by Hilton, Lisa
Madame Lesprats lived in the new lotissement on the other side of Castroux. Lotissements were one of Aisling and Jonathan’s bêtes noirs. Aisling claimed that though they could not actually see the development from Murblanc, she could feel its presence. Alex had pointed out that the farm people had to live somewhere, since the English had bought all the nice old houses and priced them out of the market, but Aisling thought the government ought to have a scheme or something. And anyway it was no good the French complaining now that all the property had been bought by foreigners, when for years they had been happy to let their beautiful old houses fall to rack and ruin and live in concrete horrors in the garden. The lotissement was certainly hideous. Many of the small houses were still raw terracotta breeze block, standing in plots of scorched mud, made uglier by the bright plastic of discarded children’s toys and several giant paddling pools, sold as ‘piscines’ in Monsieur Bricolage. Each home was adorned with a satellite dish, stuck to the roof like a button on a hat.
The Lesprats’ house was older, it had been there long enough for a squat bushy hedge to grow up around the plot. The French seemed to be obsessed with keeping nature out, surrounding themselves with topiary and evergreen, enclosing their homes like giftwrapped packages from the disorder beyond. Madame Lesprats had positioned several plastic swans along the crazy paving leading to the door, their backs grotesquely split and streaming with garish bougainvillea. Claudia wished for a moment that Alex was with her, it was all so Chingford.
‘I was getting the lunch,’ said Madame Lesprats accusingly.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I could come back?’
‘No, no, come in.’ Claudia had counted on the scent of gossip overwhelming Madame Lesprats’ reluctance to have her enter her home. Richard said that only family was usually allowed inside peoples’ houses in Castroux. She had armed herself with a small bunch of somewhat mummified roses, tied with a broderie anglaise ribbon purloined from one of the sodding lavender bags, though she knew that the correct thing would have been a huge bunch of forced chrysanthemums from the florists in Landi, crackling in coloured cellophane.
It was stuffy indoors, the blinds drawn against the heat, and the windows tightly shut. Despite the aspirations expressed by the exterior of her house, Madame Lesprats, and, Claudia guessed, most of her neighbours, still appeared to make use of just one room. A sofa was jammed along one wall of the small kitchen, with a television muttering in front of it. The space was cramped even more by an old-fashioned free-standing stove with a huge stock pot on the ring, though there was a modern electric cooker fitted into the wall of units. The lunch table was set for three, with a tomato tart and a bowl of lettuce going brown and frilly at the edges. Claudia felt a bit sick.
‘That looks lovely,’ she remarked brightly. ‘Is it hard to make?’
Madame Lesprats was off.
‘Oh, I don’t bother with that any more. I had quite enough when I was a girl. No, Jean-Marc drives me to the Carrefour at Landi once a week, it’s much better. More hygienic. They’ve got Picard as well, and you can get everything frozen. Even artichokes. They’ve got Moroccan things too, though I suppose that’s for the Arabs. Landi’s full of them, you know, Arabs. My cousin over to Cahors is a builder and he won’t have anything more to do with them, not even on the black. He says they’re too much trouble.’
Claudia wanted quite badly to sit down, but she had to wait until Madame Lesprats had finished with the Arabs and the number of babies they had, how they clogged up the hospitals, her cousin’s opinion on the meanness of the Dutch who bought holiday homes and expected something for nothing, the things Sabine heard in the pharmacy and a long story about another cousin of Madame Lesprats who had a Growth. In the end she sat on the sofa without being invited, and Madame Lesprats eyed her so beadily that Claudia thought Ginette must have said something.
Madame Lesprats paused to look in the stock pot, letting out a wave of thickly scented steam.
‘Rabbit,’ she said, prodding with a satisfied spoon, as though the animal had got what it deserved. Claudia launched in with her account of the Sternbachs’ visit and her desire to help them by finding out what she could.
‘No,’ said Madame Lesprats firmly, ‘I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.’
