When Colin surfaced the next morning, she was gone.
He was lying in his berth, his dreamy half-sleep infused with the scent of cut grass, and the cabin washed with the unspoilt sunshine of early morning, when he opened his eyes, saw her empty bed, sat upright in a panic and cracked his head on the roof.
Holy God! He scrambled into his shorts, rubbing his forehead with one frantic palm, buttoning his flies, scootching on his sandals, remembering to tug on a T-shirt and realising too late that it was inside out. The hatch was already open and he lurched onto the deck, scanning the leafy port.
“Delphine?” he yelled, with none of the inhibitions of the previous day. He couldn’t see her anywhere. He leapt up onto the mooring, leaving the startled Dragonfly to right itself, the wooden planks crashing under his feet as he ran from one boardwalk to another. He could hear the creak and rasp of ropes as the boats he passed responded to his alarm, heaving forward and then falling back; he could hear the creak and rasp of his own lungs as he called for her time after time.
He skidded to a halt and stopped an oversized man with a newspaper and a baguette under one arm. “Fille?” gasped Colin. “Jeune fille?” An image of her slight body floating in the river filled his thoughts. If she wasn’t face down in the Seine, past saving, she’d be on the loose somewhere between Ivry and Paris trying to make her way home, crazy child who no longer had a proper home to go to. “Have you seen a girl, about nine years old, wearing a hat, with a–” He should have taken proper care of her, he’d injured her, he’d made her sick; whichever way you looked at it, he’d loused up.
“Jah!” Beads of sweat were breaking on the man’s upper lip.
“Where?” asked Colin, “Where is she?”
“Over there–” the man pointed to the far end of the enclosure where a row of neglected live-aboards sidled together.
Colin hacked his way across the marina. He heard his granddaughter before he saw her, and slowed to a lope, following the splash and ripple of her laughter to an overgrown corner of the port, where broad reeds stirred the slacking river, the planks of the pontoon were split from too much sunshine and wild flowers in pale throngs filled every gap.
Irritation and relief went coursing through him indecipherably. She was slinging chunks of yesterday’s bread into the water, leaning way back to give traction to her throw, which promised much in terms of effort, but seemed to deliver very little, the bread landing only a few feet from her. She was giving a running commentary and as he drew closer he could see the tiny figure of Amandine propped haphazardly, gazing with fortitude at her own knees. He couldn’t pick out a word that the child – that Delphine – was saying, but he understood the music of her conversation, the tone of wonder, the different pitches of delight, and amusement, and hardly-daring-to-believe…
He hung back, trying to catch his breath, while insects scatted through the air. After a moment, he shoved his hands into his pockets and wandered up, as if he were on his way somewhere and just happened to be passing.
“Morning,” he managed.
“Colin! Colin! Look, oh look–” She clapped her hands together, sending a spray of bread crumbs everywhere. “I don’t know the word – c’est des loutres – regardez!”
Twisting through the current, turning and weaving amber and gold, were two otters. His granddaughter snapped off a piece of bread and passed it to him, without taking her eyes off them. The crust felt rough between his fingers and he held it for a moment, hesitating.
“They like this so much,” she whispered and to encourage him she lobbed a stale chunk in their direction. With lazy grace, the smallest otter fielded it, rolled over onto his back, held it to its mouth with scratty claws and started chewing at one corner. Colin stared at its white staccato teeth. His granddaughter gazed up at him and a warm contagion began to melt his anger and his panic, and grinning back at her he pretended to spit on the bread and polish it on his shorts, before bowling it into the air, a perfect Yorker, which the largest otter caught at the boundary, before diving down and away, until he was out of their sight. With a flip and a slip the other one disappeared.
Delphine stood staring at the last of the ripples.
“Let’s walk to the shops and get some breakfast, shall we?” he said, as the wrinkled water spread and settled.
She broke up the last of the bread and threw it with unreliable aim at a pair of geese. She was still smiling and in that instant, Colin found himself wondering if he would ever dare to let himself love her like he had loved her father, and felt stricken at the thought.
~~~
“No, not like that, hold it up a bit – that’s it.”
They were sitting almost knee to knee in the freckled sunshine, while Delphine held his shaving mirror at an angle which reflected the fenders on the boat behind them and Colin tried to shave himself in the brief seconds when he caught sight of his chin. He dipped his razor into the bucket and rifts of foam swirled round the blade.
She was watching him intently, making a study of him and every time she regarded him from a different angle, the mirror moved.
“You’ve missed a bit.”
He pulled the skin along his jaw line taut and shaved where she had indicated. She nodded in a tolerant way that suggested she would have made a better job of it herself.
