Free Lost by Lucy Wadham Page A

passed and the hormones had risen in her like a tide, flooding out her will, and she had held on to his desire as the only tangible thing in her shifting world.
    Before telling Mathieu, she had called her mother in England and told her she was going to keep the baby. She had thought of this call as an act of rebellion. She had believed she was cutting loose. Now she saw how she had bypassed Mathieu. She saw that it was a gesture of which her mother would have been proud.
    Soon she had discovered that for Mathieu her act of faith made her worthy of a depth of love of which she had never suspected him capable. He had worshipped the mother in her. Only since his death had she allowed herself to accept that this was all she was.
    Beside her, Dan slept on. She leaned over to feel his breath on her face. She touched his hair. This one’s existence had always seemed to her a simple matter, broaching no questions. He had arrived in the world complete, appearing to lack nothing. The daily minutiae he required from her he claimed without ceremony. Alice turned off the lamp beside the bed, lay back and stared into the darkness. She felt unable to face Dan unless he was asleep like this; he seemed to her Sam’s opposite in so many ways. She saw Dan as invulnerable and knew she would punish him for it.
    She looked at the digital clock beside the bed. Its green digits glowed 4 a.m. She had less than two hours before the search. In the dark she tried to imagine Sam’s fear. But she could not see him as he was, alone and terrified – only as he had been. She understood that his little life had brought him to this night of terror, that it was this terror that had beenwaiting for him. All his questions, from the moment he could recognise them, were a manifestation of this fear that had been building up behind him all his life, like a swell growing into a wave that today had broken over him.
    ‘Oh God. What have I done?’
    She felt for the lamp and turned it on, then rose and went to the basin in the corner of the room. She turned on the strip light above the mirror. Her face shocked her. The vein running down the centre of her forehead had swelled, altering her expression. Her eyes were opaque, like two holes. She was changed. Nothing, not even the death of her husband, had prepared her for this. She set her teeth hard against each other until her jaw muscles inflated and a pain developed. She stood clutching the basin with both hands, clenching her teeth, letting the desire to cry pass through and leave her. The policeman was right: she should not give in to her grief. She looked at herself again and realised that everything she had idly loved in herself had gone, leaving this behind.

Chapter Eight
    It was just after 5 a.m. and the sky was still navy blue. Stuart walked up the main street towards the mairie . Santarosa was at once oppressively familiar and yet so remote; even the houses seemed to shrink from him as he passed. The wind blew dust into his eyes. People had closed their shutters to it because it was the maestrale , a wind that brought out the worst in everyone. His mother said it made cats mad and dogs despondent; it made women plague their husbands, men hit their wives and children crueller than ever.
    There were some new graffiti in the main square. Huge red letters in support of the FNL bled on the mairie wall next to the legend: Raymond’s got Aids. A new sum had been daubed on the fountain: Drugs = Capital, and someone had written in elongated black letters: Allah is a faggot.
    The wind filled the trees and drove dust in eddies around the empty square, and the weathercock on the church creaked incessantly.
    Stuart went and stood in the arched entrance to the mairie and listened to the wind. He took a packet of mints from his pocket. They had been left behind in his car by Gérard. On the packet he read, ‘Soothing and refreshing. Recommended for smokers and those given to public speaking’. He smiled and put one in