by Aileen Izett
“Just ‘builders’, if you have it.”
She darted out into the alien light in the garden, and returned with a large bunch of leaves.
“Verbena,” she said pouring boiling water onto the leaves. “Don’t worry: for me, not you.”
She reached up for a very battered pale green Fortnum and Mason tea caddy which was so reminiscent of England it brought a pang to my heart.
Fortnum’s was where Tom introduced me to Samantha. I hadn’t seen him for a while as he had started travelling all over the world on business by then.
As soon as I saw my brother weaving through the tables, smiling broadly, leading a very young, shy Samantha in his wake, I knew. She was exactly what Tom needed at the time; instant access to the establishment through his prospective father-in-law. Samantha’s father was a hereditary peer. Had he not given consent, Samantha would have married Tom regardless. Whether Tom would have married Samantha, I’m not so sure. In any event, Samantha stayed with her man, despite his numerous affairs in the early years. Those stopped about six years ago, Tom actually telling me, with a straight face, that he had ‘turned over a new leaf’.
“What do you think?” Tom asked me anxiously when we were on our own outside Fortnum’s. It was one of those rain-sodden blustery November days in London — just as it is today, twenty years later. I was trying to flag down a taxi with Tom helping. Samantha was still inside the shop, buying a particular brand of marmalade for her mother. She had talked of little except the forthcoming wedding — wistfully mentioning how she wished she had a brother to be close to, like Tom with me. She had sought out Tom’s hand at every opportunity and he’d kept giving me soppy, embarrassed little smiles.
“Sam was so nervous about meeting you.” A fleet of taxis sailed by, all occupied. Tom was waiting for my answer. “She knows how important you are.”
“You must be very much in love. That’s an enormous diamond you’ve got her.”
“Jealous are we?” He grinned. A taxi splashed to a halt beside us. “Cost me an arm and a leg. You could say,” he said suddenly serious as he leant into the interior to kiss me goodbye, “that it’s a mortgage on my future.”
“You do love her Tom?”
He brushed his lips on my cheek. “I adore her.”
I wasn’t jealous. I was simply frightened of another woman having more claim on him. I didn’t exactly encourage the affairs but I did provide Tom with alibis when needed. Philip hated my connivance and Samantha, knowing full well what was going on, hated me. I didn’t care. I loved my brother.
*
Valerie said very little. She busied herself with the paraphernalia of making proper tea. There were lots of photographs and cards interspersed with the herbs on the dresser.
“Family?” I asked.
“Some,” she smiled, “But mostly people I’ve helped.” She smoothed wisps of hair off her face. The rest hung down her back in a ponytail. My fingernails, like Valerie’s, had crescents of dirt. Eveline had so many baths there was never enough hot water for me.
“Sugar?” Valerie asked. “I’ve bought you milk,” she added waving a carton of milk from the fridge at me. She put the milk in first.
Valerie slipped into the seat opposite. Every time she moved there was a whiff of something pungent and earthy. I pressed my arms tightly into my sides. Valerie observed without comment. She cupped her hands around her tea. It smelt heavenly. She was right to drink a tea which doesn’t need milk. French milk sits on top of tea.
“Is everything okay?”
I was suddenly gripped with anxiety that I was about to betray Tom in some way.
“What can I do for you?” Valerie asked, with a pleasant, knowing smile.
Chapter 23
Valerie liked power over people.
“The thing is, Valerie,” I began carefully, “that my brother didn’t know about Innocence Kumono when he acquired the château…”
Valerie raised an eyebrow. “Difficult,” she murmured.
I had my answer. “No,” I said. “In the circles he moves in, property is often in the name of a company so the owners can remain anonymous and I — ” I rushed on with what I knew to be the truth, which was so much easier, “ — didn’t know myself until very recently.”
“The General never stayed there you know,” Valerie sounded defensive. “It was just the sons and they weren’t there that often.”
