by Hilton, Lisa
‘So she lives there because Oriane felt guilty or something?’
‘Maybe. But they weren’t married, she and the father that is, because she’s Mademoiselle Aucordier and the farm was in her family. But it was the war, I suppose, GI brides and all that.’
‘It’s so sad.’
‘Mmm.’
Claudia had no intention of telling what she had discovered, even for the satisfaction of the gossip. She imagined that Madame Lesprats probably knew that the Marquis had fathered a child on one of his servants, but Oriane’s prescience had been so disarming, her confidences so touching, that Claudia felt both protective and superstitious about betraying her. She did allow a little smile at what Alice Froggett would have made of the story.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. It’s funny in the country isn’t it? People seem so much more interesting.’ If that was a bit near the bone, Aisling didn’t notice. Claudia refilled Aisling’s glass of red and took another from the buffet for herself.
‘Have you been to the River Café,’ Aisling asked, ‘in London?’
‘Yes, a couple of times. Why?’
‘Well, I’ve got this book of theirs, those two women, thingy Rogers, and there’s a recipe for sourdough I thought I might try, but it’s very longwinded.’
They made conversation about recipes and menus until they heard Alex’s car in the lane.
Next day was hotter than ever, as though the sun had had a holiday. The Sternbachs drove away again after breakfast, and Aisling was inclined to fret about this, thinking that perhaps it meant they didn’t like La Maison Bleue, until she reminded herself that this was precisely the kind of guest she had wanted, doing sort of people. Perhaps they had gone to Cahors, or even to Albi, to one of the huge August markets. PG-less, everyone was down at the pool when Ginette drooped up on her bicycle.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Jonathan loudly, ‘doesn’t that woman have a home of her own?’
‘There does seem an awful lot of coming and going,’ added Alex.
‘We only notice because bugger-all happens in between.’
‘Don’t be unkind,’ hissed Aisling, sitting up and putting on her sarong. ‘How are you, Ginette?’ she called loudly in French. ‘Did you enjoy yourself at the lotto?’ Even to herself that sounded a bit duchess-like.
‘Madame Glover was there from Saintonge. She won the fridge freezer.’
‘Really? Well, that’s nice. Did you win anything?’
‘No, nor did Madame Lesprats.’
‘Oh dear.’
Ginette hovered. Aisling felt that she had been caught out being lazy, lolling in her bathing costume, though it was Saturday afternoon. That was a problem here, that there were just no barriers. Should she offer Ginette something?
‘I just came to say thank you to Claudia for sitting with Mademoiselle Oriane last night.’
‘Well, that’s nice.’
‘No problem, Ginette,’ called Claudia gaily from her sun lounger, ‘any time you feel like partying!’ She was already determined to go back to Aucordier’s as soon as she could.
‘I’ll get on then.’
‘OK. See you soon.’
Ginette turned her bicycle around and wheeled it down the track.
‘Honestly!’ said Aisling, but the others had turned back to the sun. No one seemed inclined to discuss Charlotte Glover and the fridge freezer.
JUNE 1941
Laurent Nadl had lost his right leg at Verdun the year that Oriane Aucordier was born, and when the rest of him was sent home to Castroux he felt, bitterly, that he was not accorded a hero’s welcome. Stumps of various sorts had never been uncommon in the village. Old Vionne the butcher had only two fingers (the right ones at least, as he was fond of crudely reminding the women) on his left hand, Camille Lesprats had only a lump of right arm, the rest of it shredded by a threshing machine. He hadn’t even been drunk at the time, though he’d been making up for it ever since, challenging the remaining elderly boozers in the café to call him a coward and sobbing into his wine about the lost limb that would surely have made him the terror of the Boch, had he only been allowed to fight. To Laurent, it seemed that people felt that coming home at all was more than he had a right to expect. He was not about to apologize for surviving. It did not occur to him that Castroux’s reticence was moved in some quarters by a delicacy towards families who had lost sons, brothers, young fathers, and in others by a grief so huge and dulling that those possessed of it endured at first only by indifference. One life more or less could have very little meaning. Four men, finally, had come back to Castroux, from the nineteen who had gone. Laurent had left his leg behind, and Jean-Marc Teulière his wits. Yves Contier was sound, so, it seemed, was Bernard Vionne. Jean-Claude Larivière, the fifth survivor, never returned from his demob leave in Paris.
