Chapter 1 The Apple and the Pearl #36
She looks at her watch again: eight forty.
Might she have missed him? It’s never happened before; normally he’s like any three-year-old in that you can’t miss him.
He jiggles and jangles at your elbow, insistently demanding your attention.
But she did not want to take it for granted.
All day, she’s been looking for him in the shadows and folds of things, behind graves and in between the dark ridges of the bark of the yews.
Waiting for something, anything. His imperious little voice in her ear, a glimpse of his golden little head.
Even a compulsion to place a gentle hand on a sleeping chest. She’d taught class like it was any other day of the year, ignored Michael’s abject attempts at an apology, allowed herself to get worked up thinking about him thinking he’s the only one with any kind of grief, then made herself feel calmer with a bit of shouting at the new pledge in rehearsals.
Luke is objectively disappointing but Cecile has to admit that it is not his fault that Belinda went rogue in hiring him, nor that Alex was so talented and likeable.
He has no family in the world, Cecile, Belinda had said reproachfully, he’ll do fine for the corps de ballet.
Cecile had had to do some deep belly breathing to avoid shouting right here in her office.
This is not a home for waifs and strays, Belinda, this is a ballet company. And I am not anyone’s mother.
And how it hurt to say that! Especially in October, her favourite month of the year, counting down with every fallen leaf to this day, All Souls’, when she will get to remember that she was once, indeed, someone’s mother.
Her son appears to her differently each year.
That first time it was a scent that followed her around all day, the smell of the talc she used to sprinkle onto his mottled newborn skin.
In the years after it was a glimpse of him standing next to AJ on the conductor’s podium during the White Princess’s solo, a long conversation about teddy bears with his disembodied voice in her cabin just before reveille, a vision of him swinging from the curfew bell as she left the Grub after lunch.
At first she thought she was mad. Then she wished she were madder so she might have more of him. Was he following the Grub every day of the year but it was only on this day, All Souls’, that he was able to break through that so-called veil between worlds?
The Pearl waltz ends with the clatter of pointe shoes as the girls skitter off stage. There is a silence as Romero as the Blue Suitor walks on to the stage, and Cecile imagines AJ watching him, baton raised, ready for Wilf’s cello to sound and Romero’s jump to land at exactly the same moment.
She has never told AJ about Antoine, not in all these years.
Not that he was born, not that he died, not that he comes back to her every year on this day.
She thinks of that time seven years ago when AJ almost – but not quite – asked her to marry him.
She would have told him about Antoine, but the moment passed.
She thinks of AJ’s handsome profile, the way he draws a score in the air with his long fingers, the way he touched the keys on the electronic piano when he used to play for ballet class, like he was stroking the tender skin of a newborn baby.
In another life she could have loved him.
They could have lived together in a small house with roses climbing around the front door, books lining the walls and a grand piano.
Children. Grandchildren. Glasses of cognac in front of a fire, with his beloved Rachmaninov on the record player and a—
‘Sur le pont d’Avignon…’ Oh, here he is, at last! She can hear the sound of splashing and a child singing gleefully out of tune.
She used to sing this song to Antoine as she bathed him, throwing the rubber toys into the water.
Cecile had read that music was good for brain development so she sang anything she could remember, all the time.
Nursery rhymes, Charles Trenet, poorly pronounced Beatles songs.
She had no idea how to raise a child. She had grown up with only a father, unmothered, unmoored by that continuing presence in your life.
She was making it up as she went along and singing to her son drowned out the insistent feeling of you’re-a-failure in her mind.
She kicks her shoes off and leans back in her chair. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut, listening to him burbling rhythmically to himself. She can hear the sound of something bashing against porcelain and his little voice has an echoey feel, like it’s bouncing off tiles.
‘Maman!’ he calls, and she almost feels his breath move the air between them but she doesn’t look round because she knows Antoine will not be there; she only gets to see him, or hear him or feel him. Not all at once. After twenty-two years she has learned this. ‘Chante!’
She smiles.
