They moored out in the wild the following night, a guilty economy on Colin’s part, which in no way compensated for the insane extravagance of their three star supper. Forests of silver birch flickered right down to the river bank and they had a job to tie up amongst all the reeds and nettles.
Even tinned cassoulet for two, a couple of bruised pears and the end of a baguette managed to seem like a feast. They ate in a scattering of shade to the subtle song of unseen insects, with the salt smell of a distant bonfire in their nostrils and a pencil line of wood smoke tracing across the sky.
Colin extracted his one cigarette of the day from its flattened packet. It had snapped just below the filter, but he lit it anyway. “Fancy a game of cards?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth.
Delphine pulled a maybe, but preferably not face, then she stared at him, waiting to see if he could do better.
“Hangman?” he asked doubtfully.
She shook her head.
A thought occurred to him. He contemplated her through a grey exhalation – without the filter, the cigarette burnt his throat. “Why don’t you show me your album?”
“What?”
He started coughing. “The photos…” he prompted wheezily, “In your photograph album.” He chucked the dog end into the river. With a hiss it was extinguished. “Why don’t you show me?”
“Oh, those…” she answered dismissively, leaning over the side of the boat, watching a hundred minnows swarm towards the cigarette and then, in disappointment, swarm away. The surface of the water looked like grazed silk and she cupped her chin in her hands and gazed at it.
They spoke at the same time.
“I’d really like to see them.” / “What is hangman?”
“Is it on the shelf above your bed?” He persisted, stooping down and peering into the cabin.
“Oh, Colin,” she said with exasperation, as if her patience was being tried by a small and very stupid child. She grabbed the photo album before he could reach it and clasped it to her chest. Plonking herself down on the bathroom locker, she opened the album a crack. “There–” she flashed a page at him and then snapped it shut and rested it on her knees.
The album’s see-through plastic cover was spangled with light from the low-slung sun. When Colin blinked, he could still make out its golden shape. He perched himself beside her, waiting to see.
Delphine frowned and shot him a look. She opened another page by about thirty degrees. “That’s me.”
He caught a glimpse of her face in close-up, sucking on a long string of spaghetti, moustachioed with bright red sauce.
“And that’s me.” She was ice skating in the open air in front of some palatial Parisian building, one stubby leg stuck precariously out behind her. He thought he could see Michael’s figure gliding out of the frame.
“And that’s me in Brittany,” she remarked, warming to her theme. This time she opened the page completely and laid it flat on her lap. “Where we went camping.” He could see a whole sequence of images of Delphine aged about three playing by a rock pool, squatting, gesturing, reaching out, totally absorbed. On her face was the expression he often noticed when she was talking to Amandine, although Amandine was nowhere to be seen.
“Who’s that lady?” He nodded at a fair-skinned woman in the act of kicking sand at the photographer, the whitened grains curling upwards like spray, her laughter caught at that moment just before breaking. She was wrapped in a sarong and he was fascinated by the orange and red and cream colours.
“Maman, of course.”
Of course. He studied the picture, seeing what Michael, presumably the photographer, saw: her hair streaming blackly in the breeze, longer than he remembered, her face as pale as he recalled. The next photo, taken seconds later, showed her bending forward, as if hilarity had overcome her. Her head was twisted round towards the camera, the last notes of laughter fading to blue.
Delphine flipped the page over. “That’s me in the swimming pool.” Flip. “That’s me on my bike.” Flip. “That’s me asleep in the tent. I like that one.” Flip. “That’s Maman.” Fl–
“Let me see,” with his finger, Colin stopped the page from turning. The picture had been taken on long exposure, at night time, in what looked like the entrance to the tent. Charlotte was sitting at a folding table, one arm resting on the melamine surface, the other supporting her head. A gas lamp must have been lit just out of shot – he could almost hear the faint roar of the gauzy bulb burning and in the cadmium flare of the light that it cast, her face was soft and uncertain, as though she were about to suggest something, as though she still might. She seemed smiley, pliable, she could have been a little tipsy, the strap of her camisole had slipped down her arm, sleepily.
She looked loving and lovely. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected to see in her the kind of tenderness that melts and flows. He leaned in to stare at her face more closely just as Delphine let the page fall shut.
“That’s enough now,” she said, hugging the album to her and he could see that she was right; it was enough, for both of them. Enough for now. She put the album on the seat and sat on it. “We play cards, OK?”
