The Witches of Cambridge (5 page)

Tu es plus belle ce matin, ma chérie
.

“I am not, darling,” Héloïse says, curling her fingers at the ends of her hair. “But it’s sweet of you to say so.”

Héloïse slides her bare feet into slippers and shuffles across the wooden floor to the window, to sit and watch the sunrise. The weather is warm enough to sleep without a nightgown and Héloïse doesn’t bother pulling one on now. No one can see her from across the street, and she doesn’t mind how she looks, no matter that her breasts, buttocks, and stomach sag now, no matter that her skin is wrinkled and spotted with age. Perhaps it was François’s doing, the way he’d stroked his fingers along the lines that multiplied over the years, how he’d kissed her breasts so tenderly, held her middle-aged hands so softly, cupped her cheeks and kissed her lips…Probably. But Héloïse can also credit her own mother’s example. Virginie Ghanimé was forty-five when her first and only child was born. Héloïse remembers sitting at her mother’s coiffeuse, pretending to put on rouge. Until she died in her eighties, Virginie looked and felt herself to be beautiful.

C’est un beau matin.

“Yes,” Héloïse agrees, glancing outside at the sunshine. “I suppose it is.”

She sinks into the armchair by the window. It’s soft, deep, and striped in her favorite colors: dusty pink and green. Nearly a year and a half after François died, Amandine insisted on redesigning the bedroom and, although Héloïse protested at the time, she’s grateful for it now. The room is a fairy tale, an escape from reality, a reminder of the romance of the past instead of the grief of the present. The bed is wrought-iron with white sheets and a canopy of cream gauze. The desks, bookshelves, and matching wardrobe are all original Victorian antiques painted white. With the touch of a sparkling crystal chandelier, Amandine created a room that gives Héloïse a tiny smile of pleasure every time she wakes. Until a few seconds later when she remembers that François isn’t waking up with her and never will again. Héloïse used to relish the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness. She loved those few moments floating into reality on the edges of her dreams, but now the reawakening is too cruel, too much of a shock. At night she dreams that François is alive and vibrant and young. At daybreak, when she opens her eyes, he dies all over again.

Sometimes Héloïse wonders if the heartbreak of her husband’s death—along with the fact that it was her fault—would have killed her, if she hadn’t had her daughter’s deep love and sprinkling of magic as support. She needs both from Amandine now, since François’s death, along with silencing Héloïse’s heart, seems to have switched off her own magic. For the first year or so she neither noticed nor cared, but lately she’s started to miss it. It’s a sign, perhaps, that Amandine’s efforts to bring her alive again are beginning to take effect, at least a little.

—

Amandine gently pushes open her front door, wincing as the hinges squeak into the silent night air. Frankie can sleep through a parade but Bertie is a light sleeper and she’s forever in danger of waking him. Slipping in through the smallest crack she can squeeze through and softly clicking the door closed behind her, Amandine tiptoes down the hallway. She’s still pulling off her coat when she steps into the living room. At first she doesn’t see Eliot huddled on the sofa, his head tucked into his knees, but she hears him. His voice is muffled into his hand. At first Amandine thinks he’s talking to himself and then she realizes he must be speaking into a mobile phone.

“I want to see you more too, of course I do, but I—I can’t tell her yet, I—”

A cough rises in Amandine’s throat, tickling and scratching her windpipe until she can’t swallow anymore and the cough splutters into the room. Eliot turns his head as if he’s just been caught robbing a bank. An iridescent glow of guilt rolls off him and hits Amandine in the chest with such force that she almost falls over. Eliot snaps the phone shut.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Spencer. He wanted a file I had. I’ll see him tomorrow.”

Amandine feels a flush of fury that he’s lying to her. She almost wants to slap him in the face and insist on the truth. At the same time the idea of learning something that would mean the inevitable breakup of her family is almost too terrifying. Still, she can’t just let it go.

“Why did you hang up without saying goodbye?”

Eliot shrugs and Amandine is surprised by how easily he lies; even his body doesn’t betray him at all. Were it not for the echo of secondhand guilt still shuddering through her, she might believe what he’s telling her, that what she just witnessed means nothing.

“Spence and I don’t bother with formalities.”

