Significance E-Book

Jo Mazelis

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 677

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Lucy Swann is trying on a new life. She's bought new clothes and cut and dyed her hair. But in a small town in northern France her flight is violently cut short. When Inspector Vivier and his handsome assistant Sabine Pelat begin their investigation into her murder, the chance encounters of her last days take on a new significance. Lucy's death, like a stone thrown in a pool, sends out far-reaching ripples, altering the lives of people who never knew her, and the lives of her loved ones back home.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title PageDedicationPart One NIGHTRunawayFranceDomestic Interior with Three FiguresCreatures of HabitThe House with the Yellow ShuttersL’écriture FeminineMiroir NoirThe Golden BoyThe Golden GirlUnderwaterInnocenceChangesThe Running ManLiberty, Fraternity, EqualityFinders KeepersStorytellingLike AlicePart Two MORNINGSong to the SirenThe ScholarStar GazerLexiconDreamerFallen AngelA Thousand CutsDutyLost PropertyLucy Locket Lost her PocketGratitudeMise en ScèneLa Petite MortLabyrinthsBlood TiesThe Interpretation of DreamsLove HurtsLong MemoriesFishers of MenEducationBloodlinesNature MorteWritten on the BodySancta CamisiaPart Three AFTERNOONA-tisket, a-tasketEvidencePunishmentWritten in the ContractLa Barbe-BleueRevenantBodiesReasons to be CheerfulThe Hanged ManRoad RagePleasures TakenConsentControlHungerVoyeurSur la TableMirrorsHe Hears a Different DrummerA Man of Constant SorrowsClose QuartersThe QuickeningPart Four TWILIGHTOut of the Corner of your EyeKilling me SoftlyVersoSecond ThoughtsThe Damage DoneThe HuntressThe LambOn the Road to CalvaryField of PlayA Jealous GhostInto the ShadowsPastoralPart Five AFTERThe Angel’s ShareThe Love ParadeTo See a WhaleHotel RoomsThe World, as Learned from PicturesA Flower ClosingPrayersHouse of CardsAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyrightAbout Seren

SIGNIFICANCE

by

Jo Mazelis

For Mark with love

Part One

NIGHT

What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

Walter Benjamin

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz

Runaway

Summer 2007

Then she is driving. The road a sleek raven’s wing beneath her wheels. Driving faster than ever before, and marvelling, as she presses her foot on the accelerator, at the reasons for her previous caution. Yes, it is night and it’s raining heavily, but there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing in the world.

She is watching the road, her senses sharply attuned to any danger. She pulls into the fast lane to pass an articulated lorry. Guides the car back into the middle lane. Easy. A warning sign inside a red triangle. The vaulting deer. Lucy senses fear in the black painted silhouette. Imagines the sudden clatter of hooves on tarmac. And the jarring screams of the brakes. The dull impact of a car’s fender catching the animal’s flank.

She shakes her head as if disagreeing with an invisible interrogator. Imagine it all away. The motorways and dual carriageways, the airline coaches, the horse transporters, the Freelanders and Discoveries, the Picasso; the van parked in a field overlooking the road with an advert for laptops on its side.

Lucy wants all of it gone. But instead there is rain, and more rain, pushed to one side of the windscreen by the wipers, then pushed back again by the wind. Rivulets of clear water.

A man in a black Citroen catches her eye and passes her on the inside lane. His expression is leering, greedy, smug. She thinks of accelerating and swerving suddenly so that her car clips his. Her hands tighten on the wheel with intent – at these speeds, with this traffic and the punishing, relentless rain, everything could be altered in an instant.

But no, not now, not that. She is escaping: a runaway again. Just like she was when she was twelve, then fifteen. Not to forget the time she did it when she was eighteen. Now she is far too old to be called a runaway and smiles to herself at the thought. She relaxes her fingers on the wheel, sees in the rear window of the black Citroen a yellow sign announcing there is a baby on board. She slows.

The wind drops suddenly and the deluge eases, then stops. The night she is driving into is suddenly as dry as an old bone. And just as if the storm had been a source of energy for her, now it’s abated she’s suddenly tired. When she sees a sign for KATHS’ KARAVAN KAFE! TEAS, COFFEES, BURGERS, CHIPS she pulls into a lay-by. But the catering van is shut up for the night and there is only one other car: a battered white Mercedes that takes off the moment Lucy draws up. She stays behind the wheel, lets her hands fall limply into her lap, breathes deeply and closes her eyes.

She is not ill like they say she is; she is fine. More than fine. Has never felt better.

Dover. The sea is what you notice as the car crests a hill. The rain has stopped and the day has a rinsed feeling to it – a good day to begin things.

Dover. White cliffs. No bluebirds. Blue sky. Gulls soaring. The air is still and fresh; on deck Lucy gazes at the sea. It’s a busy shipping channel, vessel after vessel ploughing the grey-blue glittering water.

Staring down, feeling the throb of the ferry’s engine, its surging pulse, Lucy finds herself remembering another ferry crossing years ago. She’d been on the way back from a school trip to Europe. It had been night and she, with a few friends, had been standing on deck watching the molten sea under the blanket of night. One of them, Dougie, a sweet boy who was neither remarkably good-looking nor clever, had bought a Panama hat in Italy that he’d worn every moment of the holiday. They’d all been laughing and joking, when Dougie suddenly asked her if he should throw his hat into the sea. She barely stopped to think about it, but it had seemed right at the time, the gesture of letting go, not only of the holiday, but also of those different selves each of them had been in that unfamiliar place.

So she’d said yes. Yes. The word itself sibilant, dancing from her lips with a smile. Perhaps he had needed permission, the encouragement of a handful of laughing girls.

They all watched as he threw it over the rail like a Frisbee. It flew up, pale against the night sky. Then fell on the churning waves where it briefly swirled and danced before it was swept away into darkness.

‘My hat!’ he said surprised. Then, more sadly, he repeated the words. ‘My hat. Why did I do that?’