“And there–”
He scraped away at his upper lip, under her scrutiny. “If you could hold the mirror still for a moment…”
“Don’t you have an electric razor?”
“No.”
“Papa has an electric razor.”
“Does he?” Colin schooled himself to be casual. It wouldn’t do to allow his heart into his mouth every time Michael was mentioned. At the same time, he found it strange to think of him as a man who shaved, who had a job, a wife, a life in Paris which he knew nothing of, when he was fixed always and forever in his thoughts at about the age of ten, before the family exploded into smithereens. His stomach knotted at the thought of all that Sally had taken from him. He cleaned his razor in the water once again.
“Yes. And one day he was late for work so he took it with him in the car and the battery ran out and he went into a meeting with half a – what is it?”
“Beard.”
“Beard,” she repeated. “In French it is barbe,” she told him in an informative, important little voice.
“Le barbe?”
“Non, non, c’est feminine – la barbe.”
“French is a crazy language.” He rinsed his face in the bucket and patted it dry. “How do I look?”
“Old,” she answered, unsparingly.
“That’s OK, I am old.”
A breath of sadness flickered across her face. Her hand reached subconsciously for Amandine, who had been left sitting in the cabin with the phone on her lap. The child contemplated herself in the mirror, staring into her own eyes as if there was something she couldn’t quite understand.
“What happened to Sally?” she asked without looking at him.
Colin was emptying the bucket over the side. He watched the stream and tumble of the dirty water. “She died of breast cancer the year after you were born.”
Delphine, who seemed to be disappearing inside herself, didn’t answer. He shook the drips from the bucket and wiped it round with his towel. After the horror of the divorce, Sally’s death had caused a secondary grief to spread insidiously through his system, settling in his organs, eating at the vital parts of him. He put the bucket back in the locker, closing the lid quietly. The towel was damp in his lap. He folded it in half and then in half again, his watch strap catching on a thread. He yanked the loose thread taut and snapped it off, turning to his granddaughter – Sally’s grandchild too. She was wiping her arm across her face and the very thought that she might be smudging away a tear had him on his knees beside her, “Are you alright?”
She nodded.
After a moment or two she shook her head.
Then she nodded once more.
“Where are we going today?” she asked shortly.
“South,” he said.
“But of course–” she didn’t smile, although for a moment she looked as though she might.
“Until the butter melts,” they said together, making a raggedy chorus, a tattered pledge of good intent. She jumped up and put her arms around his waist which momentarily flummoxed him, and then she gave him a wheedling grin,
“And is it possible for me to drive?”
~~~
He did let her drive; some of the way, on the straight bits when there was no traffic. She had two speeds: fast, and heart-stoppingly fast.
“Where are the brakes?” she squealed as two Canada geese streaked past the Dragonfly’s bows, heading helter-skelter for the bank.
“There are no brakes.”
Beneath his seat the crockery shivered in its locker, the vibrations changing key as the child accelerated.
“Look at me!” she crowed.
“You put it into reverse if you want to stop…”
“Like this?”
“Careful–” There was a smell of burning metal and the Dragonfly jack-knifed gracefully through blue smoke. The river settled as close as silk, shimmering and spun. “A bit like that,” Colin said weakly. “Shall I take her for a while?”
They changed places and Delphine wriggled round in her seat so that she could dangle her feet over the side, her toes letting small slits of sunlight into the green water where the weeds bubbled under the surface, paddling which kept her amused all the way to the outskirts of Melun, where the Seine started to seem less like a motorway and more like an A road. There was a provincial feel to it: the depth was shallower and the current wasn’t bustling quite so busily. In the centre of the town it wound its way around an island. Colin had prepared himself for this.
On the island was a prison.
Delphine stared up at the implacably high walls, with Amandine peering out from underneath her chin; the expression on the child’s face as impenetrable as the jail itself. He kept looking straight ahead, as though, just now, their passage required particular concentration, but from time to time he risked a glance in her direction.
“There’s the prison,” he said shortly.
“I can see.”
“How is Papa…?”
She said something in French to Amandine, something disparaging, he thought. “Are we nearly south?” she asked him a few minutes later, with a flicker in her gaze.
“We’re on our way…”
“Good. When will we arrive there?”
He didn’t answer.
She spent the rest of the afternoon reading a comic in the cabin – it was as far away as she could get from him while still remaining on the boat. Eventually, she poked her head out of the hatch. “Where shall we rest tonight?” He noticed that her speech sometimes had a kind of quaint formality; her brittleness untranslatable.
