Englishwoman in France (31 page)

I must have drifted off. When I wake the shadows in the courtyard have deepened. The wall clock tells me I've been asleep for two hours. How refreshing to sleep without dreaming. I am clearly back to that other Starr,
also called Estella.
I check my phone and see I've missed other calls apart from those from Philip: one was from Mae. ‘How are you, babe? We're thinking of you. Olga ran away at the airport and George was sick. It's a relief to be home. Billy says you should ring us to say you're OK. But he says you will be OK anyway. I love you, girl, you know that.'

The other calls are from two magazines chasing up late copy. I leap upstairs to the eyrie and grab my laptop. I look around the room. There's something different here. I can't put my finger on it. I run down the hill, past the busy Café Plazza, and get to the library in time to use their broadband to post my copy.

Passing the café on my way back up the hill I see a scooter padlocked to the bollard where Madame Patrice's bicycle once stood. I avert my gaze and hurry back to the house. Once here I have another shower and wash my hair again, blow-drying it straight and tying it back in a loop. In one cell of my mind I remember washing it in the river, with Tib scooping up river water to rinse it and Modeste rubbing it dry with a rough woollen cloth. Now it's as straight and silky as it never was in Cessero, in Good Fortune, or in Nicomedia.

I pull on fresh jeans and a white tee shirt, tuck a hundred euros in my back pocket and pick up the pink silk linen jacket hanging in the
armoire
. Locking the great door of the house carefully behind me I turn right, down towards the quayside. I turn left again and make my way by the rue de la Poissonnerie. The house where Madame Patrice and Louis lived is all boarded up and has a faded old
A Vendre
sign nailed to the door. It looks as though it hasn't been entered for years. I make my way along the rue Louis Bages and buy an overpriced bottle of wine from an
alimentation
and make for the bridge.

On the canal path my fast pace slows. This is a fool's errand – looking for a man called Charles in a boat I won't recognize. I can't even ask in my faltering French. ‘Er . . . there was this man called Charles who hauled me out of the water this morning?' They would think I was mad, wouldn't they?

I dawdle on. There are dozens of boats tied up by the canal – large, small, grand, simple, wrecked, glamorous. In this early-evening hour there is quite a lot of activity – couples walking, children playing, people drinking and eating under deck awnings.

Then at last I see the boat and I know it. A tremble of delight passes through me from my heels to my head. I knock on the door to the cabin, once, then again more loudly, to make myself heard over the guitar music inside. Then I stand back as far as is possible on a narrowboat that has a motorbike shackled to its rail. The music dies, the door opens and a figure emerges. And emerges. I'd forgotten just how large he was. He's thinner now but he's still very big. He is wearing long shorts and the amber fish pendant twinkles against his bare chest. His curls are still fair but cropped short and he's wearing rimless spectacles. His face is more sharply boned than I remember.

‘Yes?' he says, blinking. His eyes are the familiar sharp pale blue but in no other way does he resemble either Louis or Modeste. But they are him and he is them.

I hold out my bottle of wine. ‘I came to say thank you for hauling me out of the drink.'

He frowns. ‘You? You don't look like . . .'

‘The bedraggled wretch you fished out of the river?'

He nods and smiles a little. I'd forgotten that dimple on his cheek. ‘How did you find me?' he says.

I tap the painting on the side of the cabin. ‘The
Deer House
,' I say. ‘I remember the Deer House.'

‘The Deer House? Climbing the wall in the dark? Those years ago? I remember. I looked for you . . .' He blinks again. Now he knows. He knows it's me; he remembers that fateful night so many years ago. ‘Come inside,' he says. ‘Please.'

I follow him into the narrow space with shining wood walls and crowded shelves with objects lined up in order. It has a kind of tightly packed elegance. He takes two glasses from a shelf and gestures for me to sit down on a side bench and sits on the opposite side to open the bottle. Here we are, face to face. ‘I left your house open. I'm sorry,' he says calmly.

He tells me that he found the Maison d'Estella and went exploring. We are on our second drink when he asks about Siri. ‘She was your daughter? I saw the news cuttings in your top room. Sorry, I shouldn't have been so nosy . . .'

