Mazarine Read online

  ‘Grimshaw’s vivid description … are a joy.’

  — Times Literary Supplement

  From award-winning author Charlotte Grimshaw, this is a beautifully evocative, sensual portrayal of a woman’s search for freedom and love.

  When her daughter vanishes during a heatwave in Europe, writer Frances Sinclair embarks on a hunt that takes her across continents and into her own past. What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine? Following the narrative thread left by her daughter, she travels through cities touched by terrorism and surveillance, where ways of relating are subtly changed, and a Startling new fiction seems to be constructing itself.

  ‘She is a master with mystery, very contemporary and astute. Her language is relaxed, spare and perfect.’

  — Jane Campion, The Guardian

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About the author

  Previous titles

  Praise for previous titles

  Follow Penguin Random House

  For Paul, Conrad, Madeleine, Leo

  Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

  E.L. Doctorow

  ONE

  I hadn’t heard from Maya for two and a half weeks.

  She wasn’t answering her phone or posting online, and when I rang the London office of the publisher where she worked, I was told she’d taken some leave. I thought the tone of the call was strange; the woman cut me off, although I could have been imagining it. I asked to speak to Gene Jacobs, but she said he’d left to work for another company.

  None of Maya’s Auckland friends knew where she was, and I didn’t have any contacts for her in London.

  It was unusual. My girl had always kept in touch.

  Her boyfriend wasn’t answering phone calls or texts either. I debated with myself, hesitated. At what point should I start to worry, make proper inquiries? What would a ‘proper inquiry’ be?

  I’d sent an email to Gene Jacobs, asking if he had any news, but he hadn’t replied, and I couldn’t find a new email address for him, nor any information online about where he was working now.

  An easterly storm had blown in from the Pacific islands, and the dog and I were making our way around the edge of the park in driving rain and wind. Purple lightning flashed over the bay and the air was rich with the estuarine stink of mud and mangroves. The dog waded out over the flooded playing fields and I entered a winding section of the path where the overhanging trees made a sheltering tunnel.

  I walked around a corner and Nick was standing against the bushes, his hands jammed in the pockets of his soaked anorak. He was wearing shorts and running shoes.

  We faced each other. It was a shock.

  ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Going for a run.’

  Oh, come on. He was a long way from home, and it was a monster storm.

  He took note of my surprise and went into a little performance of running on the spot.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ he said.

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  The dog, Bernie, burst out of the bushes, wagging his tail, his coat plastered with mud, and I watched as my ex and his ex-dog went through their old rituals of greeting. Out on the mudflat the rain was falling in metallic curtains and the sky was black. Seagulls flew up off the mud, strikingly white against the clouds.

  Bernie jumped up and put his big paws on Nick’s chest. Nick pushed the dog down, eyed me and said, ‘Anyway, how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Silence.

  ‘How’s Maya? All going well?’

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  Another silence. He seemed to be waiting, and I waited too, stolid, sodden, mute, while above us the seagulls let out their harsh, melancholy cries.

  ‘Well. Okay. See you round.’

  I fiddled with the dog’s leash. A needle of regret almost made me speak, but Nick turned, with an ironic wave, and jogged on.

  For a while I loitered, watching the rain spike in the puddles. I felt sorrow at the fleeting, unsatisfactory encounter, our first meeting in months, also vindictive pleasure that the dog hadn’t rushed after him but had stayed loyally at my side.

  Why was he running in my park when he lived far away, on the other side of the city? What was I supposed to have remembered? I slashed at the wet undergrowth with my stick, irritated that he’d ruined my solitary pleasure in the storm and the green wet world.

  The dog and I resumed our walk. Our route through the mangroves was flooded, and as we waded two eels swam across the path in front of us.

  I could have told Nick about Maya, unburdened myself, asked his advice — but it wasn’t his business. Maya and I could look after ourselves.

  The way he’d asked after her so casually, a calculating look on his face. Just a polite inquiry, how are you and yours?

  The encounter had heightened my sense of wrongness, and by the time I got home I was even more preoccupied about Maya than I’d been before.

  TWO

  Scent triggers memories; this, apparently, is because of our brain anatomy. Smell is processed by the olfactory bulb, which is directly connected to areas in the brain that produce memory and emotion. Sight, sound and touch sensations do not pass through this part of the brain. We all know smells are evocative, the Proustian way they take you back. It’s why the waft of dog shit reminds me of the French Riviera. When my dog does his business, he conjures up the Côte d’Azur.

  When I was a child my family took a special trip to Menton, in the South of France, a small coastal town so beautiful I was entranced from the moment we arrived. At one end of the town was the border with Italy, at the other the coast road to Monte Carlo. Every morning before the family rose and headed for the beach, my brother and I left the hotel, a green-shuttered building pockmarked with World War Two bullet holes, and went to play in the olive grove. Up the alley, under the railway bridge and into the grove, picking our way gingerly through the merde de chien. Frequently, as we skidded in later, our mother Inez would pause, sniff, hold up a hand and ask, ‘Has somebody stood in something?’

