The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (11 page)

1.

I
t was raining heavily.

Car headlights seemed to scowl around corners. Cyclists scowled back, wiping raindrops from their noses and eyebrows. Drainways and gutters gushed with water; tulips and daffodils trembled; and cherry blossom petals scattered from their trees, forming glowing veils of pink over slick brown mulch.

In the Cambridge Market Square, a man stepped in a puddle and the splash patterned out across a passing woman’s skirt. A small crowd of tourists shivered in the entryway to Barclays Bank. The market itself was closed and tightly wrapped, but a fruit-stall owner was still packing up the last of his oranges.

Just off the square, on St. Mary’s Passage, cane chairs and tables were soaking in the downpour on the terrace outside a café. In its window was a stencilled image of a buxom woman offering a tray of tea.
Auntie’s
, said the flourish above her head, and below, more plain-speaking:
TEA SHOP
.

Inside Auntie’s Tea Shop, a girl was squinting hard at her friend. He, in turn, was lost in thought. He was tall and had golden-green eyes, and a wide mouth that seemed ready to form a big wide smile. These were Belle and Jack.

A few streets away, in her attic flat, Madeleine was sitting on the couch. Her mother was at the sewing table. Rain streamed down the windows, and rain-shadows streamed down Holly’s and Madeleine’s faces and arms. The quiz show played on TV.

Madeleine was holding a closed book.

ISAAC NEWTON
, said the cover of the book in big, proud blue and, beneath that, more humbly, the author’s name.

Did Isaac have a nickname? Did they call him Zac?
she thought. Also:
What does it mean if your name begins with
I?
What effect does that have on your ego?

She remembered that she’d dreamed about her iPod last night. In the dream, she had seen it on the seat of a passing train. Its music had been spilling everywhere, staining the seat. She’d been in one train, the iPod in another, and there it had gone, heading fast away from her, her hand reaching out through the window helplessly.

Where are they now?
she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the
I
-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.

Then she saw her father’s face, and he was pointing out the iPod as it slipped towards the floor.

Madeleine’s memory slipped itself, and there was her dad again. He was pushing his chair back from the table and leaping to his feet, to demonstrate the odd way someone walked. The table was laughing hysterically. Other diners turned.

Now she saw her father crouch by her side when she was small: the intensity of his gaze while she herself counted the feet of a millipede for him.

She saw him at a hotel breakfast bar, pushing the collar of his shirt aside to show her a new tattoo.

“Why’d you get that?” she had said.

“To see how it would feel.”

That was her father’s embrace of life. He did things just to see how they felt. He
felt
things more than most people did. He stopped still to laugh his big, full laugh, not caring if people had to wait or move around him. In an underground cave once, his laugh had echoed out,
turning back on him, and he’d paused, surprised, and then laughed harder.

The expression on her father’s face when their car hit a dog in Barcelona, the expression when the vet said the dog wouldn’t make it through the night. Tears in her father’s eyes as he stroked the dog’s ears.

In Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack and Belle were sharing the hot banana cake with butterscotch sauce, and drinking tea. The tablecloth was white lace, the chairs were loops of dark wood, and framed prints of Cambridge hung on the walls.

“I had this dream last night,” Belle said, her spoon cutting a crescent moon into the cake.

“All right.” Jack’s spoon hovered. “What was it?”

“I had this dream where I kept kissing people and every time I did it was disgusting. I kept wanting to kiss random people — like the postman and that — but it was all wet, like saliva just pouring into the kiss.”

There was a pause. “That’s disgusting,” Jack said.

“Yeah, I told you that. I said it was disgusting.”

Their spoons cut at the cake, fiercely competitive for a while, until Belle said, “Hang about,” and she sliced the cake in half, pushed half his way, half hers. “Now we can relax.”

They both sat back and looked around. A middle-aged couple pushed open the door with a jangle of exclamations about the rain. A waitress muttered, “We’re practically
closed
,” but she smiled and seated them anyway. The waitress wore a black uniform trimmed in white at the collar and the sleeves, white apron over it all.