She could not answer. She had not expected regret.

She pushed aside the memory.ThatLucy was so far away it almost hurt to remember her. And there had been, or so it seemed, other Lucys too, all of them fatally flawed, all of them vulnerable to defeat and pain and humiliation. Or capable, as with Dougie and his hat, of hurting others. Better to be alone. To remake oneself.

France

At La Coquille Bleue, Lucy ordersPastis, milky and aniseed flavoured. Then steak, which comes withpommes frites. In the corner, tied with a long hefty rope, there’s a young dog, wolfish, with guarded blue eyes. After she has eaten, Madame Gallo, the hotel’s owner, allows her to smoke at the table despite the signs prohibiting it. There are framed portraits of Joan of Arc everywhere. The girl soldier the English burnt at the stake. Now they would give Joan anti-psychotic drugs; Clozaril, Zyprexa, Seroquel. In the 1950s her shorn hair and cross-dressing would have earned her electroconvulsive therapy; the voice of God would grow mute, scorched out of existence by science. Madame Gallo smiles conspiratorially at Lucy as she sits there smoking.

Lucy orders a bottle ofvin rouge. Madame Gallo watches her from behind the bar, she is middle-aged, but her face is still pretty, her hair dark and glossy. She dresses well. Looks exactly right for the part. As does Lucy, who is a runaway in the disguise of a confident young woman with money and credit cards and expensive new clothes.

It is dark when she leaves the hotel. A boy is standing on the edge of the pavement across the road. Lucy has the curious sensation that she passed him earlier – hours earlier, when it was still light, although the shadows had been lengthening. He is standing very still, the tips of his shoes over the paving slab’s lip as if he were balanced on a high diving board. As she draws closer she sees that he is not as young as she had first thought. His frame is slight, his complexion pale and his posture is awkward, like that of a teenager who has grown too tall too fast. As she draws closer she expects him to look at her. But this boy-man, poised and seemingly ready to dive into the stream of traffic, does not show the merest sign of attention even though she is passing almost within reach.

His eyes, she sees, are very pale blue. So pale and unfocussed she wonders if he is sightless. That might explain everything.

Yes, she thinks, the boy is blind and perhaps a little strange too.

The next night she goes back to La Coquille Bleue but only remembers the strange young man as she nears the place where he was standing. He is not there. Of course, he is not there.

Lucy enters the restaurant and is given a table in the glassed-in area at the front. From here she cannot see the dog with its mournfully sad, sea-blue eyes.

None of the staff seem to remember her from the previous night and there is a large family group from the Netherlands at a nearby table who talk loudly amongst themselves. They laugh and pass maps and guidebooks between them, debating the next item on their itinerary. For the first time since she left England Lucy feels lonely.

She ordersMoules Marinièrebut eats without pleasure. She has a single glass of white wine and even that seems devoid of taste, though she drinks it all the same. She asks for the bill, leaves a ten-euro note on the table and goes out into the fading twilight.

And there he is again. The boy-man. This time on a different part of the pavement. He rests one hand on the pole of a road sign. His feet are once again over the lip of the kerb. She walks towards him. He does not look at her; his gaze is fixed in some mid-air spot that hovers above the road.

Swifts dart about at rooftop level making high-pitched squeaks. Little arrows with white bellies that flash by. Little arrows that might pierce her heart, if her heart were not made of stone.

When she is two, perhaps three yards away, she stops walking and stands still, watching him.

He does not see her, nor even sense her presence so close by. He is not only blind, but also lacks the radar that most people possess. The sun is behind her, low in the sky and her shadow falls against his legs, his waist. He should sense the coolness of that shadow, but he does not move, just stares.

She feels emboldened by curiosity, by the fact she is a stranger here. She takes a cigarette from the packet in her bag, positions it between two fingers, steps even closer to him.

‘Excuse me? Do you have a light?’

She could have struggled to ask the question in French, but she wants to be certain he knows that she is English.

Her words, like her shadow, do not register. He blinks, but maybe this has nothing to do with any of her assaults on his senses – he does not see, or hear, or feel, or smell her. Touch is all that is left. But touch is so intimate, so risky if he is mad. If he is a mad, crazed boy held in some dark soundless prison, then a sudden touch, a gentle hand on his forearm might scare him into pulling a knife from his waistband and plunging it blindly into her heart.

‘He won’t answer you.’

A man is standing next to her. She turns quickly; tries to conceal how startled she feels, how guilty. He is tall and thin, with blue eyes not dissimilar to the staring boy-man. He speaks English, but with an accent, American perhaps.

‘He’s my brother,’ the man says. ‘He’s not…’ He hesitates here as if searching for a word, but gives up, doesn’t finish the sentence.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What are you sorry for?’ he asks, bluntly. It is as if he is accusing her of something. ‘Here,’ he says and reaches into his trouser pocket, pulls out a book of matches, tosses them at her.

She catches it, opens it, finds none of the matches yet used.

‘Oh,’ she says, retrieving the packet of Lucky Strikes. ‘Do you want a…’

He pulls a face to show his distaste. She wonders why he has matches in his pocket if he doesn’t smoke. Something in her would rather not smoke now in front of him, it feels as dirty as rolling up her sleeve, finding a vein and inserting a thrice-used needle. But too late, she’s committed. She lights the cigarette, turns her head to blow the smoke away from his face.

‘Why does he stand there like that?’ she asks.

‘Because he can.’

His answers are annoying, aggressive. They are brothers though, so maybe something runs in the family. Maybe this one, the older one, just seems more normal, but underneath is just as disturbed and strange as the other.

‘Where are you from?’ she asks, and he jerks his head to indicate a house behind him with lemon-yellow shutters.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Your accent…’

‘Canada.’

‘Ah.’

He looks at his watch, then at his brother. Avoids her gaze.

‘I’m from the UK,’ she says, though he hasn’t asked.

