The Age of Chalk

- For Linda C.

She came to the garden at Wargemont in her widow's weeds, as she always did, holding her small boy by the hand. It was mid-morning, and the sun's rays caressed the orange walls of the château and the garden, but the edge of the lawn, where the woman and the boy stood, remained in shadow.

"Where is she, Maman?, asked the boy whose name was Alain.

The woman smiled very slightly and shook her head, her long sad eyes fixed on the rose arbour at the back of the château, blocking the view onto the windows of the sitting room where she and her sisters used to play. She thought that she saw a movement behind the bank of lilies next to the arbour and she waited.

A girl with shoulder-length ginger hair emerged from the flowers. She wore a black dress and white apron, and a straw hat protected her head. She emerged silently, looking in the woman's direction but paying no attention to the boy. There was a shout and laughter from the far end of the garden. The woman could make out a handsome, bearded man in his middle years carrying another child on his back; but they soon disappeared behind the orange walls of the splendid château.

"Bonjour, Lucie", she said softly. She knew that Alain would have been astonished. But he could not see the girl or her bearded father; they were there only for her.

The little girl came to the edge of the garden and regarded the woman with the same long sad eyes as her own. She looked so solemn, the woman thought. She had no reason to be sad. Not yet. It was simply her nature to be solemn and pensive.

"Bonjour, Madame." She pronounced the greeting with gravity and respect. Her expression was exactly as Papa's friend, Monsieur Renoir, had painted it. He had painted Lucie many times, but most famously in a white apron just like this one.

"Go and play with Papa, Lucie. There isn't much time."

Lucie watched the girl disappear behind the flowers of her eternal summer, when Papa was still alive and they lived all together in the château with its orange-painted wall facing the arbours in the sunny garden.

The year that Papa died, she had married her David. Then came the birth of her eldest, André, and then little Alain. And the Somme killed David. She had been allowed to reclaim his ruined body and she kept the simple cross that marked the place where they first buried him. That ended everything for her. She had taken a little house near Wargemont so that she could walk to the château and visit the garden whenever the sun shone to remind her that happiness might still be found in looking at the rose arbour concealing the windows and in waiting for her memories to emerge from the lilies.

"Sois joyeuse," she whispered and turned away before Alain could ask about the mysterious little creature who was never there when they came to visit her.

On days when the sky was full of billowing clouds tinged with gray, she and Alain visited the beach and the chalk cliffs. They watched the gulls riding the wind, suspended in the salty air before they descended to their nests in the white stone. Not really stone, as she explained to Alain, for the cliffs were made from ancient shells and bones and the transparent souls of the creatures that had died in the sea long ago. Lucie would peer out beyond the cliffs with Alain by her side. The ancient sea churned blindly upon the bones of the dead, below. Its churning was white-haired. Its labour was endless. Its sighs filled her ears and silence marked the tempo.

When André came home from school in Paris, he too spent hours alone on the cliffs. Lucie didn't ask him what he thought about; she knew it was about his father. In the epic of his memory, he was the son of a dead hero and a woman made chaste by impenetrable grief. The cliffs were the walls of lamented Troy, the gulls spoke to him, and the pulsing sea was his only comfort. The sea promised him life with dark eyes and moist lips speaking in a foreign tongue.

"Astyanax!", cried the gull riding the wind, calling him by his true name.

Standing by the edge with his eyes closed, he felt the ineffable urge to plunge from the white walls into the white and black sea. Under the signature of his imagined trajectory, he saw dark eyes emerging from the spume of the waves. Her liquid breasts covered his wet cheeks. He made her foreign tongue his own. The son of Hector rose dripping from the sea's embrace and strode onto the cobble shore with his dark maid. The walls of Troy stood before him, a block in the abyss of sky, green above and white below. Between the sea and the walls he found a tide pool and a bed of sea wrack made for the bridegroom.