‘Hey,’ Calvin yells, breathless, his legs buckling under him so that he falls to his side, dizzy and disoriented by the sudden return to static life. ‘It’s Dad!’
Claudette, in the middle of drawing a picture with Zoë, looks round at Calvin, crayon in hand, as if to admonish him for yelling such outrageous untruths. Ari, who is texting Sophie with a photo of Zoë and the cheetah, looks up from his phone, which is just this minute receiving a message from Daniel: I’m here. Where are you? Marithe does nothing. She’s wired up to her music and so has no idea that her father, who lives these days in New York, whom she hasn’t seen for a month and a half, is coming up behind her.
‘Oh,’ Ari says, flushing, turning to his mother, aware all of a sudden that his stammer might make an unwelcome appearance. ‘I … I … I m-meant to say. He mentioned … ages ago that he … he might be in town and I just – I just – I just thought—’
His mother is staring him down. She raises her eyebrows at him, then reaches for her sunglasses, on the table in front of her, and puts them on. ‘I see,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ari says, trying to motion to Marithe to take off her earphones: he could do with her help here, but she is miles, oceans, time zones away, ‘I thought I’d said …’ he lies. ‘M-m-maybe it slipped my mind.’
Claudette is smoothing Zoë’s hair with a stiff hand. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘he’s here now.’
And indeed he is. Daniel reaches their group, a huge grin on his face, overcoat flapping open. ‘Hey!’ he booms, and Ari smiles, despite himself, despite the awkwardness swirling around him, despite the incriminating messages on his phone, which his mother must never, ever find. Daniel’s voice has always carried a head-turning volume, more than he himself is perhaps aware.
‘What’s with you all?’ he yells, then seizes a surprised Marithe off her seat, bear-hugs Calvin, hurls Zoë into the air and slaps Ari across the shoulders. When all this is done, he stands in front of his ex-wife. Ari is finding it hard to breathe; he is trying not to look at them yet is unable to tear away his gaze. Claudette and Daniel haven’t, as far as he’s aware, clapped eyes on each other for three, maybe four years. In that time, Daniel has moved back to the States, been to rehab, taken up running, got himself a new teaching post, seen the children every six weeks, and has started a charitable trust for elective mutes. He is, in short, a different man from the one Claudette kicked out four years ago.
Daniel waits, Claudette seated before him. He lifts his palms into the air, as if to say, and?
Claudette fiddles with the cuff of her glove, then extends her hand. ‘Hello, Daniel,’ she says.
Daniel looks down at Claudette’s hand. He lets out a laugh. Marithe looks at Ari and grimaces.
‘Seriously?’ Daniel is saying. ‘You want me to shake hands with you?’
Behind her sunglasses, Claudette gives one of her shrugs, learnt at the feet of the master of Gallic froideur (Pascaline).
‘Come on,’ Daniel says and, pushing aside the gloved hand, he leans in, cups the face of his ex-wife and kisses her on the cheek, for perhaps only a fraction too long.
Daniel seats himself, without looking at Claudette, and pulls Zoë onto his knee, asking her what she’s seen at the zoo, this cheetah he’s been hearing so much about. Ari sits at the neighbouring table, under the guise of watching his daughter but actually keeping an eye on Claudette and Daniel. He has invested too much time and effort in this meeting to abandon them, unsupervised, so soon. He is interested to see how his little experiment will progress. Calvin resumes bouncing, working up to being able to see over the net once more. Marithe is asking Claudette, then Daniel for some money so she can buy snacks, bringing Zoë on-side for leverage, and Daniel is saying, I’ve been here for two minutes and already you’re asking me for cash?
‘Nice picture,’ Daniel says to Claudette as an aside, nodding at a crayoned drawing of a monkey.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘Did you do it all by yourself?’
Ari sees his mother frown, trying to be cross but actually battling amusement. He wants to punch the air. The minute she smiles, he knows that Daniel will have won a significant victory. Daniel was always so good at puncturing her hoity-toity tendencies with humour.
‘So,’ Daniel says, as Zoë clambers over his head and onto his back.
‘What?’ Claudette says.
‘How come you’re being all …’
‘All what?’
‘I don’t know.’ He rubs a hand over his stubble – should he have shaved perhaps? Ari wonders. ‘All Pascaline Lefevre.’
‘What do you mean?’ Claudette demands.
‘You know.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yeah, you do. All,’ Daniel waves a hand in the air, ‘chilly and elegant and disapproving.’
‘Is that what you’ve come here for? To insult my mother?’
‘No, never. I was in Ireland for … a conference and thought I might come and pick up those things of mine still at the house and I heard you guys were going to be at the zoo today so I came to see my kids. Our kids.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And since when,’ he says, ‘has “elegant” been an insult?’
