by Unknown
But, more than anything, she would have looked after the land. Because it was the land that mattered. In recent times, in their mania to make money from their houses, thousands of Cévenol people had seemed to forget their role as caretakers of the land. Diseases came to the trees. The vine terraces crumbled. The rivers silted up. And nobody seemed to notice or care – as if these things would cure themselves, as if nature would do man’s work while he sat – as Aramon sat – in front of his vast TV, lasering his brain with kilowatts of meaningless light.
And what about the new people, the foreigners, who were buying up the land? They’re helpless, Audrun thought. Helpless. It isn’t their fault. They’re affected – she knew they truly were – by the beauty of it. They begin by believing they can care for it all by some means. But in fact, they don’t understand one single thing about the earth.
Not for the first time, certainly not for the first time, Audrun told herself that Aramon and not Bernadette should have been the one to die in 1960.
He’d be dust now. Exquisite thought: his face, his laugh, the stench of him . . . all would be dust.
And all the Lunel land, acquired more than a century ago by her grandparents, would be hers, and thriving and forested and green.
Audrun walked in her wood with Marianne Viala. The river at their backs was high and swift. The sun came and went between puffy white clouds.
‘You need to protect yourself, Audrun,’ said Marianne.
Protect herself? Surely Marianne could remember that, after Bernadette had gone, there had never been any means of doing that?
‘I mean it,’ said Marianne. ‘You’d better see a lawyer. If any part of your bungalow is on Aramon’s land, then he has a right—’
‘It’s not on his land. It’s on my land.’
‘How can you be certain?’
‘We laid out the drawings. We put lines where the boundaries lay.’
‘I guess it’s all right, then. I guess you’ve got nothing to fear.’
Nothing to fear.
That was what Bernadette had said when she took Audrun to see the surgeon at the hospital in Ruasse. She said the surgeon would cut off the pig’s tail growing out of Audrun’s stomach and make a nice, normal belly button, like all the other children had. And after that, she wouldn’t hear the mockery any more: ‘Show us your piggy tail, Audrun! Show us your hog’s arse!’
She lay in the hospital bed and she could feel the warm blood gushing out of her wound and sliding down onto her thighs. She tried to call somebody, but the room she lay in was tall and echoey and her voice had no strength; she just made a little strangled noise that went up towards the ceiling, like a trapped bird.
Nothing to fear.
She was eight years old. She wondered whether this hot, gushing blood was normal. It didn’t feel normal. It felt like her life seeping away, the precious and only life of the daughter of Bernadette Lunel, sandwiched in between the thin covering and the hard hospital mattress. Moment by moment, she would become thinner, flatter, as all the veins and arteries inside her emptied themselves. She would become as pale as a silkworm.
She woke with her arm attached to a bag of blood and a cool hand on her forehead – Bernadette’s. Bernadette put her face very near to hers and said: ‘It’s all right now, my little girl. It’s all right. I’m here now. Maman’s here. Nothing to fear now.’
Audrun and Marianne walked on and when they came once again within sight of the bungalow, Marianne stopped and looked at it and said: ‘I’ve got another idea. Get Raoul to come and put up a wall.’
‘What good’s a wall?’
‘A high stone wall, so that whoever buys the mas won’t be able to see your house and you won’t be able to see them.’
‘How would I be able to afford that?’
‘It could be cheap cinder blocks on your side. Just faced with stone on the side they’re going to see.’
‘Even that. Where would I get the money?’
Marianne stopped and looked back the way they had come. ‘Sell the wood,’ she said.
Sell the wood?
Audrun shook her head side to side, kept on shaking it like this, like a puppet. She felt herself made weak and limp by all this bad, rotten thinking.
Later, she lay in the dark.
‘Safe in your bed,’ Bernadette used to say, ‘now, you’re safe in your bed.’ But Bernadette had been wrong.
She was trying to remember: had part of her house been built on Aramon’s land?
