It wasn’t the nicest thing she had done, telling Arnaud about the doctor’s Friday advances but she was so convinced of his affair with Marie and it guaranteed her the physical freedom she needed from him while ensuring he remained in the study.
She made a room for Marie beside the study; the children would sleep on the first floor with her. Lucie told Dr Clareon when he came the next Friday to check her medication that her husband now knew all about what he had done to his patient in his little chair and that all that would have to stop and would never happen again. Dr Clareon looked disappointed and he breathed heavily when he checked her pulse and her blood pressure, but otherwise she was left alone.
Which meant that Lucie had almost everything she needed. She had her home and she had her child. She began to put on weight. From now on her husband and the amorous doctor would leave her alone. She would never be tampered with again.
July arrived with a heatwave. Marie and Paul were due to come on the day of the burning plane ceremony.
All was in perfect order. Lucie was looking forward to the village gathering up on the heath and she sang to herself in the kitchen as she bent over the sideboard pounding aubergines to a pulp. She spread these on the pastry bases. Then she sliced potatoes into flakes, which she lay in a dish she had rubbed with garlic. Then she poured milk and cream over them.
At eleven, Veronique from the house closest to the chateau came with a basket of seventeen eggs for the crème caramel. Veronique was shaped like a goose; long and stiffly necked, with a wide saggy behind. But Lucie had picked Veronique because she was more intelligent, it seemed, than most of the women in the village. She was a solid, loyal-looking person. And her husband was the most successful of the local winemakers, which gave her social standing and influence. With Marie and Paul on the way down from Paris with Arnaud, it was important for Lucie to put on a display to show her guests when they arrived how little she minded them being there, how happy she was in general, how well liked in the village. So Veronique was coming with the eggs for the crème caramel. They would make it together, the two of them. They would talk then and exchange all manner of intimacies, which Lucie knew would bring them closer.
Lucie went out and stood in the sunlight, one hand up to shield her eyes. The wind rustled in the branches of the olives trees.
‘Will you not take my hand, Veronique?’
‘Mais non,’ whispered Veronique, husky with fat. ‘Mais non, Madame. Of course…’ She smiled and moved forward and her whole body seemed to tremble with the effort.
Lucie tried to make a sweeping gesture around the courtyard and this gave Veronique the cue that she desperately needed.
‘I am overwhelmed by the work you have done on the chateau. It looks so elegant, Madame. All these beds laid out for flowers, a herb garden here.’
Baseema circled Lucie’s leg, one hand holding her hair back from her face.
‘These olive trees are in exquisite shape. The shutters painted so neatly. You have done exceedingly well.’
Lucie bowed her head and felt the pleasure of her own humility. She said it wasn’t the case inside the chateau but she thanked Veronique for her comments and held the woman’s arm as they went inside for coffee. The doors to the salon and to the dining room, to the library and to Arnaud’s study were all closed. But the interior was shabby by comparison with the courtyard and there weren’t more than three pieces of furniture for poor Veronique to lay her eyes upon as she walked through the hall and into the kitchen. Lucie felt the embarrassment, the paucity of it, and she wrapped her cardigan about her chest, feeling the slightness of herself around the ribcage – so little flesh, so little womanly flesh – inside all this house. It was said that Veronique’s house was stuffed to the gunnels with objects. Of course, Lucie would have wanted to have some more furniture, some paintings on these walls, but all the money that Arnaud brought back from Paris or made in his vineyard went on the things they needed to live on and on the outside of the chateau, which seemed so much more important to him, she explained to Veronique.
‘He also has a mistress in Paris,’ said Lucie quietly. Behind her, Lucie felt the fat woman shuddering and she led her into the kitchen where a pristine table was laid with cakes in a small mountain of perfect pastel pink. Veronique gasped and sat quickly beside the cakes. Baseema came to the table with them and Lucie poured out the coffee. ‘It’s just that my husband is under pressure, you know? Sometimes he needs to let it go…’
The fat woman was nodding, her mouth open, and she tried to smile.
