House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  Nor did she tell herself that she loved Alex. There was nothing at all in her feeling for him that even resembled the pride and longing she had for Sébastien. Claudia and Alex had met at a large party given by one of Claudia’s former students, an Italian girl who had been dating someone at Alex’s bank. She had given him her number and had not been remotely surprised when he called the next day. They had dinner somewhere obvious. Alex was not good-looking, but he was tall, and his face was kind. Claudia’s relationship with Sébestien was long past the point of even nominal fidelity, and Alex was a good lover. His cock was long and thick, and, perhaps because Claudia was unconcerned as to his opinion of her, she came easily with him, felt quiet when she slept in his arms. That Alex was not Claudia’s ‘type’ caused less comment than she expected amongst her girlfriends, who themselves as they moved into their thirties, were considering men at whom they would not have looked two years before. If she had put off calling Annabelle and Sally, she told herself when she accepted Alex, it was because she needed to have everything straight first.

  There was this too, Claudia thought, in her relationship with him. A sense of imminent compromise, unspoken of between her and her friends, who had dissected and analysed every incident of one another’s lives over years’ worth of wine bottles and coffee cups. This new reticence, a mutual, gentle refusal to insist or to question where once they would have dismissed, even laughed at one another’s lovers. It came from a decade of London loves and London disappointments, infatuations that collapsed into disillusion, men unremembered and unmourned after ten years of bed-hopping. There was a gravity to this restraint, a required discretion, which was not entirely derived from the fact that it was no longer quite form to mock masculine inadequacy, sexual inadequacy, for the amusement of the girls. If Claudia and Sally and Annabelle no longer laughed at their boyfriends, it was because they needed one another to believe that these men were possibilities, loves rather than affairs, and this magic cloak of love was necessary to maintain the invisibility of doubt. They participated, they knew, in a narrative where desperation to find a man was funny and also rather risible, the stuff of novels read by secretaries on the Tube, but there was to be no admittance, even in unspoken desperation, of the possibility of something other than True Love. Mr Collins had still to be Mr Right, thought Claudia, pleased because that was rather clever. Claudia knew that her engagement, once announced, would carry with it a similarly unmentioned taint of spinsterish anxiety. It was a loyalty they needed now, she and her friends, this mutual pretence that they were the same careless creatures who had come to London together after university, and that if they chose such or such a man, it was because they loved him as they had once believed they loved other, less suitable incarnations, more beautiful, or cleverer though they had been, but that there was nothing in the quality of their love that had changed. That was the essential thing, this new silence.

  There was a woman standing on the terrace below her, holding the handlebars of a bicycle. Her appearance had come so silently that it took a moment to realize, so Claudia’s gasp of shock sounded stagy. She was breathless, Claudia could hear her urgent panting, she looked around, confusedly, then saw Claudia’s white pyjamas in the moonlight, and called out in French, ‘Quick, please, I need to telephone! For the doctor.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Oh, Ginette. From Aucordier’s. I need the phone for Mademoiselle Oriane.’

  Fear resolved into the simpler timbre of domestic emergency. Claudia jumped off the parapet and ran through the drawing room, up the stairs to Aisling’s bedroom, knocked peremptorily and poked her head into the darkness. ‘Aisling, Aisling,’ she hissed in a half-whisper, ‘Aisling wake up! There’s some woman downstairs who says she needs the phone. It sounds urgent.’

  The woman waited at the back door. Claudia dithered, London discretion fighting with drama, then turned the key, stepping back quickly along the passage. ‘What do you want?’

  Jonathan, down the stairs, ‘What’s going on?’ Aisling in the doorway in a long nightdress. Claudia thought it was typical that she would keep up the rustic charm even when she slept.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Ginette,’ sighed Aisling, as though she were disappointed. ‘It’s only Ginette!’ she shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘The phone?’

  Aisling proffered the portable and Ginette fished in the pocket of her nylon overall for a scrap of paper. She dialled carefully, pressing her fingers precisely on the digits, hunched over.

  Jonathan appeared in a maroon towelling dressing-gown. The sweat of his sleep came thickly to Claudia’s nose in the cooler air from the passage. ‘What’s up?’ he asked in English.

