by Aileen Izett
“So what does your father do? A philanthropist perhaps?”
He should have done his homework. The fact that he hadn’t heard of our father’s novels, meant that our father was dead in every way.
“No.” It was sixteen years after the event, and I still found it impossible to speak of my father’s death. “He’s in fertiliser. Haven’t you heard?”
And, until very recently — until two weeks ago to be precise — Philip and I have had journalists hanging around outside the house. They have gone now, thank God — leaving the street and our neighbours in peace.
*
We were to have the chicken that evening for supper, along with quiches, salamis, cheeses and salads. The table would be laden.
“It’s a celebration,” Tom said. He was stuffing the ends of five pink candles he had found in a box of fifty at the back of the sideboard into a tarnished almost black, candelabra. I was chopping up salad leaves. The kitchen was exasperating: we had five nut crackers, three ice cream scoops, two melon ballers but no colanders or potato peelers. Perhaps the French don’t use potato peelers. Maybe the potato peeler is a purely British invention.
“For what?”
“For the château, finding the wine, for us — we’re so rarely together these days.”
“You’re forgetting about Eveline.”
“She’s not our problem.”
“She is, Tom. Like it or not, she’s here.”
“You seriously don’t believe the brother nonsense…”
“I do.”
Tom was trying to shove the last candle into its socket and it wouldn’t go. “It’s too far-fetched, Sis.”
“Because,” I said, “there was something about this house — something in the atmosphere — which I couldn’t explain before she came.”
“And now you can?”
I knew that I was going to sound unhinged, but I said it anyway.
“It’s like the shadows in the house have been stirred up because she’s here, searching for the truth about her brother.”
He looked at me in mock astonishment.
“Shadows?”
I felt my face reddening. “I don’t mean haunting. Not that.”
Tom snorted. “You’ve been here too long on your own.” Then he changed the subject. “What’s going on between you and Philip?”
“We’re having a trial separation.”
Whatever answer Tom was expecting, it wasn’t that one.
“You and me,” he said eventually. “What a pair.” He smiled. “At least we’ve got each other.”
He came over and put an arm around my shoulder. I remember the stab of pain in my chest, every bit as real as Tom.
“I wonder how different it would have been if we’d had children.”
There was nothing Tom could say. He had four children whom he saw rarely.
After a while, he moved away and placed the candelabra in the middle of the table. Pink and blackened silver made a pretty combination.
“It’s not just a ploy to have somewhere to stay?” He was talking about Eveline again.
“You can’t make that sort of grief up.” I thought of Eveline scrabbling amongst the clothes. “Don’t you remember with Dad?”
“Not really.” Tom forced the last candle into place. “I was too young. What do you think?” He stood back to admire his handiwork.
I remembered our father lying dead under the apple tree with his blue eyes full of clouds, staring at the sky.
“Smell this.” Tom had uncorked two bottles of red.
The odour was fusty and sour. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said that the wine was undrinkable.
He showed me the label. “Château Latour. The year Dad died.”
I remembered Tom up in the tree, before it happened, swinging from branch to branch. I remembered being annoyed with him, always grabbing as much of our father’s attention as he could.
“Listen Sis,” Tom said, “don’t worry about Eveline. We’ll sort something out.”
That was the first time he called her ‘Eveline’. Still though, it wasn’t her name.
Chapter 34
So around eight o’clock in the evening, we sat down at the table: Tom, me, Greg and Eveline.
Tom had invited Greg to share our supper. He had sought Greg out during the afternoon, and paced the château and its grounds with him. He seemed impervious to the fact that the château used to belong to a dictator and that a young girl was searching for her dead brother there. Eveline’s presence, I remember thinking, was merely an irritation. Nothing and no one was going to be allowed to taint my brother’s vision of the place as a wonderful retreat for his family — not even his sudden lack of wife. For all his anonymous donations to charities over the years, my brother was a hard-hearted man.
Greg had been abroad too long. He’d gone back to the caravan and changed for the meal. Sitting next to Tom, he looked foreign. Greg also needed a haircut, and absolutely not another do-it-yourself job. He could have almost been attractive in the right light with the right haircut.
I, too, had changed for the meal. For the first time ever at the château, I was wearing freshly pressed clothes. My heart, though, had almost fallen out of my chest when I saw the neat pile of clothes on my bed. For a moment, I thought that they belonged to the man in the tree. They were my clothes, taken off the makeshift line I’d strung up near the swimming pool. Eveline had ironed them, when she returned after a futile search in the woods. She was being good to her word and helping around the house.
Tom insisted that I tasted the wine first. He stood beside me, one arm behind his back, a parody of a wine waiter. “And what does Madame think?”
“Madame,” I said carefully, swirling the thin brown liquid around my mouth, “thinks it’s wonderful.”
“And Madame?” He turned to Eveline who automatically put her hand over her glass. There was a hint of eyeliner around her eyes and she’d painted her nails. The red varnish glinted.
“You can’t do that,” Tom said in mock outrage, “you may never again taste the vintage of ’73. It wasn’t a bad year for Bordeaux.”
