by Rose Tremain
“Ah well, so much the better,” Mme. de la Brosse said to Lisette. “It’s an out-dated custom. I only kept it on for Anatole’s sake. Take the cakes and the other rubbish home to your family, dear.”
“Thank you, Madame. But I still don’t understand. Why did no one turn up?”
Mme. de la Brosse shrugged. “They’ve forgotten the old ways. It’s not my fault. We live in a disrespectful time.”
Mallélou didn’t go to the mass. He hated snow and was growing, in these last months of his decline, to hate God. Why had God sent His son among ignorant Jewish fishermen who needed everything explaining to them in crass anecdotes about virgins and weddings? Why had he not arrived among the sensible burghers of Bremen, made them his apostles and baptised them in the Weser? That plaster-of-Paris Jesus at Ste. Catherine had started to seem stupid to Mallélou, anyway. Jesus with a broken thumb: typical French peasant ineptitude.
“I’ll stay with the old man,” he told Gervaise, as she and Klaus put on their coats. “Someone has to stay with him. We can’t all go rushing off to get our sins forgiven.”
“What sins?” asked Gervaise curtly.
Mallélou looked from her to Klaus and grinned. “Plenty, Gervaise!”
“And you? You don’t think you’ve got any?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’m happy to stay with the Maréchal, you know. You go to the Mass.”
But Mallélou started to push them out into the yard. “Go on, off you go. You leave me in peace . . .”
Wearily, then, he climbed the stairs to the Maréchal’s room, went in without knocking and sat down by the old man’s bed. The room was cold, with the snow pressing and mounting up against the window, but the smell in it was foetid and Mallélou tugged out a grimy handkerchief and sat with this pressed to his nose. Half asleep and dreaming of his dead sons, the Maréchal felt the presence of Mallélou near him and opened his eyes and said: “Not long, eh, Mallélou?”
Mallélou stared at him over the handkerchief.
“For me or for you, Maréchal?”
“You, you’re young compared to me. But you’re tired of it, Mallélou. I can see that. In your eyes. Life’s hard. It’s no good being tired. You’ve got to have the stomach for it.”
“Eat. Sleep. Shovel some shit. Have a nip of wine. There’s no point to it, is there? Even my cock’s limp as a dead bloody sparrow. Not like in the old days. I was chipper then. Horny as shit then. In that signal hut where I worked, we had this ashtray the shape of a woman . . .”
“You’ve told me, Mallélou.”
“. . . I used to put the fag-end right there. Burn her right in her black pussy every damn morning! Fantastic, non?”
Mallélou stared down at his feet and noticed that his sabots were worn and scratched and that there was a hole in one of his socks. He sat staring at these familiar things for a long time, remembering the long-ago days of the signal hut and repeating in an almost inaudible whisper “Fantastic, non? Fantastic, non?” A choking and gurgling sound from the bed disturbed his reverie and he looked up. With his owl’s eyes wide open on the falling snow and his snowy hair flying like flax across the pillow, the Maréchal had died.
Now it’s morning. The sun’s brilliance on the white landscape is startling. Gervaise sleeps. Upstairs, the body of the Maréchal, washed and dressed by Gervaise and Klaus in the silence of one o’clock on Christmas morning, waits for the undertakers, covered with a clean white sheet. Gervaise dreams of the party she gave the week Klaus became her lover. It was high summer and they set up a long table in the yard and got pissed as lords in the sunshine and danced to accordion music on the dry, flinty earth of the barnyard with the hens pecking at their skipping legs and the guineafowl flapping and screeching on all the roofs.
Mallélou wakes and stares at the ski-ing poster. The snow’s here now. If he were young, he’d like to dress up in a stretchy yellow suit with a number on his back and go tearing down mountains, hearing the ice under his feet. He blows his nose. The smell of his handkerchief reminds him of the old man lying and waiting for his coffin and he shudders. “Let me,” he asks the Aryan God of his imaginings, “have the stomach for spring.”
Klaus wakes in Gervaise’s bed. He can feel, is the weight of her deep sleep, her sadness. She was, in her heart and even sometimes in her head, the Maréchal’s child. Her care of him was daily proof of her love. To her land, to her animals, to her sons, to the Maréchal, she was as steadfast as the seasons. Let no one and nothing else, thinks Klaus, desert her.
He gets up without waking her and goes out to the cows, lodging himself against their warm bodies to milk them. Christmas Day. In Heidelberg, his mother will be opening the present he sent her, a set of wicker canisters for the storing of angelica and peel and vanilla pod. And here, later in the day, they will sit, the three of them, Klaus, Gervaise and Mallélou, as they always sit round the Christmas table, decorated with ivy and paper roses, and eat rich goose, and the fumes of their heavy meal will waft upstairs and creep into the Maréchal’s cold room under the door. Gervaise will be solemn and silent. Mallélou will drink to distance himself from the body above his head. He, Klaus, will note that with each year’s passing, the greater seems to be this couple’s need of him.
The milking done, Klaus comes slowly back down the lane. The sight of Larry’s Granada in its blanket of snow makes him remember, for the first time that particular morning, all the afternoons of the building of the pool, with the light going, with Larry urging him on, with the mosaic slowly, inch by inch, taking shape. In his heavy snowboots, he crunches round past Larry’s silent and shuttered house and stands some way from the swimming pool, looking with a perplexed smile at what remains of it – a shallow basin in the soft contours of the snow, an indentation. Gone, he thinks. Gone, as if it had never been.
Then he hears an insistent tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap and he throws his head back and looks up at the empty trees and the blue sky and sees, at the Maréchal’s high window, Gervaise beckoning him in. He waves to her and turns towards the lane. The sun dances on his golden head. For a man his size, his tread is light.