The First "Accident"

There is a particular quality to the hours between a phone call and an arrival. Nothing happens in them. You are simply carried, in a taxi and a queue and a seat with a tray table, from the moment when something terrible has been said to the moment when you will find out how terrible it is.

Hélène had told me what she knew. A little after six that morning Julien had driven down from the Domaine, early, alone, on the steep road that drops through the vines toward the village. On the second bend the brakes had gone. He had not had time to do anything clever. He'd put the car into the bank on the inside of the curve, rather than the wall on the outside, and the bank had taken most of it. Petit's men, who had been starting the day's work, had heard the noise and run down. There was a gash over his eyebrow, two cracked ribs, a concussion. A great deal of blood, said Hélène, in a voice with all the music scraped out of it, but nothing that wouldn't mend.

Lucas had been asleep at her house. He had been told that Papa had a little accident and was resting in the hospital, and he had asked, with perfect composure, whether Ellie knew.

"Tell him I'm coming," I said. "Tell him I'm on a plane."

I did not cry on the plane. I held Lucas's drawing in both hands the whole way, and I thought about a sofa and a lamp and the words I would rather know the real thing. I thought about the fact that I'd sat on the floor of a cold flat the night before with one sentence ready and had swallowed it because a phone buzzed.

***

He was propped up in a high white bed in a room on the third floor, with a bandage across his forehead and the left side of his face the colour of a plum. When I came in he turned his head, slowly, as though it were a considerable piece of machinery, and said in a voice like gravel, "I told them not to call you."

"Your mother doesn't listen to you."

"No." Something that was nearly a smile. "She never has. It's one of her great virtues."

I crossed the room in four steps and then did not know what to do with my hands. He solved it for me. He lifted his good arm off the blanket, the right one, and held out his hand, and I took it, and sat down on the very edge of the bed so I wouldn't jar his ribs, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

"It was the second bend," he said eventually. "I pressed the pedal and it went straight to the floor. It's a strange feeling. It's like putting your foot down for a stair that isn't there." His grip tightened. "I thought about Lucas. In the second before the bank. I wasn't afraid for myself. I thought, not like this. Not for him. That was the whole thought. I've never had one so clear."

"He's all right. He's with your mother. He asked if I knew."

"Did you tell him you were coming?"

"Yes."

"Good." He closed his eyes. "He'll have the whole house up at dawn waiting at the window."

I put my other hand over his. I didn't say anything useful. I had been rehearsing something useful for six hours and it had gone out of my head completely, and what was left was only that his hand was warm and that I could feel his pulse in the heel of my palm, steady, ordinary, there.

"You came back early," he said.

"I wasn't going to stay for a hotel breakfast."

"Did it go well? London?"

I should have told him then. The words came up as far as my teeth. But he looked so tired, and so battered, and so absolutely alive, that I couldn't bring myself to put a stone down on top of all of it.

"Yes," I said. "We'll talk about it later."

"Later," he agreed. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, and I wondered whether either of us knew how many things we had put into that word.

***

The gendarme came at noon, a tall, tired adjudant called Lemoine, and took Julien through it all again. He wrote carefully. He had already seen the car, which stood on a flatbed at the garage in the village, and he said so with a kind of regretful gravity.

"These roads," he said. "Every spring, the same. It is an old car, Monsieur Castellan. The mechanics will examine it, naturally, for the insurers, but I expect we will find that something simply wore through. It is nobody's fault. It is bad luck."

"I had it serviced in January," Julien said.

"Then it is worse luck." Lemoine closed his notebook. "You were fortunate, monsieur. A few metres further and it would have been the wall."

"What took you up so early?" I asked. I hadn't known I was going to.

"Frost." Julien shifted against the pillows and winced. "Petit sent a message in the night about the north parcel. I went up to look before the sun came over the ridge." He frowned faintly. "It turned out to be nothing. I don't think I even got as far as the rows."

It was an ordinary answer. I filed it away in the place where I was starting to keep ordinary things.

Bastien Morel rang at four, from the garage. He was the village mechanic, a heavy, gentle man who had kept every vehicle in the Castellan family running for thirty years, and he was in a state. I could hear it, tinny and distressed, even without the speaker.

"The line gave way near the rear fitting," he said, when Julien had put the call on. "Perhaps corroded. Perhaps a stone from the lane, years ago, a small nick that rusted through. I can't swear to anything. It's an old car, Julien. I should have caught it in January. I should have seen it."

"Bastien. You couldn't have known."

"It looked—" The mechanic stopped. When he spoke again, he sounded faintly puzzled. "It looked very clean, at the break. Cleaner than I'd have expected. But I wouldn't swear to that either. I'm not a laboratory. I only know cars."

"It's all right," Julien said. "Thank you."

He put the phone down on the blanket. We looked at each other, and then, by common consent, away.

***

Camille and Théo arrived at six, together.

She was white to the lips and carried a bunch of freesias wrapped in brown paper, and she came across the room in a rush and stopped short of the bed like a woman remembering some rule. "Julien. Mon Dieu. Hélène telephoned this morning. I came as fast as I could."

"I'm all right," he said gently. "Sit down. You look worse than I do."

Théo followed with a paper bag of oranges, which he set on the locker with a small flourish. His face was composed in an expression of grave and sympathetic concern, and I had the sudden, irrelevant thought that I had never once seen it slip.

"A mercy," he said. "A true mercy, that you weren't hurt worse. These country roads. One says every year they'll kill someone." He shook his head. "Will they write the car off? A shame. And if the insurers make any difficulty, Julien, I'd be glad to help. It's rather my trade. Dispute and delay. I know all their little tricks."

"That's kind," Julien said.

"Not at all. We're family, after all. In a manner of speaking."

I watched his hands. I couldn't have said why. They were smooth and unremarkable and still, folded loosely in front of him. Then I looked at Camille, who was sitting on the edge of the visitor's chair with the freesias crushed in her lap, and I saw that she wasn't looking at Julien at all. She was looking at Théo, with an expression so naked and so frightened that I felt it in my stomach.

It lasted perhaps a second. Then she lowered her eyes to the flowers and the expression was gone, and Théo turned and smiled at me with perfect warmth.

Bad luck, the gendarme had said.

That night, in the corridor outside Julien's room, I wrote the word down in my head. Next to it, for no reason I could have defended, I wrote Théo's name, and then I crossed it out, because it was absurd.

It stayed crossed out for about an hour.