‘We met in a restaurant in Paris. On Avenue Georges V. It was spring, and the air was cool and clean again. There was quiet on the streets. The women walked by in colourful dresses that were not made of curtains or cheap cloth. Oh Veronique, there was nothing like that spring. They leant on the arms of the ones who had returned, and smiled and laughed, as if there had never been a war at all. In the restaurant they drank Coca-Cola and ate. Arnaud kept saying how badly he wanted to leave Paris, you know, to give the city up and live in the country making wine. He believed it would be good for us… But I… when I arrived here I felt so strange about it all. It was so quiet. So lonely. I couldn’t believe how bleak.’
‘Yes, I find it bleak also at times. Too quiet. But we take what we have, I suppose, and we try to make the best of it.’
‘I agree,’ said Lucie, sadly.
‘I don’t envy you, Madame Borja,’ said Veronique, breathily. ‘This place. There’s so much of it to get through. Even with staff I imagine that…’
‘Veronique, I never had staff to help me. I have done this alone.’
‘But the charwoman, Madame. The North African woman. You must miss her around the house, yes?’
Lucie silenced Veronique with the cold press of her little hand.
‘My husband believes me to be useless. It’s because I can’t have a child. His punishment is that I work in this place alone. Only Baseema helps me when we are not doing her tuition together.’
The Mayor’s wife was looking at Lucie as if she pitied her.
‘You also tutor the child?’
‘Everything,’ said Lucie. ‘I do everything alone.’
‘I can imagine that this has been terribly hard for you.’
‘The tragedy is that Baseema doesn’t need me any more. She is growing up. And away from me. Until now it has not been a thankless task. But the girl is making friends. She doesn’t want to be with me. She wants to go to school.’
‘Which is right,’ said the Mayor’s wife, patting Lucie’s hand. ‘You must try to be a strong mother. And let the child be.’
In her mind Lucie saw the women in the room above the hairdresser’s. She was still young but her womb was rotten and grey. She closed her eyes till the feeling went away.
Veronique was looking around. ‘And where is Monsieur Borja now?’
Lucie went quiet then, for effect. After a moment or two she got up from the table and she asked Veronique to come with her, she had something she would like her to see.
‘Please bring the cakes, Vero,’ she said sweetly. ‘We can eat them as we go. It’s not so big as you imagined, though, is it? It isn’t as big, as formidable as you thought it would be. For a long time, you know, I was so overwhelmed, so scared to leave the kitchen. For months, we lived in the kitchen alone. I can tell you are surprised by it.’
Upstairs, they walked along the corridor that ran the length of the first floor. There was a door at the end there and the key was rusty, so small it was almost swallowed by the keyhole. Lucie pressed her fingertips on the wood and pushed at the door. There was a narrow hallway, which was empty. The walls were mottled, the ceiling damp.
‘Where are we going?’ Veronique whispered.
‘The tower you see from the village, and from the road on the hillside. It’s quite lovely, and very secret in feel. Every morning I come here, and open the shutters.’
They rounded the corner and entered a small, round space painted ent
irely in white. There was a cot in there, and a new pine nursing chair with a thick white cushion on it. Through the windows the sunlight poured into this perfect white space.
Veronique gasped.
Lucie had read in a magazine that if you wanted to have a baby you had to make the space for it in your house. She had painted it white, staying up most of the night, painting long after Arnaud had come up and stood there wrinkling his nose because of the smell. There was just something about the room: small and secure with the window in an alcove, old arched shutters, with one that had warped a bit; and the way the light moved through it at around four or five in the afternoon, a rich orange glow that stretched in a long, thinning triangle on the wall, then began to fade in a line and disappeared. Who knew what battles had raged around the chateau in the past? Who knew what beings had crouched in here, keeping watch on the hillside for signs of invasion? Now there was no sign of war; it was the quietest, safest room in the house and for hours, in the afternoon, Lucie sat here, rocking her thoughts in the chair.
