Because the gendarmes want to be certain nothing fishy has gone on, they ask me to produce my mother’s letter. This was the one she left propped against the butter dish, the one I keep like maths homework in a see-through plastic sleeve.
By fishy, I’m meaning murder. The police wanted to know that my father hadn’t murdered her. They were keen to rule that out. Yes, me aussi.
The station turns out to be no bigger than a confession booth. It’s 200° in the booth, stuffy, and although a bit of sunlight scuttles in behind us when the door is opened, the only other proof it isn’t midnight slits through a chink near the ceiling. We’re in prison already?
There are two gendarmes behind the counter and they appear to be having a laugh, sipping Pastis (oh, whatever), cracking French jokes. Sweat leaks from the bands of their kepis, which would possibly seem a fraction less ridiculous in Le Premier Arrondissement, but strike me as vastly de trop in this provincial poky.
“We were asked to bring this,” I say. I place the sleeve on the counter and smooth it like it’s an altar doily.
“What is it?” says one of them. He stabs his finger down like a dagger to the Mappa Mundi and swivels the sleeve with rude efficiency to face him. I think quickly for the words, Keep your filthy French mitts off my stuff. But, in this white-hot moment, they escape me.
“Il faut le lire,” the gendarme says. (You’ll need to read). I don’t blame him. These eleventh-hour hieroglyphs are, frankly, cacographic. This thing’s a mess. But I begin and haven’t got much past …this wretched brain… before he says: “En Français, s’il vous plait.”
Are you frickin’ kidding me, sir?
I’m barely able to get my own tongue around these words, let alone his. This is insult to insult to injury. But I summon the ghost of Madame Hubert, quickly apologize for making fun of her lisp, and jump in.
“Don’t hurry,” the man says. “Take your time.”
But Madame H wants no part in this; my sins, it seems, were unforgivable. So right out of the box, I’m stumped. And is it my feet which hurt (ces charbons sont chauds!) or my chest (I don’t think this pieu is sitting right)?
So, no, sorry everyone. I just can’t think of the French for …terrifying dilemma. Or even, This must be madness? And as far as tone, Monsieur Gentilhomme, how much gravitas should I give, for example, to …This sense of ending is so infinite or… Truly, my wits are at an end? How would you like me to say those things?
And then, there’s this to explain: two-thirds down, her pen ran out. Right where it says … impossible to bear, the ink switches from blue to black. And it’s not just the color that changes, but the thickness, too. The blue is stronger, inkier. The black, thinner and weaker. You can almost feel the point of no return.
So I’ll admit to the tendency I have to run my finger over that break in ink where dark becomes darker, and I wonder again about the gap in time. Whether it took her two minutes to find another pen (rummaging quickly among the crumbs in a drawer or the humdrum detritus of her bag) or did it take her longer? Long enough to stroke the dog and put a plate away; to wrap the Chaumes and remember to turn the key in the door.
When my father left for town that day, she was sitting at the table with her address book, and although he assumed she was writing a letter to a friend, it would turn out she was writing one to us. He said there was a vase of mock orange beside her – a bough he’d snapped the day before. She looked so beautiful sitting beneath it, he said, and when he remarked that its scent was filling the room, she said she hadn’t noticed.
What was the weather that afternoon? Overcast because, even in spring, the fog could gather? Or was there a bit sunlight coming in, falling in a fan on the terracotta tile? And where were the cats she loved – those despicable silent witnesses – who, if it hadn’t been for the warmth of the ashes, might have done something to stop her?
I don’t look at the letter as often as I used to. Thirty-two years on, it’s still in that same sleeve, creased, thumbed like a waiting room magazine. I keep it in a Precious Things Box where it shares elbow room with a lock of my daughter’s hair and an old tobacco tin of baby teeth. We reserve poring over the box for special occasions (usually Christmas!), when merriment has had the better of us and it’s time to sober up. That’s when I lift the lid and start doing it again: rolling over the same old details, asking the same old questions.
In her penultimate sentence, she says this: “ I cannot hope any of you will understand, but oh, please try.”
I did. I do. And I will.
AB - 9.12.22
So absolutely heartbreaking Alexa.
So sorry xxx