Everything Beautiful Began After (29 page)

“Awnree please, awnree please, awnree please, awnree please.”

She giggles again.

Sebastian turns to her with his finger held up to his lip, which means “I’m not mad but shush down now.”

“What’s happened?”

“You fainted,” Mama says.

The man stares at her.

Delphine steps under her mother’s arms and folds them over her little body.

“You knew my sister?” Mama says.

“She never mentioned that you were a twin. How could I not have known that?”

Delphine wonders who he is talking to. Should she say yes or no or
oui
or
non
? And then words just fall out of her small mouth.

“Maybe she forgot.”

They all look at her without laughing.

Then the radiator starts banging again. There is no talking for a few moments, and then the radiator stops and Sebastian asks the stranger another question.

“But you knew she had a sister?”

“Of course,” Henry Bliss replies.

Mama and Sebastian glance at one another quickly as if to pass a secret without saying it.

“Seems odd you didn’t know she had a twin,” Sebastian says.

“Do you know what happened to her?” Mama asks slowly. Her face is shaking.

“Yes,” the stranger says very quickly. “Do you?”

Sebastian nods. “We got a letter from the French embassy in Greece. She had registered with them when she went to live there—all French nationals have to.”

“When did you know her?” Mama asks.

“When?”

“Yes.”

“In Athens.”

“You weren’t with her then?” Mama says.

Delphine looks at her mother to explain it all carefully, but her mother is purposefully ignoring her as if to say “Don’t ask now because even though I’m not talking, it’s still interrupting.”

Henry Bliss doesn’t answer.

“As I said, we brought you here,” Sebastian said quietly, “because you said the name Rebecca before you fainted.”

Delphine imagines Mama and Sebastian’s questions softly raining down upon his head like pillow feathers.

“Were you in Athens for the earthquake?” Mama asks softly.

Delphine feels her mother’s whole body behind her.

Her eyes have begun to take in light.

“I couldn’t get to her in time . . .”

“In time?” Sebastian asks without moving his head. His eyes study the stranger carefully, as though waiting for the right moment to pounce on the truth.

“Before her building collapsed.”

Mama starts crying.

“How long did you know her, Henry?” Sebastian says, but gently.

“Long enough to love her.”

Then Mama runs out, but Delphine is rooted to the spot.

Sebastian sighs and puts his hands in his pockets. After a long silence, he says: “If you’re up to it, Henry—why don’t you get dressed and come down for lunch. Delphine will get you a towel and there’s a bath down the hall.”

“How long was I sleeping?”

“Almost fourteen hours. We even had the local doctor examine you while you were passed out.”

“What did he say?”

“He said you probably needed a good kip and that you should probably drink more water, but all French doctors say that.”

Delphine rushes off to find the towel.

“Why did you come here, Henry? To tell us?”

Henry sighs and turns to the window.

Outside it’s very green. The whistling of birds across the panes, a song only slightly muted by the uneven squares of glass.

“To see—” Henry says.

“Go on,” Sebastian says.

“To see, if she had a family. Where is her grandfather?”

“He died about a year and a half ago. Natalie was living in Paris. It was before I met her actually.”

Then banging from upstairs.

“It’s Delphine,” Sebastian says chuckling. “The towels must be on a high shelf and she’s trying to get them. Let’s take a walk after lunch, Henry Bliss.”

“Okay.”

“Be nice to get out in the fresh air.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

You sit opposite Natalie and sip green soup. There is a clock ticking loudly from the mantelpiece, as if counting down to something. Natalie keeps looking at you. Her beauty is breathtaking. She’s a little bigger than her sister, or an older version, but the eyes and cheekbones are the same. She holds her spoon with the same delicacy, between finger and thumb. You want to set your spoon in the bowl and grovel at her feet. You have to keep telling yourself that it’s not her, it’s not Rebecca, and that you must go on. You feel the sudden urge to leave, to stand up and run out. Watching Natalie eat is a strange form of torture, as it reminds you how wonderful your life will never be.