All she could recall was that it had been done roughly, hastily, in a haphazard way, with just a scribbled permission from the mayor’s office and no proper plans, only sketches made by the builder: put this here, put that there. Raoul should have been the one to build it, but he didn’t want the job; he only liked working with stone.
So another company was brought in from Ruasse and it was all decided day to day, moment to moment, in those times when the men sat in the sun, eating bread and Camembert and drinking beer and sometimes peering at this drawing or that, and once wrapping up what remained of their cheese in one of the drawings they said was no longer needed.
No surveyor had ever come back to check on the finished house – had he? No one had ever come back because no one cared a fig about it. All this land belonged to the Lunel family – had belonged to it for three generations. Boundary lines were for the brother and sister to draw . . .
But now a surveyor would come. Even a wall of stone could keep no one out, no one who believed he had a right to be there. She, Audrun, would sit helplessly by and wait for the surveyor to lay a line on the ground with a steel measure. And suppose this line led up to her house and out again the other side, what then? Would she hear someone explaining to her – as they had explained to her all her life – that she’d made an error?
You don’t do things right, Audrun.
You don’t see the world the way it is.
Audrun lay on her back and stared up at the darkness. Then, she folded her arms by her sides and closed her eyes and tried to slow the beating of her heart. She pretended she was Aramon, lying in his tomb. She waited for the vault that surrounded her to grow colder.
The restaurant terrace at Les Méjanels, a few kilometres outside Ruasse, was perched above a stone bridge over the River Gardon. The water was now as high as it had been in springtime for years. Everybody was talking about this, the beautiful jade-green swell of the Gardon after the snow melt of a cold winter and the recent rain.
Veronica, Kitty and Anthony sat at a table near the terrace edge.
The April sun was warm and flashed cutlass-bright on the swiftly moving river. On the menu were fresh trout, frogs’ legs and omelette aux cèpes. Veronica ordered a carafe of a local rosé wine. Anthony put on an old cricketing hat. There were no clouds in the sky.
Anthony ordered the omelette, followed by the trout. He ate everything slowly, taking small forkfuls, each one aesthetically perfected by the addition of a few beautifully dressed salad leaves. The wine was very cold and dry and light, and this, too, he drank slowly, not wanting any gourmandise on his part to disturb the perfect equilibrium of these delectable moments.
He knew that he was as near to being happy as he had felt for a very long time. Happy. He dared to conjure this Peter Pan word. He felt as pleased with life as he used to feel after a successful auction bid. And these hills, this long, majestic valley with its ancient river . . . these at least, he told himself, had permanence. If he could remake his life in a house here, they’d be his marvellous companions. The beauty he’d create with and for his beloveds inside this house would find an echo – day by day and season by season – in the beauty outside its windows.
He turned to Veronica and said: ‘This is the place, V. This is where I want to be. I’m going to make a bid for the Cévennes.’
Veronica smiled. Her nose was turning red in the sun. ‘Well,’ she said, trying to include Kitty in her smile, ‘that’s OK. That’s brilliant, in fact. We just have to star
t looking for a house.’
Anthony realised another thing. He’d been thinking of a small house, with some modest little curtilage, just enough space for V to design him a neat garden. But this image was altering now. What he’d begun to imagine was something more stately, where the ceilings would be high, where the kitchen would be big, where he could contrive some audacious lighting effects to show off the cream of the beloveds collection – as many of them as he could afford to hang on to. And, in the grounds, enough space for a swimming pool. A pool would help to prolong his life. Oh, and plenty of land. He wanted land now. Not so much to protect him from the envious world, but to give that envious world something new to envy.
His plans grew and flowered and multiplied in his head: guest suites, a pool house, a sauna, a knot garden, a wild flower meadow . . . He caught Kitty Meadows staring at him, as though she could read his extravagant thoughts and already had some strategy to crush them. He sat back in his chair and said: ‘What d’you think, Kitty?’
