After You Left

Chapter 6

The holiday arrived and with it a different version of the mansion.

The school run that had structured every morning since Ada arrived simply stopped. No black Laurent car pulling away from the gate at seven thirty. No Camille in her precise plaits descending the stairs at quarter past. The house woke up later, moved differently, occupied itself in ways Ada was still learning to read.

She felt the change most in the back corridor.

Oli was home.

Not theoretically home the way Alexandre was home — present in body, absent in everything else. Actually home. Moving through the house at hours Ada had not seen him before, his voice occasionally audible from the upper floors, the sound of the back door opening in the afternoons telling her without needing to look that he had gone to the garden.

She did not go to the garden.

She had her room, her mother’s bathroom, the kitchen at the permitted hours, the laundry room. She stayed inside these boundaries the way she had promised and she did not wander.

Three days into the holiday Sophie sent Ada to the laundry room.

It was the middle of the afternoon — the sky outside Ada’s window flat and white, the garden bare and still. Ada took the laundry bag and went out through the back door into the cold.

She heard him before she saw him.

The clean precise sound of a golf club connecting with a ball. Then silence. Then the same sound again. Ada kept her eyes ahead and walked at her usual pace toward the laundry room. She was almost at the door when —

“You walk like you are trying to disappear.”

Ada stopped. She turned around.

Oli was standing at the practice mat with the club resting against his shoulder, looking at her across the garden. Dark trousers, grey pullover, hair slightly dishevelled from the cold wind.

“I am going to the laundry room,” Ada said.

“I can see that,” he said. “I asked about the walking.”

“I walk the way I walk.”

“Head down,” he said. “Straight line. Like if you move fast enough nobody will notice you.”

“Perhaps I do not want to be noticed,” Ada said.

He looked at her for a moment. “How long have you been here?”

“Almost a month.”

“Almost a month,” he repeated. “How many times have we spoken?”

“This is the first time,” Ada said.

“It is,” he said. He transferred the club to his other hand. “You go to the public school. On the Route de l’Est.”

“Oui.”

“What do you like? In school.”

“Art,” Ada said.

He nodded slowly. “I thought so.”

Ada looked at him.

There was nothing playful in his expression.

He meant it. “Why?”

“I have seen you,” he said. “Sitting outside the staff entrance sometimes in the evening. You had a book — not a reading book. You were drawing in it.” A pause. “You did not see me.”

Ada looked at him. He said it simply — not to impress her, not to unsettle her. Simply as a fact he was offering. She was not sure what to do with the fact so she held onto the laundry bag strap and said nothing.

“What do you draw?” he asked.

“Things,” she said.

“What things?”

“Different things.”

He looked at her for a moment. “Go and do your laundry Ada.”

She went. She collected the laundry, folded it into the bag and gave herself exactly the time the task required. When she came back out he was at the practice mat again, his back to her. She crossed the garden at her usual pace.

“Bonne soirée,” she said as she passed. Good evening.

“Bonne soirée,” he said. He turn around and watched her disappear through the back door.

He adjusted his grip on the club.

Then stopped.

He had completely forgotten about the next shot.

Sophie was in the kitchen when Ada came through the back door.

She looked up from the counter. Looked at the laundry bag. Looked at Ada.

“The laundry took long,” Sophie said.

“There was a lot of it,” Ada said.

Sophie held her gaze for a moment then turned back to the counter. “Dinner in an hour. Go and read something.”

“It is the holiday Maman.”

“Go,” Sophie said.

Ada went.

The weekend brought Oli’s golf coach.

A compact energetic man named Thierry who had a voice that carried through walls and a passion for the correct grip that bordered on religious. Ada could hear him from her room on Saturday morning.

“Non non non Olivier — the left hand — we have discussed the left hand—”

She sat at her desk and worked on a drawing — the market on Place Colette from memory, the vendors at their tables, the light coming down between the buildings on a cold morning. She worked on it for two hours while Thierry’s voice rose and fell outside and told herself she was not listening for anything in particular.

At noon Thierry left. The garden went quiet.

Ada did not go to the window.

Camille found her in the kitchen two days later.

Ada was at the staff end of the counter finishing her breakfast when Camille came in wearing her pyjamas, her hair loose, her feet in slippers that were shaped like rabbits. She went to the refrigerator, poured herself a glass of juice and then turned and looked at Ada with open curiosity.

“What do you do all day?” Camille asked.

Ada looked up from her bowl. “I read. I draw sometimes.”

“Draw what?”

“Whatever interests me.”

“Can I see?”

“No,” Ada said.

Camille’s face scrunched slightly. “Why not?”

“Because it is mine,” Ada said simply.

Camille drank her juice and thought about this. “My brother has been going to the garden a lot,” she said. “He never used to do that when Thierry is not here.”

Ada said nothing.

“He started doing it this holiday,” Camille said. “It is weird.” She finished her juice and put the glass in the sink and shuffled out of the kitchen in her rabbit slippers.

Ada watched her go.

The observation had been completely innocent — a child noticing something strange about her brother and saying so out loud the way children do. But innocent or not it had landed and Ada felt it sitting in her chest long after Camille had gone.

Ada was coming down the staff corridor when she heard small quick footsteps behind her.

She turned. Camille was there in her pyjamas, her rabbit slippers on her feet.

“I told Maman you and Olivier talked in the garden,” Camille said. Bright and matter of fact.

Ada felt something drop in her stomach. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I saw you,” Camille said simply. “From my window. You were by the laundry room.” She shifted from one foot to the other in her rabbit slippers. “Maman likes to know what happens in the house. I always tell her.”

She turned and padded back down the corridor as though she had just said the most ordinary thing in the world.

Ada stood very still in the corridor. Her mind went straight to her mother — to Sophie in the kitchen, to four years of quiet careful work, to everything that sat on the edge of one word from Isabelle Laurent.

She turned and went straight to her mother. Ada stood in the corridor and looked at the closed door for a moment, hesitating. Then she knocked.

“Come in,” Sophie said.

Ada came in and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her mother at her desk with undefined expression on her face.

“We have a problem,” Ada said.

Sophie turned from her desk. She looked at her daughter’s face. She set her pen down.

“Tell me,” she said.