Marithe stands among the iron picnic tables, unsure what to do, where to go. Calvin is back on the trampoline, singing now, something about camels and deserts and moving shapes. He’s learning it on the guitar at home. Ari is accepting Zoë onto his knee; they have their dark heads bent together; Zoë has her thumb in and her feet dangle down almost to the ground. How can she have grown so much? She’s a proper child now, Marithe suddenly sees, not at all a baby, her face no longer round and squishable. At the next table, amazingly, sit her mother and her father. Together. In one place, at the same time. She could almost use the word ‘parents’, something which, she now thinks, has slipped from her vocabulary.
She stands facing these people, her family, uncertain to whom she should attach herself. Ari cradles Zoë on his lap, saying something into her ear: there seems no requirement for a third person there. Perhaps she should go to her parents, to smooth things over, to ensure they don’t start a row.
She assesses them from between her narrowed lashes. They don’t, she knows, look like other people’s parents. Daniel is larger, louder, more expressive than other dads. He waves his arms in the air. His hair is wilder, his shirts more elaborate, his coats scruffier. He picks up on the things people say, the way people say them: he is obsessed with the words people choose and why, with accent, with inflection, with why you say what you say, whom you’re copying when you say something in a certain way, with the differences in what he calls regional vocabulary. Marithe realised a year or so ago that not everyone’s fathers do this.
It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted, like the deck of a ship in a storm.
At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You’re picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home?
Certain things she’d always loved, like lighting the dinner-table candles or stirring a cake mix alongside her mother or sitting up on the roof to play her accordion or decorating the Christmas tree or collecting the eggs in the morning, felt suddenly hollow, distant, staged. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, as if she was viewing her existence from behind a glass wall.
And her body! Some mornings she woke and
it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours’ horses – which she hardly ever did any more, she didn’t know why – she wouldn’t have the energy, the sap in her to do it.
She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?
She had asked her mother this one night, lying on the sofa, looking up at the gold stars they had cut out and stuck up there once, a long time ago, her mother teetering at the top of a ladder, which had made Daniel shout, later, when he found out, because she was pregnant with Calvin and Daniel said Claudette must be ‘out of her mind’ to be climbing up stepladders. Marithe had looked at her, at the zone around her head, and wondered what it would be like to be outside her mind, where it would be, what it would feel like to be caught, luxuriating, hanging around in all that hair.
Anyway, the older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it?
Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She’d said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you’re describing comes of growing up but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not?
Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.
For Calvin, she feels a simultaneous jealousy and pity. He still has it, that wholeness, that verve. There he is, on the trampoline, completely on the trampoline, not worrying about anything, not thinking, but now what? Or: what if? Pity, because she knows now he’ll go through it. He’ll have to lose several skins; he’ll wake up one day wearing new, invisible glasses.
And where does she even start with her mother? When she was a child, her mother had been her mother, but Marithe is aware that most children don’t grow up in a house like hers, most people are not taught at home instead of going to school, that what she has is not normal or ordinary, that people sometimes stare at them, then look quickly away.
The last time Ari came to stay, Marithe had seen a line of light under his door late one night. She’d knocked, then tiptoed in. Ari had been sitting up in his bed, his laptop open in front of him, working, she supposed. He had set up some website in London with friends of his; they took tourists on guided walks through the city, telling them about places that appeared in films or books or plays. He’d explained it all to her before.
She’d sat herself down on his bed and he had smiled at her, in a way that meant he didn’t mind her interrupting but he might have to go on working anyway.
‘Can’t sleep?’ he’d said absently, his eyes still on his screen.
And Marithe had taken a deep breath. Why, she’d said, do we live here? And why won’t Mum go anywhere and why are we home-schooled and what is it, what is the thing that everybody knows and I don’t? I know there is something.
Ari had looked at her then. He’d looked at her for a long time. She could see him weighing up answers in his head, see him trying to decide what to say, how much to tell her. Then he’d bitten his lip and said, ‘You should really ask Mum’.
Marithe had banged him on the leg. ‘I have asked her,’ she’d said. ‘She just smiles and shakes her head.’
Ari looked up at the ceiling and sighed. ‘She’ll kill me if I tell you,’ and Marithe felt blood rushing through her chest, thick and fast. She felt that she was close to something she’d almost always known, something that had been on the other side of a curtain, all her life, and Ari had the power to whisk the curtain away. She was close, she was so close. ‘Tell me,’ she urged. ‘Please.’
‘You have to promise not to let on that you know. You have to swear.’
‘I promise.’
‘I mean it, Marithe. You have to swear on … the donkey’s life.’
Marithe squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to picture the donkey, whom she loved more than any other animal in the world, ever, and said, ‘I swear.’
Then Ari did something surprising. Instead of speaking, he typed something quickly into his keyboard, hit return, then swirled the laptop around so that Marithe could see the screen.