‘My husband is on his way down from Paris, Vero. With the son of his mistress. His mistress is my sister, Marie. For years they have been seeing each other while I have been left here alone, working on my knees to keep his home clean. You think I am overdoing it. I am. But the thing is, it’s all true. I can’t have a child, Veronique,’ she said, again. ‘I can’t have a child. But when Paul comes later on today, he will have this room that was meant for mine.’
Veronique closed her eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Lucie.’
‘I wanted it. So much.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you? Did you know this? Did the women of the village know that I was barren?’
‘Madame. I’m so sorry. I knew so little about you. We all, we know so little about you.’
And then, in the way that people turn when they get to see the vulnerable side of someone they thought was higher on the social scale than them, the Mayor’s wife stepped forward and kissed Lucie Borja on both white cheeks. She hugged her then and her big fat heart opened right up to receive the little bird who was so much in need of love and support and friendship. She kissed little Lucie’s head and she held her to her breast and let her cry.
They burnt the plane that night. The tail with its Nazi swastika showing had been found half buried in the woods. It was carried, in a ceremonial procession of trucks, up to the heath, where the village gathered to watch it burn in memory of those who had lost their lives fighting, or resisting the Vichy collaboration.
The largest paella anyone had ever seen was brought up from Canas and the couple who owned the épicerie in those days supplied the bread. The Café Union, as it was known back then, supplied the pastis and glasses.
When the villagers came traipsing up the hill at dusk, appearing first as miniatures beneath the pine trees, carrying their rugs and their babies and their bottles of wine, the air was already filling with the smell of saffron and the fish cooking in the rice. It was a party to top all others and there was music and dancing and children running around barefoot till the early hours of the morning. Meanwhile, in the centre of the turning field, on a tall bonfire, the black tail of that plane with its white insignia of fear lay fallen against the dark sky as if it had crashed into its own funeral pyre and buried its nose in the ground.
No one really knew why the tail of that plane had come to be there in the woods, nor where the rest of the plane had gone or been taken. They knew it wasn’t a fighter plane but a carrier, most likely personnel, that had veered off course before being shot down on its way in from the sea.
When Arnaud’s car pulled up at the heath that night, and the boy and the tall angular woman stepped out with him and came out to the place where all the villagers were standing in a circle round the fire, they saw Lucie chatting and laughing with everyone as if she were suddenly the most popular woman in the village.
In one of the pictures taken, Arnaud was standing in profile, the tip of a cigarette in his fingers in front of his mouth; a tall handsome man, exactly the kind of decent, honest fighting man the evening was put on to commemorate. And Madame Borja was standing to the left of the group, between the Mayor’s wife and the doctor, just a young woman with a band of chestnut-brown hair, a light silk shirt tucked into high slacks, smiling round the shoulders beside her.
The picture didn’t show the shame Arnaud was feeling nor the humiliation he experienced at finding his wife here, not lonesome and afraid and completely mad as he had suggested she was to Marie, when he had pleaded with her outside the apartment in Paris to come down – please come to the country, see for yourself how mad she is, how crazy, please! – but utterly at ease with these people, chatting, laughing with her friend Veronique on her elbow as she worked her way around.
Later Arnaud would say that Marie had simply wandered off somewhere, disgusted, he imagined, by the villagers’ behaviour, which became more and more raucous as the evening wore on, as if the black tail rising up above them was winding them up somehow, giving them an outlet for something that wasn’t quite patriotic but felt violent nonetheless.
A few of the men whipped round the edge to wake the women and children who had fallen asleep on their blankets.
The crowd moved towards the turning field and some of the men broke into drunken song, wartime songs, and the children rubbed the sleep from their eyes and rushed forward towards the plane, their faces lit up with excitement.
