Englishwoman in France (30 page)

The cyclist clapped her hands. ‘Bravo,' she said. ‘She will survive, I think?' she said. He realized now she must be English. She leaned down and took a pink mobile phone from underneath the book in her basket. ‘We require a doctor, I think.' She peered short-sightedly at the screen, made a few clicks and rang a number.

Charles looked down. The woman was wearing what looked like sodden fancy dress. All in black, with those funny pantaloons. Pentecost! Perhaps that was how she'd ended up in the water.

The cyclist tucked her phone away. ‘I'll be on my way, then,' she said, putting a foot on the drive pedal. She looked at him, her very dark eyes thoughtful. ‘Every day I ride here by the river, find a very private place and read my book. It's very soothing.' Then she rode off, a tiny, trim figure exuding energy.

He only realized when she'd gone that he didn't know her name.

The woman at his feet groaned and – desperate to do something – he tucked his coat over her. His hand caught the weight of his camera and keys in his pockets and he transferred them to his shirt pocket. She moaned again. ‘Shshsh,' he said. ‘The doctor's coming. You're safe now, madame.' He pushed more of that hair away from her face and she looked into his eyes. ‘You're safe now,' he repeated.

She blinked. Her lips moved. ‘Safe . . .' she said. Her hand reached towards him and she lost consciousness. Charles patted her face but she was dead to the world. He felt her neck and could feel the strong beat of her heart. He tucked his coat more tightly around her and settled down to wait for help.

Help came in the form of a man and woman in uniform. Some kinds of medics, he thought. They clicked and tutted over her body and the woman medic went running off. The man pulled a foil sheet from his backpack and covered the woman's body with it. He felt her pulse and nodded, obviously satisfied. He looked up at Charles. ‘This is your wife, monsieur?'

‘No, no,' he said. ‘I just pulled her ashore.'

The man frowned. ‘Are you sure she's not your wife, monsieur?'

Charles was indignant. ‘I tell you, I . . .' Then he saw what the man was holding. There was the silver chain around the woman's neck. Dangling from the chain, small and perfectly carved in silver, was a fish. Charles's hand went to his own neck, where its twin hung, perfectly carved, in amber. ‘Look! I don't know her. I'm visiting here for the first time. I have a boat on the canal. I just came down here to walk, saw this woman in the canal and dragged her out.'

‘It seems
à propos
, monsieur, that a husband and wife would have the same amulets.' The man's tone was severe.

Charles flushed. ‘Look, mate, I got this thing on Saturday at the flea market here, in a tray of
bric à brac
. The whole tray cost me five euros.' Did this man think he was an axe-murderer or a wife-beater?

The man beamed. ‘Ah. A coincidence, monsieur? This world is full of strange coincidences.
Non?
'

Charles relaxed, but was relieved when he saw the woman medic trundling a kind of wheelchair-cum-stretcher along the river path. The man spoke quickly to her and they both glanced at Charles, who found himself blushing again.

The woman knelt by the unconscious woman and suddenly said, ‘Houpla!' She'd found one of those money belts round the river woman's waist. From it she pulled out two items, barely damp from the water: a wallet with some euros and an English passport.

‘Estella Warner,' she said. ‘
Anglais. Et aussi!
' She pulled out a large key and read the luggage label attached. ‘
Villa d'Estella, rue Haute
.'

She thrust the key at Charles. ‘You must go to the house, monsieur, and tell them there we have found their
maman
and she is at the hospital. Say she is breathing well, no injuries. They will make checks and bring her back to the rue Haute.'

After that she and the other medic ignored him, fussing over transferring the unconscious woman on to the stretcher and trundling her away along the river path. Charles slipped on his now damp and dirty jacket and followed them slowly. He called in at a
tabac
and asked the way to the rue Haute. The man sold him a street map and pointed out the route, upwards towards the ridge of the town.

He made his way from the harbour up through the old town, up the narrow rue Venuste as far as the rue Haute – an alleyway of tall houses which was well named, situated as it was high up above the old town.