  The citizens of Menton loved their dogs, and the streets were paved with shit. No one thought to pick it up; it simply lay and baked in the hot sun, giving off the olfactory data that sent and went on sending, over decades, its paradoxical, nostalgic message of loveliness: palm trees, the olive grove, the marina, the town backed by grey mountains, the hard, bright enamel sky.

  In the narrow, shaded streets of the old town the canine waft mingled with the scent of ancient drains; down at the marina it hung in the air along with sea salt and the fumes of exotic Monégasque cars, the details of which my brother, an enthusiast, noted down in an exercise book: Lamborghini, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Bugatti.

  This I remember: a five-year-old can be an admirer of beauty. I wasn’t interested in pretty dresses or dolls. But I admired scenery: atmosphere, sky, weather. I experienced the physical beauty of Menton so intensely — the Mediterranean light, the landscape, the sea — that
it brought me powerful flashes of joy. I recall being moved to euphoria at the train station one summer morning; the scene was so beautiful that nothing else mattered, and I felt — it seemed perfectly logical — that I could simply fall in front of the train.

  I remember: standing alone outside Les Jardins Biovès one afternoon, hearing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy coming from an open window. Squatting on the rocks, squinting into the green depths of the swirling sea below the breakwater. The hot, vivid colours of the fruit and vegetable market. The drunken butterflies. Deep shadow, brilliant sunshine on the path that wound up above the town, past the Stations of the Cross, to the nunnery. The olive grove in a summer thunderstorm, the sky swelling, astonishingly black, the leaves with their glossy sheen, black branches glistening in the aquarium light. A tiny white dog tethered to a park bench, barking insanely at the lightning.

  The dogs of Menton. They were everywhere, coiffed, groomed, indulged, allowed into cafés and shops, beautiful lively dogs, prolific sniffers and barkers, they strolled through the market, delivering one another a gruff ça va, cheek to arse cheek.

  But in Gorbio, an ancient village in the mountains, I encountered a horror: a low, lean, slinking mutt with an appalling growth dangling from its stomach. For a long time after that I blanked all dogs, for fear of seeing such a terrible sight again.

  My memories of Menton are vivid; you only have to mention the place and I’m swamped with images. Yet I have only a sketchy recall of the person we went there specially to meet. I remember some of the encounter, but the details, and especially the faces, are lost to me.

  After Nick and I separated, I spent months drifting about in a kind of languid daze, and when Maya and her boyfriend left for London, I started writing again. I’d had a series of short stories printed in magazines and quarterlies, and had found a publisher willing to put together a collection. Now I’d got an idea for a first novel about lost connections — this because of my own particular difficulties, the troubles I’d had. I’d been thinking about my family, and that long-ago trip we took to Menton. My adoptive parents, my brother Frank, my elder sister Natasha: I wanted to understand them. I wonder, though, is seeking to understand people, to ‘know what makes them tick’ — is that in itself, potentially, a hostile act? Do families get along best when there’s a certain degree of turning a blind eye?

  My thoughts sifted through the years, played over childhood memories, and predictably perhaps, with Bernie sitting at my feet reeking of mud and mangrove, got mixed up with the idea of dogs, the chiens of Menton.

  Speaking of dogs, dogs and memory:

  My adoptive mother, Inez Sinclair, née Bravo, was always physically uncoordinated. She couldn’t tell left from right, was hopeless at sports and a poor driver, hesitant then suddenly impulsive. She usually drove at low speed, often in a state of high indignation. I remember, following one of her crashes, Inez wrenching open the car door and insisting that the other motorist had entrapped her in a wrong move.

  ‘You waved me on,’ she shouted.

  One day, when I was about seven years old, she ran over a small black dog that lived in our street. I was in the back seat, and recall the impact, a high-pitched bark that turned into a shriek, followed by an unpromising silence.

  Inez realised what she’d done and was immediately enraged. Instead of stopping to investigate, she jammed her foot on the accelerator, powering off up the road in low gear. Like so many incidents from childhood, and especially those that concern my adoptive parents, it seems a baffling mystery now. Why did she not stop and check whether the dog was dead, or horribly injured and in pain? Why not look for the owners, own up to the mistake, apologise? And why the fury?

  She seemed, if I recall correctly, to be angry that someone had allowed the dog to stray onto the road, causing her the stress and inconvenience (and perhaps the shame) of hitting it. Her habitual reflex was one of extreme defensiveness; she couldn’t stand to be accused, and didn’t have the confidence to admit she’d made even a small mistake. So she raged, and made off.

  Could the dog have survived? It seems unlikely; I never saw it again. Inez Bravo Sinclair. She was an estate agent, her smiling face appearing regularly on sale signs in the Auckland suburbs where, these days, I walked my dog. Property hadn’t been her first choice: she’d wanted to teach high school, but was prevented because she hadn’t finished a degree. Instead of going back to university, she called it an injustice, maintaining that she should have been allowed to teach without the qualification. She declared, ‘I could have got an education, but I was too lazy.’

  She was a prodigious reader, though, of fiction and the news, and listening to her you’d think she was not only highly educated but scornful of those who weren’t. She just felt that the formal bit of training hadn’t been necessary for her.

