“You bastard!”
Sophie nearly jumped out of her skin but should have known better than to assume Mathilde was tucked quietly away somewhere while the secrets that made her human were being revealed.
“How dare you?”
George’s mouth was open to answer his wife but the state of her had rendered him speechless. Her bathrobe had slipped off to reveal one skeletal shoulder, her hair was lank and matted on one side, her eyes sunken deep into her skull.
“How dare you come here! How dare you talk to her!” Mathilde pointed one thin shaking finger at them. She looked like a witch.
With expert timing, Cochon chose that precise moment to skitter back into the kitchen with a ruddy-cheeked, mud-splattered Edie in tow. She had some sort of foliage caught in one of her curls and her pants had slipped down to reveal a pale slice of smooth chubby flesh underneath her striped T-shirt.
“Mom!” she cried, when she saw Mathilde standing there. She started to move towards her but became uncertain when Cochon dug in his heels, his eyes rolling back in his head, teeth bared. Edie stopped then, too, changed her tack. “Can I have a little horse like this one, Mom?”
Mathilde made no attempt to conceal her horror at the sight of her daughter. Sophie had to keep from crying out as she watched this sink in instantly for Edie: confusion, disappointment, fear rippling across the little girl’s face.
“Mom?” Her voice lost its excitement, took on a whining tone. She plucked the pink panther from the chair where she had left it and started tugging at its ear. “I’ll feed it and take it for walks and clean up after it. The little horse. It won’t be like the dog, Mom. Or the hamster. Or the rat. I promise. Mom?”
But with a slow-motion whirl of pastel chiffon, Mathilde turned on her kitten heels, floated down the hall, pulled open the front door, got into the Deux Chevaux, and was gone.
“Shit,” said George, watching her disappear in a cloud of dust from the doorstep. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“You have a car,” Sophie urged him. “Follow her.”
“What did I do?” Edie asked, starting to cry. “Daddy, what did I do? I never said a thing about her leaving. I just want a little horsey-pig thing. Dad? Dad?”
“Not now, Edie.”
“I’ll take care of her,” Sophie said to George, giving him a shove. “You just go.”
“She hates me, she hates me, she hates me,” wept Edie as her father scrabbled for his keys and jumped in his rental to follow Mathilde. Sophie took the child by her heaving shoulders and headed her back inside, Cochon trotting along supportively at her side. But inside the door Edie shook off Sophie’s hands and collapsed on the bottom stair, weeping as though her heart were breaking. At first Sophie tried to soothe her but because she knew exactly what it felt like to be abandoned by your mother, she had trouble keeping this up and soon started to weep too.
Cochon had limited patience for this sort of thing. He had grown up with Clementine and Olivier, after all, and did not particularly care for outbursts of any emotion other than anger. After a few minutes, he remembered the comfort of La Petite’s bed and, taking one slightly disgusted look at the two bawling beauties in front of him, he leapt between them and bounded up the stairs with his tiny horse-hoof clatter.
“Sophie-e-e-e-e!” the old woman’s voice soon wafted down the stairs. “Sophie-e-e-e-e!” The two girls dried their tears and looked up towards the ceiling.
“What is that?” Edie sniffed. “It sounds spooky.”
Sophie laughed, her spirits already restored, and wiped her own nose. “It is, sort of.” She got up and held out a hand for Edie to grab. “Come on, let’s go and meet La Petite.”
The old woman was sitting up in bed twinkling with anticipation when the two of them stepped into the room. “Aha-a,” she croaked. “At last I get to meet the new generation. Welcome, my sweet.”
Edie went right to the bed and ran her chubby fingers over La Petite’s crinkled face, then patted her greasy braid. “Wow. How old are you?” she asked. “You must be, like, a thousand.”
“I certainly feel a thousand,” La Petite agreed. “But I might actually only be five hundred. So what do you make of it all so far?”
“I love the little horse,” Edie said, jumping up on the bed and helping herself to some Turkish delight. “But my mom has run away, which is pretty weird because she was run away in the first place. And my dad’s all tense and crazy. I’m not sure how it’s going to end up.”
