by Unknown
Audrun tried to sweeten her thoughts by remembering the wonderful cures for ailments old Madame Molezon, Raoul’s mother, used to brew up in her dark kitchen: young blackberry shoots, dried and stewed and mixed with honey, for sore throats; sage tea for nausea; borage tea for shock. But then Audrun couldn’t help remembering, too, that certain ailments had no cure. Nothing from the kitchen of Madame Molezon, nothing on the earth had been able to save Bernadette. In her last days, she’d told Audrun that her cancer was like a magnanerie of silkworms and her body was a mulberry tree. Nothing on the earth could deter the worms from ingesting the leaves, right down to their last little bit of green.
And that was when everything changed – when that last little bit of green was gone.
At the age of fifteen, Audrun was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory making underwear in Ruasse. Her father and her brother stayed home, worked on the vines, the onion beds, the fruit tree terraces and the vegetables. They cared for the animals and then slaughtered them. But Audrun was told she was no good on the land and would never be any good; her duty was to earn money. So she caught a bus at seven every morning, six days a week, and the bus dumped her outside the underwear factory on the outskirts of Ruasse and she spent all day hunched over a sewing machine, making girdles and suspender belts and brassieres. In her memory, all of these oddly shaped garments were pale pink, the approximate colour of her own flesh, the bits of it the sun had never found.
Her father ordered her to bring samples of her work home. Serge and Aramon fondled these pink samples and sniffed them and stretched the elasticised girdles this way and that and pulled on the elasticised suspenders like you’d pull on a cow’s teat, and laughed and sighed and shifted in their chairs. Then, Audrun was told to put the samples on, to show them off, to pretend she was a fashion model in a magazine. When she refused, Serge tugged her towards him. He touched her breasts, which, at fifteen, were already large. He whispered that she needed a brassiere for these beautiful breasts, didn’t she, and he would buy her one if she would just show off the girdle . . .
She pulled away from him. She saw Aramon, doubled up in the corner, scarlet-faced with embarrassment and thrill, laughing his hyena’s laugh.
She ran out of the house and walked to the cemetery where Bernadette’s body lay in its stone catafalque, piled in on top of her parents-in-law, and that was when Audrun began to feel it for the first time in her life, the stretching of everything round her into skeins of un-meaning . . . the breeze like beating wings, the sunlight slippery on the gravestones, like melted butter, the cypress trees like buildings about to fall. She cried out, but there was nobody to hear her. She clutched at the earth and felt it crumbling in her hands, like bread.
Audrun rocked in her chair, remembering: that was the first time.
Raoul Molezon arrived every morning for four successive days. He brought his apprentice, Xavier, to help him. They filled the crack with cement, covered it with new render, repointed the brickwork round the windows. Then they did something extraordinary: they painted the render bright ochre yellow.
In the cool shadow of early morning, it looked primrose-pale; in the evening sunlight, it blazed out like a waterfall of marigolds. It no longer resembled the Mas Lunel.
Audrun spent hours standing in her potager, leaning on a fork or a hoe, staring in amazement at this yellow apparition. She watched Xavier loading the abandoned TV into Raoul’s pickup and shovelling away the sand. She watched Aramon plant a forsythia bush near the front door. She noticed that the dogs were quiet, as though drugged by the fumes from the paint.
She saw the estate agents come back – the mother, and the daughter in her brown high-heeled shoes. She saw Aramon, dressed in clean clothes for once, standing with them in the new warmth of midday, the three of them gazing up at the startling new face of the Mas Lunel. The agents began taking photographs, one after another, from near and from far away. And Audrun knew what they were considering – that this transformation might put up the price of the mas still further.
Half a million euros?
She clutched the area of her heart. Her own little house had been built in four weeks for a few thousand. And it was the only shelter she would ever own.
She stopped the agents on the road, waving her thin arms to flag down the car. She stuck her face in through the car window.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘But I’m Monsieur Lunel’s sister and that house was once my home. And I saw what was done. He called the stonemason, and now the crack’s covered over, but it’s still there.’
