Free The French for Love by Fiona Valpy

from beyond the grave.
    In the moonlight, I prise a sheet of thick photographic paper from the frame.
    And then suddenly I’m looking into my father’s eyes.
    They are smiling with a loving, tender gaze, right into the camera, as he leans forward, lips parted, to say something to the person taking the picture. Across one corner of the print, in his handwriting which is as familiar to me as my own, is a message. It reads, ‘For Liz—my love, always, David.’
    As if the look in his dark, moonlit eyes hadn’t already said it all.

CHAPTER FOUR
    A Cathartic Cleaning Frenzy
and an Experiment in DIY
    To-Do list:
• Go through house and look for evidence of the torrid affair between my aunt and my father
• Find out if there’s a good therapist anywhere near here who can help me sort my head out after discovery of said torrid affair
• Find out if Celia knows anything
• Find out if Mireille knows anything
• Practise taking deep breaths and letting go—ongoing.
    O MG, OMG, OMG!
    As every insomniac knows, there’s a kind of madness that comes with the night. The connections in the brain, which in the light of day allow it to function quite rationally, somehow become scrambled. The normally unthinkable becomes perfectly possible, if not probable. The doubts and fears, banished in daylight to dark corners, come creeping out and push any sensible thoughts away into some unreachable chasm.
    Tonight there’s plenty of food for thought, as any chance of sleep makes its escape out of the skylights above my head, the way lit by stark white moonbeams.
    At first I try to come up with a sensible, rational explanation for the photo of my father. Perhaps it’s just someone who looks like him. (But it’s definitely him—and, anyway, it’s his writing and he’s signed his name.) Perhaps it was a photo meant for my mother. (But it’s inscribed to Liz.) Perhaps it’s just a token of friendship. (‘My love, always’? The look in his eyes?) Perhaps it’s a forgotten memento from an affair before he met my mother. (Still in a silver frame beside Liz’s bed?)
    I rack my brains for snippets of family history which might help me date the picture. Liz wasn’t at my parents’ wedding; that I know from photos in a heavy old cream leather album, embossed at the corners with overlapping gold lines, which I used to love to pore over when I was little. I once asked Mum why Liz wasn’t amongst the small crowd of guests posing on the registry office steps and she said her sister had been working in New York at the time and that transatlantic travel wasn’t nearly as easy, nor as cheap, as it is nowadays. According to Mum, Dad had swept her off her feet and asked her to marry him just a couple of months after they’d met at a dance in London. ‘She was the most beautiful girl in the room,’ had chimed in my father with a fond smile. ‘I can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she had her hair pinned up in a most becoming style.’
    I don’t think my father met his sister-in-law until after he and Mum were married.
    I pick up the photo and look at it again, bracing myself for the pang of pain and betrayal I know I’ll feel. I turn on the bedside lamp to look at the image more clearly, the familiar, well-loved features seeming like those of a stranger in this bewildering new context.
    His face is young and fresh, the photo taken years before lines etched themselves across his forehead and grey hairs eroded the dark sand of the hair at his temples. This same face gazes out from pages and pages of pictures in the cream leather album. Engagement photos. Wedding photos. Photos of him cradling his newborn baby daughter in his arms. Him and Mum. Him and me.
    I put the picture back, face down, on the bedside table and reach over to turn off the light. On second thoughts, I think I’ll leave it on, so that the dark shadows that threaten to crowd in on me as the moon continues on its way across the starlit sky, will be kept pinned