Living with Strangers (12 page)

It takes no more than a week to have confirmation from Gil’s cousin. Simone lives with her husband and family in a new house by the Loire, but she works in Paris and needs permanent childcare.

The next month is spent making plans. I take a day off work to queue for hours at the Passport Office, I book a flight, which Simone has agreed to pay for, and hand in my notice at work. Only then do I venture to let Molly and Saul know what I intend to do. I can anticipate their reaction; when it comes it simply strengthens my decision to go.

I find them both in the garden, sitting on the bench under the plum tree. It’s a warm, airless evening, heavy with summer promise. Later I wish I hadn’t seen fit to spoil it.

‘Ah, Maddie.’ Saul, as always, seems surprised to see me. Molly continues reading the paper.

‘So, what’s new?’

‘I’ve something to tell you.’ They both look up and I know immediately it will go wrong.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, trying levity. ‘I’m not pregnant.’

They continue to watch me as I kneel on the lawn in front of them.

I try again. ‘I’ve decided to go to France. I’ve got a job there – Gil told me about it.’ I figure this might help. ‘It’s with his cousin – she needs an au pair.’

Still neither of them speaks.

‘It’s… it’s all arranged really.’

Saul closes his book. ‘Why France, Maddie? You speak German.’

‘Because that’s where the job is. And I can learn – learn French. Why not?’

Molly rustles the newspaper. ‘But you hated French.’

‘I did at uni, yes, but this’ll be different. Speaking it will be different.’

‘And your job here – what happens to that? I thought you l liked it.’

‘I do, but…’ I’m slowly drowning. ‘This just seems like a good opportunity.’

‘To be a nanny? Did you ever think about becoming a nanny before? I wouldn’t have thought it was your… thing.’

‘It’s more than that. I’ll have time off when the children are at school. I can study again. It might be better if I’m over there.’ It was all worked out. Until now.

The grass is damp beneath my knees. I try one more line. ‘And I thought it might be easier if I went.’

‘Easier?’

‘Yes, for all of us.’

Saul stands up. ‘Well, you’re grown up now Maddie. You must do what you think is best.’ And he goes back into the house while Molly and I, locked in this painful communion, find nothing more to say.

In my room, stifling as it always is in summer, I bang around, muttering, opening drawers, slamming them shut – stonewalled. What is it they really want from me? Downstairs again, I have every intention of going out – for a walk, to a pub, anywhere – but I catch sight of Molly alone in the kitchen putting supper dishes away. I should leave her and go quietly from the house – she wouldn’t notice. But I choose not to, anger dictates otherwise and I taste the sweetness of righteous indignation. I’ve made a plan, a good one. Would it hurt, just once, to take an interest in something I did?

I find myself standing in the kitchen. I hear my own voice yelling, ‘I can’t get anything right, can I? No matter what I do, it’s always wrong! You moan at me for doing nothing – then when I sort something out, that’s no good either! What do you want from me – what am I supposed to do?’

Startled, Molly rests a hand on the kitchen table for support. ‘Madeleine,’ she says, ‘please don’t shout.’

‘Well, what?’ My legs tremble. I’m outside it all, lost somewhere, watching the tantrum from above.

‘I just wish…’ Molly sits down, her face grey, impassive, ‘I just wish you wouldn’t keep changing your mind. You don’t settle to anything, you don’t seem to have any direction and…’ she sighs, ‘you make such bad decisions.’

She looks up then and shakes her head. Turning I see Sophie, motionless in the doorway, watching us both.

‘We just want you to be settled,’ Molly says, ‘to find what you really want.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do!’ I’m still shouting though my head of steam is spent. ‘I’ve just been unlucky.’

‘And if you go abroad, you won’t know anyone. You’ll have to start again – with everything.’ Molly pauses, seeming to struggle – I’ve never seen her struggle for words. Is she referring to my hard won friendships – the few meaningful contacts I’ve made and kept in recent years? Then I see, in the distancing of her gaze, that she isn’t really in the room, that she isn’t talking about me at all.

‘This isn’t about me is it? This is something else. This is about Josef and what happened – what you would never tell me!’

