by Unknown
Aramon slept in the bed where Bernadette had died. On the very mattress. In sheets that had once belonged to her.
Audrun hated going into this room that stank of his encroachment on their mother’s memory. Because her brother had never loved Bernadette, not as Audrun had loved her. All her life, his wild behaviour had plagued and punished Bernadette and when she died he just looked blankly at her corpse, chewing on something that might have been tobacco or gum or even a mulberry leaf, because this was the way he was, like a silkworm, with his jaw grinding on something day and night, and in his eyes a vacancy.
Reluctantly, Audrun had agreed to help him tidy the house and try to find the things he’d lost.
While he killed the bantams he’d promised her, she began searching among all the clutter and garbage for his spectacles and his identity papers. She put his dirty laundry into two pillowcases, to take down to her bungalow, to wash in her machine and dry on the line in the sun and wind. She could find nothing clean to put on the bed, so she left it as it was, with just the old blankets and the eiderdown airing under the open window. Let him scratch all night. She didn’t care.
She doused a rag with vinegar and cleaned the windows. She swept and washed the wooden floor and took the rug into the garden and hurled it over and over against an old mulberry tree. As she slammed the rug against the tree trunk she heard the dogs begin howling in their pound, so she decided to go up there, to see if Aramon was taking care of them or letting them starve to death.
It was then, as she looked up at the house on her way to the dog pound, that Audrun noticed the crack in the wall. It was an immense, dark fissure in the stone. It ran down from under the eaves, like a fork of lightning, skirting a window frame and narrowing as it sped on towards the door.
Audrun stopped and stared. How long had the crack been there?
She felt time begin its peculiar pull between past things and present awareness. Had she looked a hundred times at this lightning strike in the front wall of the Mas Lunel and never seen it – until now? The howling of the dogs grew in urgency. The still-dusty rug in Audrun’s arms felt as heavy as a corpse. She walked slowly on.
She remembered sitting with the men who built her bungalow, sitting on the stony earth among the recently delivered slabs of plasterboard while the Camembert the builders were eating for lunch ripened in the sun, and hearing them say that, all over the Cévennes, cracks were appearing in the walls of old stone houses. The taller the house, the deeper ran the cracks.
And nobody knew why, said the men. These dwellings had been built to withstand time. But they were not withstanding it. Time, it seemed, destroyed everything at a faster pace now, at a pace no one had ever envisaged.
‘Do you think that the Mas Lunel could fall down?’ she’d asked the builders. And they’d all turned and stared up at the big hunk of a house, solid as a caserne, tucked in underneath its wooded hill. ‘Not that one,’ they said, shaking their heads. ‘That one should see us all through.’
Audrun had said nothing. She’d just watched the men spreading the oily Camembert on their baguettes and putting the hunks of bread and cheese into their mouths. But, privately, she believed they were wrong. She believed that, if you built a house in a U-shape and then, as Serge had done, tore down the buttressing arms of the U, you left something that was vulnerable. Whatever was incomplete – a cherry tree leaking sap from a torn branch, a well that had lost its cover – was at the mercy of nature.
In the human world, only love was adept at completion.
Audrun went into the dog pen and the hounds clamoured round her. Bred to hunt wild boar, wiry and fearless, they chafed and whimpered in their pent-up life, spent their existence with their noses pressed against the wire.
Aramon still belonged to a hunting syndicate and liked to boast about the boar he’d killed in the past, but he seldom went on the hunts any more, knowing he was too unsteady to manage a shotgun correctly. He seemed to prefer sitting and drinking and staring at the jumpy, violent life on his new TV, where younger people, people with greater agility, tortured and killed and were tortured and killed in their turn. And his dogs were all but forgotten, abandoned to monotony and winter cold, fed chestnuts like the pigs, fed swill and bones. Today, even their water trough was dry. As Audrun filled it up, anger with Aramon made her rib-cage ache, set a vein twitching in her neck. One day, she told herself, all this would be put to rights. One day.
In the kitchen, scouring his blackened pans, scraping grease off the stove, Audrun said: ‘You know there’s a fissure in the front wall, Aramon?’
