Free The French for Love by Fiona Valpy Page A

back against the walls where they belong. I turn over, trying to find a cooler patch of pillow to cushion my burning cheek and my overheated brain.
    And then the crazily jumbled thoughts in my head say, ‘What if Liz is really my mother, but in some strange twist of events she gave me to her younger sister?’ I hear an echo of Ed’s voice saying, ‘You were just like a daughter to the old girl.’
    But in my mind’s eye I can see, as clearly as if it were beside me on the bedside table too, another photo from the same old album. Mum lying back in a hospital bed, propped up against crisp white pillows, with a small bundle tightly wrapped in a pink honeycombed blanket, held carefully in her arms. Her hair, usually immaculately set, is dishevelled, and on her exhausted face are written pain and love in equal quantities. ‘It was such a difficult labour,’ she’d said. ‘In the end they had to do an emergency caesarean. So it was no more bikinis for me from then on.’
    As the long night wears on and the pool of yellow light from the bedside lamp starts to dissolve into the paleness of dawn, the whirl of thoughts slows and then comes to a silent stop.
    And then, all other possibilities exhausted, I’m left with the certain knowledge that my father and my aunt, two of the people I have trusted and loved most dearly in my life, have betrayed my mother and me with a secret love of their own.
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    Now I’m angry. I’m angry at Dad and at Liz for obvious reasons. I’m angry, too, because they’ve both gone and left me alone with the fact of their affair but no way of getting the further explanation that they owe me. I’m angry at my mother, and I’m not quite sure why. If she’d been a bit warmer towards my father, maybe things would have been different. Did her coolness drive him into Liz’s arms? And, above all, I’m absolutely furious with myself for being so naive as to believe that anyone on this godforsaken planet could ever be faithful. I feel betrayed by everybody I’ve ever trusted, as though what seemed to be solid ground has turned into quicksand beneath my feet.
    My anger—and the sudden horrific thought that maybe my father and my aunt used to lie together in this very bed, yikes, don’t even start to go there!—gives me a surge of energy and I get up and dress briskly. Then I clatter downstairs to Liz’s study, Lafite giving me a look of baleful reproach as he flees before me.
    I pull open drawer after drawer in her desk and filing cabinets, searching for letters, diaries, anything that will expose what really happened between her and Dad. But she’s done a thorough job of clearing everything out—I think again, coldly this time, of those black bin bags—and there’s nothing much left. I race back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, to the bedroom and wrench open chests and cupboards. Again nothing, except for the neatly folded sheets of brown paper that line the shelves and drawers. I lift these up but beneath them is just dusty wood, scattered with a few dried grains of faintly scented lavender.
    I turn to the photos lying on the bedside table. Picking them up, I go back downstairs, moving more calmly this time, and into the kitchen. Lafite is sitting patiently by his dish and looks up calmly as I enter. I put the photos carefully on the kitchen table and come over, chastened, to stroke his broad old head. ‘Sorry. Did I scare you earlier? None of this is your fault, you poor old boy. I wish you could tell me what you know, though.’ He slowly blinks his eyes in forgiveness, given that it looks as though breakfast is imminent, and I pour food into his chipped bowl.
    As I drink my coffee and spread cherry jam on a hunk of slightly stale bread, I look at the two photos on the table beside my plate. The light of day brings new clarity, the irrational tumble of night-time thoughts banished, like vampires, at least until darkness falls again.
    It strikes me that there are three