She came up again and here was her body, racked with its interminable, wet cough. This was familiar. This she could do. The cough killed the panic because the cough took everything, and, as the panic drained from her, she was able to take control of her exhausted limbs and clumsily propel herself towards land.

Eventually her hand hit rock and she pulled herself up out of the water like some kind of newt, dripping and spent. She scraped her knee on a rock and pink, watery blood ran down her leg. She sat in the grass, hunched forward to ease the tightness in her chest cavity. Aftershocks of cough. Something felt wrong in her ribcage, as if she’d cracked a bone. A woman stopped and asked her if she was okay and Anouk told her she was fine. The woman asked where her parents were and Anouk waved towards the beach. ‘Over there,’ she said.

No one would have noticed Anouk’s drowning. She knew this. Had seen it on television. Contrary to what most people believed, a drowning person didn’t make much of a splash. A drowning person was there one moment, and then she was not. Drowning was private. Unremarkable. Drowning was quiet.

33

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1899

Madame debord was frantic when I returned home from my antics under the bridge, several hours late. My hair had come loose and somewhere along the way I’d discarded my hat. She was hungry and she was afraid, and she made me sit down on the sofa in the salon with a blanket over my knees. I wasn’t able to explain to her where I had been and she was too anxious to investigate.

‘Carrying a child can do peculiar things to a woman,’ she said, flapping like a caged bird about the room. She knocked a pile of newspapers and they fanned out across the floor. I started to gather myself from the sofa to pick them up, but she snapped at me to stay seated and so I watched, helpless, as she tried to reorganize a bunch of old newspapers that refused to be piled, and so they slipped and slipped and slipped a hundred times to the floor. Eventually she gave up and, on to some other mystery, began going through the drawers of a sideboard with alarming aggression, flinging things that had been stowed for years to the floor: a pair of scissors, pencil stubs, a man’s leather glove, a lone cufflink and a snuff box. This was the most evidence I’d yet seen of her deceased husband. It occurred to me to ask her what she was doing, but I simply didn’t care.

‘I was sure I had a pair of beeswax candles somewhere,’ she said. ‘They smell lovely, and their effect is soothing. But, I—’

‘They’re in the third drawer, in the kitchen. Wrapped in brown paper.’

‘Ah.’ She disappeared down the hallway and there was the dry shuck of stiff wooden drawers being opened, and she soon returned with the candles, whispering to herself and picking at the paper in which they were tightly wrapped. After an age, the candles were twisted into a pair of brass holders and lit and placed on the mantelpiece, and Madame was sitting in the armchair opposite me.