Madeleine Toussard is born on Whit Monday in 1985, following the day of the grand reveal of the restored local church, and the pastor himself comes to bless her as the Pentecost baby. When her mother tells her this story some years later over dinner that is made festive for her and not for Pentecost, Madeleine remarks that they are not religious.
"There are many things our family is not, but he still recognised you for the miracle you are. That is why you took your mother's family name," her father remarks. Madeleine is too young to recognise the lie for another two decades, so she smiles, honoured and too enthralled by her Tartiflette to see the fall of her mother's face.
She is six years old when Maman enrolls her in the village school and she gets to see more of the world than the bakery, the fields, and the little corner store on the edge of Rue de la Gare. August is no longer quite summer, the oppressive heat turning into morning dew and a crisp, white cardigan wrapped around her shoulders to shield her from the touch of autumn.
On another day she might run through the wet hay and come out further down the road panting like a wild animal with the delighted grin of a child on her face, caught up in the wild glee of summer days, but today she is a big girl on her way to school and the backpack on her shoulders weighs heavily with newfound responsibility. Madeleine only wishes her father were here to see.
She is eight when she realises there is a gun in the house and ten when she learns that may in fact not be quite legal. There's a strange man visiting her father and he smiles at her too, though it does nothing to make the ugly scar on his face more appealing. Madeleine eyes him with distrust and wonders if this is the reason why there have always been bullets in Papa's nightstand.
Her mother's rigid poise does nothing to alleviate the tension gathering in her stomach, but she is a good girl nonetheless and goes upstairs when Papa tells her to. But she is no longer oblivious to the world around her and the stairs creak dangerously under the weight of her feet. Madeleine locks herself in her room, sitting cross legged on the floor with her once lively dolls having turned into plastic lumps. Her hands twitch restlessly in her lap, but the word 'panic' isn't part of her vocabulary yet so she simmers with unnamed anxiety violating her child's mind.
When the gunshot rings out downstairs, she does not flinch, merely shivers when the breath she has been holding since she locked the door escapes her all at once. Her mother's screaming moments later contains many words Madeleine isn't allowed to use. She does not know the meaning of all the muffled curses bouncing off the walls, but there is no need to guess when the hitch in Maman's voice is so very obvious.
Years later Madeleine, waking from a dream of that gunshot, only hears the sounds of her parents fighting and the restless hammering of her own heart. Thinking of it now, she does not recall seeing the scarred man leave, nor does she know why there were only three chairs at the kitchen table that night.
The gun. Madeleine stumbles upon it one day, when she is eleven, on an afternoon when her parents are out and she spills ketchup on her shirt. It lies under the sink - what an odd place - next to the bleach and the rubbing alcohol and several other bottles she is not supposed to touch because of the labels with the warning skulls. Her heart beats a little faster knowing she isn't supposed to be looking into this cabinet, let alone the gun. It speeds up even further when her hands, still clamped around the cabinet doors, refuse to move and shut it away from sight. She is terrified without a doubt and simultaneously captivated by an innate curiosity she is afraid to act on.
But, she is home alone. No one would see even if she touched it. Madeleine takes a deep breath and retracts her hands into her lap, drops from a squat to sitting on her legs. All she knows is which end the bullets come out of and where the trigger sits. Her fingers reach out tentatively and press against the cool metal, far away from where the bullets come out and nowhere near the trigger. Confident that it isn't going to jump out at her, Madeleine pulls it closer to the edge and bends forward to look at the many ridges on the grip, the lines of the muzzle, two letters carved into the butt.
Downstairs the door sounds, wailing on its hinges and Madeleine can hear her mother complaining about the noise. For a moment she is frozen in place and then her defenses kick in and she is quick to get on her feet, lock the door, and flush the toilet. She counts to ten and turns on the tap before she crouches back down to set the gun in its original position. When she emerges from the bathroom, she acts surprised to see her parents back and lucky for her, her mother assigns the red sting of her ears to the stain on her shirt.
Something must've given her away anyway - perhaps the dust, she muses later - because four days later she is formally introduced to the gun. Sitting at the kitchen table learning to load and unload it, Madeleine cannot imagine she is going to have to shoot a man two months later, hands trembling at the sight of a Glock held pressed to Papa's temple.
The four kilometer walk from their rotting hillside house into town grows shorter with every year and yet Madeleine finds herself on the road less and less. Her parents get divorced when she is fourteen. Two years later she is still walking to town every other Sunday to meet her father, more often than not to find him delayed or in absentia.
By seventeen she's stopped missing him and started to think of the world beyond their town, the one he has abandoned her for. By some miracle - and it must have been something her father did, she knows - Madeleine gets into Sorbonne and she laughs with tears in her eyes when she tells her mother.
