Chapter Nine

      At first, Charles cannot make out much of what the English say. Their words collide and mingle with one another in a babble of sound, like water running over pebbles.

      He thought he would be able to understand everything because Maman taught English to him at home, as far back as he can remember. But perhaps Maman spoke a different sort of English.

      Gradually, however, as the long days pass, Charles learns to understand more and more of what he hears. Sometimes he even dreams in English.

      He wishes there were only one language in the world. He speaks – or rather used to speak, French, Maman’s special sort of English and – left over from when he was very small – some Italian and even a little German. Oh, and there is yet another language – the Latin the priests use, the language of church and lessons.

      Often he does not know where one language ends and another begins. In his head they bleed into one another like watercolour paints when you splash water on them.

      Why are there so many words? And why can he say none of them?

      Early in the afternoon on the first day of October, the sun comes out for a short while and Charles goes to the Garden of Neptune. This is higher up the valley than the house, where the pleasure grounds give way to meadow and woodland.

      It is a garden within the garden, enclosed by walls and tall hedges. In the middle is a pond with a stone statue, discoloured by age and lichen. The god has lost his trident. He looks stunted because he has disproportionally short legs and arms, like a dwarf that Charles and Maman used to see begging on the Rue Saint-Honoré, near the Palais Royale.

      The other night, Charles had a nightmare about Neptune. The sea god found his trident in the water. He waded across to the wall surrounding the pool and began stabbing Charles with his weapon. In the dream, Neptune’s body was dripping and hung with weeds. His legs had scales like a fish. But as the god stabbed and stabbed, the blood poured from Charles’s body in great gouts. Soon it was raining bright blood and Neptune himself turned red.

      Blood spurts from people like water from a pump. Charles knows that. (It is a fact.)

      He has made himself return to the garden. For, if Neptune has not found his trident, then everything Charles remembers from the dream has never happened.

      It never rained blood. Not really. Never, never, never. It is important to be sure of these things.

      Neptune has not found his trident.

      Afterwards Charles decides to measure the garden. A network of paths connects the gates and runs between the beds where small bushes grow. He walks up and down, counting.

      The path parallel to the wall is fifty-two paces on its two long sides. It is thirty-four paces on one of the shorter ones, and thirty-two paces on the other – which worries Charles because it means that the garden cannot be a perfect rectangle and he will find it hard to calculate its area. He knows how to calculate areas, but only if they form exact squares and rectangles. A further complication is that he does not know exactly how long his paces are.

      He has all these numbers in his head, and he scratches them on the gravel to help him remember. But they are just that – numbers. They don’t tell him other things. They float like clouds, unattached to anything solid.

      In his frustration, Charles kicks the low wall around the pool and hurts his foot. The water is green and covered with weeds and insects that play on the surface as if it were a sheet of glass. Neptune is reflected in the water, sneering up at him.

      Charles picks up a handful of gravel and throws it into the pond. The smooth glass shatters. The reflection of Neptune disintegrates.

      There, he thinks, that will teach you to hurt me.

      That is when he hears the footsteps.

      Charles turns. The gardener’s boy has come into the garden. He walks slowly along the wide alley that runs down the middle of the garden towards Neptune and his pond.

      The gardener’s boy stares at Charles. His face is very serious. His lips are moving slightly. Charles wonders if he is trying to multiply big numbers in his head, perhaps calculating the number of stockings and shirts in his baskets. There are still red weals on his cheek from the beating.

      The boy stops just before he would bump into Charles. He scuffs at the numbers in the gravel, obliterating the facts they record. His face is dirty. He has freckles that make it look dirtier. Words pour out of his mouth in his thick, soft, shapeless voice.

      ‘Goddamned foreigner, you can’t even speak, you’re a baby, you piss in your bed, you’re a windy great looby, you skinny ballocks, you stinking Frog noodle …’

      He says the words over and again, like a prayer. The more he says, the angrier he becomes.

      He takes Charles’s left ear by the lobe. He pinches it. Charles opens his mouth and a scream comes out, a high, wordless sound like a small animal in pain. The boy does not let go. Charles tries to hit and kick him but the boy holds him at arm’s length.

      There is a spark in the boy’s green eyes. He drags Charles’s head backwards. With his other hand he turns Charles around. He forces him to his knees. He bends him over the parapet of the pool.

      The stone coping digs into Charles’s ribs. The gardener’s boy pushes Charles’s head slowly towards the water.

      The sun is reflected in its surface. He closes his eyes. The pain in his ear fills his head with white noise.

      With his free hand the gardener’s boy pins Charles’s body to the parapet.

      The water is cool and as soft as a silk dress. Charles opens his eyes. A fish slips away into the murky depths. He opens his mouth to scream. He swallows water.

      The grip on his ear drags him down and down. His legs flail. The pain in his chest is now worse than the pain in his ear. Then pain has no borders. It goes everywhere.

      In an instant Charles remembers how he saw a man drown a litter of kittens in the yard when he was very small. The man put them one by one into the bucket of water and held them under the surface. The kittens’ legs kicked. The bodies writhed. When there was no more movement, the man took each scrap of dripping fur from the water and laid it on the ground where it lay perfectly still. Then he reached for another kitten, and soon they were all dead. Sodden scraps of flesh and fur.

      While Charles is drowning, in the middle of all the pain, he sees this bucket quite clearly. He sees the man’s hand and remembers how the back of it was covered with black hairs. He sees the head of a drowning kitten between his fingers.

      Then, as suddenly as it began, it is over. Charles is dragged out of the water and thrown to the ground, where he lies, panting and dribbling.

      Slowly the white noise and the pain diminish. Charles coughs. He hears the boy’s running footsteps.

      Charles retches – at first weakly and then with increasing violence. Dirty water spews out of his mouth and splashes on his face and hands.

      That night Charles wets the bed again.

      He doesn’t know why this shameful and babyish thing should happen: it just does. This is the first time that he has been caught wetting the bed since they came to England.

      When the maid discovers that he has wet the bed, she calls the housekeeper, who is very stern, very English. Her name is Mrs Cox and she has a voice that sounds like chalk scratching on a slate.

      Mrs