by Hilton, Lisa
‘We love her. Isn’t she beautiful?’ Ginette looked wistful.
‘How is Mademoiselle?’ asked Claudia.
‘Oh, fine, fine.’
The night before, Claudia had left Ginette still immobile on the sofa as the doctor washed his hands, and, not knowing how much she now recalled, given Aisling’s cleaning-lady’s claim about fits, she did not wish to confuse her with details misplaced or provocative of embarrassment. Ginette did not seem inclined to say much.
‘And the wrist? All fine?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well, we don’t want to interrupt your Sunday.’ Claudia tried to direct Alex to the door with her eyes, but he was smiling expansively and indiscriminately, not attempting to keep up with the French.
‘Please, stay and have some tea.’ There was a long pause, Ginette’s mouth hovered open. ‘Very English?’ she produced in English, and Alex beamed at the effort.
‘We’d love to,’ said Claudia, thinking with dread of the viscous foam floating on the surface of the hard water in last night’s coffee bowl. Ginette beamed too, for much too long. She did not make any move towards assembling the tea, but remained where she was, smiling hugely. Claudia avoided Alex’s eyes.
‘Poke her with that,’ came a voice from the sofa. Mademoiselle Oriane was alert, straining out over her bound arm with a grey plastic-tipped crutch.
‘Go on. You hit her last night. Give her a good poke.’
‘How are you, Mademoiselle?’ asked Claudia stupidly.
The old woman set the crutch on the floor and hauled herself up with her right arm, bigger and obviously much stronger than she had appeared slumped against the bed in that white light. Alex stepped back out of her way, she transferred the crutch to her left armpit and jabbed at Ginette’s pink sprigged blouse with the right. Ginette’s eyes immediately refocused, the smile melted, she blinked rapidly and said, ‘What are you doing up? Doctor told you to rest. Look, we’ve got visitors.’
‘I had seen that,’ muttered Mademoiselle, turning to look at Claudia. ‘There you are. Thank you for coming last night. Is Madame Harvey your mother?’
‘No, my sister-in-law, at least she will be.’ Claudia smiled her bride-like smile and gestured at Alex.
‘I see. When?’ Mademoiselle nodded to her.
‘Well, we haven’t really decided on a date for the wedding yet.’
‘No, the baby,’ the old woman smiled kindly, ‘when are you due?’
Claudia fainted, for the first time in her life.
Giles Froggett was attacked by the Marquis d’Esceyrac’s Alsatians at the same moment that Claudia’s head made abrupt contact with Oriane Aucordier’s turquoise lino. He had heard them first, the quick bounding patter of paws on dry leaves, but the sound meant so little to him that the dogs were upon him before its identity was clear to his thoughts. They hurtled from the woods at the side of the path, not barking, two of them, ears pressed back against the long narrow heads, black lips snarling. The first brought him down in a leap of nightmare, its weight barrelling against his chest, he knew he would fall only as his back painfully struck the ground. He curled over on his side, tucking in his chin and squeezing his arms to his sides, a gesture unlearned, the body reacting swiftly as the brain struggled still with the shattering of his holiday afternoon. The second dog nipped his bare ankle, too quickly still for fear, the other was upon him, hot and fetid, snouting at his neck. He rolled foetus-like, eyes closed, heart hammering now but aiming at motionlessness, dogs could smell fear couldn’t they, hoping passivity would keep their evil yellow teeth from his veins. They circled him as he scrabbled in the desiccated leaf mould, barking triumphantly. If he moved they would kill him. He could not cry out.
‘You’re stupid.’ An English voice, a child’s voice. Giles opened his eyes. A little boy, six or seven, stood on the path in blue shorts and long blue socks, a white shirt. The dogs abased themselves, jaws to the ground, one of them licked amiably at Giles’s face as though it had just been joking. Warily, Giles sat up.
‘I am the Comte d’Esceyrac,’ said the little boy, adding conversationally, ‘my father had a cancer.’
There were leaves sticking to Giles’s knees, his polo shirt was torn. He wanted to brush at himself, but was afraid the movement might bring on the dogs.
‘You’re bleeding,’ said the Comte d’Esceyrac.
‘Are you French?’ asked Giles. The scene was beyond him.
‘Yes, but my nanny is English. She is called Sarah Ashworth.’
‘Do you think I should get up?’