‘There,’ he said.
Marithe looked at the screen. She couldn’t comprehend what was appearing there. She glanced at her brother, who was sitting up in bed, arms folded. Image after image of Claudette, much younger, materialised on the screen: her on a flight of stone steps, standing in a lake in a white shirt, in an embrace with a man Marithe didn’t recognise, on a stage in a red dress that trailed on the ground, close to the camera, far away. ‘What,’ she’d said, ‘are these?’
Ari had explained the unbelievable. That Claudette, their mother, had been an actress and film-maker, a famous one, a very famous one, a long time ago, when he was just a baby.
‘You can find her films just about anywhere,’ he’d said. ‘People still watch them. They’re classics.’ Then he’d shut the laptop with a snap, his face twisted in a way that was very familiar to Marithe.
‘What?’ she’d demanded. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There’s more,’ she’d cried. ‘I know it! I can tell by the way you’re pressing your lips together.’
So Ari sighed and they argued and wrangled for a bit longer and Marithe had to promise she wouldn’t tell Calvin and that she’d never let on to Claudette that Ari had told her, and that if Claudette ever did tell her, Marithe had to pretend she didn’t know.
Eventually, Ari reopened his laptop and typed in something else. He hit return. He frowned. He clicked a few times and then he turned the screen back.
It was an article from a newspaper, dated several years before Marithe was even born. Marithe read the headline, she read the words. She looked at the accompanying picture of her mother, grainy, in black and white, standing at a window, holding a dark-haired toddler.
When she looked up, her brother was regarding her with an expression of concern, of sympathy.
‘I don’t …’ she began, trying to master her thoughts.
‘You don’t what?’ Ari said, after a moment.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘What don’t you get?’
‘Any of it!’ Marithe rubbed her eyes; she suddenly felt incredibly tired, almost tearful. ‘It says she disappeared. It says they think she might have drowned. It says you, too, but … but how can they say that … when …’ she was crying now, tears coming hot and fast down her cheeks ‘… when we know it isn’t true, when I can see you right here in front of me?’
‘Marithe—’
‘It doesn’t make any sense. How can it be written in a newspaper that you and Mum might have drowned in Sweden when—’
‘She made it look like that.’
‘Deliberately?’
Ari nods. ‘She had to put them off the scent, to give us time to get away.’
‘But that’s an awful thing to do, to make people think you’ve died, to lead them to believe—’
‘Listen, everyone realised very soon afterwards that we hadn’t died, that she’d staged the whole thing. They traced us through several airports. She’d used our French passports, which put off the police a bit longer as they were searching for our British ones. My father, Timou, gave an interview about it at some point – there’s a picture of him with our other passports.’ Ari looked at Marithe. ‘I only know all this because I’ve researched it online. She won’t talk about it to me either.’
Marithe stared at her brother. Ari was biting his lip, clicking his pen on and off. ‘But why would she go to those lengths? What was she trying to get away from?’
/> ‘I don’t know exactly,’ Ari said, reaching for his cigarettes, ‘but whatever it was it must have been pretty bad for her to do something as drastic as that. Don’t you think?’
Marithe stands in the zoo and this knowledge rests on her, like a coat with stone-loaded pockets. Most of the time she can be as she always was with her mother: they drive to the beach, they walk to pick up the milk from the farm, they study together, they chat as they dig the garden, they make dinner, they chop wood. Other times, often when her mother is engaged in some task, shelling beans or straining cheese or patching Calvin’s trousers, she finds herself staring at Claudette and turning over the facts, quickly and stealthily, like the pages of a forbidden book: a famous actress, a disappearance, the waters surrounding the city of Stockholm, only the rowing-boat was found, leaving Ari’s father behind, suspected sightings but none of them confirmed. She will look at her mother’s hands and think, she lifted Ari into the rowing-boat. She will look at her mother’s face and think, she acted in films, she wrote films. She will cast her eyes over her mother’s shoulders, bent over an atlas with Calvin, and think, you were so unhappy that you ran, you escaped, you hid yourself away.
She hates that this now sits between them, that this gully has appeared: she knows but can’t tell Claudette that she knows. She twists her fingers into the wires of her headphones, until their tips turn magenta-vivid.
She shuts her eyes, trying to blind herself to everything she knows, trying to unknow it. She hears Calvin’s breathing, she hears Zoë’s voice, asking Ari if he will draw her a hopscotch when they get home, she hears her father talking to her mother, not what he is saying, just the rumbling timbre of his voice.
She opens her eyes and finds her mother is looking at her in that way she has sometimes: motionless, penetrating, unblinking. Marithe cannot tear her gaze away. Her father and mother are holding hands. A strange shoot of hope unfurls somewhere in her and she feels again the wrongness, the disjointedness of them no longer living together. Oh, she wants to say, do you think you might, would it be possible?