Gaëtane and Hélène take me to the Mediterranean. We set up folding chairs on the beach and wade into the water. Their bathing suits contrast, Hélène’s dark against her white hair, Gaëtane’s light against a dark mop flecked with gray. Click image for full screen

Gaetane and Helene at Mediterannean I take our picture, and Hélène makes a joke about their old bodies. Water bombers practice above us, dipping into the ocean one after another and then releasing their contents way out at sea. Gaëtane paddles out, drifting West with the current, while I stay in the warm shallows, surprised at how salty the water is. We dry off in the sun, Gaëtane and Hélène holding each other’s arms as they dress. They move together without discussion, anticipating each others’ needs after years of practice. I see that they are both wearing necklaces that Gaëtane made – she could not stop making things – wires twisted around green stones.

I find a letter from her husband to my great-grandmother: I would like to dispel any worries you have over the disappearance of Gaëtane. She will remain with me in hiding until our marriage takes place. At that time I will become her legal guardian and it is not my intention to permit her to return to Chestnut Lodge. Regretfully, I cannot sign my name until we feel free from pursuit.
Peter to Gran

Then, in a different hand, a curt proof of her presence: But I’ll sign mine. Gaëtane.

Some months later, I find the man Gaëtane married. He owns a bookstore in my hometown, and I meet him there. He sits amidst a pile of papers and coffee cups, his white hair down to his shoulders. He was in love with her, it is clear. But, he tells me, I wasn’t going to change her from gay to straight. They hitchhiked back to the West Coast from Maryland. Gaëtane had short hair, she wore a plaid shirt and blue jeans, she looked like a young lad. Peter Pratchett InterviewThe police went to his house, asked his roommates where he was. Months later, he turned down an offer of ten thousand dollars from my great-grandmother to annul the marriage. Does queer family include our protectors? I marvel at this man’s loyalty to Gaëtane, at their short friendship, that he crossed a continent to guide her back to safety. I didn’t marry her for the money, he tells me.

Hélène is preparing for la cousinade. She picks up a case of wine from the cooperative vineyard, fusses around their yard. Her niece comes over to play with Temis, who never runs out of energy. An electrician is working in the studio, then sits down with us for lunch – I learn that he lived with them for a year, when he was out of work and raising a toddler on his own. Hélène steps out to check on a friend, who is ninety and can no longer leave her home. A neighbor comes over, smokes a cigarette by the pool and chats with Hélène’s niece. We go for lunch, push three tables together, passing the tapenade one way and the breadbasket the other.

Gaëtane tells me that when she and Hélène got married after being together for 33 years, she asked her mother if she was happy for them. Fiona said no.

Chestnut Lodge discharge

All she wants to do is paint, Fiona wrote plaintively in a letter to my great-grandmother.

Gaëtane shows me around her art studio. It is built into a loft above the barn, and she holds the railing as she climbs the steep stairs. She wears her pajamas still, a faded gray set with pinstripes, and I can see the way her back curves through the thin cotton.

We have to step up and duck through a doorway to get in, and the entryway is crammed with canvases. Stacks of paintings line the walls, stand on shelves and lean against the wood stove at the center of the room. Enormous paper lanterns hang from the high ceiling, and dried paint palettes rest on the tables. Gaëtane sits on an old barber stool, her toes grazing the floor. She is beaming, amused by my exclamations as I point around the room, wide-eyed.

Everywhere in her studio, there are paintings of horses. A small horse surveys from the bare drywall above the bathroom sink, horses are painted onto small tiles, pieces of paper, canvas. She tells me about them as she leafs through a stack of horses.

A horse is quite gentle, but it is very quickly frightened. Very quickly… It quickly scares. And it is very mobile. And I like this mobility in painting. I like to represent the horse in movement. And you see, it is… At the same time, it is gentle, it is violent in movement, but it is gentle in expression.

Above her stool, a canvas is segmented, a grid of fine print pages, painted over in scrapes of white and red, and roughly retraced in black.

Gaëtane to Gran 4

Gaëtane sketched a cat and a unicorn at the top of a letter to my great-grandmother. She wrote: You see, I want to paint and make and create things. The only job that I would get pleasure doing and which is within my means is that.

On my last day at the Mas, I skim ants and flies off the surface of the pool. I crouch in the water and scoop up the tiny snails that drift in the shallows. Temis steals my towel from the arm of the cracked lawn chair. Oleander blossoms litter the grass. I am sometimes overwhelmed by the smells of this place; everything is damp and fertile.

Back in the kitchen, Hélène tucks a chocolate wafer into my backpack, and a leftover curried chicken sandwich from lunch. I stumble through thanks, promise to return, apologize that I don’t have the words for what I want to tell them.

Put that in your story, Gaëtane says, about something else, I don’t remember what.

Where do the words I never said go, those I can’t find to breathe, to appear
of common constitution, not slowly imbecile, flat on a land eaten by spoons?

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