He’d been a real chum, JC. For a while they had been in it together, all of them, until JC was made corporal and moved along the lines. He had always been a bright spark, reading things from the newspaper, spending money on books that he sent away for. Laurent didn’t care much for talking politics, but JC had been a great one for it, always on about the working man. As far as Laurent could see, the working man did the graft and took the bullets when the time came, but JC said it didn’t have to be like that, that big changes were coming for sure, and Laurent tried to seem like he understood, he’d even got into a fight or two, sticking up for him. JC wasn’t a big man, like Laurent, but he was a scrapper. Laurent could see why he wouldn’t have wanted to come back to Castroux, though his mother had taken on something dreadful; JC was a livewire, someone who wanted to be where the action was. Even Flanders hadn’t knocked that out of him.
When Laurent took the habit of walking up the hill from Murblanc to Aucordier’s after supper in the long summer evenings of 1941, he still did not quite comprehend that he had only one leg. Accustomed to its absence, he nevertheless had not entirely discarded the belief, sustained unquestioningly on the train ride south more than twenty years ago, that it would somehow grow back. This arbitrary state of the leg’s being permitted Laurent a quick recovery from the practicalities of his disability and the repugnance it aroused in him. Since matters were only temporary, it was easier to make the best of them. The stump was smoothed over with skin, though it still had a tendency to develop a greasy fungus, which itched deliciously and left pale lines of weak, vealy blood when Laurent raked his nails through it beneath the bedclothes. The wooden leg was so heavy, the leather strap chafing painfully on the now hairless skin of his thigh, that Laurent only wore it for church, preferring the relative mobility of his crutch. With his stump tied into a woollen stocking and covered by the trouser leg, which his mother had sewn into a bag, he could move quite quickly, hopping around the pivot of the crutch when he needed to turn, and balancing so well, when stationary, that he could use his right arm almost freely. He did exercises every morning, drills he had learned in the Army, press-ups and curls of an iron bar filed off from the frame of a rusting plough. Muscle had slabbed on to his arms and chest, he worked his left side more to balance out the effort of the crutch to the right. Laurent was tall for Castroux, and in his Sunday suit, with a stuffed boot laced over the false leg and his massive shoulders squared above his still-narrow waist he looked, if not handsome, at least strong and healthy. There had been no question of him spending his life as an invalid, even had he wished to. His mother was a widow, he was the only son and there was work to be done.
Laurent could not have explained, even had anyone ever asked, why it was that he felt his life so spoiled. He rarely thought of the war. At first, Bernard Vionne seemed urgent with the need to speak of it, always coming up to Laurent in the café or asking him for a glass of wine at market, wanting to tell his stories, even to hear Laurent’s. After a time Laurent avoided him and the group he formed with Yves and Jean-Marc, who Bernard insisted on pushing through the village in his chair. Now and again Jean-Marc would call out violently from the trench where h
e had left his mind, and Bernard would hold his arm tightly, staring into his face and saying ‘Now then’ until he was quiet. They became a familiar sight, the three of them, sitting in the square on fine evenings, and after a while no one took much notice of them, except to leave the wooden bench at the café door free, by unspoken consent.
Laurent had no wish to join their reminiscences. He got on with his work, the work he had always intended to do, the work he had dreamed of returning to for two years at the front. His injury was no stay on what ambition he had had, which had only ever been an assumption that he would remain at Murblanc, yet he felt now a sense of constraint there, a movement in himself towards unnamed and unknown chances of a different sort of life, and he grew convinced, as he would never perhaps have done had he returned to Castroux as whole as he appeared on Sundays, that something to which he was entitled had been taken from him.