She looked away from him, looked far away at the high tops of the hills. She had a snub nose that had probably once been called cute, but which now gave her face the squashed look of a Pekinese.
‘Why don’t you rent for a while?’ she said. ‘See if you get used to being this far away from everything.’
Rent? What kind of a wasteful, unambitious idea was that? And what was this ‘everything’ she was talking about? Kitty Meadows hadn’t the remotest idea what was – or had been – important to Anthony Verey, wouldn’t even come close to imagining it. And he certainly wasn’t going to reveal to her the truth about his ‘everything’: that it had been straying, apparently irretrievably, along the pathway towards ‘nothing’. Because anyway, he was going to grab it back now, he was going to get it all back, and he wouldn’t let anybody stand in his way, certainly not Kitty Meadows . . .
‘I don’t want to rent,’ he said. ‘I want to find something and commit to it. I want to do it before it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ said Kitty. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘V knows what I mean,’ he said, ‘don’t you, darling?’
He was talking about time, as Kitty knew perfectly well. He wanted to make some grand new statement about his life before the years ate any more of him away, before he had to lay vanity aside. And this was going to be it, apparently: some expensively restored, immaculately furnished house in the Cévennes. Famous friends would be invited down to worship. He’d spend his days getting everything just so and then showing it off. He’d speak bad French in a loud voice. In the neighbourhood, he’d be disliked by everyone, but never ever be aware of it.
Kitty was already so weary of Anthony’s company that she had begun to experience it as a deep unhappiness. He’d been with them at Les Glaniques for ten days, disturbing the rhythm of their life, making work impossible for her, and now he was going to start his house-hunt and this could go on and on for weeks or months to come. It was intolerable.
Intolerable.
As Veronica ordered crème caramels and coffees, Kitty thought how she’d like to march Anthony Verey down to the bridge below them and shackle his feet to stones and tip him into the raging water. He was the last of the Verey men, with all their old snobberies and unjustified feelings of entitlement. It would surely be better – for her, for Veronica, for the world – if he was simply disposed of, if that life he appeared to regard as so precious was brought to an abrupt end.
‘What are you thinking, Kitty?’ asked Veronica suddenly.
Kitty felt startled, fidgety as a bird. She laid down her napkin, said she’d changed her mind about the crème caramel; she wanted to go for a walk along the river.
‘Oh don’t,’ said Veronica. ‘Wait till we’ve finished lunch and we’ll all go.’
But Kitty got up. As she shook her head, she remembered, with some pain, the thing Veronica had said about her hair being ‘difficult to stroke’.
She walked away from the table towards the steps that led down to the road. As she went, she heard Anthony say in a loud voice: ‘Oh God, did I say something terrible? Am I a monster?’
Kitty kept on, without looking back. She thought: Every step I take away from him is a consolation. But the fact that she was walking away from Veronica as well put a little twist of agony into her heart. The last time the two of them had been here at Les Méjanels, at the end of the previous summer, they’d wandered down to the Gardon after lunch and sat in the hot sun, playing noughts-and-crosses in the sand, and Veronica had said: ‘I’ll do the crosses. There you are. That’s the first kiss for you.’
As Kitty walked towards the water, she wondered: Doesn’t every love need to create for itself its own protected space? And if so, why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do? It made her furious to think how easily Veronica was colluding with the unspoken open-endedness of Anthony’s visit – as though he was the one who mattered most to her, who had the right to come first and always would, and it was up to her, Kitty, to accept this hierarchy with grown-up grace and not make a fuss.
And of course Anthony knew all this. He no doubt enjoyed the knowledge. Enjoyed seeing ‘V’s little friend’ relegated to second place. It was possible that he’d let his stay drag on into summer or beyond, just to persecute her, to do his best to destroy Veronica’s love.
