-Cola?”
At all his patient little offerings, she shook her head.
As the Dragonfly followed a judicious course south towards Ivry, he maintained a running commentary, to cheer himself up as much as her.
“We’re just going under the Pont d’Austerlitz,” he called to her, “Austerlitz was one of Napoleon’s biggest battles – did you know that?”
Nothing.
“Do you know why French bread is the shape that it is? So Napoleon’s soldiers could tuck it into their boots as they rode along. It says so in the guidebook…”
In the face of her overwhelming indifference, he looked hectically round for more inspiration. The river frontage was changing: the opulent constructions of empire and ambition drawn aside to reveal the workings beneath. The plate glass office blocks and the broken glass of decaying quayside warehouses; angular cranes like mechanical birds; pallets and containers; the blue flank of a passing barge; the strenuous arches of a railway bridge; a couple sitting on the embankment next to an empty pushchair, the man holding a baby on his knee, the woman looking away; the exhalation of a slender chimney stack; a streak of graffiti and stretches of concrete, intersecting; a vapour trail high in the wistful sky. From the corner of his eye he could see a gravel barge coming up behind them, shouldering through the water. As it drew abreast of them, the river billowed and then flattened. There was a Renault Mégane mounted on the rear deck. The bargee gave a desultory nod of his head as he went past.
Colin decided that they would find somewhere to tie up for lunch, to give them both a break. He wanted to walk to the nearest bakery with the child. He wanted to point things out to her. He wanted to buy her a cake in the shape of a swan and bet her a euro that she couldn’t finish it. He wanted everything to be simple and straightforward.
She wouldn’t come with him though, in spite of all his persuasion, so he went to a Petit Casino on his own to buy the bread. Cake-wise all that was on offer were some madeleines, sealed up in cellophane bags, which looked as if they’d bounce if you dropped them, so he didn’t bother.
When he proffered a ham baguette she regarded him with watchful eyes.
“You’ve got to eat something.”
She shrugged.
“And eventually you’re going to have to say something, too.”
“I don’t want to be on this boat. There.”
“Look, I know that we didn’t get off to the best possible start, but we’re on our way now and once we get out of Paris–” he broke off, a thought occurring to him. “Actually, I’m going to need your help this afternoon.” He flipped up the seat at the stern and rummaged around in the everything locker. “It’s a VHF radio,” he explained when he found what he was searching for. “There’s a lock coming up fairly soon, a bit of a whopper actually, and we need to radio the lock keeper to ask him when we can pass through. The barges have priority, but hopefully he’ll be able to squeeze us in at the back.”
The child took the radio and turned it over in her hand. She ran her thumb over the brand name and pushed a button or two, then turned it over in her hand again.
“The trouble is, I can’t speak French…”
She held the radio up to her ear.
“It switches on at the top,” Colin said. “Then you turn this knob here to tune it to the channel that you want…”
The hiss and whisper of the VHF sounded between them. Technologically nimble, the child’s fingers moved over the keys.
“It’s channel ten for the lock. You might be able to speak to other barges, too. You press the button at the side to talk and you let it go to listen.”
A voice squawked so loudly she almost dropped the handset. She swung her legs over the edge of her bunk and wriggled her way out of the cabin, a sly grin playing around her mouth.
“Press to talk, let go to listen?”
He nodded.
Reaching for the baguette, and groping for Amandine until she remembered she was tied to the flagpole, the child fired up the VHF. “Bonjour? Allo?”
A push-tow barge was grinding down the centre of the river. Divided into two separate craft, the container at the front was rammed full with building rubble, while doing the hard work at the rear was the engine section, topped off by the living quarters. There was a battered Citroën Xantia at the stern, with a hoist for lifting it on to dry land; squeezed in next to that was a washing machine apparently going through the spin cycle and in front of the cockpit was a playpen the size of a small British semi. The boat was called Calista.
The child was talking with her mouth full, wolfing down unintelligible syllables and sentences, scattering crumbs, her chatter voluble and artless. She started waving her baguette in the air as if to attract attention. “Au secours,” she said as she signed off. “Au secours!” With a flick of the switch to turn the handset off, she flashed Colin a beguiling smile.
“Did you speak to the lock keeper?”
“I talk with Denis. We must be quick.” She began tugging at the rope. “We need to throw off the boat, hurry, hurry.”
“Denis?” queried Colin, starting the engine. “It’s cast off. Cast – not throw. Is Denis the lock keeper?”
“Denis is Mister Calista,” she gestured with the remains of her lunch at the disappearing push-tow.
Obligingly, at such short notice, the Dragonfly made her way up river in the wake of the massive barge. Colin viewed his granddaughter through narrow eyes. She preened at him – like a small bird, she settled her feathers. If there had been more space on deck, she would have strutted up and down. Coming under a road bridge, he could see the entrance to the lock on the left bank. The gravel barge was already tied up and the Calista was docking alongside her.
“But this is your lock,” Delphine nodded at the sign by the entrance.
He squinted up at it. Port à l’Anglais.
It was an up lock and from their vantage point nearly three metres down, tucked in behind the churning sterns of the two barges, the quayside seemed unreachably high. The distant bollards were spaced for two hundred foot vessels, not small fry like the Dragonfly. Colin manoeuvred close to a ladder set into the wall and grabbed onto it with a boathook, which he passed to the child.
“Hold tight, now.”
He was in the process of looping the line round the ladder and keeping an eye on the little girl, when a voice called down from above.
“It is Denis!” Delphine whooped, letting go of the boathook to wave. Colin lunged at the ladder as a bargee in a nylon singlet, sporting much armpit hair, frowned down on them. Not for the first time, he felt as if he were under scrutiny as a child protection risk. The lock was filling and inch by inch the boats were rising. When he and Mister Calista were nose to knee, the man began speaking. Colin couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, he could pick out one or two words – kidnap, for instance, which like trout and mayonnaise were the same in English – and gendarme, he got that one, too. He turned to Delphine.
