by Unknown
Such wonderful bread! But then her older brother, Aramon, had found her, caught her, told her that his father, Serge, would whip her with his belt. She pushed the broken loaf away. Willed it to be whole again. Terrified because it had led her into temptation. And then Aramon had sat her down and told her a fearful thing: that she didn’t really belong in this family and had no right even to a share of the bread they had to buy so dearly. Because she was somebody else’s child.
In 1945, he said, when she was a few days old – ‘a stinky baby’ – she’d been wound round with rags and dumped on the steps of the Carmelite Convent at Ruasse by her mother, who had been a collaboratrice. But the nuns didn’t want her. She was a child of sin. The nuns had gone from village to village, asking, did anybody want a baby, a girl? Would anybody agree to care for an ugly baby with a belly-button like a pig’s tail? But nobody wanted her. Nobody in their right minds wanted the baby of a collaboratrice with a belly-button like a pig’s tail – except Bernadette.
Bernadette was an angel, boasted Aramon, his angel of a mother. And she had persuaded Serge to let her adopt the baby. Adopt. That was the word Aramon used when he told this story. He said it meant taking pity on something that wasn’t yours. He said that Serge had screamed and shouted that no, he already had a child – his son, Aramon – and that was all that mattered to him, and what in the world did he want with a mewling girl?
But day and night Bernadette had pleaded with him – God knows why – to let her take in the baby dumped on the doorstep of the Carmelite nuns. And, in the end, she’d won. God knows how. And so they all trooped down to Ruasse and went into the freezing cold convent and heard the baby’s cries echoing round the freezing cold walls, and brought her home and she was given the name of the Abbesse of the Convent of the Carmelites: Audrun.
‘And that was you,’ Aramon concluded. ‘Adopted. See? And now my father’s going to swipe your arse for eating our bread. Because he never takes pity on things that aren’t his.’
For a long time, Audrun had believed this story which the brother, Aramon, kept alive.
‘I expect you’ve been wondering who your father is, Audrun. Uhn?’
Yes, she had. She knew babies had to have two parents, not one. Everybody in La Callune had two parents, except those who had ‘lost’ their brave fathers in the war. So she asked Aramon: ‘Was my father one of those “lost” men?’
‘Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘lost to evil! Lost in Hell now! He was a German. An SS man. And your mother was a putain de collabo. That’s why you’ve got a belly-button like a pig’s tail.’
She didn’t understand what any of this meant, only that she was supposed to feel ashamed. Aramon told her that the people of Ruasse had shaved off her mother’s hair (not the hair of her mother, Bernadette, but the hair of this other mother she’d never known, the collaboratrice), shaved off her long blonde hair and marched her naked through the market, and the market traders had thrown handfuls of fish guts at her breasts because this was what you had to do to women who ‘went’ with German soldiers, this was their punishment, this and the birth of deformed children with pigs’ tails growing out of their stomachs.
Hunger.
For the bread that day. For closeness to something.
Little Audrun sat in the dust inside the wire pen where the bantams foraged. She tried to clutch the smallest of the hens in her skinny arms. She could feel the terrified beating of its heart, see its gnarled feet, like baby corn cobs, clawing the air. Not even the bantam wanted to be close to her. She was the daughter of a putain de collabo and a German soldier of the SS. In nearby Pont Perdu, twenty-nine people had been killed by German infantry in a ‘reprisal operation’ and their names had been engraved on a stone monument, on a wayside shrine above the river, and flowers were laid there, flowers which were not real and never died.
Audrun drew her old and frayed cardigan round her body and walked on through the wood, her face lifted to the warmth of the sun. In another month, there would be swallows. In the hour before dusk, they’d circle, not over her bungalow with its low, corrugated iron roof, but above the Mas Lunel, where Aramon still lived. They’d be looking for nesting sites under the tiles, against the cracked stone walls, and she would stand at the window of her flimsy home, or in her little potager, hoeing beans, watching them, watching the sun go down on another day.
