With only slight hesitation, she said she would be working at home and his mood soared. In his mind’s eye he saw himself making the call standing in the room in Les Palombières designated his office, although he was seldom there long enough to work. His friends would be a distant convivial noise, Jane a faint presence in the background highlighting the significance of his action.
He put down the telephone, swept up his case and walked without haste towards the boarding gate. There was still plenty of time, but urgency was essential to Michael when his emotions were engaged, and so, without knowing what he did, he had pretended it.
Serena looked down at the telephone, the friend who had betrayed her. It had rung when she had been at the front door, on the point of stepping into the sunlight, into the world, into freedom, into reality. She had hesitated to answer it, knowing by instinct that it was him. The hard voice of commonsense had argued against her: he screws around, this man, fuck ’em and forget’em, that’s his style, not the pretty sentimental stuff true lovers do. And the telephone had rung insistently, persuading her that it was her mother calling, her office, the friend she had half-promised to meet later, and so, betrayed by reason and probability, she had run up the stairs and back into the jaws of destruction.
Now she felt a piercing longing. She was on the edge of tears. It was nothing significant, she was tired, they had had no sleep, but her instinct was to go out now, not stay in the same space, breathing in his breath. The right thing to do now was to obliterate him, scour him out of her memory. Two incidents of sex, awkward and unsatisfying, should not be hard to forget. The sheets were already churning in the washing machine. From her body she had scrubbed off his touch in the shower. Resolutely, she ran out into the street again, telling herself that there was no destiny cast here, it was just an episode, it would mean nothing.
4. Saturday Afternoon
‘Let me drive,’ she asked as they were leaving. She wanted Nick to be able to enjoy the scenery, because the road to Castillon was as pretty as a fairy tale but he hated going there for the bric-a-brac market.
There was a short delay while five huge, creamy Gascony cows ambled past the village war memorial. The farmer saw no reason to do his milking at uncivilized hours; he strolled after his beasts, advising them not to wander to the end of the field since it was for too hot to go chasing after them again at the end of the day.
The lane left the village and ran down the spine of the rising hills, yellow sunflowers to one side, violet-blue alfalfa on the other, a succession of sharp bends with a new vista at every corner. Outside Plaisance, the market town, they took a wider road across the valley bottom, at first in full sunlight and flanked by ditches choked with bulrushes, then dappled under the dancing leaves of young lime trees. The river Adour, running slow, deep and clear, swirled across the meadows to meet the road at right angles.
‘Beautiful,’ Nick murmured as they approached the handsome white stone bridge.
‘River’s high.’ She let the car stop and ran down her window to hear the rushing water. The sun blazed on the beaches of speckled pebbles and the lush tall grass at the waterside. Rings of ripples spread where fish rose in leisurely succession. Above the surface the air hummed with insects.
‘Nobody about.’ She smiled at him. In their first summer they had discovered that this lovely grove was deserted only during working hours; at lunchtime it became suddenly populated by pleasure-seekers. Lone fishermen and pairs of lovers trampled their bivouacs among the wild mint, courteously keeping their distances in order not to spoil each other’s sport.
The far side of the valley was wooded, and beyond that lay open country. Castillon, like all the ancient villages of the region, was on a hilltop; flowering trees, trimly pollarded, girdled it on both sides. At its approach it seemed too decorated to be a survivor of the lawless centuries which had left other settlements with immense fortifications, now picturesquely ruined. Saint-Victor had its ramparts, Saint-Mère the watchtower, Bassous a massive gatehouse, but outwardly Castillon tried to pretend its heritage amounted to nothing but jacarandas.
The village houses were handsome square stone mansions. Between the limestone walls, a crooked street the width of a deux chevaux led into the square, recommending such traffic as there might be to follow the tree line around the crown of the hill. Today the street was choked with cars; the brocante attracted crowds, dealers and buyers from half the départment and many holiday residents. Grace parked in the shade at the far end of the boules pitch.
