“Add a cupful of white wine and the parboiled, floury potatoes. Add cooking scraps-bacon rind, leftover meat or fish-and a tablespoon of oil. Cook on a very low heat for ten minutes without stirring or lifting the lid.”

I could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen. She had a monotonous, rather grating voice, which rose and fell at intervals.

“Add the raw unsoaked millet-hnn hnnn-and turn off the heat. Leave covered for-hnnn hnnn-ten minutes without stirring or-hnnnn-until the juices have been absorbed. Press into a shallow dish-hnn hnn hnnn-brush with oil and bake until crisp.”

With a keen eye to what was happening in the kitchen, I put the orange bag under the heating pipes for the last time.

I waited.

For a time I was sure it wasn’t going to work. Mother stayed in the kitchen, humming to herself in that tuneless dogged way. As well as the pavé there was also a cake black with berries and bowls of green salad and tomatoes. Almost a celebration dinner, though what we had to celebrate I couldn’t guess. Mother was like that sometimes; on good days there would be a feast, and on bad we would make do with cold pancakes and a smear of rillettes. Today she seemed almost fey, hair falling from its usually severe scraped-back style into casual tendrils, face moist and pink with the heat of the fire. There was a feverish quality about her, in the way she spoke to us, the quick breathless hug she gave Reine as she came in-a rarity almost as unusual as her brief episodes of violence-the tone in her voice, the way her hands moved in the basin, on the chopping board, with quick nervous flutterings of the fingers.

Out of pills.

A crease between her eyes, creases around her mouth, her strained, effortful smile. She looked at me as I handed her the anchovies and gave a smile of peculiar sweetness, a smile that a month ago, a day ago, might almost have softened my heart.

“Boise.”

I thought of Tomas sitting by the riverbank. I thought of the thing that I had seen, the oil-slick, monstrous beauty of its flank against the water. I wish. I wish. He’d be there tonight, I told myself, at La Mauvaise Réputation. Jacket slung casually across a chair back. I imagined myself, grown suddenly movie-star beautiful and refined, silk dress billowing out behind me, everyone staring. I wish. I wish. If I’d only had my rod…

My mother was staring at me with that expression of strange, almost embarrassing vulnerability.

“Boise?” she repeated. “Are you all right? Do you feel ill?”

I shook my head in silence. The wave of self-hatred that struck me was whiplash quick, a revelation. I wish…I wish…I made my face sullen. Tomas. Only you. Forever.

“I’ve got to check my traps,” I told her in my dead voice. “I won’t be long.”

“Boise!” I heard her call after me, but I ignored her. I ran to the river, checked each trap twice, certain that this time, this time, when I needed that wish…

All empty. I threw the small fry-bleaks, gudgeons, flat small-snouted eels-back into the river in sudden, searing rage.

“Where are you?” I screeched across the silent water. “Where are you, you sly old bitch?”

Below my feet the dim Loire flowed unmoved, brown and mocking. I wish. I wish. I picked up a stone from the bank and threw it as far as I could, wrenching my shoulder painfully.

“Where are you? Where are you hiding?” My voice sounded hoarse and shrill, like my mother’s. The air sizzled with my fury. “Come out and show yourself! Dare you! DARE YOU!”

Nothing. Nothing but the brown snaky river and the sandbanks lying half drowned in the failing light. My throat felt raw and scraped. Tears stung the corners of my eyes like wasps.

“I know you can hear me,” I said in a low voice. “I know you’re there.”

The river seemed to agree with me. I could hear the silky sounds of the water against the bank at my feet.

“I know you’re there,” I said again, almost caressingly. Everything seemed to be listening to me now, the trees with their turning leaves, the water, the burnt autumn grass.

“You know what I want, don’t you?” Again that voice, which sounded like someone else’s, that adult, seductive voice. “You know.”

I thought of Jeannette Gaudin then and the water snake, of the long brown bodies hanging up against the Standing Stones and the feeling I had had, earlier that summer a million years ago, the conviction.…It was an abomination. A monster. No one could make a pact with a monster.

I wish. I wish.

I wondered whether Jeannette had stood where I was now, barefoot and looking over the water. What did she wish for? A new dress? A doll to play with? Something else?

White cross. Beloved Daughter. Suddenly it didn’t seem such a terrible thing to be dead and beloved, a plaster angel at your head and silence…

I wish. I wish.

“I’d throw you back,” I whispered slyly. “You know I would.”

For a second I thought I saw something. Bristle black in the water, a shining silent something like a mine, all teeth and metal. But it was just my imagination.

“I would,” I repeated softly. “I’d throw you back.”

But if it had been there at all, it wasn’t now. Beside me a frog belched suddenly, absurdly. It was getting cold. I turned and went back across the fields the way I came, picking a few ears of corn to excuse my late arrival.

After a while I began to smell the pavé cooking, and I quickened my step.

3.

I‘ve lost her. I’m losing them all.

It’s there in my mother’s album opposite a recipe for blackberry cake, tiny migraine-letters in black ink, the lines crossed and recrossed as if even the code in which she writes is not enough to hide the fear she hides from us and from herself.

She looked at me today as if I wasn’t there. Wanted so hard to take her in my arms but she’s grown so much and I’m afraid of her eyes. Only R-C keeps a little softness but Fra doesn’t feel like my child any more. My mistake was thinking children were like trees. Prune them back and they’ll grow sweeter. Not true. Not true. When Y. died I made them grow up too fast. Didn’t want them to be children. Now they’re harder than me. Like animals. My fault. I made them that way. Oranges in the house again tonight, but no one smells them but me. My head aches. If only she could put her hand on my forehead. No more pills. The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come. Boise. Late home tonight. Like me, divided.

It sounds like gibberish, but her voice in my mind is suddenly very clear. It is sharp and plaintive, the voice of a woman hanging on to her sanity with every bit of her strength.

The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come.

Oh, Mother. If only I’d known.