“I’m not coming. I won’t come. It’s too hot for Amandine and it’s too hot for me.”
“Now look here–”
The two of them were not quite shouting at each other: Delphine was not quite shouting in a way that suggested she very soon would be and Colin was not quite shouting with the tested patience that comes from long practice.
“I don’t want to see the town. I’ve seen plenty of towns. I don’t want to come. I want to stay here.”
“But I need to get some petrol.”
“I don’t want to get petrol. You can get petrol without me.”
“But Joigny’s supposed to be nice.”
“Sens was supposed to be nice,” she answered darkly, as if that settled the matter.
High in the ozone, in the blue air, a helicopter hacked in lumbering circles, each one lower than the last. Colin shaded his eyes. “It’s coming in to land, I think.”
From the far side of the river an important little launch was skimming towards them carrying two men in evening dress, although it was only mid-afternoon. Delphine picked at a scab on her elbow as they tied up behind the Dragonfly, but as they started unloading a length of red carpet, she swivelled round to watch.
“Ah, Colin…”
He was briefly charmed by the way that, with her French accent, she could turn his name into the bars of a song; he liked the lilt and swoop of the syllables as she spoke them, “Colin…” For a moment he was entranced to be her reference point, the person she showed things to and shared them with. All the fight about fetching the petrol went out of him.
“There’s a restaurant over there–” he jerked his head at the other bank. “A famous one. People come from far and wide…”
The noise of the helicopter was raining down on them. Delphine covered her ears and squealed, “I think it must be the President. Or maybe Daniel Radcliffe or Lady Gaga.” The downdraught flattened Michael’s lavender tweed hat against her hair. “Do you think it is possible?”
The two immaculate men were rolling the red carpet from the launch up the river bank. One of them was not happy with the lie of it and half rolled it up in order to perfect the angle in relation to the launch. When they spread it out a second time he seemed painfully unconvinced. He brushed some dried grass from the pile with a morose sweep of his fingers and then shot his cuffs as if to have done with it. The two of them processed to the end and Colin had to physically restrain Delphine from jumping ashore and running after them.
“I think it is the Mayor of Joigny and his deputy and they are here to meet Robert Pattinson,” she declared breathlessly.
“I think they’re waiters, actually. Very smart ones,” he replied, conscious of the oil on his shorts and the fact that he had been wearing the same T-shirt for three days now.
As the two helicopter passengers, clad in expensive shades of camel and bent low because of the churning wind, came scuttling across the field, his granddaughter scrambled up onto the cabin roof and started waving Amandine high in the air.
“Bonjour! Bienvenue! Welcome to Joigny, Robert! My name is Delphine and this is my boat and we are making a grand voyage south until the butter melts!”
The couple sped along the red carpet without so much as a glance in their direction. Delphine slid back down onto the deck trailing Amandine loosely behind her.
“I don’t think it was Robert,” she sighed as the launch pulled away with its precious cargo, “Robert would have waved. He would have said hello at least. He probably would have come on board for a Coca-Cola and signed an autograph for Amandine. She collects them, you know.”
Colin tweaked her cap. “I’m going to get that petrol.”
“He probably would have,” her lower lip was jutting out and without thinking he nudged it back into place with the knuckle of his finger.
“What about you?”
She leaned against him for a moment, a negligible gift of tenderness, and as she fiddled with a loose thread on the monkey’s little snout, he was conscious of the careless warmth of her arm against his shirt. A quick twist of an emotion that he couldn’t name spiralled inside him.
“Why don’t I set you up with a fishing rod?” If I’m getting the petrol, you ought to be doing something productive – it’s only fair.”
“I cannot do fishing – it is not possible.”
“It’s easy…” He dug the bag with his fishing tackle out of the everything locker. “I used to go fishing with your dad when he was about your age; he had his own rod and everything…”
Delphine ran the monkey’s paw across her cheek ruminatively as she watched him assemble the fishing tackle.
“It screws together like this; you put that bit on there and thread the line through here…”
“Did Papa like fishing?”
He broke off from what he was doing, flooded with the memory of the two of them sitting damply under an umbrella by the canal, a flask of warm tea and their sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper on the grass between them, with Michael ticking off everything they caught in his I-Spy book of river fish.
“Yeah, he did like it. He was very good at it, what’s more.”