The young village boy they called Lollo walked on his own at the back, his hands in the pockets of his shorts, his shoulders hunched against the crowd.
It was Lollo’s thirteenth birthday, and he was used to celebrating his father’s memory, the village hero who had died as a hostage strapped to the roof of a retreating German truck.
People said it was because the boy was angry. The villagers were getting carried away with the plane, forgetting the heroes who had died for them to be free. Others said it was because he had this need to prove his bravery – he wanted to be a war hero. He waited till the fire was lit and the first of the flames began to take hold of the logs and the children were standing rapt at the front, holding their hands out to test the warmth. Lollo hurled himself onto the bonfire and scrambled up to the top in his bare feet and sat himself on the tail of the plane, straddled it and rocked himself backwards and forwards till the thing began to shake. He was holding his hand in the air like he was riding a bucking horse and people were screaming by now, some with enjoyment, others with fear. But after a few minutes, the boy hadn’t stopped and none of the people crowding round could comprehend what he was doing. The flames were leaping higher. A few of the bigger men came forward, shouting, trying to bat him down with their hands. But the boy didn’t come down. And the fire burnt and got more and more furious and began to lap round his legs and now everyone was screaming. It was then that two or three of the men went in to rescue him, leaping up into the flames and grabbing a piece of him, a foot, a hand, and pulling him down, him and the tail, sliding him down onto the ground and away from the fire.
Arnaud drove Lucie and Baseema and Paul back down the hill in his car. It was morning when they arrived at the chateau and the sun was coming up. Baseema was asleep before they even carried her out of the car. Arnaud laid her down in the cot bed in Lucie’s bedroom while Lucie put Paul to bed in the nursery and then went upstairs to check on Marie. She found her sister asleep in bed, sleeping off the journey. For a moment or two she stood and stared at her sister, who looked lovely asleep in the bed, with her hair all choppy and pixie-like on the pillow. She was glad her sister had got prettier. She was glad there was something pretty for Arnaud to put his thing into at last.
No, that didn’t worry her at all. What worried her was the effect that her sister’s boy would have on Baseema this summer. She could feel the change coming already, and she knew that soon, the child would let her down.
BASEEMA
Hotel Soleil, the Pyrenees, March 2006
P
aris was the mountain. The well-spring of immigrant violence came from that mountain and trickled down through the rest of the country, reaching various troubled industrial cities where it swirled under the bridges and went again, thinning out through the rest of France, where most people tended to live quietly with log-burning fires and family meals and some people, right out in the middle, couldn’t yet read. By the time it got to the Pyrenees, you wouldn’t know much about it; only a trickle of something cold and wet that leaked into conversation in the dining room but was nothing that couldn’t be muffled in a glass of something at the bar or mopped up with a beautiful new towel. If you kept yourself clear of the daily news, and you didn’t go into the banlieue, you probably wouldn’t know much about it. When it all came down to it, most people wanted peace and tranquility; they wanted to work an honest day and sleep, to eat with their children and come to these mountains to ski. They wanted as much of the bounty of niceties as their circumstances would allow. Baseema had put the bath towels she had ordered in all of the bathrooms now. They were white and fluffy and folded on a heated shelf. She had taken the delivery herself, out in the cold driveway this morning, from the man who complained about the roads. It was March. There was unemployment. In Paris there were labour protest riots. In the banlieue the immigrants were still torching cars. But that was Paris. And Baseema felt no connection to the city or to her roots. It was only Lollo who knew and liked to remind her. Maghreb, he would murmur when she made a sauce that was too piquant. Baseema ignored her husband when he said such things. She ignored him quite a lot these days and left him on his hateful sofa while she busied herself with the tasks that were required of her as hotel manager. Each morning she pulled on a clean turtleneck and coiled the thick length of her silvery hair into a neat bun at her neck. One of the chefs said that Baseema was like a swan.
We All Ran into the Sunlight Page 9