‘Well, you can now.’
The child held on to the dogs by their collars, their shoulders well above his waist. A voice called through the trees, ‘Charles-Henri?’
Giles stood, his back smarting. There was blood in his sandal, quite a lot of blood. He felt dizzy. Charles-Henri answered in a rapid staccato, then looked contemptuously at Giles. ‘You had better come up.’
Tea was being served on the oval lawn before the chateau, white cane chairs, white cloth dappled with leaf-light beneath a huge tree. A smaller boy, neatly identical to his brother, sat quietly to one side with a picture book, a couple, oldish man and younger, fair-haired woman in a dark blue dress, talked quietly. Like a painting, Giles thought. The tree was probably an oak. He scrambled after Charles-Henri through a rhododendron bush. A young woman in large shorts, hair in an Alice band, ran forward. ‘Sarah Ashworth, I presume?’ said Giles, attempting to recover himself.
‘Oh, you’re English. I’m so sorry, what has Charles-Henri done to you?’ She had a clear, ringing voice, ‘Plummy’, Giles said later to his wife.
‘Actually,’ asserted Charles-Henri, ‘I probably actually saved his life. Zola and Balzac were eating him, to tell the truth.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah Ashworth.
‘I’m bleeding.’ Giles hoped he didn’t sound whiny. Charles-Henri, his heroism unappreciated, wandered off.
‘This is, I’m sorry? This is Mr Froggett. The dogs bit him.’ Giles limped a little, affectedly if he were honest, as they approached the tea table. ‘I’ve already met your dogs!’ he called cheerfully.
‘The Hounds of the Baskervilles?’ said the man, his English more heavily accented than, presumably, his grandson’s. He was obviously pleased with this remark, more pleased than concerned.
‘Vicious, I would say,’ answered Giles defensively, conscious of the man’s soft linen jacket, his gold signet ring, irritated even further by the consciousness.
‘They were only, as you would say, doing their job. I am very sorry. I hope you are not badly hurt?’
Charles-Henri reappeared, crumbs on his mouth, tugging at the jacket and speaking French.
‘I see,’ said the man to Giles, ‘you were lost?’
‘That’s it, I’m staying down the hill there, at Murblanc.’ He pronounced it ‘moorblonk’.
‘Of course, at the Henrys’ house. Well, would you like Sarah to find you a bandage? A glass of water? Or perhaps you would prefer to be driven home?’
This was clearly the right choice. Down the hill and back up the lane to Murblanc in Sarah’s capable little Renault, Giles wondered why he had said ‘Yes, please’ like a child who has behaved badly at a birthday party.
Dinner at the Harveys’ that night was a surprisingly gay affair. Eventually the sky was streaked yellow and purple like a new bruise, Sunday was on the way to being dispensed with, everyone took a late swim. Claudia, her bikini top thoughtfully attached, practised diving with Oliver and Richard. They tried to teach her the pike, and she plunged again and again, sopping hair trailing her mouth as she resurfaced, laughing, unable to get it right. She had forbidden Alex to mention her collapse, the relief, as she surfaced in his arms, of the knowledge that he could not possibly have understood what Oriane had said, was cooler than the water. She felt loving towards him again and thought that the faint could introduce nicely her resolution to tell him the truth. She flexed her legs, trying to bring up he
r knees and shoot them out straight as she turned in the air, the pool meeting her body too soon each time before she had executed the movement, and she tumbled splashily until she felt truly tired, an incipient languorousness in her limbs promising real sleep. She would drink water tonight and leave her cigarette packet upstairs.
Aisling thought ‘Sod it’ and cooked a great crock of spaghetti with tomato sauce and a salad. No one changed, they ate outside, slurping in their damp bathing costumes. Magnanimously, she told the boys that they really ought to practise their French with Claudia, she spoke perfectly. Claudia questioned Jonathan, intelligently ignorant, about wine, she leaned her head on Alex’s shoulder. When it was dark, the men lit citronella candles in yellow ceramic pots against the mosquitoes. Alex found a CD of baroque music and turned the stereo in the drawing room up loud, so the sound of violins poured over the balcony to the garden. Claudia said, ‘Aisling, you must be dying for a night off from cooking for us ogres. Alex and I thought we might go out to dinner tomorrow night.’
‘Fine, what about going into Landi, guys? We could go to the pictures and then have a pizza.’