He finished assembling the fishing rod. “You’re very like him, you know,” he said to his granddaughter, after a pause; he found himself wishing that she would lean against him one more time, but she was scanning the middle distance, her eyes darting this way and that as if she had mislaid something. “To look at. You’ve got his hair, and his colouring.”
“Papa’s going thin on top. That’s why he wears a hat.” Her voice sounded terse, as if she were correcting him, as if this was something she had gone over with him many times, but her eyes were still searching, on and on, trying to locate all that she had lost.
“That hat?”
She chose not to answer. He could see she was brimful with something, something which darkened her gaze further, which caused her to fold her lips tight and rest her chin on Amandine’s head, something which made her draw in a breath and look at him acutely, and then say nothing.
“And you laugh exactly the same way that he does, with your mouth curled up a bit at the side. That was one of the first things I noticed – the way you laugh.”
“OK, I’ll do the fishing. I’ll do it. If that’s what you want,” she shouted to shut him up.
He blinked in astonishment. He laid the rod along the locker, taking his time as he digested the sour taste of victory. “You don’t have to…”
Delphine rolled her eyes to the heavens.
“Not if you don’t want to…”
“I’ve said I’ll do it.”
“I just thought that it might–”
“Colin,” she shouted, then she clapped her hands over her ears and started making la la la-la la sounds at full teenager volume, although she was only nine.
“OK, OK,” he looked up and down the mooring, smiling and nodding at the one or two boaters watching them with interest. “Let’s hit the rewind button. Do you want to do some fishing while I go and find the petrol?”
“No.”
“OK.”
“But I will.”
Reflecting on the weird way in which you can win an argument and still feel you haven’t got what you wanted, he showed her how to bait the hook with a bit of old bacon and how to reel the line in. He cast the rod for her.
“Amandine goes fishing often,” she observed dispassionately. “She catches sharks and everything. In Brittany, when we go on holiday.”
“Well, let’s see what she can do with the Yonne.” He peered down into the river and then passed her the rod. “I won’t be long. Don’t talk to strange men and don’t leave the boat under any circumstances. Understood?”
She gave him a withering glance. When he reached the end of the pontoon and turned to look back at her, she was up on the cabin roof with her headphones and sunglasses on, doing a kind of lying-down dance, the fishing rod with its line snagging in the water abandoned on the deck below.
~~~
To calm himself down, he had his one cigarette of the day over a furtive beer in a bar in the main square. 24/7 childcare! Not for the fainthearted, or the recently retired except in very small doses when there was a parent on hand to bundle the child back to. He stubbed his cigarette out half-smoked and checked his watch.
The route back to the mooring was downhill, thank God, and the streets were laid out in a thousand year-old grid designed to keep out as much of the sunlight as possible, but still the mediaeval houses, their walls the colour of scorched earth, seemed to glimmer and shift in the glare.
He paused on the bridge to catch his breath, his eyes seeking the Dragonfly. In the distance he could just make it out, lazing in its berth, moving with wide-hipped indolence from side to side as the current went swaying past. He took his hat off, wiped his forehead on his arm and fanned himself. Beneath him, the reflection of the town lay like oil upon the water and it was bliss, for a moment, to lean against the cool stone and gazing down, to lose himself in the marbling of clouds, the inflections of blue shot through with river green.
Beyond the port de plaisance was a recreation ground and he smiled to himself to hear children squealing and calling, their vaulting laughter the soundtrack of a summer’s day, picturing the games of chase, the terrible pleasure of a dare, the hide and seek, the racing to catch up, the always out of reach –
He hesitated, his hat motionless in his hand, the heat collecting round its brim. The clamour, dispersing through the air, changed tone, drawing out into a single cry of anguish. He strained to place it, tilting his head to hear more clearly. It wasn’t coming from the rec. He crammed his hat back on to his head and heaving the jerry can into both arms, he started to run.
Sprinting with twenty litres of fuel sloshing against his chest was impossible to sustain for long. He reached the end of the bridge, panting, and set the container down to rest for a moment. When he picked it up again it seemed twice as heavy, but he staggered on for another fifty metres before he had to stop again. He rested with his hands against his knees, weighed down with the recognition of that cry. To hell with the fuel! He left the can there in the middle of the path and dragging more breath into his lungs, he started to run in real earnest, conscious of the epilepsy of the tall trees flashing past and the panic rising inside him.