Reaching the river, Kitty turned right and walked along the narrow path above the churning, dazzling water. She saw that the grey beach where she’d sat with Veronica was flooded and would only reveal itself again when the heat of July came back and the river shrank to a slow-moving channel. Boulders that had been stranded mid-stream last year were submerged now, and Kitty could imagine all the newly hatched brown trout beginning their lives in this sheltering darkness, nibbling at the green protein-rich weed that billowed up from the shingle bed.
Thinking about the innocent lives of fish, Kitty found that she was crying.
She stumbled on. She wanted to sit down and cry properly. But there was nowhere to sit. There was only the narrow path, just wide enough for one person, and nothing to do but to follow that, until she felt able to turn round and go back.
Anthony believed she’d done it on purpose, to spoil his moment of happiness, and this made him all the more determined not to let her ruin the whole day or distract him from his plan, which was now to visit as many estate agents as he could find in Ruasse.
They were on their way there at last, after waiting half an hour for Kitty to show up. Veronica drove and Anthony sat in the front and nobody said a word. Kitty rested her head against the window and closed her eyes.
No doubt, thought Anthony, she wants to go straight home, to stare at her hopeless watercolours and drum up some way of getting rid of me. But I’m not going to let her get rid of me. I’m Anthony Verey and I’m myself again: I’m the Anthony Verey . . .
In Ruasse, Veronica parked the car in the market square, under white plane trees just coming into leaf, as the sun began its decline and a suggestion of cold was felt again in the air. On the opposite side of the square were two agents and Veronica directed Anthony towards these, saying she’d catch him up.
‘All right,’ he said. But he said it wearily, to let his sister know that he disapproved of her pandering to the moods and whims of Kitty Meadows. Kitty, he thought, should have been left to stew in the back of the car while he and V went and looked at photographs of houses. Indeed, this would have been ideal, to strand her in the car, lock her in like a child, while they, the Vereys, got their first glimpse of his future . . .
He strode off across the square, still wearing his cricketing hat, hearing the click and knock of a boules game in the sandy gravel, the chime of an ancient clock. Ruasse, he’d been told, had two souls and this was one of them, its old soul, defined by the white plane trees and narrow, tilting buildings with clay roofs and a clutch of expensive shops. But its other soul was elsewhere, on the margins of the town, where high-rise flats balanced on flimsy foundations. If you coul
d keep from coming face to face with this other soul, so much the better, or so V had said.
Now, Anthony stood at an estate agent’s window. His heart was racing. He began to stare at photographs and prices. Through the glass door of the premises, he could glimpse two women at work on their computers under cold strips of industrial light. He saw them glance up and stare at his comical hat.
Veronica sat in her kitchen and smoked and listened to the stillness of the night.
In front of her on the kitchen table were half-finished sketches of a garden she was designing for clients at Saint-Bertrand. She wasn’t working on the drawings exactly, just moving her pencil around, shading in stands of box and a line of yew buttresses over which the clients had rhapsodised. Veronica knew that these buttresses would take three years to look solid enough to form the architectural shape that had so thrilled Monsieur and Madame, but she hadn’t dared to mention this. She got tired of repeating that gardens took time, that they weren’t like interiors, that you had to have patience. She knew she didn’t live in a patient world. Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to them the fugitive wonders that flickered into their minds.
Tonight, Veronica’s own heart was agitated. The day had begun well, ended badly. She’d had to be severe with Kitty in the car in Ruasse, had to say to her that nothing, no, nothing would stop her from caring for Anthony, because he was her brother, and if she, Kitty, expected her to stop loving him, then they were all in grave trouble.
She knew Kitty had been crying and this upset her. Whenever she remembered where Kitty had come from, and allowed her mind to form some torturing image of Kitty laying breakfast tables in the Cromer guest house, waiting on a shabby clientèle who left stingy tips, then toiling off to her lowly job in the library, her heart felt like breaking. She wished she could have changed Kitty’s past, retrospectively. But the past was the past. You couldn’t change it. And this was what she’d had to remind her in the car: ‘You have your past and I have mine and Anthony was a part of mine and I’m never going to push him away. Not for you. Not for anybody. Never.’