  ‘They haven’t got a phone, you see,’ said Aisling, as though that explained everything.

  ‘Who hasn’t got a phone, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Ginette and Mademoiselle Oriane, from Aucordier’s up the hill. There must have been an accident. Claudia found her.’

  Ginette turned back to them. She was thin, feet snub in green felt slippers. Claudia saw that Aisling had on a patient encouraging smile, as for a child. ‘Mademoiselle Oriane had one of her nightmares. I heard her scream, then she fell out of bed on to the floor. I think she’s broken her arm. I best go back up.’ Her speech was rapid, in the thick nasal accent of the region. There was a moment of hesitancy on Aisling’s face.

  ‘The other lady is hurt,’ Claudia offered.

  ‘My God!’ said Aisling dramatically, then quickly in English, ‘I’ll go up in the car. Jonathan, will you put the lights on and watch out for the doctor, he mayn’t know the way up? Just a moment,’ she added imperiously to Ginette.

  Claudia followed Aisling up the stairs. ‘Shall I come, too?’ she asked, feeling that Aisling minded about something.

  ‘You might as well, since you were up anyway.’

  Alex was still sleeping. Claudia pulled his light sweater over her pyjamas and shoved at her espadrilles with her feet. On the way back down, she picked up a bottle of cognac from the table in the drawing room, Aisling reappeared in jeans. ‘Right then, Ginette.’ Jonathan was making tea. The three women loaded the bicycle into the boot of the car and Aisling manoeuvred carefully up the narrow Murblanc lane to the road, only slightly wider, steel coloured in the moonlight. The road climbed to the left until they stopped at the large square house that Claudia had seen over the brim of the hill. The door was open, a harsh neon strip frosted the yard from indoors. ‘It’s only me,’ called Ginette loudly, ‘and Madame Harvey.’

  Mademoiselle Oriane was propped on the floor against a high wooden bed. Ginette had clearly been too afraid or too weak to move her. Aisling stepped forward purposefully, her voice matronly. ‘Now, Mademoiselle, what’s going on? You remember me don’t you, Madame Harvey? From Murblanc? I bought your lovely table for my kitchen.’

  The old woman’s eyes were so pale that it was hard to discern where her floury, crinkled face began. Her hair was absolutely white, tucked into a blue web of hairnet. As Aisling approached, she spat at her, viciously. She called her, in a high, strong voice, the son of a whore.

  Ginette rushed forward. ‘I’m so sorry, Madame Harvey, she’s confused, she gets like this. It’s one of her spells, oh dear, when she fell, she was screaming so.’ Ginette stopped short and began to cry, her sobs mounting into wails, she hiccuped breathlessly, uncontained, and began to gulp like a frog, her shoulders convulsing, saliva running down her chin.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ said Aisling.

  Claudia cautiously put an arm around Ginette’s shoulders, but the gasping continued, the frail muscles bouncing beneath her housecoat. Claudia shook her a little, then raised her arm and cut a short slap across her face.

  ‘Now,’ Claudia said firmly, feigning confidence, ‘come and sit down, Ginette. I’m going to give you a little drink, and we’re going to put Mademoiselle right. Come on.’ She led Ginette to a dingy brown sofa, looked to the cupboard next to the huge old fireplace, occupied by an oil stove
, and retrieved a glass. She was still holding the bottle of cognac. ‘Now you drink that,’ pouring a measure, ‘and we’ll get on. The doctor will be here soon.’

  ‘She’s not right, you know,’ said Aisling in English, meaningful on the word ‘right’.

  ‘Should we lift her back?’

  Mademoiselle Oriane had closed her eyes. With an arm each beneath her shoulders, they pulled her up until she half sat on the bed. She winced, her left arm dangling, Aisling slung her legs around, covered the horrible lumpen feet with sheet and blanket. Their swiftness was tender. Claudia fetched a glass of water and propped it to the slit of mouth. ‘Is that better, Mademoiselle?’