The agents had round faces, almost identically formed, with pursed little lipsticked mouths. The daughter was smoking, drawing deeply on some expensive mentholated brand and puffing the smoke out of the car window. They both stared wordlessly at Audrun.
‘A bit of cement won’t stop it widening,’ Audrun went on, clutching at the burning metal of the car, ‘the earth calls to the stones on either side. It never stops calling.’
‘Listen, Madame,’ said the mother, after a moment or two. ‘I think we have to make something clear to you. We’ve been asked by your brother to handle the sale of the mas. And that’s all. We honestly can’t have anything to do with a family feud.’
Family feud.
‘Ah,’ said Audrun. ‘So he told you, did he? He told you how I was treated?’
‘How you were treated? No, no. Nothing in the past has anything to do with us. We’re just acting as agents for the sale.’
‘I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you. He pretends none of it ever happened.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but we have to be on our way now. We’ve got another appointment, a very urgent appointment in Anduze.’
‘You should ask him about the crack. Ask him. He called Raoul. And I saw what Raoul did. I’m not lying. He just jammed a bit of mortar in . . .’
But they weren’t listening any more. The mother threw the gear lever forwards and Audrun felt the car beginning to move and she had to hop and skip with it for a pace or two, then jerk out her head and watch it accelerate away.
A week after his arrival, hoeing tiny weeds from Veronica’s otherwise immaculate gravel courtyard on a warm afternoon, Anthony caught sight of his own reflection in one of her French windows and noticed how the southern sun had already taken away his London pallor and made him look more youthful.
Admiring this new self, his mind blazed suddenly with a new thought:
I could love again. After all, perhaps I could . . .
Anthony straightened up and lifted his face to the sky.
Love a woman, even? Why not? He’d loved his ex-wife Caroline in a companionable sort of way. Why shouldn’t he lead a comfortable but simple life with an attractive but undemanding woman, for ten or fifteen more years, and be at peace . . .
. . . or then again, this part of France was full of tanned, dark-haired boys and the thought of these, and the way they might whisper to him in French in the hot nights, was now, already, giving him a tentative but gloriously welcome erection.
He returned to his task with renewed energy, determined to root out every last weed from the courtyard. He hadn’t looked forward to gardening, but now he found that the work produced in him a sweet stillness of mind, in which hope had begun to gleam again, like the sun emerging from round the edges of a cloud.
‘You know you’ve saved me, don’t you?’ he said to Veronica that evening, as they sipped chilled white wine in the salon.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘London’s killing me, V. It literally is. I’ve thought about this a lot since I’ve been here, and now I’ve made a definite decision. I’m going to sell up. I should have done it two or three years ago. I’m going to be reborn in France.’
The moment he said this, he looked for and found – and enjoyed – a flash of terror in Kitty Meadows’s eyes. It was such an eloquent flash.
‘Don’t worry,’ Anthony said, smiling lazily at her. ‘I won’t perch on your do
orstep. I’m not that insensitive. I’ll look further south – near Uzès, probably. As long as the view’s beautiful and I have enough room for a few of the beloveds. Nothing else matters.’
Veronica got up and crossed over to Anthony and put her arms round his neck. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I think it’s a wonderful idea. It’s colossal and brave and brilliant! Let’s drink to it! We’ll help you find the perfect house.’
Kitty sat motionless in her chair. She folded her small hands in her lap.
Anthony telephoned Lloyd Palmer. He began by apologising for his drunken night at Lloyd’s house.
‘It’s OK,’ said Lloyd. ‘At least you weren’t sick. How’s France?’
‘Listen,’ said Anthony, ‘I’ve had a kind of epiphany. Too long and dull to explain, but I think I might buy a house down here.’
‘A tree-house?’ said Lloyd with a snigger.
‘All right, touché, Lloyd. But why I’m calling is, I may be asking you to put in hand the sale of some of my shares . . .’