There is a silence then. The sort of silence that hovers between strangers. Human strangers in particular perhaps. If they were apes she might have crept forward and begun to companionably pick parasites out of his hair. Or maybe he’d have screamed, pulled back his lips to reveal sharp teeth, then charged at her with wild eyes and flared nostrils.

She does not know why she is thinking this. Nor why she is lingering there at all.

‘Why are you angry?’ he asks her suddenly.

‘What?’

‘You look angry. Is it my brother? Does he offend you?’

‘No, no. Of course not. Why should he? I just…’

‘Okay, fine,’ he says. The words are clean and clipped, as if he is snapping sounds out of the air and leaving mysterious and meaningful shapes behind. Like the chalk marks describing where the victim of sudden death had fallen.

He turns to his brother. ‘Aaron! OK. It’s time to come in now!’ He is unnecessarily gruff, she thinks. She expected more pleading, a gentle coaxing, not these sharp orders. And he asked whyshewas angry! ‘Aaron,’ he barks.

His brother turns his head slowly at the sound, then blinks at the speaker. She reads sorrow in his expression, the cowed look of a dog that’s been beaten once too often.

‘Don’t talk to him like that,’ she says, knowing she shouldn’t. Something in her wants to provoke him.

‘Now!’ the man says, ignoring her.

Aaron seems at last to come to life, he lifts his hand from the road sign as if he were ungluing it. His eyes move vaguely over the two people looking at him; the female stranger and his brother.His brother. You could see the recognition suddenly register in the sharpening of his eyes.

He began to move forward, trudging his feet not so much reluctantly as wearily, as if they were heavy, as if gravity was increasing its hold just in the places where his shoes met the earth’s surface.

Lucy saw now that she had been wrong to speak out. That it was none of her business.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘For what?’

‘For you. For your brother. It must be hard…’

The younger man had drawn level with them. His face was slack, the eyes dull, and yet you couldn’t fail to notice how perfect his bone structure was, how achingly attractive he would be if he were wholly alive. She was surprised to find herself mourning the loss of what should have been a potentially vivid and fully functional human being.

‘I’m sorry for you too,’ he said.

His words had their intended effect. She could not answer.

She watched them go. The two brothers, the younger one shuffling like an old man, the other stiff – almost bristling with anger. She wanted to know more. Wanted to understand the barely suppressed rage that was directed towards her. To know also where she had gone so wrong.

Domestic Interior with Three Figures

Marilyn’s brother-in-law was standing facing the closed door. ‘Brother-in-law’ was not a term that suited him. When she thought about a brother-in-law what came to mind was a man very like her husband: self-assured, intelligent, good looking and passionate about life.

Instead there was Aaron.

Poor Aaron.

Standing there staring at the blank face of the door, stepping slowly from one foot to the other and, judging from the insistent movement of his jutting-out elbows, doing something strange with his hands.

Scott was sitting near the window reading a book, oblivious.

‘What’s he doing?’ Marilyn said.

Scott glanced quickly at his brother, then shrugged and shook his head as if to say did she really think he would have any better idea of what went on in Aaron’s head?

‘I think he’s got something.’

Scott lifted his head to study the figure by the door more carefully.

They always had to look out for stuff like this; Aaron had a habit of picking up small objects and worrying away at them until they broke. Or if the object didn’t break then after a time he lost interest and dropped the thing wherever he happened to be, so that jewellery, coins, keys and so on had to be closely watched or kept locked up. Four years ago Marilyn had left her engagement ring on the shelf above the bathroom sink in Scott and Aaron’s parents’ house and, after searching all over, they’d finally found it in the toilet bowl in the outhouse. At the time she thought that Aaron had done it deliberately. That he was sending her a clear message about what he thought of her.

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Scott had said. ‘I wish my brother was capable of such clarity, such clear signs of possessiveness and emotion. It’s not personal, believe me. Forget it. You’re wasting your tears.’

She found that last phrase troubling. ‘Wasting your tears’ indeed – as if tears were precious and had to be carefully guarded, saved for the rarest of occasions. Scott was one of those men who was profoundly discomforted by tears, especially women’s tears. And Marilyn had always cried easily and helplessly from both sorrow and joy.

She watched Scott as he put the dog-eared and yellowing copy ofThe Handmaid’s Taleon the chair and crept towards his brother. When he drew close enough he peered over Aaron’s shoulder and said gently, ‘Hey, whatcha got there, buddy? You wanna show me?’

Aaron did not want to show him. He began to groan softly in protest and to rock from one foot to the other with more emphasis.

‘You gonna show me, huh? Come on, show me,’ Scott grabbed Aaron’s wrists and the groaning noise went up in pitch and volume.

‘Don’t hurt him,’ Marilyn said.

‘I’m not hurting him. Now come on, give it to me. Let go! Let go, damn you!’

The noise coming out of Aaron’s mouth was awful – like that of a tortured animal.

‘You’re hurting him!’

‘I’m not hurting him. For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, shut up. Come here.’

She moved across the room so that she was next to them. She could see that although Scott had a firm grip on both of Aaron’s wrists he was being measured and careful about the level of force he used.

‘Open his fingers,’ Scott said.

Marilyn hesitated, then reluctantly did as she was told, discovering, as she pried Aaron’s fingers up, that he gave only the barest resistance. His left hand in particular opened as easily as a flower and there in the centre of his palm, resting in the crease of his heart line, was a round white button, smaller than a pea.

‘What is it?’ Scott asked.

‘A button.’

Aaron wailed.

‘It’s mine,’ she said. She had recognised it straightaway as belonging to one of the few dresses she possessed that still fitted comfortably; a flowery print frock she’d bought in a vintage store in Ottawa eight years ago. It had struck her then as a very romantic dress with its row of tiny pearl buttons down the front. She had felt feminine and beautiful in it, like a woman from another age. Scott called it her Emily Dickinson frock, and she was never entirely sure if that was meant as a compliment or not.