‘Star Wars The Prequel? Kevin says it’s in VO.’
‘Oh, God, all right.’
‘Cool.’
At ten o’clock, Mrs Froggett appeared, looking morose. She asked Aisling if she had any disinfectant. ‘Giles was bitten by a dog,’ she explained.
Aisling glared pre-emptively at her sons. Poor Mr Froggett was a geography teacher, apparently the saddest profession known to man, and nearly as funny as Jaffa Cakes. Richard and Oliver constantly rehearsed a mysterious dialogue that they found endlessly hilarious.
‘Jaffa Cake, Vicar?’
‘Don’t mind if I do. I must say, I do enjoy a seedless fruit.’ Jonathan had no clue as to why Jaffa Cakes provoked this reaction, he said they hadn’t been invented when he was at school. She ought to ask Alex, maybe.
‘How dreadful,’ she said aloud. ‘Look, why don’t you all come up for a glass of wine? You must tell us what happened.’
Mrs Froggett assented and reappeared shortly with her family. The Froggett daughters wore acne and surly expressions, their father a surgical stocking bulging out of his sandal, which had obviously come from the hypochondriac’s paradise of the pharmacy in Landi. They sat down, Jonathan fetched more glasses. Giles told the story of the assault.
‘So you met the d’Esceyracs?’ asked Aisling nosily.
‘It was the grandson who found me. He said he was a Comte.’
Richard and Oliver nearly suffocated with glee.
‘Well, do you know, he probably is. I’d heard there were two little boys, living in Paris. The father died.’
‘I thought it was the other way round,’ said Claudia, ‘Marquis and then Count. Like de Sade.’
Alice Froggett, the vegan, had just finished her A levels and was going to Cambridge. She said, ‘I think it depends on the antiquity of the title.’
‘I didn’t think the French had an aristocracy any more?’ queried Alex.
‘They still have the titles, but they don’t really mean anything. Like Italians,’ said Claudia, ‘contessas all over the place.’ This information was a relief to Giles Froggett.
‘He didn’t seem that posh to me, anyway. That castle looked like it was half falling down. There really should be a sign about those dogs, they could kill someone.’
‘Maybe we ought to do something, Jonathan. Speak to the Marquis?’ It was clear to Claudia at least, that Aisling’s interest in such an encounter had nothing to do with the state of Mr Froggett’s ankle.
‘It’s absurd, isn’t it, that they still go around using such antediluvian titles?’ said Alice Froggett hopefully, but no one disagreed with her, which was disappointing.
JUNE 1939
In the summer of 1939, no one in Castroux was at all surprised when Mademoiselle Lafage moved back to the schoolhouse to become Madame Boissière. The bride was married from Aucordier’s in a fawn crêpe de Chine coat and skirt made up in Monguèriac; for a week, William was forbidden to go in pursuit of the bassoon in case he smeared the costume with excited grubby hands. Mademoiselle Lafage’s mother was coming from Paris, and her friend Simone from the training college was to be bridesmaid, so Oriane did out William’s room and put a jug of lavender stalks on the washstand, so that Mademoiselle Lafage might wake alone on her wedding morning. Oriane thought that would be nice, for the last time. There was to be lunch in the café and dancing afterwards, with lights in the square. Mademoiselle Lafage had hoped for something quiet, some cake and champagne before the drive to the train (they were to take a walking tour in the Italian Alps), but François had persuaded her that they had to have a real country wedding. In Castroux, everyone attended everybody’s wedding whether they were invited or not, funeral too, come to that, so Mademoiselle Lafage resigned herself, and discreetly asked Betty Dubois to make sure that all the café’s shutters were kept wide open.
Monsieur Boissière had purchased a new necktie with a pattern of daisies, and half a dozen bottles of champagne. He told Betty to make sure it was poured out for the right people, and gave her a list to learn to be certain. The Marquise d’Esceyrac who might well stay after the Mass, Monsieur Larivière, the mayor, himself and the bride and the bridesmaid and the bride’s mother, Père Guillaume, the three teachers from the schoolhouse at Landi, and poor Oriane Aucordier, though not that brother of hers and certainly not Camille Lesprats and his cronies, who were filthy boozers. It was Camille Lesprats and his rustic odours that caused Mademoiselle Lafage such worry. Castroux was countrified enough for someone of Simone’s experience without smelly old peasants, high and gamey in the June heat, crowding around and showing people up.