It was obvious that she was lying. She clearly did not care that Claudia could see it.
‘Perhaps I could ask your relation, the lady I saw at the fête? Amélie?’
‘Oh no, you don’t want to be bothering her. Anyway, she can’t remember anything, poor old thing.’
‘Do you think Mademoiselle Oriane up at Aucordier’s might be able to help?’
‘I think people should mind their own business,’ snapped Madame Lesprats. She looked suspicious and offended and Claudia felt rude. She tried to chat for a few minutes on general topics, to make it seem as though she had really paid a social call, but it was obvious that in asking about the war she had been crass, emphasized her position as an outsider, a foreigner. She trudged back up to Murblanc feeling embarrassed and dispirited, but she did ask Aisling for the number to telephone the chateau.
1942
Cathérine received a letter from Paris. It was exciting because no one had ever written a letter to her before and she couldn’t think who it might be from. She took it up to Oriane and they read it together at the kitchen table. ‘Dear Cathérine,’ it said, ‘I am sorry to write to you now, but you were always a good hardworking girl. I am ashamed to have to write to you, but things are very bad here and my poor mother is unwell. There is nothing to be had in the shops, and we are feeling it. You wouldn’t believe they are wanting eighty francs for a skinny little chicken! So if your family could spare it, I hoped you might be able to send some pâté, or some of that potted ham we used to enjoy in the good old days at Castroux, or perhaps some cheese. I will be sure to pay you back when times are better. I hope you are keeping well and working hard. Respectfully, your friend, Emilie Cleret.’
‘Well,’ said Cathérine, ‘the cheek of her! Herself, saying she’s my friend. Good old days in Castroux my arse.’
‘She must mind it,’ said Oriane, ‘I mean, she’s probably ashamed to have to ask. And her mother’s sick.’
‘Well, look after your own, that’s what I say,’ snorted Cathérine, crumpling the letter and stuffing it in the fire underneath the soup pot. ‘And I was so pleased too. It might have been from my mystery man!’ She laughed.
Laurent and his father had driven the Murblanc cows to Monguèriac to be sold. It had taken six days, but they had got a good price, and they had been just in time because the prices were fixed, even though things were getting more expensive, everyone said. Alice was long gone, but her daughter Albertine was still William’s favourite and he had cried when he saw her plodding sadly away along the lane. Vionne’s butchers had been investigated by the Ravitaillement, the food inspector, but they had a warning from the shop at St Urcisse. Their pork and capons were long gone when the man came to visit finding only a few veal chops and three rabbits. On Fridays a truck came from Cahors with a clerk and two Milice men, and the people of Castroux handed in their produce, with the sums being ticked off in a register. On Saturdays they sold everything else at the market in Landi. François Boissière asked Père Guillaume to speak about these goings on, he said it was not only dishonest but unpatriotic, it would undermine the government. Père Guillaume preached that Sunday on the merchants in the temple, which François understood as a refusal. Afterwards, when Charlotte served a crisp leg of pork with sage and garlic that she had from Cécile Chauvignat in return for some help with her certificates, he bowed to the ineveitable, took a third helping and swirled his salad in the juices.
Now she had the new goats, Oriane made up her cheeses in the dairy off the barn at Murblanc. She borrowed one of Papie’s donkeys and drove it down with the churns slung across its shoulders. Papie met her every morning and always said that it was just as well the road from Aucordier’s led downwards. H
e was as pleased with his joke after two years as the first time he made it. She wrapped the cheeses in muslin and gave them to Laurent for the market. He gave her back the money, always reminding her to put something away for the wedding. Her preserves were much better than Cathérine’s, he had taken her cherries and apricots in syrup and over the winter she had made pickled walnuts and damson wine, though it was true that sugar was so dear now she wondered if it would be worth buying the extra to make something to sell next year. Laurent said there were people in Landi who came all the way from Paris to buy for the big hotels and restaurants, and if they could get the sugar they could do very well with the fruit, though it was a shame they had not got any Chasselas, they had gone for a fortune last year. Madame Nadl made her rillettes and pâtés and buttered gizzards as usual. They had heard that people from towns went bicycling about on Sundays, pretending they were out on a trip, but looking for a box of eggs or a foie gras they could hide in their saddle bags. No one had come to Castroux though, and Betty Dubois said what did you expect being stuck in the middle of nowhere, it was just their luck.