Two days later she receives a congratulatory postcard in the mail with Armenian stamps and even in a fit of hatred towards her father Madeleine can't bring herself to throw it away. When she leaves home for the last time, it sits somewhere at the bottom of her three cardboard boxes worth of baggage to make up for the absence of the man himself.
Paris is easy: comfortable, warm. She studies the aversions of the mind with unprecedented devotion and spends sunny Sunday afternoons wandering along the Seine with a too talkative boyfriend to make up for the long silences of sleepless nights. Spring is just around the corner with pastel mornings and flowers she's allergic to blossoming everywhere, and for the first time in fifteen years Madeleine Toussard considers herself happy.
Of course that is when she finds her father at her door with a bouquet of flowers and his hat held hesitantly in his hand as though he's about to be shooed away like a misbehaving dog. And in that respect he is not wrong, for she is not happy to see him and she could not hide that truth from him even if she wished to. He is smart enough to understand the meaning in the way her mouth turns into a frown from the languid, wine addled smile that is now a lost token of a too expensive dinner.
"What are you doing here?" she asks him in a trembling English that has lost its perfect intonation in his absence. Never mind that; she's always been more French than English anyway, but the way her hands shake when she fumbles with the keys is new.
"Such a warm welcome," he says and his smile is insincere in the way it curves up along the left half of his face. Nevertheless, she feels immediately at ease to discover he is just the same despite the fact that she has come so far in their time apart.
"I don't like strange men loitering on my doorstep. Particularly when they keep guns tucked out of sight in their ill-fitting trench coats."
One of Madeleine's neighbours casts a worried look their way in passing and her father hurries to say, "You always have been so funny." His laugh is fake, absorbed into the worn wallpaper of the corridor.
"Oui en effet, Papa," she says and her smile is as crooked as his, though that does not seem to worry her neighbour in the slightest. "Viens, s'il te plaît."
She leaves the door open for her father to follow her into the closet she calls home and Madeleine makes a point of not letting him disturb her Tuesday night. She tosses the keys on a stack of advertisements on the coffee table and deposits her breakfast dishes in the sink. She's never been the most orderly person, but she wishes she'd made her bed this once, seeing as it sits in middle of her already disordered living room to add to the chaos.
Madeleine adopts an air of false distance and asks: "So? What do I owe your presence to?"
She knows she sounds like an injured animal snarling at him like that, but she never did get the hang of anger management. She prompts an answer by raising her eyebrows and if her mouth purses ever so slightly in distaste on its own accord, well, she is only human.
"Madeleine, please." He is serious now even as he stands sweating in his coat.
Madeleine takes note of the crow's feet and the lines in his forehead that have grown impossible to ignore in the three years since she's last seen him and suddenly finds his presence unbearable. She throws the doors to the faux balcony railing open for a breath of air and takes the flowers from him just to have something to do. It's her way of turning her back on him, opening cupboards to find the vase her mother gave her as a graduation present. "Speak," she says coldly, reaching for the crystal abomination on the top shelf.
"I merely wanted to see you. Is that a crime?"
"By no means. I simply don't happen to return the sentiment."
She fans out the tulips and sets them down on the coffee table. They're a dash of disturbing orange in the midst of her monochrome flat and she has to admit her father does have a way of intruding on her life in the most pleasant ways. The silence stretches out for an instance too long before her father finally smiles with sly satisfaction.
"You've gotten good at lying."
Madeleine huffs, "obviously not good enough."
For a while they are fifteen years in the past when she was caught out stealing the Nutella jar from the kitchen cupboard and she'd shot him the most hateful look a five-year-old could fashion. Her frustration with herself is forgotten as quickly now as it was then.
"So, what is it you suggest we do?" she asks.
"I only want to know you're happy."
"That doesn't answer my question."
He draws a breath to protest, but decides against it and lets out a heaving sigh. "Have dinner with me at the St Alpin next Tuesday."
"Will that get you to leave me alone?"
"Is that what you want? To be alone?"
"I am not alone in the way you imply, if that is what you are worried about," Madeleine snaps. She wills herself to calm down, to not let herself be tainted with the hatred that consumed her mother in the course of a hasty marriage falling to pieces. In a quieter voice she says, "I've met someone," and it seems to her that the world has come to a staggering halt when her father blinks at her in surprise.
Two heartbeats later he says, "Good. That is... very good. Invite him along too, won't you. Indulge me in the one dinner and I'll let you get on with your young, bright life. Without me, if that is what you want."
