by Hilton, Lisa
Aisling had been up at seven, diligently seeing off the ghastly Lawses before their long cross-country drive. As she crossed back from la Maison Bleue, she heard Madame Lesprats’ car pulling in at the bottom of the hill, and thought that she should really have brought the fresh linen for the turnover down with her, to save Madame Lesprats, who was at least sixty, a hot climb. Yet she felt selfish today, a little careless, and wanted to be away from the house before anyone woke up to claim her. It was Claudia’s tone, she decided, which had so ruffled her, an imprecise suggestion of patronage. Too small to be in any way reasonable to mention in bed to Jonathan after dinner, and unkind perhaps, as the girl was probably nervous, uncertain before what was after all to be her new family, though Aisling didn’t in the least believe that, didn’t believe that Claudia was the sort of person who was ever nervous. She had said to Jonathan, ‘What do you think?’ hoping that if he, too, had some reservation, she might be able to analyse her own aloud. But he was muffled with drink, digestifs and red wine on top of the vintage champagne that Alex had produced with City-ish ostentation to toast the engagement, and had only said, ‘Seems like Alex has done pretty well’. Aisling understood this clearly to imply that he found Claudia sexy, too sexy to mention. Jonathan only felt it safe to comment on women’s looks when they did not interest him. He thought this prudent and diplomatic, without realizing that Aisling was perfectly aware that if he said a woman was ‘very attractive’, it meant that he didn’t really think so. He had no idea that the quality of his silences was a more precise indication of interest than if he had denied having noticed that a woman had any allure.
Claudia was very pretty, Aisling recognized, pretty enough for it to be surprising, almost, that she should be with Alex, but jealousy was not the source of her discomfort. Aisling had never had any claim to be particularly good-looking, had been sensibly aware of the fact since she was quite young, and had simply made the best of herself so as not to look, as her own mother would have put it, ‘a fright’. She took care with her clothes, her hair and her make-up, but with little vanity, content that she should look nice and not aspiring to more. Rancour at other, more beautiful women had never troubled her, and now, at forty-two, this calmness about her appearance gave her an attractiveness that other women of her age who had perhaps been far more so a few years ago might be glad to possess. Having no special looks to lose, Aisling did not make the mistake of trying with pathetic tenacity to retain them. Her figure had always been average, but was little changed after two pregnancies, and she was fit from walking, gardening and swimming. She never dieted, or squeezed herself into unflattering clothes a size too small. Her hands were protected by gloves and lotion when she worked outside, and though she guarded her fair skin from the sun, she did not mourn the wrinkles around her eyes or the grooves that ran from her nose to the edge of her lips. The other English women she knew from around Landi seemed to fall into two categories. There was a depressing carelessness, like her friend Charlotte Glover, who occasionally ornamented her shapeless blouses and sensible slacks with an ill-advised scarf or slash of lipstick, which served to accentuate her general grubbiness. Equally depressing was the attempt at glamour, spongy pink bodies, bloated with alcohol and idleness, spilling out of brief bikinis, low-cut tops and too much hard jewellery. In comparison, Aisling felt quite satisfied with her own appearance, which she judged in the language of her magazines to be elegant and understated. Jonathan usually complimented her when they dressed up to go to a dinner party or an occasional concert in Toulouse, and in groups with other husbands she felt less invisible than she had at twenty.
Claudia’s looks, Aisling decided as she started down the road towards home, were definitely not the problem, though it was disturbing to see Alex mooning over her so, jumping up to fetch her cigarettes or her pashmina, attentions that Claudia seemed to demand as little as she took them for granted. No, it was her tone. Last night, with the PGs safe, prodding mirthlessly at her carefully marinaded chicken breasts, Aisling had felt relaxed, expansive, proud of her home and her beautiful view, of Oliver and Richard, neat in pale blue shirts, of the fragrance of her food, so she had felt awkward when Claudia had turned the conversation to the fact that after their two years in France, the Harveys had not really made any French friends.
