by Michelle Wan
•
La Binette was on the big-nosed postman Gaston’s route. For years, his canary-yellow minivan had bucketed past the place, making only infrequent stops. There was rarely any mail for the residents, mostly circulars and bills that the facteur deposited in a rusty iron box set on a cairn of stones at the roadside. Never had he needed to negotiate the narrow track leading from the road to the farmhouse itself. Just as well, for Gaston, like others, preferred to stay well clear of mother and son.
However, on this afternoon there was a delivery requiring a signature. From the Electricité de France, so it had to have something to do with the electricity. As he turned off onto the muddy, rutted lane, Gaston reflected that, in all the time he had come down the valley, he could not recall actually having spoken to either of the La Binette pair. Today, he wondered nervously if Vrac would be around. Of the two, he thought he would rather deal with the woman. Once or twice he had seen Vrac standing on a hillside roaring unintelligibly at the sky, or glimpsed him in the rain, moving like an animal among the trees. Besides, he didn’t think Vrac could read or write, let alone sign his name.
Gaston pulled up in front of the farmhouse. The day was turning overcast and windy, with the suggestion of an impending storm. Reluctantly he heaved his bulk out of the minivan. A crow rose flapping from the roof.
“Allo?” he shouted from the bottom of the six deep steps leading up to the front door. In addition to its unusual style, he noted that the house was built of darker stone than normal, giving it a damp and secretive air.
Laboriously, he climbed up to the elevated stoop. He knocked. Silence. The front of the house had one window. Peering through grimy glass, he could make out nothing of the darkened interior.
Not here, he concluded, considerably relieved. He wondered if he could get away with putting the EDF envelope and the signature form in the mailbox at the roadside with a note instructing la Binette to sign the form and leave it for him to pick up the following day. He wasn’t really supposed to do that, and he had no reason to believe she would comply. Ah well, he supposed he’d just have to try again.
As he turned to descend the steps, he saw, with a sense of shock, that la Binette was waiting for him at the bottom. She wore overalls tucked into knee-high rubber boots, and a black jersey with the sleeves pushed up. With her massive forearms and her birthmark obliterating one eye, she reminded Gaston uncomfortably of a beached pirate.
“Ah, madame,” Gaston stammered. Perhaps she had been in the byre at her cheesemaking, for her hands were wet, and her wig, the color of dirty straw, was tipped askew over her forehead. Fleetingly he wondered what had become of her own hair, not that he would have dared to ask.
“What?” she said. Her voice was hollow and harsh, like wind blowing down a chimney.
“Er,” he said, “it’s this. For you.” Tentatively he held out the electricity board envelope.
She ignored it, glaring balefully into his face.
“What do I want with that?”
“Eh bien, how am I to know?” he gabbled apprehensively, realizing that it was probably a final notice of arrears. “However, as you can see, it requires your signature.”
She spat, aiming for a spot just off his right toe.
“Madame!” Gaston pulled his foot back. “I am only doing my duty.”
At that point Vrac appeared, rounding the corner of the house and stopping up short behind his mother. Together the pair of them blocked the facteur’s way like standing stones. Gaston thought how much bigger Vrac seemed up close. He wore dungarees over a greasy sweater and a pair of steel-rimmed sunglasses with one lens missing, giving him a patch-eyed look and the bizarre appearance of parodying his mother’s birthmark. The expression on his large, misshapen face was not friendly, and he smelled strongly of sheep.
Gaston tried affability. “Come. I’ll leave it here, shall I?” He placed the envelope on the third step. “And if you’ll just sign this. A mere formality.” He extended the required paperwork.
Vrac gave a sudden, braying laugh. He moved close enough to poke Gaston hard in the chest and plucked the form from the postman’s hand. Scowling, he goggled at it upside down and right side up, turned it over, and gave another burst of mirthless laughter. Momentarily, Gaston was taken in by this dumb show. Then he caught a gleam of malicious cognition in Vrac’s eye.
