House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  Betty and Andrée didn’t think much of that. ‘Rubbish,’ Andrée snorted, ‘she can’t wait to get into bed with old Boissière!’

  The kitchen at the café had a damp terracotta floor and smelt of spilled wine and yellow soap. It was built down into the ground so that the only window, above the porcelain sink, looked out through fronds of honeysuckle to the bottoms of the tablecloths airing on the washing line. Oriane was breaking eggs into every basin that could be assembled.

  ‘Do you think they’ve done it already?’ asked Betty.

  ‘In the schoolhouse on Wednesday afternoon!’

  ‘No, in the woods by the Virgin, with her knickers flapping in the breeze!’

  ‘No, at your house, while she was practising the bassoon!’

  Andrée grabbed Betty from behind and pumped her hips at her fat backside while Betty blew at a wooden spoon with her eyes screwed up.

  ‘She played the scale of C major to cover his huffing and puffing!’

  Andrée and Betty looked like ‘Happy Families’ cards swapped around, Oriane thought. Betty Dubois, the café owner’s daughter, looked as though she belonged in the bakery, plump as a brioche with soft pale skin and light hair, a big bosom and stomach under her apron. Andrée, the baker’s daughter, was dark and skinny with a big nose that pecked at gossip, and small bright eyes that gleamed like crème de cassis. Andrée was a fine cook though, she had made the pièce montée for the wedding the day before and it would be she, not Betty, who supervised the twenty big truffle omelettes. No one could say that Monsieur Boissière was stingy, everyone was excited about the feast. There would be foie gras, of course, with fig bread, then the omelettes, then capon with roast potatoes and ceps, the salad and cheese, made in the dairy at Murblanc by Madame Nadl, then the dessert of cherries in red wine, then the tower of choux pastry and caramel decorated with the white blossoms that Oriane had picked in the nuns’ garden. They lay on a plate in the larder covered with damp paper.

  The short country term was already over, but both the classes from the school were assembled on the steps of the church with a painted banner that said ‘Vive Les Mariés’ in meandering primrose letters. The Marquise d’Esceyrac attended the Mass with her little boy and graciously accepted a glass of Monsieur Boissière’s anxiously proffered champagne. Camille Lesprats got roaring drunk, and everyone laughed about ‘Poire William’ when the digestifs went round. Mademoiselle Lafage’s friend Simone had purplish lipstick and a rather revealing apricot costume, she drank Papie Nadl’s eau de vie from a glass like a man instead of coyly dipping a sugar lump. Monsieur Larivière, who had given away the bride as well as performing the legal ceremony, proposed the toast, looking quite the thing in his sash. Then the bridegroom seated himself at the piano and played a soft, wandering piece whilst gazing at his red-faced wife, while all the guests respectfully pretended to listen.

  The benches were moved outside and the old ones sat down to watch the youngsters dance. Yves Contier settled himself on a chair in the shade, important with his accordion. Papie Nadl stepped forward with his violin, but instead of nodding at Yves to begin he raised his bow for silence. He spoke up in his high, reedy voice, ‘As we know,’ he began, coughed a little, ‘as we all know, Madame Boissière has made her home up at Aucordier’s for the past few years. William Aucordier has made a present for her. All by himself.’ The amiable quality of the quiet shifted a little. Oriane clenched her hands in the skirt of her dress.

  ‘Go on, William,’ said Papie.

  William got to his feet. There was a dribble of yellow crème patissière on his jaw. He reached out to Papie, his arms wide and anxious, as though to receive a child, and made a little squeak. Someone tittered, and Madame Boissière frowned. William took Papie’s violin, holding it delicately in his big raw hands, and settled it under his chin. He dipped his torso in an awkward bow. Then he arranged his fingers around the bow and began to play. He played softly at first, his eyes closed, a little tune that ran up and down the fret, then gathered itself, and dipped, and soared, mounting like a bird hopping from branch to branch, pausing, swooping back, rising higher and faster as his elbow sawed and he nodded forward into the music, pushing it on and tapping his foot until it ran under his hands like the river in winter, and then he curbed it, softening, ending on a long full note, dying away and holding them all there, spun for a moment a little above the dust of the square. The silence was new again. That was what was remembered of that day, that William Aucordier astonished everyone in the village when he played the violin for the first time in his blue shirt at the schoolmistress’s wedding.

