The Lollipop Shoes (36 page)

The wind blew stronger, and we fled. Not least because of Rosette, of course. I’d known from the start I was carrying a child, and like a cat, I bore her in secret, far away from Lansquenet—

But by December the wind had turned, taking the year from light into dark. I’d carried Anouk with no difficulty. My summer child came with the sun, at four-fifteen on a bright June morning, and from the moment I set eyes on her I knew she was mine, and mine alone.

But Rosette was different from the start. A small, limp, fretful baby who wouldn’t feed, and who looked at me as if I were a stranger. The hospital was on the outskirts of Rennes, and as I waited beside Rosette, a priest dropped by to counsel me, and to express surprise that I would not have my daughter baptized in hospital.

He seemed a calm and kindly man, but too like so many of his kind, with his well-worn words of comfort and his eyes that saw all of the next world, but none of this one. I gave him the usual litany. I was a widow, Madame Rocher, on my way to live with relatives. He clearly did not believe this; looked at Anouk with suspicious eyes and upon Rosette with growing concern. She might not live, he told me earnestly; could I bear to have her die unbaptized?

I sent Anouk to a hostel nearby, while I recovered slowly and watched over Rosette. It was in a very small village – a place called Les Laveuses, on the Loire. And it was to there that I fled from the kind old priest as Rosette’s strength dwindled and his demands became more insistent.

For kindness can kill as readily as cruelty; and the priest – whose name was Père Leblanc – had begun to make independent enquiries regarding any relatives I might have in the region, including who might be looking after my eldest daughter, where she had received her schooling, and the fate of the imaginary Monsieur Rocher – enquiries that I did not doubt would eventually lead him to the truth.

So, one morning I took Rosette and fled by taxi to Les Laveuses. The hostel was cheap and impersonal; a single room with a gas fire and a double bed with a mattress that sagged almost to the floor. Rosette was still reluctant to feed, and her voice was a pitiful plaintive mew that seemed to echo the wail of the wind. Worse still, her breathing would sometimes falter, stopping for five or ten seconds at a time, then hitching back with a hiccup and a snuffle, as if my baby had decided – if only temporarily – to rejoin the land of the living.

We stayed in the hostel for two more nights. Then, as New Year approached, the snow arrived; dusting the black trees and the sandbanks along the Loire with bitter sugar. I looked for somewhere else to stay, and was offered a flat above a little
crêperie
run by an elderly couple called Paul and Framboise.

‘It’s not very big, but it’s warm,’ Framboise said – a fierce little lady with berry-black eyes. ‘You’ll be doing me a
favour, keeping an eye on the place. We’re closed in winter – no tourists here – so you needn’t be afraid of getting in the way.’ She looked at me closely. ‘That baby,’ she said. ‘It cries like a cat.’

I nodded.

‘Hm.’ She sniffed. ‘You should get it seen to.’

‘What does she mean?’ I asked Paul later, as he showed us our little two-room flat.

Paul, a gentle old man who rarely spoke, looked at me and shrugged. ‘She’s superstitious,’ he said at last. ‘Like a lot of old people round here. Don’t take it to heart. She means well.’

I was too tired then to enquire further. But after we had settled in, and Rosette had begun to feed a little – though she remained very restless and barely slept – I asked Framboise what she had meant.

‘They say a cat baby’s bad luck,’ said Framboise, who had come in to clean the already spotless kitchen.

I smiled. She sounded so very like Armande, my dear old friend from Lansquenet.

‘Cat baby?’ I said.

‘Hm,’ said Framboise. ‘I’ve heard of them, but never seen one. My father used to tell me the fairies would sometimes come in the night and put a cat in place of the real baby. But the Cat Baby won’t feed. The Cat Baby cries all the time. And if anyone upsets the Cat Baby, then the fairies will sort them out for sure.’

She narrowed her eyes menacingly, then, just as suddenly, smiled. ‘Of course, it’s only a story,’ she said. ‘All the same, you should see a doctor. Cat Baby doesn’t look well to me.’

That at least was true enough. But I’ve never been easy
with doctors and priests, and I hesitated to follow the old lady’s advice. Three more days elapsed, with Rosette mewing and gasping throughout, and eventually I overcame my reluctance and called to see the doctor in nearby Angers.

