by Unknown
Never.
She saw the word have its effect on Kitty. And knew that Kitty still hadn’t understood how strong was Veronica’s need to protect Anthony – from the world and from himself. So she began to explain it again: how, when they were children, Raymond Verey, the handsome father who was so often missing from home, bullied his son, called him weak, puny, babyish, kept asking him when he was going to ‘become a real boy’. Lal, still enslaved by Raymond Verey, had mainly stood silently by when he did this, but she, Veronica, had formed the habit of speaking out for her brother.
‘I hated my father for tormenting Anthony,’ said Veronica. ‘It wasn’t Anthony’s fault that he wasn’t sporty or strong. I was those things, but he wasn’t. He was thin and dreamy. He liked doing little domestic pastimes with Ma.’
Veronica remembered very vividly Anthony’s obsessive love for Lal. She’d had to protect him from that as well, she explained to Kitty. On days when she saw him almost dying of hurt, she’d had to try to protect him from his own feelings.
‘What about you?’ asked Kitty. ‘Who protected you from anything or anyone?’
‘I told you: I was OK,’ said Veronica. ‘I was impervious to a lot of things. And I had my pony, Susan. I talked to her. Susan and I would go and tear round the jumps and I’d forget everything. I was fine. But when Ma turned away from Anthony, he died.’
She evoked one such day. It had been Anthony’s eleventh or twelfth birthday and Lal had driven them to Swanage beach for a birthday picnic. It had been just three of them. Raymond was in London, as usual, living his own distant life. And it was high summer, with a hot sun shining and the sea calm and blue. And they ate the delicious picnic Lal had prepared, everything except the birthday cake, which they were saving for later, and then they went swimming.
Lal, elegant as ever, was zippered into a skin-tight, lime-green bathing costume. But when the swim was over and she tried to get out of the wet costume, the zip jammed, and there she was – with a wind whipping up now and the sky clouding over – getting cold and cross. She tugged and tugged at the zip, then she tried to get herself out of the costume without undoing it, but it was too tight.
Anthony danced about on the sand, his face white with terror. He gave his own towel to Lal, but she tossed it away, saying, ‘Don’t be stupid, Anthony. That thing’s soaking wet.’ She threw him the car keys and sent him off over the dunes, wearing his sagging bathing trunks, to get pliers from the tool-kit of the Hillman Minx. He came panting back with the whole toolbox and Lal lifted her shapely brown arm impatiently while he searched for the pliers among the jumble of wrenches and spanners and then found them and clenched the zip head with them and attempted to drag the zip down.
But the zip wouldn’t move. Lal was going blue-white with cold, her whole body in a spasm of shivering. ‘Come on!’ she kept shouting at him. ‘Come on, Anthony! For God’s sake fix it! Can’t you see I’m freezing to death?’
He was freezing too and his hands were shaking. And then he accidentally let the pliers bite into the soft white flesh underneath Lal’s arm and she gave a scream and pushed Anthony away from her and he fell backwards into the sand and began sobbing.
He spent his days trying to please her and now, when she was in trouble, when she needed him, he’d only managed to wound her.
‘He couldn’t bear what he’d done,’ said Veronica. ‘It traumatised him. To have hurt Lal! To have drawn blood! It was the worst thing he could imagine.’
‘So what did you do?’ asked Kitty quietly.
‘Well, I think I put my hanky on Ma’s wound and told her to hold it there, or something like that, and then I tried to get them both warm. I got the rug from the car and made them sit down close together and I wrapped them in it. Anthony just clung to Ma and cried and I said, “That’s good, Anthony. Hold on to her very tight and keep her warm.” Then I went looking for some scissors. It took ages, but eventually I found a nice woman with a knitting bag and she had scissors in that and she helped me cut Ma out of the bathing costume. We got Ma dressed, and she drove us home but she wouldn’t talk to us. She thought the world should be punished because she’d been stuck in a lime-green bathing costume.’
‘Ridiculous . . .’ breathed Kitty.