Exasperated, Scott sighed loudly, ‘Okay. Okay. Here have this.’ He let go of Aaron’s wrists and reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses’ case and removed the glasses. Aaron didn’t move his hands once they were released, but stood posed with upraised hands as if he were a saint displaying his stigmata. Scott put the empty case in one of Aaron’s open hands, but the fingers didn’t close around it and it fell to the floor.

‘Do you want milk? Nice milk and cookies?’ Scott coaxed.

Aaron was quiet for a moment, then he turned and began trudging in the direction of the kitchen. Scott watched him go, then turned to Marilyn and slowly shook his head.

‘What?’ Marilyn said.

‘How could you say that?’

‘What?’

‘That I was hurting him.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I know you’d never hurt him deliberately, I just…’ The look on Scott’s face silenced her.

‘You didn’t think? Yeah. No one else does either.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Okay, forget it.’

Scott followed Aaron into the kitchen and got the cookie tin from the cupboard.

‘Okay, buddy. Nice milk and cookies? Yeah, you like that, eh? Yeah?’

Aaron drank deeply from the glass, then lowered it to reveal a white moustache of milk on his upper lip. He blinked and crammed a whole ginger biscuit into his mouth. His eyes were glazed over with concentration and his left knee bounced up and down in rhythm with his jaw. Scott stood to one side with the cookie jar resting in the crook of his arm, waiting for Aaron to finish the biscuit he was eating before allowing him another.

Marilyn stood watching them. Her hand moved to her belly and rested there for a moment, then remembering herself, she hastily took it away again. She did not want Scott to see her in that clichéd pose, to recognise the gesture for what it was; that of an expectant mother gracing her swelling womb with an exploratory and protective hand.

Busying herself, she got the dress that had lost the button from the laundry basket where it was waiting to be ironed, sat down on a rustic milking stool in the corner of the living room and, like a penitent in a reformatory, stitched the tiny button back on.

Creatures of Habit

For the third night in a row Lucy is drawn to La Coquille Bleue. There she is, smiling at her old friend Madame Gallo as she seats herself at a table near the bar. And while she looks at the menu, she’s sipping milky-whitePastisand remembering the bullet-hard aniseed balls she sometimes ate as a kid.

Tonight she orders steak with salad, refuses potatoes when asked. Nods thoughtlessly when the waitress asks if she wants the steakbleu. Nods vigorously when she asked if she wantsvin rouge.

Saying ‘yes’ she finds, has a sort of sweet madness about it. Yes, yes, yes.Oui, oui, oui. She likes the sound of the words – in either language the effect is soft and welcoming.

The steak when it comes, when she stabs it with her knife, bleeds. Red wine and red blood.

She finishes her meal and lights a cigarette, then gets the new silver compact from her bag and applies a slick, bright coat of the red lipstick she bought five days ago. She smiles and nods at Madame Gallo and wonders what it is precisely that makes the woman look so utterly French. She imagines her into black and white photos by Lartigue, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.

It’s the sculptural quality of the woman’s black hair, Lucy decides, and the fact that French women don’t opt to go frizzy blonde as they age, instead remaining as they were when young. She will try to do the same she thinks. I’ll stay here, never go back, never say a word to anyone – not Thom nor anyone at the college nor Mum and Dad. She feels mildly guilty when she considers her parents’ reactions to such a mysterious disappearance, remembering as if through a fog their reactions to her younger escapades, but pushes it aside to concentrate instead on this delicious dream of transformation. She’d be known as ‘the English woman’. Her accent, mild as it now was, would not reveal her Celtic roots, not here where the only thing to notice was her – so far – very poor French.

She picks up her glass and downs the last mouthful of wine, stubs out her cigarette.

Pays at the bar, leaving a generous tip. ‘Merci! Merci. Bon nuit, Madame Gallo.’

She leaves the restaurant waving gaily and calling, ‘Au revoir!’ and wondering if all the damn foreign tourists sitting in the glass-fronted atrium think she is a native.

It’s earlier now than on the previous two nights. The sky is a darkening violet watercolour streaked with scarlet. There’s no sign of the young man or his brother. She scans the street, looking up and down. She studies the house opposite, the one with acid-yellow shutters. Most of the upstairs windows are flung open; some, where they catch the light from the setting sky, glow rosy pink.

She crosses the street diagonally towards a pay phone. Once there she lifts the handset and holds it to her ear. Pretends to dial, pretends to feed coins into the slot, pretends to speak, to listen and nod, all the time gazing over at the house with yellow shutters.

During this charade, she thinks about where she’s come from; the small rented flat in Hammersmith that has been her home for nearly two years. During her first months in London the light was, or seemed to be, grey – grey and thin and unforgiving. The western coast where she’d grown up was hardly known for its sunshine and achingly blue skies, but London had somehow registered its presence on her consciousness during that first rainy October, and now that image of London was fixed in her mind.

She was meant to be back at her job as a part-time lecturer just over a week from now and she was also meant to have finished the final draft of her PhD dissertation. There were other things she was meant to be doing too. Her life was full of loose ends; it was frayed, unravelling, irredeemable. Her sense of dread about work was beginning to seep into where she was now. Freedom and happiness, the trip itself had been dying as soon as it had begun.

Even here in France, she had taken up another routine, as if coming to La Coquille Bleue night after night might give her a sense of security and permanence.

She continued to nod occasionally as she held the telephone to her ear. She imagined she was listening to some distant speaker who spoke such wisdom and sense that she could only absorb it in silence.

She should perhaps not play these games – what begins as a perfectly normal flight of fancy could harden into madness. She’d had a breakdown at the age of eighteen when she was at the Glasgow School of Art. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ladder-backed chairs still gave her the horrors. She’d been trying to write an essay about form and function in design. There was something about those chairs, their Presbyterian starkness and the unnecessary height of the back rest had made her flip. That and the way she was living: the starvation diet, the drink, the vampiric men and the unwise experiments with drugs. Poor Charles Rennie would have had a fit if he’d known that somehow his chairs reminded her of swastikas and horror films and that she’d had to tear their pictures from the library book and burn them.

