“Christian!” my mother tutted, pretending to be shocked, though I suspected she was secretly thrilled by his roguishness.
At dinner my mother forced me to wear the jacket and trousers she had brought down from Paris. I sat opposite her, scratching my neck where the jacket rubbed my skin and scowling sulkily. I’d been looking forward to her coming all day, hoping against hope that a spell in the countryside would be exactly what my parents needed to make them get on again. But now that she was here, I realized it was a terrible mistake. From the moment she’d stepped out of the car, it was obvious that she would hate it.
The young housemaid came in and began ladling some kind of thin vegetable gruel into our bowls. As she finished serving me, I realized Christian was watching me with a wry glint in his eye.
“You young rascal!” he teased with a playful nudge. “You’ve got your eye on her, haven’t you?”
Seeing she’d overheard, I felt my face start to burn with embarrassment. Luckily, Bertrand was on hand to rescue me.
“I hear the delivery van broke down again. I hope you didn’t both starve.”
“Not at all.” I smiled, brightening. “In fact, we took the lawn mower into the village.”
“Lawn mower?” Christian spluttered, nearly choking on his gruel. He turned and gave my father a mischievous scowl. “I hope this isn’t some new prototype you’ve been working on without me, you sly dog.”
Papa smiled, but I could see that the joke was a little too close to the bone.
“Now you mention it, I couldn’t help noticing a lack of motorcars in the village,” my mother added. She turned to Bertrand playfully. “Have you banned the locals from owning them?”
He wiped his mouth carefully before answering. “The average income in Regnac doesn’t quite stretch to luxury sports cars, my dear. Not that that’s stopped Victor from trying to make a case for an official vehicle.”
“Who’s Victor?” Maman asked curiously.
“He runs the local bar.”
“So why does he need an official vehicle?” Christian asked.
“Because he also happens to be Regnac’s mayor,” Bertrand explained.
“Mayor?” My father gulped. “No wonder the place is going to the wall.”
I saw a flicker of irritation cross Bertrand’s face. “What makes you say that?”
“Let’s just say we had a little run-in with him yesterday.” My father sniffed. “He didn’t exactly welcome us with open arms.”
“No wonder,” my mother said, “if you turned up on a lawn mower.”
After dinner, while my father, Bertrand and Christian stepped outside onto the gravel to smoke, I decided to give my mother the slip. I knew she would only make me take a bath in the freezing mausoleum that pretended to be a bathroom. Then she would run the nit comb through my hair. Since her arrival she had become convinced that the house was infested with lice and fleas. Which, in fairness, it probably was.
Instead, I decided to lie low in the flagstoned cellar. It might be several hours before my mother abandoned her search for me, so I found myself an old crate in the corner and settled down to doodle car designs.
Just above me, a grille opened out at ground level. Through it, I could hear my father and the others as they smoked and chatted.
Suddenly I sat rigid. The young housemaid had entered the cellar.
Frozen to the spot, I watched as she emptied the dregs of the wine from supper into a dusty old bottle.
“Tell me,” I heard Papa asking above. “Has Marguerite always been mute?”
“Not at all,” Bertrand replied. “She just chooses not to speak.”
“I thought she just disliked me,” my father grunted.
“She hasn’t said a word since her baby was delivered stillborn over twenty years ago,” Bertrand explained. “Must have been the shock. She’s had another child since then—Amandine. But she still won’t say anything. Not a single word.”
“The serving girl doesn’t say much either,” Christian complained, sucking on one of his foreign cigarettes again. “What’s her name?”
“Camille,” Bertrand answered. “She’s probably just suspicious of you. You can hardly blame her.”
Camille immediately stopped pouring the wine. Realizing that they were talking about her, she tilted her head to listen. In the moonlight I could see the way her dark eyebrows framed guarded, watchful eyes. A second later her eyes adjusted a fraction and suddenly she was staring straight at me.
She sprang back and stared at me defiantly. “Are you spying on me?”
“N-no,” I stammered. “I promise. I was trying to hide from my mother.”
And as if summoned by my words, Maman now stepped out to join the others above. “Have you seen Angelo?” she demanded sharply.
Down below, I shook my head imploringly at Camille. “Please…”
I was certain she was going to give me away, but to my surprise she said nothing.
“I’m sure you can afford to relax the reins a little,” I heard Bertrand suggest soothingly. “After all, he is on holiday.”
Camille gave me one of her withering looks, then turned abruptly and stalked out of the cellar.
As I watched her march up the stairs, I realized two things with absolute certainty.
The first was that I would become firm friends with her. The second was that right now, she hated my guts.
I sat shivering in the steel tub while my mother barked orders at me from the other side of the bathroom door. I’d managed to avoid her the previous night, but she’d finally caught up with me after breakfast and forced me to take a bath. Halfway through filling the tub, the water suddenly turned brown, so I was now huddling in only a few inches of tepid, rust-colored water.
I could tell that Maman had something important she wanted to say.
“Angelo?” she ventured timidly from the landing outside.
At first I didn’t answer. Apart from anything else, my teeth were chattering from the cold.
“Please answer me, dear.”
“What?” I replied sulkily.
