by Aileen Izett
I had been so stupid, so bound up in my own thoughts — living out, and not even happily, my own version of reality. It wasn’t a comfortable drive back to the village.
It was too much of a coincidence that, out of all the châteaux in France, Eveline turned up at the former Kumono château.
As soon I thought that, I chastised myself. I was being stupid and ignorant. I was guilty of racism, judging simply on appearance. On what grounds could I link her to a dissolute dictatorship? The answer was none.
I was desperate for a drink. I wanted to buy a bottle of wine, a deep, dark, red wine and to drink myself into an insensate stupor and then I wanted to wake up and find myself back in London, with everything normal as it had been two months before, except that nothing then had been normal. I had been wracked with suspicion just as I was now, in France.
I imagined Philip sitting on his side of the bed, bending to tie his shoelaces. I could see myself in my bra and pants, in the en-suite, face pressed up against the glass, rubbing away the mist my breath was making I tried to apply mascara. “Another cup of tea?” he’d offer and I’d say yes and as soon as I’d hear his footsteps descend the stairs, I’d rush to his suit jacket and delve through his pockets looking for something — anything — to prove that he was having an affair. I hated myself then. If I could have sloughed off my skin, I’d have done so.
I pulled up in front of the mini-supermarket a little further along the main road into the village. Despite the bottle crates piled up beneath the awning and the out-of-date posters on the door, it looked as deserted — abandoned even — as ever.
If General Kumono had sons, he could have had a daughter.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the cool dark space. I stood in front of the delicatessen counter with a fluorescent light flickering and humming over a range of palely pink, chunky hams. I don’t know why I was standing there. I don’t buy delicatessen ham. I don’t like the way a thin slice slithers away from your hand and thick slices are too reminiscent of the pig they came from.
“Are you alright?” Someone touched me lightly on the arm. It was a woman, small and lank-haired, whom I recognised but couldn’t immediately place.
“I’m Valerie. We were at that party when — ” Her beady eyes were frank in their curiosity. “You’re very pale.”
“I remember. I’m fine, thank you.”
“You were swaying.” She looked almost accusing. “I thought you were about to faint.”
“It’s coming out of the sun. I’m looking for the wine.”
“Are you sure?” Her eyes continued to assess me. She had a shallow basket at her feet, full of salad with hairy roots. Her toes, which hooked over the edge of her sandals, were like a marsupial’s.
I had the chance then to admit that I had just found out who the former owners of the château were — but I didn’t. I didn’t like how she was looking at me.
Anyway, right at that moment, I wanted to buy some wine.
“It’s over there,” Valerie pointed to the back of the shop.
I picked up four bottles of red wine and two litres of still water. She was still standing by the delicatessen counter, waiting for the assistant to finish with me and serve her. I could feel her eyes watching as I paid for my goods and left.
Back at the château, no one came out to greet me as the car crunched to a halt on the gravel. The house was shut, except for a salon window which I couldn’t remember opening. Even the huge archway doors were closed.
“Greg! Greg!” The words bounced back off impenetrable walls. Sky and clouds were jumbled together on the ancient panes. A fortress. The château’s shadow stretched past me, blanking out the sun’s warmth. I tried the front door. Locked. I hammered.
“Eveline! Eveline!” The words danced in the air. I panicked, gripped with the fear that something dreadful had happened behind those thick walls. I remember my heart thudding and the sudden weakening of my legs as all my energy drained away. I remember sitting down on the steps leading up to the front door. They had gone for a walk, I reasoned, and quite properly, Greg had locked up. They hadn’t left me alone. They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. I managed to quell the tidal wave of panic threatening to engulf me.
I had four bottles of wine, two lukewarm bottles of water and no corkscrew. In the end, I successfully used a long thin nail I found lying on the terrace. I sat out of reach of the château’s shadow on the other side of the ornamental pond. I swallowed mouthfuls of warm wine and waited for Greg and Eveline.
I distracted myself by looking for the dull gold of Greg’s carp flickering beneath water lilies. I couldn’t see them. “A pond without fish is a sad thing,” I’d said to Greg, months before, when we were both up to our knees in water, clearing the pond of weed. Then the morning after Dora and Babs’ disastrous party, he appeared carrying a plastic bag full of water with the two fish. “Sorry,” he’d said gruffly, “that your dress was ruined.
I was touched. “You don’t have to apologise for your friends.”
“I’m not,” he said, decanting the fish unceremoniously into the water. “Those people are acquaintances, not friends.”
“So what am I then?”
He’d turned his head towards me. “The boss,” he’d said, grinning. Even that wasn’t quite true.
A youngster burnt up and down the hill on his moped. A dog barked. The air was heavy and sweet with the fragrance of late roses run wild. I was hungry.
And while I sat waiting for Greg and Eveline that evening, I couldn’t get out of my head one lurid detail about the dictator’s sons which I had read years before, sitting with the newspapers and the bacon and eggs which Philip always made on a Sunday. Everything else I’d read about the Kumonos I had forgotten, in the way you do when events don’t actually impinge on your own life. The horror of the image of young men, with their right feet cut off, trying to play football in a prison yard, still churns my stomach. Those young men were the national football team who had lost a prestigious football match. Execution was, mercifully, their final punishment.