It is too much of an ultimatum for her to agree to right off the bat, one of those one-sided bargains her father likes to throw around to make his ideas look like a choice. But Madeleine has always been her father's daughter and a tad too stubborn for her own good, so she nods. Her father is smart enough to leave with a tip of his hat and not a single word. Even alone with the fluttering curtains and flowers she hates, Madeleine still makes an effort to scowl after him.
She is many things here and none of them seem to match up with the girl her father knows. In Paris she is the girl from the countryside who gradually outgrew her accent and got together with the university's most promising mathematics undergraduate. To Christian White she must still be little Maddy frolicking in the garden, at least if the perplexed look on his face when she shows up to dinner five minutes early in a saffron dress is anything to go by.
Her smile is brilliantly dazzling of its own accord and there is a certain misplaced pride in the way she sticks her chin out at her father when her boyfriend shows up in a suit he hates just to appease her. Later, with dinner laid out in front of her and Matthieu discussing the political shift in Germany with her father, Madeleine mentally kicks herself for being so desperate for the approval of a man she claims not to care about.
Nevertheless she lets herself be soothed by the easy dinner, watching quietly as her company entertains itself for her sake. By dessert she is convinced this is how it's always meant to be: her in Paris, leading a distantly normal life her father can only hope to graze every now and then. It's not quite happiness, but it is a contentment deep enough to simulate the feeling to the tee. She can still tell the difference.
On one late October morning her mother calls her about the house one final time. It's been on the market for two years, growing damper with every rainfall. Last time Madeleine went to visit she'd stepped through the pantry floorboard with a yelp, tearing down the shelf she tried to grab hold of. It was a lost cause and so they'd simply put two wide boards over the floor instead of fixing the hole, hoping it would finally sell. Then, two months ago, the good news.
"They're going to tear the house down," her mother says now with a sadness that is only compassion for Madeleine. "The new owners are going to build a larger chalet to function as a guest house."
"A guest house?" Madeleine doesn't want to sound so pathetic. She hasn't cared for the house in years, hasn't stayed in it for more than a weekend at a time since she left. It cannot be salvaged, she has known that for a long time, and yet she clings to it.
"I didn't know, when I sold it."
"No, no. Don't be sorry, Maman. It is probably for the best." She doesn't know if she believes that, if she can convince her mother she does. Not when their shared memories all lie in the bedrooms and the staircases of that house. All the mornings she spent glaring at her breakfast with her feet tucked under herself on the kitchen chair, the days she used to run between the sheets on the laundry line pretending to be in a labyrinth.
All those mundane, half forgotten moments at home flash through her mind and she wonders how many of those even exist in the photo albums. She knows there is a photograph of her on the balcony with a yoyo hanging over the edge, another where she sits on Grandpere's shoulders with the house caught sideways in the background, but not a single one of the house on its own even though it has stood for more than a century before her.
"Will you take a picture of it for me?" she asks.
Oxford holds a year long open exchange programme and Madeleine, thinking of her prospective work opportunities, applies. There are few qualified candidates outside of specific departments and she gets the single prized spot in the psychology department. The trouble is the tuition fee is larger than her bank balance has ever been. It's far too much to ask of her mother, a primary school teacher in her late forties, who could not spare that amount of money for her even over a span of three years.
Madeleine ponders her options - or rather the one and only option of polite declination - over a bottle of wine and microwave fries in the company of her laptop when she receives an e-mail that her tuition has been paid earlier this afternoon. We assume you accept your place at Oxford based on this transaction. Please inform the board if there has been a mistake. She reads the entire message again, then once more aloud to make sure she isn't hallucinating. Another e-mail, this time a welcoming message from the director of the admissions board, arrives.
Madeleine phones her mother, crying in disbelief.
When her mother asks her about the tuition fee, her glee shatters, split instantly in two upon the realisation that there is only one person who could have paid for it. She tells her mother not to worry, that there is a scholarship. That it is sponsored by her father's ill expressed love goes unmentioned.
The semester abroad makes coming home, or rather her grandmother's house, even more oppressive. Grandpere is there to greet her at the door despite his bad hip and she chastises for getting up for her sake, but she secretly loves him all the more for it. Sars-le-Bois holds an uncomfortable familiarity as though she would see her eight year old self were she to look in the mirror. Maman is happy she is home and Madeleine only wishes she could return the sentiment.
But she has become an extension of her former self, too large to be tied to a small town. She lets her eyes wander over the pictures on the ledge of the fireplace: family portraits of her uncle and cousins, a forty-year-old wedding picture of her grandparents. One of her mother pregnant at twenty with a delicate smile and a hand held over Madeleine. In the other picture of the two of them Madeleine is barely eighteen and she remembers her mother telling her an awful joke to create the smile she wears in the picture. It seems strange to her that she has characterised someone's life for so long, but in many ways it extends the other way too. Because no matter how far from home she drifts, she keeps Maman with her in a silver locket.