A crowd of boaters had gathered round the Dragonfly and he charged through them scattering them to right and left.
“I’m her grandfather – let me through – excuse me please–”
He didn’t know what he expected to find. He just knew that he couldn’t stand the swollen, shrilling sound of Delphine’s screams.
There was a woman standing next to her, her arm encircling the space around the child, as if comforting her without actually having to make contact.
“I’m her grandfather–” he cried, and the boaters took a few steps back. “What is it? What’s happened?”
Delphine was incapable of stopping herself from sobbing; the hawser sounds of her crying kept coming and coming. Her head was hanging and in her hand she held the mallet, glistening silver with gore.
Colin dropped to his knees beside her. “Tell me what’s happened?” Her hair had fallen forward, hiding her face and when he tried looping it back so that he could see her better, he could feel that it was stiff with… matter. She had a trail of greasy blood down one cheek; it was all over both her hands and the mallet, the palest blood imaginable: a smear of platelets and scales.
He took the hammer from her and laid it on the pontoon. He held her against him, lacking practice, and she pressed her face into his T-shirt and all her tears and sticky fishiness washed over him.
“I killed it. I didn’t know what to do. It wouldn’t keep still and I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t get the hook out of its mouth. It kept moving. It kept twisting. I tried to get the hook out and I couldn’t, and I couldn’t throw it back into the river with the hook still there, so I found the mallet in the locker and I hit it and it kept moving and I hit it. I hit it and hit it.” She looked at him with bleary eyes. “It wouldn’t stop moving…”
Colin sat back on his heels. He had thought the chances of her catching something with a ratty old bit of bacon were about a million to one. He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket and held it out. “Here, spit on this.”
Delphine spat halfheartedly and he wiped away the blood from her cheek. She burrowed back into his T-shirt when he had finished and she huddled close as if she had been washed ashore there, limp and spent.
“Why don’t you show me what you caught?”
He could feel the muffled shaking of her head between the crook of his neck and his collarbone, but he clambered upright, lurching a little under her weight and she clung to his top with a barnacle grip.
One of the helpful boaters had retrieved the jerry can and placed it on the pontoon with a nod. He thanked the man silently and the small knot of people loosened and began to disband.
He set her back on her feet, keeping a tentative hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you show me…?”
She answered by curling herself closer into the harbour of his chest.
“Well, let’s get cleaned up a bit, shall we?” With her still attached to him, he rinsed the mallet in the river and then knelt her down and made her wash her hands and arms, the scales of the fish silvering the surface of the water. “Come along now…”
She hardly seemed to know what she was doing. He led her like a child – she was a child, something that it was somehow easy to forget – back along the pontoon to the Dragonfly.
Lying on the deck amongst its own weeping viscera was a big fat catfish, a double figure warrior. “Delphine, you are an absolute marvel! I’d kill to land a catch like that. How on earth did you do it? You are extraordinary!”
Still she pressed her face against him; he could feel her wet breath and her wet tears seeping through his clothing. “I’m not,” she gulped.
He crouched so that he was level with her. The world looked different from this preteen angle. “You are to me,” he said.
“I’m a not nice person.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you are.”
“You don’t know me.”
He scratched the back of his head. “I’m getting to know you…” His knees were seizing and he wanted to stand up, so he said in rather a rush, “You’re sunny and you’re brave and you make me laugh.”
She shook her head, her eyes downcast, not meeting his gaze, and her tears coursed and then dripped onto his shorts. He made one or two attempts at mopping her cheeks, then he levered himself up, climbed onto the boat, wrapped up the catfish in a carrier bag and opened a Coke for the two of them to share. He sat himself next to her and to his delight she leant against him.
“I tell you what we’ll do: we’ll sail the Dragonfly across the river to that famous restaurant, where we can probably only afford one crisp between us, and we will take your fish with us and ask the chef to cook it for your supper. How does that sound?”
She managed a watery smile which had him wondering if his attempts at kindness made things worse. The smile faded and for a moment she had an orphaned look about her that he didn’t like to see.