Molly seems to crumple then, all bristling defensiveness draining away. ‘It’s complicated,’ she says. ‘It’s always been so complicated.’ She looks down at the floor, resting an elbow on the table, suddenly old. I see her as she might become, much later, when the years have overtaken her. I know too, that this isn’t just about Josef – it is so much more. Her own disappointments, eggshells she has walked, the peace she’s been forced to keep. I could go to her, kneel down, hug her. But that’s not our way, we’ve not learned to heal. I know a touch will be anathema to her; she will flinch and shrug me off. I can do nothing but walk away – unexplained, unresolved.

Taking Sophie by the hand, I leave the house, and all my questions remain unanswered for another seven years.

*

The hardest part of my decision to go is leaving Sophie. After the scene with Molly, I take her down to the lake.

‘So, you’re going away too – like Josef did.’ Sophie looks at me, eyes beginning to spill.

I hold her firmly by the shoulders. ‘No,’ I say, ‘not like Josef. I have to go, yes – it’s not possible to stay here – but when I do go, you’ll always know where I am. Always. And I’ll write too, like I did when I went to uni and to London.’

Sophie’s crying now, convulsing with deep sobbing sounds. I put my arms around her until she stops. ‘But,’ she hiccups into my shirt, ‘I won’t see you!’

‘Yes you will. You can visit in the holidays – come and help me with the children. And,’ though I know already this is a lie, ‘I’ll come over, I’ll come home sometimes.’

‘Will you?’ she sniffs, lifting her head from my chest, leaving a mucus trail behind. ‘Promise?’

I hold her away from me. ‘I promise I’ll see you as often as I can. And I’ll send photos – you can too. You can have my old Brownie, it still works.’ Sophie is calmer then. I give her my handkerchief, which she blows into loudly and hands back to me. That makes me smile. I roll it into a ball and push it up my sleeve.

‘And you won’t fight with Mummy any more?’

Were we fighting? Is that what it was? A fight is at least a connection. I lunged in, at long last, but I did not want to hurt her, I simply wanted to be heard.

‘No,’ I say, holding Sophie’s hand as we walk back through the churchyard. ‘I won’t fight with her. Not any more.’

But when I return from the walk with Sophie that evening, my anger has not quite dispersed. I go back up to my room and take out a lined notepad and pencil. In my head is a verse I learnt as a child. I write it down and tuck it in the drawer, hiding it beneath the airmail pad and envelopes.

The scene with Molly has done nothing to alter the atmosphere between us; it simply confirms what we are both aware of. I need to go. Molly needs me to be gone.

*

Two weeks later, I leave for France. Saul drives me to the airport, with Sophie for support this time. Again, my luggage is meagre in quantity, despite not knowing how long my stay will be. Saul carries my case – a new one bought for the occasion, since I’ve bequeathed my old brown one to Sophie and she’s packed all her music in it.

‘Don’t stay,’ I say, as we hover edgily around the queue to check in. ‘There’s no need. I’ll be fine.’

Saul fills his pipe, looking everywhere but at me.

Sophie hangs her arms around my neck. ‘Don’t go,’ she says.

‘I’ll see you soon.’

‘I’ll miss you so much.’

‘And I’ll miss you too. But you’ll manage, you’re a big girl – remember?’ Sophie slowly unwinds her arms and they fall by her sides.

Saul finishes packing his pipe and puts it in his pocket. He places a hand on my arm and kisses me briefly. ‘Good luck this time.’ Then, as they turn away, he says, ‘Let us know how you are, how you get on.’

I nod slowly, my face too full to speak. I stand alone amidst the clatter of departure boards, the relentless flurry of human traffic, then turn away too, into the crowd.

The house by the river is no more than two years old. Vast in size, large parts of it remain unfinished, awaiting the next injection of capital and renewed enthusiasm. Simone and her husband Bernard bought the plot of land five years before, to capitalise on the new private housing market. I later discover it was a bid to appease Simone, whose lust for the city could only be trumped by the prestige of a costly self-build.

Simone fetches me from the airport. She seems friendly enough in a hasty, abstracted way and talks constantly in the car – a barrage of sound I can make little sense of. Throughout the journey she takes her eyes off the road far too often and looks across at me, expecting a response. I look back at her and smile as intelligently as possible, fearful as we weave in and out of chaos on the Péripherique.

On arrival, Simone conducts a rapid tour of the house, most of which is not my concern, except as somewhere I’m expected to clean. My part of the house consists of a small bedroom just inside the front door, most of the space taken up by a highly ornate wardrobe. My clothes scarcely fill a corner of it. There’s another door from the bedroom, which I assume leads to the kitchen or some other part of the house, but later when I ask Simone for the bathroom she regards me with disdain– a look I will experience many times in the coming months.