“Monsieur,” he cried, somewhat shrilly but with all the dignity he could muster, “I really must—”
But Vrac merely stuffed the paper inside the bib of his dungarees and stalked away.
“Madame,” Gaston appealed to the mother, who still barred his path, “I regret to trouble you, but I must have that back. With your signature.”
“Toi.” Her eyes had never left his face. “Va t’faire foutre,” she directed, telling him crudely what he could do with his form and his signature together.
It was not a hot day, but Gaston found as he edged past—she left him barely enough room to get by without actually having to brush up against her—that he was perspiring heavily. Defeated, he scrambled into his minivan and drove rapidly away.
•
Les Colombes was also on Gaston’s route. He had no mail for the de Sauvignacs, but after his experience at La Binette, Gaston felt that he owed himself a stop at the château. He needed something to calm his nerves. He was so shaken that he ground his gears twice as he downshifted to take the steep ascent.
The château was, of course, altogether a different matter, for the de Sauvignacs had once been, and for many remained, the first name in the land. Henri de Sauvignac père, now long dead, was still remembered with affection as a dotty old gentleman with a passion for botany. The son, the present Henri de Sauvignac, was a more worldly character, known in his heyday for his elegance, high living, and appetite for women. He had taken his wife, Jeanne Villiers that was, a willowy, compliant creature, from a well-to-do bourgeois family. In the sixties, the couple had made a handsome grouping with their two little boys, driving about grandly in a shiny new Citroën with hydropneumatic suspension, the first of its kind in the area.
Of the two de Sauvignac sons, Alain, the elder, had grown up, studied civil engineering, and gone abroad to work in places like Gabon and Cameroon. Patrice, the younger, had not grown up because he had drowned in a pond in the woods below Les Colombes when he was seven. It was a terrible tragedy, and some said that Jeanne de Sauvignac had never fully recovered from the loss.
Now in their seventies, the de Sauvignacs lived almost like recluses but still commanded respect. Aristocratic folk, Gaston called them, with an old-fashioned sense of ce qu’il faut. Even on days when he had no mail for them, he frequently made the steep drive up just to look in on the old people. In winter Monsieur was often good for a small tot of rum, in summer a refreshing coup de blanc, either of which Gaston took standing on the stone floor of the cavernous kitchen.
In return, the facteur gave them the latest local gossip and ran the odd commission, rub for Madame’s rheumatism from the pharmacy in Belvès, cigarettes and newspapers for Monsieur from the Chez Nous emporium in Grissac.
The de Sauvignacs still had their Citroën. Like them, it had grown old but retained a certain dusty cachet. From time to time, Monsieur might still be seen puttering sedately along the roads, raising a hand in greeting to the locals, and stopping occasionally to offer, with seigniorial courtesy, directions to lost motorists and rides to bewildered hitchhikers passing through his territoire.
•
As he neared the top and turned onto the path running up to the rear of the great house, Gaston remembered that he had been meaning in any case to ask the de Sauvignacs about the pigeonnier. If nothing else, it would give them something to chat about and be good for his coup de blanc.
He had shown the photocopy earlier in the week to his fellow facteurs (keeping quiet about Mara’s cash incentive), with no luck. Now, standing in the vast, damp stone kitchen of the château, he watched anxiously as Henri de Sauvignac studied th
e, by now, much-wrinkled photocopy. Before looking at it, the old gentleman had first taken his glasses from his jacket pocket and polished the lenses with care before setting them on his beaklike nose. A once imposing man, he was now stooping and cadaverous, but still meticulous in his habits.
“Hundreds like it in the region, m’boy.” He shook his head and passed the photocopy to his wife. Jeanne de Sauvignac, trailing several layers of shawls, looked about for her glasses, could not find them, and ended by squinting ineffectually at the paper at arm’s length.
“Dear me,” she murmured with an absent, lopsided smile that always made Gaston think of village idiots, even though he was ashamed to harbor such a disrespectful thought in association with someone belonging, if only by marriage, to the first family of the region.
