by Hilton, Lisa
William rolls up like a beetle and rootles his nose into the grass, warming it with his breath. In the earth, he hears his sister’s boots, pounding down the field.
‘For shame,’ shouts Oriane. ‘Don’t you know the boy is not quite finished?’
William does not look up, but he knows Oriane will have her hands on her hips under her apron, bunching the cloth so her body stands even skinnier between the folds, like a poppy-dolly. Her knuckles stroke his sore face. ‘Look at him! All over mud. You should know better, the lot of you! Come on now, William, come on home.’
Shame is a word William recognizes, a hissing word with the sting of a slap within it. The sound and the sense come usually together. ‘For shame, William,’ says his mother, reaching across the table as he dribbles his soup, cuffing him with a bent hand so that her knuckles crack hard across his cheekbone, ‘For shame,’ as William rolls howling across the kitchen floor, her anger dull and hard as the crack of the iron ladle across his skull. Sometimes Oriane uses the word, and then its power dims, quietens, leaking its force until the house is silent.
‘For shame, Maman,’ gathering a bundle of William into her arms, as her mother lays her head on the long oak boards and sobs too, the sound passing back to the wetness of her despair. ‘For shame, for shame,’ until William hears the poplars bow in the shudder of her sobbing breath and creeps back to her crabwise across the smooth dirt floor and lays his head against her broken heart, drumming to the hum of his blood outside in the darkness of the trees. Shame is stilled then, the logs shift in the fire, William forgets until the next day or the next when Shame grows strong, dances in the tightness of his mother’s lips until her hands are possessed by it and reach once more to batter it from her.
Shame hovers around Aucordier’s. The square pale stone house and the two barns scoop and cup it like the wind that scrapes forever across the plain and pauses between the roofs, twisting down the chimneys and sidling under the doors, whipping the wash into contortions and scattering the chickens with dust until it emerges as a whisper of a breeze, unfelt in the village down the valley. Oriane knows, as William does not, the elements of shame, can count them clear as fat clouds in a blue summer sky.
Her father was a shame, a roaring stinking storm of it, until he subsided in their mother’s bedroom into a whimpering puff, worn out with the drink. One.
Her mother wore his shame in the purple lumps of her eyes, which, when they paled sufficiently for the Aucordiers to go to church, glowed horribly bright and obvious against the faded mauve of her Sunday hat. Two.
William is a shame, poor thing, dumb and hopeless, a lolling child whose scent is the high sour smell of the less than loved, the ferment of loneliness carried in the skin of the old and the ugly. Three.
Oriane knows that William’s shame is her parents’, the result of something too much more than cousinly affection in the Aucordier family. Four. This is a dripping shame which has seeped into her, she does not know how, curdling inside her and sticking like the sucking mud of the yard after rain. ‘La terre amoureuse’ they call it, when the mud clings so and there’s nothing to be done in the fields and Oriane goes to school, scraping soft new words on to her slate. The schoolhouse has a big stove and the floor is made of wood. School is for rainy days, and Oriane likes the French lesson, because the pictures in the story book have nothing to do with Castroux, or mud or shames. Cécile and her brother Jean live in a pale, precise world where the sun is always shining and Papa takes them for a ride in le bateau on la mer bleue, while Maman waits behind in a long white dress and a big hat with a pink ribbon to prepare le goûter, which is du pain with de la confiture. French is clear, it forms itself cleanly, dividing the world into le and la. Cécile and Maman have pink ribbons, Jean and Papa blue shirts. Mademoiselle Lafage the schoolteacher says that Occitan is a dirty, primitive language, and she raps at the big boys with her ruler when they whisper dirty things at the back. Oriane sits up very straight, so straight it hurts the bottom of her spine, and tries to take no notice when big boys howl at her like her brother the werewolf, dribbling and biting at their arms, hunching one shoulder up to their ear and letting the other arm swing low to the ground, grunting.
Four shames, one for each corner of the house, like the scallop shells carved to welcome pilgrims.