It was Betty who got the dances going, it must have been a year or so after Oriane started walking out with Laurent Nadl. She nagged and begged for weeks at her father to buy her a gramophone, even trying to persuade him that it would improve business in the café, but he said that men came to have a quiet drink and get away from a lot of women’s noise, and the last thing the customers wanted was some nigger shrieking at them after a hard day’s work. She consulted Andrée Charrot, who thought that maybe they could borrow the wireless from Père Guillaume, but neither of them had the nerve to ask him and they couldn’t see a way to claiming that dancing was holy anyway, especially as it might encourage people to stay up late and lie in bed on Sunday morning. Magalie Contier wouldn’t have Yves playing, she’d enough trouble keeping him at home as it was. So that left William Aucordier, who cost nothing and was happy to fiddle away for hours. Hilaire Charrot didn’t mind letting them have the barn, and the two girls spent a whole Sunday with rags tied around their heads, sweeping and clearing, making a bonfire of crumbling discarded beams and ancient birds’ nests. Betty was imagining candles with pleated paper shades, but Andrée said not to be a fool, everyone would be burned to a crisp in a minute and they weren’t opening the Palais de Danse in Monguèriac. Neither of them had ever seen that when it came to it, but they had a shared idea of low lights and red velvet and tall men in impeccable evening dress. People would have to bring their own lamps and refreshments, though Monsieur Dubois grudgingly agreed to let them have a couple of the benches and trestles that were brought out for weddings and funerals for the mothers to sit on. The girls persuaded their brothers, Jean and Nic, to drag the furniture along the river bank to the barn, and Betty wanted to put up a notice in the window of the café, but Andrée scoffed at that too, on the grounds that everybody knew already and they were sure to come because what else had there ever been to do around here?
Charlotte Boissière told François that it was beneath their position as schoolteachers to go to such a thing, and didn’t these giddy girls realize there was a war on? François said it would look well for them to pop in early on, for propriety’s sake, since Père Guillaume could hardly be expected to attend himself. Besides, cultural activity was good for morale. This was exactly what Charlotte had expected him to say, and most satisfactory since she had already altered her violet costume and could now wear it whilst retaining a sense of moral superiority over the outing. The Boissières were surprised to find that they did not know everyone crowded into the barn that first Saturday night. Girls and their mothers had walked over from Auzerte and St Urcisse in their clogs, their Sunday shoes in handkerchiefs, there were boys who had come on bicycles from Landi, and three strange, silent brothers without a collar to their shirts between them who had only been seen before at the market, where they sold gnarled little cheeses rolled in ash. They came from one of the tiny forgotten hamlets in the steep cliffs above Saintonge, where there was not even a cart track through the woods, and people married their sisters. None of them danced, they just stood stiffly in a corner, smelling strongly of goat, but they stayed until the very end. William, fetched in triumph on Laurent Nadl’s motorbike, took off his carefully brushed jacket and played from nine o’clock until two in the morning without once putting down his bow, sweat pooling in his ears and a huge grin on his face as he jigged his feet in time. The mothers sat along the walls, and everybody walked home in the starlight along the Landine, calling goodbye at the bridge, their voices carrying far across the hills.
