The Comet Seekers: A Novel (27 page)

Every table is loud and laughing in the restaurant and there’s a queue out of the door. In this weather, what are they doing, go home – they laugh in the kitchen – but secretly they are enjoying themselves. All François can think about though is the heat and the noise and the smell and the heat, it’s impossible to think about anything else and that’s what he needed tonight; so it’s hardly surprising he doesn’t realise he’s being called from the door. He’s working, he can’t stop; everything is perfectly timed, stepping out would ruin it. But there’s that voice again.

François, it’s important.

He stops what he’s doing, looks up.

François!

His mama is standing in the restaurant kitchen, shouting to him.

The head chef glares at him – members of the public are not supposed to be back here, and besides, she looks a little crazy, her
hair and clothes drenched from the snow, a puddle of melted ice already forming on the floor.

I’ve had an idea, she’s smiling, I had to share it with you.

Mama – he never calls her mama, what does it mean that he’s calling her mama instead of Severine? – what are you talking about?

One of the ghosts, she begins.

The embarrassment hits him unexpectedly, a rush of blood to his face; everyone will hear this.

And then she’s talking to other people too, people who aren’t here; she’s looking over her shoulder, laughing at God knows what, arguing with an old man who isn’t there. This is the worst he’s ever seen it.

Severine.

There was a baby, she’s saying, and he was stolen, and I think I know what happened to him.

Mama.

She looks straight up at him.

He takes her by the arm.

There’s a quiet cafe, round the corner, he says. Come on. This way.

He wraps his coat around her shoulders, gently guides her out of the kitchen and towards the street, feels his back burning where every set of eyes are staring at her – and staring at him.

She lays out a family tree on the table, with little heaps of salt and pepper for people and toothpicks connecting the branches. He encourages her to drink some peppermint tea. It is quiet here, at least; that is a relief.

Do you see? she says.

He looks at the mess on the table, remembers a night when he was a boy, when she dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night and said they were running away to Paris.

Severine, he says, taking her hand, Mama, I think there’s something wrong. I . . . I think we should talk to a doctor.

You’re not listening to me. Brigitte, she had a child.

There is no Brigitte. She doesn’t exist, Mama, this is nonsense.

It is
not
nonsense.

And her face is different; an expression of stubbornness he remembers from when he was a boy.

He runs his hand through his hair, tries to find the words to make her see the reality.

But just as suddenly she is back, as he knows her. I’m sorry, she says. I interrupted your evening – as if she’s only just realised he was at work – you should go back to the restaurant, she smiles. I’ll get the next train home. Back to Bayeux.

As she stands up, she stumbles against the table and the family tree scatters, black and white salt and pepper falling to the floor like ash.

Then she stops in mid-stride, turns back for a minute with sadness in her eyes.

You missed Sunday lunch, she says. You were missed at Sunday lunch.

François desperately wants to say he’s sorry. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, he’d just wanted to avoid a scene – this one, in fact – until he’d worked out how to deal with it. But then she changes again; never mind, she says, never mind, everyone else was there, and she turns and walks towards the door.

François reaches for a serviette, starts to clean up the mess then stops and rests his head in his hands. Looking up he sees Severine open the door, step outside, and rush off down the street without looking back.

He walks home that evening through the melting streets of Paris – snow turning to slush, sheets of ice into puddles – and
tries to let the changing beauty of his city distract him from his thoughts. There is a comet in the sky, but tonight he will not stand outside in wonder.

They hadn’t teased him when he got back to the kitchen, though he was expecting it; they had been concerned. Chefs are usually more raucous than that – all rough language and rough skin. That’s how you know when something is really wrong, he thinks to himself, when people who usually prefer to goad offer kindness.

He doesn’t know what is happening to his mama.

Later, Severine sits straight up in bed and puts the light on, even though Brigitte hates it.

I’ve had an idea, she says.

An idea about what?

What happened to your son.

There is a pause before Brigitte replies.

He is alive?

He died five hundred years ago. But he might have lived beyond that night, I think.

Brigitte is still, her face lit by the moonlight.

Great-Grandpa Paul-François begins, describing their arrival at the old chapel in Bayeux, sixty years ago. How they went to the archives, down in the baptistery, found records barely legible in faded ink and misspelled scribbles.

I was the one who spotted it, chimes in her granny. There was a second marriage, to Elyn Enynimolan, 1459.

Brigitte’s skin is flickering now like the embers of a fire, threatening to catch light, hissing in the breeze that shouldn’t be there – you told me that before, she says.

They did, says Severine. But did you know Elyn had a son?

Severine braces herself for the rush of flame and anger that accompanies Brigitte’s jealousy, but this time it doesn’t come. Brigitte is staring at her, waiting.

There is no birth record for her son, Severine continues. And there’s no other mention of Elyn Enynimolan here. But I looked up the name, and it’s Irish – not French.

So what?

In Ireland they’ve started putting all their church records online, says Severine, glancing at her granny. The others couldn’t travel to keep searching, but I didn’t need to. I found a mention of her, Elyn, in a parish register from the west. She’s down as Elyn Enynimolan
vidua
. She was a widow. And it says she had a son. Áed Enynimolan, born 1456.

Brigitte sits quietly for a moment, her hand outstretched to stop anyone else from speaking.

Her child was born before she was married?

Or it was never her child in the first place.

What did she do with my son?

Severine turns to face the ghost.