She would see the strip-light blink on in the kitchen of the mas – that old green-tinged rod of light – and picture her brother stumbling to and from the electric stove, trying to fry lardons, gulping from his glass of red wine, dropping ash from his cigarette into the fat of the frying pan, picking up the bottle and drinking from that, his stubbled face wearing that fatuous grin it acquired when the wine excited his senses. Then, with a shaking hand, he’d try to eat the burnt lardons and a burnt fried egg, spooning everything in, with another cigarette smouldering on a saucer and outside in the dark the dogs in their wire pound howling because he’d forgotten to feed them . . .
Upstairs, he lived in grime. Wore his clothes till they stank, then hung them at the window to wash themselves in the rain, air themselves in the sun. And he was proud of this. Proud of his ‘ingenuity’. Proud of the strangest things. Proud that the father, Serge, had named him after a variety of grape.
What a brother to have!
Who was your mother, Audrun?
Putain de collabo.
Who was your father?
SS prick.
She went to her other mother, Bernadette. She took a pair of scissors and asked Bernadette to cut off the pig’s tail. And the mother held her close and kissed her head and said, yes, it would be seen to. They’d go to the hospital in Ruasse and the doctors would make everything ‘sensible and tidy’. But doctors were expensive and life was hard, here in La Callune, and she would have to be patient.
So Audrun patiently asked, ‘Who was my other mother, the collabo? Did she die? Was she hung upside down in a well by her ankles tied with wire?’
Bernadette began weeping and laughing, both at once, and sat Audrun on her knee and cradled her head against her shoulder. Then she tugged her arms free of her pinafore and undid her blouse and showed Audrun her white breast with its brownish nipple. ‘I’m your mother,’ she said. ‘I nursed you here, at my breast. What’s this nonsense about collabos? There were none of those in La Callune, and you mustn’t use that word. I’m your mother and this is where I suckled you. Feel.’
Audrun put her small hand on the bosom, soft and warm to her touch. She wanted to believe this mother’s words, comforting to her as bread, but Aramon had warned her: ‘Bernadette will lie to you. All women lie. They’re descended from witches. Even nuns have witches for mothers. Nuns lie about themselves, about their chastity . . .’
So she took her hand away and climbed down from Bernadette’s knee and began to run away from her.
But this upset Bernadette and she came after her and lifted her up and said: ‘You’re mine, Audrun. My little girl, my darling. I swear it on my life. You were born in the early morning and I held you in my arms and the sun shone through the bedroom window and in my eyes.’
Audrun stood now in front of a sweet chestnut tree, moved, as she was each spring, by the sight of the new leaf. In her childhood, the family had fed their pigs with chestnuts and the pig flesh had skin that bubbled up into beautiful dark crackling, and it tasted sweet and had no taint about it.
But now a blight had come. Endothia, it was called. The chestnut bark split and reddened and fell and the branches above the reddened scars began to die. All over the Cévennes, the chestnut forests were dying. Even here, in Audrun’s wood, the signs of endothia were visible. And people told her there was nothing to be done, there was no magician or saviour, as there had been long ago, when Louis Pasteur had travelled down to Alès and discovered a cure for the terrible silkworm diseases. Endothia was part of life now, the part that had changed beyond recall, the part that was old and blighted and withered by time. Trees would
soon die in this wood. There was nothing to be done except to cut them down and burn the logs on the fire.
Audrun’s bungalow had no fire. It had four ‘night-storage’ heaters, heavy as standing stones. As the winter afternoons drew on, the heaters cooled, the air cooled, and Audrun had nothing to do but sit in her chair with a crocheted blanket over her knees. She folded her hands in her lap. And sometimes, in this deep cold stillness, she would feel an episode approaching, like a shadow that laid itself across her, a shadow attached to no solid form, but which took the colour from everything in the room, which bleached her mind and made the furniture stretch and shift behind a plane of glass . . .
Audrun examined the trunk of the chestnut tree. No sign of disease on this one yet, but she said the dread word to herself: Endothia. The air was so still that she seemed to hear her own soundless voice. Then, the next moment, she became aware that she wasn’t alone and she turned and saw him, stumbling as he did these days – he who, as a boy, had been as agile and swift as an Indian brave – gleaning wood for the fire, putting the fallen pieces into some kind of sling on his back, a sling he’d cobbled together out of an old moth-eaten blanket.