The house with the door large enough to fit the key was easy to find. He banged his fist on it twice, three times. When no one answered he inserted the key in the lock and passed through an archway into a shady courtyard. Leading off the courtyard were two glazed doorways, one into a kitchen and one into a salon. The salon door was open when he tried it, so he let himself in.

He looked around. The salon was modest enough in itself, with a long couch and a graceful table, but was dominated by a vast fireplace big enough to roast an ox. A kitchen at one time, he supposed. He peered into the large kitchen next door which led through to another internal courtyard. There was no sign of life.

He listened again. No sound. Then, almost without willing it, he made for the stairs. Every bed except one was stripped. He peered under one of the stripped beds and looped out a Barbie doll. He propped her in a comfortable pose against a pillow on her stripped bed. In another room where the bed was made up there was a laptop case on a table and a single suitcase. Only a few items of clothing remained in the massive armoire: jeans; embroidered blouses; a silk jacket; a knitted shawl; trainers; boots. Not much, all told. Clearly the woman was here on her own.

He backed out of the room in some embarrassment and saw there was yet another wooden staircase rising against the massive grey stone wall. He climbed upwards again and found himself in a room high in the eaves. He could make out a rather messy daybed and a long table covered with books, neat piles of paper and a slim blue laptop.

The light from the narrow window was dim so he fumbled around for a switch and turned on the light. He sat down and turned over some of the papers. Most of them were astrologers' charts scribbled over and marked with different coloured pens. Beside the laptop was a chubby spiralbound notebook. He flipped through it and saw pages of neat writing – people's names at the top with information below neatly organized into bullet points with succinct conclusions at the end. Charles thought that if you discounted the fact that astrology was bunk, here was evidence of an organized, sane mind – not the mind of someone who would throw themselves in a river.

He turned the book over and started again from the back. These pages were full – in a scrawl almost by another hand – of various versions of the word
Siri
written a thousand times – large, small, sideways, backwards. This time it was clear the writer was clearly very hurt, or very angry, or both. These pages were full of madness. They were in the hand of a person who might very well throw themselves in the river.

He placed the notebook by the laptop and tried to put the sheets of paper back in neat piles. His eye dropped to a brown folder at the bottom and he pulled this out. It was full of newspaper cuttings of articles about a single event. The headlines ranged from
Chilling Teenage Killing
through
Girl Slaughtered by Friends
to
Teenagers Sentenced for Savage Killings
. The cuttings were three years old. The girl had been eleven years old and her name was Siri Warner. There was a photo of Siri's mother and father at the funeral. Their grief bled from the page of grainy newsprint.

Charles frowned and shoved the cuttings back into the folder, shoved the folder to the bottom of the file, clattered down the wooden staircases, out through the salon and the courtyard and out into the street.

He looked both ways and decided to go right, back down to the quayside and out over the wide bridge to the canal. He needed to get to his boat, his refuge in recent years when things had been bad in business, bad in life. He couldn't bear to think of a little girl called Siri being killed and a mother so sad that dark swirling water was a positive option.

He would check on the woman tomorrow, but for today he hurried down to the quayside along the narrow rue Venuste which once, according to his guidebook – in 600 BC – had led up to the beautiful Temple of Venus on the brow of the hill in the town they then called Good Fortune.

M
y chest was sore and my eyes were screwed up against the light. I was fighting against the manhandling, thinking first it was Goldenwand's men, then the execution soldiers in Cessero. How much you can think in a flash! I was soaking wet with the water thrown by Lupinus and choking with the smoke from the smouldering woodpile.

At last I opened my eyes to blazing white light and saw Modeste's amber fish pendant dangling from the neck of the stranger. Then blackness, then murmuring voices. Then the roar of traffic and the rattle of a nearby train. So I kept my eyes closed tight and pretended to be unconscious as they poked and prodded and manhandled me on to a stretcher then into a van of some kind.

I knew instantly that I was back into my own not-dreamed life, although most of me was still in that muddy village, watching the soldiers' sinews flex as they brought the swords down on the necks of my dear ones, Modeste and Tib. Then as I was lying there in some clinic, being poked and prodded yet again, my mind struggled with the very hard thought that there was no ‘then and now'. Really it was the ‘now and the now'.