Oriane is too busy, mostly, for the counting of shame. William stayed at first in the kitchen with their grandmother, porridge and saliva oozing tepid on two formless chins, two bewildered mouths straining for words they couldn’t find. It was quite a surprise when William outlived her. Now William is old enough at least to be trusted not to fall into the fire, and Oriane no longer has to secure him to the laundry pole with a long loop of rope when she goes outside. Now he wanders about the yard like a chicken, unable to help Oriane with her easiest jobs, like sacking potatoes. She tries to teach him, dragging him to the pump with the bucket, giving him a line of string to hold as she ties up the peas, but William makes no effort, merely wanders peacefully away with the bucket spilling in the dirt, and lies with his huge ear to the ground, as though he were listening for moles. Sometimes Oriane wants to rush at him, to beat him with her dirty fists and splayed nails, she feels her mother’s fury within her as she strains to carry the logs or mend the high door of the big barn that the wind bursts through, contemptuously, several times a week, but she stops herself, as four shames are enough for anybody.
Oriane sleeps with her mother, now that her father is dead. They get up just after the light, and Oriane slices the hard bread and makes the coffee as her mother dresses. Aucordier’s had been a big farm once, but the fields mostly went in her father’s time, and Oriane’s mother sold the last but one to old Papie Nadl, down the hill at Murblanc. Sometimes Papie’s donkeys escape and Oriane has to chase them from the plum trees. In the evening, if she is not too tired, Oriane walks down the hill towards Castroux, to meet her mother who goes out for the grapes or the cherries, the melons or the apples, to the chateau for the laundry or sometimes across to Saintonge to Chauvignat’s pigs. Oriane minds William, hoes and weeds the vegetables, washes the clothes and fetches the water, feeds the chickens and the three goats and the baleful, scabby rabbits, milks and collects eggs, sweeps the house and makes the beds, sweeps the ashes and fetches the wood, hoes William and feeds the vegetables and washes the goats. As she goes about, she names things in French, le grenier, la poule, mon frère. Many of the children in the village hardly speak French at all, and many of the mamies and papies too, though Mademoiselle can’t rap at them with her stick. Oriane speaks Occitan with her mother, but she likes to translate the words inside her head as they talk, so that there is always a part of her that is somewhere else.
William is a musician. High up on the plateau, he seeks sounds beneath the dull bass of wind that curries forever along the plain. His ears can separate the song of the fat little oriels from the swish of the poplar leaves and the cries of the children playing rescoundut far below in the village square. Long ago, he beat time with a metal spoon as his mother scoured the pots at the pump, jigging his grandmother’s compliant hand as accompaniment. The air made an organ of the spread of bone beneath a hawk’s wing, carried the soprano scream of a rabbit beneath a fox. William danced to the angelus as it sang up the hill from Castroux, bounced to the chop of the tractor blades as they hummed in Nadl’s fields. Everything he knows, he knows through sounds, the rain comes when the wind gathers the clouds together, the soup will taste thick and salty when Oriane moves the paddle through the bacon and barley, sleep is the knock of the loose shutter that bumps through the nights.
Sophie Aucordier rarely takes her children as far as the village. They go to Mass on the Days of Obligation, but do not linger about gossiping afterwards in the square. When Oriane goes to the school she is to come straight home immediately, for the devil finds work for idle hands. Sophie suspects that she may have married the devil, and even though she saw him expire with her own two eyes, yellow and shrivelled and mu
ttering about the fiends hidden in the walls, she would not be surprised if the demons grew tired of his company and sent him back to torment her. So she remains vigilant, because decency and hard work will preserve her. No children come up so far as Aucordier’s begging for eggs for May Day; on the first of the year Papie Nadl walks his wreathed donkey straight down the hill, leaving Oriane and William to the mercies of the Israelites. Sophie Aucordier keeps herself to herself and the village lets her, confirming her belief that the world is a cold, uncharitable place, making a sorry little virtue of her loneliness. William is the proof that she has no right to joy, and in the still summertime, when the sound of Yves Contier’s accordion and Papie’s violin can be heard all the way up the valley, she puts the bolster over her head. Oriane pretends not to hear her weeping.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Claudia’s resolution about Sébastien lasted until three o’clock the next morning. The dinner had been got through, and mercifully Alex had been so tired after the drive and the drinking that he had gone straight to sleep. Claudia was longing for the relief of tears, the tension was balled in her lungs, but in a sudden, terrible intimation of what marriage could be like, she lay raw-eyed in the darkness and realized she would have to find somewhere to cry.
