The Night Rainbow A Novel

CHAPTER 9




A row of dark blue swallows sit on the telephone wire that goes between the house and the barn, under the blue, blue sky. These are the summer babies, all thin and wobbly and not as polished as the grownups. The mother bird is with them. She keeps leaving the wire and flies in big circles, whizzing past the blue shutters of our house, past the cherry tree and the eaves of the barn where they were born. Their nests are right by the big scar where the earthquake shook the stones apart in the olden days.

I am watching them lying on my belly, looking into a puddle, where upside-down trees drop into a deep well of blue. At the bottom of the well a fat dappled morning-moon has just a small sliver shaved off one side. When the mother bird gets to the point of the barn roof, with the witch-catcher tile, she keeps going up, high into the space between the two buildings, and comes back down to sit on the wire again. Margot, I say, if there are no witches then why have we got the witch-catcher tile?

Those birds don’t want to fly, says Margot. They want to be back in their nest.

You don’t know, do you? I say, rolling over and looking up at the realness of the reflection, at the red tile that sits on the point of the roof like a crown. The tile is for catching witches, I say, and it was put there by grownups. So grownups must think there are witches.

Well, Maman says there are not.

Maybe Maman is wrong, I say.

The mother swallow is twittering at her children. Come on, I think she is saying, flying is easy. But her children edge from side to side on the wire, cocking their heads and looking nervous. They’re not sure they can do it, so I start to feel scared that they can’t too. I remember them as tiny baby birds when they just hatched. From my window I could just see their small fluffy grey heads and yellow beaks poking out of the mud nest. They yelled for their food. As they grew bigger there was less room, but they still huddled up, a nest full of shiny feathers and bright eyes, and their mother still put food in their open mouths. She doesn’t do that any more. They have to do it for themselves.

You should be able to choose when you want to fly, I say.

Yes, Margot agrees.

Fly, fly, sings the mother bird, edging up beside them and chittering. She is helping them. If they had fingers instead of wings I imagine them all holding hands.

It’s sad that birds can’t hold hands, I say.

They can’t even hug, says Margot.

What do you think they do instead?

They just snuggle up together in their nest.

That sounds nice too, I say.

Then something seems to scare them, and they all lift off the wire together, flashes of white and blue. The mother leads them on the tour of our courtyard, and they follow her. They have remembered that they can do it after all. The wire bounces as they land, one, two, three, four . . . and five. Brothers and sisters, all together. Something brushes against my legs and I jump. But it’s only a cat-visitor. He rubs up against me, silky against my skin, and purrs, but he is not looking at me, he is looking at the baby swallows.

He’s waiting for one of them to fall, says Margot.

They don’t fall, I say, they’re birds. Birds fly.

Not always, says Margot.

That’s not right, I say. Birds don’t fall over while they’re flying. I look at the cat. He is still staring at the swallows.

They won’t fall! I say.

The father bird arrives on the wire, bigger and even more glossy. He sits at one end of the baby birds and the mother bird sits at the other. I look at the swallow family on the wire and start to feel the darkness dripping into me out of nowhere.

It seems best, I say, if a family has the maman and the papa.

It’s twice as many people as just a maman, says Margot. But mamans are still best.

I put my fingers into the pocket of my dress, which I have chosen again today, and feel the edges of the lonely photo. Papa loved me, I say. He used to pick me up and swing me about.

Maman loved you too, says Margot. You used to bake cakes and pies and biscuits shaped like stars.

That was before the baby died, I say. Papa tickled me, used to let me ride on his tractor.

Maman is the most beautiful, says Margot.

Papa had big hands and a splendid smile, I say.

Maman let you help with the laundry, says Margot, even when you dropped things on the grass.

I remember that, I say. Maman floofed the clothes and put them on the line, and I passed the pegs.

And Maman used to sing to you, says Margot.

We sang together, I say.

You knew all the songs, says Margot. Children’s ones and grownups’ ones. French ones and English ones.

But then the baby died, I say, and took her voice away.

Right, that’s quite enough of this, Pea, says Margot. You are being grumpy and it’s boring!

She throws herself on top of me, squashing all the air out. Her face is right on top of mine, her nose pressing my own nose and her eyes so close that I can’t see her at all, just a smudge of colour. Come on, she says, we are going to do some science.