“But nevertheless they were…”
“You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know what they’re buying into,” Valerie interrupted forcefully. “Coming over here, not knowing the language, not knowing the history. Some people are very foolish.”
She meant me, even though she knew that the château wasn’t mine. The last of the light was retreating from the garden. We were sitting in darkening gloom with a strange metallic glint to it — sharp-edged like the taste of Valerie’s tea.
Valerie withdrew a box of matches from a drawer under her side of the table. “I don’t know why,” she said slowly, “people think that they can just buy a place and take it over, as it were.” She carefully lit the candle on the table between us. The sweet scent of beeswax permeated the air.
“People,” Valerie shook her head, “have no sense.” She busied herself with placing the dead match back in the box and back in the drawer. “You do know,” she sipped her tea, “that the château dates back to mediaeval times?”
I wasn’t there for a history lesson.
“But why have a château you hardly ever use? It doesn’t make sense.”
Valerie shrugged, expressing her lack of interest. “What does anyone do in a holiday home?”
I was getting nowhere. I tried a change of subject. I asked how she came to be in France?
She laughed. She was embarrassed. “The usual story I’m afraid.”
When I didn’t say anything, she continued. “I met a man. He happened to be French, and I ended up here. This was his parents’ property. When we split, he didn’t want to be in the sticks so I bought him out. I couldn’t afford to return to England…” she smiled brightly, refocusing on me. “Are you married?”
I told her that my husband would be coming over.
“Soon?”
“I hope so.” There was an ache, a very lonely ache, in the pit of my stomach.
The garden flashed up against the window. As we waited for the roll of thunder to recede, a splash of rain hit the pane and then another and another. A river of water coursed down the other side of the glass, catching in the candlelight’s reflection. Rain drummed on the roof.
Valerie smiled, the angularity of her face softened by the light. “Nice isn’t it? Nice and cosy.”
I hoped that Greg had found Eveline; that she wasn’t outside, wandering around in the deluge.
“So many English,” Valerie said softly, “come over here to buy the property of their dreams at a fraction of the price they would pay back in the UK… I wonder if they would bother if they could afford to buy the equivalent at home?”
“You know,” she continued, “there’s even a stall at the market selling English produce: HP sauce, baked beans, Colman’s mustard. I mean, if you want all that, why don’t you just go home? What’s the point in living in France? I mean, living in France isn’t like choosing from your high street Tesco’s confectionery counter…”
I tried to imagine the General’s sons in my local Tesco back in London, squabbling over lemon sherbets and chocolate éclairs with a couple of heavies squaring up menacingly to anyone who even so much as glanced in their direction. Unfortunately, I knew their taste in sweets, given the amount of sweet wrappers at the château, but I couldn’t picture them at all. I thought of the smiling, bespectacled young man in Eveline’s photograph.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Valerie was in full flow. “Some of my best friends are English even though I prefer my French friends nowadays… I do wish the English would make more of an effort, you know? Learn the language for starters. I gi
ve French classes… herbal therapy doesn’t give me enough to live on — there are a few spaces, if you ever feel the need to brush up…”
“My French is practically non-existent I’m afraid.”
“Even better. A clean sheet.”
Outside, it was pitch black. The flame on the candle between us faltered and Valerie’s shadow swung alarmingly on the wall behind her. Another flash of lightening illuminated her face.
I was beginning to feel completely claustrophobic. “Could we have the light on?”
“You know,” she said as she returned to the table, “you look a bit peaky. I’ve just the thing.” She opened a cupboard door. “Elderberry wine,” she flourished a bottle. “It’s not as expensive as some of my other products.”
“What you have to understand,” Valerie announced when she has poured out two glasses and I had taken my first appreciative, hypocritical sip, “is that the château is very ancient. It’s got a long, long history. It has survived and will survive anyone who occupies it. For ancient buildings,” she intoned softly, “are entities in themselves with layers of energy and memory which we displace at our peril.”
