‘I’m just asking you to delay, that’s all. Hold back, give me some time. A day or two, that’s all. I have an idea, but I might be wrong. Let me go and see if I can find her, coax her back. Our family’s been through enough, don’t you see?’ She was holding the detective’s arms, squeezing them, not letting her look away.
‘I can’t delay Interpol,’ the detective said, ‘but they’ll be fairly ineffective without strong leads – a place to start, I mean. France is a big country. You’ll have a head start if you don’t delay, but I should warn you, my DI knows about the Wright–Khalil connection. They’ll be interrogating Khalil on this. He might put a pin in the map for them.’
Miriam nodded. ‘I understand,’ then led the way to the front door and closed it on the sergeant. Then she sank down to the coir matting in a puddle, her cheek on its coarse weave, smelling the boot dust and feeling the freezing winter air roar in under the door’s brush strip. She went to bed soon after; her paralysis at war with the urging of the detective to make haste.
Lying in the bedroom, the dancing light playing through a chink in the curtains, she replayed the years of her marriage as if running a cine film in her mind. Did he ever want us? A wife and children? All the holidays – was he trapped, restless in every one? All the times he’d gone away for a conference or to play badminton with Roger. All their tendernesses, their various strains. The arguments and the reparation. She ran them all through a new filter, like a computer program adjusting the figures. She observed, and observed again, as if she might make the oscillation settle.
She cried, as the evening melded into night; cried then became still – cataplectic, almost. When she finally drifted off to sleep, the cine film began again, searching for clues in the crackling faded images of family life.
In the morning she heaved a suitcase down the stairs, Rollo’s perplexed expression looking up at her.
‘I’m sorry to leave you with all this,’ she said.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Well, can I come with you?’
‘No,’ she said, her palm to his cheek. ‘Darling Rollo. You must stay here. Go and visit him in prison. He needs you.’
The road down into Vouvant winds beneath trees in leaf, past Monsieur Ripaud’s riding stables, where Edith had gone on her first hack through the Forêt de Mervent without, Miriam had been horrified to learn from Ian, a helmet.
‘Where do you think we get the phrase laissez-faire from?’ he’d teased, bringing out the smelly cheeses which had filled the fridge of their holiday g?te with a sharp odour. ‘She survived, didn’t you, Edie?’
‘Ew, socks!’ Rollo yelled, whenever the fridge door opened and the smell hit him.
It was the summer Edith seemed to discover passion after passion – reading and horses, primarily – subsisting on a diet of French bread (soft white pillows torn from the middle) and peaches, which leaked rivulets of juice down her chin and onto her top. She hadn’t wanted Miriam to wash the trousers she rode in because they smelled of Artur, the horse she now ardently loved.
Miriam drives the car up the steep incline to the car park, in the shadow of the medieval Melusine tower. She pulls her coat from the back seat. The wind roars through the trees as she walks to the wall at the edge of the car park, peering over to the distant water below. Gusts stipple its surface into hurrying slicks like scales. She pulls the coat tightly around her and turns towards the bar-tabac, where a carousel of postcards looks as if it might keel over in the wind.
‘Une Anglaise?’ says the man behind the bar. ‘Elles sont partout.’
‘Oui, mais une Anglaise qui habite ici?’ says Miriam. ‘Il y a depuis quelques mois?’ She’s fumbling about for idioms, like rummaging in an old suitcase. The words are there, but not necessarily in the right order.
‘Bof,’ he says, turning down the corners of his mouth. ‘’sais pas.’
Miriam orders a coffee and surveys the room – a dark space with an enormous television bracketed to the wall, showing some sport or other with periodic cheers. A smattering of people, mostly watching the TV. She decides to take a table outside, despite the cold wind.
She holds down the flapping page of the guide book she has purchased at Stansted for the purposes of finding accommodation, as the barman sets down her cup and saucer. Her leather-gloved hand rests on a page titled: The Legend of Melusine.
According to the story, Melusine is said to have murdered her father and, as punishment for this, the lower half of her body was changed to that of a serpent every Saturday evening. Not long after, she met Raymond of Poitou and when he asked to marry her, she agreed on condition that he would never gaze upon her on a Saturday evening. Everything was fine for several years and the couple lived in the chateau at Vouvant, but one night he broke the promise and saw her in the form of part-woman, part-serpent.