Chapter 9
9
A few days later when Adeline left the shop to pick Lili up from the after-school garderie , her daughter was less chatty than usual. She walked home quietly, holding her mother’s hand and responding to questions with short, basic answers rather than her usual meandering prattle. Adeline felt her forehead once they were home, but it felt soft and cool. She crouched down, taking herself to eye level, and looked at her daughter’s face. ‘Are you OK, mon coeur ?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened?’
Lili shook her head from side to side in response.
‘Are you feeling poorly?’
Another shake.
‘Just tired?’
Another shake.
Adeline sighed and lifted her daughter onto the armchair. ‘I’ll get you some juice,’ she said. ‘And a biscuit?’
This time there was a nod. Lili was no doubt weary from the day rather than anything else, Adeline reassured herself as she poured jus de pomme into a small glass and grabbed a couple of butter biscuits. No doubt after this pick-me-up she’d be back to her usual self.
It was after she’d arranged Lili’s snack on a small side table and given her one of her favourite books to flick through that the words came. ‘Mummy,’ her daughter said, just as Adeline was returning to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. ‘Why are we always alone?’
She turned, looked at her daughter’s earnest eyes, the crumbs at her mouth that made her look adorable and so very young. ‘We’re not alone,’ she said. ‘We’re new here. But we have our friends already. You’ve met Monique – she’s Mummy’s friend, and yours. And you have Alice and Manon in your class – you told me you played skipping with them yesterday in the playground.’
Lili shook her head.
‘You’ve had a fight with them?’
Another no.
‘But today Alice’s mamie picked her up from school, and her papi was there too,’ Lili said sadly. ‘And Manon says she can’t play on Saturday because she is going to her aunt. And I know my granny has gone to heaven. But I had Uncle Kevin once and now he’s gone too.’
‘Oh, Lili.’ Adeline walked back over to her daughter and sat on the arm of her chair, reaching out to stroke her tousled curls. ‘Uncle Kevin isn’t gone. He’s still in England, just where he always was. But we’ve come for an adventure!’ she said as brightly as she could. ‘We’re far from him at the moment, but it won’t always be that way.’
Another sad little nod.
‘But at le weekend , everyone says they see their families, but we haven’t got a family, have we? I don’t have a papa , and I only have one oncle and I don’t know if I had another grand-mère , some people have two,’ she said, looking at her mother accusingly. ‘Why don’t I have anyone, Mummy?’
Adeline tried to keep her mouth from wobbling. Instead, she leaned and kissed her daughter’s head. ‘Lili, you do have Uncle Kevin, and one day perhaps he’ll get married and there’ll be an auntie. Maybe cousins. And I know you miss Granny – I do too.’
‘When will I see Uncle Kevin?’
‘Soon, my darling. Soon,’ she said, feeling a prickle of guilt at her own words. Because she’d cut Kevin out, at least for now, while she healed, but hadn’t stopped to think how she was denying her daughter pretty much her only other family member in the process.
Her words seemed to appease Lili though, who began to munch on a biscuit thoughtfully. ‘OK,’ she said.
But as Adeline walked again towards the kitchen, a little voice asked her, ‘And Mummy, why don’t you have any friends? The other mummies talk to one another. But you don’t talk to anyone, do you?’ This was asked in the way that many children’s questions are asked: in complete innocence of their impact.
Adeline felt herself pause at the doorway. She breathed deeply. ‘Well, Mummy had friends in England,’ she said – although had they been friends? Were they still friends now they were no longer colleagues, now she’d disappeared from their daily lives? Even Chris, whom she’d thought of as a best friend, hadn’t been in touch. ‘And I have Monique here now. And there’s Michel,’ she added, ‘Monique’s nephew. He’s nice.’
Lili nodded. ‘So you’re not lonely?’ she asked.
‘No poppet, I’m not lonely.’
Once in the kitchen, she boiled the kettle and leaned on the counter watching it rattle into life. It was funny how children could cut through to the heart of things without realising. She’d read the odd clickbait article about the funny things children say or the difficult questions children ask. And they’d often seemed amusing. But Lili’s questions had cut her to the quick – the way her five-year-old was able to see things that perhaps she’d been denying herself. That she was lonely, and it was essentially her own fault.
The day she’d found the papers amongst Mum’s things, she’d felt her entire world shudder. And now everything in her life seemed divided into before and after. Before, she’d been relatively sure of who she was, what she was. After, she’d found herself freefalling; her memories tainted, her sense of who she was, altered. Her reaction had been to try to start again. Create a new her with the new knowledge she had of herself.
Colleagues who’d signed her leaving card had called her brave when she’d told them she was going to France.
But was she brave? Had she been running towards a new future – a future she could create for this new Adeline, the one she’d discovered under the lies? Or had she been running away; had she cut everyone out because she didn’t want to have the conversations about it all, didn’t feel ready to face the truth properly?
