In the Gold of Time

by Claudie Gallay, Alison Anderson

Genres: Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Set between Normandy and Arizona, In the Gold of Time is a seductive tale of silences and dark, half-revealed secrets, and a haunting elegy for innocence lost in a lost world. A young father holidays by the sea near Dieppe with his reproachfully perfect wife and their twin daughters. Returning from the local shop, he meets an eccentric old lady, Alice Berthier, who lives with he mute sister, Clémence. Their mysterious house is full of old photographs and strange objects - sacred ceremonial masks once belonging to the Hopi, a tribe of Native Americans from Arizona. Haunted by memories of a tragic past, Alice takes comfort in her new companion, and he, in turn, is drawn into her mysterious world. As his family recedes into the background, her stirring tales of the Hopi and the Arizona desert become the only salve to his despondent soul.

Release date: December 20, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 258

Sample

It was still the calm of morning. Dustbins. The first métro. The concierge in the street across the way was opening his shutters. The upstairs neighbour had just come home. Anna and the girls were still asleep.

A morning like any other. I had just got up a little earlier. Because it was the start of the holidays.

I drank my coffee. Elbows on the table. On the refrigerator door were the girls’ most recent drawings. Flowers on the wallpaper. Daisies with white petals, eight petals per flower. A repeating motif. To infinity.

Anna always said, there’s something reassuring about the repetition of things.

We were going away. Like every summer. Our two months in Normandy. Our cases were ready in the passage, swimsuits, boots, swim rings in a box with board games, total sunscreen and rakes for collecting cockles.

What had we forgotten?

You always forget something.

After the dustmen, it was the seven o’clock bus and the woman who had the bistro downstairs taking out her chairs. She made a scraping noise with them. I had told her a dozen times, if you would lift them up, they wouldn’t scrape.

She lifted them for a day or two and then the noise started again.

Anna wanted to move away. Too noisy. Too many neighbours. Too much of everything.

Or not enough. Depending.

She wanted to buy a house. In the suburbs. With a garden. She said it would be good for the girls, the air was better.

She said we could also ask to be transferred and go even further, to Dijon or Provence. Dijon I could understand. But Provence, no less. Anna was asking too much.

I did not want to leave Montreuil. I did not want to buy a house here or anywhere. I do not know what I wanted. The thought of the holidays frightened me. Like Sundays. Rainy Sundays, worse than anything. How endless the morning hours seemed. There was so much to do. I did nothing.

I made some more coffee.

Anna was in the shower. I could hear the water running.

Pruners in the street a bit further up. They were cutting the branches that touched the façades. Which meant a lot of branches. I opened the window and shouted, how will we manage without the birds if you cut all the branches!

The birds – titmice, a few robins. In winter I hung balls of fat from the bars on the balcony. I would wait by the window. It made me late for the lycée.

The upstairs neighbour worked a night shift. Guard at the Louvre. He did not like it when I shouted like that, just as he was dropping off.

A young woman in the building across the way. Little flowered curtains. Pink, as light as lace. She was watching the pruners. When she saw me, she gave a little wave. Her nightgown looked as if it was the same fabric as her curtain.

It was July.

It was already hot in the flat.

In the bedroom next door the twins were still sleeping.

Our house, La Téméraire, overlooked the sea, a few kilometres south of Dieppe. We bought it just after the girls were born. Love at first sight, said Anna.

We took out a loan for ten years.

In winter, La Téméraire weathers every storm. We never come in winter. Only summer. And a few weekends in the spring. We find tree trunks and lifebuoys in the garden. Sand, planks, the corpses of seagulls. It takes us days to clean it all up.

It was raining when we got there. I stopped the car as close to the door as possible. The twins took their things and went straight up to their room. They had been good the whole trip, filling up their holiday notebook. Girls’ things. With boys it would have been different.

“Different how?” Anna said.

I did not feel like explaining.

We opened the shutters and began to unload.

At noon we ate sandwiches. The girls found some old Martine books in a box in the attic. Anna did not want them reading Martine so the girls read them in secret, at school or when they went to the neighbourhood library.

By afternoon it had stopped raining and Anna took the girls to the beach. I stayed out on the terrace. It was low tide. I could see the girls running. They went a long way, right down to the water’s edge.

They were hungry when they got back. Anna made some crêpes. The girls went and sat outside, at the white table on the terrace.

While they were having their snack, Anna went into the bedroom and put on a new dress. Her breasts, beneath the light fabric. They were round, full. I said, you should make a nightgown with the kitchen curtains. She shrugged. After that she went to the supermarket. I looked after the girls.

The next morning, Anna stayed with the girls and I went for a drive in the 2 C.V.

It was like that all the first week, calm.

In the morning, the first one up made breakfast. Coffee. Toast with yesterday’s bread.

The girls woke up at ten and then it was their turn for breakfast. Afterwards we went for a walk along the beach, then a swim, and then back home again at lunchtime.

The shutters were weather-beaten. Every year, because of the salt, they had to be repainted. Green, chromium oxide, it never changed. It’s easier to touch up, said Anna.

The tyres on the 2 C.V. needed changing as well.