‘Aramon.’
He raised his arm, as though to prevent her from coming near him. ‘Just a bit of wood,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of wood for the fire.’
He had trees of his own, a dense thicket of holm oaks behind the dog pound. But he was too lazy to take the saw to them, or else knew that he shouldn’t trust himself with the saw; the saw would have his hand.
‘Just a branch or two, Audrun.’
His hair was dirty and wild. His unshaven face was pallid, almost grey in the sharp sunshine. ‘And I was coming to ask—’
‘Ask what?’ she said.
‘I’ve got in a muddle there, up at the mas. I can’t find anything. My carte d’identité, my glasses . . .’
She hardly ever went inside his house – the house that had once been kept so clean and orderly by her beloved Bernadette. The stink of it made her gag. Even the sight of his old shirts hanging out of the window to be washed by the rain, she had to turn away when she saw these, remembering Bernadette’s laundry chest and all the sheets and shirts and vests white as fondant and folded edge-to-edge and smelling like fresh toast.
‘Aramon,’ she said. ‘Go home. Take the kindling. You can keep what you’ve gleaned, even though you know it’s not yours.’
He let go his makeshift sling and the pieces of wood crashed around his feet and he stared helplessly at them. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated up there. You know?’
‘What d’you mean, “complicated”?’
‘Everything’s got jumbled up with everything else. I can’t tell one thing from another. Someone has to sort it out. Please . . .’
Her stare was as hard as yew. She felt the poison of him, like a yew berry in her mouth.
‘You can have a couple of bantams,’ he offered. ‘I’ll wring their necks for you, pluck them, gut them. You can invite Marianne Viala, uhn? Have a lovely feast. Get the gossip. Pardi! I know how you women love to gossip.’
‘Have a couple of bantams for doing what?’
He shifted his feet, scratched his neck. His eyes, once beautiful, were still brown and deep. ‘Just help me. Please, Audrun. Because I’m scared now. I’ll admit it.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘I don’t know. It’s this mess I’m living in. I don’t know where to find the things I need.’
Boys.
They were young men in their twenties, but Anthony Verey had often referred to them like that: ‘the boys’ or ‘my boys’. It had given him power over them to disparage what had, until recently, threatened to overwhelm him and make him weak: their beauty.
The boys he chose were mostly poor, on state benefit or with menial jobs, trying to get into their adult lives, trying to survive in London. He brought them to his exquisitely decorated flat above the shop on the Pimlico Road. Loved the thrill of it – a poor stranger in his bed. Then he took them downstairs and let them see the beloveds in the near-darkness. Let them feel, touch, smell the beloveds. Smell knowledge, security, comfort, entitlement, money. But he never let them linger. Paid them fairly, but always sent them away without any promises of further meetings, because he couldn’t stand the idea of their presumption that he, because he was older, because he was almost old, would enslave himself to their virility and youth.
But for a long time, now, there had been no ‘boys’ in Anthony’s bed. Desire for them had gone absent-without-leave. The only boy who visited Anthony – in dreams and in those empty times when he sat at the back of the shop and no customers came in – was the boy he himself had once been.
He knew that this was abject, a sentimental surrender, but he couldn’t help it; this was who he yearned to be: himself as a boy, sitting with his mother, Lal, staring at the rainbow colours the sunshine magicked into the bonbonnière on the dining-room table of her house in Hampshire, while the two of them entranced themselves polishing silver, and outside in the garden one of the long untroubled summers of the 1950s went slowly by.
It was more than abject. Anthony told nobody, not even his sister Veronica (or ‘V’ as he always called her), that what he longed for was to be the child he’d once been. It appeared that V – three years older than he was – was getting on perfectly well with her life, still moving obstinately forward, full of plans and projects, and not even particularly attached to her early memories. If he’d admitted that where he dreamed of being was in the old Hampshire dining room, aged ten or eleven, cleaning silver with Lal, V would have been stern with him. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Anthony. Cleaning silver! Of all pointless tasks. Have you forgotten how it tarnishes?’