“You’ll have a time finding one among so many,” Monsieur observed. “Things have a way of blending in. One gets so used to seeing them, buildings, people, one no longer in fact sees them, not for what they really are.” He seemed to imply that Gaston would be destined to pass by that particular pigeonnier every day of his life and never recognize it.
Gaston thought disconsolately that this might be true. He tried to envision all the pigeon houses that he routinely encountered. Many were attached to houses. Others, like the one Mara was looking for, were solitary, freestanding towers. It could have been one of them or none of them. Pity the detail was so hard to make out. Merde of a print. Why couldn’t the pigeonnier have been one of the really distinctive ones, like that self-important cross-timbered block set on six stone pillars he’d once seen in Quercy?
“She’s offering a reward.” Gaston felt it appropriate to impart the information to the de Sauvignacs. A thousand euros wasn’t to be sneezed at and would establish that his inquiry was serious.
“Hmmm,” said Henri judiciously. “As much as that. But you have only her word that she’ll pay up.”
“She seemed sincere,” Gaston ventured cautiously. “Of course, I know with foreigners it’s say one thing, do another. Still, it’s worth keeping one’s eyes open.”
“Of course. You do that, m’boy,” agreed Henri and offered Gaston the longed-for coup.
“But what does this person want with a pigeonnier?” Madame’s watery blue eyes goggled at the postman. Her dry, yellowy-gray hair was as faded as her face. “Will she buy it?”
“Ah. There’s a story,” exclaimed Gaston, enjoying the cool trickle of wine down his parched throat. And he then spun the de Sauvignacs his version of Beatrice Dunn, enjoying their scandalized attention.
“Funny how life brings things back around,” he wound up his narrative with a deep, philosophical sigh. “First la canadienne disparue. Now, all these years later, the sister.”
“Indeed,” Henri said dryly.
Jeanne, bony beneath her shawls, stirred restlessly.
“Well,” said Gaston, feeling it was time to change the subject, “what do you hear from—where is he now?”
“Douala,” Jeanne said at once.
“Ah, yes,” Gaston nodded knowingly. Their son, Alain, was off in Africa, constructing roads. It seemed to the postman that he could have built a superhighway all the way around the continent, he’d been at it so long. For twenty years at least, Gaston had carried up letters bearing colorful stamps from places like Abidjan and Libreville. “Still building things?”
“Bridges.” The mother gathered her draperies primly about her. “He’s their, what do you call it, washout expert. Very important work.”
“Head operations engineer, actually,” corrected her husband.
“It rains a lot out there, you know,” Jeanne confided. “Bridges are always washing out. He works terribly hard. Of course, it has its compensations. He’s much in favor with influential people in the Cameroon. He’s been to the presidential palace, you know.” Her rusty voice pealed with pride. “And he speaks the local patois quite well.”
Gaston had heard much of but never clapped eyes on this prodigy, who seemed to like living in places where things collapsed in the wake of tropical storms. For his part, the facteur couldn’t understand this preference for the jungle, with mosquitoes and snakes, over the healthy Dordogne countryside.
“His contract has just ended, so he’s coming back to be with us.” Madame’s puckered cheeks went pink with pleasure. “For a visit, before he lines up something else. He’ll be home any day now.”
That was another side of the Dordogne, Gaston reflected. Young people fleeing for lack of work, only the old remaining. A countryside abandoned to foreign holiday cottagers, or people from Paris who spent two weeks a year in run-down family houses that stood empty and shuttered the rest of the time. How many were like the de Sauvignacs, left stranded, waiting eagerly and pathetically for the next visit from children who had moved on to other lives, other worlds?
Although, in the de Sauvignacs’ case, Gaston had heard that it was some problem between father and son that had caused Alain to leave home and stay abroad. Something to do, perhaps, with Alain’s objection to his father’s profligate ways, his chronic fondness for a bit of skirt. No doubt about it, the old fellow had been a spender and chaser in his day. Women from Limoges to Bordeaux, until his wife’s money had given out. It was rumored that this was the bone of contention: Henri de Sauvignac had run the estate into the ground, and the son sweated in Africa to keep Les Colombes in de Sauvignac hands.