I went to Dieppe. The shop assistant mixed the paint there in front of me. He added the brushes. Sandpaper. It was the beginning of the holidays, I took it all without arguing.

It was the girls’ birthday as well. Anna asked me to bring a kilo of strawberries for the cake.

I bought the paint, changed the tyres. I also bought a bicycle pump, but I forgot the strawberries, and yet, before I had left the house Anna had said, be sure you don’t forget the strawberries, and I said, I won’t.

I was nearly home by the time I realized. I had seen a green-grocer’s van parked a short way behind me, by the side of the road. I reckoned that with a bit of luck he would still be there and have some strawberries. I turned around.

The van was there. I pulled over onto the lay-by. The green-grocer had already lowered half of his awning. When he saw me he stopped what he was doing. He asked me if I wanted something and I said, yes, strawberries, a kilo. He raised the awning. He put the strawberries in a bag. A brown paper bag. And as the strawberries were deep red, luscious, I asked him to add an extra handful.

I went back to the car. A muddy dirt path led away into the trees. An old woman was walking away down the path. She was carrying a basket. She took one step, then another. Her basket was full. She had to keep putting it down, changing hands.

“Would you like some help?” I said, following her down the path.

She stopped. She scrutinized me, scrutinized the 2 C.V.

I picked up the basket.

“What have you got in here that’s so heavy?”

“Five kilos of pears, for jam,” she said. “And the sugar.”

She had a deep drawling voice.

I followed her for a hundred metres or so along the dirt path. More mud than dirt. She stopped outside a gate, an iron grille partially overgrown with ivy.

There were no other houses after that. Just the path which grew even narrower, and then the trees.

She opened the gate.

Behind it there was a garden. Flowers. And a long, low house with a thatched roof and irises growing all around. A path of white gravel.

We walked on.

There was a conservatory built on to the house, a sort of glass cathedral, and when I came closer I saw there were more flowers inside.

Behind the house a row of trees acted as a windbreaker. The cliffs were not far from there. You could hear the sea.

I remember thinking, if the girls were here, what lovely bouquets they could make.

The old lady stopped outside her door.

“You can leave the basket on the table,” she said, pointing to an iron table outside the house.

She took a pear from her bag. She held it out to me. For your trouble, she said, but then added that if I took the pear she was giving me, Clémence would not have the right amount for her jam, and it would certainly cause a problem.

“Clémence is my sister. She makes jam as if we were to live another thousand years.”

She waved her hand, as if to say that it was something she could not understand but that was just the way things were, and sometimes you just had to give in without trying to understand.

The pear was in the palm of her hand. She kept it there for a moment then closed her fingers round it one by one and put it back in the bag.

“Besides, jam pears are never very good. You bite into them, they’re dry, a bit tasteless and they don’t smell anything like Williams. But Williams are too expensive for jam, Clémence won’t have them.”

She held out her hand.

“My name is Alice, Alice Berthier.”

She had a strong, authoritative handshake. She hesitated for a few seconds as if she still had something to say, then she turned her back on me.

“Just pull the gate shut behind you when you leave.”

She headed off down what looked like a long passage and vanished inside the house.

When I got back, the girls were playing on the terrace. A game of wooden skittles I had never seen and which they had found, rummaging in the garage.

I went over to them. It was their seventh birthday.

I said, “You’re seven now!” I hugged them. They laughed. A marvellous laugh, from inside, spreading across their entire faces. I told them not to move and I ran to get the camera, but by the time I got back it was too late, they had started playing again and even though they were still laughing, it was not the same laughter. I took the picture anyway.

I went to Anna in the kitchen.

Anna, her hands in soapy water.

The window overlooking the sea was open wide. A breeze brought with it the smell of salt and brown seaweed.

Anna said, “Can you make the cake?”

The recipe was on the table. The meringue cake. I knew how.

I switched on the radio.

I poured flour into a salad bowl, broke the eggs, yolks, whites, put the yolks in with the flour. The girls were shouting. I could see them through the window. They had left their skittles and were playing with the water hose. Anna went out to hang up the laundry. Reaching for the line. Her arms held high. Her dress riding up her thighs. She had got a tan.

I added the sugar, melted butter, yeast.

I spread the batter in the pan.

Then I whisked the egg whites until stiff and since we did not have a mixer I had to do it by hand. I added the sugar, a hundred grammes, and then went to look for the strawberries and could not find them.

I went to look in the car.

The girls were on the swing and Anna was pushing them. I smiled to Anna and she smiled back. There were a hundred metres between us. The red laundry basket in the grass. The scooters.

I waved, nothing, everything’s fine. The strawberries were not in the car. I must have forgotten them at the old lady’s. When I put the basket down on the table.

I closed the car door. I thought, it’s eleven o’clock, I have time to go back, but then I looked at the dashboard and saw it was nearly noon and I had no time at all.

I went back to the kitchen.

In the place of the strawberries I put some peaches in syrup, a can Anna kept in the cupboard just in case. I covered them with the egg whites and placed the cake in the oven, forty-five minutes on the lower rack.

When Anna sliced into the cake, she could see there were no strawberries. She did not say anything. Neither did the girls.

