House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  Cathérine was always laughing, but Laurent was quite stern. Every week after Mass he set off on his motorbike, and no one knew where he went. La Moto, people called him. The machine was blue and black with polished silver pipes and Laurent could mount it quickly, despite his leg, twisting the handlebars into a triangle with his body and then supporting his whole weight on his arms as he started the engine. It looked as though it must have taken a lot of practice.

  Oriane asked Cathérine why he hadn’t got married, there’d be plenty of girls who would have him, and Cathérine said he was very serious, he wanted a serious girl, because he’d been in the war. Yves Contier had come home from the war though, and he had got married to Magalie, who wasn’t that old, and they had four children. Bernard Vionne, too, had his boy Marcel. Oriane thought that maybe Laurent was ashamed because of only having one leg and felt very sorry for him. She knew about that, because of their father and William. Laurent was gentle though, and he always came up to Aucordier’s when his own work was over if she asked him for help.

  Most homes in Castroux did a big wash twice a year, in April and October. Two or three washerwomen came with a wagon from Landi, and for a week or so the wash-house opposite the nuns’ garden was filled with steam and the scent of wet ash. Poplar wood was best for ashing, as oak and chestnut stained the clothes with tannin. If the wind was not high, the women draped the linens over the big rosemary bushes inside the sheltered walls so they would absorb the scent, and it looked as though it had snowed, with all the shrubs white and bulbous. When Sophie Aucordier was still there, Oriane had gone down to wash with her mother as it was too expensive to pay one of the women. They had hauled the sheets and clothes down the hill in the barrow and pushed them back up again twice a day, soaked and heavy, to dry and air in the breeze of the yard. Sophie said it was the only time the hateful wind ever came in useful. Oriane liked pouring the blue into the vat, it made the sheets and her father’s shirts so white that you had to squint to look at them in the sun, and she was proud to smell the fresh scent of iris root as the wind beat it about the yard, hiding the smells of the chickens and goats.

  At the chateau, there was a proper indoor laundry room, and Oriane poured soda instead of blueing into the copper, which Cook said didn’t get the soiling out so well as blue, for all it was more modern, but then perhaps the d’Esceyracs were not so dirty as the people in the village. On Monday, Oriane rubbed the wash with soap, and brushed at any stains, then screwed the fabric into long sausages and left them in two cotton bags submerged in the rinsing vat overnight. Next morning she filled the ash bag at the fireplace and placed it in the bottom of the copper, which she lined with a fresh sheet. She filled the boiler with three buckets from the well, and when it bubbled she used the long wooden scoop to transfer it to the vat for the first washing. There was a plug at the top of the vat from which the water could run down a funnel to be reheated in the boiler and scooped back, and that was the most difficult part of the work, plucking it out before her hand was scalded. While she waited for the water, the clothes had to be rubbed against the ridged side of the vat, stooping and kneading until her arms ached and her kidneys stabbed with pain. When the water ran clear, the wash was ready for bleaching, and then it had to be rinsed three times, hot, cold and cold, transferred between the two tubs with great care so as not to drop it on the sodden stone floor. Oriane worked barefoot, so that no dirt was trodden into the laundry room. Though it was hard and made you breathless, she liked the heat and the steam because afterwards her face felt so clean when she splashed it with the cold fresh rinsing water, though Amélie and Cathérine teased her and said she would grow a red porous nose like Camille Lesprats.

  Madame’s things had to be done separately, in the china sink, and they were put to dry in her own linen cupboard, off her dressing room, so that no one should see. The silk underwear was washed with a dilute solution of Savon de Marseille, and Oriane poured lavender essence that Cook distilled at the end of August into the rinse. At first Oriane had felt nervous, handling such fine things, but she saw after a while that sometimes they were marked with little spots of blood, or rims of grime, or other things, and though Oriane would never have said so to the other girls, it was comforting to think that the Marquise was just like everybody else. You learned things, washing. For instance, Monsieur and Madame did not sleep in the same bed like ordinary married people, they had separate rooms, but Oriane knew when Monsieur had visited Madame in the night, and whether he had stayed to breakfast with her, since he took coffee whilst Madame liked her chocolate in the morning.