He and Lal never minded about that. When it started to go brown, they just cleaned it again. They sometimes sang as they worked, he and Lal in perfect harmony. While V was known to be safely cantering around the paddock on her bay mare, Susan, or clamped in her room, making pencil drawings, with her nose pressed to her favourite art book, How to Draw Trees, they sang show tunes.
‘The boat’s in! What’s the boat brought in?
A vio-lin and lay-ay-dy!’
The silver object Anthony had adored most in the world at that time was one of Lal’s cream jugs. His careful hands traced the complicated contours of its handle, the delicate foliate sprays engraved on its sides. ‘Oh yes, that’s a poppet,’ Lal had cooed. ‘Georgian. About 1760, I think. Lovely little hoofed feet. Wedding present to me and Pa. You can have it when I’m dead.’
There had been a hundred other objects in that house which had given the boy pleasure. He liked to press a latticed silver cake-slice against his cheek, open and close the clever silver asparagus tongs. Oh yes, and hear the chime of the grandfather clock (‘Wm. Muncaster, Whitehaven, 1871’) in the hall, a sound he for ever associated with the school holidays, with a white Christmas tree in December or with a vase of sweet peas in July and the end of Latin and rugby for a long and blissful while. Lal would observe him listening to the chimes of the clock, observe him with her blue eyes the colour of the sky, and touch his face with her hand in its silver-cleaning glove. ‘That’s so dear,’ she would say. ‘The way you love the Muncaster.’
And he would smile and suggest another show tune, so that she wouldn’t see that he was giggling at the way she, who had come to England from South Africa and still spoke with an accent which flattened vowels and slid numberless sounds in strange and embarrassing directions, used the word ‘dear’.
Anthony thought that Lal would have understood his longing to be a boy again. In the last fifteen years of her own life, he’d observed her thoughts returning quite frequently to Hermanus, where her parents had owned a villa within sight of the sea and where, in the South African summer, meals had been served by black servants (‘houseboys’) on a fifty-foot verandah. She told Anthony that she’d grown to love England, her adopted country, ‘but part of me stays South African
, you know? I can remember African stars. I can remember being smaller than a Canna lily.’
Anthony sat on at his desk as a slow twilight descended over Chelsea, and glared at his address book. He wondered whether, tonight, he was going to be brave enough to call one of the ‘boys’. Without enthusiasm, he turned the pages of the book, reading names and telephone numbers: Micky, Josh, Barry, Enzo, Dave . . .
They challenged him. Hungry, vigorous, wild, they were all, he felt, more alive than he’d ever been. The last one to visit his bed had been the Italian, Enzo, with solemn eyes and a lovely pout. He’d worn an expensive shirt, but his shoes had been dusty and down-at-heel. He’d showed off his cock, presented it for admiration, ropey and big in his hands, as though offering it at auction.
Then, whispering in Anthony’s ear, the boy had begun a stream of dirty talk, a continuous, low accompaniment of smut. Anthony had listened and watched. The light in his bedroom was doused to dull amber and the body of the boy appeared smooth and golden, exactly what Anthony liked, the buttocks fat, almost womanish.
His arms went round Enzo. He touched his nipples, stroked his chest. He began to feel it, the first choke of desire, but then the damned monologue drifted into Italian and now had no meaning for Anthony, just became irritating, and he told Enzo to stop talking, but the boy didn’t stop, he was a dirty-talk diva, a smut-salesman and he was keeping on going.
The things we do . . .
The desperate things . . .
Enzo lay on the bed. Anthony knelt. He still wasn’t hard. But he thought the fat buttocks might do it, if he concentrated on them, stroked and kneaded them, parted the flesh . . . But no, really and truly what he wanted to do, suddenly, was to slap them. Wound the Italian boy. Wound himself. Because it seemed so base, so pitiful, this getting of boys – just to prove that he was still alive as a man. It was ridiculous. He’d moved away from the bed, tugged on his robe, told Enzo to get up and leave. Paid the promised cash, stuffing it into the pocket of Enzo’s leather jacket and the boy went out, sulky and offended. Anthony had sat in his kitchen for a long time, had sat without moving, listening to the hum of the fridge, to the traffic on the road, aware that he felt nothing; nothing except rage.