She fixed her eyes on the candle flame. “Tell me, have you found any names?”
I was puzzled, wary of the direction in which the conversation was going. “What sort of names?”
“I’ve heard that there are names scratched into the walls with the invocation: ‘Mon Dieu, sauvez-nous’.”
At that moment the bulb in the overhead light pinged. Valerie paid no attention to the fact that we were almost in darkness again. She beckoned me closer. I leant my face further into the warmth of the candle flame.
“Save us my God,” she whispered dramatically, grasping my hand with both of hers.
I pulled my hand away. Valerie leant back in her chair, satisfied with my reaction. “It was during the French Revolution. The château was pillaged and the family executed but before they were carted off they managed to scratch their names into the walls. You haven’t come across them? The names, I mean?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing like that. Just a lot of really weird things and now we’ve found clothes, modern clothes, in a locked room off the archway. They definitely didn’t belong to the Kumono sons and so I was wondering,” I say in a rush, “would you know whose they could be?”
Valerie looks at me speculatively. “Friends? The General never came himself. Just the sons and their friends would come to your château…”
“My brother’s château.”
Valerie ignored my interruption. “We’d know when the sons were coming because they’d send a housekeeper a few days before to air the place. A nice chap, jolly. He spent so much money shopping in the village, he was very popular with the locals. The sons would come down in the dead of night, in a convoy of black limousines. I saw them once when I was out in the woods. They’d stay two weeks max. We always knew when they’d arrived because they liked their music loud. Heavy bass. You could hear it from one end of the village to the other but no one dared…” She stopped talking, lost in reminiscence.
“Dared what?”
“To ask them to turn their music down. Daft, isn’t it? They weren’t friendly. Not at all in fact. They had army types patrolling the grounds. Louts more like.”
In a way, I was relieved. “So that's all it was; a party house.”
“Yes,” Valerie agreed, “but you always have to remember who they were.”
She shifted back in her seat, remembering. Her face brightened with recollection. “There was an incident once. A couple of locals found a man up a tree, in the woods. You know where I mean?”
I had an awful feeling of foreboding. “Behind the château?”
“They had wild parties up at the house, hence the music, if you could call it music, pumping out… Anyway this man, hardly more than a boy, he was completely non compos mentis. Stoned out of his head… The Kumonos wanted it all hushed up — drug taking wasn’t good for the image…” Valerie snorted. “I mean to say when we know now what they got up to in their own country…”
“So what happened?”
Valerie looked at me vaguely. “The couple managed to coax him down from the tree and wrap a coat around him because he was so cold. He had been terrified out of his wits by something — the boar hunters, probably. He kept on saying that he wouldn’t go back to the château.”
“He spoke French?”
“Yes. And English apparently. Highly educated, I expect — well, you would be wouldn’t you, if you’re hob-nobbing with the likes of the Kumonos. Weren’t the sons educated in England? Anyway, they had to practically frogmarch him up the avenue… what else could they do? They couldn’t be responsible.”
“No,” I said.
“September is the start of the hunting season here. It was so warm that year that the butler bloke gave a garden party, after the sons had gone back home…”
I remembered talk of a garden party. The drunk woman at Babs’ and Dora’s party.
“How long ago?”
Valerie thought. “Well, the Kumonos have been gone — is it five years?” She nodded. “A year or so before that? But I haven’t told you the funny thing about the man in the tree…” She stopped and looked at me speculatively.
“Go on.”
“The couple who came across him must have had a fright. I mean, you’re walking along and you hear someone whimpering, starkers up a tree. Can you imagine?”
“No clothes?” I felt sick.
“Not a stitch,” Valerie giggled. “Poor chap. I tell you what, you’re as white as a sheet, even in this light. I’ll run you back. We can sort out your car in the morning.”