  Inez had an American accent, having grown up in Ann Arbor and arrived here in her late teens when her father, Old Bravo, who was an engineer, took a job on a dam-building project. She met my father in Auckland when she temped as a secretary in his legal practice, and they travelled together and lived in New York. During the time my father was working for the UN, he and Inez, having been told they couldn’t have any more children after Frank and Natasha, decided to adopt, and found their way to me.

  It was a few years ago that Inez stopped speaking to me. She had warm relations with my sister and brother, but I, the black sheep, had committed offences grave enough that all but the briefest verbal contact was banned. What these offences were, I didn’t clearly know. There was no end to the silent treatment; she didn’t seem to tire of it.

  Natasha, who hadn’t been excommunicated, tended to rebuke me and become quite loudly self-righteous when I pointed out, even mildly, that Inez did nothing in those days except freeze me off. It seemed I was committing a further sacrilege to acknowledge it. This was an odd extra feature of the silent treatment: its existence was denied. If I mentioned that she’d given me barely a frosty nod in years, the rest of the family hotly rose in her defence. I was accused of ‘madness’ and ‘paranoia’, and Inez herself was ‘hurt’, ‘shocked to the core’ and of course ‘completely baffled’.

  I was making it up, it seemed.

  But the next week, she would sail past me on the street as though I were a phantom, long dead — to her at least. There was something intimate in this: only she and I knew what she was doing. Paradoxically, it was an exclusive connection between us.

  In the same way, she used to say things to me, only me, that shocked me. Little secret asides. Once she picked up a photo of the infant Maya and asked, laughingly, ‘Who’s this hideous baby?’ Then covered her mouth. ‘Maya? Oh. Whoops.’ She inspected a picture of Patrick, slightly overweight in his bathers, and asked, wondering and wide-eyed, ‘Do you know this big fat chap?’ Child-like innocence was a favourite vantage point from which to launch all sorts of mischief. When my clever Maya went through an argumentative phase, Inez regretted to tell me (earnest, conscientious) that children who argued thus were not intelligent. Patrick (who was sharp as a tack) wasn’t intelligent either, Inez told me. (But never mind.) When Maya turned one, Inez remarked, as if relishing an old, dear memory, ‘It’s quite a power trip having a one-year-old child!’

  Could it be the case that, of everyone in the family, I was the one who got closest to Inez? Closest to seeing her? My sister, a music teacher, seemed to disapprove of discussing family dynamics, and there was something, what was it, obedient or not daring about Natasha; she’d never rebel or throw caution to the wind — well, she still had a good relationship with Inez to lose, after all. Poor Frank was wrapped up in his own problems, and Father, Justice Sinclair, now retired from the court, was only concerned with peacekeeping so he could go on doing what he wanted: his own thing.

  I don’t know which came first, Inez’s silence or my dawning understanding. When we operated on an assumption of goodwill and I was merely baffled by small cruelties and betrayals, while I still hoped and trusted that there
was love despite the turbulence, I remained blind and could therefore be allowed to stay close.

  But once the balance shifted, when I saw — perhaps this is it — when I suddenly perceived that there were layers beneath, that nothing about Inez was quite as it seemed, she immediately knew it. The very essence of our relationship was rearranged. Like two magnets whose charges had turned repulsive, we could never move close to each other again. Yes, magnets: think of that rubbery sensation, the invisible force pushing each apart.

  I suppose what I’m saying is I didn’t pursue her. I didn’t go after her asking, Mother, why hast thou, etcetera.

  Only once, after she’d blanked me in the street, I followed her into a café and shouted at her, or at least spoke loudly enough to cause embarrassment. I think I called her a ‘nutcase’. Impotent rage.

  She was sitting at a table writing in a notebook, as per her morning routine. For years, she’d kept diaries. Inez’s little black books: I’d never read one, and could only imagine the bad press I’d received. Do I sound bitter? Well, I know. It’s just that I foresaw pages and pages of solipsism and self-justifying madness …

  A café half-full of people, yellow winter sunlight falling across the floor, the genial tattooed barista at his machine. Two women, each with a baby on her hip, paused their conversation and turned as I clawed my way past them and raged at Inez, and she looked up at me, frozen, her pen clutched in her little paw, while I loudly stuttered out a year’s worth of hurt feelings. I repeated it, that my own mother should have turned on me, and done it then, when I was in the middle of relationship difficulties. Nick and I were on the brink of splitting, I was feeling especially vulnerable, and now she had started cutting me dead.

  These days.

  The family jogged along. My sister was good-hearted, possibly slightly rivalrous in the natural way of a sibling, also perhaps subconsciously wanting to avoid exile herself. (Cross Inez at your peril!) She was genuinely sympathetic to Inez, who was, after all, renowned for being kind and good, honest and selfless — and defenceless, too. The Judge, irritated beyond measure by family conflict, defended her along these lines; Inez, he said, was an open book. She, more than anyone he knew, was unable to tell a lie. If she said something tactless, it was because it had ‘just popped out’. She was so honest it was almost a flaw …