Chapter 19
19
The following Friday, the day before Lili was due to finish school for the spring holidays, Adeline asked whether it would be OK to take the afternoon off. ‘There’s a little concert at the school,’ she explained.
Monique had been delighted at the idea. ‘Do you think I could come?’
‘Are you sure?’ Adeline had said. ‘I think they’re just doing a couple of songs or something, a little dance maybe.’
But Monique was adamant. ‘ Mais oui ! I’d love to see ma petite Lili perform. I can close the shop for a couple of hours.’
Adeline nodded and smiled, but felt something in her stomach tighten. ‘Well, that’s lovely,’ she’d said.
After lunch, they sorted out some new orders, then wrote a note and fixed it to the inside of the glass on the door. Locking the shop behind them, they set out on the short walk to the school.
The late April sun had warmed them, and halfway there, Monique slipped off her cardigan and tied it around her waist. They passed familiar faces – exchanging nods and smiles and bonjour s. Adeline, uncomfortable at first with the idea of Monique coming, began to relax. Perhaps it wasn’t so terrible that Lili thought of Monique as a grandmother figure. She’d understand more as she got older.
‘I can see why you decided to settle here,’ she said to Monique as they crossed the road and turned down the narrow strip of tarmac that led to the school.
Monique looked at her with a smile. ‘I felt as if it were my home; this strange place I’d stumbled across.’
‘Do you ever miss Paris?’
‘Ah, a little. Sometimes. But then Paris is always there when I want. The train is perhaps just four or five hours. I used to go often. Not so much now. Oui , Paris is wonderful. But I am always happy to come home too.’
Adeline nodded. ‘You know, in London, I don’t think I knew anyone’s name,’ she admitted. ‘Not even the people in the same apartment building. I used to say hello to one or two people, but they were strangers really.’
‘It is like that in Paris too. It can be nice, sometimes, to be private. But I am someone who needs connection. People.’
It was an odd thing to say in some ways, Adeline mused, when she considered how Monique had cut herself off from her family. But then, some things fractured a relationship to the point of no return. It wasn’t her place to judge.
They reached the school and joined the stream of parents making their way to the playground, following a series of coloured arrows directing them to where the performance would take place. A set of orange plastic chairs had been laid out in three neat rows to create an audience, leaving the majority of the playground free for the children. Monique and Adeline sat down in the second row and gradually, the other seats filled up. A teacher was hurriedly arranging some paper flowers and marking out an area with chalk, and when she looked up the stone steps, Adeline could see movement and colour inside, but couldn’t make out anything specific. She longed to see what Lili was wearing – her daughter had let something slip about a hat she might be sporting, but otherwise had tried to keep the whole thing a secret.
She turned to Monique and was just about to say something, when the doors opened and another teacher walked out – Adeline recognised her as the head of the school, Ma?tresse Fabienne. They’d spoken once or twice in the playground but not in any detail. She was a friendly woman with grey hair tied back in a neat ponytail, and looked to be around sixty years old. The waiting parents settled obediently into silence as if they were pupils at the school themselves; and Adeline wondered if perhaps some of them had been Fabienne’s pupils once.
The head teacher read out a brief introduction – how the children had been studying spring and new life as part of their term’s work and how the dances and songs they had prepared were all about welcoming in the new season.
The doors opened again and the children came skipping out, dressed in colourful T-shirts and each sporting a paper hat, which they’d clearly made themselves. Adeline spotted Lili, whose hat was decorated with pieces of colourful paper cut into the shapes of butterflies and flowers. As her daughter’s eyes met hers, Adeline gave a little grin of pride.
A small speaker began to emit some music and the children joined hands in a circle, skipping around in time and singing along.
It was then that it happened .
Adeline felt something swell inside her as the children began to sing:
‘Vole, vole, vole papillon au-dessus de mon école
Vole, vole, vole papillon au-dessus de ma maison.’
It was a simple song about a butterfly, and yet she felt a shiver run through her body at the tune and the words. Something stirred inside her – a feeling of déjà vu, of having experienced this very moment, this very song, this very sound before.
She was about to say something to Monique, but when she turned to look at her friend, she saw that tears were running freely down her face. Her eyes were fixed on the dancing children, her head nodding slightly to the sound of the music. Yet something was clearly very wrong.
Adeline nudged her. ‘Are you OK?’ she whispered.
Monique looked at her, her face creased with something like grief. ‘ Oui ,’ she said. ‘Do not worry.’
But it was hard not to.
Once the performance was over and the children had been herded back into the building, the teachers thanked the parents for turning up. The children would change now, but if their parents could wait, they could take their offspring home with them for an early finish for the holidays.
As soon as people began to stand and stretch and mill about, some disappearing beyond the gates to sit in cars or light cigarettes, others clustering in gossipy groups, Adeline walked to the shade of a large tree that stood proud at the back of the outdoor space, its roots clearly so big that they had grown beyond the patch of earth left between the tarmac for it, and had begun to raise the black surface, sending cracks running along its length .