Maybe it was happening again. Now. Here in Northern France. A Somme madness, where there was too much spilled blood in the soil.

A light came on in the downstairs room of the house with yellow shutters. A warm orange light that seemed to both welcome and repel her.

She saw a human shape move like a shadow across the window. A man who moved with a confident stride. Not the younger brother then, whose gait was hesitant, weighed down by a tangle inside his head, the permanent physical knot of brain damage.

She found herself thinking about the rabbits she’d watched in the fields behind her parents’ bungalow last time she’d been home, the way they’d take short runs then suddenly freeze. The busy activity of foraging, then what? Sudden fear and the compulsion to be still. The dream of invisibility?

The front door of the house opened. It was painted yellow like the shutters; it caught the last of the light as it swung open and flashed briefly before it was closed again. A tall figure hesitated by the door. She could not see his face. He was pulling on a light-coloured jacket, buttoning it, checking the pockets. Then he moved down to the front gate and into the pooled light of a streetlamp.

She nodded at her imaginary friend on the other end of the phone, mouthed meaningless words.

The man, and indeed it was the older brother, walked towards the telephone box. His pace was neither hurried nor was it quite an aimless amble. She was certain he had not seen or recognised her. He passed within a yard of the phone booth.

She replaced the receiver, left the booth and, after a moment’s hesitation, began to follow him.

She followed him without quite knowing why. Perhaps because she wanted to talk to someone in English. Maybe, she thought, this is a Babel trait – a sudden inexplicable need for someone whose language you speak, whose tribe you belong to.

Or is it the desire for adventure? Or curiosity which, as she knows, killed the cat.

He walks down a wide road, crosses another, then cuts down a narrow cobblestoned alley into a broad tree-lined street of residential houses. Lucy is momentarily distracted when an old man steps from one of the houses as she passes. He is bent double with age and his gaunt face is distinguished by extravagant wild black eyebrows that give him a surprised, even electrified expression. At the end of his outstretched arm is a domed pewter-coloured birdcage. Inside the cage is a gleaming blue-black creature with a vivid orange beak. The sight is so improbable that Lucy feels more than ever that she inhabits a surreal dream. Her step slows, then she recovers herself. She catches sight of her prey near the end of the street and picks up her pace.

He turns into a wide boulevard where there are a number of bars. People are sitting outside at tables, eating and drinking. A perfect evening. Couples and families promenade. A pretty girl wheels her bike along and when she stops to chat with a group of young men three of them rise and exchange kisses with her. They talk animatedly for a minute or so, then the girl moves on, steering her bike confidently amongst the meandering crowds until she crosses the road and goes out of sight.

Up ahead the man is still walking along at an unhurried pace. Sometimes Lucy loses sight of him when he is absorbed by small crowds or her view is obscured by slight turns in the road. She decides to follow him just to the end of this street. Her game is beginning to lose its edge and there was no purpose to it in the beginning, only the mischievous idea of acting on impulse.

She slows, decides to walk a little further and then perhaps to stop at one of the little cafés for a coffee and a cigarette. She begins to pay more attention to the tables and chairs on the terraces outside the bars. All of them seem to be occupied and she doesn’t want to share a table, wants to be entirely alone. Unmistakably alone. The English woman, mysterious, self-reliant and confident. Needing no one.

Further back, the cafés had been emptier and there were plenty of places to sit. She changes her plan. Walk another thirty yards or so, then turn around. She marks out the spot where she plans to give up; there, where a plane tree’s branches and leaves have embraced a lamppost, so that its ornately shaded light seems to sprout from it like a glowing amber flower.

She is so busy thinking about this, projecting the future of her next half-hour, that she fails to see that the man she has been following for the last twenty minutes has disappeared into the very café where she plans to abandon her game.

As she nears the tree, she realises that she has finally lost him. She stops walking and scans her surroundings. Trains her eye further down the road, then looks at the other side of the street – nothing. She searches the faces at the tables outside the cafés. He isn’t there, or anywhere to be seen. It is as if he has evaporated.

She is still a few yards from the tree. A question remains. Should she continue as planned or give up now? She hesitates, suddenly aware of how strange and lost she must look. How crazy.

This, she has always thought, must be the borderline between utter madness and a milder form of disturbance. Self awareness. Embarrassment at the thought of being perceived as crazy.

As if to prove she isn’t insane, to show she has somewhere to go, something important to do, she looks at her watch. Looks without actually registering the time. She walks on, then stops under the tree. She gets her guidebook from her bag, pretends to study it as she leans a shoulder on the tree, assuming artificial casualness.

She looks about her, then again at her watch. She gives a moue of disappointment, closes the book and returns it to her bag. Looking up she sees that there is now a small table free and decides that this is fate – that this is where she was meant to come, and that nowsomethingwill happen.

A waiter offers Lucy the menu, which she waves away, asking instead for a black coffee.

It is a pleasant night, there is a slight breeze, but it’s balmy and she enjoys the sensation of the warm air on her bare legs, the soft movement of it over her face and hair. She could happily sit here for an hour or two.

The coffee comes promptly, an espresso, thick and oily in a very small cup. She adds four cubes of sugar. She’ll be awake all night after drinking that. Maybe it’s a mistake. She’s agitated enough already, without sending a poisoned chalice of caffeine and processed white demon carbs careering through her system. She should have something else; something that soothes her and will knock her out enough to sleep when she gets back to the hotel. Insomnia has stalked her all her life, lying dormant for months and even years at a time, only to return again and again, as it had a month ago – nudging her awake at ten to four in the morning with her mind in the grave.