Whilst he served Greg, Eveline stretched her impossibly long neck and emptied the glass. I was surprised because the wine, despite what I said to Tom, tasted old and bitter. Tom looked momentarily horrified. Greg stifled a giggle. I glared at Greg. Tom poured Eveline another glass. She downed it in one.
“Eveline — ” I was about to say: ‘be careful. Don’t get drunk.’
Tom interrupted me. “I can see you’re a girl after my own heart.” He poured her half a glass and wagged the bottle. “Let’s leave a little something for the rest of us.”
Eveline smiled and took a sip. Tom looked touched. Greg’s face was a picture.
“Eveline,” Tom offered her the plate of salami, “just picking up where we left off last night, how come your family were friends of General Kumono?”
“How come?” The question seemed genuinely to baffle her. In the silence which followed, her eyes wandered over the plates of food, wandered over all our faces, like she was searching out an answer in order to please Tom. I wondered if the wine had gone to her head.
“Tom means…” I said, in case she hadn’t understood. But of course she had understood.
“My father was the General’s architect.” Her knife clattered onto her plate.
“Did you know him personally?” Tom’s voice dripped with sympathy.
“Yes,” she said defiantly. “But I was always frightened of him. He played stupid tricks, like the first time I met him.”
“What sort of tricks?” Already, I was anxious for her, for what horror she might reveal.
“I was only small and I was sent out into the garden when he arrived. My brother was sent to play with me.” She bit her lower lip, remembering. “He didn’t want to, because he was twelve at the time and I was only four — but already, I think, our parents didn’t trust the General. So my brother played shop with me, my
favourite game. Do you know the game?”
“Yes,” I said, “Tom and I used to play it when we were children. Didn’t we Tom?”
Tom wasn’t not paying any attention to me either. All his concentration was on Eveline.
“We got stuff from kitchen: tin cans, things like that. We made a display with the cans.” Eveline drew a triangle in the air as an explanation, her eyes still on Tom.
“We did too. Don’t you remember Tom?” I knew I was gabbling.
“Sis,” Tom said gently. “Shut up.” So I shut up. We waited. Tom nodded to Eveline.
“Anyway,” Eveline continued. “General Kumono was leaving. He was nice to us. He gave us sweets. He had a pocketful of sweets. But at the gate…” Her voice wavered.
“Go on,” Tom said softly. “You’re with friends here.”
“At the garden gate, we were waving goodbye beside our shop, with our parents there…” She faltered, and started again. “He took out a gun and whoosh! He shoots. Pow! Pow! Pow!” Eveline’s palms and fingers aligned together like she had a gun, bullets scudding across the table. All the time, she was pointing at Tom with her two index fingers and their blood-red nails.
It was stricken, the silence, which followed. It was as if the General had joined us at the table; an overbearing caricature of a man who would have been laughable if he hadn’t been so dangerous. Tom had met the man but Greg and I — we were familiar with the General from news footage. We had seen the images of the mass graves, the tidy lines of excavated bones. Eveline had brought his spectre to our table.
Tom played for time, lifting his glass up to the light and then swallowing the lot. Greg was quite still, his chin bent towards his chest, as if he were deep in thought. I pressed Eveline’s hands back into her lap and held them there. I could have wept for her.
“What was the General shooting at?” Tom reached back and lifted a bottle of wine off the sideboard. He helped himself liberally. Greg roused himself, took the bottle from Tom, and poured himself another glass. Tom winked at me. He was trying to be light-hearted. The attempt fell flat.
“The cans,” Eveline shrugged her shoulders. She was long past caring. “It was a joke. The bullets — silver bullets — they were only for the cans.”
“Your poor parents.”
She gazed at me solemnly. “My father put a hand over my mother’s mouth.”
“Are those the bullets?” I hazarded a guess.
“Yes. My father marked two and gave us one each, my brother and me — as a good luck charm, you know? It was his dream,” she shook her head, unable to believe her father’s naivety, “that we lived without fear. Of course we always lived in fear after that.” She picked up her knife and fork, folded the slice of salami in two and popped it into her mouth, as if she hadn’t been, two minutes before, taking aim at my brother. If those bullets hadn’t been make-believe, my brother would have been dead, as dead as my father and her brother.
“Which is why,” Eveline announced, “that I know that Zachary is dead. He would never have left behind the silver bullet.”
Zachary. The same name as in the passport, hidden in the desk drawer in the library. Eveline’s shadows swarmed around the table. It was they who were eating the glistening flesh of the chickens; they were scooping up the muddy-looking foie gras and savouring it, like Tom, on baguette; they who were chomping through tough endive, slicing through the flaccid moon of a ham quiche. Not us.
I pushed back my chair.
“Sis, wait,” Tom said, half-rising. He knew what I was going to do.
He addressed Eveline. “Isn’t Zachary a rather unusual name for your part of the world?”
Eveline wiped a droplet of oil from her lips. “My father heard the name when he was studying in Paris.”
Tom’s expression was completely neutral.
“My brother was here,” she insisted. “I found his chain. The bullet proves it. I don’t need more proof.”