With the dances, it seemed as though life began again in the valley. Soon it was nearly every week that a man would come to Aucordier’s or Murblanc on a bicycle, asking if William would play on a Saturday night, and Laurent didn’t seem to mind taking him on the moto. Sometimes William would get paid, twenty or thirty centimes for a night in a dirt-floored barn where the owls hooted in confusion outside, wondering where their peaceful roost had gone. Laurent put the coins in a jar for him and said that when there was enough they would go to Monguèriac in the train and buy him a new violin. Betty said it was a bit much, that other people had copied her idea like that, but she was happy to walk ten kilometres with Andrée and Amélie and Cathérine, and spend the week trimming the hem of her best dress or copying a pattern for a bolero jacket from one of the magazines, gossiping about who they had danced with and who they would see next week. After the first dance, Oriane preferred to stay at home, or sit sewing in the kitchen at Murblanc with the Nadls and Papie snoozing in the corner. She hadn’t felt it was right to dance with anyone else, not that any of the boys had asked, because everyone knew she was going with Laurent. He hadn’t said anything to her, but she thought it must be impossible for him, with his leg, and she hadn’t wanted to hurt him by mentioning it. It wasn’t the dancing though, that she was glad to avoid.
Oriane knew what went on between people. She knew it from her work in the laundry at the chateau, and if she needed reminding, from Amélie Lesprats and her dirty mouth, and from Madame Nadl’s stories in the kitchen of who was expecting and who had to be married in a hurry. In Castroux, it had never even mattered much whether the baby came before the ring, so long as the wedding was managed eventually. There were some sorts of rules. At first, when Laurent called for her in the evenings, they had gone up to the hut on the plain, though they could just as well have made themselves cosy in the kitchen at Aucordier’s, but that wouldn’t have been right. So they sat uncomfortably on the pile of rocks, and Laurent kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth. She liked the taste of him, the crisp, woody smell that was always in his clothes, the muscles under his shirt and the strength of his arms. After a few times he touched her breasts under her blouse and she was surprised, ashamed, that she got wet, sopping wet so there was a patch on her skirt when she stood up to go home. Then she expected that after a while they would do everything, and though at other times she still felt a sense of lack, of dismay, when she looked at him, when they had been kissing for a while she wanted to carry on, for him to hold her and lie down on top of her. It was supposed to hurt, the first time, but she was prepared for that. So when he did not, and when later he began to stop kissing her if she unbuttoned her blouse, she was sorry for him, because she thought he was ashamed of his deformity.
The next time, Oriane thought she would help him. She put her hand in the middle of his trousers, where his thing would be, and rubbed him, whispering in his ear, ‘It’s all right, Laurent. I love you.’ When he struck at her, missing her face and knocking himself off balance so he slipped on the stones and slumped on his knees in the grass, she felt as cold with shock as if the blow had found her. He struggled to his feet, grappling with the crutch, and pulled her shoulder, shaking her so hard she felt dizzy.
‘Don’t,’ he shouted, ‘don’t ever do that again!’ Then he turned away and she began to walk alone across the plain towards home, her head up and her eyes smarti
ng. After a while, a little mean voice inside her told her she ought to laugh at him, a hard, sneering laugh, to see him scrabbling on the ground like that, poor crippled thing.
‘Look at you!’ she wanted to shout, ‘How dare you? Look at yourself.’ Then she knew it was her mother’s voice she heard, and realized that there could be a terrible pleasure in cruelty, even though you knew it would hurt yourself too. When he came up behind her, the crutch tapping anxiously, she flinched when he reached out, just to hurt him because she knew he would be even more ashamed if he believed she thought he might hit her again.
‘I’m not William, you know. I’m not simple,’ he said softly to her back. ‘Oriane, I just think that it’s better we wait for that sort of thing. Until we’re properly married.’ His voice was tender, as though he might cry even, so she turned around and rested her face a moment against the warmth of his coat, then let him take her hand as they walked on. She was shocked at herself, to find that there could be such hate in her, where it was not deserved. So Oriane did not go to the dances, because she wanted to avoid being alone with him afterwards, coming back in the dark.