By the time Greg and Eveline appeared from the direction of the woods, I was so relieved that I could have cried — but I was also stiff and cold, cross and a little drunk.
“Sorry,” Greg smiled sheepishly, “we got lost. Went round and round for bloody ages.” Eveline looked like one half of a couple standing beside him, her eyes warm and happy. She also looked as if she could be a Kumono. I saw an in-built arrogance about her — an assumption that everyone would do her bidding, as I had done over the last few days.
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Late.” Greg was all gangly arms and legs. He looked so inappropriate as the escort of a beautiful woman. “I thought it best to shut the place up as it’s not my gaff…”
“And on whose time did you go on your little excursion?”
The smile was wiped off his face.
“I pay you to help me renovate this place, not to go traipsing around the woods. What do you think I thought when I saw the place empty? For all I knew, you could have upped sticks and left.”
“I’m not listening to this shit,” Greg turned on his heel. “You asked me to look after little Miss Madam here. Which I did. I’ve worked ten hour days for you and charged for eight and you give me grief about one fucking afternoon when I’m still doing what you want me to do but not with my nose to the grindstone. Fuck off. I don’t need your money — your brother’s money,” he shouted back as he marches off down the avenue at a lolloping pace, so furious that he forgot his bicycle.
Eveline and I looked at each other. Her eyes were unflinching. She, who was the cause of all the trouble, made me feel ashamed of my outburst.
I wanted to slap her, scream at her ‘who the hell are you?’, and shake her till she answered but I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure if she wouldn’t hit me back harder. She made me feel weak, impotent and a little fearful. I was the first to drop my gaze.
So Eveline and I stood t
here, beside the pond and watched Greg about to disappear out of our lives.
Chapter 17
“Greg!” He kept walking, his back resolutely turned. I ran after him. “Greg! Please.” My breath caught at the back of my throat. “Greg.” I hooked my fingers into the back of his overalls. “What about your bicycle?”
“I’ll pick it up some other time.” He propelled me along with him, not deigning to look at me.
“We can’t get into the house.”
“Funny that. The key is in the urn.”
“Please Greg.” We were almost at the front gates where we found Eveline, eight days and a world away. “I’m sorry.”
Finally, reluctantly, he stopped and turned to face me.
“I thought it might do her some good.” There was no warmth in his voice.
I glanced back. Eveline was still standing where I left her.
“She was doing my head in — drifting around the house like a lost soul without you around. I thought if I got her out, it might help. You know?” He took a step towards me, his anger fizzing in my face. “Look, I don’t need this crap. What do you think I left England for? I’m a free man. All I need is a place to sleep, something to eat. I don’t need this shit. She’s a problem and you’re not dealing with it.”
He flung up his arm so abruptly, he nearly knocked me off my feet. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean…”
He caught my arm, righted me. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches between us. We were standing much too close.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Greg?”
He took a step back. He knew exactly what I meant.
“I tried. You wouldn’t even talk to me in the beginning, remember?”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. I gave up trying. Thought you’d find out eventually.”
We walked back together, with the sun setting behind the château. He nodded towards the still figure of Eveline, wreathed in shadow, standing by a pool of liquid gold.
“But when you saw her at the gates, didn’t you think that she maybe had something to do with them?” My voice was so low, the words couldn’t carry.
“Yes,” he said, “but like you said, she’s just a young girl.”
The kitchen felt different. It felt cold and shut-up and damp after a long afternoon of incubating shadows which flapped against my face, like wet washing on a line, making it difficult to breathe. Greg marched through the them and snapped on the light. The shadows drew back, becoming flat planes of darkness, pooling in the corners, normal. Greg gave me a funny look. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.”
Eveline disappeared straight upstairs. The kitchen looked almost homely in the artificial light. Greg retrieved the bottle I’d been drinking by the pond and the rest of the wine from the car. I asked him to stay for supper. He accepted, decanting what remained of the open bottle into a large tumbler. He lounged against the dresser, watching while I rummaged through the cupboard looking for something to eat. I regretted buying just wine and water at the supermarket. He finished the wine in a couple of gulps and waved his empty glass at me.
“Oh go on then, Greg, open another.” I couldn’t say anything more because Eveline had started to run herself a bath and when the ancient plumbing system cranked into motion, it could have been the gates of hell opening. I decided on foie gras, courtesy of the château’s stocks of the stuff, on hard little slices of pre-toasted bread, and a bouillabaisse soup which smelt revolting as soon as the can opener touched the tin. Greg, meanwhile, crashed open drawers shouting obscenities over the thunderous clatter from the pipes. He shook me on the shoulder, making a pumping movement with his hand, holding up a bottle.
“A corkscrew,” he bellowed. “When is she going to turn off that bloody water?”
In the end, he found a skewer with a curlicued end into which he threaded a knife sharpener, the sort fathers in TV advertisements use before ceremoniously carving the Christmas turkey, and winched the cork from bottle. I found three crystal glasses, green with age, at the back of a high shelf.
