Natasha Reverde

Who they are

A woman in a village near Angevin, with a cottage behind a blue door and a house-cleaning business with three employees. She is Spook Street’s most intimate witness to Les Arbres, and she gives River Cartwright the account everything afterwards rests on: the Russian, English, German and Czech men, the American called Frank whom everyone obeyed, the six or seven boys kept on the premises and taught by a Frenchman called Jean, and the fire that came after the cars left for Poitiers.

In 1990 she was eighteen and pregnant by Yevgeny, the ex-KGB man at the house. She left the child behind when she went to Paris — she does not dress this up — and spent ten or eleven years there, working as a prostitute, “and that is not something I feel shame for”. She came back after her father died, and Frank threatened her off the property when she tried to return to it. She has been in the village ever since, cleaning other people’s houses.

On the page she is direct, unsentimental and quick. She says “Bertrand?” at her own door before she can stop herself, because River has Bertrand’s face; then she asks who sent him, decides the answer is bad news, and takes him in anyway. She gives him tea, her history and her photographs, and he takes one of them and lies to her about what he will do with it.

What they want

Stated: to know what happened to her son. She asks River who sent him, keeps a photograph of Patrice at ten, and by C12 River is using her name as a claim on Patrice — that he has met his mother, and that she wants to know he is alive.

What Spook Street shows her wanting is smaller and harder to get: an account of the place that took her child and then shut its gate on her. She offers River the only thing she has, which is testimony, and she is never told what it cost.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C06 — Says “Bertrand?” at her door before she can stop herself, asks who sent him, and when he names Victor tells him it is bad and invites him in.
• C07 — Describes the commune as it was in 1990, tells her own story from eighteen onwards, shows River photographs of Bertrand as a boy and of a child called Yves she regards with distaste, and names her son Patrice.
• C12 — Offstage: River tells Patrice on the Embankment that he has met his mother, and is slapped for it.

Tells

The name said before the thought arrives — “Bertrand?” — and then the correction. The flat refusal of shame, offered before anyone has asked for it. The way she names the boys one by one and gives each a verdict, as a woman who knew them as children and did not like all of them.

Open questions

Whether she ever learns that Patrice is dead, and who would tell her. Whether River’s lie about the photograph is ever going to be paid off — he pockets it and says he will tell her if he finds her son. What Frank’s threat actually consisted of. And what she knows about Bertrand that she chose not to say to a stranger wearing his face.