On the table is a shopping list. The handwriting is almost identical to the handwriting in the diary, but they were twins after all. It could still be Rebecca’s child.

Then Sebastian asks where you are from, and you’re telling him when suddenly Delphine bursts in wearing a bathing suit and ballet slippers. She’s also carrying a plastic whale.

“Delphine, go upstairs and change,” her mother says.

Sebastian smiles and puts down his spoon.

“Am I fancy enough for the circus?” Delphine says, looking at you.

Then Delphine begins to dance.

“Delphine!” her mother cries, and the little girl dances out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Sebastian laughs and Natalie glares at him.

“
Qu’est-ce que tu fais, Sebastian?
”

He nods and then gets up.

“Your soup is getting cold, circus girl!” he shouts up the stairs. “
Vite, vite.
”

Then Sebastian looks at you. “Funny, eh? Kids.”

“You got any brothers or sisters, Henry?”

You set down your spoon.

“I had a brother,” you say. “But he died when he was a baby.”

“Sorry,” Sebastian says.

When Delphine comes down Sebastian is washing lettuce.

“The soup is cold now,” her mother says.

“I had to pee.”

After lunch, Natalie stacks plates in the sink. Sebastian takes a pack of cigarettes from the drawer. Delphine sees them.

“
Non, non, non, non,
Sebastian! No smoking, remember?”

“In the house, Delphine—no smoking in the house.”

“You shouldn’t smoke, Sebastian!—it could make you die.”

“Let’s take a walk,” he says, touching your arm. “I’ll show you around.”

Sebastian steps into a pair of Wellington boots and hands you a heavy black walking stick with a silver owl at the top.

“Found this in the house when I was renovating.”

Delphine wants to come but her mother takes her upstairs.

You step out the front door into a country lane. The hedgerows rise up on each side. Blackberries stud the leaves and branches. There are birds flying high above you.

“So you were Rebecca’s boyfriend in Athens?” Sebastian says.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Natalie still gets upset about it.”

You nod in understanding, then walk in silence for a kilometer or so.

“Forgive me for asking this,” Sebastian says. “But is there another reason you came here?”

A few white cows on the hillside eat their way across pasture. The air smells of grass and manure.

“To see if she had family.”

“Not to fall in love with her all over again?”

You say nothing because it’s true. Then your mouth is full of words, and impulsively you confess to Sebastian that Rebecca was pregnant.

He stops walking and touches your arm.

“With your child?”

You nod.

He seems more disturbed than you would have thought.

Neither of you move.

After a few moments, Sebastian seems like he wants to ask you something, but then shakes his head.

“What’s done is done,” he says. “I’m glad you told me—it won’t go any further, I promise.”

You walk for a long time without speaking.

The road gets very narrow. Sebastian explains that it was built for horses and small traps. Then he points out a truck stop café where Natalie and Rebecca worked when they were teenagers.

You remember the journal but say nothing. You don’t know what to think and consider that you will never know whose child Delphine really is—that you’ll never know whose feelings they were. To find out could cost the happiness of a little girl who is loved and knows nothing of the tragedy that defines you.

“When I arrived here,” Sebastian explains, “the village was almost deserted. There was no work for the young, really, and so the elderly either died alone in the village or moved to nursing homes in the cities, closer to their kids.”

“But how did you end up here?”

“By literally crashing into it—into a stone wall, actually.”

Sebastian stops walking and drinks in the air with long, deep breaths.

“Earlier that day,” he went on, “I had taken drugs in a quiet corner of Gare du Nord in Paris, and then, in a sort of calm stupor, I climbed into a Mercedes that some foolish twat had left running outside the station.

“Does that surprise you?” Sebastian asks.

“A little,” you say.

He is walking quickly now. You walk alongside him, listening, searching his story for a wisdom you can relate to.

“I drove and drove, not knowing where I was going, but just driving. Then I must have turned off the highway and begun driving through the countryside around here. And then at some point, I crashed into a wall in the village.”