The noise stopped. Eveline had evidently run out of hot water.
“How did you find out about the Kumonos?” Greg broached the subject, while his back was turned, intent on opening a second bottle of wine.
“A couple of kids whose car had broken down. I took them to a garage. They knew about the château.”
“Did they now,” he said jokingly, plonking the bottle on the table. “Clever clogs. Is Ms Mystery coming or what? I’m starving.”
At which point, Eveline glided in smelling expensively luscious.
Eveline put her thin, elegant hand over the rim of her glass before Greg could pour her some wine. She sat with her back to the window, her shadow truncated by the windowsill behind her. Headless. As far as I could remember, the Kumono sons had been hung. Greg was sitting at one end of the table and I was at the other. His shadow was elongated and pointed, just like him.
Greg ate with gusto, lips smacking, soup flying off his spoon, crunching through the foie gras toasts. Our shadows shifted places, a breeze slipped through the window. I straightened my shoulders.
Greg smiled over at me. “What do you call an Irishman…”
“Not now, Greg, please.”
I took a deep breath. “Eveline, you know I want to help you.”
Her head was bent over the bowl, hair still damp from the bath.
“It’s just that it’s a bit difficult…”
Greg snorted.
“Please, Greg,” I glared at him.
Without looking up, she pulled the plate of foie gras nearer.
Four dainty bites and Eveline polished off a toast.
“Please look at me.”
Finally, she looked up at me with her unfathomable eyes and perfect face, dabbing her mouth with a piece of paper towel. I took another deep breath before I launched into the unknown.
“Did you know General Innocence Kumono or his sons?”
It’s amazing what reverberations names have. Just think of the name ‘Hitler’. Both Eveline and Greg looked at me: he, worried and anxious, and she, frozen, huge eyes above the makeshift napkin pressed to her lips. The shadows hung motionless in the middle of the room. They were waiting. I was waiting. Greg was waiting.
“You’re not related to them by any chance are you?”
Eveline pushed the table back with such force, our half-full bottle of wine spilt across the table. With a flash of pure torment from her great eyes, she ran out of the room. She clattered up the stairs. A door slammed.
We listened to the wine drip onto the floor.
Greg righted the empty bottle, and bent down to mop up.
“That’s that then,” I said, breaking the silence. “We’re no nearer knowing who she is or what she’s doing here.”
Greg squeezed his wine-red paper towel, filling his plate with liquid.
“Well, she’s heard of the Kumonos.”
“All this time,” I said wonderingly. “How come you never said?”
He shrugged. “It was no secret. Want another?” Greg opened our third bottle of heavy red wine. I pushed my glass over to him. I was like a lake, an unruffled surface deep with red wine.
“Was it just the sons here?”
“As far as I know,” he said. “Look, I only came to France three years ago. I don’t know much. Nobody talks about them.”
“You could have told me.”
“Look,” he said, “you were so uptight when you came you were bloody impossible. You’re lucky I didn’t walk out.” He scraped back his chair. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I sat at the head of the table with the detritus of our meal in front of me and started on the rest of the bottle, trying to ignore the mass of darkness banked up against the weak, watery light from the low energy bulb. I drank steadily, watching the shadows change form when I wasn’t directly looking at them.
I decided against phoning Tom: one, it would
mean leaving the kitchen and two, it was past midnight and he would think me drunk. I was drunk, deliberately drunk. It was liberating to feel so detachedly drunk. When I had enough Dutch courage, I made a break for the stairs.
In the dining hall, I stopped in front of the telephone. So what if I was inebriated? It took a while because my fingers kept missing the holes for the digits on the old-fashioned, circular dial. The shadows seemed to have solidified into the corners of the room. I kept a watchful eye on them.
“Hallo!” Philip said welcomingly as if I had just walked into our house in London. It couldn’t have escaped him that I had never called him from the château before.
“Listen,” I enunciated very clearly and slowly. “Can you find out if General Innocence Kumono had a daughter?”
“Excuse me?”
“Innocence Kumono. The dictator executed about four years ago. Daughter.”
“What’s going on? Darling, are you by any chance…?”
A shadow seemed to have detached itself from the others and is starting to slip across the floor towards me.
I slammed down the phone, but not before I said “Africa”, “Don’t darling me”, and “Call me tomorrow.”
Chapter 18
When I woke, the early morning light was filling up the window behind the curtains. For a moment I thought that I was back with Philip. I’d had one of those delicious dreams in which you surrender yourself to a lover’s caress and your body floats away on a cloud of well-being and happiness, and you think to yourself I must keep this dream going, and why don’t I get this drunk more often, if this is the effect? Then I remembered that my room in the tower didn’t have curtains and Philip and I hadn’t made love for months. With horror I realised that the arm flung over my chest was Eveline’s and it was her knees pressing against my thigh. I was in Eveline’s bed. She was asleep beside me. A hangover drummed on my brain. For a moment, I thought I was going to be sick.
I’d checked on Eveline on my way up to my bed. As I pressed down the handle to her door, a shadow loomed over me, drowning me in its darkness and I’d made a dash for the safety of her bed and had been too frightened to leave it.