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She flinches, actually flinches. “I don’t believe it. I know my grandfather, he’s not the type to hold a vindictive spiteful vendetta against an entire family for the sins of their father. He is kind. You haven’t seen how he talks to Doris. I mean, how many nearly ninety-five-year-old men would waste time and energy trying to help a woman like her get over her trauma?”
I was so wrong. I thought I’d been dreading telling the story. Actually, what I’d been dreading, without realising it, is having her struggle to believe me.
“You think I’m lying? I made all this history up?” My tone must have cooled noticeably. Because I was afraid of this. That she might touch my guarded, suspicious, unhealed wounds, and things would change between us.
“Of course not.” She hurries to explain. “I’m just saying it may have been island gossip, that’s all. You are laying the blame for what happened to you at his door when he too might have been innocent. Look.” She warms to her theme, using her hands to illustrate her point. “You’ve seen how loved he is, here. You’ve met Gabriel and Pierre, they’re not stupid or clueless, are they? So, they wouldn’t have respected or admired him if he’d been such a vengeful, hateful, cruel man?”
I say nothing.
“Gossip has a way of changing with repetition. Could what you heard about him have just been like a game of Crazy Whispers?”
The words hit me like a slap. I bounce off the bed, knocking my knee on the wall of this bloody tiny shoebox room. Where the hell are my clothes?
“Crazy Whispers? Is that what you think?” I grit the words as I yank on my trousers.
“I’m just saying you haven’t actually heard him or seen him do any such—”
“Oh, yes I have.” I button up my jeans and search for my shirt but can’t find it. “I was ten years old when he threatened to thrash me with a stick.”
“He did, what?”
“He found me picking blackberries down the hill.” I give up on the shirt and grab the hoodie on the back of a chair and shove my arms into the sleeves. The story comes spilling out, the part I was determined not to tell her, the chapter of the story that really hurts. How my father lost his job because he was accused of stealing. “Every time something went missing people looked at him until he couldn’t get a job. Any job. It was…” My voice is muffled as I pull the hoodie over my head. “My sister’s birthday but we couldn’t afford to buy her a cake, so I was collecting berries for Mum to make a crumble. Hedge saw me down the hill and threatened me with his stick.” I hop on one foot while pulling on my boot. “When I told my mum she took me by hand and marched over to his shop and told him not to threaten her children. He said he’d caught me sneaking where I shouldn’t. Everyone in the lane heard. Everyone assumed I’d been stealing.”
“What you don’t know is how all the name-calling made my father unemployable.” Here it comes, and I can’t stop telling it. My part in this story. Destroying my parent’s marriage and making my mum and sister poor.
Elodie is still sitting on the bed but has pulled the covers right up to her chin. The air in the tiny room crackles with tension.
“I was too young to understand what it means to be called a thief. How my father’s inability to pay his bills on time, and the fact I was always running away from school to play, even my curiosity about the cider pressing, the harvesting, all of it was taken as proof that my father must have sent me stealing from every farm where I played.”
I look for my clothes, my wallet, something, anything to justify me banging around the room which suddenly feels claustrophobic with the two of us in it.
“Then one day some kid at school lost his watch. The headteacher, your father, by the way.” I try very hard to keep my voice level. “Your father ordered a search. Someone said they’d seen me climb over the wall to run away.” My chest is very tight, and my breathing comes faster and harder.
“Actually, I’d climbed over the wall but only because I always played truant when the lessons got boring. I hadn’t heard about the theft or the search, I was just going to play but that was it. Proof I had stolen the watch and run to hide it so my dad could sell it and pay the bills.”
I’m so angry now I don’t even look at her.
“The problem with La Canette is they’ve never had a police force. So, there was no real authority to investigate. Your father buckled under the pressure of outraged parents and expelled me from the school. ‘Officially’because I was disruptive, but everyone took it as proof I was a thief. What had been a suspicion, my expulsion from the only school on the island made it a certainty. That evening, a group of vigilantes marched up Catcher Lane, gathered outside our house and shouted,Out Hemingway thieves,out, out.I can still close my eyes and hear them. See the fear on my sister’s white face when a stone came flying through our window. The next day we took the ferry to England and never came back. All except my father who refused to be driven out. That night ended our family. He stayed here alone, gradually selling off our furniture to survive and when he died, only four people attended his funeral.”
The memory, the anger, the guilt I never voice out loud, it makes me hot all over, or cold, either way my skin has broken into a sweat.
Elodie sits there, the bedsheet tight over her body. And it comes to me that I will never see her naked again.
“I’m going to have a shower.” I walk into the cubicle and leave her to get dressed and leave in privacy.
chapter Thirty-Five
Hal
The shower cubicle is tiny and wasn’t designed to allow a man to stretch his arms and legs while undressing. But then, in normal circumstances, a man would not have got dressed before coming into the shower.
I curse myself for being a fool and letting my guard down. Then curse myself for being too hasty to take offence. She said no more than anyone else might say in her position. It makes sense to question the accuracy of historical gossip. Even my sister has often speculated that some of it must surely have morphed over the years. Am I blaming my girlfriend for my own personal guilt over my family?
Then I curse myself again for sleeping with her. I knew history would come between us, and if she had talked to her grandfather as I bloody well asked her, this would never have happened. Did I really think Elodie LeFevre was the right woman for me? I should have stuck to my resolve to stay away from her, to finish the job quickly and leave.
Fool, fool, fool, the word bounces inside my head while I pour lots of shampoo on my head. But the soap hasn’t been invented that could scrub away the memory of Elodie’s fingers through my hair, on my face. The sound of her laughter or the way she makes me laugh in the middle of a serious discussion.
Wake up, Harrison. Stop the crazy train before you fall for her.