The doctor examined Rosette with care. She needed tests, he said at last. But that cry confirmed it in his mind. It was a genetic condition, he said, most commonly known as
cri-du-chat
, thus named for that eerie, mewing cry. Not fatal, but incurable; and with symptoms that, at this early stage, the doctor was hesitant to predict.

‘So she
is
a Cat Baby,’ said Anouk.

It seemed to delight her that Rosette was different. She’d been an only child for so long; and now, at seven, she seemed at times weirdly adult. Caring for Rosette, coaxing her to feed from a bottle; singing to her; rocking her in the chair Paul had brought from their old farmhouse.

‘Cat Baby,’ she crooned, rocking the chair. ‘Rock-a-Cat Baby, on the treetop.’ And Rosette did seem to respond to her. The crying stopped – at least, some of the time. She gained weight. She slept up to three or four hours at night. Anouk said it was the air of Les Laveuses, and put down saucers of milk and sugar for the fairies, in case they called by to see how the Cat Baby was doing.

I had not returned to the doctor in Angers. Further tests would not improve Rosette. Instead we watched her, Anouk and I; we bathed her in herbs; we sang to her; we massaged her thin little pipe-stick limbs with lavender and tiger balm and fed her milk from an eye-dropper (she would not take the bottle teat).

A fairy baby
, Anouk said. She certainly was a pretty one; so delicate with her small shapely head and her wide-spaced eyes and pointed chin.

‘She even
looks
like a cat,’ said Anouk. ‘Pantoufle says so. Don’t you, Pantoufle?’

Ah, yes. Pantoufle. At first I’d thought maybe Pantoufle would disappear, once Anouk had a baby sister to care for. The wind was still blowing across the Loire, and Yule, like Midsummer, is a time of change; an uncomfortable time for travellers.

But with the arrival of Rosette, Pantoufle seemed, if anything, to get stronger. I found I now saw him with increasing clarity; sitting beside the baby’s crib; watching her with button-black eyes as Anouk rocked her and talked to her and sang songs to quiet her.

V’là l’bon vent, v’là l’joli vent

‘Poor Rosette doesn’t have an animal,’ said Anouk as we sat together by the fire. ‘Maybe that’s why she cries all the time. Maybe we should ask one to come. To look after her, the way Pantoufle looks after me.’

I smiled at that. But she was in earnest; and I should have known that if I didn’t address the problem, she would. And so I promised we’d give it a try. Just this once, I’d play the game. And we’d been so good for the past six months; no cards, no charms, no rituals. I missed it; and so did Anouk. What harm could come of a simple game?

We’d been living in Les Laveuses for nearly a week, and things were beginning to get better for us. We’d already made some friends in the village; I’d grown very fond of Framboise and Paul. We were comfortable in the flat above the
crêperie
. With Rosette’s birth we had more or less missed Christmas, but the New Year was approaching, full of the promise of new beginnings. The air was still
cold, but it was clear and frosty, and the sky was a vibrant, piercing blue. Rosette continued to worry me; but we were slowly learning her ways, and with the help of the eye-dropper, we were able to give her the nourishment she needed.

Then Père Leblanc caught up with us. He arrived with a woman he said was a nurse, but whose questions, repeated to me by Anouk, led me to suspect that perhaps she was some kind of social worker. I was out when they called – Paul had driven me to Angers to pick up some nappies and milk for Rosette – but Anouk was there, and Rosette was in her crib upstairs. And they’d brought a basket of groceries for us, and they were so kind and interested – asking after me, implying we were friends – that my trusting Anouk, in her innocence, told them far more than was wise.

She told them about Lansquenet-sous-Tannes and about our travels along the Garonne with the river-gypsies. She told them about the chocolate shop, and the festival we had organized. She told them about Yule and Saturnalia, and the Oak King and the Holly King, and the two great winds that divide the year. When they expressed interest in the red good-luck sachets over the door and the saucers of bread and salt on the step, she spoke of fairies, and little gods, and animal totems, and candlelit rituals, and drawing down the moon, and singing to the wind, and Tarot cards, and cat babies—

Cat babies?

‘Oh yes,’ replied my summer child. ‘Rosette’s a cat baby, which is why she likes milk. And that’s why she cries like a cat all night. But it’s all right. She just needs a totem. We’re still waiting for it to arrive.’