“I think we shall rest at Samois-sur-Seine, if it pleases you Mademoiselle.”
“It pleases me,” she replied and he wasn’t sure who was humouring whom, but he was relieved that once again both of them were trying. “Je serai ravie. I will be ravished,” she added graciously.
Even in July, with the lime trees sighing in the heat, turning the evening air syrupy with sap, a town with a closed funfair is a melancholy sight. The main square and the scribble of streets leading from it were lined with sideshows which had their lurid shutters up; the chrome ranks of the dodgems stared glassily into the middle distance and the arms of the rocket ride reared up at gawky angles. Like a soundtrack of dismay the generators kept up their enervating hum. The supermarket was closed; the library was closed,
“Everything’s always shut in France. It’s shut because it’s a Monday, or it’s shut because it is lunchtime, or it’s shut because there’s a fair in town, but then the fair’s shut too. It’s a miracle that anybody makes a living here at all.”
“The bar is open over there…”
“I can’t take you into a bar – you’re nine.”
The owner wore a white vest and had braces holding up his serge trousers and the only other customer wore a white vest and had a belt holding up his serge trousers, his style statement personalised by the addition of a greasy canvas cap. The cracks in the mosaic floor were filled with what looked like coffee grounds and they couldn’t find a table that didn’t wobble when they put their drinks upon it. Colin ordered her a Coke, but the delivery wasn’t due till Thursday, so she had to make do with Orangina and Amandine was not amused.
Delphine slurped through her straw. Colin plotted the line of the rivulets running through the condensation on his glass. The room was divided by a brick arch which still had Christmas decorations pinned to it. The man in the cap turned the page of his newspaper. Delphine drummed her heels and Colin had to fight the urge to ask her not to. The owner wiped down the counter with a fraying piece of rag and as an afterthought cleaned a circular orange tray with something of a flourish. A bee flew in through the open window and then realising the error of its ways, straight away flew out again.
A summer evening, a French village, stifled expectation, the lamenting heat…
Colin swirled the beer around his glass and drank a mouthful, making it last.
“Who was Albert Dreyfus?”
A page was turned, a tray clattered, Colin swallowed his beer.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw a sign on a building back there.”
He craned his head to see, frowning. There was a commemorative plaque high up on the side of the house at the end of the street opposite. “I can’t see.”
Her mouth made small whisperings as she repeated, “In this house lived Fernand Labori, the lawyer who defended Albert Dreyfus and Émile Zola.”
“It was a cause célèbre, I seem to remember” he answered, keen to show off his grasp of French history, “At least, I think it was. Dreyfus was accused of something that he didn’t do – was it treason? I’m not sure – but because he was Jewish and there was a lot of prejudice about in those days, nobody believed that he was innocent.”
The bottle of Orangina, with its flakes of orange pressed to the occluded glass, was halfway to her mouth. She stared at the dulled surface of the table, not drinking. She set the bottle down.
“What happened to him?”
“He went to prison, as far as I recall.” He banished a fleeting picture of the pale, repelling walls in Melun. “Old Fernand can’t have been much cop as a lawyer, plaque or no plaque…” he went chuntering on, covering for both of them, until it became impossible not to acknowledge the change in atmosphere: hot air touching cooler air, currents shifting.
Delphine put both elbows on the table. “Samois-sur-Seine is a very boring place and I feel sorry for anyone who ever had to live here,” she announced.
Colin surveyed her with some surprise, “That’s not very nice,” he said placidly.
“Very sorry for them,” she persisted.
“Are you going to finish that?”
“I don’t like it here, I don’t like Orangina and I don’t like–” A huge manufacture of emotion was under way. She scraped her chair back as he reached for her drink and took a swig.
“I wish I was–” the lack of anything to wish for – her home, her mother, her father, her old life – only seemed to make things worse. She grabbed Amandine and bolted for the door, knocking into the furniture, making a chair topple and leaving him open-mouthed. He glanced at the men in vests, who looked away. The owner wiped down the counter; the man in the cap folded his paper in half and cleared his throat.
Colin eyed a beer mat on the table. He touched the corner of it with his finger, conscious of the contained turbulence which seemed to sit so oddly with Delphine’s playfulness; of what near neighbours her laughter and her brooding silences were turning out to be. As he groped in his pocket for some change, he wondered which one of them was most out of their depth. He paid the bill, reminding himself that he was the grown-up, that right now he was all she had.
