House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  One time she licked him all over, her tongue rasping on him like a mother cat cleaning a kitten, all the way from his toes, which had white hair at their joints, up to the hollow of his collarbone. Her tongue lapped at the blue numbers inked in his armpit, just next to the soft gold hair that sprouted there. He explained that it was a tattoo, that all the men who had volunteered had them. He and Willi had been tattooed at the same time when they joined the division. She asked him how he spoke such good French, and he explained that he had taken lessons for six months in Bordeaux, and that was how he was promoted. The piping on his short, double-buttoned jacket was pink, but that wasn’t because he was a translator, it showed that he was part of the Panzer section. He had been in Russia with his tank. Oriane asked him about Russia, she had some idea of snow and people in big furry hats, but Karl liked better to tell her about his tank.

  The tanks were the most important section of the whole army, he said. He told her how fast the tank could go, how tall it was, and how much petrol it needed, more than four litres to drive one kilometre, which sounded impossible. He had a badge, a black tank in a silver wreath with an eagle and the same sign as on the chateau flag, with the number fifty. That showed how many battles he had been in on the Eastern Front. She laughed and said maybe it was dangerous to tell her things, she might be a spy.

  ‘You?’ he said. ‘You’re not a spy. You’re a slut.’ He laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said happily, ‘yes, I am.’

  Willi was unimpressed that he was carrying on with a girl from the village. He said he knew how it would end.

  ‘And what about Ursula?’ he asked. ‘It’s not like you can go getting married again.’

  Willi and Karl were friends, but since Russia that friendship seemed to Karl to have been based on a mutual will to silence. There were too many things it seemed impossible to say. They could talk a bit about girls, or the officers, but now, after the taut, baking summer, there seemed to be a great wave of silence between them, waiting and roiling, ready to engulf them. Karl found that he couldn’t say to Willi that it wasn’t just a bit of fun, that there was something – he looked for the thought – there was something clean about Oriane. Not innocent, but pure somehow, the way she wasn’t ashamed of it, her greed for him. She didn’t seem to need him, there was none of the bother with love talk that girls usually required. He had been touched by her, the first time he saw her in the yard, she was so obviously afraid and so defiantly trying to hide it. And then her mouth, that hair. He got hard just thinking about her.

  Until the first frost coated the leaves in the rose garden at the chateau with white, Oriane could still not fully believe in the meaning of the black fear she had pushed down inside herself since the summer turned. Each day on her way home from work she sat beside the little Madonna watching over her pool and prayed for a miracle. She hauled the heaviest loads into the copper and her heart leaped whenever she felt an answering stab of pain in her back or the muscles of her abdomen, every morning she snatched up her nightdress in the hope of a spot of blood, but there was nothing. When Karl hung about in the stable yard, she avoided his eyes and shook her head swiftly to show that it wasn’t safe, and after a week or so she saw him less and less often.

  She brewed verjus with Cathérine, they gathered the tiny golden mirabelles and made syrup, and stewed jam from the huge overblown marrows that squatted late in the vegetable garden, but it was impossible to speak to her. Amélie might have been understanding, but she was a gossip and too stupid to help. A girl at Ligeac, over to Auzerte, had hanged herself in the cherry orchard, her feet dangling under the turning leaves. Andrée said gleefully that the crows had pecked her eyes out by the time they cut her down.

  Oriane had no wish to do away with herself, and even if she had there was William. It did not occur to her to try to leave Castroux. She found herself thinking that if only Laurent would crash into a tree on his motorbike and die, then everyone would feel sorry for her and she wouldn’t have to marry him either. It didn’t even feel wicked to think it. But Laurent wouldn’t marry her now, and then people would talk and ask questions. There had been so few of those between moments in her life, the times when no one knew where she was or what she was doing. That had been part of Karl. She doubted her power to create more of them. Maybe she could walk to Landi and make up a story about a strange man who had given her too much wine and taken advantage? That sounded like something in one of Papie’s songs. Laurent had done nothing to deserve such shame, which would come to him anyway if there was a baby at Aucordier’s and no more talk of a wedding. The fear hummed in her head until she was numb and dizzy, but she had to do something, before it showed.