Sophie was astounded. It was as though Edie and La Petite had known each other forever, were merely picking up on the strands of a conversation started over tea and madeleines earlier in the day.
“Have you two met?” she asked, sidling over and sitting on the end of the bed, helping herself to a sweet as well.
Edie looked at La Petite. “You do kind of look like Mrs Milligan. She lives in our building,” she said. “Only her wrinkles don’t go in so many different directions.”
La Petite hooted with laughter.
“Mrs Milligan makes the best chocolate brownie,” Edie told Sophie. “She says gluten free is a crock.” She popped more Turkish delight in her mouth. “This is really nice,” she said. “It tastes of flowers.”
“You certainly inherited the family way with words,” La Petite told her kindly, although it occurred to Sophie that the family didn’t really have a way with words. “Now, what’s with these tears I see shining on those cheeks?”
Edie looked at her, weighing up what she should tell the old woman.
“We-e-e-ell,” she eventually began, her chin jutting out in mild defiance, “I think everyone cries when their mother runs away from them. Twice.”
La Petite passed a piece of candy to Cochon, but he was really a chocolate horse. He spat it out on Mathilde’s Frette linen and licked at it half-heartedly before sighing and closing his eyes. “Why do you think your mother is so fond of running away?” La Petite asked.
Edie pulled at her sleeve. “Well, I guess I screwed up her life. You know, by being born and all.”
“That’s not true,” Sophie said. “You mustn’t say that.”
“She says it herself,” argued Edie, which somewhat diluted Sophie’s point.
“She can be pretty mean,” La Petite pointed out. “We’ve noticed that ourselves.”
“You have?” Edie was astonished. “Usually grown-ups call it something else.”
“Grown-ups can be very annoying like that,” La Petite said, “but mean is mean in my opinion, especially when you’re on the receiving end of it. Of course, there’s usually a good reason for a person to turn mean. It’s not an entirely natural condition.”
“But what reason does Mathilde have to be mean?” Sophie felt moved to ask. “She has everything a person could ask for. What’s missing?”
“Yes, Edie,” La Petite asked. “What’s missing?”
Edie screwed up her nose and took a deep breath. Just because nobody had ever asked for her opinion didn’t mean she didn’t have one. “It just hasn’t turned out the way she expected,” she said in a way that made Sophie want to cry again to know that she thought of such things. “I guess maybe she didn’t know what it would be like having a kid and that if I was a pair of shoes she would have taken me back and got a refund because I didn’t fit right. But you’re not allowed to do that with kids. There are laws.”
“You look pretty good to me,” La Petite said. “What makes you think you don’t you fit right?”
“We-e-ell,” Edie said again, making a play of pulling at one thick fuzzy ginger ringlet, “I think she prefers blondes.”
“But that’s just hair!” cried Sophie, even more upset now.
“Yes, but I’m also not pretty like her and I’m, you know, kind of tubby. I really like chocolate-chip cookie-dough icecream even though Mom tells everyone I’m lactose intolerant. It’s just like the gluten. I’m not, you know, allergic or anything. I’m just not allowed it.”
“Phut.” La Petite was dee
ply unimpressed. “You poor girl. You got here just in time. Don’t worry, my sweet, about your mother or your father or any little thing. It’s going to end up just fine.”
La Petite’s great-grandfather had also taught her that sometimes all a poor lost soul needed was to be told that everything was going to be all right. There was nothing magical about that, either.
“So, what about school?” The old woman continued.
“Oh, that.” Edie’s face fell and Sophie felt a sympathetic strumming in her chest. “Um, well, the good news is that I’m not deep down stupid because I’ve had all the tests but I don’t read and write so good. I’m not the only one in fifth grade who gets special lessons but it sure makes my Mom pretty mad.”
One chubby little hand reached back into the Turkish delight box, icing sugar puffing up into the air as she scrabbled.
“Edie,” La Petite sounded very serious. “I am going to tell you something that no one else may ever tell you and I want you to listen very carefully to me. And when I’m gone I want you to listen to your Aunt Sophie, because she will tell you the same thing. It is something you need to know.”