“I love this place,” said Belle.

“It must have been drool,” said Jack. “You were drooling while you were dreaming, so that’s why the kisses were like that.”

“I don’t drool.”

“Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially when you’re dreaming. You’re paralysed when you dream. You can’t move anything, not even your tongue, so you can’t swallow your spit.”

They both picked up their spoons again, thoughtful.

“That paralysed thing,” Jack added. “It’s probably why I have so many dreams where I’m trying to run or drive to get somewhere, but I end up going nowhere.”

“No. You have those dreams because you
are
going nowhere.”

“Thanks,” said Jack.

Earlier that day, Jack and Belle had met Holly and Madeleine in the café at Waterstones, when the rain was still high in the grey.

“Begin,” Holly had said, “by closing your eyes and breathing in the books.”

Belle and Jack did so, while Madeleine went to get extra chocolate sprinkles for her cappuccino.

When she returned, they had opened their eyes, sweet and startled, like small children waking from long naps.

Holly nodded her approval at them, and then she said:

“Who does?” said Belle.

“It’s a nice line, isn’t it?” said Jack.
“She walks in beauty, like the night.”

“Do you know who wrote those lines?” said Holly.

“I did,” said Jack, smiling with faint pride.

Belle regarded him, incredulous, then her face cleared.

“Oh, right,” she said, “so it was Byron.” She turned to Holly. “Byron wrote it.”

“Hmm.” Holly squinted thoughtfully. “I thought so too, Belle, but Jack seems so sure of himself. Maybe Jack
did
write it?”

So all three had explained to Holly about the names in the hat.

“I didn’t have to
become
Byron,” Jack added, “because I already
am
him, or anyway exactly like him. But without the poetry. Also, girls are not falling over themselves to have my children. As far as I know. If they are, they need to do it more loudly. Apart from all that, I’m just like Byron.”

“The similarities are blowing my mind,” said Belle.

“Different names too,” Jack had continued. “Byron and I have different names.”

Now in Auntie’s Tea Shop, Jack fixed a critical gaze on the little shelf hanging on the opposite wall. Its edges swirled and curled, the wood getting carried away with itself. A copper kettle sat alone on the top shelf, looking slightly lost. Jack thought that the owner of the tea shop had probably got that copper kettle for a present. And after the present giver went home, the shop owner had said, “What am I supposed to do with this bloody thing?” and someone else had said, “Oh, stick it up there on the shelf.”

Jack turned back to Belle, tilted his head towards the kettle, and she raised her eyebrows, agreeing with all his thoughts.

“I still think I’m like Byron,” Jack said, suddenly moody. “He had this thunderstorm inside him, see? He was probably an Aries like me.”

Belle glanced up at the beams on the whitewashed ceiling. She took another mouthful of the cake.

“Was he?” she said.

“Was he what?”

“An Aries like you?”

“That depends when he was born,” Jack said patiently.

Belle blinked once.

“Oh, right.” He squinted into his memory, then gave up and riffled through the notes in his bag. “Huh. Twenty-second of January was his
birthday, so no, he was an Aquarius. That’s all right, though. I was an Aquarius just two lives back.”

“You and your past lives,” said Belle. “Maybe Byron had an aura like yours.”

“You and your auras,” said Jack.

“I could read his aura for you if you want. Have you got a picture?”

“You can read auras from pictures?”

Belle shrugged. “Dunno. Never tried.”

Jack poured himself some more tea. Everything on the table was white: cake plate, teacups, salt and pepper shakers. The teapot itself, also white, had a sort of attitude about it: tall and fancy, its handle like a hand on a hip, spout curving up and over like a wave, like it was dead keen to get into your cup.

“I’m going to study it at university, you know,” Jack said. “Astrology. Did I tell you that? I was thinking, it’s what I feel passionate about, so I should. You think you’ll study auras?”

“Nope,” said Belle. “Auras is a load of bollocks.”

Jack was so shocked he nearly dropped the teapot. Belle reached out a hand to save it.