Oriane got up at half past four on Saturday morning. She had boiled water the night before and left it with a stem of rosemary to soak. It smelt crisp and spicy as she washed her neck and under her arms. It was not quite light, she pushed the shutter a little so as to see better, and could smell that it was going to be hot. Her eyes were peepy, she rolled the cloth in the cool water and pressed it to her face, yawning, wishing she could climb back into the bed where William still slept, his arms wrapped around his head to cushion his ears. He was decent, she had made him climb into the tub the night before and scrubbed roughly at his throat and face while he howled and splashed. She put on a skirt and blouse over her bodice and knickers and wrapped her head in her mother’s print scarf. William opened his eyes. He heard the faded silk squeak against his sister’s clean hair. She was standing by the window, folding her best dress into a flour sack, a blue dress with a pattern of violet-coloured flowers. Oriane felt him stir, gave him a big smile, put her finger to her lips. William followed, ‘Shhh’, then pointed to the dress, and whispered ‘Polida’. Pretty.
The church clock struck six as Oriane reached the nuns’ garden. From Aucordier’s, she had seen fine plumes of smoke across the valley at Saintonge and clear over the village, but as she reached the bridge she plunged into dawn vapour, swimming waist deep in dense, silvery mist, tangible to her spread fingers and thick as a January morning. Two wagons passed her as the road began to rise again over the river, she stepped politely to the side of the road and the drivers wished her good morning, though they were not Castroux men. The white stones led up from the ghostly river until where the bells rang it was bright again everywhere. There was no gate to the garden, just a stone archway with an empty niche set in the wall, opening on to a modern gravel path through the trees, which stopped against the wall at the other end. The wall had been built up, but beyond it, Oriane knew, were vague mounds, ploughed over now and joyful with sunflowers, but where in winter it was possible to imagine the outlines of the buildings that had once stood there, the hospital, chapel, cloister. Along the river bank, by the barn owned by the baker, Monsieur Charrot, there was a single stone pillar that was used as a boundary marker between the Charrot and Teulière plots. The relief was worn almost smooth except at the base, wher
e, if you pulled away at the grass, you could see that the carving had once been a filigree as sharp and delicate as lace.
Oriane felt that it was precious, this between time. She picked a sage leaf from one of the huge bushes that flourished in the shade of the old apple trees and rubbed the velvety scent on to her fingers. It was so rare to be not just alone but absent, with no one knowing where she was and no sense that there was work she ought to be getting on with. Walking slowly, she touched the spikes of the rosemary and closed her hand around a wizened grey apple branch, breathing deep until she felt her lungs strain to open further in the swashy shade, spreading her arms and relishing the coolness in the soft morning shadow. She wondered what it would feel like to slip from her clothes and lie naked in the damp grass as though it were a beautiful green carpet. But imagine if someone came by! They would think she was as silly as William. She untied the neck of the flour sack and fastened it again around the branch, tying the ends so the bag was raised up and her dress would not be spoiled by wet stains. The orange flowers by the wall were still furled tightly where the sun had not reached them, treasuring their scent inside. They would open up nicely by the time the cake was served. All the same, as she knelt to gather them, she lifted her skirt to where the sudden white skin above her knees showed, and settled her legs apart, so the juicy grass brushed her, and grew warm on the inside of her thighs.
The Nadls were going to the wedding in the wagon, so William could leave with them. It was a shame Cathérine couldn’t come, but she hadn’t a half day, although the girls might be allowed out in the evening, for the dancing. The Mass was at eleven. The bridal party, Oriane liked the sound of that, so smart, the bridal party were to come in Monsieur Larivière’s motor car, driven by the mayor himself. There was bread and coffee and strawberry conserve laid out under a cloth in the pantry, and three madeleines for the ladies in a saucer. Oriane had fetched them from Charrot’s herself yesterday and told William she would lock him in the goat shed for a week if he so much as sniffed one. Downstairs, the floor was swept and there was another jug of lavender on the table, laid with bowls and spoons. Perhaps the best coffee cups, the wedding cups from the buffet, might have looked well, but they didn’t hold much and Mademoiselle Lafage was greedy for her breakfast, though she might, Oriane supposed, feel obliged to hold back today on account of nerves.