Mazarine Read online

  ‘Perhaps. Or she could be in Berlin. Or Amsterdam. Or Brussels. Who knows.’ She crinkled her eyes.

  I was angry, stung, to have come so far, managed to find her, and then to be dismissed in this insulting way, her tone implying that my concern was irrational and I was simply pestering people for no good reason: her, our children.

  ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’ I stood up.

  She followed me down the hall.

  ‘Are you going back to Auckland?’

  ‘No. I’m going to find a motel in Hamilton.’

  ‘A motel? Why?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  She looked away. ‘So. You want to rescue your daughter from my son.’

  ‘Rescue? I want to find her. To speak to her. What do you mean? I have no objection to your son.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Your son is fine. I just want to speak to Maya.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ she repeated.

  I hesitated. ‘As far as I know, he’s perfectly fine. Nice. Isn’t he?’

  Her expression was closed, unfriendly.

  ‘What do you mean? Is there something wrong with him?’

  She smiled coldly. ‘Wrong? No. Maya is a beautiful girl,’ she added.

  ‘Thanks for all your help,’ I said, sarcastic.

  ‘Here.’ She handed me a business card. ‘So you can call me next time.’ Meaning: so you don’t need to come here and bother me.

  ‘Cheers.’ I walked away.

  At a motor lodge on the strip heading into Hamilton, I managed to get the keys to a room even though it was so early, a unit at ground level where I could park the car right outside the door, making it easier to smuggle in the dog without the receptionist catching me: pets were not allowed.

  Before I checked in I bought supplies, teabags, milk, bread, ham, and with my last strength I walked the dog in a local park, even throwing the tennis ball for him.

  I couldn’t get warm. In the motel unit, I had a long hot shower, and got into bed. Still my bones ached and I felt chilled. It seemed important that I make a plan, but tiredness overcame me. I took paracetamol, slept heavily for a long stretch, woke and wondered what to do.

  My encounter with Mazarine had been embarrassing, humiliating even, especially since I’d felt unable to explain why I hadn’t found her contact details and phoned, instead of turning up on her doorstep. Her air of toughness and pragmatism had made me feel like a flake and a drama queen; well, no doubt I was. On the other hand, what else could I have done but leave, after Nick had broken in and physically attacked me? Trying to picture Mazarine’s face, I thought how much I’d disliked her, how cold and unwelcoming she’d been.

  Surely it was reasonable for me to want to talk to my daughter, make sure she was safe. She’d said she was ‘leaving’ Istanbul. Did that mean she’d soon be back in London?

  This should be, I thought, the kind of crisis that leads to change. To take stock: after Nick, I’d ended up living in a rented house that didn’t feel like home, I was lonely, reliant on pets for company, and increasingly alienated from my extended family, the rupture with them having come about, ironically, as a result of my attempts to discover why I was so solitary, and why I’d failed to acquire women friends or any kind of structure (club, society, regular job) that would cushion me when things went wrong.

  I’d lost family support, if you could call it that when it depended on conforming to my designated role. Since the beginning of Inez’s silent treatment, I’d increasingly caused upset by questioning. Natasha shouted at me when I said that if I was crazy, Frank was even crazier. In my view, our brother was undeniably lovely, but had so many problems he’d need years of psychotherapy to untangle them. This contradicted the official line that he was fine, and that any minor issues he might have had been foisted on him ‘somehow’ by his wife, Aurora.

  Once I asked him experimentally, ‘Do you ever wonder why we’re so fucked up?’ I’d had a few too many glasses of wine, and got carried away with the idea that he and I could help each other. His reply was eerie. ‘But we’re not fucked up at all, Frankie,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  I started to daydream about a new move. I still had money I’d earned from writing screenplays, maybe enough to buy a house or an apartment, one that would really feel like a home. The current rental had always felt temporary; now that Nick had broken into it, I never wanted to live there again. This brought me back to my situation, and a longing for Maya so strong that I got out of bed and started pacing, causing the dog to jump up and bark. I shushed him, hoping no one had heard through the concrete walls.

