CHAPTER 30
I did not return home that Christmas but stayed with Roser. I had called her shortly after I arrived at Perpignan, and she insisted on being driven by her son out to where I had been given a room, to make sure I was comfortable and safe, in her words.

“Ah, girl, this is no kitchen for one with a mother like yours! You need…what is distressing you?”

That very nearly broke me, and before her son I fell into more tears. She led me to my bed and sat down with me.

“Tears? This is that boy, that Benny? You were so quiet in the Summer, when you slept under Thierry’s roof. I had thought it was that you lacked him. It is worse, is it not? An ending?”

I nodded. She embraced me, and whispered into my ear. “A girl, so tall, so slender, you shall have many suitors here”

The only word that blazed in my mind was the one that Benny had thrown at me: trust. I could no longer lie to this woman.

“I cannot, Roser. There are things you do not know about me”

“No? The size of your feet perhaps? Or the shapes in your modest bathing suit?”

I was shocked out of my tears. “You know?”

“I told you, that first day, how I was a mother, and a grandmother, no? And I put the cream to your skin, and I did not feel the hardness of some muscles? I told you of the prescription, you had forgotten in your sorrow? Sophie, I am too old to worry about little things and so I concern myself with the big ones: who is this person I see? I saw a girl, yes, a polite girl, a girl charming to me, and modest. You are to…”

She said something in Catalan to Jaume, who was just sitting on the one chair looking concerned, and for one moment of true weakness I wondered whether his concern spared any for me. He cleared his throat, with some nervousness.

“Mama says, she asks, will you be having surgery to make…a difference there?”

I tried to smile. “Some I have had already. They took away---“

“No, I do not wish to hear. But if you mean that you now have no other source of hormones, then we must talk”

Roser nodded. “Think, my little one. My son can organise the necessary medication that your doctor writes for you, and you are not to be seen then collecting something that could bring misfortune on you. Now, we have you calmer, si? If you can, we would know what happened to hurt you so terribly”

I told them as much as I could bear, of the old days and the beatings, the new ones and the friendships, the love; of the voice from my past, that name from him and then from Benny.

“I cannot return, I cannot. I am lost”

Roser continued to hold me. “Then I must speak with your mama, no? If you cannot go home then she must come here. Not always; a student must have their space for wildness. But you will not be alone, Sophie, even though you believe you are. And you will not sit in this cell every night. You will be with us when we each have time, and a Catalane you will become”

She sighed happily. Jaume raised an eyebrow, then shrugged at me. “There is no use in resisting, my little one. She will have her way. Perhaps it will be you as the cooking teacher, your mother as the student”

They took me from my room to a small café where a stream or canal passed under many baskets of flowers, and we had a piece of cake and some coffee, and then a little wine. Roser’s presence was bringing me into some light, and she was full of questions.

“Your brother, your Roland, his wedding, it was nice?”

Yes. It had been wonderful, as pure a day of love as could have been hoped for, even filtered through my shadows of loss. Margot had been as beautiful as all of us save her had always known, and my brother more beautiful than I had ever seen or imagined possible of him. We had driven from the Mairie in a line of cars, their klaxons blowing, until we had arrived by the Men’s Abbey for photographs of my beautiful brother and sister. I managed to force a smile onto my face for my own photograph, but I did so by reminding myself repeatedly that it was not my day to spoil but theirs, and I must make it as sweet and fitting as I could.

Roser laughed when I spoke of Matty and his sudden emergence of courage with Elle, and when I explained that…Guillaume had asked for my mother’s consent to their own wedding she smiled again.

“Ah, Sophie, there is more of these things than you tell. Now, we are agreed–“

Jaume interrupted, calmer now that we were not talking of surgery to intimate parts. “Sophie, when Mama says we are agreed it is translated best as ‘She Has Spoken’. Is that not true, Mama?”

Roser gave another of her shrugs. “I find it makes the life go much more simply, and that is because I am right always. What it is that I was saying: you will visit us, and we will visit you, and you will heal. Your studies will excite you, and you will become a grown woman to amaze your Benny---no, no tears. There are flowers, there is wine. And cake with chocolate. Come, son of mine, let us take this lady to her place. Write the numbers, Jaume”

I was given a piece of paper with several telephone numbers upon it, and Jaume took me back to my room. Roser pressed my hands tightly before they left.

“Sophie, my little sweet, these are numbers to be used, not left hidden somewhere. Call upon us, not only when you have need, but as a friend does, to give greeting and to speak of nothings. You will heal. I know this thing”

The studies began, and they took away some of my pain simply by leaving me no time for it. They were absorbing, and it was clear that they were to make me more than a reader and speaker of the language, because they addressed the subject so broadly. There was the history of the tongue, and at the same time the history and theory of all tongues. That was indeed a welcome discovery, that I could use my mind to ease my soul. I still could not face my family, my friends, that place for Christmas or St Sylvestre. I know that Roser spoke to Maman, and I can make assumptions about what was said, but to my shame I could not make myself endure the memories. That Christmas should have begun with my Benny meeting me from the train, embracing me, telling me of his longing for my return. That was not something that would happen. And so I spent my first Christmas without my family, and then the next one was easier, and the third…

Roser was wrong; there were no suitors, or rather there may have been but I ensured there were none that went further than a second essay at saying hello to me.

Maman, Margot and my brother came down for the first Summer break, for I did not go home, and for the second, but that one I spent along the coast in Palavas, in a bad hotel filled with mosquitos. I tried not to answer their calls, unless Roser caught me, when she would insist I spoke. It was one call, one conversation that brought me once more to the brink of the precipice.

“Sophie…it is Maman. Mme Chinon wants to speak to you. You have an opportunity in August, if you wish it, but it is here, at home. You must come to us”

“Can I not have it here?”

“My sweet, there is only the place at the CHU. To find one down there, it would be near to impossible. And…”

I could hear the tears in her voice, and my heart pained me, but to go back there, it was too much to bear.

“Sophie, there is more. Your Papa, myself, we would be wed then. How can we marry without our daughter to witness and share?”

I am not your daughter, not in the eyes of Benny. That was my thought, and it was the sharp glare given to me by the Catalane that was all that showed me what I must do. I had forced myself for my brother, my sister. How could I not for my parents? And so, when I had finished my studies, and University was behind me, I packed up what I had accumulated in my little cell, which consisted of clothing, text books and nothing much beyond those, and Jaume drove me to the railway station in Narbonne, from where the trains were simpler, and Rollo met me at the other end of the journey, just as the last lights in my soul were going out.