8
I dream of Lowen. We are standing side by side in front of D’Arvor’s lake. It is so dark that I can’t see its contours, but I can smell it: fresh water and pure night. In the castle, a masquerade ball is in full swing. Distorted violins reach us; they sound like someone crying. Just swim, Lowen tells me. It’s not hard. Come on, Cam. I’m reluctant to; I don’t know what lurks in the water, but I know it’s terrible. I know something is about to snatch me any second. I dip a toe in and brace myself, until the fear spreads fast into my mind and I run to the castle. Cam! I know Lowen is running behind me—I get to the door of the yellow salon; then I turn back to him. But he’s vanished. I turn to the ball, the pyramids of éclairs and mountains of fromage blanc streaked with coulis, red and thick and coagulated. I remember Maxime. Find Maxime. He will help. I move from guest to guest, pleading with them to take off their masks, but when they do, every single one is Constance, laughing at me.
I open my eyes and the gorgeous bedroom comes into view. The sun is already pouring onto the parquet and blackbirds are singing. It takes a while for my heart to stop pounding and the unease to lift from my chest. What a stupid dream. Stupid brain.
I’d say it’s 8 a.m. I’m amazed I fell asleep so quickly last night. After catching Lila and Maxime’s conversation, I tiptoed back to the kitchen and brought in the dessert, which was eaten among yet more pleasant conversation. I felt jittery, however—uncomfortable in my own skin. I refused Marie-Laure’s offer of coffee and turned in early. However I did find my room and did not get lost, and did not meet any ghosts, and the bed cocooned me without creaking ominously, as if the castle was taking me under its wing, reassuring me that Lila was wrong and I am welcome here.
Noises of life echo in the corridor, footsteps on the runner carpet, doors opening and closing—I can’t identify whether people are coming or going, or if there’s a fixed time for breakfast, when and where I would be expected to turn up, what awaits me. I wish I knew. I wish the codes of this place were instinctive to me.
And also…the headache lingers as I start to really take in my surroundings. The pieces of furniture, trying to grab me by the hands that made them. Constance choosing the shade of these very curtains—
I want you to make this yours. You belong here.
The pond is opening at my feet, threatening to wash away the room and take me, with the bed, into its depths. I’ve worked so hard to get my gift under control, and now I’m constantly fighting it. I should have thought that, in my weakened state, it would be a struggle to resist D’Arvor’s voices, when I’m not ready for them.
I’m not sure she’s the right choice. I don’t know if she’ll fit. I groan and pull the bedsheet over my head.
The universe turns peach, fragrant with softener. That’s fine—I can stay here all day, right? I carefully stretch an arm out, pat the bedside cabinet and retrieve my phone to check the time.
8:13 a.m., and I have a text from Lowen.
Cam, sorry about buggering off last week. Can we talk about it? How about I pop by at the weekend? Make you some scones?
I reply immediately, relieved.
I’m not about, sorry. I’m actually in France, if you can believe it.
Ah, good for you. What for? You finally taking a holiday?
I wish. I type this as a reflex, but I don’t wish. I haven’t taken a holiday in years and wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I did, especially right now. I don’t really feel like telling Lowen about D’Arvor. There’s nothing to say—I don’t know what the job is yet.
I add: I should be back in a week or so—talk then?
I’m on a course then. Abroad as well.
Oh, what kind of course? Good for you too 
This is fine. Talking to him like this. Casual, friendly conversation, lighthearted emojis.
A pastry course. It’s in Rennes actually
I type, erase… I’m aware he must be seeing my three dots.
Rennes? In Brittany? That Rennes?
You were the one who recommended it to me. Months ago. Maybe years, even? Anyway they’ve had a cancellation and I was on the waiting list.
I remember that conversation. Going through our old motions, the arguing we always seemed to fall back on since he’d left London. I had once again canceled a visit to Cornwall, and on FaceTime he took a jab at the fact that I worked too hard. I then told him about a prestigious pastry course my mother had always raved about, threw it into the conversation like a grenade, like something he would never have the guts to do, when I was actually doing the unkind, defensive thing of turning the attention away from the fact that I’d flaked on him. I can’t believe he actually went and signed up.
You didn’t tell me
It’s quite competitive. I never thought I’d get in. Applied on a whim and only found out about a month ago—a fluke.
I know we’re both thinking that he could have told me in London and about the conversation that was cut short.
Not a fluke!! Congratulations
So where are you exactly? Anywhere near-ish?
I have to tell him now, don’t I? I take the coward’s way, staying vague. In Brittany too. About an hour’s drive away
You’ll be gone by the time I arrive though.
Yeah, I don’t really know but it’s likely. I hope you have a great time.
A beat, then I type: I’m proud of you.
The ticks turn blue, and Lowen’s online status disappears after a few seconds. I imagine him staring at my text, then putting the phone back in his pocket. I have no idea what he felt.
Things are good in this bed cave, I tell myself, as the ache of Lowen’s theoretical proximity and the current mess of our friendship flood over me. Things are safer under the bedsheet.