‘Really?’ she had said, exhaling a long plume of Marlboro Light over the remains of the strawberry brûlée. ‘Are the people here unfriendly to strangers, then?’ Her inflection was entirely solicitous. At home, Aisling thought, she would have asked the girl to put it out.
‘Incomers, eh?’ put in Alex, snorting as though he had said something clever.
‘Not quite that, I think,’ defended Jonathan, ‘more that, well, the people around here have lived here for generations, and, well …’
‘They’re not quite PLU?’ suggested Claudia, her head on one side.
‘Darling!’ said Alex, with mock sternness, taking her hand and turning it to kiss the inside of her slim wrist, so that her ring caught in the candlelight, his eyes turned up to her face. Claudia pulled away, the movement slightly exaggerated with Armagnac.
‘Since we’re in the country, darling, let’s call a spade a spade. Or a peasant a peasant for that matter. Shall I help you clear, Aisling? Gorgeous pudding.’
Scraping and stacking the plates for the dishwasher, Aisling had felt an unaccustomed urge to explain, to justify herself to Claudia. But why should Claudia make her feel insecure? What would she know about living in France, or the countryside, or the French? She was obviously a snob, probably intimidated by Murblanc and trying to feel superior at the Harveys’ expense. Yet, distressingly, she was right, in a way. Aisling’s acknowledgement of this blended with her certainty that she would find the little tartlets she had made for the Laws family untouched in the morning, and that somehow, this was connected to the fact that she and Jonathan had never been asked for drinks by Monsieur d’Esceyrac when he stayed at the chateau that overlooked the village, even though he had been perfectly affable to them that time they had met at the chasse lunch in February, and had told Aisling that she was welcome to the walnuts and plums that fell from his strayed fruit trees on to Murblanc land.
Aisling had meant to make a warm clafoutis of these plums for the new PGs, who would arrive that evening, but along with the linens, she had forgotten to take the labelled bag from the big freezer, and now she would have to think of something else that would be quick, as she had to drive the boys to the riding stables in the afternoon. Oliver and Richard were not quite yet at the age when hours of fusty morning sleep were an urgent necessity, and although it was only half past eight she heard them in the pool as she let herself through the side door, quickening her pace as she stepped down the narrow corridor with the pantry on one side, the boot room and the buanderie on the left, thinking that she must consult the dreaded exercise book for the welcome dinner. She could feel the calm of her walk draining from her, parched out by the strengthening sun.
The kitchen was full of cigarette smoke, blue and nauseating. Claudia was perched on the worktop in a pair of baggy white pyjamas, holding an Emma Bridgewater coffee mug with a pattern of fig leaves and staring into space.
‘Morning,’ said Aisling tightly. ‘Sorry, do you mind putting that out?’
Claudia started, rather guiltily, caught out. ‘God, Aisling, I’m so sorry,’ she rushed, stubbing the end into a saucer and ineffectually waving her hand at the smoke, as smokers do. ‘Look, it won’t happen again. I’m really sorry. So rude of me.’
She looked genuinely distressed. ‘It’s all right,’ said Aisling, and surprised herself by adding, ‘I used to smoke myself. But Jonathan hated it.’
‘Alex, too,’ said Claudia, with a hint of conspiratorial smile.
Aisling disliked her even more. ‘I’ve got to get on, actually,’ she said in a brisk, housekeeper tone. ‘All the breakfast things are under the cloth on the side terrace. The boys can show you. Perhaps you might like a swim?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Well, I’ll go and get dressed, then.’
Aisling retrieved the exercise book from beneath three large aubergines in the vegetable basket, which brimmed at one end of the long oak work table. She wrote ‘Tartlets not a success (too tart?!). Mrs Laws said we have lovely home, but didn’t we miss England, I said this is home. Awful, really.’ On a new page, she added, ‘Welcome dinner. Froggett Family. Aperitif PG white with ratatouille toasts. Prawns with aioli. Poussin with citrus sauce, haricots verts, almond rice. Brouilly chilled. Cheese, salad.’ If she used some of the hard, sharp ewe’s cheese, she could drizzle it with the excellent local chestnut honey. But the Froggetts would expect a proper pudding. Aisling scribbled, ‘Baked peaches with rosewater crème fraîche.’ She could pick the fruit up while the boys were riding. That would have to do.