Chapter 24
I didn’t feel well. I hadn’t eaten all day and hunger was making me light-headed — that feeling of dislocation as if the centre of gravity has moved to the moon, except there wasn’t a moon that night. Valerie drove slowly, pressed up against the steering wheel. The rain pounded against the car and the wipers wheezed backwards and forwards. “I’m sure you’re going down with something. You weren’t well yesterday in the supermarket, remember?”
I’d got drenched from running the short distance from the house to Valerie’s car. I couldn’t stop shivering. As we drove through the village, Valerie swerved sharply to avoid a plastic bin lid bouncing across the beam from the headlights. No one was on the streets.
“How did the villagers know that the young man came from the château?”
She gave me the answer I had been expecting. Dreading. “There aren’t exactly many foreigners around here.”
I couldn’t stop thinking of the shirt which Eveline had so carefully smoothed out on the dusty carpet, as if she was trying to conjure up the man to whom it had belonged — or boy, I thought with a sickening lurch. She was so young herself.
The car strained up the hill to the château. I could see patches of light between the flailing branches of the trees. Valerie shifted down a gear. “Which reminds me,” she said, “your visitor caused quite a commotion at the circus.”
“She’s not a visitor as such.”
Valerie gave me a sideways glance. “Is she your maid?”
I laughed. “Good Lord, no.”
From the gates, except that there were no gates, the château looked crazy, like the prow of an ocean liner ploughing through a stormy sea. Every window was ablaze. Valerie swung the car into a rectangle of light beside the front steps.
“So she’s a friend helping out?”
“Not exactly. She turned up at the gates with a silver bullet in her hand. No explanations. None at all.”
Valerie’s eyes shone with ill-concealed curiosity. I was sorry for offering that nugget of information. I wasn’t thinking. It just came out.
“Anyway, she’s gone,” I lied, shutting the door firmly so that Valerie couldn’t ask me any more questions.
Valerie shrugged her shoulders and sent the car into reverse.
I stood in the driving rain and watc
hed as the red eyes of her tail-lights flickered down the avenue and disappeared.
A finger of light slanted across the darkness in the archway. I was certain that we had shut the door to the furniture store and almost as sure that we switched off the lights. I called for Greg and Eveline, straining my ears to hear above the wind and the rain. Nothing. No one. Fear sparked up, somewhere deep inside me but I couldn’t cross the sliver of light, not without knowing what was behind the door. A retreat back into the elements wasn’t possible.
I summoned every ounce of courage I had. Slowly, the door yawned on its hinges. The furniture was there, just as Greg and I left it. So were the dust-cloths, pooled on the floor: like the Hoover, ironing board, and iron — still there, undisturbed. Just the pile of clothes, scattered by Eveline, had gone. The room with its acres of empty space looked ordered and peaceful. It was as if we — me, Greg and Eveline — had never been in the room. That I’d imagined it all.
Greg had scrawled a note, ‘Gone to find Eveline’, and left it on the kitchen table. I towelled myself down with some kitchen paper. I needed to eat. There was foie gras in the fridge, growing a crust because it had been shoved onto a shelf without being covered, and a few bits of stale baguette. I wolfed them, and took a slug from the remnants of wine in the bottom of a bottle which somehow Greg and I missed the evening before and I felt warmer, less light-headed — and definitely more brave. I went back out into the archway.
I stepped into the room, very conscious that the only exit was behind me.
The doors to the enormous cupboard were closed. I put my hands on the handles, twisted them, closed my eyes, and pulled. It was such a relief to see the eight shelves of shirts, t-shirts, trousers and underwear refolded into neat piles. No wonder I couldn’t find Eveline earlier. Then I saw a shadow move and for one wild moment, I thought it was the man who Valerie said had been found in a tree, returning to reclaim his clothes. I rushed out of the room, dashed through the archway. When I slammed the kitchen door behind me, I told myself that I was being ridiculous, that it was my shadow moving in that desolate room — but when I think back, sitting here in London, it couldn’t have been. I’d been in between two open cupboard doors so couldn’t have cast any shadow.