It had been the timing of everything, she thought. The fact that she’d thrown her phone across the room after the call with Kevin, shattering its touch screen so it was no longer usable. And then the advert she’d stumbled across online when she’d been looking up this area of Provence just to see what it looked like. She’d made an abrupt decision in a heated moment, had come across with her passport and her daughter and not a lot else. She didn’t know anyone’s phone number, couldn’t remember her passwords for social media; but if she was honest with herself, she could have made more effort to get back online. To get a phone. To, at least, answer her brother who was perhaps a little at fault, but didn’t deserve the worry she’d no doubt piled onto him.
Here, everything was new. Her job, the people, the house, Lili’s school. And so different from everything that had come before. And she’d created a partition in her brain; allowed herself to step forward and done everything she could to avoid looking back. It had felt good; she’d convinced herself nothing was wrong. The only things that sometimes pierced her denial had been the emails from Kevin – and she’d stopped checking even those.
Looking at it rationally as she poured boiling water onto a teabag and watched the water stain copper-brown, her actions had been far from proportionate. She’d raced to this other version of her, as if by living the life that perhaps she should have had from the start would erase the lies and the pain. Instead, she’d isolated herself, made herself lonely. And confused her daughter.
She fished out the teabag with a spoon, added milk to the amber liquid and watched it swirl and combine as she stirred. She would get herself back on track. Buy a phone and re-establish old connections. Force herself to read Kevin’s emails and respond. She’d ask Monique whether she could finish early a couple of times a week and try to chat with the other mums, rather than race to the garderie after the shop closed; and she’d accept any invitations for coffee or any gestures of friendship that were offered, without suspicion. Michel had seemed nice, there was no reason to believe he had any ulterior motive in asking her for coffee. Even if, as she suspected, Monique had put him up to it.
She took her tea through to the living room where Lili was working on her second biscuit, spraying crumbs on the page as she looked at the pictures of a little, lost chick trying to find its family. It was a French book, borrowed from the school, but they’d read it almost every night recently.
Adeline smiled at Lili’s earnest face and messy eating, then picked up her volume of poems. Turning to the next one, she read:
Tell the truth but tell it slant
Reading the short verse, the end lines stood out most for her:
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
A memory flashed in her mind – Kevin, his face red with frustration or anger or some other mixed-up emotion, saying to her again and again, ‘She was always going to tell you. But it was never the right time. She was scared.’
‘Scared of what? That I’d reject her?’
‘No, Addy. Scared of breaking you.’
Tell the truth but tell it slant – the idea of gradually revealing truth rather than letting it hit others with its starkness out of nowhere. Wasn’t that a kind sentiment rather than something malicious? Mum had been sick for several years – maybe she’d put off telling Adeline because of this thing, or that thing, or Lili’s birth, her illness; perhaps she was always waiting for the right time and was never given the chance. Adeline would never know. But she had to believe her mum’s intentions were good – she owed her that, at least.
Perhaps, even now, she’d have been better off not knowing .
Adeline had lied too – to Lili, she realised. About Kevin. About being lonely – because if she was honest with herself, she was a little lonely. A little lost. She’d lied to protect her child’s feelings. Because that’s what you do when you’re a mother.
‘Are you crying, Mummy?’ a little voice piped up. Lili had left her chair and was standing next to her, looking worried.
Adeline realised her cheeks were damp. ‘It’s just this poem,’ she said. ‘It made Mummy feel sad for a moment, that’s all.’
And she missed her mother, she realised. Despite it all, she’d do anything to have her mother back.
‘Stupid poem,’ Lili said crossly.
Adeline found a laugh breaking through her sadness. ‘Oh, no, it’s a lovely poem. It just made me feel sad for a moment, that’s all.’
Lili reached for her hand and pushed something into her palm.
Adeline looked. It was a small, blue stone. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘Monique gave it to me. To help me make friends. But maybe you need it too. She said it’s magic. And it worked! I’ve got lots of friends already.’
Adeline felt a shiver of unease. ‘That’s kind of her,’ she said. She turned the stone over in her hand. ‘You know it’s only pretend, though, don’t you? You make friends because of who you are, not because of a crystal.’
Lili shrugged dismissively.
‘But maybe it helps,’ Adeline added. Because if there was a time to believe in a little magic, childhood was certainly it.
She took a big sip from her tea and shuffled a little so that Lili could climb onto her lap. Dickinson’s poems were replaced with the chick story, the blue stone was laid carefully on the table, and she read to Lili as her girl snuggled in and gave her the comfort she’d instinctively known she needed.
Tomorrow, she decided, it would be a new start. She’d start being honest with herself about who she was. She’d accept her past and work towards a better future. And this time, there would be no more lies.