  After so long avoiding him, Karl seemed hard to find. At first he had been everywhere, now he seemed to have vanished back into the anonymous grey and black mass of his companions. Uselessly, she waited about the doorway of the laundry until Cécile Chauvignat gave her a sharp look and asked if there was someone she hoped to see? Oriane felt truly frightened then. If Cécile guessed, would she go to prison? Her secret was making her stupid, as once, ensorcelled, it had made her reckless. She had feared shame in Castroux, but now, looking at Cécile’s calculating eyes, she understood that she had committed a crime. She hurried off through the woods, not even glancing up at the bridge, and it was five more hideous days before she heard footsteps behind her as she hung out a wash and knew that it was him.

  ‘Ça va, Oriane?’ he asked gently.

  ‘No.’ She put her hand on her stomach and looked into his face. He understood immediately.

  ‘Meet me later, when you finish. I’ll wait for you.’

  Karl tried to give her money. He explained, though she knew it already, that there was nothing he could do. They would be leaving any day now, he said, any day. She crumpled the notes and threw them on the floor, despising him when he scrabbled in the mouldy ground to retrieve them. Then she caught his face turned up in the candlelight and saw that it was wet, so she knelt down and took him in her arms, to have him inside her just one last time. When they were lying together, her head in the crook of his arm, he pulled up to look at her and she knew what he wanted to say.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t say it. There’s no point, see.’

  He held her tighter, but didn’t speak, and for a little while he slept, as she rested her lips against his skin of his skull under the delicate newborn hair. When he was still, she moved gently from under him, pulled down her skirt, pushed back her hair. The key was still in the pocket of his tunic, but that didn’t seem to matter any more.

  HARVEST 1943

  The grapes were in, but there would be no celebration of the vendange this year. Still, Madame Nadl said, there could be no objections to a few friends having a quiet supper in their own kitchen. If people wanted to call in for a drink on their way home from the vines, that wasn’t her fault. So Laurent and his father set up the long trestle in the passage that ran through the house from the Murblanc kitchen, and Cathérine and Oriane stewed six rabbits in verjus and garlic as they did every year. There was duck neck stuffed with pâté and Madame Nadl made her fruit cake, heavy with brandy and dried figs. Jean Charrot had worked on the Murblanc vines, so he was there with Andrée, and Camille Lesprats turned up as usual whenever there was a chance of a free drink, but they tolerated him for Papie’s sake. Murblanc was a big farm and usually they would have asked the mayor, but Madame Nadl thought best not. Monsieur Larivière appeared anyway and said he was come to supervise the vintage, which made everyone laugh. The men sat at the table and the women took their food in the kitchen. When they had eaten, they carried the jugs through and Monsieur Larivière thanked Madame Nadl politely, and made the toast, ‘To a long drought and a lake of wine’. Then the women returned to the kitchen and each of them took up their sewing, their fingers moving as swiftly as their tongues, pausing now and then to nibble a chunk of cake.

  ‘It’s quite like old times,’ said Madame Nadl, and Oriane kne
w she was talking about the old custom on winter evenings where people would crowd together in one house or another, often with the animals beneath them for warmth, the men drinking and playing cards, the women sewing and talking in low voices of their men. No one had ever come up to Aucordier’s though, and her mother had been too shy and afraid to take her children for a bit of warmth and company.

  William was playing and the men began to sing. Oriane waited on them, taking away the jugs to refill them. Camille’s face was purple and the others were flushed too, they had opened the front door to let in a breath of air, and Papie was maudlin.

  ‘The next time you open that door,’ he sighed, ‘it will be for me. I won’t last another winter.’ They all laughed because Papie said this every year too.

  ‘To the good old days, eh, Papie?’ called Jean, but Papie did not raise his glass.

  ‘The old times won’t come again, that’s for sure,’ put in Camille. For a moment the men were silent, nodding slowly, the room full of the presence on the hill.