As he hurried back through the little town, the funfair was beginning to strut its tawdry stuff and the air smelt of candyfloss and diesel and hot rubber. The bakery was open and he doubled back, scanning the yellow cellophaned glass for a cake in the shape of a swan among the tired fruit tarts and the cracked meringues. Nothing doing, but he spied a frog made of green marzipan and chocolate and dashed in to buy her one of those instead. In the window of the newsagent’s was a display in homage to another local boy made good – the musician Django Reinhardt. He bought an ancient CD housed in cloudy plastic and then hurried back to the port.
He spotted her sitting on the quayside clasping her knees and for a moment her neat outline with its stilled angles seemed unimaginably familiar to him. He speeded up, waving the baguette above his head in salute and then, his joints making faint protest, lowered himself down beside her. He could feel the warmth of the stone through his shorts.
“Was it talking about the trial and Dreyfus going to prison that upset you?” he asked without preamble.
“Yes.”
They looked at one another, each of them momentarily disarmed by their own candour.
“I thought so,” Colin said after a pause. In the distance he could hear the spangled music of the funfair and for a while he sat listening to the fragmented chords. “Because of Papa…?”
She didn’t answer.
“I thought you might like this,” he slid the paper bag containing the marzipan frog towards her. She glanced at it, then rested her chin on her knees.
“Because of his trial…?” he tried again.
She sketched a shrug, a slight shifting of muscle, nothing more.
“We can’t not talk about it, you and me.”
He thought he saw her expression harden, but it was the hardness that comes from shouldering a burden: there was effort and stress and pain written in her face, though she said nothing.
“The reason we can’t not talk about it is that we both love him, we care about him, we mind what happens to him.”
She started picking at the bald patch on the side of Amandine’s head, running her fingernail along the thinning weft of the material. She didn’t utter a word.
“Are you angry with him?”
She stared at him in brief astonishment and shook her head.
“For what he’s done?”
A thread was coming loose in the tight black darning of Amandine’s nose and she rolled the end of it between her finger and thumb with renewed absorption.
Given half a chance Colin would have retraced his steps to the bar and ordered himself a drink considerably stiffer than the lightweight French beer he’d had earlier – a cognac perhaps, or a Calvados. At difficult moments his default response had always been to walk away: to potter in his shed, to wash the car, to build a boat… He gnawed at his lip, “If you don’t talk about something, if you can’t bring yourself to talk about it, then you run the risk that it becomes bigger than it needs to be,” he went on, doggedly.
Delphine looked at him with strange compassion, as if she could see that he was floundering because she was floundering too. “It is not possible…” she said haltingly and he couldn’t tell what wasn’t possible – for them to talk, or for the horrible, shitty mess that Michael had made to be any bigger than it was.
High above them an arc of wild geese slung themselves homewards across the sky and Colin lost himself in the whirred telegraphy of their wings and the whisper of the lime tree leaves which shed their scent like rain. “Do you like marzipan?” He lifted the frog out of the bag and wagging it from side to side he croaked, “Hello Delphine,” and then answered on her behalf, “Hello Mr Frog.” It was the best that he could do.
She took the frog and to oblige him she bit off its chocolate-coated toes.
“Good.” He climbed onto the Dragonfly and helped her down beside him. “Tonight I’m going to give you your first one pot cooking lesson. We’ll make risotto and when we’ve eaten we’ll drink Coca-Cola by the light of the moon.”
Delphine chopped garlic, onion and mushrooms somewhat erratically, while Colin put his new Django Reinhardt CD on the CD player. He didn’t just cook, he acted out the cooking with extravagant gestures, tossing the vegetables up into the air and catching some of them in the pan, while the rest bounced over the side and into the river. As they sizzled in the hot oil, he started tapping along to the music with a wooden spoon on the edge of the frying pan, then the outboard motor, the cleats and Delphine’s grey tweed hat, so that in the end she couldn’t not laugh.
He put up the cabin door table and sat her down at it, spreading the drying up cloth over her knees as if it were the finest damask. With a sweep of his hand, he presented the can of Coke to her.
“Mademoiselle…” he said in a cod French accent, “I zink you find zis is a ferry good year, non?” He ripped the ring pull off with a bow. “You waunt to taste?”
Delphine tasted; she gave him a bashful glance.
“Might I recommend ze risotto for zis evening? Ze onion I have plucked myself from ze shelves of Leclerc and ze mushrooms zey are waild…”
He clowned for both of them and when he slumped back in his seat after the meal was over and smoked his one cigarette of the day and their merriment threatened to fold up into something small and disposable, he turned the volume on the CD player to full and towed her up onto the quayside and the two of them danced chaotically to Reinhardt’s indefatigable rhythms until the night was so black that they couldn’t dance anymore.