I heard you.
The words are on her lips.
You don’t speak like that to Spence. Tell me who it was.
But, unlike the cough, Amandine manages to swallow the words. The truth is still too scary to contemplate and, for once, she’s grateful that she can only feel people’s emotions and not know the why behind them.

Eliot stands and crosses the room. When he reaches her, for a split second Amandine thinks he’s going to give her a kiss, perhaps pull her into his chest and hold her tight, but Eliot just passes by, twisting his body slightly so he won’t have to touch her as he leaves the room.

—

During the past few weeks waking up in her bedroom, Héloïse has begun noticing that the room is becoming more animated than she is—which, no doubt, was Amandine’s intention all along. Perhaps it’s been active for the past year, but she simply hasn’t noticed before.

It shifts around on a whim while she sleeps. When she wakes the armchairs turn up at the other side of the room; the two desks rotate in shifts to sit under the windows, taking it in turns to soak up the light; the bed tests out different corners of the room, the bookshelves different walls. Some mornings, new pieces of furniture materialize and old ones disappear: a reminder of the cycle of life and death, possession and loss. It’s not something Héloïse particularly wants to be reminded of and yet sometimes the new things delight her.

Two days ago Héloïse woke to see a brass hat stand next to the door, complete with three wooden, ivory-handled, silk-edged umbrellas at its base and three straw hats hanging from its arms. The next day five paintings appeared on the wall opposite her bed: four of Monet’s gardens at Giverny and one by an artist she doesn’t know (Amandine tries to educate her mother about such things but Héloïse has never cared who the painters are, so long as the paintings are beautiful) of a thatched cottage with sunflowers under the windows and chickens in the yard. It reminds her of home, growing up in the Dordogne, and brings her comfort for a moment or two.

The room, Héloïse knows, is Amandine’s way of telling her to stop staring out of the window and start stepping out of the house. And yet she can’t, and won’t be able to until she finds a way to switch off her thoughts, her memories, her longing. So far, she hasn’t had much luck. She still thinks of François every few minutes. The first time, about a week ago, when a whole half hour passed without him in it, Héloïse found herself gasping for breath when she thought of him again, like a drowning swimmer.

Most of the time she thinks of the mundane things—the way he ate toast: nibbling around the edges until he reached the middle; the way he sneezed: squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing the sneeze before it exploded; the way he looked at her every evening before switching out the light: as if she were twenty years old on their wedding night. In thirty-five years of marriage they’d had their fair share of fights, of course, but, judging by her friends’ critiques and complaints about their husbands, Héloïse had been far happier than most of them. And yet they’d all been allowed to keep their husbands, while she had lost hers. Her François. Her short, sweet, portly, balding, devoted François.

She sinks into the memory of him again and smiles as she feels his breath on her cheek.

Certainly devoted, mais oui,
he says.
But not entirely bald. At least, not until the last few years.

Tears fill Héloïse’s eyes. She grips the armchair and blinks them back. She must find the strength to stop listening, she must find the strength to let go. Or else what’s the point of being alive at all? She might as well close her eyes, open her veins, and let the warm, bloodred grief slowly pull her under. And perhaps she would, if it weren’t for Amandine and the boys. So Héloïse shakes her head, like a dog shaking off water, in a halfhearted attempt to free herself from the grip of grief, to slowly pry its tight fingers from around her throat.

Non, not yet. I’m not ready. S’il vous plaît, non—

François has been whispering these particular words into Héloïse’s ear every day since the day he died. Of course, one day, it must stop. Or one day she must stop listening. Because, despite her sorrow, Héloïse has always believed that life has meaning. She believes that since she’s still alive it must be for a reason. Or, if not, then she at least owes it to François, to life itself, to make the most of the breath in her lungs and the blood in her veins. There are still things (on her best days) that she wants to do, or had wanted to do. She’d like to visit her birthplace again. She’d like to travel. She’d like to see more of the world. As an undergraduate, she’d been offered a scholarship to study in San Francisco, at Berkeley. She’d been wild with delight and had, with François’s blessing, immediately begun making plans. They hadn’t worried about being apart for a year. They believed in their relationship, in the strength of their feelings; it wasn’t a concern. And then, three weeks before she was set to leave, Héloïse discovered she was three months pregnant.