For the longest time, Lowen was my only anchor. At boarding school we would escape the common rooms and pad along the corridors to the library, where we would read on a beanbag each, for hours—he, comics, and I, Gombrich’s The Story of Art. When we grew older and more defiant, he’d sneak into my dorm and we’d sit side by side on my creaky single bed, me hugging my knees as he bent to turn the volume of his Discman up and up, the Foo Fighters blaring in our ears, the teachers on duty threatening us with detention if they caught Lowen there again.
Our real intimacy started because of my failure; it was the only time failure brought me anything good. I hadn’t told anyone at school I couldn’t swim; Lowen figured it out in our first year after I got a detention for the third PE swimming lesson I skipped. “You can’t have your period three times in a month,” the PE teacher told me, loud and humiliating, when she found me hiding at the back of the library. Lowen invited me to come and spend some time with his family for the holidays. He said he could teach me, and I hated being out of my depth. That first summer was the best of my life, full of scones, fish and chips, sand, and laughter.
After that, I stayed with him every summer of secondary school. Lowen taught me how to become a competent swimmer, how to tackle the mental and physical fatigue. He knew where and when it was safe to go and I trusted him. We’d spend the summers on Porthmeor Beach eating his mother’s ham sandwiches or walking up and down the coastal path to Carbis Bay. He never judged me for what I didn’t know—he understood my parents hadn’t bothered teaching me things like swimming or riding a bike. He still jokes sometimes that learning to swim unlocked that will of iron he thinks I have; that conviction I had until recently that working harder and harder was the key to conquering my feelings of inadequacy.
I miss that certainty now. And the cramped Cornish cottage, the smell of wood burning and fresh bread in the living room, the mismatched sofas, the handmade blankets piled on every surface. As I conjure it, D’Arvor seems to expand. It stretches so vast, it is so full, it might swallow me. But as much as I would rather stay under my bedsheet right now, I can’t. I have to go face them all.
You have to meet Maxime.
To give myself courage, I conjure the memory of the first time I met Maxime Foucault as an adult. The memory that has fed my fantasies over the years. This Camille Leray was twenty-one years old, quiet and solemn in a packed, tipsy, and loud university bar in St. Andrews. I had red hair down to my hips that was not yet straightened, wore glasses not contacts, and was still short (Say petite, Camille, it makes it sound prettier, Maman used to say). I was a master’s student studying art history; it was December, the stuffiness of the bar and the heat of all the bodies a stark contrast to the bitter cold of pre-Christmas up North. At all social occasions, my friends and I were the corner gang, hovering in the shadows of the walls, talking about Böcklin, drinking neat spirits that we hated, and watching the party from the corner of our eyes. As art historians, we were cursed with too much attention to detail and historical context to fool ourselves that we were a cool crew. Plus the actual cool crew all had something in common: they were posh.
That night, the last Thursday before we broke up for Christmas, I had been tasked to go to the bar to get another round. The pub was packed, and I felt the disadvantage of my lack of height as I fought my way among blond and pink-cheeked boys built like rugby players, and tall equestrian girls, their bare shoulders sparkling with glitter. I was the nerd in dungarees and knockoff Doc Martens, ’scusing herself slowly and painfully toward the bar.
It got worse when “Mr. Brightside” started playing, very loudly, and they all started to move. In a blink, the floor space turned into a mosh pit, heavy bodies jumping up and down and, because they were drunk, sideways, erratically. Panicked, I tried to retreat to my safe corner, but an elbow slammed into my chest, knocking the air out of my lungs, and I found myself on the ground. It’s only a bar. This is not a stampede. Don’t panic, Camille. I tried to get up, but nobody had noticed me. Feet stomped on my hands, and legs pressed around me so closely that I couldn’t move.
Until two strong hands caught me and pulled me up. “Are you all right?” I hung on to impossibly green eyes and a tall body shielding me from the surrounding madness. The smell of pine trees and spring water, conjuring the clearing of an enchanted wood, a place of rest. I had seen those eyes before, but that was impossible. Why would he be here? He was supposed to be in France within the thick walls of his castle. That’s where my mind had placed him, all these years, with the thought that I could always find him if I wanted to. “I don’t know,” I said, fighting for my voice. He shook his head. “Let’s get you out of here.”
And he did. We slammed the door on the bar, shutting out the Killers, and found ourselves shivering on the snowy pavement.
“That was really dangerous,” he said with irritation, raking his fingers through his hair. “Are you sure you’re quite all right?”
I realized I’d been staring at him. I needed to be sure it was him. “Yes, I am. Sorry, but… are you French?”
He spoke English with a heavy accent he clearly wasn’t bothered to work on. “Yes,” he said. “I’m from Brittany. I’m on my year abroad here.”
“Me too,” I replied, in French. “Well, I’m only half-French, so this is not my year abroad, but…”
I realized his eyes never left mine, not even when a loud scooter nearly skid on the ice mere meters away from us. “Which half?”
“Pardon?”
“Which one of your parents is French?”