MAY 1934
The new road into Castroux had been built in Napoleon’s time. It had been planned to pass through the village and follow the crest of the hill above the Landine river, through the hamlet of Saintonge, and on another fifty kilometres to the departmental capital of Monguèriac. The road came to Castroux and never left, a quibble in a sub-prefecture, a favour unreturned, an intractable landowner; no one remembered why, but it had never been finished, so the road stopped short at the corner of the church, opposite the optimistically classical facade of the Mairie. The new road formed a branch of the ‘Y’ shape of the village, with the church sitting in the crook, the old road dipping to the bridge across the river, and the track to Saintonge rising obliquely to the left. Aside from the Mairie, the new road had changed nothing in the aspect of the village, which staggered up the eastern side of the hill as it had done since the convent had been burned to the ground in the forgotten intensity of the Cathar persecutions. Coming up from the river, the walled garden of the nuns, bowed out with ancient, ligneous apple trees, was the first sign of the village. The ingenious irrigation channels of the garden had been diverted to the wash-house, which now faced the gateway, but herbs grew there still, great humps of sage and rosemary, full of butterflies in summertime. Though the walks had vanished long ago, the grass was rich, and this enclosed half-acre retained – without the quotidian business of the village-proper where trees that did not yield were good only for burning – an air of tapestried enchantment, as though unicorns might still lie down there.
If the ghost of a hollow-eyed, white-draped nun were still to walk in Castroux, it was unlikely she would be sighted near the church itself, which was of a later and altogether more prosaic date. The Madonna in the Lady Chapel, a snug wooden personage of the early seventeenth century, was convincingly matronly, almost rotund, and though the brightness of her cheeks had faded, they were still sufficiently pink to suggest that she had plenty of energy to spare from the cheerful Christ-child plumped stolidly in her lap to go about such matters as the strangling of ducks and the bottling of apricots, should that be required. She suited Castroux much better than the delicate, etiolated remnants of more mystical piety. Superstitions that had been old in the days of the convent remained in the village yet, but they were of a practical cast, concerned with the burying of rabbits at full moon in potato patches, or the efficacy of a pregnant woman’s urine to bring on the artichokes. Père Guillaume, whose name had been manipulated on his arrival in Castroux to Poire William, a great joke in 1920 and still good for a laugh more than a decade later, had been troubled initially by the increases to the poor box brought about by his predecessor’s having sold vials of holy water, which were apparently of great benefit to the melons. He resigned himself quickly to the mysterious workings of the Lord, blessed a barrel of it in front of the church on Easter Monday, and permitted the congregation to siphon it off in cans, greatly benefiting in turn a charity for orphan apprentices that was dear to his heart. Castroux, correspondingly, was noted for the sweetness of its melons, and for a viscous eau de vie stewed out of them in a barely concealed still by Papie Nadl at Murblanc every September, to whose effects, within bounds and bearing in mind his nickname, Père Guillaume turned another blinded eye.
The orphan apprentices possessed a fine new headquarters, with schoolhouse and dormitories, on the edge of Monguèriac, and it was to this long, yellow-washed building that Père Guillaume turned his thoughts when Sophie Aucordier, poor woman, passed away leaving an idiot son and a daughter not yet fourteen. Père Guillaume was concerned for the child; it seemed to him she had a hard life, even by Castroux standards, with a drunken father and an imbecile brother. The mother had been decent enough, though she had never struck the priest as a kind woman. She had brought her children regularly to Mass, and when Père Guillaume had tried to speak to her about Oriane’s more irregular appearances in the schoolhouse she had met his criticism with resignation rather than excuses, to which, from what he knew of their hardscrabble existence up there on the plain, he would have listened sympathetically. The Nadl family, at Murblanc, had been good to the orphans, he believed. Madame Nadl had come for him when it was time for the last rites, and had supervised the arrangements for a respectable funeral, but charity in Castroux began strictly at home. Oriane Aucordier could not expect her neighbours to take responsibility for long.