  Oriane was breathless with happiness and surprise. Papie was beaming, though he had not been the only one to wipe a tear from his eye. ‘We had you there, eh?’ he asked everyone. ‘Oh, that’s a good one! We had you there!’ Cathérine said she had heard music coming from the cow barn for years, but she thought Papie must be playing to William to pass the time, although it did seem as if he was improving with all the practice. Everyone laughed and laughed, there was not a bad word to be said. Père Guillaume said it was an example. What Oriane remembered later was the rapid flutter of the light, how it danced in the dappling leaves of the chestnut trees, the same light the wind had pushed so cruelly around the eaves of Aucordier’s now gathered up so wonderfully in William’s music, how it spun between the pale massed bow strings, and how it cancelled out shame.

  SUMMER HOLIDAYS

  Charlotte Glover was drawing a batch of pots from the kiln next morning when Richard Harvey appeared on his bicycle. It was already filthy hot, but August was the busiest season for the markets, and she was making a load of the thick, brightly coloured salad bowls that had really sold well last year. If they were popular again, she and Malcolm might be able to return home for Christmas. ‘Mum said, can you babysit tonight?’ asked Richard ungraciously, disgusted with the description. ‘She said to say she phoned, but there was only the answer machine and she needs to know.’

  Charlotte set the blistering rack down slowly on the wall of the old pigsty. What did Aisling think she was doing, she thought self-righteously, it was Monday morning! Lolling around in a negligée painting her nails? She was working, and so was Malcolm, who took odd jobs in the season on English gîtes and had got up at six-thirty to drive fifty kilometres to see about the filter in some hysterical woman’s pool. The Glovers did not have a pool. Then she felt mean and asked Richard if he would like a glass of Orangina.

  ‘Is your mum going out then?’ she couldn’t help asking, wondering where it was she and Malcolm hadn’t been asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s sick. We were meant to be going to see Star Wars, but now she’s going to drinks at the chateau,’ he pursed up his mouth to inject pretension into the last syllable, ‘and we have to stay at home with Caroline.’

  ‘Caroline?’

  ‘Caroline Froggett. She sucks. She’s a PG and she’s got a sister, but the sister’s grown up and her parents are going too. It’s crap, actually,’ he said, daring the semi-risk of the word.

  ‘Oh dear, that is disappointing. I didn’t know Aisling and Jonathan knew the chateau people.’

  ‘They don’t, but my mum can’t wait to have a nose. You know what she’s like. And the dogs at the chateau tried to kill Mr Froggett, that’s Caroline’s dad, so they’re all going to have a meeting about it and drink loads of wine, probably.’

  ‘Well, tell your mum it’s fine, but a bit short notice. I think Malcolm’s got some videos of Monty Python, we could watch that instead.’

  ‘Yeah, all right. Thanks for the drink.’

  On the way home, Richard jerked his bike into a skid around the wall of the bridge, like Valentino Rossi. He and Oliver consoled themselves for the general crapness of living in France with the thought that next year he would be old enough for a moto. That’s if dad let him have one, because they couldn’t even have a Playstation, even though you could get the converter plug in Landi. Also, you could buy spliff in the bar in Castroux, w
hich was cool, though he hadn’t actually had any spliff yet. Claudia had caught him filching a cigarette and had been pretty cool actually, saying that if he was going to smoke he might as well do it properly, and she showed him how to inhale in the barn. He pretended not to know how, although he’d been smoking since he was like, twelve, a year ago. Richard definitely fancied Claudia, although her tits weren’t that big, but she was really pretty and smelt of perfume and her clothes were all droopy and a bit see-through. He wondered if she sexed with Alex a lot.

