Page 14 of Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt

‘As you can imagine, I have many parents coming to me with their child geniuses, children who have had the best violins and suburban teachers, and are forced into hours of practice. Even if they are technically far more brilliant than you, I often feel that their soul is not in the music they play. In other words, they are performing monkeys, simply an extension of their parents’ egos. With you, this is definitely not the case, partly because you are an orphan and do not have parents, and your guardian is a man who hardly needsa child that does not belong to him to impress his friends when hehimselfis so impressive. So... even if there are flaws in the way you play and – no disrespect meant to your papa, but I would guess that he was not a professional?’

I shook my head, feeling as if Iwasbeing disrespectful, whatever Monsieur Ivan said.

‘Do not look so sad,petit monsieur,really. I can see he taught you with love. And in turn, he found a talent that was much greater than his own that he wished to nurture. What school are you at, at present?’

None. I cannot speak so I cannot go.

‘Even though it is none of my business, that is not good. I know you can speak, not just because I have been told so, but in the instinctive way you have stopped yourself replying to me since we have been talking. I think that you are surrounded by good, kind people and whatever terrible things have happened to you in the past, which have left you so damaged you dare not communicate, I hope for your sake there will be a time when you will. But no matter, I say that only as someone who has suffered much too, since I left Russia. So much suffering, so many wars in only fifteen years of humanity... You – and I – are both the result of it. One word of advice, my young friend: do not let those bad people win, all right? They have taken so much from you – your past, your family. Do not let them take your future too.’

Embarrassingly, my eyes filled with tears. I nodded slowly and then reached for my handkerchief.

‘Ah, I have made you cry, I apologise. I can be too free with my words. The good news is that if you have no school, it will be far easier to slot you into my timetable. Now then, let me see...’

I watched him pull out a slim diary from his jacket pocketand turn the pages over, which weren’t many, because it was only January.

‘So, we shall begin with two lessons a week. I can make eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, and two o’clock on a Friday. We shall see how we go, but I have a good feeling about you. Really, I do. So, I shall take you down to your nursemaid. She seems like a kind woman,’ he stated as he left the room and walked towards the lift.

I nodded.

Then I remembered, and hastily wrote some words.

How much for each lesson?

‘I shall speak to Monsieur Landowski, but we émigrés must help each other, mustn’t we?’

He slapped me on the back so hard that I nearly fell into the box inside the cage. He pulled the door closed, pressed a button and down we went. I wondered if it was how birds felt when they flew, but I doubted it somehow. Still, it was fun and I looked forward to doing it twice a week in the future.IfMonsieur Landowski and Monsieur Ivan could agree on a price.

‘Madame, your boy was a triumph! I shall be taking him for certain, at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, and two o’clock on a Friday. Tell Monsieur Landowski I shall telephone him to talk about the details. Safe travels home,’ he said. Then with a wink and a smile, Monsieur Ivan walked back towards the lift.

June 2008

I closed the pages of the old, leather-bound diary and stared through the window of the jet. My intention to sleep had vanished after reading the letter, which pointed me to the journal that now sat on my lap. The man who claimed to be my father – Atlas – wrote with such deep regret.

I cannot voice or begin to explain the love I have felt for you since I knew of your imminent arrival. Nor can I tell you in this letter the lengths I took to find you and your mother, who were both lost to me so cruelly before you were born...

The emotional weight of the past few weeks descended upon me, and I felt my eyes fill with tears. At that moment, I wished for nothing more than an embrace from Jock, my husband, who seemed to have been taken from me at the point when I needed him most.

‘If only you were here.’ I dabbed my eyes with one of the silk napkins that had been placed in the side pocket of the luxurious leather seat. ‘But you’d be loving this five-star treatment, that’s for certain.’

The letter from Atlas had promised his diary would contain the answers to my true heritage, but it was absolutelyenormous. After reading the first section, I was nowhere nearer to understanding his story or how I fitted in to it. Whoever my ‘father’ was, he’d clearly led quite the life. Even though the opening part of the diary had been written by a ten-year-old child, the voice was filled with maturity and wisdom, as if the young boy was inhabited by an old soul.

I shook my head, noting the pattern of the last few weeks was repeating itself. Every time I seemed to be getting close to the truth of my past, further mysteries were thrown up. Why was the boy pretending to be mute? Why did he feel that he could not reveal his true name? And what on earth had led to him being discovered, orphaned, under a hedge in the middle of Paris? If anything, it seemed that Atlas’s diary had begun too late for me to understand the full picture.

Mind you, I thought, if you’re going to land on anyone’s doorstep, the famed sculptor behind one of the new Seven Wonders of the World –Christ the Redeemer– wasn’t a bad person to end up with.

I sighed, feeling somewhat odd that Atlas had entrusted me, the apparent biological daughter he had never met, with the story of his life before allowing his beloved adopted children to read it. They were, of course, the ones who had known and loved their ‘Pa Salt’ so very much. Surely they deserved to discover his secrets first?

I tried to quell the flutters in my stomach as I contemplated the nature of my situation. Here I was, jetting out to join a bunch of total strangers on a superyacht pilgrimage to lay a wreath for a man that I, as of yet, felt no connection to. Yes, I’d very briefly met a couple of them, but it wasn’t enough to quell my nerves. I didn’t even know if the other women were aware that I was seemingly genetically related to their adoptive father. That, coupled with the fact Atlas had decreedthat I should be the first to read his diary, had the potential to make the sisters feel resentful.

I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that it had been the family who had attempted to trackmedown, rather than the other way around.

‘They want you there, Merry,’ I told myself.

Of course, the greatest source of comfort came from the knowledge that I was flying towards my own children, Jack and Mary-Kate, who were already aboard theTitan. I knew just how thrilled they would be by my decision to join them on the cruise. Even if the six sisters turned out to be total lunatics, at least my kin would be there to protect me, and to keep me sane throughout the trip. Apparently, the cruise was due to take six days in total – three days to sail theTitanfrom Nice to Delos and lay the wreath, and three days to return. Plus, if it all became too much, I could ‘abandon ship’ on the nearby island of Mykonos, which boasted an international airport.

There was a knock on the panel doors, which had been pulled in from either side of the cabin to form a partition between front and back.

‘Oh – hello?’ I said, pulled away from my thoughts.