Louisa sniffed. The shock of the cold water had roused her, but she had no desire to share the pool, ample as it was, with two screaming brats. She pushed her sunglasses up on her forehead and peered into the distance at the lacy silhouette of oak trees.
The wood began with a border of saplings standing diffidently apart from each other, their light foliage hardly shading the ground. ‘Why are those trees all the same size? Surely it can’t be forestry? Not with oaks. But they’re such even distances apart.’
Jane welcomed the change of subject. ‘Oh yes, that is planting, I know it is. The whole wood was planted centuries ago and managed ever afterwards on purpose for the mushrooms.’
‘Gosh. Gosh. Serious menu planning.’
‘When we bought the place, Madame Montaud put the price up for it. Terrain à cèpes. Michael was furious.’
‘They really do think about food, don’t they?’ Louisa was awed, and regarded the trees the way architectural tourists look at Chartres cathedral.
Almost joyous now that the scrutiny of her family had been dropped, Jane began an oblique appeal for understanding. ‘The wood was what started me learning about French food. I remember trying to tell Michael that it must have been planned for mushrooms, and he wouldn’t believe me.’
The conversation, idle at the time, had been a fulcrum in her life. It had taken place out there, among the young trees, when they were in the first stage of their marriage and any days away from the infant demands of Imogen were precious. She had been charmed to discover a corner of the world where Michael was not a household face; he said he was delighted also on that score. They had only just bought this tumbledown heap of building and neglected corner of land, and she still believed that they would all be happy if she could get her husband away from his work, so he could relax and spend more time with his daughter; she was beginning to be able to hold a conversation, and Jane was sure that if he could only be with the child a bond would form.
Imogen was just beginning to trouble her. Although Jane gave the child the same punctilious care her own parents had given her, she was not responding. Hollow-eyed and listless, she did as she was told and nothing more. It was impossible to make her happy.
Already Imogen was revealing a conspicuous gift for snuffing out hope. Jane felt a constant sense of failure in the little girl’s presence; when she was away from her, that burden was lifted, but then she felt guilty. Intimidated by becoming a stepmother at an age which she felt was too young for any kind of parenthood, Jane had insisted that her own children would have to wait; now, in the first excitement of finding the farmhouse, she was drawn to the notion that a child of her own would bring back the promise of their marriage.
Michael had led the way to the wood at the end of a spring afternoon, when the sun was foundering among black cloud banks in the raw red sky. He had been striding between the saplings, his long legs eating up the uneven ground while she hurried after him, and her intention in asking the question had at first been only to get him to slow down and wait for her.
‘Do you think they planted this wood for the mushrooms?’
He had halted and turned to look at her with no understanding at all. Michael had a characteristic, piercing gaze; his irises, light brown at rest, seemed to darken to black when he was gathering intelligence. Now he looked almost alarmed, as if he feared the unknown hazards of alien territory.
‘I was thinking – why’s this wood here? It’s not a logical place. The mushrooms could be the whole point of them, all those wonderful old trees over there.’ She ignored his reaction. ‘Three hundred years old, the very big ones, the notaire said. Oaks, beeches and pines, perfect for mushrooms.’
‘Surely it’s just a wood?’ The grass was shorter then, recently grazed by Madame’s last remaining pair of cows.
‘No, no – look at the whole landscape around here. Only the worthless corners are left as woodland. Everything is planted for a reason. They even use the marshy corners to raise their young trees for windbreaks. The only natural woods left are where the ground is so poor it’s got no value for crops. And we haven’t seen a concentration of oaks like this anywhere else, have we?’ Shortness of breath forced her to pause. It should have been a romantic thing, an evening stroll across the field, but Michael had again set off impatiently towards their goal, leaving her behind. Obstinate to make her point, she ran a few steps to catch up with him. ‘Look – this is good land, prime land, flat, easy to plough. No sensible farmer would have allowed it to go to waste.’