He’d come in with the two dead bantams and thrown them down on the table. Now, he was fumbling with his spectacles, found by Audrun under his pillow, the wire arms bent out of shape by the weight of his head.
‘I’ve seen that,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’
Audrun said he should ask Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, to look at it, but Aramon said no, he’d looked at it himself and it was a crack in the mortar, that was all, nothing to start sweating about. Then he tugged his bent spectacles onto his nose and searched for his cigarettes and lit one and coughed and spat onto the stone floor and said: ‘I’ve had enough, anyway. It’s driving me mad, this big shit-hole. It’s pulling me down, ruining my health. So I’ve decided. I’m selling the house. And the land. I’m selling everything.’
Audrun stared at her hands, like root vegetables in the sink-water. Had she heard what she thought she’d heard?
‘Yes,’ said Aramon, as if reading her question. ‘I’ve had enough. So I’ve got onto it right away – before someone changes my mind for me. Estate agents came out from Ruasse. I expect you saw them when you were squinting through your curtains! Mother and daughter. Daughter wearing high-heeled shoes, stupid bitch. But they were interested. Very interested indeed. The market’s dipped a bit from what it was, but they say I can still get a good price, pardi, a mountain of money. Live in clover for the rest of my days.’
Live in clover. Aramon?
In such a scented, green and blameless thing?
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Sell to foreigners, that’s what the agents told me. Swiss. Belgians. Dutch. English. Plenty of them have still got money to burn, despite recession. And they like these old places. They tart them up with swimming pools, and God knows what else. Use them as holiday homes . . .’
Audrun dried her hands on a torn dishcloth. She turned to Aramon and said: ‘It’s not yours to sell, Aramon. It belonged to our parents, and our grandparents . . .’
‘It is mine to sell. You had your sainted wood and your bit of land for your bungalow and your vegetables. I had the house. I can do what I like with it.’
Audrun folded the torn cloth. She said calmly: ‘How much do you think you’re going to get for it?’
She saw him look startled, almost afraid. Then he picked up a used match and with its charred end, wrote a number on his palm, then brought his palm – cupped, as though to hold a bantam chick – close to Audrun’s face and she saw what was written there: €450,000.
Audrun took her medication and lay down for the night.
She dreamed about the strangers who would install themselves in the Mas Lunel while, some way off, Aramon basked in his clover field.
The strangers attacked the house with a peculiar ferocity, as though they didn’t want this house, but some other house of their own imaginings.
They rearranged the land. A lake appeared. The colour of the lake-water was pink, as though it had been mixed with blood. They spoke some other language, which might have been Dutch. Their children rampaged around the yard, where Bernadette had sat in the sunshine, shelling peas. In the night, they cavorted, naked and screaming, in the blood-tainted lake and played rock music. The noise they made bounced and echoed from valley to silent valley.
On the evening before he left for France, Anthony dined with his old friends, Lloyd and Benita Palmer, in their house in Holland Park.
Lloyd was a semi-retired investment
banker who, over the years, had bought hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of furniture from Anthony. Benita was an interior decorator who’d created the rooms where this furniture sat. Her preferred palette of colours ranged from straw to cream to coral. In her downstairs lavatory, decorated in apricot toile de jouy, stood an 18th-century snakewood and mahogany vitrine (‘The brass galleried top over a flower-painted frieze, the base with two snakewood inlaid doors and parcel gilt festoon apron’) worth at least £16,000. In the beige and cream and gold dining room, where they now sat, hung a pair of oil paintings by Barend van der Meer (‘Fine example, still life of plums and grapes with vine leaves arranged on a glass dish, 1659’ and ‘Fine example, still life of pomegranates with African grey parrot, 1659’) worth a conservative £17,000 each. The George III silver wine coasters (‘The sides pierced with scrolling foliage with waved gadroon rim’), that had come to rest in front of Lloyd’s place at the table, Anthony had picked up in a sale in Worcester for £300 the pair and sold on to Lloyd for £1,000 each.