“OK. What do you want to play? Snap, or Damn It? Or shall I teach you Gin Rummy?”
“Teach me Gin Rummy,” she demanded, and they sat up late cheating at cards until the glitter went out of the river and night fell.
~~~
“Colin! Colin!”
“Eh?” He flailed his way up from the depths of sleep. Delphine was shaking his arm. “What is it?”
“Something has happened!”
“What time is it?” He squinted at his watch, wincing at the earliness of the hour and then pulled his sleeping bag over his head.
“Look–”
“Go back to sleep…”
She leaned across and with her finger and thumb forced his right eyelid open. He started up, blinking.
“Careful – you’ll have my eye out.” He rubbed it with his knuckle and shouldered his sleeping bag around him with disgruntled movements.
“Look outside–”
“It’ll be a miracle if I can see anything at all,” he grumbled, “Ever again,” then following her pointing finger, he said “I can’t! I can’t see anything.”
“That is what I am trying to tell to you – doh.” In frustration she smacked her forehead with her hand.
Crustily, Colin tried to wipe the porthole clear with his finger and when that failed, with his sleeve. It remained thickly smeared with white. He regarded Delphine. “Hmmm.”
Shrugging a sweatshirt on, he looked at his watch once more, allowing his granddaughter plenty of opportunity to apprehend his sense of injury at the time it told, before he began opening the hatch.
She barged her way out before him. “Regardez…!” she breathed.
The mist lay in skeins on the surface of the water. The Dragonfly was buried deep beneath its fondant folds and when Delphine stood up, only her head and shoulders could be seen. Colin surfaced beside her. It was like entering a world of make-believe and the two of them stood blinking as if they’d just stepped through a wardrobe or fallen down a rabbit hole.
Delphine began to giggle. “It’s meringue!” She tried scooping the mist into her mouth but the vapour went slipping through her fingers. The bright, white lightness of it made him think that, like shaving foam, he could put blobs on her nose and chin, but although their hands chased and swerved, the fallen cloud could neither be caught nor contained and the two of them stood laughing in the whitewashed world that the dawn had revealed.
“You’re soaked through,” Colin observed, as the skin around her mouth turned blue. “We’d better get you warmed up.”
As they dived down to find the entrance to the cabin an unearthly noise stopped them in their tracks. It was a carnal sound, rhythmic and urgent, a breathless sound of pursuit, questing, thrashing, reverberating.
A hundred metres down river, through the mist and up into the sky, rose a swan, its muscular arc curving just above their heads. They could see, feather by feather, the line of its neck, ending with the strange hieroglyphic of its beak. Close to, its feet looked murderously black and the vast sweep of its wings seemed to violate the air.
Colin tilted his head back and then further back, watching the fearful mechanics of its flight as the swan went straining higher and higher. He could feel the downdraught fierce against his face.
“Merde…” breathed his granddaughter and he didn’t correct her.
It was a moment of weightlessness, of disorientation, of perfect delight. On and on went the mighty bird, wisps of mist spilling from its plumage as it claimed the whole wide river for itself. They listened until the leathery rasping of its wings was no more than a sigh in the distance and its white shape was absorbed into the sky. After a second or two, Colin bowed his head; his neck was stiff from looking upwards and he felt chilly now the spell was broken and the swan was gone. Delphine shivered beside him.
“Turn round,” he said, “and I’ll give you a hot potato.”
“Quoi?” She stared at him, unable to keep the suspicion from her face. She turned around, craning her neck so that she could keep an eye on him.
He breathed out hard between her shoulder blades then rubbed the warm air through her pyjamas and into her frozen muscles. “Can you feel that?”
She nodded. “Do it again.”
He did it again, and then again. “Better now?”
She grinned at him. “Much better. Shall I give you a – what do you call it – a hot potato?”
She turned him around and huffed and puffed into the small of his back and pummelled at his T-shirt, so that he was aware of a small patch of warmth seeping into his creaky bones.
“Thank you,” he said after a moment, conscious that these days he bruised more easily than he used to. “Thank you very much.”
Temporarily restored, the two of them stayed on deck a while longer, watching the mist dissolve, but as the morning was disclosed in all its purity, he couldn’t help remembering the pictures of Charlotte, laughing and luminous, and he was suddenly afraid of what they might reveal.