“A few hours later at dawn I awoke covered in glass and partially crushed by the stones that had fallen through the windshield. And if you think all that is far-fetched, then listen to this, Henry. I stepped from the car and fell in love.”

Sebastian stops walking again and spreads his arms.

“With all this dereliction, I found myself enchanted.”

Sebastian is much older than you thought—forty-seven.

He has a brother with Down syndrome that he wants to move in with them eventually. Then you both come upon an abandoned barn. The walls are slanted gray stone with hanging moss.

Sebastian leans on a gate and lights a cigarette.

Chickens dot the yard, pecking around a battered Mercedes they’re using as a coup. All the windows are missing. The front end is also completely smashed in. A sign on the top says:

TAXI

PARISIEN

Sebastian laughs.

“The shiny paint gives it away,” you tell him.

“Chicken shit will take care of that pretty soon,” he laughs. “That part of my life is long gone.”

Sebastian walks you around the barn, pointing out birds’ nests, beehives, low bushy green squares covered with wire that mark the beginning of his organic vegetable business.

“Anyway, to cut a long story short, I bought a derelict house for €�15,000, did it up, and then opened a little café, which I only do now in the summer—Delphine is the waitress, if you can imagine that—I have an old espresso machine and of course Coca-Cola and fizzy drinks for the kids. And I met Natalie when one day she came into my café when she was down from the Paris suburbs with Delphine, trying to sell her grandfather’s house. But the house couldn’t be sold.”

“Why?”

“Mold—it’s close to a lake and somehow the water has seeped underneath and the whole place is fucked. But it’s a big part of her life, you know—it’s where she and her sister grew up, so even though it’s a wreck, it would upset her to get rid of it completely—so it’s just standing. I’ll take you to see it if you want.”

You nod, but then you think you wouldn’t like to see it.

As you step through tall grass toward a gate, you decide to burn the journal. You’re still not sure who wrote it. You’ll never be sure and don’t care anymore.

Delphine is a happy child—and truth is just a lie that everyone believes.

Sebastian holds the gate open and tells you about the British Spitfire plane he found in the woods behind the house. He said that it was hidden there by the Résistance during the war after it crash-landed in a muddy field. Once his organic vegetable business is in full swing, he’s going to buy the parts for it and get it airborne, teach Delphine how to fly, he says.

After crossing a few grassy meadows, you see Sebastian’s tall house in the distance. The shutters are painted white. Clouds drift beyond the roof.

“Did the house come with the café?” you ask him.

“That’s a secret,” he laughs. “We didn’t buy it from anyone—we just live in it.”

“Do you know who it belongs to?”

“I do,” Sebastian says. “A family that left after the war for Paris because they were collaborators.”

“Do you know anything about Rebecca’s mother?”

“I do, as a matter of fact,” Sebastian says.

“Is she in Paris?”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“Rebecca told me.”

“Natalie doesn’t know,” Sebastian admits.

“Know what?”

“That I went to see her.”

“Is it true she abandoned her children?”

“It is—and it’s lucky for them she did.”

“Why?”

“She’s got something—a mental thing—same as what her mother had.”

“Rebecca’s grandmother?”

“Yeah—she killed herself in the lake when Rebecca’s mother was a little girl.”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The next morning, you wake and go downstairs. It’s getting cold. Fall is coming. A bright nest of fire crackles and spits in the stone fireplace. Sebastian is outside splitting wood with a long-handled axe.

A cat stops eating and looks up at you. Before you can pet it, you hear purring.

You decide to take a walk before breakfast, to stretch your legs and feel the morning wash through you.

You don’t want to see Natalie anymore. She’s a stranger dressed in the clothes of someone you once loved. It’s impossible to love someone after they’ve died. And that’s why it hurts so much.

Maybe tomorrow you’ll go back to Wales.

You step into your shoes and leave quietly by the back door. You turn the handle very gently. The morning air is cold. A shallow mist lingers low across the fields.

You pass Sebastian’s vegetable patch and climb over a gate into empty pasture.