If you go around the side of our house, on the sunniest side that looks out over the mountains, everything is very wild. There grass is seedy and scratchy and there are lots of nettles. There are also big thistles, taller than me, with beautiful hairy purple flowers that you can’t pick because the spiky leaves stick out too far to reach over. You can find a lot of insects there all the time: ladybirds and punaises and gendarmes. There is a big tree that has purple blossom on it in long dangly bunches, where you can see all the butterflies. We don’t normally play there, because it is right in the sunshine, and because of all the stingy-ness, but today we are out of bed early and it is not too sunny yet.

So, we are going to do the science, says Margot, and we are looking for specimens.

Alive ones?

No, we are not allowed to take alive ones from nature, only plants and things that are dead but not smelly.

I have got a magnifying glass, I say.

Yes, and I have got a stethoscope, says Margot. So let’s go.

A black and white swallowtail butterfly is sitting on the purple flowers drinking the nectar. There is a peacock butterfly too, and a brown and orange one that I don’t recognise. They are all alive, though, so they are good to look at but not good specimens. I decide that down on the ground is a better place to search. Soon I find a butterfly wing. It is very fragile and a creamy-white colour, like milk. The rest of the butterfly is not with it. It either dropped off, maybe, or perhaps the butterfly got eaten but not the wing. I put it on to a big flat stone while we find some more things. Margot finds a white feather, using her stethoscope, and then we find a crispy little yellow thing, a bit like a ball. I poke it with a stick. Nothing moves. When I look closer, through my magnifying glass, I can see that there are lots of empty spaces in it.

It looks a bit like a wasps’ nest, says Margot.

They would be very tiny wasps, I say.

I didn’t say it was a wasps’ nest, she says, just that it looks like one.

It does, I say.

It is a very good specimen, she says.

What do you think made it? I ask.

Well, says Margot, fastening up her white scientist coat. I would say that this specimen was made by very small wasps or another kind of very small insect.

I put the tiny nest together with the feather and the wing very gently into my pocket and keep my hand pressed over the opening so they don’t fall out. We will take these specimens to the girl-nest, I say, where they will be safe.



Claude must have already been down to the girl-nest because there is a new bottle of water and a red tin with pictures of biscuits on it. Pink ones and yellow ones and brown. It is hard to open. I have to put my fingers under the corners and try to pull the lid off. It is stiff and stuck and I am getting annoyed, and then all of a sudden the lid flies off and the biscuits tumble out of their places and some land on the green and red blanket and others in my lap.

The girl-nest is clean, says Margot.

I thought so, I say.

We eat some of the escaped biscuits and then put the lid back on, but less pressed-down. I start to empty my pocket. I get out the photo of Maman and the baby. Then I take the butterfly wing and the nest for very small insects and the feather. I hold them all together in my cupped hands. Four kinds of things that are treasure. I decide that I will bring things here to our nest and I will make a collection. Then when it is too hot to go to Windy Hill I can come here and like my collection, and it will make me feel better. I will keep everything in the biscuit tin, next to the pink and yellow and brown biscuits, and then when we have eaten all the biscuits it will just be for treasure, and no one will look in the tin because it has pictures of biscuits on, and not pictures of photos and feathers and wings.

We did good science this morning, says Margot. And I have decided that our challenge has to be sciency as well.

Making Maman happy? How is that sciency?

Science is about solving puzzles, of course. With our brains. We need to do more brain-thinking.

OK, I say. How?

Well, Maman is happy mostly when we don’t make a noise, says Margot, and when we do make her breakfast.

Yes but only if things don’t get broken.

Yes. And we know some things that make her sad.

Yes, I say, like dead flies, Papa’s tractor and everything being a mess.

Right then. We can’t stop flies dying, or move the tractor, but we can do cleaning up.

Margot, I say, you really are an excellent scientist.

I am full of excitement about this idea, so we quickly have one more biscuit each and climb down the ladder.

We bump into Claude and Merlin on the other side of the stream.

Hello, I say, but we are just going home to make Maman happy.

Hello, says Claude. That’s OK, we were just popping down to see if you had found your biscuits.

Yes thank you! And the tin is good too.

Claude smiles. I’m glad.

Merlin winds around me, wagging his tail and lifting his head to be stroked.

Merlin is really lovely, I say.

He really is, says Claude. I love him a lot. And he crouches down to give Merlin a big cuddle. When I see Claude’s arms all wrapped around Merlin, and Merlin happy at being loved, I feel a strange sort of sad.

We really do have to hurry now, says Margot. We have work to do.