‘My goodness, what extraordinary things you think about. Old Madame Montaud is far too doddery to get out here and as mad as a hatter.’ With a fond chuckle he put his arm around her shoulders. This gesture never comforted her, only made her feel physically overwhelmed. ‘Why would anyone bother planting a wood just for mushrooms when they could buy them in the market?’
Exasperated, she let herself stumble over a fallen branch to break out of his embrace. ‘Nobody round here would pay good money for mushrooms when he could grow enough to sell. And see how there are lots of young trees here, just a few really old ones … I’m sure they planted this wood to raise the mushrooms.’
The implications of the pig-killing shed and the duck-fattening barn, buildings destined to become their pool house and the children’s wing, had already signalled that natural heirs to this ripe countryside were confined to an unmerciful existence. She was passing her first summer in Gascony in awed discovery of the absolute dedication of peasant life to the production of food. The property even took its name, Les Palombières, from a pair of hides for shooting wild pigeons, great status symbols in earlier times, reduced now to twin heaps of mossy rubble under a tangle of brambles at the margin of the wood.
‘This is your Marie Antoinette thing, is it, playing at being a peasant farmer’s wife? They wouldn’t bother. Mushrooms just grow anywhere. Look, they’re all over the place.’ He pointed disdainfully at a great bed of fungi rising out of the meadow grass in open ground, the young ones penis-shaped, thumb-sized and an unearthly violet colour, the mature caps ragged and greyish.
Confidently, she had embarked on the final explanation. ‘Not the good eating mushrooms. Those things are ink caps, you can eat them but they just cook down to mush, they’re pretty worthless. The best are the really meaty mushrooms, the ceps and the chanterelles, they make a really good meal, people can bottle them or dry them – but they only grow in woods, they need special chemical conditions which you get under old oaks and pines. That’s why dishes with mushrooms are called forestière… What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’ He ought to have been charmed by her enthusiasm. Instead, Michael’s eyes had again narrowed in concentration and a black frown flickered over his face, to be wiped away with a conscious effort and replaced now with a look of bland interest. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I didn’t know you knew about things like this.’
She was gratified to have a genuine reaction from him. ‘It’s just a little thing, hardly important.’
‘Is it something you’ve just found out?’
‘I suppose so, talking to people about the house and so on.’ At her office in the Department of Agriculture, she saw European Community papers on fungi. Mushrooms had been part of the fairy-tale interludes in her childhood when she and her brothers had been sent for holidays with their Scottish grandmother, who lived on the edge of woodland. She had forgotten their forays until now, but was reluctant to tell Michael too much.
Much as she wanted him to be proud of her, she knew already that to her husband knowledge was power. Expertise of her own could be annexed to his greater mastery. She saw that soon he would be showing the bounty of the wood to their friends and guests, saying ‘Let me explain how it is about these mushrooms …’
‘Let me explain’was Michael’s little bit of conjurer’s business, the distraction while he performed the trick. The trick was to make you wrong. ‘Let me explain how it is with a man,’ he would offer when at last she had e
nough evidence to accuse him of having an affair. A few years later he would set aside her insistence that his conscious presence in the home was necessary to her and their children, saying, ‘Let me explain how it is in a marriage.’ These explanations came from such a lofty perspective that they could not be refuted; they elevated Michael’s personal will to the position of a universal law.
She had shrugged again, looking sidelong at him from behind the golden curtain of her hair, hardly able to believe that she had found a corner of creation that her husband could not invade. ‘Maybe it’s just a woman’s thing to pick up these little scraps of information. I remember my grandmother used to talk about looking for mushrooms during the war. Madame Montaud was so anxious to show me the wood, when we first came to look over the place – don’t you remember?’
‘No, no, I don’t remember at all. I’m sure you’re right, it’s a woman’s thing. Feminine mystique, cycles of nature, seasons …’ When he felt that he had to defend himself against a woman, Michael had a way of making a showy concession to feminism; presuming that she was his opponent, he also presumed that this would disarm her.