‘Et les belles dames font comme ca,’ she croons, and she imagines her little boy laughing, a rubber bath toy in each fat fist, raising them above his head to plop them into the water.
‘Et les beaux messieurs font comme ca,’ Antoine sings back and she remembers the way people used to smile indulgently to see the two of them sitting together on the bus, devoted Madonna and child, singing an old-fashioned nursery rhyme, dipping their heads in mock courtly bows.
She hears him take a deep breath to shout the long ohhhhhhh before the next verse and she joins in, their voices rising together to a tuneless pitch before crashing into an airless gasp.
He collapses into giggles and she drinks in the sound, lets it pour into her lungs like cool, crisp mountain air, lets it drive out all the dust of days on end spent in the dark box of the Grit.
She will eke it out all through the dark of winter, the blush of spring and the blaze of summer, surviving until next year.
A knock at the door. Cecile operates a not-exactly-explicit closed-door policy, letting it be known yet unspoken that, unless you’re AJ, you’d better have a really good reason for knocking on this door.
But before she can turn to Antoine’s voice and tell him to be quiet, he shouts ‘Entrez!’ with the glee of a beloved game about to begin, the same way he used to when she’d call him her little prince and pretend to be giving him a royal buffet for him to enjoy in his bath.
Cecile hears the door creak open and she spins around on the ergonomic desk chair. Her eyes fly open to see Greg, dressed in his King costume and hand-knitted purple socks with MONDAY stitched on them, staring at the wall.
Cecile feels something like ice water drip down her neck as Greg lifts one hand and waves, a shy and dopey smile on his lips.
‘Can you… you can see him?’
Greg nods.
Cecile swallows a sob. ‘Tell me what he looks like.’
‘Little blonde head, brown eyes. Playing with a rubber snail. Chubby. Looks like a baby, really.’
Idiot. He was almost three, not a baby at all.
‘On y dansé, on y dansé,’ yells Antoine but she notices with a bubble of panic that his voice sounds muffled now. She needs to get rid of Greg, he’s ruining everything.
‘Greg.’
He turns to her, with difficulty, and a dim part of her notes with pleasure that it is as difficult for him as it is for her to tear his gaze away from the spirit.
‘Get out.’
Greg nods. He opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, then shuts the door gently behind him.
But the click of the door has disturbed her son’s spirit because the singing stops and he calls
‘Maman?’ and there is a tremor of petulance in his voice that used to make her panic, the prelude to a tantrum that would have him beating his fists on the floor, throwing his head from side to side and screaming until he gasped for air, all while she sat next to him, trying to hold him, wondering what she had done wrong to induce such rage into such a little body, wondering if there was something monstrous writhing inside him trying to get out.
‘I’m here,’ she says, and she sings again, slightly desperately. ‘Sur le pont…’
‘Maman!’ he cries again and now there is the echo of a scream behind his voice, the flump of a soft flesh on metal, a screech of tyres.
It gets louder and louder in her mind, drowning out Antoine’s singing, and now she can’t sing back, her throat is ashes.
This is how it always goes. First there is the beauty of him, back again, then there is the cruelty of reliving what took him away.
She calls out to him but his voice gets more agitated.
She realises he can’t hear her anymore, he’s leaving her.
Again. He’s been with her no more than ten minutes, interrupted by that dolt, but she has never been sure what time means to Antoine, to anyone on the other side.
A few years ago she read that the physicists no longer reckon time as one straight line but rather a looping river of eddies and pools, and as soon as she saw the words she knew that’s where she is, stuck in one of time’s eddies, drifting around this tiny corner of the universe, waiting for something, anything of her dead son to appear to her.
He’s gone. There is only the sway of the cello of the Blue Suitor’s solo and the soft thump of Romero’s jetés landing on the stage floor. She reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out the bottle of cognac and a glass. She pours herself a couple of fingers and downs it.
Greg is a kind and gentle man, and truly a talented dancer, but she will never forgive him for this. These past couple of years his body has reminded her of a beloved old labrador, blind and limping with farts that stink of death, but pity has held her back.