‘Each time I was with child,’ she began, ‘I used to cry. Often and without obvious cause. My husband thought I was suffering from hysteria.’ She leaned closer to me and tucked the blanket more neatly around my stomach. ‘I can feel it,’ she said, and placed her palm on my body. ‘We need to make arrangements before you become incapacitated.’ She kept her hand on my stomach, and she was so close I could smell the powder on her skin. ‘We travelled to Nice once, not long after we were married. The sea was a shade of blue I don’t even have the words for, so much prettier than how it is at home. La Manche is the colour of storm. And the rain in Wissant. So much, worse even than Paris. But Nice is very different. We walked on the promenade, every evening we walked, eating some delicacy freshly plucked from a tree, almonds or apricots, and one minute you would catch that briny smell off the sea and the next turn it would be some wild, lemony herb. I could hardly believe we were in France. And,’ she moved her hand from my stomach to my knee, ‘the children are healthier there. I’m certain of it. More sun. Finer air.’

I couldn’t speak. My tongue was curling, again, with the oddest desire to consume grit, dirt, coal. All reason was abandoning me.

‘I probably was hysterical,’ she said, and smiled, kindly. I could scarcely follow what she was saying. ‘But now,’ her eyes flitted to my stomach. ‘We have another chance.’

I licked my dry lips and there was the shiver of candlelight on the walls. A snag of thoughts. Packing and transport, finding new lodgings. A disgraced lady’s maid and her invalid mistress and a bogus story.

Madame was smiling but her skirt quivered with the obsessive jerking of her knee. ‘We will overcome this,’ she said.

In that moment. The future was a black gash forced open by rancid breath, a tongue licking my ear. ‘Pennyroyal,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Do you know about it?’

Her smile set, like wax. She took her hand from my knee and smoothed her skirt over her lap with exaggerated gestures, as if she were a child playing at being an adult.

‘Have you heard of it? Do you know if it works?’ I asked.

She stood and went to the window and ran her fingers up and down a pleat in the drape. ‘I saw, today, how carefully you tended the geraniums,’ she said.

‘Madame. Please.’

‘They look so much healthier without all those dead leaves.’

34

Pieter

Stavanger, 1956

Somehow, bear, a year passed after we lost you. It passed in the way one might cut through metal sheeting with blunt scissors.

Consider how it would be to move through the world but not be a part of the world. This is what grief is. A wasteland, dusty and infertile. The wind is gritty, the food tastes of nothing and there is no music, and in the distance some dark, unknowable thing is waiting. This is what grief is. Hollow as a tin can.