Edie looked at her. “If it’s about the man’s penis and the woman’s vagina, I’ve been told that already and frankly I’m not surprised you all drink so much.”
“The penis and vagina business I’ll leave to someone else, I promise,” the old woman said with remarkable composure.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Edie told her. “So, shoot.”
“In my time, which as you know there has been quite a lot of,” she said, settling herself importantly in her bed, laying her crinkled hands neatly on top of the covers, “I have seen many, many little girls who have something wrong with them and I can officially tell you right here and now that you are not one of them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. Nothing at all. You are perfect just the way you are. Perfect. The trouble is, and it’s not with you at all you see, that your mother is mean. It’s not her fault, but that does not change the fact that she is mean. She never learned how to be a good mother and that’s a shame for both of you. But the good news is, it’s not too late. It’s never too late. Your aunts and I are going to help her.”
“We are?” Sophie had her doubts. “Does Clementine know this?”
“We are. Especially Clementine. Even if she doesn’t know it yet, but she will. And your father’s going to help too,” La Petite told Edie, “although we may need to get him a new spine.”
“My dad is actually pretty cool,” Edie told them. “Well, maybe not cool but I didn’t ruin his life. He told me that. He says his life has been better since I was in it, which is a pretty nice thing to say to your kid, don’t you think?”
“You, my sweet,” La Petite said opening her arms to Edie, “might even be better than perfect.”
“And you might be better than Mrs Milligan,” Edie told her, climbing into her embrace. “That brownie sure is good but she does smell of mothballs.”
Amitié
For two hours George combed the busy highways and narrow back lanes of the Marne from Chierry to Boursault, looking for Mathilde, but to no avail. Of course, being a male he didn’t like asking strangers for help, especially in a foreign language, but he’d done his best, even if his inquiries had met with nothing but head shakes and looks of great pity. When he arrived back, his face grey with worry and fatigue, and she saw how distraught he was, Sophie offered to search with him, an offer he gladly accepted.
“What about Edie?” he whispered in the hallway. “I don’t think she should come, I don’t want her to see her mother …”
“I’ll get Clementine to mind her,” Sophie said with a confidence she did not entirely feel. She had heard Clementine’s opinions of nearly every child in the village and none of them were flattering. Still, she knew her sister well enough by now to suspect that her animosity just disguised her vulnerability on the subject of offspring. So while George waited in the car, she took Edie over to the winery. Cochon refused as usual to entertain the spiral stairs, and after weaving their way around the vats in the cave, they finally found her eldest sister.
“Look at her hair,” cried Edie, when she first saw Clementine. “It’s just like mine!”
As for Clementine, her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she looked up from what she was doing and saw the pint-sized version of herself.
“This is Edie,” Sophie said quickly, “Mathilde’s daughter. Could she stay here with you while her father and I …?”
“Edie?” Clementine, as usual, was clueless. “Her father and you? Stay here while you what?”
“It’s hard to explain, Clementine,” Sophie was flustered, “but George and I need to go and find Mathilde. She’s … taken off. She’s missing.”
“What’s that smell?” Edie asked. Clementine had been filtering the wine from the vats where it had been fermenting into oak barrels where it would age until it was time for the blend.
“La-a-a-a!” Clementine trilled. “La-a-a-a!” The outbursts had increased again since Hector’s departure.
“Please, Clementine,” Sophie urged. “Not now. You’ll frighten her.”
“Nah,” said Edie, who actually looked quite impressed. “There’s a kid at my school with Tourette’s and he says much worse things than that.”
On that note Sophie said her goodbyes, leaving Edie and Clementine staring openly at each other in the dim light of the cave.
Clementine could not help it. She reached out and pulled at one of Edie’s ringlets, stretching it out straight then watching it ping back into shape.