“I’ve got something to show you,” I said, standing up.
“Sis!” Tom tried to call me back.
As I took to the stairs, Greg asked Tom how business was in London. Good old Greg. We had to maintain a semblance of normality.
Chapter 35
I upended the drawer. The papers scattered across the desk. No passport. I checked the two unlocked drawers underneath. I stopped my frenzied searching and thought back to the last time I had seen the passport.
There had been a stiff feeling to the cover — as if it was new but it wasn’t; it was out of date. Most of the pages were blank and unused. Some were stuck together. I remembered the identity section, the photo of the young man, with Zachary as his first name and an unpronounceable name for his second.
I could remember dropping the key into the cloisonné pot, but I couldn’t be sure if I had put the passport back because I couldn’t recall actually, physically, locking the drawer. I was sure though, that Tom had taken the passport.
Back in the kitchen, I caught the tail-end of some joke of Tom’s — something about all work and no play making Tom a poor boy. Greg looked puzzled. He hadn’t understood the punch line. Eveline looked drained and in a world of her own. Tom stopped laughing when he saw me.
“Everything okay?”
“Can I have a word with you?” I kept my tone light.
He gave a mock groan. “Can’t it wait till the washing up is done?”
Greg glanced up at me, then back to Tom and across to Eveline.
“We’ll do it.” He started to gather together the empty plates. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine thanks,” I said, locking eyes with Tom as he slowly rose from his chair. I thought he was directing the question to me. Later, I realised he was asking Eveline.
Tom and I walked through the archway and out to the front of the house, the only sound the scrunch of our shoes on the gravel. Tom strolled along, hands in his pockets, ostentatiously sniffing the night air, as if nothing was wrong. He was waiting for me to speak.
“Where have you put it?” We stopped in front of the ornamental pond which glittered with stars, like the sky.
“Put what?”
“Stop playing games,” I said wearily.
Tom shrugged his shoulders. “An out-of-date passport isn’t much use to anyone.”
“What have you done with it?”
“Can’t you see, Sis, that she would have claimed the passport as her brother’s whether it was or not?”
“But it was his as it’s turned out.”
Tom put a finger to his lips. “You’re shouting. It’s called being cruel to be kind. She didn’t know about it, did she?”
“Where is it?”
“Burnt,” he said smoothly. “In the remains of the fire she started.”
I closed my eyes and saw the man shaking the branches of the tree. I opened them and he was there between me and Tom. I shut my eyes again. I felt dizzy.
“Are you okay?” Tom’s face was up close to mine, his eyes glistening with concern. “I can see how all this could do your head in.”
“It was totally and utterly wrong of you.”
“It was the right thing to do,” he said firmly. “For you. You’re the person I care about.” I’d wanted him to take control and he had: he’d taken the decision and the relief I felt, the worry of what to do with the passport, sloughed off me — but I was still angry.
There was a soft ‘plop’ as something dark slid off a lily pad and scattered the stars.
“Hey, did you hear that?” Tom whispered.
“How did you know where I kept the key to the desk?”
“You’ve always kept keys in little pots. Remember the ballerina jewellery box which you had when you were small?”
The ballerina twirled to music. I’d kept the key hidden in a papier-mâché pot I’d made with a yoghurt tub at school.
Tom threw back his head and laughed. “And you never knew!” he crowed.
Always, he could make me remember how we once were: a na
ughty little boy and an earnest little girl.
He squeezed my hand as we make our way back into the house. “Seriously, it’s best that the girl goes.”
“With what?”
“I’ll give her some money.”
“It’s not money she’ll want. It’s her diamonds.”
He stopped so that I had to turn to face him again. His teeth gleamed white. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up to the woods with her tomorrow. Fat chance we’ll find the diamonds but at least we’ll have done our best. Either way, there will be absolutely no excuse for her to stay.”
Back in the kitchen, back in the pools of light, Eveline was nowhere to be seen. Greg had opened another bottle of wine. A stack of shiny plates gleamed on the rack.
“I’ve been thinking,” Greg said, “Claudine. Maybe she remembers if Eveline’s brother was here.”
“You’re right. Valerie mentioned her.” I couldn’t hide my excitement.
“Who’s Claudine?” Tom asked.
Greg told him.
Tom looked at me. “She sounds round the twist. There’s no point.”
“There is,” I said as firmly as I could. “If we can get Valerie to come with us, she can translate.”
“For Christ’s sakes, nothing went on. It’s a nonsense. This is hunting country. There are bloody bullets all over the woods.”
“If something had happened to you, I’d…”
He cut me off. “Seeing the cleaner will be a waste of time!”
“We have no choice!” I shouted at his back, disappearing up the stairs.
“Do you two argue like this all the time?” Greg asked good-humouredly.
I told him the truth. “Only in this bloody place.”
Chapter 36
There was a note propped against the plate of croissants telling me that Tom and Eveline had gone up to the woods — with a PS ‘I’ve taken the car, hope you don’t mind’. I did mind. I’d wanted to engineer a visit to Claudine. By taking the car, Tom had effectively marooned me at the château.