Girl Unknown(79)

‘Get it off me,’ she said, distressed now, reaching behind her to claw at the clasps holding the bodice together.

‘Careful with that,’ Madame said, coming alive to Zo?’s fragile state, and going forward to assist. I just sat there, held back by the coldness of all she had done, her meddling, her manipulation, the memories making me cruel.

The clasps undone, Zo? wrenched herself free of the corset, her breasts, small and wide apart, visible for just an instant. The rings of the curtain sang out as she drew them swiftly across the cubicle rail.

Outside, the heat hung above the streets, the houses, down to the white shore, the boats clinking under the sparkling sun. Nearby on the bridge a fire raged. But in that changing room there was only cold.

Madame bent down and picked up the corset, fingering it delicately, the look she gave it bordering on distaste as if it had been sullied by the grubbiness of this exchange. There was no sound apart from that of weeping in the cubicle, and the clink of the glass cabinet as the tiara was returned.

The rest of the dresses were gathered up with a new alacrity, Madame saying, ‘I will put these back if you are finished,’ anxious now to be rid of us.

Sometimes, even now it is all over, I think I can hear her crying like she did that day in the dress shop. Her weeping echoes up from the corridors of the past, making me stop whatever I am doing, momentarily thrown by what has happened. And I think of the straightness of her back as she cycled ahead of me, back along the track, past the oyster bar, empty now as the sun dipped towards the horizon. I see her in my mind’s eye cycling away from me, moving towards the evening and all that was to come.





22. David


The evening began with a change of plan. Caroline, agitated from the moment she returned, complained that it was too hot to cook.

‘Let’s go out to eat instead,’ I suggested.

I was lying in the semi-darkness of our bedroom, waiting for the two Solpadeine I had taken to kick in. Caroline was hastily changing out of the clothes made grimy by the bicycle ride in the heat. ‘I can’t face going back to Saint-Martin,’ she said.

‘Did something happen?’ I asked, made curious by her agitation. Something was clearly bothering her.

‘Nothing happened. I’m just hot,’ she muttered. ‘That bloody fire. God knows what kind of toxins we’re inhaling.’

I got up slowly, heaviness sucking at the inside of my head like a wet cloth. ‘Have you got anything else I can take for a headache?’

She rummaged in her bag before handing me a sachet of white tablets. Normally I scoffed at her homeopathic remedies, but the headache had been building all day, blurring my thoughts and making me feel clammy. It had eased after the lunchtime wine, but now that it was wearing off, the pain had roared back to life.

‘I’ll ring the bistro in the village. I’m sure they’ll have a table free,’ I told her, slipping two pills under my tongue, then went downstairs to make the call.

The house was quiet, but for the sounds of shuffling preparation coming from behind closed doors, the others having retreated to their rooms to dress for dinner. Passing Zo? and Chris’s room, I heard him say: ‘What about the little black number?’

Zo?’s reply sounded unhappy: ‘No. I don’t think so.’

I didn’t linger, still haunted by what I had overheard of their lovemaking earlier that day. In the kitchen, Caroline’s half-hearted start at dinner sat forlorn and abandoned on the table. I took my phone and went into the quiet of Alan’s study, rang the bistro and booked a table – indoors, because of the smoke still hanging in the air – then lay on the couch and closed my eyes.

Caroline’s remedy was stronger than I’d thought it might be, pulling me under into a troubled sleep. I was caught in the tangle of a strange dream when I heard someone say, ‘Dad? Dad!’ in an urgent tone, and felt a pulling at my sleeve. Opening my eyes I saw Holly, gazing anxiously at me from behind her glasses. In her hand was a piece of paper.

‘What is it?’ I asked, pulling myself into a sitting position, a groggy feeling in my head, like I was under water.

‘I found this.’ She held up the piece of paper, still watching me with those big worried eyes.

I saw the blue and white insignia of the letterhead, and recognized it immediately. Panic crawled into my throat. ‘Hang on, Holly. I can explain.’

‘It says, “Test results are inconclusive.” ’ She pronounced the words carefully, stressing each vowel, making it sound like a verdict of guilt or a fatal diagnosis of some sort.

My thoughts teemed with confusion. Where had she found it? I was sure I had left the letter, along with the other information on DNA testing, in my desk at the university.

‘Robbie and I were playing Scrabble. We needed a page to keep score. Mum said there was paper here on the desk.’

She pointed to the old mahogany bureau, a sheaf of my documents in a blue folder alongside some journals and books. The letter from the clinic must have been slipped in among them. Holly was rattled and upset. I knew I had to act quickly, and carefully. ‘Listen, sweetheart, it’s not what you think.’

‘It says she’s not our sister.’

‘No, that’s not what it says.’

‘It is.’

‘No.’ Her panic was winding me up when I needed to stay calm. ‘All it says is that the samples they were given proved insufficient to make a match.’