In a Kingdom by the Sea. Sara MacDonald

CHAPTER FOUR

       Cornwall, 1971

       If I close my eyes you won’t be gone. If I close my eyes I won’t see Maman’s face any more. If I close my eyes I can pretend we are surfing through small fast waves. If I close my eyes we are together at the beach café eating ice cream after school. If I keep my eyes tightly closed you will still be here …

       We are climbing into Papa’s boat and motoring out on the evening tide to fish for mackerel. You and Papa are singing to the fish and embarrassing me.

       I love the silver-purple flash of their skins as we reel them in. You are quick at taking the hook out of their mouths but I can’t do it. I hate seeing Papa bang their heads against the side of the boat.

      ‘Pff!’ you say to me, ‘you like to eat them barbecued with Maman’s frites, though, don’t you? You love her mackerel pâté stuffed in crusty rolls …’

       We moor the boat and walk round from the quay with the fish. Maman is sitting on the beach in the last of the sun with a picnic. There is lettuce and tomatoes from the allotment, great sticks of French bread, sausages and chicken, pâté and cheese.

       There is always loads of food because Maman knows your friends will wander past hoping she will call out to them to join us. Maman feeds everyone.

       ‘She’s French!’ you say, shrugging. ‘Food is what Maman does.’

       Maman and Papa drink red wine from little kitchen glasses and Papa says, ‘My beautiful girls! Look at my beautiful girls!’

       You are the beautiful one. Maman is pretty, too, but I am not. I stand out because of my hair. It is fair and thick with tight springy curls. I don’t have shiny, blue-black hair like you and Maman.

       I get teased about my hair at school but you tell me that it is unique. You say that anyone can have straight dark hair but hardly anyone has curly, fair hair, green eyes and olive skin. You tell me I am cute and clever. You tell me you could never make up stories like me, nor read three books in a week. But I would like to be like you, so beautiful that people turn their heads to take another look as you walk past …

       ‘My beautiful girls. Look at you all sitting on the rug … I must take a photo …’ Papa sighs.

       ‘Too much red wine,’ Maman says, rolling her eyes.

       You can never wait for summer to come. You love it when the campsite opens up on the hill and the beach café stays open until dark. You love it when the tourists start to pour in and the village fills up. You stop pretending to be bored by the grey winter and the empty town. You come alive again like the trees.

       What will I do without you? What will I do? You have millions of friends, but I don’t, and you hardly ever say no if I want to play with you. ‘She’s my sister,’ you say firmly. And that’s that.

       I know all the places you go when you are fed up, when you and Maman argue. You climb down to forbidden Nannaver Beach, tucked under the cliffs, but you make me promise never to go on my own.

       Do you remember that day we made a den up in the fields underneath the hawthorn? A fox or badger had made a hidden path between the thorns. We pinched Papa’s sandwiches and flask and stayed there all day to get out of cleaning our rooms.

       When we got home Maman was cross and said we smelt of fox poo. She didn’t think it was funny. Papa did, and he hosed us down with the freezing water from the garden hose.

       Last May Day, you took me with you over the fields to Marazion Festival.

       You held my hand as we ran. Your hair was flying out behind you in a great snaky wave and getting in my eyes. You were laughing as you pulled me along because we were late and your friends were waiting.

       The Mount was lit up like fairyland. We could hear music coming from the causeway and the sun was falling into the sea.

       There was a German family walking the other way, back to the campsite. They smiled and asked if they could take our photos. I was in jeans but you were in your favourite, faded, once-pink summer dress. The dress everyone smiled at you in; the dress Maman and Papa did not like you to wear. There was trouble later when they picked us up and saw that you were wearing that old dress.

       Once, when we were in Penzance, a woman stopped us in the street. She had been staring at you from the other side of the road. She said she was a talent scout for a model agency. She tried to give Maman her card but Maman said she did not want it, that you were only thirteen years old. The woman looked amazed and said, ‘She is incredibly voluptuous for a thirteen year old.’

       Neither of us knew what voluptuous meant but it made Maman furious and she was very rude to the woman in fast French and we both got the giggles.

       One rainy day you pricked both our thumbs and pressed our blobs of blood together. You wanted us to be real sisters, not half-sisters, but you were always my real sister even before our blood was joined.

       Dom, I don’t know what you did for Maman to send you away, but don’t worry. She will come and get you. She doesn’t mean it. She will want you home soon with Papa and me. There have always been four of us. You, me, Maman and Papa …

      I wake on my own in the London house sobbing in the hours before dawn. The dream is visceral and still powerfully alive. I thought I had dealt with and buried all this long, long ago.

       CHAPTER FIVE

       London, 2009

      It is a strange, uneasy summer in London. The war in Afghanistan dominates the news. The sight of huge RAF planes lumbering into Brize Norton carrying coffins and mutilated soldiers casts a pall everywhere.

      Publishing is in a difficult place at the moment. Commissions are slow and Emily and I feel anxious. Book translations are harder to obtain and I have not been able to place any new foreign authors for months. It has taken me years to build up a good little bilingual team and I do not want to have to let anyone go.

      Then, with serendipitous timing, Isabella Fournier, a bestselling French author I met last year at a Paris book launch, asks if I will take over the translation of her latest book. It is a bit of a coup and it has given us some clout. I relax, feeling sure that the year is going to improve.

      For the first couple of months Mike and I manage to Skype each other regularly. He is living in a hotel near Karachi Airport but quite a distance from the city. Mike would never admit it to me but I think his first few weeks in Pakistan are proving daunting.

      He cannot leave the hotel without security and for some reason it seems to be taking a long time for a driver to be vetted and a car allocated to him.

      ‘They were in such a hurry to get me out here, so you’d think they could sort out security before I arrived …’ he tells me irritably. ‘Everyone in the office is bending over backwards to make sure I have everything I need, but at the end of the day they all head home to the city and I am stuck out by the airport in this bloody awful airline hotel full of passing and inebriated cabin crew …’

      The hotel is not bloody awful. Mike showed me round it on his iPad, but he obviously feels trapped and bored.

      ‘Surely there must be secure hotels in the city?’

      ‘Of course there are. They are just being overcautious with me. I’m the only European employee out here at the moment and it would be embarrassing for them if anything happened to me …’