The Storyteller's Daughter Read online

  It wasn’t until I was about eight that I first felt something was wrong. On our first day back after the summer holidays, Mrs Partridge, in an attempt to get to know the class, had asked us to write a paragraph entitled ‘My Earliest Memory’. I knew how much everyone loved hearing about my life, so when it was my turn to share my work with the rest of Red Class I stood up, puffed my chest out, held my head up high, and read my paragraph with pride.

  ‘In my earliest memory I am very little and I am sitting on the kitchen floor at home and my mum is about to start chopping runner beans when they all leap up and run away. My mum says she knew she shouldn’t have bought runner beans and then she starts chasing them and they are running in circles round me and I am laughing. It was very funny.’

  I looked up from my book and smiled at Mrs Partridge, waiting for her to praise my work, but she didn’t look pleased at all. In fact she looked positively annoyed. To make matters worse the other children in the class were starting to laugh. Not their usual, gleeful giggles of entertainment, but scornful sniggers. Something seemed to have changed over the summer holiday between infant and junior school, my friends seemed to have grown up, and for the first time ever I experienced the humiliation of knowing my peers were not laughing with me, but at me.

  ‘Meg,’ said Mrs Partridge sternly, ‘that’s a very funny story but it’s not a memory, is it? All the other children have written something that actually happened to them.’

  I looked around me at my classmates faces contorted into sneers and sniggers. I heard Johnny Miller call me ‘dumb’, and Sophie Potter whisper that I was ‘a big fat liar’.

  ‘Why is she always telling fibs?’ Tracey Pratt whispered.

  I didn’t understand. Sophie and Tracey used to love listening to my childhood memories.

  I felt my cheeks burning but didn’t know what I had done wrong. I did remember the runner beans. I could still see them jogging in circles, puffing and panting as they did laps around me, and my mother chasing after them with a chopping knife and telling me to watch my head. I remembered that.

  Didn’t I?

  ‘Meg May,’ said Mrs Partridge, sharply, ‘you’re in the Juniors now, I hope this isn’t how you think a junior should behave. Now, go and sit in the corner and don’t rejoin Elm table until you can stop being silly!’

  And so I slunk off into the corner, confused and ashamed, hot tears burning my eyes.

  After that day I questioned everything. I knew beans couldn’t run, and people couldn’t float, so how was it that I remembered these things happening? Did I remember these things happening? Or was it like that time I found myself telling everyone how once, in nursery school, I had spun in circles so many times that I had thrown up on the play rug?

  ‘That didn’t happen to you, silly!’ squealed Jenny Bell. ‘That happened to me!’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ I screamed. ‘That was you! I don’t know why I said that!’

  At the time we had nearly wet ourselves laughing, but now, following my humiliation at the hands of Red Class, the incident seemed to take on new meaning. How had I thought that something that had happened to Jenny had actually happened to me? Was it because she had told me that story so many times that I had somehow put myself in her shoes? What if being encircled by frightened, puffing runner beans was not a memory at all? And if my memories had never really happened, then what had happened? Memory, it suddenly seemed, was subject to distortions and could not be trusted.

  ‘Well, I remember it happening,’ said my mother, defiantly, when I questioned her about it. ‘Those blasted things were fit as fiddles and just kept going and going. I distinctly remember that by the time I caught up with them I was too exhausted to cook them and we ended up having egg on toast for dinner instead.’

  ‘But beans don’t run,’ I persisted.

  ‘Huh! You try telling them that!’

  Suffice to say that by the age of eight I was confused. Could I trust my mother? Could I trust my own mind? Only one thing was for sure: never again would I humiliate myself by talking about things that might not be true. Even if there was only the tiniest chance that something might not be true I would hesitate before saying it. I would weigh everything up first, use every bit of knowledge and reasoning I had, and then try to come to a sensible conclusion. Only when I was one hundred percent sure that my views were logical and right would I give voice to them, and that way nobody could ever call me a liar again. And nobody would be able to laugh at me.

  In a fit of over-zealousness I threw out my dolls and packed away my story books in an attempt to rid my life of any make believe that might contaminate my mind. I pinched myself each time I daydreamed as a form of punishment. I listened to my mother’s stories with nothing more than polite detachment, and sat alone on the wall at break times watching my classmates with distain as they ran around pretending to be ponies and princesses. They didn’t understand the danger they were in, teetering on the edge of fantasy worlds that threatened to pull them in and drag them under, sapping them of any logic and making them laughing stocks.

  But I knew. I had seen the dark gulf between fiction and reality and there was no way I was going to be dragged down into the abyss.

  I had, without knowing it, already decided to become a scientist.

  Chapter 2

  One dark and magical evening, my parents’ eyes first met over a tray of croissants somewhere in the middle of Cambridge city centre.

  ‘I had been at the library,’ my mother always tells me, ‘studying for my English O-level exam. I should have been home hours ago, but I had completely lost myself in Wuthering Heights. The romance, the anguish, the tragedy, the undying love! Well, the next thing I knew an agitated librarian was turning out the lights and ordering me to leave, fretting that she was going to miss the start of University Challenge. When I emerged from the library, darkness had already fallen, and knowing that I would be in for a scolding when I arrived home, I jumped on my bicycle and started to pedal as fast as I could go.