They had half-furnished the Alhambra here and a pilgrimage was necessary each summer. The noise of the fair, an intense murmur, met them half-way up the alley leading to the village square. It was one of Castillon’s hidden treasures, a generous space bordered by broad stone arches, each pillar decorated with a climbing rose. The village had two regular shops only, a baker and a general store, both tucked into narrow sidestreets, but on the first Saturday of every month the shuttered façades of the square opened up and the whole village gave itself to the business of trading defunct household goods.
Grace set off eagerly into the crowd. Between troughs of geraniums, the senior stall-holders took the best positions under the broad, low arcades while the less fortunate filled the centre, with bright-coloured awnings and umbrellas.
‘I suppose we ought to take Jane Knight a present,’ she called to him as she stepped over a bathtub crammed with old black gramophone records, at the same time running her eye over a jumble of kitchen implements.
‘Will we find anything here?’ Nick was looking anxious. He was bemused at the process by which his wife could pick up a piece of junk from a market stall, breathe on it and transform it into a stylish object which all their acquaintances would admire.
‘Well, I know what you mean. What do you give the couple who have everything? I know she goes for picturesque kitchenalia though. They’re always using them to dress up the pictures in her books. Maybe one of those little enamel salt tins?’
‘It’s his birthday, isn’t it? I was thinking about wine … Oh God, you’re right. I suppose those foodie people know a lot about wine.’
‘Yes, but it’s always nice to find something new. What was that knockout stuff you bought in the Landes last year? I’d rather choose something special for her. Oh, there she is, the button lady. We need some more of those white linen ones for the pillowcases …’ Like a hound on the scent, she loped away from him. Grace had a particular affection for the button dealer, a tiny, coquettish old woman with a black straw hat decorated with cerise velvet roses pulled down over her sharp nose. Her stall was a mere card table, stacked with shoeboxes rattling with buttons of every imaginable material: plastic, horn, jet, bone, mother-of-pearl, mosaic, beads, crystal, brass, silk.
Frustration took a firm hold of Nick. It was hot. The allure of rusting iron bedsteads, unstable chairs and blistered yellow jars in which generations of farmer’s wives had crammed portions of preserved goose had faded. Grace was not edgy any more, she was absorbed and happy, the threat of the following day forgotten.
‘Darling, can I leave it to you? I’ll see you in the café.’ He strolled away to the narrowest alley where two tables and eight chairs stood hopefully in the shade of the old stone archway. A door between the tables led to a gloomy bar, and beyond a flowering courtyard set with tables laid for lunch.
Swallows had nests in the carved coping of the archway, and he watched them feeding their young, whose gaping beaks were just visible at the nest holes. The arch was another relic of the turbulent era that began in 1154, when Henry, Duke of Aquitaine, inherited the crown of England. This event left the English with the delusion that Gascony belonged to them, a fantasy they maintained despite the impossibility of making one dominion out of two countries that were a thousand miles apart. Four hundred years of war ensued, endured by the Gascons in addition to the routine scrapping of their own local rulers. Even today, schoolchildren would solemnly explain that their own one-shop hamlet had once her
oically resisted a siege, or had been brutally sacked, or had been the site of a daring kidnapping for love. Castillon was a typical bastide, a town fortified in those turbulent years so life could carry on within strong walls in the protective shadow of a hilltop castle.
It was an hour before Grace appeared, finding her husband restored to good temper. Nick was on his third beer, pink-cheeked and dreamy with history. On the table she proudly put a loose parcel of newspaper.
‘Is that all you’ve bought? I thought you’d be haggling over Henry IV’s bed, the time you took.’
‘I couldn’t find anything that was right. Then just as people were starting to pack up I saw these …’ She opened the package and spilled over the table a set of old butcher’s labels, elaborately lettered and decorated with pictures of jauntily posed livestock. ‘Aren’t they wonderful? Look at this silly chicken. And this one, “Beautiful breast, 3 francs a kilo”. Aren’t they perfect?’
‘If you say so.’
His idle remark, intended to convey nothing more than his trust in her taste, stabbed through her fragile equilibrium. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Her eyes were suddenly thunderous.
‘Nothing, nothing … I just meant I’m sure you’re right.’