And now I'm back at the Maison d'Estella, showered and changed and drinking camomile tea made by the nurse who did the prodding and poking and finally brought me home. She tutted and fussed when we found the house open to God and good neighbours – or more particularly the Gitans who lived in the old quarter, whom she didn't trust.

I asked her about the man who rescued me. She didn't know him. ‘But he was a boatman, madame. He had a boat on the canal. He was English and I think his name is Charles.' I close my eyes and see Modeste's amber fish dangling before my eyes as the man came close to me there on the river.

Now she's gone, leaving behind a lingering scent of antiseptic.

I sip the rest of the tea and try my very best to make sense of it all. It can't have been a dream. How can I remember it so well? My mobile, still on the kitchen top, vibrates. I take a very deep breath and answer it. It's Philip. ‘That you, Starr? Where've you been? I've called you a dozen times this morning. Are you OK?'

It's thrilling, in its own way, to hear his voice. ‘I'm OK, Philip. Really. I've been out and about. Talking to people. Eating nice food.' I think of Tib's honey.

‘On your own?'

‘I met some people. And I did a lot of thinking.'

A silence at the other end of the phone.

I try the usual thing. ‘How was the flight?'

‘There was a delay. Weather. George was sick and Olga went off with a stranger who bought her a story book and returned her safe and sound. Mae drank a bottle of wine and slept the whole of the journey.'

‘Oh, well. You know Mae. Not much you can say, really.'

‘Estella,' he says. ‘About what was said . . .'

‘I'm sorry, Philip, but I think . . .' I pause. ‘If I've done anything here in Agde I've realized that I have to let Siri go. I have to set her free from my own sadness.'

‘That's so good,' he says his voice tentative. ‘You do know that I've always missed her, Stella. And always will.'

‘You were a wonderful father for her, Phil. You made our lives better.'

‘And now . . .?'

‘I think we both have to let go. You have to let me go. I think you should find someone who brings out your sense of fun. As Mae said, I've been trampling on that for a few years now. There has to be someone out there.'

‘But it's you I want, the old Stella.' He coughs. ‘You know, you sound like the old Stella even from here.'

‘That old Stella's not here, Philip. You have to let her go.'

Another pause, which I don't know how to break.

He says at last, ‘Are you sure you're OK?'

‘I'm sure.' I take a breath. ‘I will always be grateful to you, Philip. And I'll always be your friend.'

‘There'll be things to sort.' He sounds forlorn.

‘We'll do that when I get back to England. Will you do something for me in the meantime?'

‘Anything.'

‘You know that little attaché case of my mother's? The one I put Siri's bits and pieces in?'

‘Of course.'

‘Will you put that in a very safe place?'

‘Of course.' A pause which I allow to lie there between us like a sword. ‘Goodbye then, Stella.'

‘Bye Philip.' I hit
end call
to stop it all.

My body is beginning to flood with relief, like the calm-down after an orgasm. I go through to the salon and lie down to reflect on all these events. One version of the truth might be that, cast down by my irreparable loss, I isolated myself and then tried and failed to commit suicide by drowning. Then, the theory would go, the fact that my attempt failed was a relief and will allow me to re-evaluate the rest of my life.

The other, more vital version, is that I've been granted an epiphany, a glimpse of eternal and enduring life, of deep truths buried in history. I've experienced great happiness, terrible cruelty and learned many things that I'll never forget, that will be part of me forever. And I know now that my daughter has a great soul that survives, amongst others, alongside the souls of Tib and Modeste.

But certain things are very clear to me now. One is that I didn't try to kill myself. Another is that my time with Modeste and Tib was no dream. Another is that I was with them for a purpose: to allow the baby to continue on her journey and to be a witness for Tib and Modeste to those last cruel events. Finally, I'm quite certain that Tib has worked his miracle on me. My mind is clear – clear as a bell. Not a touch of madness about me. Not now.