The outside seating area is arranged in an apron of tables bordered on two sides by low wooden troughs filled with glossy-leaved plants. Her table at the furthest edge of the terrace is next to one of these planters. She tips the coffee into the planter, amazed by how it soaks in quickly, leaving only a dark stain on the surface of the earth. Coffee probably isn’t very good for it. She hopes no one saw her. But even if they did, what does it matter? She’ll never see them again. They’ll never see her. And maybe the explanation will be, Oh, she’s English? Well, that explains it.

She replaces the empty cup in the saucer, catches the waiter’s eye. ‘More coffee?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says and orders a half litre of the house red.

‘Anything else, bread, olives, cheese?’ he offers, smiling.

‘No, just the wine.Merci beaucoup.’

He smiles, though his eyes remain cold. He doesn’t like me, she thinks.

He retreats to the interior of the building. Inside she can see a small semi-circular bar where a number of men are gathered on high stools. A slot machine blinks gaudily in the background showing a cascade of playing cards that are illuminated one by one to give the effect of movement.

He does not like me, she thinks again, and gets her mirror and lipstick from her bag. Studies her face, applies more lipstick. She sees nothing to dislike in her reflection, only the slightly surprised, slightly disappointed look of a lonely young woman who nobody loves, not really. Not even Thom – who just pretends.

The waiter returns and puts the carafe and a glass on the table. She thanks him without catching his eye, without smiling. She drinks the first glass of wine quickly, then pours another. Wellbeing seems to flow through her and she smiles wryly at the thought of her own silliness. She is amused by her little spy game and forgives herself the absurdity of it. She is even at the stage of composing this escapade into a story to tell friends. ‘Oh hey, and one night I got so bored I followed this guy – this uptight Canadian. What was I planning? God knows! Maybe I’d just have said “hi.” Maybe – oh well – it didn’t happen.’

Her friends would laugh and gaze at her wide-eyed. They wouldn’t choose to holiday alone, not unless they had to for some reason. Maybe she’d add a few adventures – sexual liaisons, romantic interludes, complications with jealous wives, intrigue. Why not? It would keep them on their toes. Keep them in awe of her. No one would dare challenge her or call her a liar.

But then it might get back to Thom and he might not see the funny side. Might object to looking like a cuckold, even if he knew it wasn’t true. But then again, she and Thom were finished. Over. And no, he didn’t love her. Never had.

She’d picked up her glass and raised it to her lips ready to drink, when a shadow fell over her.

‘Did you follow me here?’

He was standing with the light behind him so at first all she saw was a dark silhouette, his blond hair haloed in the light.

‘Pardon?’

‘You heard me.’ He shifted his weight onto one foot, cocked his head to one side so that now he was illuminated by the light instead of obscured by it.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said, and smiled at him.

‘Did you follow me?’

She stared at him, feeling caught out, but also to no small degree, entirely innocent. She hadn’t known he was hereprecisely. She’d followed him, but given up when she lost sight of him. The finer point of the matter was debatable and she resented his accusation and particularly the unfortunate loudness of his voice. Her smile fell away.

‘Quite honestly…’ she began to say, then stopped and shook her head. She shrugged her shoulders as if shaking him off. She would not deign to even speak to him, leave alone utter a denial. She sipped her wine and without looking at him took a cigarette from her bag and lit it, using the matches he’d given her the day before.

Silence is a useful tool, she had often found, no one could ever accuse her of protesting too much.

Roughly, he pulled out the chair opposite, scraping it noisily over the concrete slabs. He sat.

‘Do sit down,’ she said, meaning to convey sarcasm, but somehow failing. He leant back in the chair, put his elbows on the armrests and laced his fingers together, then stared at her.

‘Look,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sorry about your brother. I’m sorry if I upset him in some way…’

‘He’s not upset…’

‘Well, then I’m sorry if you think…’ She stopped herself as she was about to say,I’m sorry if you think that I look down on him, on you because he’s…She didn’t want to vocalise that. Somehow mentioning any form of social judgement seemed to expose the truth of her feelings.

He waited, then turned his head, signalled the waiter and ordered a beer.

‘Why did you say I was angry?’ she asked.

‘Because you were.’

‘I wasn’t. Why would I be angry?’

‘Everyone is.’

‘That’s not true.’

He made a quick snort of contempt.

‘Maybe you’re the one who is angry and so you view the world that way. You imagine everyone thinks like you,’ she said.

‘I know what I see.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why did you follow me?’

‘I didn’t. I’ve already told you I didn’t.’

‘I saw you. You were in the phone box near our house spying on us. Do you think I’m stupid?’

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ she said and with this small truth, found that she was able to meet his eye.

They gazed at each other for almost a minute, then he unlaced his fingers, reached for his beer and took three big gulps. She didn’t know why men drank in that way, pouring liquid – it could be water or milk as much as beer – down their throats while their Adam’s apples worked up and down like slow pistons. Maybe it was a form of sexual display. Or alternatively it was a show of power – drawing attention to a vulnerable part of the body – the throat – and saying in some oblique way – you dare!

Or he was just thirsty. Then again, displaying his needs, his wilfulness in satisfying these needs, was a way of signalling to her that he might, if he chose, consume her.

There was, despite his accusations and insults and anger, an indisputable sexual charge in the air between them – had been since the start. She was emboldened by this idea, it galvanised her into playing the role of the minx. ‘So what if I did follow you?’ she said. ‘I mean, why would I do that, do you suppose?’

He raised one eyebrow; an enviable trick

She had finished the last of her wine. Had drunk enough to be feeling wired up and full of energy. Time to go dancing, time to laugh with just a soupçon of too much gaiety. The devil-may-care adrenaline pulsing in her temples, invading her brain with elaborate dreams and schemes.

Why, if she offended him so much, had he chosen (however gruffly) to sit with her? He was as much drawn to her as she was to him.

But she kept her head.

‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked her.

The waiter was hovering by the table. Here was a debatable situation – was he merely alerting her to the waiter’s presence or was he asking if he could buy her a drink? The money – who paid for what – had nothing to do with it really – it was more a question of whether they would continue with this – whateverthiswas exactly.

