BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Novels
Sadlers Birthday
Letter to Sister Benedicta
The Cupboard
The Swimming Pool Season
Restoration
Sacred Country
The Way I Found Her
Music and Silence
The Colour
The Road Home
Short Story Collections
The Colonels Daughter
The Garden of the Villa Mollini
Evangelistas Fan
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
For Children
Journey to the Volcano
For Richard, with love
Acknowledgements
Extract from Salad Days reproduced by permission of The Agency (London) Ltd 1954 Julian Slade.
Extract from Staying On by Paul Scott, copyright 1977 Paul Scott, published by William Heinemann. Reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the author.
Drawing of mulberry leaf by Nicole Heidaripour.
TRESPASSRose TremainChatto & WindusLONDON
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Table of Contents
The childs name is Mlodie.
Long ago, before Mlodie was born, her pretty mother had had a stab at composing music.
Mlodie is ten years old and shes trying to eat a sandwich. She prises apart the two halves of the sandwich and stares at the wet, pink ham inside, and at the repulsive grey-green shimmer on its surface. All around her, in the dry grass and in the parched trees, crickets and grasshoppers are making that sound they make, not with their voices (Mlodie has been told that they have no voices) but with their bodies, letting one part vibrate against another part. In this place, thinks Mlodie, everything is alive and fluttering and going from one place to another place, and she dreads to see one of these insects arrive suddenly on her sandwich or on her leg or start to tangle its limbs in her hair.
Mlodies hair is dark and soft. As she looks at the slimy ham, she can feel sweat beginning to seep out of her head. Sweat, she thinks, is a cold hand that tries to caress you. Sweat is something strange inside you trying to creep from one place to another place...
Mlodie puts the sandwich down in the dusty grass. In moments, she knows, ants will arrive and swarm round it and try to carry it away. Where she used to live, in Paris, there were no ants, but here, where her new home is, there are more ants than you could ever count. They come out of the earth and go down into it again. If you dug down, you would find them: a solid mass of them, black and red. Your spade would crunch right through them. You might not even have to dig very deep.
Mlodie lifts her head and gazes at the leaves on the oak tree above her.
These leaves are yellowing, as though it were already autumn. The wind called the mistral keeps blowing through the tree and the sun keeps moving and piercing the shade and nothing in this place ever ends or is still.
Mlodie, says a voice. Are you all right? Dont you want your sandwich?
Mlodie turns to her teacher, Mademoiselle Jeanne Viala, who sits on a rug on the grass a few paces away, with some of the younger children hunched up near to her, all obediently chewing their baguettes.
Im not hungry, says Mlodie.
Weve had a long morning, says Mademoiselle Viala. Try to eat a few mouthfuls.
Mlodie shakes her head. Sometimes, its difficult to speak. Sometimes, youre like an insect with no voice, which just has to make a movement with some part of its anatomy. And everywhere around you the mistral keeps blowing and autumn leaves keep falling, even though its a midsummer day.
Come and sit here, says Mademoiselle Viala. Well all have a drink of water.
The teacher tells one of the boys, Jo-Jo, (one of those who tease and bully Mlodie and imitate her posh Parisian accent) to pass her the picnic bag. Mlodie gets up and moves away from the sandwich lying in the grass and Mademoiselle Viala holds out her hand and Mlodie sits down there, near the teacher whom she quite likes, but who betrayed her this morning... yes she did... by making her look at things she didnt want to see...
Mademoiselle Viala wears a white linen blouse and blue jeans and white canvas shoes. Her arms are soft and tanned and her lipstick is a bright, startling red. She could have come from Paris, once. She takes a little bottle of Evian water out of the cumbersome bag and passes it to Mlodie.
There, she says. There you are.
Mlodie presses the cool bottle against her cheek. She sees Jo-Jo staring at her. Bully-boys faces can be blank, absolutely blank, as though theyd never learned to say their own names.
So, says Jeanne Viala in her teacher-voice, I wonder who can tell me, after the presentations we saw at the museum, how silk is made?
Mlodie looks away, up, sideways, far away at the jumping light, at the invisible wind... All round her, the children raise their arms, bursting to tell Mademoiselle Viala what they know, or what, Mlodie suspects, they have always known, because theyre part of this landscape and were born out of its earth.
Jo-Jo says it: Silk is made by worms.
He, like the others, always knew it. Everybody learned about it from their grandparents or great-grandparents and only she, Mlodie Hartmann from Paris, had never ever thought about it until today, until Jeanne Viala took the children to the Museum of Cvenol Silk Production at Ruasse...
Right, says Mademoiselle Viala. Dont all shout out at once.