“Am I right in thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked her. “Am I fully up to speed with this?”
His granddaughter was making a detailed study of the hoist on the back of the barge, as though she might sketch it later, from memory.
“Perhaps you could put me more fully in the picture? What exactly did you tell our friend here?”
She didn’t look at him directly, but her eyes flicked sideways. “I said to him that I am on this boat against my will. Which is true,” she added defiantly. “I say the same to you, non?”
A complicated inflection escaped from Colin. “You did say that, yes. Although that is slightly different from…”
“I didn’t think that he would call the police,” she said in a small voice.
“Has he called the police?”
The bargee took a long hard look at the darkening bruise around the child’s eye and switched his gaze to Colin. With a hand the size of an Alsace ham he cleaned out the contents of one ear, wiping his finger on his trouser leg.
“He says you must give a satisfactory account, or–”
“I’m her grand-père,” he began, while the man cleaned out his other ear. When assistance with translation was not forthcoming from his granddaughter, he said in a louder voice, “Vacances… grand-père… Angleterre.” He smiled and nodded and then for good measure he attempted a Gallic shrug.
Denis was unimpressed. With ostentatious slowness, he craned his head to look at the back of their boat, where the Dragonfly’s name and registration number were emblazoned in a deeper shade of blue. He appeared to be making ponderous mental notes.
In a moment of inspiration Colin whipped his mobile phone out of his pocket and began thumbing through his list of contacts, “You can talk to her grandmother, if you like. She will explain.”
This was an eventuality that Delphine hadn’t costed into her escape plan. “Pas nécessaire,” she said swiftly to Denis. “I make a joke, une petite blague. Amusante, non?”
Ahead of them the lock gates were opening. Mister Calista said something to the child, then muscling up his shoulders he stared at Colin. He jabbed two fingers at him. The meaning was clear in any language: I’ll be watching you.
“And bon voyage to you, too,” retorted Colin, while the child, who appeared to have shrunk to about half her size, fiddled with the VHF for a moment and then put it quietly back in the locker.
~~~
They continued on their way in circumspect silence, with the reticence of those who sense they must be mindful of one another, without being certain how.
“Where are we going?” asked Delphine dully, at one point.
“South,” he answered, hedging his bets.
“South where?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “South until the butter melts, I suppose.”
A little while later she tried again. “What is a dragonfly?”
If Colin heard, he didn’t answer, and after this their efforts petered out, their unfamiliarity with each other too awkward to overcome.
The opening to the marina where they were to stay the night was screened by branches. The mooring consisted of a municipal leisure centre with harbour attached, full of fatigued yachts covered in plastic sheeting spattered with bird shit, houseboats undergoing a kind of Forth Bridge-style renovation that would never be completed, and bumptious little motor cruisers. They tied up near a jetty where two lads were attempting to deflate an inflatable canoe and cram it into an unfeasibly small holdall. The child regarded them with critical interest as they flattened and rolled and then lay on the canoe, to no avail.
“It’s a flying insect, actually.” Colin set a saucepan of water on the Primus stove. “A dragonfly. They look like little brown bi-planes. And there are damselflies as well. You see them all the time on the river, as blue as an August sky. If you sit very quietly sometimes they’ll settle on your hand.”
“The Dragonfly,” The child scrutinised her own small palm, rolling the dirt out of the creases with her thumb; “It’s a pretty name.”
“Some people call them the devil’s darning needle. There’s a legend that if you fall asleep by a stream the Dragonfly will sew your eyelids shut.”
“Like me,” she piped up, “I had my eyelid sewed!”
“Glued–”
“It’s the same thing,” she countered. She went back to studying her hand, flexing it, then cupping it and holding it out, tilting it this way and that. “I have a pretty name too,” she remarked, “but you never call me by it.”
He stiffened. The saucepan was coming to the boil and he turned off the gas. “Don’t I?”
She shook her head, “Never.”
He didn’t have to make a mental inventory, or check, or ask himself why. He sat there, watching splinters of lime scale spiral through the water to the bottom of the pan, contemplating the sadness which was like a shadow of himself: it rose in the morning when he rose, and moved through the day with him, and settled down with him at night.
“Pourquoi pas?”
He wondered whether it was easier for her to ask difficult questions in words that were more familiar to her.
“I don’t know why…” he answered, untruthfully. He thought of all the years of habitual denial, when her name had been unspoken. I don’t have a son anymore and he doesn’t have a daughter. I no longer have a wife. I am nothing and have no one. It was easier like that. It ruled out the prospect of further loss. He chewed on his lip, then opened his mouth as if now, prompted and put on the spot, it might be possible to speak. His mouth closed of its own accord. He was frightened of naming her. It would be an admission of something. It would acknowledge too much. “I suppose I’m scared of messing things up,” he muttered, as if that would explain it. “Grown-ups are hopeless at getting things wrong.”
She was taut beside him.
“You’re right, it is a pretty name,” he managed, hunching his shoulders forward. He found he didn’t want to let her down. He didn’t want to fall short. He cleared his throat in preparation, straightening his back.
She put a finger to her lips, but he was past noticing.
“Delphine,” he began; it was like learning a new word in a foreign language, he was trying to make sense of it in his mouth. “Delphine…”
“See?” she whispered, hardly hearing him. “See?”
The sound of her name spoken aloud took him almost to the brink and for an instant he thought that all his unhappiness would come tumbling out; he blinked and swallowed, aware of a congestion deep inside him. When he had got a grip on himself, he followed her gaze and saw that two damselflies, quivering blue, were coupling on her grimy hand.