Outside, it had grown very dark, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. A wind was building up. Tendrils of ivy tapped fretfully on the small panes of the kitchen window, and Gaston could see trees swaying in the distance. He drained his glass, saluted—for some reason with the de Sauvignacs he always raised a respectful forefinger to the side of his cap by way of greeting and leavetaking—and hurried out to his van.
The first drops of rain were already smacking down, forming big craters in the dust on his windshield. He looked back. Husband and wife seemed to be clinging together in the obscure opening of the kitchen doorway, Madame’s draperies whipped by a moist wind. He had the impression of a pair of ragged crows balancing precariously on their perch.
Rapidly he backed out of the overgrown courtyard, where in better times tradesmen had called with crates of champagne, oysters in season, truffles, and foie gras; and where nowadays few but Gaston, with his belly and beetroot nose, ever came.
In the cover of the shrubberies at the corner of the house, a large shape stood motionless as the postal vehicle bumped off down the narrow lane. Vrac stepped out onto the weed-choked, rain-spattered flagstones.
Jeanne saw him first and uttered a startled cry. She stamped her foot. “Go away. Shoo!”
Henri looked up and frowned. Then he said, “Ah, it’s you. Come here.”
FIVE
“You’ve got a fouine,” said Mara.
She was balanced precariously on the courtyard wall, peering at the rough tile ends of Prudence Chang’s roof. Down below, Jazz was whining and trying to scramble up after her.
Prudence, dressed in a smock like the figures in the Quimper ware she collected, frowned. Sunlight gleamed on her faultless casque of black hair. “I’m from L.A.,” she complained. “The only wildlife you get there is Homo sapiens. So what’s a foo-een in anglais?”
“A marten. Like a weasel.” Mara shooed Jazz off and jumped down. “They like old stone houses. Look, you can see where it’s been getting in. That hole right there. It’s made its den in your roof.”
“Oh, swell,” said Prudence.
Like many of the expatriates coming back to the region for the summer, Prudence had called Mara first. If the toilets didn’t work, if mice had chewed the wiring over the winter, if renovations were needed, Mara knew exactly what to do and whom to contact—fixers like Edouard, who would block up Prudence’s roof; Kranz, the plumbing whiz; masons and painters who attended to damage done over the winter by wind and water. She also subcontracted work to a quaint trio of unmarried sisters in Limeuil who specialized in custom sewin
g.
“You’ll have to leave it,” Mara advised, brushing her hands off on her jeans. She had stopped by to check on a delivery of tiles from Pablo for the renovation of Prudence’s kitchen. The stainless-steel double sink had been installed, but the new tiles for the counters had not arrived, despite the dealer’s fervent promise to expedite them.
“Leave it?” Prudence objected. “Mara, it crashes around up there at night like a drunk husband. I’m losing my beauty sleep. And it smells.”
“It’ll smell worse if you close the hole up now. It’s rearing a litter up there, and the lot of them will die. Wait until the babies are grown and leave the den. I’ll get someone to seal it up for you then.”
“Oh goody,” said Prudence unenthusiastically. “I can hardly wait.”
“By the way,” said Prudence, walking Mara to her car. “That landscaper you set me up with.”
“Julian Wood?”
“He’s been asking questions about you.”
“Oh?” Mara felt her cheeks go warm. “Like what?”
“Like what do I know about you. If you’re attached. I think he’s interested. Sweetie, you’re turning pink.”
Mara gave a snort of laughter. “He’s fixated on orchids. I doubt if he thinks about anything but flowers. Besides, he’s not my type. And I haven’t turned pink.”
Prudence cocked an Oriental eye at her. “What’s your type, then?”
Mara was sure that the pink was now a dark red. “Oh,” she said evasively, “someone a little more urbane. Less—less botanical. For heaven’s sake, Prudence, I don’t know.”