I’ve not been able to find out what happened to him yet. But I’ve thought about it, and my guess is that he stayed in Ireland. Elyn was his mother, as far as he knew, so Ireland would have become his home.

Brigitte lets the information sink in.

But we still don’t really know what happened, she says.

We think he survived.

Brigitte is silent now. She had always hoped that, somehow, they would find her family – or her family would find her again. If only she had more time; another generation or two. Her silence is interrupted by the phone ringing, insistently, before going quiet again.

Oh, Severine, says Brigitte – and Severine looks up, expecting more questions about Ireland. Instead she says: What is going on with François?

Severine and her granny and Great-Grandpa Paul-François all look over to the phone that she has been ignoring since she got home from the restaurant.

He thinks I am mad, she says, laughing as if it is ridiculous, although the ghosts don’t laugh with her. And then she turns serious again. It is pushing us apart.

Her granny and her mother lock eyes, move closer to one another.

So, I’ll do what I have to do. I will keep him away from you, she says, and you away from him. Besides, the comet is fading – the ghosts look up to the sky, almost as if they had forgotten they needed to leave – so I’ll see you next time. And in the meantime, I’ll try to make things better with François.

And once they are gone, she thinks, she has to make things better with François, because soon he will be the only member of her family who is left.

THREE DAYS AFTER LIAM’S FUNERAL
Róisín boards a flight back to New York. Being at home was only making her feel worse so maybe she needs to be far away.

They have run out of wine on the plane. She swears. She is full of anger and it has nowhere else to go.

In the queue at passport control there is a family, a mother and a father, two children. The youngest is held in her mother’s arms, toddler tears from before she joined the queue still patterning her face. The other, a boy, sees her staring, tugs on his father’s sleeve, who puts a hand on his shoulder, pulls him forward to face straight
ahead. Róisín wraps her arms around her stomach. Her bag falls to the floor. She can’t stand up, she’s bent double, sobs shake her body. More strangers join the queue.

Róisín doesn’t want to look at the sky any more and she’s given up trying to understand the Earth. She imagines going back to that day when she first left home, when she saw the whole universe between two palms and imagined it would be beautiful. What crap.

She climbs up to the roof that night, to her terraced roof garden above her new apartment, but she doesn’t bother to scan the sky. She just wanted to get away from all the people crowding the streets; New York is all about the crowds, the people. She used to love that, but today it made her want to scream. She stays there all night, just sitting under the emptiness until, in the early hours of the morning, she gives a silent gasp, a dry retch, as something that was a part of her is torn away.

At coffee, the other postdocs and lecturers, students and professors all talk about galaxies, spectra, telescopes. She cannot care. She can hardly listen. What does it matter, that galaxy formation happened slower than we thought, or faster? How can she have spent her life looking at distant things too far away to hold?

We didn’t think you’d be back so soon, someone says.

She looks up, disorientated. Stares at his blue eyes, his pale green shirt; she has no words any more.

There is an arm placed around her shoulder, someone trying to take her hand on the arm of the chair. She is unaware of the tears cascading down her face.

Comet Lovejoy is nearly gone, visible only through a telescope. It survived its journey through the corona, but it’s not the same now as it was; its shape is distorted, its path irregular. This is a comet
that will fly to the outer reaches of the solar system and never find its way back. She can’t say that she blames it.

Standing in Dr Joshi’s office Róisín hands over a neat white envelope containing her resignation.

Why on earth? says her boss. He is a little offended.

I can’t find any answers in the sky.

That depends on your questions.

Yes.

Give it some time. I understand your cousin . . .

I’m sorry, she says. She needs to get out of here – she’s afraid she’s going to cry again.

OK. Although . . . well, if you’re sure?

A nod; she manages that. And:

Thank you.

Do you know where you’ll go?

I don’t know. Somewhere remote. Isolated. I . . .

There is no need to explain to this man, who will have employed a replacement within the week, that finally she understands the need to be alone. It took Liam’s death for her to understand his life.

I’m sorry. I just can’t be here right now, she says.

As she leaves the room she blinks and rubs, desperately, at her eyes. It makes no difference.

Beyond the buildings, which are ornate and magnificent, the sun is too bright to illuminate the world; it drowns it out. Róisín holds her hand up to her face, tries to shield her eyes but can’t. She needs darkness. She needs a wilderness away from people and light and hope, where the sky will get truly dark and her breath will freeze. She looks up, one more time, but she knows it is no use. There is nothing left in the sky and the ground beneath her feet is broken.

1957

Comet Arend–Roland

A brother and sister scamper around the house as their mother prepares dinner in the kitchen; frying aubergine in garlic olive oil and searing fish in butter, singing to herself, swinging her dress in time to the tune. Beside her, the ghost of her father chatters about the day she was born, reliving the story of the storm that cleared the air after a war, that left a piercing blue dawn to greet a wailing newborn into the world.

She is having so much fun she doesn’t hear the door open as her children take their games outside; they are boisterous, these youngsters, never do as they’re told – fearless of the world, as it should be. The sound of the traffic, still unfamiliar to her, doesn’t reach inside the house. No sounds make it into the kitchen until the scream and by then it is too late.

Aubergine burns to black in the minutes that follow, mirrored in black fabric and black skies in the days that follow that until, one morning, Antoine appears at his mother’s bed.

Why won’t she play with me any more? he says, talking about his sister, and his mother kneels by the bed and tries not to let her son see her tears.