“Oh. My mother.” Brittany. My thoughts were a whirlpool of excitement and confusion. His presence was intoxicating. It was like being back there again. D’Arvor and his magical lake, digging its roots in Brocéliande. I did seriously consider that, because of my ordeal, I might be completely making him up. Any minute, I might snap out of it and realize I was speaking to a spotty first-year engineer called Bryan. “She was from Brittany too. Whereabouts are you from, exactly?” I had to be absolutely sure.
“West of Rennes. At the edge of the Paimpont Forest.”
He had used its official name. Not its storied name, marked forever by the legends of King Arthur and his knights. “Brocéliande,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he smiled in recognition, then the smile melted into something more intense. “Have we met before? I’m Maxime Foucault.” He was stooping slightly to talk to me, like he aimed to shield me from the cold. He was, of course, younger and more fresh-faced than the man who stared at me in Courtenay; he has been, at every age, the most handsome version of himself.
I felt too shy to mention that we had indeed met before, when we were seven. Surely he wouldn’t remember. “Camille Leray,” I said.
“Camille Leray,” he repeated, as his face opened with a wide smile, his eyes flickered, and he started to say something else—
The door of the bar had slammed opened and Tallulah Something, the most attractive girl in my course, was calling out to him. Maxime shot me a look of apology. “Shall we go back in?”
I shook my head, putting on the cardigan that I had, really elegantly, kept tied around my waist. Compared to Tallulah I was a right mess, like some kind of small farm boy time-traveling from the 1950s. “I better be off.”
“I’ll walk you home,” he said, as Tallulah scowled.
I smiled, trying to be cool. “I think you’re needed here. I’m just five minutes away.” I could see he was conflicted. Please choose to stay with me, I begged him silently.
“All right, if you’re sure. I’ll see you later, I suppose.”
“Thank you for rescuing me,” I told him in French as I walked away.
I found out we were on the same course; I don’t think he had bothered turning up for lectures much in the first term. I would love to say that we became friends, but he was popular, permanently surrounded. Tallulah made sure nobody else would dream of going near him, not with the motives I had. I wanted to smell him again. I wanted to imagine how he would touch me, even the first movement of pulling me toward him; I wanted to know the heat signature of his hands and exactly where he would choose to place them—my shoulder blades, like wings unfolding just before takeoff, or perhaps my neck. From the onset, he was a deeply physical, obsessive crush. I dreamt and dreamt of him on my sunken mattress that had seen too many students’ bodies.
We didn’t speak again properly until the Victoria and Albert Museum, the summer after the course, when I managed to make a fool of myself and spoil anything we could have had.
After a slow, frustrating wash under the treacle of water provided by the old-fashioned bath, wrapped in a towel, I tiptoe to the window to take in the view. The sun is up now, but the morning still bears the rags of dawn, mist clinging over the water basins like Merlin’s potions. Sparrows and blue tits are shaking in the sand of the paths. As I survey the hard, precise beauty of the garden, the night and thoughts of inadequacy disperse and I fall in love with it all over again. I become aware of my body breathing under the soft towel, of my feet stroking the parquet, of the intense physicality of the kind of lust running through me.
In my studies as well as my work, I thrived on adrenaline, always pinging toward the next task—it felt like being in love. That need for the next gratification—stumbling across a masterpiece, tapping into its world, the excitement when audiences realized they wanted it, had to have it, then hearing the hammer fall on a record-breaking sale. I miss it more than I can say.
I think D’Arvor is the only place that could create that buzz again. Something that reconnects me, from a single point in my lower belly, to hunger for fine things, for touching and being touched. I push the window wide-open, letting the morning cool my skin, and that place I always forget to dry, the hollow between my collarbones. There are still droplets trapped there and I spread them with one finger, imagining it as the place where beads of sweat would pool, where a lover would be able to taste the salt of my skin—
He’s here. He walks right out of the woods and, of course, because this is the height of ridiculousness, because I was thinking about a dress of misty tulle and thorny flowers in my hair, he is shirtless, wearing only black jogging bottoms, loose trainers, and a white towel thrown around his neck. If he wasn’t speaking on the phone, he’d be the most clichéd chapter of a Regency erotica novel. Maxime. I don’t think I’d guessed the triangular shape of his torso right, the lines of the lean muscles of his chest—not like someone who drinks protein shakes and works out four hours a day, but like someone who swims on the regular. His wet locks are flattened and stick to his forehead. He darts through the lawn like a stag toward me at the window. I should close it, draw back the curtain, but I’m caught up in my most feverish dream. A bit closer and I’ll be able to hear what he’s saying on the phone—
He’s right under my window when he looks up—startles, frowns. His eyes say, Were you spying on me? The charm is broken. I wave in lieu of an apology, skittish and awkward, at the same time trying to retreat and close the window. The towel is slipping—I can feel its corner coming loose at my armpit—and as I hurry backward, it gets stuck on the window latch and I find myself naked, scampering away to the depths of the darkened bedroom. I don’t know whether Maxime saw this. I wrap myself in my dressing gown and drop on the bed, my head in my hands. It’s so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. My laughter sounds mad, like it isn’t my own. I look up, half expecting to see Constance standing over me, holding her mask, but I’m alone.