  They perked up as Papie began to tell his stories of the old days, how the men of Castroux would travel for a whole day in wagons to the big estates around Cahors and sleep every night amongst the vines with their heads on their boots. ‘And we knew how to celebrate, too,’ he admonished, wagging a finger. ‘Oh yes, when we were finished I remember I lay dead drunk under a hedge for three days.’

  ‘And the girls,’ cackled Camille, ‘do you remember them, Nadl?’ Monsieur Larivière cast him a warning look, pointing to Oriane framed in the candlelight from the kitchen.

  Laurent was smoking, sitting a little apart and letting the scent of the tobacco drift out into the night. He looked much more sober than the others.

  ‘Tell you what, Nadl,’ old Camille was saying, ‘how about we try some of your good stuff? Keep the chill off your old bones.’

  ‘I’ll fetch it,’ said Oriane quickly.

  She skirted the few trees that divided the house from the bottom field and began to cross the empty meadow, unbuttoning her jersey gratefully as soon as she was out of sight of the house. The warm air was still cooling to the sweat that seemed to fizz on her skin. Her breasts felt much heavier, prickling and rubbing against her bodice, her hair felt heavy too, and she wished she could unfasten it and let the breeze unravel it down her back. The barn was still so thick with the soft grassy breath of the cows, it was hard to believe the stalls were empty. Papie kept his store in an old wardrobe with fruits and flowers carved into the rim, so old even he could not remember where it had come from. There were strange little creatures peeping among the garlands of apples, with pointy, deer like faces. Oriane’s fingers traced them a moment in the dark, she thought them pretty, though Laurent said the thing was so rickety it would fall down one day and kill someone, that it was only good for the fire. The stoneware flagon was heavy and she carried it back up to the house cradled into the hollow of her hip. The trees were too thick to see if there was any light from the chateau.

  ‘They’re well away,’ said Andrée later, as the singing grew louder.‘How will I get him home?’

  ‘You can come in with me,’ said Cathérine, ‘Jean can go in the little barn. He won’t mind, the state he’s in.’

  ‘I’d best go,’ said Oriane. ‘Once William’s gone, they won’t stop.’

  ‘Make Laurent take you up,’ said Madame Nadl. ‘He could do with the fresh air. Mind he doesn’t fall over himself.’

  Oriane waited until All Saints’ Day to tell him. She would have to leave it long enough to seem to be sure. It was a bleak day, the brown fields sodden. A hard little wind tweaked at the women’s hats and handkerchieves and beat the chrysanthemum petals in the flowerpots they carried until the poor little blooms were ragged scarecrows of themselves, their bronze and yellow dulled to the tone of tobacco smoke. Père Guillaume led the procession from the church once around the square and then stood at the gate of the cemetery as the congregation filed past, the women with their flowers, the men carrying the candles. Outside the café, Betty’s father served wine to a bored huddle of heavy grey overcoats. Oriane bent to kiss the earth of her mother’s grave, followed by William. They had no proper flowers, so she had done up a bunch of rosemary in a ribbon, for remembrance. She wondered if William understood that his mother was here, and if he was sorry. None of the candles stayed lit, some of the men swore as they scrabbled in the gravel covering the graves, trying to make a hollow to protect the flame. Next year, thought Oriane, I will come with my baby in my arms, and the next year I will hold his little sticky hand as he walks next to me, with his scarf tied tight. I will love you, she said to herself, oh I will love you love you love you.

  Everyone slipped away in small groups, not talking much, glancing at the group inside the café. Oriane, William and the Nadls set off for the bridge, walking slowly to pretend they were allowing Papie to keep up, Madame Nadl clutching at her best hat. As they came in sight of the wash house, Oriane tugged gently at Laurent’s sleeve, guiding him into the nuns’ garden. ‘Laurent, I need to tell you something. Let the others go on a bit.’

