I ring the bell. Here you are. Shoulder-length hair. Bare feet. Shy smile. Clear gaze. ‘Hello, come in…’ you hold out a hand stiffly, like all English women who don’t kiss hello.
We go through the shadowy hall; to my right, I make out a kitchen. An abandoned cup. On the left, a sideboard, a few art books, a painting. I feel like a thief in an empty house. But I haven’t stolen anything yet, no photos or notebooks, no pieces of your soul.
Your office in the attic. A divan covered with a rough woven fabric. Wordlessly you point me to a chair ten feet away.
We talk and laugh in French, occasionally in English.
Off to one side, a stained drafting table. Some soft brushes. A few tubes of paint. Everything is immaculate. Give the walls your paintings that bear the mark of your knife.
When it’s time to leave, I say:
‘I like this adventure. Like a secret.’
We choose a date. Next time I’ll take notes. You smile:
‘You know, Christophe, I like disappearing. That’s how it is. I see people for a while, then I don’t see them. Maybe we’ll never see each other again.’
I think of your paintings: always the same graceful, anxious silhouette caught in black gouache. How many times have I wanted to take one of them with me as I was leaving? But I’m not as brave as you: I didn’t do it.
I can wait. I have the time and I have the choice,
I am even spoiled for choice.
Only chance can heed the call of my choice.
When it comes, by chance, it’s the absolute proof of my choice.
One day, it’s not the day. The door is open on the fifth floor. I cross the long living room. Sitting on the edge of the divan, legs splayed like a boy, you hold a record in your hand. We dive deep into words, guitars, dreams. I don’t say much. In front of us, the hi-fi, as it used to be, the old material world in black and yellow casing with its heavy remote control. The era of cassette tapes is not far off.
We listen to a song in silence, then two, then five. You bow your head, clasping your hands. I feel weak, my muscles ache. When the music ends, you say, ‘Well, Christophe, when shall we see each other again?’
The family safe was sealed forever by Godfrey, your father, who won gold at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. As for me, my role is clear. I’ll write, narrate, interpret, but as you know, Charlotte, the Knight never sets the Maiden free.
You’ve always written, like your mother. When she was fifteen she recorded her daily activities in purple ink in a pretty notebook. Today – but what is this never-ending today? – you want a book to exist and you want it to be your heart.
I stare into your grey eyes: only part of you is there. You are looking beyond me.
This is how secrets are made. Place yourself at the centre of the world and stare at us from behind those eyes.
You want to escape the history of film, which tells its own story anyway. You want childhood. The poetry of childhood. From our first meeting those words came to me.
I walk forwards, I walk backwards, one step behind the other. I walk backwards towards myself. Endlessly returning to the point of departure. The start of the beginning. The beginning of my life. Who I am.
I was born in my maternal grandparents’ home and spent the first months of my life there. A big Victorian manor house all brick and greenery, near Cambridge. They had given it a strangely romantic name: ‘Coupals’. The war was ending. My father came home on leave from Malta, kissed me and within a day had returned to the island, scanning the sea and the sand. The history of men.
I can see my mother approaching, radiant, in almond green tulle and taffeta, her makeup glowing. She loves fairy tales, kings and queens, dresses with trains, crystal tears. The feeling that all is good in the world.
She is dressed for a ball. Is she always this elegant?
It’s the early 1950s. My mother takes me in her arms, kisses me briefly as if there is no time, no lasting happiness, no promises for the girl who clings to her dress, searching for a way to be loved. And then she disappears into the night.
When you have a secret, you cherish it. You hold it close. The secret grows, never fades. Sometimes it slips out, a word, a look. And it becomes a memory.
I like looking at little girls. I listen to them, I look at their tangled hair, their innocent hands: I see my secret in their eyes.
My mother is the heroine of a romantic novel. Her carefree youth is mirrored in the happy pages of The Great Gatsby.
It’s spring and the party of the season is about to begin. Everything is satin and perfumed silk. A photographer catches the moment. Fitzgerald wasn’t dreaming. This side of Paradise is all too real. That long car drawn up beside the steps of an elegant mansion is not some relic from a distant past: it is my mother’s youth.
Alongside her sister, three years older, my mother lived the glamorous heyday of the 1920s. Both were pretty and pampered, young debutantes whose affections every eligible bachelor in Cambridge dreamed of winning at the ball. Before the carriages came and carried off their grace and delight and my childhood dreams…
My mother loved to laugh, to dance, to play. She was entrancing. She let life carry her along. She was a butterfly by day and a princess by night.
She was at the glittering heart of the social whirl. Naturally she never worked. There was no question or need of such a thing.
The Gurteens were not aristocrats but they were a prominent family. Highly respected weavers by trade, they still have their factories at Haverhill two centuries later. They started off making religious vestments, then moved on to army uniforms, and ended up dressing the whole town. Today, my cousin Christopher manages the factory, which is listed as a site of historical significance. Modern machinery has been installed in its workshops of glass and steel.
One day my mother’s brother William invites one of his friends home. They are both twenty. In a startling coup de foudre, my mother realises that the man standing there, a stiff figure in his military uniform, will be the love of her life. She is just twelve. The handsome athlete, a saturnine, distant young man, ill at ease with the world, is already training for the Olympics.
Godfrey Lionel Rampling’s entrance into her life is feverishly recorded by Isabel Ann Gurteen in her journal in flowery ink.
My father was six when his father was killed in battle in Basra, then under British mandate. It was 1915. Between heaven and hell. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates. His mother Gertrude was left a widow with three children. She was penniless but brave and tenacious. She remarried fairly quickly, but her new husband didn’t want to take on three children.
So they decided to keep the two youngest, Barbara and Kenneth. My father was sent to his maternal grandmother in her Victorian manor in the countryside. A radical, devastating separation. A reasoned act of abandonment. That’s how it was back then and you didn’t argue.
My great-grandmother was a severe woman. My father found himself not only orphaned but sent to boarding school. He was only seven.
Such, therefore, was the lonely childhood of the great Godfrey Rampling, colonel in the Royal Artillery. How many times did he see his family? He never said. He was impenetrable. And I never dared ask.