‘But it’s here!’ she says, opening the other door in my room to reveal a small
salle d’eau
perfectly equipped with shower, toilet, washbowl and something else that looks like a toilet but evidently isn’t. Since there’s only the one door in this room, my mind spins with visions of the whole family trooping through my bedroom to use the facilities.

‘It’s yours,’ Simone says, sensing my alarm, ‘just for you – we have others,’ and she gestures above her head, rattling a wristful of gold bracelets. This is truly another world; I am here without a map.

We end up in the kitchen. Here, the full extent of my duties becomes clear when she opens a large cupboard, containing dusters, mops, buckets, aerosol cans and a very small vacuum cleaner. There’s been no mention of the children.

‘
Et… les enfants?
’ I manage.

Simone reels off another series of garbled sounds and then stops. ‘Tomorrow,’ she says in English, ‘Bernard bring them.’

I sleep little that night, haunted by images of large alien children I will have no control over, to whom I’ll forever be unable to speak. But when they arrive the following afternoon, to my relief this is all unfounded. Bernard speaks fluent, if heavily accented, English and in the space of five minutes, clarifies the incomprehensible blur of the previous day. Reassuringly, the children smile sweetly and shake hands. Olivier, aged four, stays close to his father and looks at me strangely as we go through routines in English. His seven-year-old sister Aurélie promptly takes me off to view her collection of stuffed toys. Dinner that evening is a low-key affair; I’m overtaken by exhaustion and am more than ready to sleep.

Simone leaves for work soon after seven in the morning. I’m expected to give the children their breakfast and walk them to the school bus on the main road, half a mile away. That first morning, Aurélie organises her brother, shows me where to find cutlery and dishes and makes hot chocolate for us all. Then she sits at the kitchen table, calmly swinging her legs, dipping a croissant into her bowl.

After breakfast the children set off up the drive ahead of me, small backpacks bouncing, and turn to wait when they reach the top. They seem too young and vulnerable to entrust to the rattling vehicle that drives off with them twenty minutes later, but they climb on board cheerfully and, with a quick wave, are swallowed up by noisy hydraulic doors.

When I return to the house, Bernard is on the point of leaving and he pauses by the car door. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he says in English, ‘things were getting desperate. It’s hard to begin with, but it gets easier, believe me.’

‘I’m sure it does,’ I say. ‘And this is good for me too. I needed something new.’

Bernard gets into the car and starts the engine. ‘Don’t mind Simone – she can be… demanding at times. Make yourself at home, the day is yours now. Watch TV – it’s good for your French.’ And he drives away, crunching loudly on the rough ground.

*

In spite of the housework, a list of which Simone pins up daily in the kitchen, early days with the family pass easily and uneventfully. By ten o’clock I’ve usually swept and dusted the huge living room, tidied the children’s rooms and prepared vegetables and meat for dinner. Gradually new patterns emerge, different from anything I’ve known. There’s something invigorating in the lack of familiarity, the foreignness of it all that holds no twitching memories. The old slate wiped clean, propped up and ready for a new chapter.

With several hours free in the daytime, I venture out along the levée by the river or walk the two miles into the nearest village. A bustling place set around a small shaded square, it has an impressive variety of shops – even a beauty therapist. French women, I discover, seem to spend a large amount of time and money on their appearance – at least that’s the impression I gain from Simone. She’s swift in trying to smarten me up, making suggestions about what I should wear – a little make-up perhaps? Have I tried a facial? Something called ‘exfoliation’ is
de rigeur
apparently, though it sounds like chemical warfare. She thinks little of my ‘natural’ look – hair hanging loose, rarely cut except when I lived in London and ventured into a salon now and again. Simone, I notice, together with several of her friends who regularly gather at the house for dinner, has overlaid her own dark hair with an orange rinse. It seems to blend well with the other elements of sophistry – the jewellery, the tailored finesse.

At four o’clock the bus brings the children back, tired and less amenable than in the morning. I prepare afternoon tea for them. They call it
goûter –
just as Gil’s mother gave me – fresh bread with lumps of chocolate tucked inside, dipped hungrily into hot milk. Sometimes we eat ripe blackberries, gathered from the hedgerow on the way home from the bus.