‘Sell shares? Is that what I just heard you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you out of your fucking tree? I couldn’t bring myself to do it, old son. Have you checked the Footsie lately? I could not do it. Not even for you.’
‘If I find a house, Lloyd, I need to be able to move quickly. You can’t dilly around here when you buy property. You have to commit.’
‘Use cash.’
‘I don’t have any cash. All I have beyond the shares is debt.’
The d-word silenced Lloyd Palmer.
‘I’m shocked,’ he said at last. ‘What happened?’
‘Reality happened. Time happened. And selling the flat is going to take more time, so—’
‘Selling the flat? I can’t believe what I’m hearing in this conversation! Have you lost your marbles, Anthony?’
‘No. It’s over for me in London. You and Benita know that as well as I do. So I’m going to try to make a new start, down here, not too far from V.’
Lloyd let out a long, melancholy sigh.
In the silence that followed this sigh, Anthony said quietly: ‘I’m trying to save my soul, Lloyd, or what’s left of it.’
‘Borrow,’ snapped Lloyd. ‘It’s the only sensible thing you can do.’
Rain fell.
Veronica and Kitty sat on old wooden chairs in the stone arch that led to the terrace and watched it.
It was manna: the thing they longed for, month in, month out. They listened to it swishing along the smart new gutters, clattering on the leaves of the Spanish mulberry tree. If the ground underneath the Spanish mulberry was soaked, then it was a good rain, more than what the people of Sainte-Agnès called deux gouttes. This was one of the ways they measured it.
They breathed the moisture-scented air. Imagined how, in the million upon million tiny fibres of the roots of the grass, an imperceptible swelling was already occurring and how, if only the rain would keep on and not stop suddenly from one moment to the next, their lawn would be bright green again in thirty-six hours.
The blessed rain was becoming heavy now, the sky above was the colour of slate. The water was beginning to make puddles on the uneven stone of the terrace when Anthony wandered through into the arch.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked Veronica.
‘Watching the rain,’ she said.
‘Watching the rain,’ said Kitty.
Anthony looked at the two women. They held themselves so still, appeared so moved and entranced by the falling rain, they might have been spectators at some exquisite performance of Swan Lake. So it seemed only right that he join them, that he fetch another chair and sit quietly behind them, as in a box at the ballet or the opera, and watch it too.
So odd, he thought as he sat down, so unpredictable, the things that become precious to us, become beloveds. Who would have imagined that rain could be beloved by two middle-aged English women? To Africans, yes. To that parched land. Lal used to remember and evoke for him the arrival of the rains in the Cape Province and how the tracks to her grandparents’ farm would become red, beautiful blood murram red, and how nameless flowers would blossom out across the empty veld. But surely Veronica had never thought about rain in this ardent way.
‘The thing is, you never know,’ he said aloud. ‘You just do not know.’
‘What?’ said Veronica.
Anthony hadn’t really been aware of speaking out loud.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking that it’s good, not knowing. Not knowing what’s going to suddenly make you feel something.’
‘Feel what?’ said Kitty.
She was a spell-breaker. That was one of the many things Anthony couldn’t stand about her. She was this little pedantic spell-breaker with no imagination. What a comedy that she considered herself an artist! Anthony sighed. After he’d moved down here, he’d find a new partner for his sister.
‘Feel anything,’ he said. ‘Rapture, for instance. Or irritation.’
The rain kept on for three days. The mimosa blossom turned to a brown mush. The house grew cold. Anthony began to feel that England had followed him here, was trying to pinch at his sleeve, but he struggled to fight it off.
From his window, he stared at the Cévennes, folded in blue mist. Wondered if there wouldn’t be something uniquely wonderful about living up there, really high, so that you could feel the ancient grandeur of things, feel closer to the stars. And get the sense that the world was once again spread out at your feet, that you were lord of your domain – as he had once felt himself to be in his glory years of money and success – superior in your way to everything and everyone who toiled below you in the valley.