‘You more than anyone have a right to know about Siri.'

I
will
tell him all about Siri. And Louis, and Modeste and Tib. But there will be plenty of time for all that. First . . . ‘Your name! The nurse said you were an Englishman called Charles something . . .'

He grins and moves to sit beside me on the narrow bench so we are sitting tightly, shoulder to shoulder. ‘My ex-wife preferred Charles, but really it's Ludovic. Do you remember, your friend compared me to a board game? So it's Ludovic.' He takes a long sip of his wine and turns to look straight at me with those big blue eyes.
Louis. Modeste.
‘My friends now call me Luke. A work thing,' he says, holding up his glass in a toast to me. Or both of us, perhaps.

‘Hello again, Ludovic,' I say. ‘Hello Luke.'

I
found out the truth about Tibery and Modeste the day before Luke and I set off on the
Deer House
to begin our journey back to England. The days since he dragged me out of the river had been a tumble of catching up, explanation and exploration. Luke was desolate to hear about Siri, knowing her and losing her in an instant, concerned about my grief and faintly disbelieving about my stories of Louis and Madame Patrice, Tibery and Modeste. Odd, that – Luke smiling in disbelief, looking at me with Modeste's eyes.

On our last day in Agde we went on Luke's motorbike to a place called St Thibery, a mile or so from the city. There by the river we found a small dusty town whose streets circled in an odd fashion around the remnants of a beautiful medieval abbey. We kept getting lost. We found the one
tabac
then lost it again. We found the one
boulangerie
then lost it again. Somehow there was no way of knowing our left from our right. It was a shapeshifting kind of place.

We sat in the one café and I tried to tell Luke about the Cessero I knew. We wandered around again, hand in hand. I tried and failed to see
my
Cessero. Only its location near the river told me it was the place I wanted it to be: that and the dusty plaque linking the medieval abbey to the martyred boy. Saint Thibery.

We called in the tiny tourist shop and I asked the woman for information about the village and its history. She rooted in a store cupboard and fished out a sheaf of papers. ‘
Seulement un document, Madame
,' she said, smiling.

The document is single-spaced, seven pages long, in faded typescript and unsigned. It speaks of Tib and Modeste. So, as Luke and I made our way north through the locks on the Canal du Midi and then up the great rivers on our way to Paris, I used his old doorstep Harrap's dictionary to translate the pages of the document one by one. I worked very hard to get it right, careful not to add my own remembered truths, the truths of my own experience.

I was sitting with my back to Luke's bike on the deck of the
Deer House
when I wrote the last words on my pad and read my translation right through again. Looking up at the night sky over Paris I could see Virgo twinkling above us. And across the sky, steady as ever, the Great Bear sat secure in its proper place.

Extract from Starr Warner's translation of her ‘found' paper:

The Greeks, the Gauls and the Romans called this place Keppero, then Cessero. Only after the Merovingian age, when the Christian era began, was it called Saint Thibery . . . There was a child called Thibery who in the fourth century AD was found guilty of embracing Christianity and martyred in this place . . . As legend has it, the boy could cure a sick man of his mental demons with a single touch. His noble and inspiring acts made people respect and admire him. And apart from his physical beauty he possessed the highest intelligence and a loving heart. Even at eleven years old he was sensitive to the flaws in the human heart and was particularly skilled at curing those ill in the mind . . . Thibery was born in Agde – then called Good Fortune – in 301 or 293. His father Helée, governor of the city of Agde, was a devoted servant of Rome . . . He appointed, as tutor for his son, a wise and literary man called Modeste, who bestowed on his pupil the sacred fruits of knowledge gathered throughout his life . . . The fact is that in secret, Modeste was following the new religion of Christianity. His pupil witnessed his commitment and – like his tutor – was drawn to Christianity and secretly began to participate in the rites of that religion . . . Although he cured his father of blindness and also cured a relative of the Emperor Diocletian of a degenerative sickness, Thibery and Modeste's religion made them traitors and, with their companion Florence, they were executed on 10th November 304 AD. The executions took place on the landing stage at Cessero. The three of them were buried at their place of execution . . .