Though Anthony had often teased Lloyd Palmer that he was one of the ‘rich bastard masters of the universe’, he’d previously been happy enough with his own role in that universe as the prime arbiter of Lloyd and Benita’s taste in furniture and pictures. But now, tonight, when he saw Lloyd, at sixty-five, still sailing triumphantly through his life, despite the economic downturn, about which he complained very loudly (‘I’ve taken hideous losses, Anthony, absolutely bloody hideous!’), but to which his lifestyle seemed strangely immune, with his large but still handsome wife like a sequined spinnaker beside him, whooshing along in the vanguard of all that was most desirable in rich British society, Anthony felt a wounding stab of envy.
The Palmers were a ravishingly fortunate pair. This vast and magnificent ship of theirs, ballasted by numerous children and grandchildren, was unthreatened by storm or by calm or even by corrosion – or so it appeared. Anthony had to express it baldly to himself this evening: Lloyd had always been ahead of him and always would be. He was so far ahead, in fact, his lead so manifestly unassailable, that there was no point in Anthony imagining he could ever catch up. And the worst thing was, he could see Lloyd thinking these same thoughts. Even Benita may have been thinking them: Poor Anthony; things are difficult everywhere, but for Anthony Verey Antiques it has to be the end of the road. Thank God we aren’t trying to make a living, in the anarchic 21st century, out of trying to sell what our American friend Mary-Jane refers to as ‘dead people’s furniture’ . . .
These sombre considerations had led Anthony to drink a great deal of Lloyd’s excellent wine. Lloyd had matched him, sip for sip, and the two of them now sat face to face, across a choppy lake of glassware, coughing on cigars, slugging cognac and determined, as Lloyd had touchingly put it, ‘to get to the heart of the whole ruddy thing’.
Benita had gone to bed. She knew – perhaps because she was more cultured than Lloyd and had read and understood both Ibsen and Lewis Carroll – that there was no ‘heart of the whole ruddy thing’ and that when men talked about searching for it what they often wound up talking about was cars. Occasionally, she’d noticed, they reminisced in a sentimental way about their past lives, elevating university pranks into myths of universal significance or exaggerating the traumas caused to them by public school beatings. Tonight, as she closed her bedroom door, she heard Anthony say: ‘The only time, Lloyd, that I was happy . . . the only fucking time that I was happy in my life was in a tree-house!’
Lloyd’s explosion of laughter was loud. Lloyd adored laughing (and people tended to adore Lloyd partly because he laughed so much), but now, tonight, Lloyd discovered that the side-effect of this particular collapse into mirth was a slight wetting of his underpants and this, he thought, as he continued to giggle, was something surprising, something that happened to old men, but not (yet) to him.
‘Yes,’ Anthony was going on, ‘that’s the honest truth, old man. In a tree-house.’
‘Oh God!’ said Lloyd, recovering from his laugh and putting one of his meaty hands on his groin, to see if the wet had come through to his trousers, which it had. He thrust a crumpled linen table napkin down there and said: ‘So go on, tell me, where was the fucking tree?’
Anthony poured himself more cognac from the William Yeowood decanter. ‘In the hols’, he said, ‘when V and I were kids, I once made a tree-house in the spinney behind the house . . .’
‘Barton House, or whatever it was called?’
‘Yes. Bartle. Ma’s house. Our house. Before you knew me.’
‘Well before I knew you, old man. I mean, well before. Unless you were still building tree-houses when you were at Cambridge?’
‘Shut up and listen, Lloyd. We’re meant to be getting to the heart of things.’
‘Are you saying . . . are you saying, at the heart of everything . . . at the heart of fucking everything is a fucking tree-house?’
‘No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying . . . I’m just saying . . . all I’m saying is I was very happy when I gave the tea party for Ma.’
‘What tea party?’
‘Just listen. You’re not listening to me.’
‘I am listening.’
‘I gave a tea party in my tree-house. I invited Ma. OK? I had Mrs Brigstock bake some stuff: malt loaf and brandy snaps. And I got everything ready. Table. Tablecloth. China etcetera. Chairs.’
‘Who’s Mrs Brigstock?’
‘Mrs Brigstock is Mrs Brigstock, Lloyd. The cook-housekeeper Ma had at the time.’