‘I should have a coffee I suppose,’ she said, addressing him rather than the waiter.

‘Another of those,’ he said, nodding at the empty carafe. ‘And a beer for me.’

The waiter turned on his heel and was gone.

‘I said I’d have a coffee.’

‘No, you didn’t. You said yououghtto have coffee, which suggests that you really wanted wine.’

‘God! – What are you – a psychologist?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘Very funny,’ she said, though it occurred to her that he wasn’t joking and was indeed a psychologist. The last thing she needed.

A second carafe of wine was placed before her. She half-filled her glass, determined to take it easy. She should have had coffee, but he was right, she wanted wine.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, twisting the stem of her wine glass slowly, watching how the dense ruby-coloured liquid moved and caught the light.

‘Scott.’

He didn’t reciprocate by asking her name, which made her momentarily angry at the oversight, but then she took to the idea of being without a name, the mystery of it.

‘So, Scott,’ she said, unable to resist trying out his name on her tongue. ‘What do you do for fun around here?’

‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them.’

Before she had a chance to really absorb this remark, let alone respond, he stood up and crossed quickly to a nearby table where he picked up a discarded newspaper.

He’d left his last remark hanging in the air. Had abandoned it like a lost balloon, ‘I let strange women follow me, then I fuck them…’

He came back, sat down and carefully opened, then refolded the newspaper so that the front page was uppermost. It was a copy ofThe Guardian, a day or so old, with a brown ring marking the word ‘Guantanamo’ in the headlines.

She frowned, watching disbelievingly as he fussily smoothed the newspaper’s cover page with the flat of his hand. She could not now say ‘Pardon?’ or give him some coquettish riposte, but neither could she forget what he’d said. Nor what it implied.

He was, she supposed, a not very nice human being.

Why did that come to mind? The phrase ‘not very nice’? It was the sort of thing her mother would say, had said about Lucy’s best friend, Tracy. ‘That girl’s not very nice. I don’t like her.’ Whereas for Lucy that was the very essence of her friend’s appeal. Tracy smoked and drank and read the NME and did things with boys that she described to Lucy in graphic terms afterwards. So when Lucy’s mother said that Tracy wasn’t very nice, it almost acted as a recommendation, a character reference. Who wanted nice whennot nicewas so exciting and dangerous?

‘So why did you come here?’ he asked, shaking Lucy out of a reverie in which she was thirteen again and wearing Converse baseball boots and ripped jeans, with an old plaid flannel shirt tied permanently around her waist as she cried extravagantly over a newspaper photograph of Kurt Cobain.

‘I just wanted a drink.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I meant why did you come to France?’

She shrugged.

He shrugged back, then turned to gaze down the street as if she bored him.

Why had she not just answered him? He was perhaps only making conversation, attempting to be friendly, to undo the aggression that had marked the start of this acquaintance.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said – why was she apologising – she hated saying sorry. ‘I didn’t understand what you meant.’

He turned slowly to face her, his gaze seemed to track her features, moving between her eyes and mouth, only once dropping down to glance at her breasts. A beat of time passed, then he spoke.

‘I meant what I said. The question was clear enough, surely?’

‘Yes, but the answer is so simple. Why does anyone come to France? Or go anywhere for that matter? Dull as it may seem I’m here for a holiday. To get away. To relax. To have some fun.’

‘Ah,fun,’ he said and he might as well have made that clichéd hand sign which marks two inverted commas in the air around the word. She felt belittled – which must have been his intention.

‘Well, you asked the question,’ she said.

What had made her say that damn cliché about fun? Momentarily she pictured herself throwing her glass of wine in his face.

But her glass (she had automatically, as if she were really about to pick it up and throw it, looked at it) was empty. Empty and she couldn’t remember drinking it – a worrying sign.

‘Who are you here with?’ he asked then.

‘No one.’

‘Ah.’ He raised that one eyebrow again as if to show that some assumption he’d had about her had been confirmed.

‘I prefer it that way.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t like people?’

‘No, that’s not it.’ Why was he making her feel so defensive, so exposed?

‘You just like your own company?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Hmm.’ He absorbed this. Maybe he was, as he had claimed, a psychologist.

She emptied the carafe into her glass, filling it to the brim. To hell in a handcart, she thought, then not caring how it looked, she bent her head to her glass and drank a quarter of an inch of the liquid without lifting it from the table.

He stood up.

‘Are you off, then?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’ He stretched himself, sighed, shrugged. A rapid succession of signs which were contradictory and unreadable. Except that leaving was in and of itself the most uncomplicated sign of all.

He disappeared inside the bar. She watched as he stood there chatting for a few minutes with the man behind the counter. He looked more relaxed, threw his head back and laughed at something the other man had said. Then the man on the stool next to Scott leaned towards him – evidently in order to say something private – and as he spoke he flicked his eyes in her direction. Scott turned and glanced at her. She looked away quickly. She heard laughter again, but had no way of knowing if it was about her.

She gazed up at the large plane tree on the pavement outside the café, noticed for the first time that curling up its trunk and hung about its branches were unlit fairy lights. It would look so pretty if they were switched on, she thought. She took it personally that no one had made the effort – it was as if the world had conspired to always deal her the third-rate experience, the uninspired. The unadorned.

She glanced once more into the bar. Scott was now half-sitting on a bar stool, one foot on the rung, his knee sharply bent, the other leg straight, foot planted firmly on the floor with the toe pointed towards the exit. A waitress was standing next to him smoking a cigarette.

Lucy looked at the wine in her glass and realising that she had already drunk too much, she picked it up and added it to the coffee in the planter. It was swallowed up quickly; the plant was as thirsty, as empty as she was.