Madeleine has forgiven him. This is what she tells herself on her twenty-fourth birthday, spent at home with her mother looking through the many photo albums of her childhood. There she stands with uneven pigtails pointing out a butterfly on the ground. Holding up a drawing of her family and herself on holiday in Tangier, the scene only recognizable by the addition of a place and year in her mother's neat script. In one photograph she is eleven, dancing with her father in a lime green tunic he'd brought her from abroad and she still remembers the way it had a strange, worldly scent that never washed out.
This is her love caught in snapshots. Her hatred of her father is not so clearly pronounced. She recalls it as spat words at the top of the staircase, the exact order, phrasing, and context long forgotten. It manifests in the trembling of her hands whenever she receives foreign mail. The shadowy figures in her nightmares that carry the faces of her father's 'friends'. But all that, and everything that has been before has blended together into a single emotion that leaves her body in the form of drunken tears and staggering explanations muttered at her mother from within her embrace.
When she finally calms down, when the both of them stop crying, her mother shows her the biggest treasure of them all: her birth certificate. Madeleine regards the uncertain wobble of the pen her name is written in. She knows she is named after Maman's great aunt, that she shares her mother's surname.
"Your middle name," her mother says in a hoarse voice, "was your father's mother's."
She has not spoken of him to Madeleine in years, perhaps she hasn't spoken of Christian White to anyone at all because she too does not know how to separate her love and her hate for him. The tears that collect in Madeleine's eyes are followed by a fleeting smile and she hugs her mother with a fervor she hasn't exhibited since the days of her early childhood.
Her life in Paris as woman in her mid-twenties, who is thoroughly woven into the beating heart of the city, settles into a sort of exciting ease. She goes out with friends every Thursday, gets a flat without a mold stain in the bathroom corner, finds a job at a research facility to keep her on her toes with her nose buried in a Belgian study on the psychology of incarceration. Sometimes, when the light turns red and she comes to a staggering halt in front of a crossing, her life seems to slow just enough for her to see the flawless mechanical engineering behind it. For all intents and purposes, she is the epitome of mediocre excellence.
Then there is the incident at the train station - a needle jutted into her arm, but its contents never dispatched - that puts her on edge. She waits restlessly for a postcard, for even the poorest explanation or the most obvious lie. A phone call, a familiar coat standing on her doormat. Nothing.
The following Thursday on the street after Elle's, four blocks from home, her mounting paranoia finds a man in the shadows so very obviously following her and her heart is in her throat again. She clutches her purse close, considers how fit her shoes are for running and all the while she counts that he takes three steps for every two of hers. In the flurry of a night bus stopping in the fifteen meters that separate them to dispatch a group of drunken students, she bolts.
She is not stupid enough to go home where she could be taken from her own bed without warning, not when whoever is looking for her knows where to find her on her way there. Madeleine thanks her mother's insistence on always paying in cash (It helps you keep track of your spending, cheri.) and checks into a hotel under a false name with crumpled notes slammed haphazardly on the counter. If the receptionist notices the trembling of her hands, she does not say a word about it.
All she can afford is a room in which she can hardly stand sideways next to the bed, but as far as life insurance goes, it is cheap, and she lets her frightened little heart settle in her chest before she starts crying. Somehow she always knew this would happen. She admonishes herself now for not thinking about it seriously before, because now she will have to call her father.
She stares at her phone, sniffling and practising her opening line until she no longer sounds like she's been bawling her eyes out for half an hour. All she gets is the voicemail and she represses the urge to scream.
"Whatever you did, fix it," Madeleine says and hangs up. She considers the walls for a long while, the blue duvet cover that swallows her navy dress until she is only four limbs and thudding head laying in a bed. She sleeps on the fuzziness of five liquor bottles from the minibar and wakes to the wake up call she ordered for six am sharp.
When she tiptoes to breakfast, head still spinning from adrenaline and alcohol, there is a package left for her at the reception. The insignia is one she's seen a hundred times on the back of the letters her father used to send home when she was little and Madeleine decides to forgo breakfast to slip back up to her room with the envelope.
Minutes later she stares down at the bed cluttered with a fake passport, birth certificate, work certificate, a dossier on living with a false identity, a plane ticket, a credit card, and an accepted job posting for Médecins Sans Frontières in Paraguay. In the middle lies an unsigned note which simply reads: It would be best for you to leave to country for a while.