Père Guillaume had made inquiries at the apprentice school, and at the Mairie concerning what remained of the Aucordier farm, and, as he set out on his bicycle on a raw wet day in May, he believed he had found a solution to the poor girl’s future. If the property were to be sold, and Oriane spent a few years in Monguèriac, she would have enough to support the brother decently until such a time as God called (and Père Guillaume, calculating on the back of a missionary pamphlet in the presbytery one night, had guiltily considered that William’s type rarely live long), and to leave a small competence for herself that would enable her to find work, as a lower standard teacher perhaps. Mademoiselle Lafage, at the school, said she was quite able, and then, perhaps, she might get married.
Père Guillaume freewheeled all the way to the bridge over the Landine, then dismounted for the climb to Aucordier’s. He thanked the good Lord for his bicycle, which kept him fit enough for emergency rushes about his hilly parish. The basket had been fitted with a rainproof leather fishing box, which was most convenient for the oil and wafers of extreme unction, or the lugging of the censer up to Saintonge, where he said Mass monthly in the little ancient chapel. At the seminary, Père Guillaume had thought of getting up a cycling club, but had been advised that the bishop might have something to say about it, and he felt a little rush of pleasure at his independence now, each time he mounted the machine and bowled along a lane with his cassock hitched up and billowing out behind. It seemed impossibly far away, that world where a bicycle might be seen as encouraging immorality, though he could delineate clearly the twenty years of his own life that had passed since he had daringly purchased his first Follis. He felt that time had expanded so, since the War, even here in Castroux, that those memories of his cautious bishop might have belonged to his own grandfather. Still, it was certainly a wholesome activity, and he felt rather wistful that he couldn’t interest the lads in the village in a club, but the idea of taking physical exercise for pleasure in Castroux was seen as an absurd affectation. Fit for the lady guests of the d’Esceyracs perhaps, who might occasionally be seen, encumbered with easels and parasols, wandering about in the park of the chateau, but unreasonable for hardworking Christians, who obeyed the commandment to rest on a Sunday with an alacrity that Père Guillaume wished they might spread more evenly over the remainder of the Catechism.
Oriane Aucordier was stooped over a fork in the kitchen garden when he rolled his bicycle cautiously through the churned sludge of the yard. He thought irritably of splotches on his mudguards, and that later he would have to brush dried muck from the hem of his cassock. The girl wore man’s rubber boots with her thin bare legs showing, and a shapeless brown overall, lumpen and sexles
s, but Père Guillaume noticed that she had put up her thick braid of dark hair under a cap since the funeral. She greeted him politely and invited him to step into the house, without any of the flapping apologies for unwashed floors or ill-arranged husbands with which women customarily welcomed his visits. The fire was banked up high, and the dirt-floored room pleasantly warm after the dripping chill outdoors. The priest noted with approval that the pots stacked by the hearth were scoured, as was the huge wooden table of creamy oak, while the brother, squatting harmlessly under the stairs and occupied with a bird-scaring rattle, appeared equally well tended. His deformed ears, splayed wide like an overblown cabbage, were pink inside and out, and his green wool jersey had a thick darn like a caterpillar on the collar.
‘William,’ said Oriane clearly, ‘look, Father is here to see us.’
Père Guillaume understood a little Occitan, after ten years, and Oriane’s speech was slow enough for him to catch the words. What astonished him was the acknowledgement in the boy’s eyes, and the fact that, after some straining with his poor misshapen mouth, William produced a sound that might, kindly interpreted, approximate to ‘Bonjour’.
‘Well done, William!’ answered the priest heartily, and Oriane spoke again more quickly now, and again the boy seemed to make sense of her, for he put down the rattle and sat quietly, staring placidly at his sister.