The House with the Yellow Shutters

A phrase had popped into Marilyn’s head as she stood at the sink peeling potatoes. She watched her hands as they denuded each mud-caked potato with a string-handled peeler. She tried saying the phrase aloud in a whispered chant, ‘like quicksand’s kiss, that draws me in…’ She knew that she should stop what she was doing and jot the words down, but somehow, an element of self-consciousness or duty stopped her and she continued to peel potatoes.

The water was lukewarm as she had added a little from the hot tap. She remembered peeling potatoes for her mother back home in Canada, her hands bright red in the icy water. Never questioning why they had to be peeled in that way in particular and what was wrong with a little warm water, a bit of comfort?

Not ‘quicksand’s kiss’ then, but more like muddy water. Maybe it was the grit she sensed on the pads of her fingers that had made her think of sand, that and the fact that they had spent that day at the beach. And she was weary; her mind could not entirely focus on any one thing.

‘Do you need any help here?’ Scott was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; despite his words he looked as if he didn’t really want to help, though she was certain that if asked, he would.

‘No, it’s fine. Won’t be long now, thirty-five minutes at most.’

‘Okay, I’ll get Aaron to have a wash.’

She smiled. The smile acknowledged the difficulty of his task. It was far easier, she knew, to deal with supper – the mashed potatoes, meatloaf, carrots and gravy – than to get Aaron to do even the simplest thing like washing his face and hands.

For the last four years they had been coming here with Aaron. Two weeks every year dealing with Aaron was completely exhausting. How his aging parents coped for the other fifty weeks of the year she didn’t know. Maybe back home in more familiar surroundings he was easier to cope with. And, crucially, his parents loved him, he was their child after all. That had to make a difference. Except that when she imagined having a child like Aaron, she could not picture love at all, only a devastating disappointment, a terrible burden of pain and guilt and regret. And she felt bad for even allowing this thought to enter her head. It didn’t matter that there was honesty in recognising it, she should not, she was certain, even think it. Especially now that she herself was pregnant.

She hadn’t told anyone yet. She calculated the pregnancy to be eleven weeks, and she’d taken two pregnancy tests, one the week before they left for France, and one after they’d arrived, which she’d done in the ladies loo at the airport after they’d landed. She’d been nervous about flying, had some strange notion that the air pressure in the cabin or the altitude or stress would make her lose the baby.

Losing the baby that early on in the pregnancy wasn’t always referred to as a miscarriage, sometimes it was described as a spontaneous abortion – a term which made her shudder.

She planned to do a third test when they got back to Canada. Only then would she tell Scott. Only then could she begin to believe it herself, which at this moment she didn’t entirely.

So she stood at the sink peeling potatoes, dreamily letting her mind range freely, while in the hallway she heard Scott chiding and chivying Aaron towards the downstairs bathroom. Threatening no supper, no ‘nice meatloaf’, no ‘buttery mash’ if he didn’t wash his face and hands, then switching tactics and promising ice cream tomorrow if he was good tonight.

And in opposition to the sounds of Scott’s voice, there was Aaron’s wall of words ‘No, no, no, no, no’ which altered in pitch and tempo, rising and falling and sounding to the uninformed outsider like the cries of someone being tortured. And maybe to Aaron it was torture. Did it really matter if he washed his face and hands or not? Sometimes it didn’t seem worth the effort, but then as Scott said, you start letting one thing go and the next thing you know you’ve got him tied to a leash in a dirty basement, and you hose him down once a month and only then because the smell is floating up the stairs.

The phone started to ring.

‘Marilyn! Mar! Sorry, can you get that? We’ve got a situation here…’

She dropped the potato and the peeler into the tepid brown water, grabbed a clean tea-towel and hurried into the sitting room wiping her hands dry. It was seven-fifteen. She knew who was calling, Momma and Poppa Clement, to say ‘night-night’ to their best boy,Aaron. Though so far he’d never been persuaded to come to the phone. Telephones with their disembodied voices, even the familiar voices of his parents, seemed to scare Aaron. But every evening Scott and Aaron’s parents rang up and asked to talk to him.

In the hallway she saw that Aaron was holding onto the newel post at the foot of the stairs with two hands. His body was rigid and his head was bent low at the neck, a sure sign that he was in a defiant mood. Scott was standing next to him with a lavender-coloured bath towel in his hands.

She didn’t really need to hurry to get to the phone, her in-laws would let the phone ring for minute after minute after minute until someone finally picked up, and in the event that no one picked up the first time, they would ring every half hour after. They were persistent and vigilant, would seemingly never give up anything once they had started, which might explain their untiring devotion to Aaron.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that you, Marilyn?’ It was, as she’d expected, Scott and Aaron’s mother. Her voice was full of warm enthusiasm, like that of a kindergarten teacher talking to a five year old, yet it always made Marilyn think of disappointment.

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘How’s our boy?’

‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Marilyn said out of habit, aware as she said it that Aaron’s voice, the angry ‘No, no, no, no, no’ must be carried, along with her own voice, over the wires, up to the satellite, to be beamed down into Audrey Clement’s ears as she stood in the overheated kitchen of their scrupulously clean Ontario home.

‘Has he had his supper?’

‘No, not yet, I’m just in the middle of it.’

‘Oh, what are you having?’

‘Meatloaf, mash, veg.’

‘Oh, he loves his meatloaf! She says they’re having meatloaf, Dave.’

Dave was Marilyn’s father-in-law, a man who was tall and stooped, with a white beard and a full head of white hair that made him look like an underfed Santa Claus, especially in the red sweater Audrey had knitted him last fall.

‘Will Baby come to the phone?’ Audrey said in a needy voice. Baby was the affectionate nickname Audrey and Dave had for Aaron.

‘No, Audrey, I don’t think so, but I’ll just ask. Hold on.’ Dutifully, knowing it was a charade, she went to the doorway and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Scott, your mom’s on the phone, does Aaron want to say hello?’

And Scott, in an equally loud voice said, ‘Aaron? You wanna talk to Momma? Momma’s on the phone.’