  ‘As I was cycling alongside the river I noticed how brightly the moon hung in the sky that evening, and how the stars seemed to be winking at me one by one. I slowed down, mesmerised by the moonlight glistening on the water, illuminating the white swans that bobbed on the surface, their heads nestled beneath their folded wings. The air was still and the night was silent, the only sound the gentle grind of the gravel beneath my tyres. My skin tingled with anticipation. It felt like an evening for wizardry and wonders, ripe for magic and enchantment. I should have carried on along the river path towards home, but the bulrushes seemed to whisper to me, and the branches of a horse chestnut tree beckoned me towards the bridge. An owl hooted a warning, telling me to hurry home, but on the other side of the river a toad croaked an invitation to cross the bridge, and a single star flashed in the sky like a beacon luring me over to the other side.

  ‘Just then the most scrumptious scent overwhelmed my senses, making me so woozy that I nearly fell off my bicycle. Hot butterscotch, toasted almonds, spiced teacake, dark rum, treacle tart… I tried to keep my handlebars straight, but my bicycle was like a thing possessed, and started veering off towards the bridge. I tried to fight it, but the delicious scent was intoxicating, and before long I let go of my handle bars altogether, closed my eyes and found myself free-wheeling over the bridge and towards the city centre, where I came to a stop in front of a huge white tent in the market square.

  ‘I dropped my bicycle on the ground and watched the steady trickle of people emerging from side streets, making their way, trance-like, towards the tent, before disappearing inside. As if in a dream, I allowed the sweet, sugary scent to engulf me as I was carried across the market square, and swept in through an opening in the canvas.

  ‘Inside was a cacophony of lights, sounds and the most incredible smells. At one stall a man turned the handle of a gleaming silver machine, while a large woman with ruddy cheeks pulled out a long string of herby sausages. At another, a man flipped golden crêpes rig
ht up to the roof of the tent before watching them sail down through the air, landing perfectly in the base of his frying pan. His friend flambéed the crêpes so that great orange flames shot upwards with a loud whoosh and everybody gasped and clapped. At another stall, two women threw a large ball of glutinous dough between them, stretching it out, swinging it like a skipping rope and then plaiting it into a loaf before throwing it into the fiery pit of a clay oven.

  ‘As I pushed my way through the crowd I noticed the banner that hung from one side of tent to the other: Célébration de la Gastronomie Française! I had no idea what it meant, but I really didn’t care. I was still following my nose, heading towards the source of the delicious sweet scent that had drawn me inside.

  ‘A squawking chicken brushed my head as it flew past me, closely followed by a fat man with a meat cleaver shouting something in French. A woman with a basket of baguettes bumped into me, muttering ‘pardon, pardon,’ as she jostled through the crowd. Someone tried to press a piece of cheese into my mouth and shouted ‘taste, Mademoiselle, taste!’ But I didn’t notice any of it. Through a parting in the crowd I had spied the source of that intoxicating scent.

  ‘He was handsome, with dark hair and fire in his eyes. They were, of course, reflecting the flambéed crêpes, but to me it seemed they were a window to the burning passion in his soul – a passion for the dough that he was kneading with such gentle grace and dexterity, his hands moving one over the other like rolling waves. For a moment I watched him, breathing in his scent, tasting him on my lips, savouring his aroma. I had never known that anyone could be so delicious. I watched, enthralled, as he twisted the dough into perfect croissants and laid them, ever so lovingly, onto an enormous baking tray.

  ‘He looked up and met my gaze, as if he had expected me to be there all along. He smiled, and I found myself standing right in front of him, although I think I must have hovered over to his stall because I could no longer feel the ground beneath my feet, and I’m sure my legs were too weak to carry me there. We gazed into each other’s eyes for what felt like an eternity, unable to look away.

  Neither of us spoke, and for a while it seemed that words were unnecessary. Then, holding my breath, I watched as his lips parted, and he whispered the most delicious sound I had ever heard.

  ‘Mademoiselle, où est l’hôtel de ville?’

  Où est l’hôtel de ville.

  For years I thought it was the most romantic phrase in the universe. The way my mother said it, the words rolling into one another, made it sound so sensuous. She said it was a declaration of love, and I believed her. I imagined that on my wedding day Johnny Miller would gently lift my veil, lean in to kiss me and whisper: ‘Meg, my darling, où est l’hôtel de ville.’ I never considered how I would a reply seeing as I didn’t even realise it was a question.

  ‘Tell us again how your parents met,’ Sophie Potter and Tracey Pratt used to beg, excitedly, and I would describe for them the scene of the meeting, just as my mother had always described it to me, whilst they hung on my every word, clutching their hearts.

  ‘Où est l’hôtel de ville,’ they would repeat dreamily at the end of the story, ‘that’s sooo romantic.’

  In order to truly embrace my cultural heritage, I would occasionally wear a red beret to school.

  ‘Paris is the most beautiful and romantic city in the world,’ I would tell my friends, ‘and as soon as I’m old enough I’m going to go and study there. I’ll probably find my father’s family and live with them. They will be so excited to meet me!’