Murblanc had been bought from the d’Esceyracs, Laurent knew, though he did not know and would not have much cared that the house was older, in parts, than the chateau, and that the d’Esceyracs had farmed there before they became grand and moved up the hill when Henri IV was king. Murblanc land began in the little wood below the rise of the castle hill, the Bois de la Reine, which the d’Esceyracs liked to claim, a nonsense again unknown to Laurent, had been named for Queen Marie-Thérèse as she made her wedding journey up from the Basque country to Versailles. Laurent knew the wood was named for the Queen of Heaven, as there was a little shrine to Our Lady by the stream that circled the base of the chateau hill and formed the western boundary of Murblanc, passing the cow barn on its low mound in the winter meadow, and tipping into the Landine. Between the wood and the meadow was Bottom Field, with High Field on the ridge that ran against the house in the middle of the property, and Top Field joining the old road that linked the Castroux bridge and the plain. From the road, the Murblanc lane cut deep against the two fields to the yard, leaving a little triangle of scrub for the donkeys by the orchard wall. Behind the orchard were the small barn, the old bread oven now used for storing wood, and the vegetable plot, and at the back, before the land rose to rocks and a thin cover of ever-puny trees, Laurent’s father had planted six rows of terraced vines. Though the yield was small, the concentrated sun on the bank and the moisture that filtered down from the plain produced a rich red wine that was as good as any from the big vineyards around Cahors.
Much of his time was spent within the eighty acres of the farm. Laurent’s great-grandfather had come north from the Lot some time in the last century; he had been a miller, and there were still cousins at Montrattier, and two fields that Laurent’s mother let to them. His great-grandfather was buried in Castroux, the headstone said 1899. His ancient grandfather still loitered about the farm, tending his beloved donkeys and even brewing in his still with his few remaining cronies when autumn came.
Laurent went up to Aucordier’s on a June evening wearing a clean shirt and carrying a basket of his mother’s, lined with an embroidered napkin and holding two dozen apricots. He had picked the fruit himself before supper, with the solid heat still heavy on his stripped back, and washed them carefully, one by one, at the pump. He considered wearing his leg, but it seemed better manners to walk up the hill, and the thought of the pitch of the road bearing on the stump was unpleasant. Oriane was sitting on a stool outside the front door, bent over a bucket of new broad beans. Under her arm, she saw Laurent Nadl swing and hop into her yard with his mother’s best pink straw basket bobbing absurdly in the crook of his elbow, and knew he had come to marry her. She gave no sign that she was aware of him, feeling it would be rude to anticipate his tippety progress by getting up to meet him. His Sunday boot made no sound on the hardened dirt. When he was closer, he called out, and she turned, wiping her hands on her skirt, tucking a coil of hair behind her ears. When he had greeted her, he held out the basket and said, ‘I brought these for you.’
Oriane thanked him and offered her stool while she fetched him a glass. She swam through the thick green air of the cool kitchen, she set the basket on the table. There was wine in the jug in the larder, protected from the flies by a white lace cloth weighed down with little glass beads, amber coloured, like the warm skin on Laurent’s fruits. She stretched towards the shelf where the four thick glass tumblers stood, then paused. For a long moment she rested her forehead against the thick oak, feeling suddenly very tired, and very sad. Then, moving briskly, she went to the buffet in the kitchen and turned the key. Swaddled in scraps of grey blanket were her mother’s wedding gifts, the pink and white china bonbonnière, the set of delicate coffee cups, and six crystal goblets, bluish tinged, contoured rough and chunky like the stonework on the church. Carefully, she extracted two, inspected them for dust, and set them on the table. One she filled, into the other she poured a few drops of treacly dark wine, then stepped out into the light.
‘Well then,’ said Laurent. He smoothed his trousers over his leg and the stump and raised the blue glass, took a swallow. Oriane sipped, and waited until he had drunk, standing awkwardly by the stool.
‘Will you come for a walk with me?’ he asked, and when she nodded, he stood up and took her hand.