‘You mean, women are closer to the earth.’
‘Oh, come on, J, stop sending me up.’
‘I’m not sending you up.’
‘Yes, you are, you’re making fun of me because I can’t express my admiration for you without sounding like a chauvinist.’ He pulled a wounded face, kicked up the leaves in mock despondency. It was one of his most appealing turns, this downcast schoolboy act, and more effective as he cut his swathe in the world. Michael Knight, the Michael Knight, the great Michael Knight is hurt and I am the cause of it – Jane’s heart swelled to a more generous volume at the thought, for a short while obscuring the uneasy atmosphere of this conversation, which stored itself away in the memory bank of her feelings.
It would be another year before she arrived at the opinion that nothing could hurt Michael, which was why he could easily pretend sensitivity. He put his arm around her shoulders again and then, as if to show that there were no hard feelings, wanted to make love in the shade of the oak trees.
The wood proved to be the most coveted mushroom bed in the area. Only a few days after that conversation they had woken at dawn to see a stealthy procession of cars without lights driving along the little road that crossed the railway on the far side of their new domain. The occupants climbed out, provided with baskets, bags and old melon crates, and began to raid the wood, their torches, flickering between the tree trunks.
Michael had at once protested to the farmer who owned the adjoining land, who agreed to close the lane with a chain at night during the mushroom season. With amusement, they noted that this action, far from being considered a mean, dog-in-the-manger move, won them looks of respect in Saint-Victor, the nearest small town. The joiner and the plumber employed to renovate the house began to submit their estimates more hesitantly, explaining that of course the building regulations required this or that but it was not absolutely necessary in this case and if they were not too concerned … well, why not choose the cheaper option?
It was another proof that she needed him, that every woman needed a man, because the world was made for men and you needed manly strength to tame it and make its energy flow freely. Jane saw that if Michael had not leaped up to protect his territory they would instead have lost respect, been cheated and despised in consequence and never entered into a real acquaintanceship with their neighbours, one of the many mundane human pleasures that she enjoyed keenly in France because it had disappeared from their city life. It was also proof of the injustice of life, because Michael had no interest in the mushrooms, only in defending his own.
Jane had been moved to investigate the precious fungi now in her possession, to consult old Madame Montaud, and Marius, her energetic son who worked as an engineer in the regional capital. She eagerly walked the woods with them, making notes in her new pocket mushroom directory. Marius dropped wistful remarks about the quality of the shooting over the land and she willingly allowed the old woman to manoeuvre her into granting him the rights in exchange for a proportion of his bag. Faced with birds she could not even recognize, she asked for guidance in cooking them.
She compared the Montauds’ advice with that of the farmer whose much larger holding of land enclosed their own, and with the wisdom of the market traders and shopkeepers in Saint-Victor. In due time, poking around in the dusty bowels of a secondhand-furniture shop, among the horsehair mattresses and holed enamel milk churns, she discovered old books of cookery and household management, some of them handwritten, faded copperplate on browned pages tied together with a rust-spotted satin ribbon. ‘Your pig should be killed when the moon is waning.’ She read one sentence and bought the whole pile.
The next year, when she was pregnant with Emma, Jane gave up her job at the Department and began a book, Food from a French Farmhouse. It was a pastime, until the day Andrea Moynihan knocked on her door and announced that Michael was having an affair with a woman at his office named Grace. The news had hit her like a blow in the face, but Jane had considered her swelling belly and what she had been told of the ways of the world, and decided to keep the secret. This would pass. She had not then realized that just as Michael was an extraordinary man, he would be capable of extraordinary betrayal.
Without much calculation, in a dreamy ecstasy of fertility, she retired to Les Palombières and poured into the book all her fascination with the house and land as it had operated for centuries before their occupation, an enterprise dedicated to the production not merely of food but of a sophisticated abundance of nourishment. Food from a French Farmhouse was a great success.