  It was a bit sad, but he actually missed school. He and Oliver boarded in England, which was fine, because he didn’t want to go to the lycée in Landi with all those rubes, no way. School was a universe away. School was internet and skiing trip and sneaking into town on the bus and it wasn’t weird to live in France because lots of people’s parents did, even though to hear his mum you’d think they were the only English boys to speak French at all. His parents’ French made Richard cringe. He hated, detested, loathed and despised the way they always carried on speaking unnecessarily, chatting to everyone in the shops instead of just saying thank you and going like they would in England. The way they smiled too much and made mistakes, and those awful pantomime actions to make up for it. French was not another world, it was just what you spoke when you played football in Castroux or hung around the café sharing a cigarette with Jean-Luc or Kevin, who both had motos and were not at all impressed that Richard and Oliver spent half the time somewhere else. Mum kept asking about his friends in the village, asked him to invite them for supper, but Richard didn’t know how to explain that Kevin’s mum would think Aisling was mad, and that they just didn’t talk about who was English and who was not, it wasn’t important. He liked having a pool though, because only English people did, and when it was hot and there were no fucking PGs he could say ‘Fancy a swim?’ and they’d all troop up the hill and Aisling brought down cold bottles of Coke and cake, which everyone ate like it was nothing special, although he’d never even been in any of his mates’ houses.

  Richard pumped hard up the lane, swerving tightly around the gatepost, Rossi well in the lead, wasting Biaggi. Maybe Dreary Malcolm had that cool Monty Python with the shrubbery. He might try to neck with Caroline Froggett. She was a minger, but she was a girl, and no one at school would know she had spots.

  Claudia told herself that she felt like Tess when she discovers that Angel hasn’t read the letter. A jolly gel who introduced herself as Sarah had appeared with a note at breakfast time, and Aisling had martialled the household into acquiescence. Claudia knew she was being silly, she could perfectly well tell Alex at any time, if not today, tomorrow, but she had pictured the moment so clearly that it had become talismanic. Thwarted, there was a sense of reprieve, she still didn’t have to go through with it. Sébastien would be at his parents’ place near Biarritz. She wanted to call him, to have him come to claim her without explanation. Biarritz was not so far away, she could get a train, appear there and just refuse to move, lots of women did that, would do just that. The fact that Sébastien simply did not love her did not make him any less responsible. Surely they could work out some form of a civilized, mutual life?

  Claudia did not blame Sébastien for not loving her, she was even honest enough to question whether there was not, in her own love for him, some element of rankled pride, some urge to conquest, since he was the only man she had ever cared for who hadn’t cared back. She couldn’t blame him because he had never made a secret of it, never disguised the fact that he slept with other women, offered exactly what he had to give and never a promise of anything more. She had been convinced for a long time, for the first three years of their odd relationship, that he must come to love her, if only by virtue of propinquity, but when she had seen finally that this was not true, her bewilderment led to shaming jealousy, to the awful accusations in Paris.