The silence around her was vacant and terrifying. In London, a day could be filled with a walk across Kensington Gardens to Hyde Park, a trip around Selfridge’s Food Hall to choose some wine for some fucking barbecue, then a crawling drive to Wandsworth or Clapham. All of Alex’s friends seemed to work in the City and live in garden flats in South London, with wooden floors and Ikea kitchens, expensive stereos and lurid eighties-yellow walls. The men were bankers or lawyers, as were most of the women, with the occasional financial PR or dim primary school teacher thrown in. The primary school teachers were usually prettier than the lawyers, but otherwise Claudia had difficulty telling the couples apart, an inability that Alex claimed was pure affectation, but which struck her sincerely at Sunday lunches or the dreaded barbecues, when she wasn’t certain whether she was talking to Anna solicitor who lived with Tom banker or Lucy banker who lived with Gordon solicitor. Claudia was aware that everything about her, her clothes, her job, even her cigarettes, was an anomaly in Alex’s circle, a distinction that had relieved her when she first began to go out with him, but which tonight left her dumbly dismayed.
There was nothing wrong, she told herself over and over, with Alex’s friends. They were intelligent and well educated, more intrinsically able, she felt, than herself. They travelled, for weekends in Europe and long trips to Asia or South America, they skied and played tennis and went to the opera and the latest films, but Claudia nevertheless sounded a false note within their cultivation, a boorishness that derived, she thought, from the fact that their ideas extended no further than the obviousness of Sunday newspapers. She felt herself to be superior to them, although she had no logical right to, a superiority based, she feared, on no more than the fact that nearly all of them were unattractive, the men paunchy or spotty, the girls thick of chin and ankle, and hopelessly dressed. Claudia had the knowledge of her own beauty that comes easily from a lifetime of admiration, she was precise about the extent and limitation of her power, grading it according to the groups in which she moved. In Alex’s world it shone more brightly than in her own, where it was challenged occasionally, by fashion models or the impeccable grooming of the women whom she taught.
Claudia worked in the education department of an old and distinguished auction house. Four days a week she lectured on British Pictures from 1700 to the Present Day to small classes of earnest American graduate students, idly interested financiers’ wives (they of the impossibly manicured appearance) and an ever-evolving pool of easy Europeans, constant only in their cashmere, who rarely lasted a full term, and who would politely disappear to Gstaad or St Tropez without ever appearing to feel that their course constituted some sort of commitment. Claudia had written her postgraduate thesis at the Sorbonne, on Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, and on Friday mornings she gave a class on history of art to the baccalaureate students at the French lycée in Kensington. She occasionally contributed a bilingual review or a short article to an expensively produced and little read journal called Diréctions, edited by an old university friend, not because such work particularly pleased or suited her, but because it gave her access to dinners with journalists and film people at the Groucho or Soho House, to fashion shows and talks at the ICA, and private views in the East End. Her presence at these events, to which Alex of late had awkwardly and excitedly accompanied her, gave her, she felt, some sort of status beyond that of a teacher, a sense of inhabiting a private and more engaging London than the resolutely English city known to his friends.
There had been a dinner – Charlie and Fran? Emma and Henry? Sébastien’s book was lying on the Heal’s coffee table. For all that its presence was like a prop in a bad film, it had stabbed at her. His photograph was on the back cover, a Hollywood film version of the French intellectual. The men had already gone through to the garden.
‘Are you reading this?’ Claudia asked.
‘I should. Did you see him on the telly?’
‘Yes,’ said Claudia.
‘Oh, God, of course, you probably know him. He is so gorgeous.’
‘I do know him,’ answered Claudia, ‘a little.’