Michael began to talk proudly about ‘our little house in France – where I can be at home with my family and my wife writes her books’. He never shared any of her joys; she had taken joy in their baby, although Emma was irritable and sleepless from the start. Whatever she had done wrong by Imogen, Jane felt she was doing it again. When Emma developed eczema it seemed like her own guilt manifesting in the child’s distress.
There were always reasons why Michael could not spend more than two or three days in France, reasons of the calibre in which he always dealt: meetings, ministers, deadlines, emergencies – cast-iron, indisputable reasons. Other women succeeded. Grace, other messengers brought bad news to her door. Jane confronted him, and the lying began. He wanted a son; she had Sam. Nothing changed. The children were wretched, Michael, was mostly absent, and when he was present he lied. Proudly, she refused to be a kaffee kvetch wife, bitching about her husband and her kids in her neighbours’ kitchens. Perhaps it was her own fault, perhaps she was unrealistic, too attached to her sentimental woman’s vision of a family. She had her work, and she had Les Palombières, and as the years went on and days came when her pain was overwhelming, she clung to these two.
‘Impressive. Really impressive. Serena, I don’t know anyone else, man or woman, who could have done this in the time. Let me know if you ever want a job doing this. Let’s see how it plays.’ Serena sat down, feeling awkward at his praise, and the editor ran the tape again while Michael read her words as the pictures flickered on the small screen. ‘… and so,’ he concluded, in the soft, heavy voice that she remembered from her student years, when you could believe a world disaster was inevitable if Michael Knight assured you it was, ‘at least half the children we have met during the making of this film will be enjoying their last summer here in the former Yugoslavia. Conditions in this camp, like many others in this tragic country, are so desperate that unless help reaches them before winter sets in, these children will die.’ On the last word his own voice sank to a whisper.
He paused, then went on in a sombre tone to make the appeal over the ChildAid pledge line numbers. ‘Is that too fast? Nine digits, it’s long. Here, see if you can get a number written down in the time:’ A pencil tumbled into Serena’s lap, further embarrassing her by falling between her thighs to the floor.
It wa
s almost 2 a.m. For six hours in the flickering claustrophobia of the edit suite five of them had laboured to perfect a film which to her had seemed slickly assembled at the outset. Michael had ridden the producer and researcher unmercifully; to back him up he had called in Stuart Devlin, NewsConnect’s most respected reporter, whose awards covered ten feet of the reception wall, who stood patiently at his back with his heavy-lidded eyes on the tiny screen, tipping the arguments this way or that with a few mumbled words.
Out went interviews Michael judged irrelevant, montages that bored him or arguments he condemned as side-issues which weakened the script. Devlin did not always support him, and Michael deferred to his opinion. Taking confidence from that, Serena had crossed him a couple of times, which he had accepted. All the same, she saw that he liked doing this; ripping apart months of work by subordinates was a gratifying power play, but he was also right. What had begun as a sound report little different from many others was now a dazzling emotive dispatch, the kind of film only NewsConnect distributed. She already admired him, and this final small thoroughness with the telephone numbers, this care for the lumpen audience fumbling with their ballpoints, was the cherry on top. Silently, Devlin picked up the pencil for her. He was slight and quiet, with short fleecy fair hair and pale lashes, a face unremarkable in life but on camera the image of a daring war correspondent.
‘Take the end one more time please,’ Michael ordered, staying the editor as he rose wearily from his seat. ‘I want to make sure it marries in smoothly.’
‘We can fade in the title music…’
‘I don’t like ending with a fade. Ending with a statement works best.’
Michael Knight’s voice was rich and embracing, full of propriety, wisdom and kindness. It was the voice of a much older and bigger man, a man of great consequence, one with a well-earned place in history. His very first job had been as a radio news reporter, where his voice had been the foundation of his fortune. When people said that Michael Knight was a great loss to the screen, what they meant was that no other voice had the same blend of emotionalism and power. The suggestion had never been made that he chose still to narrate NewsConnect’s keynote documentaries out of vanity or egotism. No one could have done it better.
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