On a Wednesday there’s no school. Though my free time is constrained I come to love the slower pace first thing in the morning, a lie-in until seven-thirty or eight, when Olivier comes down and jumps on the bed, announcing that he wants something to eat. The three of us take breakfast up to the first-floor mezzanine where the television churns out special programmes for Wednesdays, designed to amuse the children at home – cartoons, serials, dubbed American broadcasts – all of which I fail to comprehend completely. But we sit there, fellow conspirators, enjoying the decadence. No doubt Simone would complain if she knew, and somewhere I can still hear Molly’s voice telling me I should be doing something useful. Yet I already know my usefulness here is valid. It has not taken long to feel needed.

*

After I’ve been there about six weeks, Bernard finds me in the living room one evening as I attempt to read a news magazine.

‘You’ve settled well here,’ he says, ‘the children seem very happy.’

‘The children are lovely. They’re very adaptable.’

Bernard scratches his head and sighs. ‘They’ve had to be. It’s been hard – especially since Olivier was born. But Simone loves her job – hates being at home.

‘What does she do?’ I haven’t spent long enough in her company to find out.

‘She’s an accountant. She’s set up her own business now – hence the hours and the need to be in Paris. The head office needs a Paris address.’

‘But, doesn’t she miss the children? She hardly ever sees them.’

‘It’s the way it’s always been – part of the deal. The children have never known any different. And since we built this place,’ Bernard looks up, high into the rafters of the living room, ‘well, there’s no other option now.’

Over the weeks, I watch these new family dynamics. I suspect Aurélie’s composure has little to do with equanimity. She has a withdrawn look whenever her mother is around, pulling in the entrails of childish need. It isn’t hard to recognise. Simone, for her part, gushes around both children at times, overflowing with apparent warmth, touching them constantly before disappearing again for hours, even at the weekend. I quickly learn when she wants time with them. Even if we’re in the middle of something – a game, a meal, homework – she will fly in, hug each of them fiercely and sit down as if her entire day has been focussed on this particular point in time. Perhaps it has, but ten minutes later she’s on the phone or grabbing her car keys and the children and I quietly resume our own brand of domesticity.

I also learn to deflect her barbed criticism of whatever I do with the children. Not long after the exchange with Bernard, Simone knocks on my door early one Sunday. I’ve heard Bernard’s car leave for Mass and the children know that Sunday is officially my day off. Half asleep, I sit up in bed, conscious of how unkempt I must seem against the gloss of her appearance. She speaks slowly, for which I’m thankful, as my understanding still lacks any speed of process, but there’s no compromise in her attack.

‘I think you’ve upset Aurélie,’ she says. ‘She tells me you won’t allow her to play by the water unless you are with her.’

I try to form some kind of defence but Simone doesn’t wait. ‘She’s a very reliable girl, she doesn’t need you hovering over her – she needs to develop independence. I have always allowed her to play at the front by the river and I don’t take kindly to my rules being ignored.’

Again I go to speak but she’s in full flow now. ‘And another thing – Olivier is wearing his old clothes for school, day after day. You know I put out what he’s to wear and still you allow him to put on whatever he wants. It may be your way of doing things – you may not be concerned about what you look like – but my children are to dress as I want them to, understood?’

Understood indeed.

Simone turns to go. ‘I’m taking the children to Paris for the day. The living room floor is in a state – perhaps you could clean it while we’re away?’ It isn’t a request.

I wait until her car leaves, then go into the kitchen to make coffee. It crosses my mind to leave the floor – mopping it takes an age, but I haven’t planned much for my day off and I think it prudent to keep the peace.

I’m aware that my presence here may be threatening to her, that the children might temporarily slide their affections over, simply because I’m the one attending to their daily needs, but Simone’s accusation has no basis in truth. Aurélie never asks to play alone by the river. The three of us often spend time there together, searching for stones and shells to make a ‘shop’. But in spite of her self-reliance, Aurélie at seven and a non-swimmer is too young to play there unsupervised. This is no stream like the one where Josef and I played; the water here is wide and chases in fierce rapids past the house. If caught, even the strongest of adults would fail to stand upright.

There’s no more truth in Simone’s complaint about Olivier’s clothes. He always dresses himself for school in his mother’s choice, usually some new outfit she’s picked up in Paris. Only when tired after school does he pull on something old and familiar. Increasingly I wonder which planet Simone inhabits, and whether she simply looks for any excuse to find fault.