  Aisling unbent. ‘We’d better wait for the doctor. It’s a good half-hour drive from Landi. I’ll make some tea.’ Ginette was silent on the sofa, clutching her half-empty glass tightly, her eyes far away.

  ‘What about her?’ asked Claudia.

  ‘Just shock, I suppose. I don’t think it’s serious. She comes to help Madame Lesprats sometimes, at our place. Madame Lesprats always calls her “pauvre Ginette”.’ Aisling was setting a pot of water to boil, pushing aside a saucepan from which a bone and a lump of carrot protruded.

  The large room, hard in the neon, was floored in turquoise lino. Aside from the bed and the sofa, there was a fridge under the angular wooden staircase, a formica table covered in a wipe-clean plastic cloth printed with sunflowers, and four wooden chairs, a calendar from the church in Castroux on the wall next to the fireplace, a television half covered in a crocheted pink doily on a huge dark buffet, and a small folding table with a vase of plastic lilies and a framed photograph of a black and white young man with a Proustian moustache. There was too much space, like a set in a theatre before the actors come on, and a strong thick smell of soup. Around the fireplace, saucepans and casseroles were piled, neat but homeless, and the table was set with two striped coffee bowls, an orange plastic dish of white sugar cubes, and two teaspoons, ready, Claudia supposed, for breakfast. She had never seen such a poor room, a room whose sparseness had nothing artful in it, whose shabbiness was merely shabby, not deliberate or bohemian or charming. She had never been so stupid as to believe that there was anything picturesque about poverty, but the room grated at her nonetheless, in a way it would not have done if it had been squalid. It was ugly, and the ugliness was painful, the calendar with its photograph of a nun at Lourdes was painful, the orange bowl was painful.

  Aisling had appropriated the coffee bowls and filled them with boiling water, into which she unenthusiastically dunked two Lipton tea bags. Claudia always associated those yellow labels with France, the way Lipton tea always left a white scum on the surface of the water.

  ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’ Aisling continued in English, following Claudia’s eyes. ‘It could be a wonderful house. I don’t know why she doesn’t sell it. The maison de retraite at Teulière is really wonderful, they have a marvellous time going on coach trips and playing boules. She could get a fortune for it you know, there’s the barns too, but you know what the French are like.’ She paused, then added in an accusing tone, ‘I didn’t know you spoke French.’

  ‘I’ll look out for the doctor, then.’ Claudia took her tea to the doorway and looked down the hill for headlights.

  1934–9

  Propriety put the rout to Père Guillaume’s good intentions. Mademoiselle Lafage, the schoolteacher, let it be known that she was looking for lodgings in the village as the Board had seen fit to appoint a master to the schoolhouse, and it was not decent that two unmarried people should share their quarters. Mademoiselle Lafage knew her rights, and applied to the bureau in Monguèriac for a boarding allowance. If the Board wanted to throw good money after bad, it was their own affair. Mademoiselle Lafage thought that no schoolmaster would be any more capable than she of prodding knowledge into the lumpish heads of the bigger Castroux boys. Monsieur François Boissière might well be from Toulouse, but she had taken her diploma in Paris, and was more than equal to him. If he thought she was going to waste her education teaching crochet and catechism he would have a surprise, that was all.

  So Mademoiselle Lafage went to lodge up at Aucordier’s with that poor child Oriane and her idiot brother. Laurent Nadl came with a chalky bucket and distempered the walls of the best bedroom, which Oriane had the sense not to mention was where her father had twitched and raved to death. Mademoiselle Lafage’s possessions were dragged up from Castroux on a cart. They included the artistic blue and yellow curtains that Mademoiselle had sewn and hung herself, and which she couldn’t see were deserved by the new teacher. For the first time in Oriane’s memory, a fire was lit upstairs. Mademoiselle Lafage arranged her books, hung up the framed copy of her diploma, and unpacked, to William’s joy, a large elongated bellows of an instrument that she explained was called a bassoon. She let it be known that she would take her evening meal at the small table in her own room, and afterwards, if William did not become too excited, she allowed him to stand in the doorway as she practised, her legs stretched out in front of her, toes in their black shoes straining to a point on the high notes and her eyes squinting with concentration behind her glasses. The schoolmistress provided her own coffee and sugar, and washed her underthings in the flowered china basin that had belonged to Oriane’s grandmother.