It looked miraculously lonely among all that pine-scented mist, as though it didn’t belong to man at all, but to eagles and silence. And so you would be able just to be. At last, you would be able to stop striving and wait for it to flood back to you: the thrill of being alive.
Now, the estate agents’ car came and went, came and went all the time to and from the Mas Lunel. The starving dogs barked in anguish. Audrun saw the would-be buyers stand in the driveway, frozen by this animal frenzy.
When she went up there, to take Aramon another pile of clean laundry, she said: ‘If you want to sell the house, you’d better get rid of the dogs.’
He was fumbling with a broken flashlight, taking out batteries and putting them in again, banging the flashlight on the wooden table. ‘It’s not the dogs,’ he said. ‘They know the dogs will be gone with me. It’s your bungalow.’
Audrun laid the clean washing on a chair. She’d been going to put it away in the airing cupboard for Aramon, but now she didn’t care to do this. She saw the flashlight suddenly flicker into life. Heard her brother give a snort of pleasure.
‘Yes,’ he said, shining the torch beam in her face. ‘They said your house was an eyesore. That was the expression they all used, an “eyesore”. So I told them to buy you out. Knock your house down! There’s a thought, eh? Or I could do it for them. Have them pay me for doing it.’
He doubled over with his high-pitched, wheezy laugh. Switched the flashlight off and slammed it down and reached for a cigarette. ‘People with money,’ he said, ‘they like old houses. They’re in love with stone and slate and fat pieces of timber. To them, a place like yours is worthless, just a blot on the landscape.’
Audrun turned away from him, going towards the door. She was about to walk out into the sunshine when she heard Aramon say: ‘Shame for you that you built it so near the boundary.’
‘I built where I was told I could build,’ said Audrun calmly. ‘To connect to the electricity supply and the water.’
‘Well,’ said Aramon, ‘that’s all very well, but you strayed over the boundary line in places. I saw you do it, pardi! So I’m going to get the surveyor to come and have a look at that – where you strayed onto my land. And anything that’s found to be on my ground I have the right to bulldoze.’
There was no point in staying
to argue with him. Words never prevailed with Aramon. As a child, only one thing had prevailed: the beatings Serge used to deal out with a belt or a bamboo cane. Now, what prevails, thought Audrun, is money. That’s the only thing left.
When she got back to her door, Audrun looked all around her, at everything she could see. Although these two houses, the Mas Lunel and her own bungalow (which had no name), were only just outside La Callune, it was as if they were miles and miles from any other habitation. Apart from the road which ran behind her property, the old driveway to the mas, laid down in schist and brick rubble by Serge, the collapsing stone walls of the vine terraces and her square of vegetable garden, the rest was wild nature, meadow grass, holm oaks, beech, her chestnut wood with the pine-clad hill above and the river beyond. People thought her stupid, not right in the head, because she sometimes lost track of bits of time, but she wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t see how lovely these things were and how, if you were a businessman from some ugly, teeming city, it would be these you would want to buy.
She turned and stared at her bungalow. Its rendering was a faded pink and Audrun had painted the metal windows blue, which had been Bernadette’s favourite colour but which had somehow always looked wrong next to the pink. In summer, she planted scarlet geraniums in pots on the window ledges, but the pots were empty now, waterlogged by the recent heavy rains. The crazy-paving of her terrace was covered with damp leaves, bunched into odd patterns by the wind. Her stone bird-bath, where she watched sparrows and tom-tits come to drink, was green with verdigris. Her fly-curtain had fallen askew across the front door lintel. Her small Fiat car, parked near the door, was so scarred with rust that it appeared only to be waiting for the metal merchant’s grab-iron to snatch it away.
The place looked abject. And Audrun thought how the prospective buyers of the Mas Lunel were right: the bungalow should never have existed. The Mas Lunel and the land around it should all have been hers. She would have sold the dogs to a hunter who would have cared for them and let them work. She would have repaired the crack in the wall. She would have kept everything clean and sanitised and alive.