  Oriane sat down to lunch with the others at eleven o’clock. Cook served everybody at the long table in the kitchen, she said there was no point in doing separately for maids and men these days, though Clara had to be sent up with a tray for herself. ‘Herself ’ was the nurse who looked after the Marquise’s baby, little Charles-Louis. He was a lovely little boy, with fat red cheeks, staggering about in the nursery, sucking on a worn yellow bobbin from which he was inseparable. Everyone thought it was a shame for him, his mother leaving him alone so much when he was just two, but no one felt sorry for herself, Mademoiselle Cleret, who was from Paris and gave herself airs. ‘It’s not as if she is a governess, even,’ sniffed Cook. Oriane thought Mademoiselle Cleret must be rather lonely, pushing the baby carriage up and down the lanes all day with no one to talk to. She went to Mass with Cook and Clara on Sundays, but she barely spoke to them the rest of the week, keeping to the nursery and her little bedroom on the third floor, where she had her own wireless and a big pile of fashion magazines passed on from Madame. Mademoiselle Cleret wasn’t old, but she looked it in her starched navy uniform. It was English style, with stiff white collars that Oriane had to press, all seven, when she ironed on a Wednesday. Perhaps she could be friends with Mademoiselle Lafage, though Oriane would never dare to suggest it. When Mademoiselle Cleret did speak, it was to tell tales of the d’Esceyracs’ house in Paris, which was in the very best part of town, a place called St-Germain, where there were always parties with the very best people, and she took little Charles-Louis for walks in a park called the Luxembourg gardens with the babies of duchesses. ‘The very best duchesses, no doubt,’ said Cook. Mostly though, Mademoiselle Cleret was stuck with Castroux, where she grumbled about the dust and the heat, or if not that, the mud and the cold, and she made Amélie scrape at the clogged wheels of the baby carriage with a stick.

  Clara and Amélie lived in, sharing one of the attic bedrooms next to Cook, who snored something terrible. The long dormitory above the stable was empty now, a place of sunlight and cobwebs. Two of Amélie’s Lesprats cousins saw to the horses and the odd jobs, though they were very superior about their real job as chauffeurs, which meant they polished the Marquis’s car when it was there and fiddled unnecessarily under the bonnet. There were Lesprats everywhere, old Camille had been one of fifteen and had had thirteen children himself, so Amélie had relations from Landi to Monguèriac. The boys had made a snug, smelly nest for themselves in an alcove off the tack room, which had a fireplace, and on Sundays they went for their dinner to Amélie’s parents in the village. Monsieur Contier, Yves’s father, was the gardener, though he was nearly as old as Papie Nadl. He was too old to farm, but he had a wonderful touch with roses, Madame said, and she was so proud of the sweetness of the d’Esceyrac melons she would often drag old Monsieur Contier out to meet her guests when they came down from Paris in the summer. He mumbled and touched his cap, but didn’t tell them about the holy water. In fact, there were not guests from Paris so very often, Monsieur le Marquis was usually away, and Madame was often with him, fetched in a car from the station at Monguèriac and driven away to dance with the very best people in St-Germain.

  Cathérine slept at Murblanc, but though she walked up with Oriane in the morning, she worked the full day, so Oriane returned alone, taking the track down through the woods to fetch William. Sometimes she would stop and sit down at the little shrine to the Madonna and
leave her a posy, or just trail her fingers in the brook. It was nice to sit and think, and plan the chores for the afternoon. Cook allowed her to take some bread and a bit of cheese or sausage for William, so often they sat on the bridge over the Landine while he ate his lunch, and then they walked into Castroux. Oriane felt very grown up as she counted her own money from her own purse to pay for a few nails or a loaf from Charrot’s bakery. Sometimes she left William playing in the square and stuck her head into the kitchen of the café, where she would share a sirop with Betty Dubois and tell her about the doings up on the hill, how the funnel of the copper had got clogged with a ball of string, or how Charles-Louis had escaped into the drawing room and broken a porcelain figurine. Betty liked to hear about the food Cook made, though that was better when Monsieur was there because Madame liked odd meals, dry toast, a nasty sour thing called a grapefruit, the size of a football, or just a plate of steak chopped up raw with capers. Betty said it was because she was slimming. It was all the rage, slimming. Oriane liked sirop de grenadine, but they usually had lemon because it was cheaper and Betty said her father would have her if he knew she was giving the other kind away for nothing.