  It was warmer here, the air sheltered between the stone walls was softer with the clean earthy scent of wet herbs. For a moment, when she said the words she had prepared, carefully, as though she were concealing happiness with embarrassment, his face was bright with such joy that she could believe herself. Safe, she thought, safe, safe. But then his face twisted into a bitter, suspicious grimace, and, though he continued holding her arm, his own was as lifeless as his wooden leg.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to have the wedding, then?’ he said coldly.

  He couldn’t know, that was the thing. He had been dead drunk, had fallen asleep snoring as he was kissing her on the bed. She had tugged off his trousers and drawers, trying not to look at the thick purpled sole of the stump, and had arranged the covers over him. The sheet was prepared with a dab of rabbit’s blood she had poured into a medicine bottle when she and Cathérine had prepared the stew. When he awoke she was downstairs with her hair tidy under a handkerchief, and she blushed at him as she served his coffee.

  ‘There’s no need for that. With things the way they are, everyone will understand if we wait, like we planned.’

  ‘I’ll tell my mother. She’ll be pleased, I daresay.’

  ‘Are you pleased, Laurent?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She didn’t dare to answer, just followed him meekly out of the garden.

  There was a massive oak beam out in the barn, the strut of a mill-wheel. It had been lying there for years but the wood was supple and dry. Flexing the powerful muscles of his abdomen until they held him firm, Laurent swung the axe. It was too bad. Everyone in Castroux would be having a joke at his expense, saying he went rutting like a swine after one too many with old Lesprats. Disgusting. He was terribly disappointed that Oriane had allowed this to happen, men could not help themselves after all, it was up to the women to see that they behaved. Laurent had been shocked on his recent trips to the market at Landi, to see how some of them carried on. There were girls in Landi, bold girls from big cities who had come back to their country relations in 1940. They swaggered about arm in arm, with powdered faces and cigarettes stuck in greasy red mouths. He had even seen Cécile Chauvignat furtively smoking as she unpacked her sausages. Laurent might trade with them in Landi, but he still saw himself as set apart from those sluts, who seemed to represent everything that was wrong with things lately. Worse than the women were the men, who sat back and watched French women demean themselves, conniving at the disgusting behaviour. As usual, Laurent felt cheated. As he saw it, the high-ups had talked plenty about the noble sweat of the French farmer when they wanted to line them all up and cart them off to Alsace to be shot to bits. Now the very same men said they had to submit to price fixing, practically giving that famous old sweat away while people went hungry. Laurent’s argument did not admit the fact that no one in Castroux was any hungrier than they had ever been. So it was one
thing to get yourself a fair price and not be cheated by those liars in Vichy, but it was quite another to lie down and let them fuck you. There was a part of Laurent that believed they had got what they deserved, really. When you looked at how weak and sloppy and stupid people were, they weren’t fit to be in charge themselves. It was confusing, but more than ever, you had to keep your self-respect. He would make it up, though. Once he had the centre out he could hollow it out with the lathe, to make a real little cradle.

  JANUARY 1944

  William was confused. There was a man asleep in the goat house. Usually, he rattled his stick gleefully in the scrap bucket as he made his way down the path and the goats bounded up to meet him, nosing for crusts. Today all he had was a bundle of hay, because Oriane said there were no scraps for the goats any more. William hoped they would not be hungry. The man was not dead, like the black goat that William had found in the straw, he was snoring. William heard the snores all the way up in the yard, a rich stew of a sound, so he set the hay down silently and opened the door just a crack to see. The goats were snickering, butting their heads towards the light.

  ‘Shh!’ William whispered to them, and pulled the door just wide enough for them to slip out. The man was wrapped in a blanket with his boots sticking out at the bottom, and a cap over his face, but William could see that he had a beard. He didn’t know what to do. Oriane was away to work and he was all alone, so he was not supposed to leave the yard, but there shouldn’t be a man in the goat house. He might be a bad man. Was it a secret? He shut the door slowly, slowly so it didn’t creak, and walked away with his feet splayed and soft in his boots, pressing the earth so he would not make a noise, though the snoring continued regular. The mist was so thick down here that the goats had disappeared, but William could hear their jaws working as they chewed sadly at the bare twigs poking out of the hedge. Poor goats.