  I had a map of France pinned over my bed, with a little flag stuck right in the heart of Paris. I would imagine my father – young, strong and handsome – in a stripy tshirt and a beret like mine, cycling through the Parisian streets on his way to work at the most prestigious bakery in France. I didn’t like to think too much about the tragic pastry-mixing incident, but I had a sense that his death had been heroic. He had died in his quest to create the finest cherry tart and name it after my mother, and that was as heroic a death as I could imagine. Somewhere I had heard a phrase about the brave dying young, and I imagined whoever said it must have been talking about my father.

  My mother said that, in spirit, my father was always there with me, and that was comforting, but also scary.

  ‘Will he be there when I’m on the toilet?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, darling, he won’t be with you then.’

  ‘Will he be there when I’m taking a bath?’

  ‘No, darling, not if you don’t want him there.’

  ‘Will he be there when I’m doing something naughty?’

  ‘Yes, he certainly will. So you’d better behave yourself.’

  I would often talk to him. Seeing as he was always there (apart from when I was on the toilet or in the bath) it seemed rude not to, and I would imagine I could hear him talking back to me. No, he didn’t think Tracey Pratt was as pretty as me, or that Mrs Partridge was right for making me sit next to smelly Scott Warner in assembly, and yes, he did agree that my mother should let me stay up until gone nine o’clock. He always agreed with everything I said, which was very endearing and made me love him all the more.

  And I did love him, I think, in the idolising, dreamy way that makes it possible to love someone you have never met. He might not have been there in person, but he was part of me, and I was part of him, and somehow that gave me strength and a sense of belonging. I would look in the mirror and see a small nose and pointy chin which – because they definitely hadn’t come from my mother – must have come from him. He was there in my beret, my map of France, my love of cheese triangles, and he was there in the mirror’s reflection, looking right back at me.

  One day, inevitably, the mirror broke. Smashed into a thousand tiny, painful, splinters. If I hadn’t loved him so much then perhaps it wouldn’t have been so hard, but losing the respect of my peers was nothing compared to losing my father.

  It happened in my first week at Millbrook Comprehensive, in Madame Emily’s French class. I had never had the opportunity to learn French before, but I knew I was bound to be a natural. After all, it was in my blood.

  ‘Right class, who already knows some French?’

  My hand shot up. I did! I did!

  Finally, away from the rest of Red Class, I had the opportunity to make new friends, to impress people with my knowledge instead of spouting ridiculous stories. It had been some time since I had turned my back on fiction in the pursuit of all that was good and true, but my reputation had followed me around Elmbrook Primary like a bad smell until the very end. I heard the words they whispered about me: liar, fibber, tittle-tattle. Now I had the chance to start again. After an agonising wait while Christopher Newbuck stumbled through the French for ‘my grandmother likes ping-pong’, and Louise Warbuck got in a muddle and told us that her father was a coconut, I finally had my chance to shine.

  ‘Où est l’hôtel de ville,’ I said in the passionate, dreamy way that my mother had taught me.

  ‘That’s very good, Meg,’ Madame Emily praised, clearly impressed. ‘And can you tell the class what it means?’

  ‘From what I understand,’ I said, with such pretension that I cringe to recall it, ‘it’s not a phrase that can easily be translated. But it’s a traditional French declaration of love. And it was the first thing that my father – who was an actual French person – said to my mother when they first met.’

  Madame Emily gave a sharp shriek of laughter.

  ‘Well, I’m not sure where you got that from! It would be quite an odd way to express your love. It means where is the town hall!’

  All around me I heard my new classmates starting to giggle. I felt as if the classroom was closing in on me. Where is the town hall? She must be confused. It couldn’t mean that. I watched Madame Emily chuckling away, and glanced at the still-unfamiliar faces around me contorted with laughter. Seeing that I didn’t find it funny in the slightest, but was instead on the verge of tears, Madame Emily suddenly stopped laug
hing and asked for quiet.

  ‘Where is the town hall is an extremely important phrase though,’ she said, as way of compensation, ‘and it’s probably going to be the first thing you will want to ask someone when you arrive in France, which is why it’s the first phrase we learn. If you turn to page one of your textbook, everyone, then you’ll see that phrase at the top of page one… ’

  And there it was, right at the top of page one in French Made Fun! In the cartoon, the Englishman with the bowler hat and umbrella was disembarking from the ferry and asking a random Frenchman – identifiable by the string of onions round his neck – Où est l’hôtel de ville? It wasn’t romantic in the slightest, and in the context of my parents’ first meeting it made absolutely no sense what so ever. It didn’t take me any time at all to realise that it was clearly the only French phrase that my mother remembered from her own schooldays, and that she had taken advantage of my ignorance in order to deceive me.

  ‘The individual words aren’t important, darling,’ my mother said, dismissively, when I burst into the flat later that day, and threw my new school bag on the kitchen floor in anger. ‘It’s the sentiment that matters. Think of it like a Victoria sponge. You wouldn’t eat any of the ingredients on their own, but mixed together with passion and love they create something – ’