She smoked too much and drank a bottle of Australian red by herself. There was a glabrous potato salad. Claudia watched Alex eat it in the dying light. He pretended to mind about food, but she wondered sometimes if he knew what anything really tasted like. Pudding was ice cream from an expensive box. All the time, Claudia had seen Sébastian’s face, the hollow above his collar bone in the shadow of his jaw as he moved inside her in the dark. The image rasped at her like dust motes dancing in the tilt and whistle of an invisible wind.
Claudia’s handbag slumped on a bentwood chair, carefully repainted and then distressed by Aisling. Sandpaper, she said. Claudia took the bag in both hands, so it shouldn’t clink, and went back to the bathroom. Then she lay face down on the floor and wept. For a while, she was unconscious of the sound she made, then gradually the high keening that had hummed and pushed in her ears since she had woken was released, and she heard it away from her, like a ship’s horn caught across a beach, coming closer and closer until it subsided into great hissing sobs that crossed her like blows. She gasped for air and rolled on to her side. Here I am, she thought. On the floor in the bathroom. She sat up and pushed her hair with wet hands from her wet face, saying nothing to herself. In her bag, tucked into a book Sébastien had given her, was the letter he had sent. The book was a beautiful edition of John Donne’s poems, over a hundred years old. The letter said:
My darling Claudia,
Alarms and excursions. I am so sorry that you left Paris that way. I am sorry, also, that we had the conversation we had, and if I loved anyone at all, my own, it would be you. I don’t see the inevitability of our parting any more than I see the inevitability of that, but I am sorrily flattered when you say you could not bear it. I don’t think, though, that I told you, when you forced me, anything you had not known when we met. You know where I am, my love.
Ever your,
S x
Claudia looked at the letter for an hour, the last five minutes of which she saw go by on her watch. She tried to get a signal on her mobile, but was reduced to slithering painstakingly downstairs to the phone in the kitchen. At precisely three a.m., she dialled his flat in Paris. He would be up, he liked to work at night. She whispered that she was sorry, that she had not meant to be so pleading, so undignified, that he ought to know her better than that, that she didn’t know what had come over her and that she had decided to marry Alex. They had laughed about Alex in bed together. They called him Old Faithful. Sébastien said, ‘Well, lucky Old Faithful. Shall you be a faithful spouse?’
‘Terribly,’ said Claudia. ‘You’re invited to dance at my wedding, of course.’ They laughed.
Claudia went back to bed with a glass of water as a prop and surprised herself by falling asleep rather quickly.
Claudia’s hair was the colour of acacia honey, thought Aisling, and she was quite insufferable. It was Friday, changeover day. Aisling was doing what she called ‘the chapel walk’, a path that led up through the woods behind Murblanc and passed a small, pink brick church whose foundations, according to a sad little printed card, were Roman. It was displayed with the modest and, to Aisling, infuriating diffidence to tourist attractions so typical of the region. The track looped around the plain square block of Aucordier’s farm, isolated on the high purple-grey plain, where ancient Mademoiselle Oriane lived alone – except for poor Ginette, who came occasionally to help Madame Lesprats with the ironing – and then doubled back along a poplar avenue to the Castroux road, dipping towards the river and a wonderful view of Murblanc on the right, which Aisling had photographed for her brochure. There was smoke rising from Aucordier’s, scenting the still air with a brief autumnal reminder of mouldering wood, but Aisling was alone today in the landscape, her figure progressing across the ridge with the permanence of an illumination from a mediaeval book of hours. The idea soothed her, gave a resonance to the contact of her feet with the ancient road, a little pilgrim marching stolidly beneath a bright sky bordered in golden curlicues and peacocks entwined in mounting, green-inked boughs. There seemed always to be a breeze in the poplar avenue, and their branches today made a sound like water rushing far away. ‘Soughing,’ thought Aisling, pleased with the justice of her word, and she stretched her arms so that her knuckles met behind her back, and turned her face up to the sky, breathing the remaining freshness of the morning, which still smelt green, though throbbing already with the gold promise of the heat.