“I know you’re angry—about your father and me…taking time apart. And that’s OK. I don’t blame you. But you have to understand, this is nothing to do with you….” She sounded flustered now, babbling a little. “I mean, you mustn’t ever think it’s your fault. However things turn out, we will always love you, so very much. You do know that, don’t you?” She suddenly fell silent, waiting patiently for my answer. “Angelo…?”
Inside the bathroom, I’d stopped shivering. I sat quite still, refusing to give my mother the reassurance she so desperately wanted.
I knew that it was cruel of me to punish her, that I should have told her I understood that sometimes people fall out of love. This was what the rational side of my brain kept telling me. But I didn’t want to be rational. I was furious. Hadn’t she promised she would love my father for richer and for poorer?
I gritted my teeth and forced myself not to say anything. For a moment my mother was silent as well, and I wondered if she was crying.
“Maybe we could take a trip to see Grandpapa back in Italy. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Her voice sounded desperate now, but going on holiday to Italy was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be here, making things right again.
Getting no response, my mother finally gave up. “Don’t be too long,” she whispered, her voice catching with emotion. Then I heard her footsteps echo away.
I felt a sharp pang of guilt. I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could to block out the hurt, then leaped out of the bath.
A few hours later, we were all squeezed like sardines into Christian’s sports car. Despite the freezing weather, he thought it would be exhilarating to roll the roof down. So I was now sandwiched in the back between Bertrand and my mother, who was swathed in a huge scarf, while Christian sat in the front with my father.
“You still haven’t said where we’re going,” Maman protested, her voice muffled
behind layers of scarf.
“To the test track,” Bertrand roared above the noise of the wind and the engine.
“Test track?” I repeated, my spirits suddenly soaring. “Here?”
“Didn’t you know? It’s where our first-ever models were tried out.”
I stood up to peer around for any sign of it, only for my mother to yank me back down.
“For goodness’ sake, Angelo, you’ll get yourself killed,” she scolded. “Besides, you should show a little more decorum.”
Decorum was a word Maman often used. I still didn’t know what it meant, even less how to show it.
By now the weather had become spiteful, stinging our faces with gusts of horizontal sleet. After one particularly cruel blast, my mother’s scarf blew clean off and stuck itself to the windshield.
Suddenly blinded, Christian swerved, only just missing a cow that was standing in the middle of the lane. As the car veered toward the hedge, the front wheels leaped over the grass verge and sank into a boggy ditch.
“Blast it!” he cursed, leaping out to assess the damage.
“If it’s OK,” my mother announced a little shakily, “I think I’d like to go home now.”
Christian’s disembodied voice echoed from behind the radiator. “That may not be as easy as you think. The tire’s flat.”
Bertrand, however, was already out. “Not to worry. We’ve arrived.”
I frowned and looked around. Arrived? “But this is just a field.”
“To the untrained eye, perhaps.” He winked. “Come on, it’s still a little walk from here.”
As I jumped down, my feet immediately sank into ten centimeters of icy mud, and my mother’s face turned even paler.
“If it’s all the same, I think I’ll stay,” she declared.
The ever-thoughtful Bertrand took the large blanket out of the back and laid it over her lap. “There,” he said. “That should keep you warm. We won’t be long.”
And with that we four men—or should I say three and a half men?—strode out across the soaking grass, leaving Maman with just the cow for company.
The test track itself lay another two and a half fields away. When we finally reached it, nobody said a word for nearly a minute. Apart from anything else, no one except Bertrand could be sure what we were supposed to be looking at.
To all appearances, we were standing at the edge of yet another dreary field. But when I peered more closely at the ground, I saw something poking up through the snow and weeds. Fragments of crumbling tarmac.
“This is it,” Bertrand whispered, a boyish grin lighting up his face. “This is where I tested our first successful model when I was a lad.”
“No wonder it’s so overgrown, if it was that long ago.” Christian snorted wryly.
Bertrand ignored him and turned to my father, his eyes glistening. “I don’t care what the Money Men say. One day you’re going to design a car that I can test here again. Something France has never seen before. You’ve done it before and you’re going to do it again.”
Papa glanced around uncertainly. “Surely the only thing you can test here is a tractor?”
“Maybe that’s what he had in mind,” Christian joked. He hadn’t meant anything by it—he never did—but by now my father had heard enough jokes at his own expense.
“I better check on Julietta.” He scowled, and began the muddy trudge back to the car.
Bertrand watched him head away and sighed, heavyhearted.
But if Papa was feeling downcast, Bertrand’s words had given me a new shot of encouragement. If I could just persuade my father to try and create one more hit design, maybe everything could be saved: my father’s career…even my parents’ marriage.
I turned and looked up at Bertrand, my eyes gleaming with determination. “If he won’t design you a car,” I told him defiantly, “I will.”
An hour later, with the spare tire finally in place, Christian steered our bright yellow sports car off the rutted lane and we began the tortuous journey back to Regnac.
No sooner had we swept our way up the hill and into the main square than there was a sudden squeal of rubber on wet cobbles and Bertrand, my mother and I were flung forward, our faces plastered against the seat in front.