“You can wear your best dress and I will find a pair of shorts that doesn’t have oil on them and put on a clean T-shirt for the occasion. Maybe we should ring them up and ask them to come and fetch us in their launch. Why don’t we? That’s what we’ll do – we’ll call them.”
She gave an almost imperceptible nod and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand; she straightened her spine. It was bad enough seeing her upset, but even harder to see her being brave. “That’s my girl,” he said gruffly. He ruffled her hair. “The only thing is – you’ll have to do the talking.”
~~~
Delphine put on a bit of everything: an orange skirt, some grey leggings, a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and something green and floaty over the top of that. She twisted up her hair under the lavender tweed hat and painted her nails in different colours.
All of this was done privately, and without joy. Colin watched from the corner of his eye as he shaved and washed his hair in the bucket. He towelled himself dry, shaking his head like a dog coming out of the sea, scattering drops everywhere.
“Colin! Now I will have to do my nail all over again. It is not possible–”
“Are you ready?”
“I have to paint again – this nail, and that one. Mer–”
“Let’s get going.”
“–de.”
They couldn’t find a phone number for the restaurant. No launch, no red carpet, but they set off through the rec, over the bridge and along the quay on the other side, as irritably as an old married couple.
An immaculately dressed waiter met them at the entrance.
“Poisson – jeune fille – rivière–” With no help from his granddaughter, Colin made catching motions, the carrier bag swirling with dangerous scents. “Ou est le–?”
The maître d’ appeared, and Colin tried again.
“Poisson–” He started to unwrap the fish, and the piscatorial scent immediately intensified. Delphine, with an existential sigh, made a minute examination of a vase of lilies every bit as tall as her, standing by the reception desk like angels clustered at the gates to heaven. “Jeune fille–” He clapped his hands together as if catching something: flies, catfish, moonbeams?
“May I help Monsieur?” asked the maître d’ in impeccable English.
Arrested mid-mime, Colin replied with a courtesy that matched his. “My granddaughter,” he gestured in her direction; if Delphine could have climbed into the vase of flowers, she would have done, “Caught her first fish this afternoon. In your river. It is an extraordinarily fine specimen, and deserves the finest cooking.”
Accepting the compliment while at the same time keeping to a safe distance, the maître d’ humbly inclined his head.
“Which is why we have come here.”
“It is not ordinary for Chef to prepare something he has not sourced himself,” came the murmured deprecation.
“It is no ordinary fish,” said Colin. “Well, actually, it’s a little bit… damaged… in places, you can see it put up a very good fight.”
The head of service took the carrier bag and finessed it onwards to the waiter at the speed of light. “We will ask the kitchen…” Anticipating Colin’s thanks, he humbly inclined his head once more and Colin, in turn, inclined his just a fraction further. “Would Monsieur et Mademoiselle care to enjoy a cocktail…?” His glance passed over the terminally embarrassed Delphine. “On the terrace, perhaps, where it is quieter?” he suggested, diplomatically.
Colin wetted his lips with his beer and gazed at the river; through the limestone balustrade he glimpsed the duck egg blue prow of the Dragonfly and his chest welled at the sight. What would you think if you could see us now? he said silently to Sally. As he stared at the child sitting opposite him, he had the vaguest notion that all the hurt which had dogged him for so many, many years might somehow be cleansed by her. She was drinking noisily from a tall glass containing a symphony of juices that was a fruit salad – almost a meal in itself. She was swinging her legs, but he didn’t say anything. He rolled the beer around the inside of his glass and smiled inexpertly across at her; she made a slurping sound back at him and he knocked about one pound fifty’s worth of beer down in a single gulp.
A man in chef ’s whites with chequerboard trousers approached their table. “Mademoiselle,” he began. “Is it true that you caught so magnificent a fish from the river this afternoon?”
Delphine’s eyes rounded. With the straw still in her mouth, she nodded.
“I propose a preparation très simple, I will grill your fish myself and serve him with a bitter almond emulsion, perhaps une salade verte on the side and some potato frites.”
“With mayonnaise?”
The chef smiled at her. “That was my thought precisely. It would be a pleasure.”
He went gliding back to the kitchen and Delphine finished her cocktail and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She leaned over the table and held her hand out to him. He took it a little diffidently, and the two of them sat there companionably, while she picked the dirt out from underneath his fingernails, and the sun went tumbling through the clouds casting comet’s colours across the sky.