  In the late afternoon, I considered driving into town and buying food from a takeaway bar, an unappealing prospect, but I needed to walk the dog before night, so I gathered my jacket and bag and led him out to the forecourt. The ranch slider of the office swished open just as I shut the car door, but the woman who emerged didn’t notice the dog, only glanced at me briefly and walked away towards the gate, where a neon cowboy spelled out the word Vacancy with his rope lasso.

  The air was cold, with a real edge to the wind. I threw the ball for the dog, thinking about Joe’s mother, replaying our encounter. How unsatisfactory it had been. I was so angry at the way she’d dismissed me that I’d rushed off, leaving unfinished business. For one thing, she’d seemed to convey some doubt or reservation about Joe. (Or had she? I couldn’t exactly recall.)

  I decided to go back and talk to her again.

  SEVEN

  There were no lights on in Mazarine’s house, and all was silent when I put my finger on the bell, pressing it, in my nervousness, longer than was polite.

  I waited in the car, checking my phone for messages, replying to a couple of emails. I searched for Maya online, checking her Facebook page, which had comprehensive privacy settings and revealed nothing. I regretted I wasn’t one of her Facebook ‘friends’, but I’d had no interest in Facebook and had felt that asking to ‘friend’ my daughter would be intrusive; in fact I’d always prided myself on giving Maya her privacy, and had been surprised when parents of her peers told me how they regularly searched through their kids’ phones, insisted on being their Facebook buddies, spied on them, an approach I’d thought would lead to a lack of goodwill and trust.

  One mother had told me, ‘You have to know where they are and who they’re with at all times.’

  Surely if your child was reasonably well adjusted and secure, such rigid surveillance wasn’t necessary, but perhaps I’d been lax, and it had seemed to Maya that I didn’t care.

  After half an hour, a battered Ford SUV pulled in next to the Don Quixote letterbox, and Mazarine Libard got out.

  She was carrying a cardboard box along with her bag and some supermarket shopping. If she was alarmed to see me, she showed no sign, only gave me a stony look.

  ‘Need a hand?’ I gestured at the box.

  ‘No thanks. Fine.’

  I followed her to the front door, where she lowered the box, which was evidently heavy. She straightened, with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and unlocked the door.

  ‘I could take one end.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She pushed open the door and we manoeuvred inside, both managing to trip over the dog. The leash caught one of the shopping bags, sending it onto the floor, the sound of glass breaking inside.

  Mazarine gave me a look of exasperation. She picked up the bag, extracted a cracked jam jar, dropped it into a bin and said, ‘I googled you. I’m afraid I haven’t read your book. I don’t read much local fiction.’

  I waved my hand; it didn’t matter.

  Her eyes stayed on me. ‘You do look like Maya.’

  I hesitated. ‘Did you think I might not be who I said I was?’

  ‘No, it’s perfectly normal to drive hundreds of miles to speak to someone in person. At dawn.’

  I smiled weakly.

  She washed her hands at the sink. ‘I’m going to cook.
Would you like something to eat?’

  After she’d changed into jeans and a shirt, I sat in the kitchen and watched her prepare pasta and a salad. She refused offers of help. ‘It’s not complicated,’ she said.

  We sat at the wooden table, the round-faced cat watching us from the top of the fridge. At first we ate in silence, which I found embarrassing, although it didn’t seem to bother her. I plunged in.

  ‘You’re a lawyer, so maybe I should explain.’ I pushed my chair back slightly, and found that I was blushing. ‘It’s rather awkward.’

  She gave me a shrewd, assessing look. ‘In my job, I hear it all. Nothing can shock me.’

  ‘I mean, explain why I turned up here, instead of calling you or emailing.’

  ‘You didn’t have my contact details,’ she said, deadpan.