“Same, same, see?” Edie said, shrugging her plump little shoulders then reaching up and doing the same thing to one of Clementine’s ringlets. “What else? I’m a good swimmer but I can’t run very fast. I broke my arm the only time we went skiing. I’m no good at basketball. I never get picked for volleyball. I’m probably going to be a shepherd in the nativity play again this year so I won’t get to say anything. Oh! I can do this though!” She held her up her two thumbs and, unaided, bent them backwards until they all but met her wrists.
Clementine, somewhat overwhelmed by the child’s litany of sporting ineptitude, held up her own thumbs and bent them back almost as far.
“Cool,” cried Edie, meaning it. “Twins! Hey, I know what that smell is. It’s blackberries. My favourite. Is it blackberry season in France?”
“Blackberries?” The wine Clementine had been in the process of decanting when Edie arrived was the lower valley pinot noir. Its blackberryness was more powerful than usual this year, she had tasted it in the grapes themselves and had remarked to Hector about it. Slightly stunned, she poured a little bit of the fresh pinot noir wine into a glass and handed it to Edie.
“You’re giving me wine?” she asked, amazed. “But I’m only 10.”
“You’re a Peine,” Clementine told her, “there’s no doubt about it. You should have been tasting since you were five. Just drink it. No don’t gulp, sip it. That’s right, swill it around in your mouth. Feel it on your tongue and at the back of your throat. Now, spit it out and tell me what you think.”
Edie spat it out. “I think Diet Coke has better bubbles,” she said. “Dad told me champagne had bubbles.”
“They haven’t been born yet,” Clementine told her. “That happens later. We will blend these still wines together. Then we will bottle that wine and the bubbles come as it rests, which takes a few years — unlike Diet Coke which probably takes four seconds. Anyway, I don’t care about Diet Coke, I care about what you think of the pinot noir.”
“Okay, okay, keep your hair on.” Edie took another sip, swilled it around in her mouth, felt it on her tongue and the back of her throat, then spat it out again. “I can definitely taste blackberries,” she said. “Only it’s not like actual blackberry juice. I’ve never tasted blackberry juice, but I think it would be sort of thinner and this is kind of thick, more like milk, only it catches when you swallow. You know what? It remind
s me a little bit of cough mixture,” she said, holding out the glass for a refill, “only it’s good.”
Now Clementine was truly staggered. For the child to pick blackberries in the first place showed a level of skill most adults couldn’t muster but to pinpoint the texture? To appreciate the taste? At 10?
“I like you,” she told Edie. “I like you a lot.”
“Good,” Edie replied pragmatically, “because I need all the friends I can get.”
By the time Sophie and George got back — still without Mathilde — Clementine and Edie had tasted seven more wines. Edie had identified jasmine and nuts in the chardonnay, apricots and mangoes in the meunier. Clementine, who had never tasted a mango in her life, had been flabbergasted, especially when Edie went on to describe the fruit as “sort of like summery bubble gum but not stretchy, more canned-peaches slippery”. Clementine knew exactly what she meant.
But the child’s confidence slid away when her father returned minus her mother. “You didn’t find her?” she asked anxiously, plucking at her sleeve, as George and Sophie sought them out in the kitchen. They were sitting on either side of the remains of the Black Forest chocolate cake for which Bernadette with her Alsatian roots was justifiably famous.
“Good grief,” George said, looking at Clementine sitting beside his daughter. The two were identically covered in chocolate in a way only true Black Forest aficionados can be. “You must be the other sister.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “George, this is Clementine.”
“The resemblance is remarkable,” George said. “You could be —” he didn’t actually say “Edie’s mother” but everyone heard it anyway. Clementine and Edie looked at each other, licking their lips. Neither found the prospect repellent. Well, one of them needed a daughter and the other a mother so it was hardly surprising.
“We couldn’t find her,” Sophie spoke gently, “and we looked everywhere, ’Mentine. We’ve been all the way to Epernay. We searched the town, we checked the station in case she’d caught a train somewhere but there’s no sign of the car and anyway, she wasn’t dressed for it. I went to Christophe’s office but he hadn’t seen or heard of her. We’ve been to Le Bois too, on the way back, but she hasn’t been there either.”