Monique followed her, quiet now. Her tears had gone and she looked a little more like herself.
‘That was so sweet,’ Adeline said. ‘Did you enjoy it?’ She looked at Monique’s face and watched a myriad emotions race across it before Monique seemed to gain control.
She fixed her eyes on Adeline’s. ‘Yes, it was beautiful. Very sweet. And Lili’s hat was vraiment adorable!’
They were silent for a moment. Adeline leaned on the metal fence that surrounded the playground and looked across at the stone houses, the tiny bend in the road; she could see the spire of the church over the tiled roofs and above it, the wash of blue and white sky. The words came, despite her trying to repress them: ‘Why were you crying?’
Monique shrugged. ‘It was just the song.’
‘The butterfly one.’
‘ Oui . So many memories.’
The silence fell again.
One or two children began to open the door and run into the arms of their waiting parents. A couple raced to the little climbing frame, chattering loudly. Lili had yet to emerge.
‘Because you know, one time, I had a baby,’ Monique said, almost out of nowhere.
Adeline nodded. ‘I do know.’ She felt her face get hot. ‘Michel told me. I hope that was OK.’
Monique shrugged, her eyes shining. ‘I suppose it is not a secret.’
Adeline put her arm out and touched Monique briefly. ‘It must be hard, to remember.’
Her friend nodded. ‘It is. But then it is also hard when I forget for a time. I don’t want to forget her. But I don’t want to remember.’ She smiled, acknowledging the contradiction. ‘It was the song I sang to her, when I held her just that one time. At that moment, I wanted with all my heart to keep her, but I’d finally accepted that I didn’t have the strength to defy my parents. I was a child; no more than sixteen. I sang that song because I imagined my baby was a butterfly, and that she would fly and be free and have a good life.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘And I hoped perhaps one day she might fly back to me.’
‘Oh, Monique.’
Monique shrugged, half-heartedly. ‘It is long ago. The pain is not normally so raw. It was just the song, it opened up a passage in time for a moment and I was back there, with my lips against the baby’s ear, whispering, singing a little. And hoping that my mother might change her mind.’
Adeline felt her eyes moisten. She blinked away the tears. ‘It must have been awful.’
Another shrug. ‘Yes. It was a terrible time. But it was thirty years ago now.’
‘Thirty? Michel said maybe forty or more?’
Monique flapped her hand as if it weren’t important. ‘Thirty, forty, fifty. It doesn’t matter. It was long ago. And I have had to learn to live with the pain. But it is hard sometimes.’
‘Of course. It must be awful.’ Adeline’s mind raced. Because the amount of time did matter. To her, at least. Thirty years – she looked at Monique, studied her face.
‘ Oui , but there have been a lot of days since. And the pain gets less.’
Adeline nodded.
Then, ‘ Non , that is not right,’ Monique said. ‘The pain does not get less. But somehow I grow around it. I find that I can bury it more deeply. And some days I do not even think of her. At least not for many minutes.’
Adeline imagined how she’d have felt if Lili had been taken from her. It sounded impossible; far-fetched. Yet she herself had only been in her twenties, and single, when she’d had Lili. A generation beforehand, or if she’d been a few years younger, the same could easily have happened to her. ‘And you were sixteen?’ she asked.
‘ Oui .’
‘And what year was that? How old are you now?’ The questions seemed stark; rude almost, but she couldn’t help herself.
Before Monique could answer, something small barrelled into Adeline’s legs and she stumbled slightly into the fence. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, then looked down to see Lili, smiling excitedly up at her. ‘You scared me half to death!’ she said.
Lili’s face fell.
‘But the dancing, the singing, it was wonderful!’ Adeline added quickly. ‘We were amazed!’
‘You were?’
‘Of course,’ Monique said, ‘and of course you were the best one.’
‘I was?’
‘ Mais oui ! How can you think otherwise!’ Monique exclaimed, putting her hands on Lili’s upper arms. ‘I am sure everybody thought so.’
Adeline held back her urge to say something a little more measured to Lili about it being a team effort and her classmates shining too. But it was nice to see Monique smile after everything she’d said. And if she inflated Lili’s ego a little, well, it wasn’t the end of the world.
As they walked back to the shop, with a promise to pop into the patisserie en route, Adeline studied Monique’s face, trying to establish her age. She couldn’t be as young as forty-six, could she? The age her mother might be? Monique was truly a mystery. Sometimes she looked young, vibrant. Sometimes older. Always beautiful, glamorous and confident. But somehow ageless – her personality shining through and making any wrinkles or grey hairs seem irrelevant.
She wondered, as she paid for three slices of chocolate fondant, as they made their way chattering along the street, as they unlocked the shop and stepped inside, how she might get Monique to open up again. It wasn’t fair to interrogate her about something so painful. But there were questions she absolutely had to know the answers to.