‘Did you?’ With offended gestures, she gathered up the labels and folded the paper around them.
‘Of course I did. What else could I have meant?’
‘Lots of things. Anything.’ In an instant, the sunshine and enjoyment of the morning were poisoned. How easy to shrink down into one of those vicious women who curbed their men with sneers and rectitude and sighing implications of guilt. Without warning the desolation of life without Nick presented itself, an icy wasteland scoured by bitter winds of remorse.
She put her hands to her head as if in pain, but he pulled them away and held them on the tabletop. ‘This is all my fault. I should never have been so stupid and insensitive. Let me cry off, tell her we can’t come.’
‘No, no. I’ve made my mind up. I’ve got to face it.’
‘No, you don’t need to face anything. Why? What will it change? You never liked the man, so why …’
She struggled with her conscience. She was longing to confess, to get Michael out of the shadows and on the table between them to be exorcized. Years ago, she had confessed to a priest and got nothing but what she expected, uncomprehending platitudes. And then he had asked if her husband knew, and advised her to look well in her heart when she wanted to tell him, and ask herself for whose benefit it would be. Trite as the thought was, it echoed.
Above them, high in the coping of the arch, a swallow dived from its nest and flew low past them and out into the bright sun at the end of the alley. ‘Because of us. I’m afraid it will change us.’
‘It won’t, why should it? We’re good as we are, we don’t need to change.’ That pitiful, open look, so like a child who had innocently caused a catastrophe.
‘This isn’t really the past, Nick. I’m not …’ She put her fingers to his lips to stop his question. ‘Not telling you everything. I don’t want to. It was long ago and it won’t do us any good now. Do you trust me?’
‘Yes. OK. Of course.’
‘But there is something unfinished. You did me a favour, meeting Jane. I didn’t realize, I couldn’t understand it. There is something I’m carrying round from that time, I just feel weighed down with it. I am frightened, of course I am. But I really, really want to be free of it. For us, for our sake. So we’re going.’
‘I understand.’ Of course, he did not. He took her hands again and squeezed them, sealing the bargain. There was more to say, but she left it and kissed him on his forehead where tiny beads of sweat had appeared, forced out by high emotion in the noon heat.
Comforted by lunch, they journeyed homewards through the golden afternoon, with Nick driving. Grace meditated on her marriage, the image of love generated by their need for it, three-dimensional and with all the desired features and functions, but still of their own imagining. Other people told her that they were happy, but she felt that she was trapped in a mime-artist’s cage, a prison of her own mind, terrifying but invisible to all but herself.
As they crossed the bridge and drank in the loveliness of the river, he turned to her and said, ‘Do you mind that I’ll never be rich, Grace?’
It tore open her heart and she found tears stinging her eyes. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘No. This isn’t about money. Do you know what it costs, to be rich? Isn’t what we have something money could never buy?’ She reached across and put her arms around him. ‘Don’t ever make money, Nick, please. Just be you. I love you.’
‘Salmon is a great, great luxury round here, of course.’ In her kitchen, Jane stripped away the wet newspaper and showed Louisa the huge silver fish, smeared with blood around the head, mouth and gills agape. Antony had weighed the allure of his book against the advantage of knowing what was proposed for the fête champêtre and followed them; he was standing warily at a distance, as if doubting that the monstrous fish was safe to approach.
‘It looks very fresh.’ Delicately, Louisa poked one of the gelatinous eyes.
‘Caught this morning. Feel, it’s still quite rigid. The rigor mortis takes a few hours to wear off. But she lays them out nice and straight so there’s no trouble fitting them in the pot.’
The major part of Michael’s birthday feast was being prepared by caterers from the regional capital, but Jane liked to cook something herself, and the guests expected it. Heaps of vegetables lay on the red tiled floor awaiting attention.
‘But where on earth did she catch it? Not in the Gers, surely.’
Antony had observed that the nearest local river was a vicious muddy torrent on whose banks fishermen were conspicuously absent.
