Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [48]
London was full of wet gray air, and Françoise was amazed that it was still so bomb-damaged. Long lines of black brick houses were punctuated by areas of rubble, in which grubby children swarmed. Colorless and poor-looking people stood in queues outside dimly lit shops.
Her father tapped her arm and pointed.
“There, Françoise, look: Saint Paul’s Cathedral!”
But she was still looking back from the taxi window at a pair of houses propped up by great balks of wood. Their faces had been ripped off, exposing peeled wallpaper, bedroom fireplaces, the splayed blackened rib cages of floors under torn linoleum skins.
She was astonished, alarmed, by how foreign England was. The fact that she spoke its language was — it seemed to her — no more than a weird coincidence.
Grandpa Edmund had sent a car to collect them from the railway station in Norwich. The driver was a red-faced young man with receding hair. Neither Françoise nor her mother could understand a word he said.
When the car emerged from the city, Norfolk was in its autumn beauty. Fields rolled away toward woods and hedges the colors of spices: cinnamon, ginger, paprika. A tractor towed a plow and a snow flurry of seagulls. The sky was immense.
Her father pointed out items of interest: “A windmill, Françoise; see?” A black-and-white wooden building, like a giant cuckoo clock with four overgrown hands.
They passed through a village where a humpbacked bridge gave them a view of sailing boats and a tract of glittering water.
“The Norfolk Broads,” her father announced.
Her mother laughed incredulously. “Broads, Gerard? Did you say broads?”
“I did,” he said, turning in his seat to look at her, grinning. In American parlance it was a vulgar term for women.
A little later, he pointed again, his finger just under the driver’s nose. “You see that church, Nicole? That’s where I was christened.”
Its great gargoyled tower dwarfed the brick and flint cottages clustered around it.
Françoise had been to Norfolk once before, as an infant. She had no memory of it. Now she was baffled that things that were small by Montreal standards should look so big. It was hard to make sense of scale. Of anything. She was Alice in Wonderland. She had been removed from the story of her life and plopped into a different story altogether, a story in which words wandered around the dictionary, and everything was old-fashioned. No, ancient. Like in a book where witchcraft and stuff like that was real. The huge chestnut trees that lined the avenue to the manor, for instance, with their swirled crusty bark and their branches that were all gnarled elbows and knuckles. What might they do in the night? What might emerge from their darkness?
What emerged now was the house, and when Françoise saw it, she leaned forward between the front seats of the car and said, “Wow!”
Grandpa Edmund was not (as she had feared) a croaking yellowing thing on a shadowed deathbed, with a heart fumbling for its next beat. He was, first, a voice calling greetings from the terrace above them. Then he was a white-haired, leathery-faced, black-waistcoated man who wrapped his left arm around her while leaning on a walking stick. He smelled of horse and old apples, and the only thing really wrong with him was that he was laughing and crying at the same time.
She grew to love the place, despite the scowling furniture in her bedroom, the peculiar food served in heaps, the sad painting of her dead grandmother that hung over the parlor fireplace. When it finally dawned on her that she was not going home, she was not unhappy.
She learned to ride the bicycle that Edmund had bought her, even though Nicole lamented the scabs on her daughter’s knees. And on a glittering morning in late October, her grandfather led her out into the courtyard to where Magnus, one of his great shire horses, stood waiting, its dappled coat like the shadows on the moon.
Peter, the groom, was the man who had driven them from Norwich; he looked more self-assured holding Magnus’s bridle than he had with his hands on the steering wheel of