When I looked up, I found myself gazing into the tired eyes of an old donkey, standing stock-still in front of us.
“What is it with the animals in this village!” Christian cursed, leaping out to shoo the old ass out of the way.
The donkey, however, had other ideas, resolutely refusing to budge. Despite Christian’s best efforts, she simply blinked at him through her long eyelashes and thrashed her matted tail, then did absolutely nothing.
“It won’t make any difference,” Bertrand explained. “It’s Geneviève—she belongs to the farmer, Benoît. You’ll have to go round her.”
“What’s she doing standing here anyway?” Christian grumbled.
“Delivering the post,” boomed a voice out of nowhere. “Or she should have been.”
I glanced over and saw that the voice belonged to Victor, the bar owner—and, as we had now discovered, mayor.
“Why would a donkey be delivering the post?” I asked, baffled.
“Normally she wouldn’t. But Marcel, the postman, slid on some ice and buckled his bicycle wheel. Now he’s laid up at home with a twisted ankle.”
An idea suddenly popped into my head and I tugged on Bertrand’s arm. “Couldn’t we deliver the post in the car?”
“What an excellent notion!” he agreed without batting an eyelid.
“Not so fast,” Christian protested. “I for one have had more than enough wild-goose chases across bumpy lanes. Someone else can drive. Besides, one of us needs to escort Julietta back to the house.”
“In that case, Luca can drive,” Bertrand declared.
My father started to complain, but I quickly intervened. “Please, Papa—it would be an adventure.”
He thought about arguing, then resigned himself. “Fine.” He sighed. “But Bertrand will have to do the map-reading.”
“Agreed,” Bertrand said.
Fifteen minutes later, the post for the entire local district, in a variety of sacks, had been loaded into the back of Christian’s sports car. With everything stowed, Victor appeared clutching two chickens, one under each arm, and handed them to me.
“Make sure you give them to Jean-Pierre,” he growled. “Monsieur Hipaux will know where he lives. Tell him they’re payment for fixing the table.”
His words were drowned out by the rasping of gears as my father shunted the car abruptly into reverse.
Geneviève, who had remained rooted to the spot the whole time, marked the occasion with a loud bray and then deposited a toffee apple of dung within a hairsbreadth of my mother’s elegant shoes.
I clung tightly to the sacks of post—and the chickens—as, with a jolt, my father swung the car out into the road.
“Technically, you’re going the wrong way,” Bertrand shouted across to him.
“You mean there’s a right way?” Papa asked as he gripped the wheel. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might just be starting to enjoy himself.
At the bottom of the road leading away from the village, we ground to a halt again and I tugged down my goggles to join my father and Bertrand as they peered over the bonnet.
Up ahead, the road looked like it had come under heavy enemy bombardment. Every meter or so there were craters brimming with muddy snow.
“There’s nothing for it,” Bertrand declared. “We’ll have to take the bridge. But you’ll have to drive across the field to get to it.” He nodded toward the field of corn stubble on our left.
At that moment I noticed a farmer and his wife approaching up the road. Peering more closely, I realized that the woman was Marguerite, the mute, granite-jawed housekeeper we’d met on our first night. Her husband, who I would soon learn went by the name of Benoît—owner of the donkey—was old and crooked, with all his teeth missing exc
ept for two nicotine-stained pegs that clung precariously to his gums. His few wisps of hair were stuffed under the rim of his beret.
Both of them were heavily laden. Benoît was carrying what turned out to be two earthenware pitchers of homemade wine, while Marguerite was balancing trays of freshly laid eggs, still covered in straw and bird muck. When they finally reached us, Benoît struck up a conversation with Bertrand in an accent so thick I decided it must be entirely made-up. At the end of it, Bertrand leaped out and began helping them into the back of the car.
“What are you doing?” my father asked, confused by this new turn of events.
“Their cart horse is lame,” Bertrand explained. “We’re giving them a lift to the market in Boutonne.”
As Benoît and Marguerite clambered into the back with me, some of the wine slopped onto the leather upholstery and I winced at its rancid smell.
“You can’t tell me he’s planning to sell that stuff?” I whispered.
Bertrand looked surprised. “Sell it? Good heavens, no—that’s what he drinks while he waits for Marguerite to sell the eggs.”
I glanced at the old man, who grinned back amiably, one of his yellow pegs jutting out. A moment later my father swung the car left and we began to lurch our way across the field.
Ahead of us the earth was so frozen, the wheels of the car jolted and creaked as we bounced over the icy puddles. I eyed the tray of eggs that Marguerite was clutching on her lap. As we lurched over a particularly steep hump, one, quickly followed by another, leaped spontaneously off the tray, hit my father’s neck and cracked. Egg white dripped down his nape.
“This is hopeless!” he cursed, dabbing at his sticky collar. However, Bertrand continued to smile throughout, clearly amused by the whole adventure.
After a painstaking ten minutes we finally arrived at the bridge.
The term bridge was a fairly loose one, as the bridge consisted of little more than a few rotten beams with some sheets of rusty metal laid across.
“I recommend you get a long run-up before you attempt it,” Bertrand advised my father.
“You actually expect us to go over that?” he asked.
The Tin Snail Page 5