Children of Light

‘For me?’ said Mireille.

‘Four days ago it arrived, and we were waiting for you. You were not at the Tuesday market and I said to Macon, do we deliver it to her? But who can find La Ferrou these days, it is so overgrown.’ She handed over the letter reluctantly. It had been the source of much conversation in the café. If it had been in French she might well have been tempted to open it. ‘From your son? A relative?’ Mireille looked at it and put it into her pocket.

‘What about lunch? Today it’s a good piece of chicken with wild mushrooms.’ At the café door Auxille was shaking out a cloth and looking obviously in their direction. Odette and her daughter were arranging newspapers outside the shop and doing the same.

‘I won’t stop, thank you,’ said Mireille. ‘I’ve been making my hut more habitable. It’s taking up a lot of time.’

‘On your own? You should have asked Macon. No wonder you look so tired.’

‘Do I?’ and Mireille smiled, a pale version of her usual dazzling one. ‘It’s finished now, but thank you.’

‘On Saturday we go to the market in Draguignan. They have everything there. There would be room for you.’

‘I do need a cannise,’ said Mireille slowly, ‘and some cooking pans, and some rope …’

‘Then it’s settled. Meet us by the café at eight. When we come back we shall have lunch.’ She still didn’t go but stood there smiling furiously in her navy and pink dress, like a sturdy, gaudy, hot-house plant. All this for the contents of a letter, thought Mireille.

She took the letter out of her pocket and opened it. The frisson of anticipation coming from Jeanette was almost audible. She read it. There was a pause between her reading and relating the contents to Jeanette. Jeanette took this pause to be the translation from English to French, not Mireille’s attempt to alter it completely. ‘He says he’s very well. He wishes me a good holiday and he sends his love to everybody in St Clair. He’s been windsurfing recently and he had dinner with his girlfriend’s parents. That’s about it.’

‘Ah …’ said Jeanette, hoping for more but already creating a suave sophisticated young man having a candlelit banquet in a castle. The girlfriend’s parents were aristocrats, surely.

‘I’ll see you on Saturday,’ said Mireille.

She was furious. Not with Jeanette. She crunched down through the woods like a wild boar. In her hut she threw the letter on to the table. It was some minutes before she could pick it up again. Perhaps she had misread it. Perhaps she had somehow mistaken what had been said and turned it into an insult.

Dear Mum,

What on earth do you think you are doing? I thought you were having a two-week break and now you say you’re staying there until the summer. What’s got into you, have you lost it completely? There’s plenty of things you should be sorting out here. What about the house? What about your job? I know you’ve been upset and all that, but staying in a hut isn’t going to make it better. I’m sure it’s idyllic but you must remember I have no memories about that place, so describing it in detail does nothing for me. When you next contact me please give me some definite arrangements.

Love,

Stephen

She screamed out of the door and across the valley as if her vehemence could be carried on the wind all the way to England and slap Stephen around the face. ‘I know you’ve been upset and all that.’ That bit got to her the worst. She sat down to write him an immediate reply but could get no further than the first sentence, which she changed many times. ‘How could you? How dare you. Why are you so arrogant?’ She sat with her arms on the table. Through the door she could see the sky, the clouds changing it from blue to grey to white. A band of sunlight falling on the floor, appearing and disappearing with the regularity of dance. She tried on another piece of paper. ‘You do not know what this place means to me.’ When she wrote this her eyes filled with tears, because no, he didn’t know. The distance between them was much greater than anything geographical.

Stephen. He was tall and blond, like Gregor had been, and with hazel eyes, also like Gregor’s. He was confident and well-spoken. He was the first to shake somebody’s hand. He liked windsurfing and rock climbing. He drove a red Astra. He liked fixing things. He liked the Lake District. He worked for a computer software company. He liked information. He liked facts. He liked order. Yes, she had to remember that, even as a little child he had collected snail shells and put them in neat rows by the hut. Other young men didn’t change their socks and lived happily in festering nests of used handkerchiefs and beer cans, she knew that. But Stephen was immaculate. The Heathers was like that now. Big bright prints. Black and chrome Italian lighting. Dark blue cups and plates. A red blanket on one arm of the sofa. We are alike, she thought, and looked round her own hut, although he might not have seen the connection. Pans hanging on the wall and the floor scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed. The loft swept and rid of unwelcome arachnids. Her sleeping bag on a red blanket she had found in the bottom of the trunk. By the sink a dark blue tin mug.

Dear Stephen,

I am not mad, but please accept that I need to be here. You do not know what this place means to me and yes, you are right, I can’t describe it to you. I will stay here until June, then I will let you know what I’m going to do.

It wasn’t enough, but she felt something final about writing it. She had sent her mother a postcard after she left home. ‘I will not be back for some time. Do not worry about me. Love, Mireille.’

She put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. She knew what she was saying. Leave me alone. It was something she had never said to him before. She started another letter.

Dear Stephen,

And this time I shall call you Sanclair, because that is your real name and I named you after the village. I know you remember nothing about this place but I remember it. I wish you did remember. When you swam in the Ferrou, you were never scared of the water, you would have crawled right in if I hadn’t stopped you. You were so fearless. Nothing scared you. Even a late summer thunderstorm that shook the hut and the rain beating like boots on the roof. You sat there on the floor with big wide eyes and your mouth open, not afraid, but awed. Gregor said, ‘It’s the sky gods having a party,’ and he took you outside to see the lightning flashing in great forks across the valley, and you both came back wet and shivering. I had to stoke the stove up and you were chattering with cold. You said, ‘So big!’ and stretched your arms out. ‘So big!’ For days after you looked up at the sky, waiting for another storm. I wish you could remember. We all slept up in the loft and took it in turns to tell stories. Can’t you remember Gregor’s, about the man with the lame donkey and the boat to the Scottish islands? The blind woman in the Sudan who could tell her family’s history for generations? My stories were Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, Peter Pan, and the tale of Avelard, the troubadour. When it was your turn you told such funny things, big monsters, sky gods and the old woman with a lump on her nose. Your world was so small. The hut, the village, the Ferrou, your red shirt, your floppy rabbit. Then I would see you playing and I could see your world was endless. A tree was a wizard, a stone was a lump of the sky. You played by the Ferrou, talking to nobody, talking to somebody, a muddled up French and English. Sanclair. You started off here and I wish you could remember because it must have affected you, to be a child in the woods. I will not send you this letter.

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