‘OK. OK. Keep your wig on! How was I meant to know? And how did you get a ruddy table and chairs up into a ruddy tree-house?’
‘I carried them. Up the ladder. I wanted everything to be spot-on for Ma.’
Lloyd was unable to stop himself from breaking out into another spasm of laughter at this point in Anthony’s story and when this, in turn, was accompanied by another warm seepage into his pants, he stood up, and bent over, holding his napkin in such a way that Anthony wouldn’t see the area of wet on him, and tottered towards the door. ‘Back in a jiff,’ he said. ‘I want to hear the dénouement! Truly, I do, Anthony. This is as gripping as Winnie-the-Pooh.’
In the charming toile de jouy cloakroom, Lloyd relieved his aching bladder and attempted to dry his underpants with wads of apricot toilet paper.
The snakewood and mahogany vitrine flung back at Lloyd his own unsteady reflection. This little wetting business had sobered him up slightly, but not so much that he wasn’t still enjoying the evening, enjoying both Anthony’s company and, at the same time, the realisation that his old friend was in some kind of mental turmoil. This turmoil, which – yes – Lloyd was actually enjoying, appeared to be connected not only to Anthony’s finances, but to something else, some existential something he didn’t seem able to express.
In years gone by, when Lloyd had told people he was a friend of Anthony Verey’s, he’d often had to suffer – time after predictable time – their star-struck reactions and he’d always felt the unfairness of this in relation to himself. Because, year by year, he’d made more money than Anthony, probably far more money. But he’d made it quietly, away from the glare of notoriety. People ‘knew’ Anthony Verey because he was seen at glamorous exhibition previews and gallery openings, often among a coterie of flamboyant actors and artists, and because he had his name on the sign of a smart shop in Pimlico, which no amateur collector dared to enter. He understood a hell of a lot about furniture and pictures, Lloyd had to admit, but he, Lloyd, understood a lot about global markets. Why had art turned Anthony into ‘the Anthony Verey’ when making money in the city had never turned him into ‘the Lloyd Palmer’?
Lloyd stood swaying there. The toile milkmaids and their lovers danced on, ageless, on the wall. The lavatory bowl choked up with apricot paper.
Time was getting to everybody of his generation now, Lloyd mused. Even to Benita, whose beautiful upper arms had lost their firmness and sheen. But it was getting to Anthony Verey in a satisfyingly
lethal way.
Left alone in Lloyd’s dining room, Anthony soon became aware that his cigar had gone out. The paraphernalia of relighting it suggested itself as being beyond him at this particular moment, so he laid it down in the heavy glass ashtray and sat very still, doing nothing except stare at the room in all its opulence and grandeur.
Indistinctly, he caught sight of his own face in the giltwood overmantel (‘Second quarter 19th century, flower and scroll carved frame with asymmetrically carved cartouche crest’) and discovered this face to be wan-looking, rather small, more crumpled than it usually appeared. He heard himself sigh. He didn’t want to look small and crumpled, when Lloyd was so huge and loud, his skin so pink and bright, the collars of his shirts so stiff and immaculate . . .
And now a new cause for dismay seeped into Anthony’s mind: why on earth – for God’s sake – was he telling Lloyd Palmer the story of the tree-house? The whole tree-house thing was private. It had been between him and Lal. Between them alone. So why, suddenly, was he blurting out something so personal and precious to a philistine like Lloyd? What was the matter with him?
He realised with a shudder that he was ridiculously drunk. Perhaps this face in the overmantel wasn’t really his? It was just a . . . suggestion of how he might look to an unpractised eye, to someone who didn’t really know him . . . And by tomorrow, it would be gone, that face that no one knew. He’d be far away in France, in a different kind of light, with Veronica, with his beloved sister, V . . .
But he knew that it was stupid of him to have got drunk. It meant he would arrive at Avignon with a hangover. Just when he’d hoped to see things clearly again, his head would be aching, his brain in a fog. And V’s friend, that stumpy little Kitty woman – with her watercolour daubs and her shocking habit of saying her thoughts out loud – would know exactly how he was feeling and let him know that she knew, and make the first twenty-four hours hell for him . . .