  The evidence for her long self-delusion was confusingly positive. Since their first meeting, at a dinner party organized by Annabelle, who edited Diréctions, he had been erratically attentive. They had met about once a month, at first for weekends of bed at the flat in Paris, odd nights when he was in London for work, then trips to Italy, to the countryside in France, a magical New Year in Bruges. She had met his friends, had cautiously and over-casually (for one of the many irrationalities of their affair was its retaining an air of the clandestine; Claudia had not at first thought it in good taste to discuss with Annabelle the fact that she was fucking her star writer, and the feeling persisted long after Annabelle had been mollified), introduced him to hers. Sébastien was not rich, but he sent her presents, wonderful, surprising presents, antique books, a cashmere overcoat, tiny pots of truffled foie gras from Fauchon, a jam jar of water from the Grand Canal. He was lavish with compliments, he bought flowers and cooked dinner and read to her, asked her opinion on a paper he was writing or a lecture he was giving, he remembered her birthday, had dashed to London and held her through the night when her father died. They were intimate, made good stories of adolescent miseries, talked about difficult colleagues, watched movies grubbily on Sunday afternoons. His concierge knew her name. It was real, as far as she could see, no abbreviated romance perpetually stalled in its first stages, something rich, and in her mind at least, teleological. She told herself that loving him meant she had no right to question, to demand. They talked freely of her lovers and his, which Claudia felt was very sophisticated, yet somehow she had been certain that she, Claudia, held him. But his pained, embarrassed confusion when she made her furious declaration, his letter, made it as clear as it had been all along that he was just not available, to her or anyone else, for the kind of love she trusted that she deserved. It had been so embarrassingly obvious, during that long night, that he pitied her, and she could not bring herself to hate him even for that. Were it not for the child, she knew that she would have persuaded herself that this was good enough, as she had so many times before, and to make what dignity she could from choosing so, but she knew, even as she lay by the pool with a paperback collapsed across her nose and ached for him and dreamed of release, that he would not come, because she had pride enough, at least, not to make him.

  The Marquis d’Esceyrac had not written that morning to Aisling out of any sense of duty to their bitten and frightened guest, but to please and distract his daughter-in-law, Delphine, who was making her first visit to the house, from which she had been married, since Charles-Edouard’s death. The Comtesse d’Esceyrac had her own interest in the Harveys (efficient Sarah Ashworth had rectified the doubt as to their name), equally unflattering to Mr Froggett. Despite the evidence of the chateau, and the equally imposing hôtel particulier in St-Germain of which the Marquis now occupied just a single floor, the d’Esceyracs were in a somewhat straitened position. The Marquis had been elected Vice President of the Jockey Club twenty years ago, a victory by default achieved when the two other rival candidates discovered at the last moment that they were both shareholders in an extremely dubious mining enterprise in Morocco; exposure of which by either of them for the purpose of social prestige meaning certain ruin for both. They had a cheerful lunch at Le Grand Véfour and withdrew mutually from the race leaving d’Esceyrac as the only contender. The ambition of his life thus attained, the Marquis spent most of his time and, to Delphine’s chagrin, his capital, in the Hôtel Drouot. Charles-Edouard had practised indifferently as a stockbroker before the terrible shock of his illness, and Delphine, by her own estimate at least, was now not only widowed but poor.

  The chateau simply must be turned to account. The Anglo-Saxon love affair with La Belle France showed no signs of diminishing passion, and judging by the number of horrid old farmhouses sold around the Marquis’s land to English people in the last few years, the English were making a fine profit from pandering. Delphine had refused a number of kind invitations to the Côte d’Azur this year in order to bring her boys to spend some time with their grandfather, and their grandfather around to an idea. Why should not Esceyrac becom
e a sort of hotel? Like many women who have only ever seen work as a means of passing the time, Delphine was untroubled by her complete ignorance of the hospitality business, or any business. She had it all worked out. The chapel would make a marvellous restaurant, the two upper storeys bedrooms, the ballroom a lounge, the kitchens were already suitably vast, and the paddocks and woods, stripped, could be a golf course. Perhaps it would even be possible to have a spa in the painted gallery, something Eastern, a wooden jacuzzi bath fitted in an alcove. Delphine saw tennis courts, a new swimming pool, Americans arriving in chauffeured black Mercedes, taking tea in the library.

  As for the family, there was a perfectly wonderful old grenier, with a cottage next door, at the bottom of the hill on the opposite side to Murblanc, of which an architect might make a large and beautiful house. Heaps of people had done it, in England too. Charles-Edouard’s colleague Armand had assured her, when she discreetly mentioned her plans over a consolatory lunch at Laurent, that it would be simple for him to produce the necessary investors. He had ordered two glasses of Château d’Yquem and a rather unnecessary soufflé aux framboises, and pressed her hand earnestly over the tablecloth.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do, Delphine, anything. For Charles-Edouard’s sake.’