They looked at me, all three of them.

The girls’ eyes. The same as Anna’s. Caramel-coloured.

After the meal the girls went up to their room. A nap, Anna’s idea.

Even if they did not sleep.

I was outside on the deckchair. I could hear them. Blue sky through the lilac branches. Their voices lulled me. My daughters’ laughter. I tried to guess what they were doing. What they were telling each other.

Anna wandered around the house and then came over to me. She sat down on the edge of the deckchair. She placed her hand on my ankle. Her nails were covered with a pink film. No rings, just the wedding band with our names engraved inside.

It was low tide.

Seagulls shrieking.

Anna said, do you want to go for a walk? I shook my head. The girls must have fallen asleep. I could no longer hear them.

I closed my eyes and Anna went back inside the house.

I stayed there until three. Then I drove off in the 2 C.V. I wanted to go for my strawberries. Ten minutes there and back, I thought, and then we will go to the beach.

I parked on the lay-by. The little path. The ground, too much in the shade. As if it were soaked. There must be springs not far from there, higher up.

I went up to the gate. The letter box was shaped like a bird’s nest, with the two names painted on, Alice and Clémence Berthier, and I thought, I should make a letter box for La Téméraire.

The girls would like that.

And then I remembered that we never got any post at La Téméraire. We had put our subscriptions on hold, Le Monde, Télérama.

I rang the bell, and as there was no answer I rang again, leaving my finger a bit longer on the buzzer. I waited. No-one came. I went through the gate.

Alice was in the conservatory. In a rocking chair, a plaid blanket over her lap. She was reading. A cat lay on a wicker armchair next to her.

“I’ve come for my strawberries,” I said.

She looked up and over her glasses.

“Your strawberries …”

“I rang the bell.”

She shrugged. She pushed her blanket aside and stood up.

A door led directly from the conservatory to a pretty room that served as a sitting room. Two windows. One gave on to the garden, the other to the rear of the house.

“Look at this! She’s shut the window again. Anyone would think it bothers her to let Voltaire come and go as he pleases.”

She opened the window then turned to me.

“Voltaire is the cat you saw.”

Two armchairs had been drawn over to the window. Hand-made cushions. Cross-stitch. Cat hair clung to the fabric.

Against the wall was a large cast iron radiator. A low table with a game of solitaire.

The cat came into the room. He looked at us, first Alice, then me, then he went to rub against Alice’s legs.

“He’s a good cat,” she said.

The cat was purring, going from one leg to the other. His back arched.

“But you can’t trust him, he’s a killer. Grasshoppers, butterflies, anything that lives in the garden … He catches moles, too. Cats can be so terribly violent sometimes.”

She sat down in one of the armchairs by the window.

“Do you like cats?”

“My strawberries,” I said. “I forgot them here this morning …”

She took a packet of tobacco from her pocket. The packet was flattened. Amsterdamer.

She pointed to the game of solitaire.

“Would you like a game? Well, that’s to say, I shall go first, then you.”

She placed her tobacco on the table next to the game.

“Your strawberries … of course …” she said, moving a first peg.

When she won a peg, she removed it from the board and placed it on the rail around the edge of the game.

At one point, I recall, there were a dozen or so pegs still on the board. In bad spots. She could not win now.

She looked up at me.

“We ate them,” she said.

That was all.

She had not finished the game.

Beyond the windowpane, it had begun to rain. We could hear the first drops on the roof of the conservatory.

“Bloody summer!” she said. “It’s going to be a rotten one, that’s a foregone conclusion.”

She held out her packet of tobacco.

“Would you like one?”

I shook my head.

“You’re angry about your strawberries, is that it? What can I say … There they were, in their bag, so tempting … I never thought you would come back for them. And to be honest, they weren’t all that good. They looked good but they didn’t taste that good, I assure you … We had to slice them down the middle and add sugar, and believe me, even with the sugar, they were anything but delicious. Let’s go and ask Clémence to make us some tea. Will that do, some tea?”

She picked up the cat and held it against her.

“Unless you don’t care for tea; she can make you something else.”

She glanced at the clock.

“Clémence eavesdrops behind doors, she can’t help herself. She’ll be here in five minutes with the tray, believe me.”

She pointed to the armchair across from her. On the other side of the little table.

I sat down.

“We’ve got out the extra leaves for the table. My nephews are coming. They’re on holiday. They always come here on holiday. They ring us and say, we’re on our way, and two days later, here they are.”

She was stroking the cat with the palm of her hand. The cat was purring.

“People become such creatures of habit …”

She adjusted her shawl around her shoulders.

I put the pegs back in their holes.

Outside, it was still raining. A shower, thick drops splashing against the windowpanes. I thought that because of the rain, I did not have to go home just yet. I began to play. Alice was looking out at the garden. Puddles. Plants bowing to the rain.

“They tell me I ought to go and live in the south. What on earth am I supposed to do in the south?”

She turned to face the other door, the one that gave on to the corridor.

“Clémence won’t come now. She can’t have heard you. You’ll have to come back for tea another time.”

She put the cat down o. . .