  It was a long walk home, but if there was a wagon passing, the driver would usually give them a lift up the hill, and that gave Oriane a chance for a rest before beginning the afternoon’s work. She had to be extra careful about keeping the house nice because of Mademoiselle Lafage, so she was glad on the whole that she did not have a pig. When her mother was alive, that had been one of the shames of Aucordier’s, because even the poorest people had a pig, but her father had sold their last one to a carrier before it was killed, and had hitched them both a ride to Cahors with the money. The carrier had pushed him out of his cart at the entrance to the yard five days later, covered in his own red sick, and all the pig money was gone. Sophie Aucordier left him in the dirt for a whole day, stinking and covered in flies, but when night fell and she tried to get him to the privy to clean him off he had pulled out a plank of wood from the queasy-looking fence of the sty and broken it across her back. So when Laurent Nadl asked her if she would like a penong bringing back from the fair at Landi the first spring she had gone to work up at the chateau, Oriane had thought about it and said no. William always hid when the pig killer came, even from Saintonge he could hear them screaming. That autumn, when Madame Nadl kindly offered to let them share the fricassee of fresh throat meat, fried with flour and lemon, Oriane said it upset him, and they stayed at home.

  The rabbits were difficult too. Oriane loved them when they were small, blind and writhing in the straw, but as they grew they became sullen, shuffling resentfully behind their wires, snapping at her hand even when she pushed a bunch of fresh sweet grass through to them. They knew their fate, and they hated her for it. She told herself they were cruel, nibbling up their own children like that sometimes. Laurent showed her how to grab them by the soft loose skin on the back of their neck and twist the supple little throat, but the first time, Oriane dropped her rabbit and it lay screaming and rolling in the dirt of the yard until Laurent finished it off with a lump of brick. She learned to be deft and quick then, though she always had to close her eyes at the little pop of bone that meant the warm body would grow heavy and still in her hand. When she had enough clean skins, she made a cap for William, and she cooked the rabbits with vinegar and olives, or with mustard, or sliced them up for a pressed terrine. All the same, she never stopped hating the way those skinned eyes rolled at her, because they had trusted her, once.

  SUMMER HOLIDAYS

  Sunday scratched, half past three was endless. The air felt stagnant, even the water in the pool blood-warm. Nothing moved in the valley aside from an occasional car passing at the bottom of the hill, the sound of its passage stretching the length of the road in the stillness. Beneath the milky sky the family at Murblanc moved with a fellahin slowness, a dogged un-English lethargy. The house knew centuries of such heat, would remain cool enough for sleep at least until the sun banked, with the shutters closed and the thick stone walls sweating a last chill of winter. Yet some Northern inability to see light and heat as anything other than a blessing, too precious to be squandered, kept them irritably out of doors. The Froggetts baked stoically on their terrace.

  Claudia had thought she had slept late, it had been after three again when she had got to bed, but she was disappointed when she woke to find it was only nine-thirty. Alex, maddeningly, slept on. Richard and Oliver lay on the grass under the chestnut tree, sighing with exaggerated boredom. Aisling had woken at the same time, and was irritable at starting her day behind. Her first thought was that Claudia spoke perfect French. She had forbidden the boys the pool when she found them dive-bombing the Froggett daughters. Alex and Jonathan were liverish, it was too hot to eat and there were no papers because Aisling had missed the market. In the breathless shade they flicked resentfully at a three-dayold Telegraph. Aisling thought about dinner and wondered if she ought to ask the Froggetts up for a drink.

  Charlotte Glover telephoned to say thank you.

  ‘I thought I might walk up to Aucordier’s to see how the old lady is,’ said Claudia to no one in particular, pronouncing the name lightly, as though it had always been familiar to her.

  ‘Yes, you could take some cherries. They’re a bit manky, I was going to do a clafoutis, but it’s the last, they’ll do in a basket.’ Aisling sat with a pile of recipe books with greasy yellow Post-its marking the pages.

  ‘I’ll come,’ said Alex.

  ‘Are you sure, darling? It’s very hot.’

  ‘Do me good.’

