Throwback Thursday: ‘The Bumblebee’s Daughter’ by Robin Malcolm

Sabine Derosier did not believe in ghosts. The idea of transparent apparitions lurking in corridors was the stuff of fancy. She believed in the tangible. But the fact was, she was haunted, and on her darkest days she was forced to admit that her mother’s words were spectre-like. They teased her, followed her, drove her back to the last place she wanted to go. Back to the village of her childhood. 

Sabine, go back to Tignes. 

She walked across the moonscape of a lakebed gouged from the French Alps. Behind her, an imposing dam spanned the valley, attended to by a swarm of maintenance equipment. Before her, the skeleton of a town exposed by the draining of a reservoir lay in its grave under a cloud-filtered sun. 

A shovel resting on her shoulder, Sabine avoided the scattered tourists. She marvelled at the tarmac under her boots, intact after thirty years under water. The soles of her shoes had walked this road a thousand times, shopping with Maman, on the way to school, or to church. The boulangerie had toppled, though she thought she caught a whiff of baking baguettes. A caved-in roof marked the grocer’s, where Beaufort cheese, fresh pears, and bundles of leeks were once displayed. Of the proud hotel that had hosted skiers and other visitors, only the ground floor still stood, its stone walls like the rib cage of a long-dead memory. 

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.” 

She started at the man’s sudden appearance. He was as thin as the branch of a willow, and wore a frayed woollen coat and trousers that sagged at the knees. His greeting was that of a man who knew her, then realized he did not, but he regained himself quickly, tipping his hat to reveal a head of silver. “Angelo Donati, at your disposition.” 

“Bonjour, Monsieur Donati.” 

“Just Angelo, if you please.”  

“Sabine,” she murmured. “Enchantée.”  

He eyed the shovel slung over her shoulder. “Tell me, mademoiselle, are you an archaeologist, come to dig among the ruins of Tignes?” 

“No.” Her light laugh belied her nervousness. She surveyed the landscape, looking for police who might forbid her to dig. “I was born in this village.”

“Ah, so you are looking for buried treasure? A memory of your childhood, then?” He considered the mud-caked ruins before them.

“In a manner of speaking.” He struck close to the truth, though she did not know what she had come for. She only heard her mother’s self-reproach, replaying in her head like crumbs left behind from a dream: “Je regrette.”

Maman’s hand had plucked at the bedcovers, “I am sorry, Sabine.” 

Sabine had taken her mother’s hand gently, the skin paper-thin, brutalized by the chemotherapy. “You regret what?” 

“We should have told you.” Her mother coughed, a wracking sound that seemed to come from her soul. “We only meant to protect you from pain. I am sorry. We should have told you.”

“Told me what?” 

But Maman had yielded to sleep.