At the entrance of the yard, he paused, as if uncertain of the direction, though there were only two ways to go and they had both walked them since they took their first steps. Up or down. ‘Will we go there along the ridge, then?’ he asked.
‘That’s nice. We’ll look at the view,’ she answered.
It pained her then that even in these first moments, she should be conscious of something unfinished, impoverished in their appearance as they moved along the hot white stones of the road. She in her dusty skirt, with her hair stranded across her forehead, and he, so much older, hurting her with his starch-collared shirt, keeping his stride effortfully ahead of her own. She wished she could see them together differently, separate from herself observing; it seemed cruel that she could not be unconscious for a little while. But they walked in silence, and that was wrong too, though she could think of nothing to say herself, she expected something from him. They went along like married people already, not jostling or whispering or pinching, and though the skin of her cheeks felt warm, she knew it was only from the sun, full on their faces now as they came up from the shade of the last poplars and emerged into the searing western light of the plain. She knew him too well for there to be anything curious or exciting in the sensation of his hard brown palm in her own, though she wished that there were not grey-green strands of bean pod squashed under her nails. They went on for ten minutes or so. A few spreads of elderflower remained in the hedge, and Oriane said, ‘I should have brought my basket.’
Laurent pointed to a tumble of stones lying a little way across the sheep-cropped grass. ‘Shall we sit down?’ It was the remains of one of the little huts the shepherds built, there were many of them dotted over the plain. Some were neat, with stoves even, that the hunters used in winter, but most were crumbling now, one room with a roof left to slide back into the soil. They sat on a low wall with iron tethering rings let into it, spattered with lichen the colour of egg yolk. Deliberately, Laurent put his arms around Oriane’s shoulders and kissed her, and just as deliberately, after a little time, pulled away. He took her hand once more. ‘When shall it be, then?’
‘I haven’t thought. With everything as it is. And then there’s William.’
‘You know I’m fond of William. He’s a good lad, really.’
Laurent had a plan, which he explained to her. Things would change after the war. Aucordier’s was a fine big house, though it needed a lot of work. He would begin on that this winter when he had more time.
Oriane and William would move down to Murblanc in a year or so, where there was lots of room, especially as Papie couldn’t last for ever. He didn’t see that Cathérine would marry, but that would be a help to Oriane, having her there, when the children came. He thought Aucordier’s could be let, without the land of course, but painted up, with a nice bit of
garden. People were going in for what they called weekend houses now, they might get a doctor or a notaire from Landi, or even Cahors. The plot where the goats were kept was too steep for anything but vines, but they could have Chasselas there in a few years, and you never lost money with those, and fruit, he thought, cherries or plums, in the field above the house. He would get a workshop going in the barn, a real carpentry workshop, that was what he loved, maybe even take on a few lads, and if it was a success they could have an overseer for the farm. They began to talk about the idea, about which bedroom they would take at Murblanc, and whether the goats would get along with the cows. Oriane would plant a flower garden, a real one with a stone seat.
As they spoke, Oriane watched a carousel of kites, nine or ten of them, whirling in some complex pattern along the edge of the ridge where the rocks were turning now from white to mauve, their wings almost touching as they swooped in tight spirals. It was too simple, she thought, that must be why she did not feel happy. There was no struggle, nothing difficult. She would not have to work so hard. She would live at Murblanc with Laurent, and William would have a home, and she would no longer feel lonely and strange. At the same time, she could not really imagine anything changing, could not envisage leaving Aucordier’s, so perhaps that was why she did not feel excited, because it did not as yet seem real. But it would do, she told herself, and held tight to Laurent’s arm as he talked about his idea for making chairs and dressers in the small barn. She held on all the way down the road, looking up at his face and saying, ‘This is my husband,’ swallowing down the coil of dismay that twitched within her, a tiny serpent flexing its tail.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Delphine d’Esceyrac had telephoned again, to ask Aisling if the Harveys were going to the Castroux fête on the twenty-second of August. ‘It will probably be awful,’ she had said, ‘but then I feel we ought to go to these things?’