‘No, no!’ Jane was looking for something, pulling drawers in and out, puzzled. ‘Have you seen where I put my little knife? It’s just the thing for this … No, no, there’s nothing in the Gers, it’s polluted to hell with fertilizers and whatever. And it runs into a bigger river before it gets to the Atlantic. You couldn’t catch a cold in the Gers.’ She pulled a small steel knife from the block and felt its edge. ‘This’ll have to do. The Adour is where they catch salmon, when they can, nowadays, not many left. South from here, a nice clean run down from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic. She is amazing, she always seems to get one for Michael’s birthday.’
‘You mean that girl caught it?’ Antony normally lived in a trance of well-bred lack of interest, which showed a brief sign of breaking.
‘Uh-huh.’ Jane looked up from slitting the creature’s belly with a small, malicious smile.
‘Good heavens. How extraordinary.’
‘Women always catch the biggest salmon, you know. The big cocks. If they’re fly-caught. It’s pheromones. When she ties the fly some pheromone scent is left on it and the great fools can’t resist.’
‘Don’t watch this, Antony.’ Louisa hoisted one hip on to the corner of a table and held out a bowl to catch the dark red entrails as they tumbled out of the body cavity. ‘The old Eve, eh? I wonder if some women smell sexier than others – to a salmon.’
‘That girl must smell like Sharon Stone, if they do. The size of this thing – it must be twenty pounds at least.’ At the sink, Jane washed the fish and patted it dry as tenderly as if it had been a baby. Her face, almost wizened with the tension of worrying about Emma, was serene once more.
‘She didn’t ask for any money or anything. At least, I don’t think she did – frightfully strong accent.’
‘Oh, she’ll be round later, or tomorrow. People trust each other in the country. She’s a Basque. There’s a lot of them round here. Nobody would dream of cheating a Basque, they’re worse than the Mafia.’ Jane pulled up a chair to get the fish kettle down from its hook on a ceiling beam, while Antony, who had obediently retired to the edge of the room, shuffled a few steps forward to indicate that he would have helped her if not pre-empted.
‘I suppose she’s a poacher, s
he looked kind of furtive.’ Boldness in women disturbed Antony, but he never liked to hold controversial opinions.
‘Well, illegal, yes. She won’t apply for a fishing permit because she thinks that’s collaborating with the stinking French. And then everyone would know where she’s fishing.’
‘But she is right about that, isn’t she? Everybody else would get there first.’ Louisa fetched a cloth to wipe twelve months of dust from the pan.
‘Probably. But the Basques live on secrets, their code of silence …’ And as the kingly catch was oiled and seasoned and laid out upon its rack, and onions and carrots peeled for its poaching liquor, and herbs picked and wine poured, Jane told her tales of extracting recipes from the close-mouthed Basques. Forty-eight mountain herbs in the liqueur they called Izarra, and every one, and where it grew in the inaccessible mountains, an ancient secret; the herbs were processed in a separate plant and sent to the distillery identified only by labels written in code.
‘What’s it taste like?’ Antony interrupted.
‘Cough mixture.’
‘Oh.’
The Basques, she continued, had their own species of chilli, which would grow nowhere else, and secret ways to dry it. Earnestly, with wondering eyes, she related the miracle that the Basques alone could make cornmeal porridge without stirring.
‘It’s a universal peasant dish, cornmeal porridge. And it’s an incredible sweat to make. You have to stir it continuously for about an hour. Century after century women all over the world stirring until their arms ache … sweating into the fire …’ Jane was in a trance. She loved the idea of women cooking the same food the world over, in every country wherever the corn would grow high as an elephant’s eye, preparing it to be eaten hot or cold, savoury or sweet, polenta in Italy, grits in America, gofio in Spain and all over France where the Landais called it cruchade, or the Bearnais broye, the Périgordiens las pous. Even now, she emphasized with delight, when this humble food appeared on the smartest restaurant menus, enhanced by high-tech industrial processing, a gastronomic cliché, the old Basque shepherds still kept the secret of making it without stirring, throwing the grain into the boiling liquid at the right moment so that a bubble formed in the pot and the meal swelled within, and all that was necessary, at another precisely judged instant, was to prick the magic bubble and scoop out the tender porridge.
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