  At breakfast, the men had listened politely to Aisling’s explanation of the adventure, Ginette’s breakdown, the arrival of the doctor, the broken wrist. They both felt, though neither said so, that it was tiresome of Aisling to be so interested in the neighbours, bothering over silly old women whom she would not have noticed in England. Excessive somehow and not worth hearing about. You expected women to be kind like that, they were feminine. Richard put in that the old woman from Aucordier’s was a witch, and that he had seen her pissing in her artichoke patch on his way back from tennis. ‘But we loved the artichokes that Ginette brought for us,’ said Aisling mischievously.

  ‘I didn’t,’ declared Oliver, ‘they’re disgusting and hairy. Sick.’

  Richard whispered something about Mrs Laws, the boys collapsed into their habitual huddle of wheezing sniggers.

  ‘There could be something in it,’ Jonathan smiled at them, ‘maybe we should try it on Mum’s tomatoes.’ Aisling swatted him with a napkin, everyone laughed.

  ‘They’re nice kids, Richard and Olly,’ offered Alex as they began the climb. He was gallantly carrying the basket of cherries, huge and bulbous, the colour of clotted blood. There was something cancerous about them, Claudia could hardly stand to look. Her mouth was dry, but she felt a horrible gush of sour gastric juices lurch in her throat, gulped it back. She could tell him now.

  ‘Do you think they get bored here?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you bored already?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s heaven.’

  ‘Bloody hot.’

  They carried on in silence. The steepness of the hill had been disguised last night in the car, Claudia felt the pitch of it a little in her lungs. Was this over-exertion? she thought suddenly. Alex was red-faced, she could sense him breathing carefully through his nose so as not to let her hear him puff. His belly bulged a little over his belted shorts; released from his scaffolding of suits and tailored shirts, Alex was soft all over, less convincingly male. Sébastien did not have that look of peeled, grub-like Englishness. Sébastien would be wearing jeans, ancient worn Levi’s sitting low on his tanned hips, his T-shirt would not be neatly pressed navy blue from Hackett’s, but something overwashed to the texture of fine suede, bought ten years ago in the rue Oberkampf. In photographs, the same T-shirt or jacket would appear over and over, a snapshot at the beach in Mexico, the magazine pictures of the Venice Biennale, ev
entually arriving at Claudia’s time, the T-shirt smooth against her breasts, pulled from the tangled floor in the morning, the corduroy jacket warming her one cold October morning in Florence. An American woman had Polaroided them kissing in the Piazza della Signoria and shyly given them the picture. Claudia, though she knew it was not original, touched Sébastien’s clothes like talismans when she found herself alone in the flat in St-Germain. He did not have many things so Claudia had once been pleased by the continuity of his clothes, the way they bridged the time before she knew him. She realized now that the presents she had given him, a black cashmere sweater, a heavy printed silk scarf, would complete Sébastien in time for a woman whom he had perhaps not yet even met. Hopelessly, Claudia felt tears start at the back of her jaw.

  ‘Darling! Darling, what’s the matter?’ Claudia loathed herself for the concern in his voice. She scrubbed at her face with a dusty balled fist, screwing up her eyes.

  ‘Nothing, I’m just feeling a bit dizzy.’

  ‘Ought we to go back?’

  ‘No, no, sorry, we’re practically there. I’ll be fine when I have some water.’

  Aucordier’s was as lifeless as the day. Claudia knocked hesitantly at the door, this was the wrong time to come, the two women would surely be sleeping. But Ginette appeared promptly, smiling, normal, her hair heartbreakingly twisted in plastic rollers.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Claudia. ‘This is my fiancé, Alex.’

  ‘Enchanté, Madame,’ said Alex gravely. He proffered the basket with the ghost of a little bow. He is kind, thought Claudia, so kind to me.

  Ginette insisted they come in, and though Claudia was reluctant to see the room again, it was surprisingly cool, no soup, only the vinous combination of old beams and stone. The air felt suddenly watery, smooth and greenish as a plunge into a lake after the glare outside. Mademoiselle Oriane was on the sofa, straight backed but nodding, in a white blouse and broad dark grey skirt. The hairnet was covering Ginette’s rollers today. On the television, Romy Schneider trilled through the Alps in a crinoline. ‘Oh, it’s Sissi l’Impératrice!’ Claudia realized that she had exclaimed.