I can only imagine what they made of that. Secrets and rites; unbaptized infants; children left with strangers, or worse—

He asked her if she would come with him. Of course, he had no authority. He told her she’d be safe with him; that he would keep her safe throughout the investigation. He might even have taken her away, but for Framboise, who came in to check on Rosette and found them sitting there in her kitchen, with Anouk close to tears and the priest and the woman talking earnestly to her, telling her that they knew she was afraid, that she wasn’t alone, that hundreds of children were just like her, that she could be saved if she trusted them—

Well, Framboise put an end to that. She sent them both packing with a flick of her tongue, made tea for Anouk and milk for Rosette. She was still there when Paul brought me home; and she told me of the visit from the woman and the priest.

‘Those folk just don’t know how to mind their business,’ she said scornfully over her tea. ‘Looking for devils under the bed. I told them – all you have to do is look at her face.’ She nodded towards Anouk, now playing quietly with Pantoufle. ‘Is that the face of a child in danger? Does she look afraid to you?’

I was grateful to her, of course. But I knew in my heart that they’d be back. Perhaps with official papers, this time; some kind of a warrant to search or to question. I knew Père Leblanc would not give up; that given the chance, that kindly, well-meaning, dangerous man – or someone just like him, one of his kind – would follow me to the ends of the earth.

‘We’ll leave tomorrow,’ I said at last.

Anouk gave a wail of protest. ‘No! Not again!’

‘We have to, Nanou. Those people—’

‘Why us? Why does it always have to be us? Why doesn’t the wind blow
them
away, for a change?’

I looked at Rosette, asleep in her crib. At Framboise, with her wrinkled old winter-apple face; at Paul, who had listened in a silence that said more than he could have said with words. And then a flicker of something caught my eye; something that might have been a trick of the light, or a spark of static or a stray ember from the fire.

‘Wind’s up,’ said Paul, listening by the chimney-breast. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if we had a storm.’

Sure enough, I could hear it now: the last assault of the December wind.
December, despair
. Throughout the night I heard its voice, keening and wailing and laughing. Rosette was fretful all night long, and I slept fitfully as the wind squalled and ratcheted the slates on the roof and rattled the windows in their frames.

At four o’clock I heard the sound of something moving in Anouk’s room. Rosette was awake. I went to see. And I found Anouk sitting on the floor in a badly drawn circle of yellow chalk. There was a candle burning beside her bed, and another one over Rosette’s crib, and in the warm yellow light she looked rosy and flushed.

‘We fixed it, Maman,’ she told me, bright-eyed. ‘We fixed it so that we could stay.’

I sat down beside her on the floor. ‘How?’ I said.

‘I told the wind we were staying here. I told it to take someone else instead.’

‘It isn’t that easy, Nanou,’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ said Anouk. ‘And there’s something else.’ She gave me a smile of heartbreaking sweetness. ‘Can you
see him?’ She pointed to something in the corner of the room.

I frowned. There was nothing. Well, almost nothing. A fugitive gleam – a flicker of candlelight on the wall – a shadow, something like eyes, a tail—

‘I don’t see anything, Nanou.’

‘He belongs to Rosette. He came on the wind.’

‘Oh, I see.’ I smiled. Sometimes Anouk’s imagination is so infectious that I find myself almost carried away, seeing things that cannot be there.

Rosette stretched out her arms and mewed.

‘He’s a monkey,’ said Anouk. ‘His name is Bamboozle.’

I had to laugh. ‘I don’t know how you think of these things.’ And yet even then I felt uneasy. ‘You know it’s just a game, right?’

‘Oh no, he’s real,’ said Anouk with a smile. ‘Look, Maman. Rosette sees him too.’

In the morning, the wind had dropped. An evil wind, a tornado, the locals said, felling trees and levelling barns. The newspapers called it a tragedy, and spoke of how, on New Year’s Eve, a branch from a tree had dropped on to a passing car as it drove through the village early that evening. Both driver and passenger had been killed – one of them a priest from Rennes.

An act of God
, the papers said.

Anouk and I knew otherwise.

It was just an Accident
, I repeated as she woke up crying night after night in our tiny flat in Boulevard de la Chapelle.
Anouk, those things aren’t real
, I said.
Accidents happen. That’s all it was
.

And as the year turned she began to believe. The
nightmares stopped. She seemed happy again. But still there was something in her eyes – a shift from the summer child she was – something older, wiser, stranger. And now Rosette – my winter child – seeming more like Anouk day by day, imprisoned in her own little world, refusing to grow like other children; not speaking, not walking, but watching with those animal eyes . . .