  Oriane felt neither obliged nor ungrateful to Mademoiselle Lafage, though she was thankful for the simplicity of her presence. William was now able to wash and dress himself, and in the early mornings she allowed him to watch the coffee on the fire as she went about the yard, releasing the hens, stuffing bread and hay through the bars of the rabbit cages, watering the goats. On cold days, the little animals were reluctant to leave their warm, pungent stall, and she set William to chase them, flailing his arms and making a strange deep lowing noise that never failed to startle the silly creatures and send them hopping out into the wind. Sometimes Mademoiselle Lafage would look out of her window, a scarf tied around her sheared brown hair, and laugh as William pursued the goats enthusiastically into the mud. Oriane peeled the vegetables for the soup and left them in a pot of water, wiped coffee and mud from William and set off with him in her clogs, her clean apron rolled up in a bag.

  William hated cold days, the wind slashed painfully at his ears and he yelped, rubbing his palm against the vulnerable holes. Oriane tried to protect him by tying a shawl of their mother’s around his cap, so that his head bobbed monstrous large in the silver mist. In the unpredictable time between January and March, when dense, icy fog was succeeded by days of startling brightness, the sky as rich as ink, the braziers were lit in the dawn orchards. Some were oil stoves with lids to protect them from the wind, some just little clay pots filled with coals, which glowed orange all along the valley, around the chateau hill and up over the brow at Saintonge. Stumpy figures stood around them, wrapped into mushrooms, with the tips of their noses poking out of their scarves. They could be frightening, Oriane thought, these strange little goblin fires, if their purpose was not so tender. If the blossom was not saved, there would be no fruit, so the men of Castroux, even men like Camille Lesprats who got drunk in Dubois’s and beat his own grandchildren, rose in the dark and coaxed the precious heat from the braziers, watching the newborn flowers until the sun rose as if they believed they could warm the trees by their own human presence.

  Madame Nadl, Papie, Laurent and Cathérine were all kind. William spent each morning at Murblanc, though Oriane feared at first that he would be in the way.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Madame Nadl told her, ‘he’s willing enough and it’s company for Papie. They can keep each other out of mischief.’ In the village, she said that it was a shame the way Sophie Aucordier had treated that poor child, he wasn’t really dumb at all, just strange, and his sister kept him very nice, you had to say that for her. William trotted happily about with Papie, watching Laurent at work in the barn, driving the cows into the meadow each morning. They were beautiful cows, the Murblanc animals, seven big Blondes d’Aqui
taine with cream-coloured hides and soft pink noses. His favourite was called Alice, and Madame Nadl taught him to milk her, pressing his face against her warm patient flank and smelling the sweet grassy smell of her cud. William waited in the barn, stroking Alice’s ears and singing to her, when the Nadls went in for their lunch, until he saw Oriane coming down the track from the chateau.

  They went to Mass every Sunday now. Amélie Lesprats boasted that she was going all the way to Landi to take the School Certificate, and Oriane thought it would have been nice to go to Landi too, but Amélie came to work at the chateau all the same afterwards, and it was still possible to speak good French with Mademoiselle Lafage. She didn’t much mind leaving school, she had never gone there regularly, and Amélie didn’t seem any cleverer for it. Laurent said he didn’t see much point in girls going to school, it only made them ugly like Mademoiselle Lafage, and his own mother had managed quite well without it. Laurent’s sister Cathérine said he was an old stick, and when she had enough money saved she was going to get a husband in Monguèriac, a man with a shop maybe, and sit behind the counter all day on a stool and never get up to milk an old cow again. Madame Nadl laughed and said how was Cathérine going to persuade this marvellous shopkeeper to marry her if her jam came out stringy and she burned the meat? ‘He will love me for my great beauty,’ replied Cathérine saucily, pushing her bosom out and patting her meagre bun, and they all laughed because Cathérine was as plain as a saucepan, but it wasn’t cruel, because she said so herself.