Now she reaches up to press her palm against the window. The cool dewy glass against Héloïse’s skin suddenly snaps her out of the past, so she’s sitting in her enchanted room once more. Slowly, she turns in her pink and green armchair to face the painting of the farmyard and, still feeling the brush of François’s breath on her cheek, Héloïse whispers these words to herself, over and over again:
Let go, let go, let go
…

—

When term ends, or Noa runs out of money, or is feeling particularly lonely, she doesn’t go home to either of her parents but visits her aunt instead. Ostensibly this is because Heather Sparrow lives less than a mile from Magdalene College, on Park Street in a tall Victorian house overlooking the river, while her mother lives three hundred miles away in the Lake District and her father (Heather’s brother) in a rather grimy street in London. In truth, it’s because Noa’s mother—now separated from her lover—still blames Noa for ending her marriage, even though she won’t admit it to either her daughter or herself. And Noa’s father doesn’t know how to deal with a daughter who can see more about him than he can. Both Noa’s parents prefer to pretend that things aren’t the way they are and they don’t take well to people—especially their own flesh and blood—pointing out emotions and secrets they take great pains to hide.

Noa’s aunt, on the other hand, is nearly as blunt as Noa. She appreciates her niece’s ability to see the truth and say it without censorship. Indeed, she’s often voiced the desire to have Noa’s strange sense for herself.

“I wish you could have it,” Noa says, for what feels like the seven hundred thousand sixty-second time in her life, as they sit in Heather’s kitchen drinking tea and eating blueberry scones. “I’d give it to you in a second, if I could.”

“I don’t understand why you hate it so much,” Heather says, taking another gulp of tea, then slathering another scone (her fourth) with butter and clotted cream. “I’ve spent my life wishing I had some sort of extraordinary gift so I wouldn’t be so bloody boringly normal.”

“It’s hardly a gift,” Noa says, sipping her tea. “I’ve got no friends and I’m starting to doubt I’ll ever, ever have an actual relationship with a man. Anyway”—Noa smiles—“you’re hardly normal.”

“True.” Heather nods, gobbling up her scone and licking her lips. “God, these are delicious. Well, if men can’t handle the truth, why don’t you give women a try?”

Noa smiles again at her beautiful, portly aunt’s five thousandth attempt to convert her. “If women were any better at hearing their secrets spoken aloud, then I might very well give it a go,” she says, “but I’m afraid to tell you that they aren’t.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Heather sighs. “Still, maybe you’ll see sense yet.”

“Or maybe you will,” Noa teases.

Heather nearly snorts up her fifth scone. “Hardly. I’ve tried men and they’ve tried me and we simply don’t suit each other.”

Noa sighs. “Well, lucky you, getting to try everything and everyone. At this rate, I’ll die a virgin.”

“Pish!” Heather exclaims. “Don’t be ridiculous. Give it time, you just—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Noa says. “It’d be okay if I was a teenager, but I’m twenty-three. In Austen’s time I’d be an old-maid governess by now, fit for nothing but other people’s children.”

“Well, then, it’s lucky for us both that we don’t live in Austen’s time, isn’t it? Anyway, I couldn’t live in a place without ready access to chocolate. Can you imagine?”

“You’d die,” Noa admits, “or become a highwaywoman stealing illicit sugary substances from the rich.”

“Your chocolate or your life? Sounds about right to me.” Heather laughs, licking her fingers. “These scones are too delicious. Who’d have thought that the simple addition of frozen blueberries could turn something bland into something irresistible? But, really, when you find your perfect match, you won’t have to worry about your gift, or your curse, or whatever you think it is, because they will love you for all that.”

Noa humphs into her teacup. “I doubt it.”

Heather shrugs. “That’s only because you’ve never been in love, so you’ve no idea what it means. Lily loved the joy I took in eating, she loved that I didn’t squash myself for social events and could always be counted on to blurt out something silly that most people would be too shy to say.”

“Do you miss her too much?”

Heather nods, her eyes filling. “Every day.” Then she smiles. “But it used to be every minute of every day, and now a good ten minutes can pass without memories of Lily, so progress is being made.”