  ‘No, but I decided to come here on the spur of the moment. The thing is …’ I stopped. I’d been going to say I’d had nowhere else to go. ‘I had a domestic issue. My ex-partner got into my house, in fact broke in, effectively. I don’t know how he did it. I lock everything and he doesn’t have a key. He wouldn’t tell me why he’d got in, and then he assaulted me. Not seriously, but enough for it to be upsetting.’

  She steepled her fingers. ‘Were you injured?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  My blush deepened. ‘No, I realise I should have done that straight away.’

  ‘Sure. The best thing is to call the police and lay a complaint, then stay with a friend or family until you can see a lawyer, and apply for an order against him.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t. I just left.’

  There was a silence while she absorbed this with a sceptical frown, as though my account was incomplete, which of course it was.

  ‘So, did you come because you want legal advice? I have to tell you, I’m not a family lawyer. I can refer you.’

  ‘I thought you were a prison officer. I didn’t know you were a lawyer. I came because I’m worried about Maya.’

  She was still frowning.

  I went on. ‘The two things came together. I was worried about Maya, then Nick broke in and assaulted me, and I suppose I panicked a bit, I wanted to get away, to hole up in a motel out of town just to take stock, and when I was driving on the southern motorway I remembered that Maya and Joe had visited you, and I thought I’d come and ask you about Maya.’

  ‘Surprising you could locate me without my details,’ she said. ‘I don’t advertise my home address. I have some pretty challenging clients.’

  ‘I knew the area, roughly. I found the letterbox.’

  ‘Oh, that. Jasmine painted it.’

  ‘Jasmine?’

  ‘My ex-partner.’

  ‘It’s cute.’

  ‘Cute? Yes. I must throw it in the bin.’ She drummed her fingers on the table. ‘So, you’re on your way out of town and you decide to find me, and just like that, you do.’

  ‘It took a bit of effort.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you not believe me?’

  She shrugged, minutely.

  ‘Okay, to be honest I headed out of town because I had nowhere to go. No close friends I could call on.’

  ‘And no family?’

  ‘Yes, I do have family, elderly parents, siblings. We get on, but it’s complicated. I didn’t want to confide in them.’

  ‘Where are you going after this?’

  ‘Back to the motel.’

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re in a bit of a crisis.’

  I pressed the water glass to my burning cheek. ‘It’s fine. I just have to decide what to do.’

  We looked at each other, and I noticed she had a tiny flaw, a fleck of glossy blackness, in the blue-grey of her right eye.

  ‘Before he got into my house my ex, Nick, turned up in my local park, which is miles from where he lives. I ran into him there while I was walking the dog. He asked after Maya. And when I got home later, he was in her room.’

  She had straightened up, was listening with a professional air, her eyes on me. ‘Had you told him you were concerned about her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are they close?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t like him at all.’

  ‘What does he do, this Nick? Is he a journalist too?’

  ‘His thing is IT, computer security. He works for a company that advises banks on risk, also law firms, maybe government departments, I’m not sure.’

  ‘What do you think he was doing in Maya’s room?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s stuff belonging to Joe in there, by the way, clothes and books mostly, if you want any of it. They both left in such a hurry.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘My sons and their junk. I have enough of it here, thanks very much.’

  ‘How many other sons do you have?’

  ‘Just the one other. Mikail is older than Joe; he left home, oh, about five years ago. Their father lives in Paris. I had my kids young, before I finished my studies. You must have, too.’

  ‘What does he do, their father?’

  ‘My ex-husband is an academic; his field is linguistics. Emin is from Chechnya, although he’s a French citizen. I met him at Oxford. We came here to live briefly, but when we split up he went back to Paris and I kept the boys. He couldn’t stand it here.’

  ‘Chechnya. So, is he Muslim?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I didn’t know any of this.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘It seems wrong, that I’ve never met you until now, that I knew so little about Joe.’

  ‘Well, the kids change fast, you can’t keep track half the time, who they’re hooking up with. You know as much as Maya could be bothered to tell you, right?’