The mere notion of living in such deceptive existence displeases her, but perhaps it has always been all smoke and mirrors when it comes to her father. If her life did not depend on this, she might expose her father to the police for the hell of it. As it is, she finds herself on an airplane headed South-East as Madeleine Swann, her prized middle name erased from this new, false life.
Watching the dwindling life below, she is shaken by a hot flash of anger at having even the last little bit of her integrity erased. She thinks of the gunshot in the kitchen, the creak of a door in the dead of night in their suite at l'Americain, the strange silver ring her father used to spin around his finger at the dinner table when he thought no one was looking. All he has ever done, even in giving her life, is take from her, and this time she vows to abandon him out of sheer spite, to crawl out of this pit he's inadvertently dug for her.
Following the collapse of a dam, Madeleine Swann finds herself in an intermediate town that's half wiped out just in time for the celebration of Pentecost Sunday. The wailing of the people she bandages, the complaints of spoiled food by mothers whose children she bathes and inspects with a critical eye, none of it is out of order for her because it seems to her that there is always a holiday to be celebrated with grandeur.
But, lying in a bunk in the late afternoon, she hears the bells of the salvaged church on the other side of town ring for High Mass and she is reminded of her, or rather Madeleine Lie Toussard's, birthday. It does not fall on Whit Monday this year, nor does she intend to celebrate it the following week. The birthday on her passport, the one issued to the woman she has become over the course of two long years, is marked as the 27th of October and that is what she tells people when they ask her.
The makeshift tent clinic is flooded with new patients and she cuts her break short to help the staff out.
The Hoffler clinic is a blinding speck of glass in a barren snowscape. She finds it ugly and cold much like the climate, yet it serves as a nice contrast to the constant multicoloured heat of Latin America. She buys a new wardrobe in whites, and greys, and blacks to fit her office and mountains beyond the window. One day, still uncomfortable in the silence and always cold, she watches an avalanche erupt somewhere in the distance and swallow half a mountainside in a cloud of pure white dust. Her next appointment is an investment banker curious to explore the effects of an early childhood trauma on his life choices. It's all very dull, high and detached and wrapped in a safety blanket made out of money. Madeleine Swann prefers it to swatting away mosquitos throughout her waking hours to stay among the living without her father's aid.
It is not what she envisioned for herself, not as a child, nor a more well educated adult carving out the path of a now diverted life. She documents the cases with meticulous care nonetheless, her observations of their thoughts spoken onto a tape recorder in calm French to be deciphered into a case file in English at a later point in time. Her newest client catches her by surprise as she is reading up the progress of the last and she gestures for him to sit as she finishes up.
"Mr Bond, my name is Dr Madeleine Swann," she says in a rapid switch from one case to the next, eyeing the man before her.
He wears the classic poker face of a closed off man and an evasiveness to match, although she notes his body language is uncommonly open, but she wouldn't go as far as to call him intriguing.
"I see you left this final question blank. What is your occupation?"
"Well, that's not the sort of thing that looks good on a form," he says with a lopsided smile that reminds her of her father's.
"And why is that?"
"I kill people." An almost apologetic smile brushes over his lips as though he pities her for the way the world drops out from under her. "Small world, huh?"
The worst thing about it? She does not even know which side the man before her is killing for, assuming there are only two. "Where is he?" Madeleine asks, knowing it is too late even as the words leave her mouth.
Mr Bond says, "Your father is dead," and the words sound in her mind like a gunshot.
~FIN~
Notes
1. The title is an adapted version of the line "The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes" (16) from T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
2. Pentecost is a (in this case) catholic holiday to "commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit on the early followers of Jesus". Essentially it celebrates the establishment of the church. The holiday falls onto the Sunday fifty days after easter. The following Monday, known as Whit Monday, is a public holiday in some countries including France. My mild obsession with the holiday stems from reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "Love in the Time of Cholera" one too many times for my English LangLit final.
3. Madeleine's lines to her father in the corridor should translate to "Yes indeed, Papa." and "Please, come in." respectively. As per usual, I don't speak French, so please do correct me if either is wrong. There is only so much cross referencing various dictionaries and Google Translate can do.
4. The story around Madeleine's change in name is based on a recent tumblr post by isthisrubble which falls in line with my opinions of some of the things SPECTRE left to desire in terms of her identity and history.
5. While Médecins Sans Frontières does work in Paraguay (I checked), but the dam incident is entirely fictional.
6. This series was inspired by the premise of Carol Ann Duffy's poem collection "The World's Wife". I highly recommend "Demeter" as a companion piece for this fic. It perfectly captivates the other side of this story, namely Madeleine in the eyes of her father.