  ‘That Joe is Muslim …’

  She put down her fork and looked hard at me. ‘First of all, so what, Muslim or not? Second, he’s not.’

  ‘Not?’

  ‘Not religious. He’s like me. I’m non-Muslim and also an atheist.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘And, as you know, was married to a woman for ten years. Which was something Joe could happily accept.’

  ‘What about your other son?’

  ‘Mikail now considers himself Muslim first. He stopped using my surname and took my husband’s. Khasanov.’ She pronounced the name sourly.

  ‘Muslim first? Is he conservative then?’

  ‘Very, as I understand.’

  ‘So, he doesn’t approve of you?’

  ‘No, but that’s no surprise. I have a good relationship with my ex-husband, though — good, not close. He has a French wife, also an academic. They have kids together. Last time I saw Emin he’d just come back from Chechnya, which I thought was crazy.’

  ‘Why?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t know why he goes there. The place is run by thugs.’

  ‘Where are you from, by the way? Is Mazarine a French name?’

  ‘My family was originally from the Netherlands, although my mother now lives in Buenos Aires. Her second husband was Argentinian.’ She pursed her lips, lowered her eyes and added, ‘A Mazarine Blue is a kind of butterfly.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yes, Frances. In the family Lycaenidae.’

  Was she joking? Her expression was high-minded; clearly she enjoyed imparting information. There was a solemn, big-sisterly quality about her, an authoritativeness that I noted, perhaps because it was so unlike Inez, who asserted herself in an unconvincing fashion, all hammy façade and melodrama.

  She said, ‘Actually, Frances, the male of the species is deep blue, but the female Mazarine Blue is brown, which is a bit confusing!’

  A pause.

  ‘Can I ask, did you just come to it late, being gay? I mean, you had a husband, had kids, and then?’

  Her expression changed. ‘These things are not straightforward. I fell in love with a person.’

  ‘Who happened to be a woman.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  �
�I don’t know how that could work,’ I said without thinking.

  ‘It’s a real mystery,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Anyway, you said Joe has been in Paris? So, did the brothers meet up?’

  She hesitated. ‘Joe told me he and Maya visited his dad, and while they were in Paris they went to a few meetings of some protest movement or other. He rang me and said there were riots around la Place de la République, and a person he knew had been arrested.’

  ‘Not Maya?’

  ‘No. He would have said.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About three weeks ago. Joe told me Mikail had moved to Paris, that they’d met at their father’s apartment on previous visits. Mikail was living with his wife in Brussels before that.’ She named a district, Molenbeek.

  A memory stirred, I tried to recall old news reports. ‘Oh. Is that where some of the terrorists came from?’

  ‘That’s right. The New York Times calls it “the Islamic State of”.’ She made quote marks in the air with her fingers.

  ‘It’s a hotbed apparently.’ I tried to sound ironic.

  She glared. ‘There are thousands of young Muslim people living in Brussels and Paris—’

  ‘Who are not terrorists. Of course.’ I rubbed my eyes, looked away. ‘Only I’m worried about Maya.’

  ‘We all worry about our kids.’

  I shifted in my chair. ‘I’m not sure why you use that tone. Do you think it’s unreasonable of me to ask? It’s completely out of character for her not to make contact. And now she’s sent me an email that just seems wrong.’

  She raised a hand, made a quelling motion.

  ‘In fact, if she doesn’t email me again I think I should drive back to Auckland and ask the police for advice. I’ve been tiptoeing around, worrying about “privacy” and “not intruding”, and meanwhile who knows what’s going on? What if she’s in trouble?’

  She put her hand on my arm. ‘Okay. Don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t do what?’

  ‘Drive back to Auckland. Not now. You look exhausted. And don’t go to the police. At least not about the kids.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’

  I stared at her. ‘She’s my daughter. Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘And say what? There’s nothing to tell. She’s told you she’s in Istanbul. Look, Frances, I know Joe very well. And I know he’s very fond of Maya.’