‘I know,’ said Veronica. ‘But that’s just how she was, sometimes. And we never touched Anthony’s birthday cake. Ma conveniently forgot all about it. And when he realised she wasn’t going to put candles on it or cut it or sing or anything, he sat down and ate almost the whole thing, on his own in the kitchen, then threw up in the garden.’
Kitty was silent when Veronica reached the end of this story. No doubt she was thinking how spoiled and difficult their mother had been, how half a lifetime spent in white South Africa had blinded her to her own selfish behaviour. But Veronica hoped the anecdote about the day at Swanage had driven home to Kitty the realisation that protecting Anthony was a lifelong habit which she would never be able to break.
After a moment, Kitty said: ‘I understand it. I do. It’s part of why I love you; because you’re kind. But you’ve got to tell me how long Anthony’s going to stay with us. Just tell me that.’
‘I can’t tell you. Because I don’t know. He wants to look for a house, now. He’s putting all his hopes into that. So I have to help him, don’t I?’
‘Sure. But he doesn’t have to be with us day and night. Why can’t he move to a hotel?’
Veronica turned away from Kitty angrily and punched her fist against the steering wheel of the car. ‘If you can say that,’ she said, ‘you haven’t understood one word of what I’ve been talking about!’
On the table, underneath Veronica’s garden sketches, was a pile of brochures from the estate agents in Ruasse. Veronica moved her own drawings aside and began to leaf through these. She stared at washed-out photographs of big, crumbling, stone houses attached to scant descriptions and large prices. It seemed that Cévenol property owners were bent on getting rich now, along with everybody else in the Western world.
Veronica’s eye fell onto a photograph of a tall, square mas, standing with its back to a low hill planted with holm oaks. Unlike all the others, the cement façade of this one had been painted a creamy yellow and this gave the place a kind of unexpected grandeur. The price being asked was €475,000. Veronica rubbed her eyes and began to read the details: six bedrooms, large attic space, exceptional beams, high ceilings . . .
A noise in the kitchen made her look up. Kitty was standing there, wearing the bulky, washed-out cardigan she used as a dressing gown.
She came over to where Veronica sat and bent down and put her arms round her shoulders and laid her head on hers.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Veronica pushed aside the house details. She reached up to Kitty and they stayed like that, in an awkward hug, for a long moment.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ Veronica said at last.
‘Come to bed,’ Kitty whispered. ‘I hate being there without you.’
Whenever a car stopped on the road, now, Audrun thought it would belong to the surveyor. ‘He’s coming any day,’ Aramon had told her. ‘Then we’ll see how much of my land you’ve taken! Then, we’ll know, ha!’
She stood at her window, waiting.
She saw Aramon walk out early one morning, going towards the neglected vine terraces, bent low by the weight of the metal weed-killer canister strapped to his back. He’d told her that the estate agents had advised him to clean up the terraces, that the kind of purchasers interested in the Mas Lunel would also be seduced by the idea of growing grapes. ‘I can’t see it myself,’ he’d scoffed. ‘Bossy cunts of agents know nothing about vines! But I know. I know how they break your back. No lazy town-dwelling Belgian or Englishman would put in the work. But who cares? I’ll do as I’m told. For 475,000 euro, I’ll be as obedient as a whore.’
Audrun followed him, unseen, down to the terraces. She stared at the rows and rows of vines, all unpruned, with the skeins of last
year’s growth still tangled round them and all the stony earth that nourished them choked with grass and weeds. Standing in the shadow of some ilex scrub, she watched Aramon working half-heartedly with his secateurs, snipping a few cuttings, then stopping and lighting a cigarette. He stood there smoking, with his nervous, inebriated glance jumping here and there in the bright light and the canister of weed-killer abandoned in the long grass.
Audrun looked at him with her eyes narrowed and hard. She was trying to decide how best to kill him.
She went up to the Mas Lunel and began searching for his will.
He’d never married or fathered any children, so everything would be hers if he died before her, unless he’d contrived to will part of it away to one of his old hunting friends. And she doubted that he’d got round to this, ever made the necessary burdensome visits to a notary, but she needed to be sure. If he’d made a new testament just to spite her, he would have hidden a copy somewhere.
She went first to an old mahogany chest in the salon, the most comfortable room in the mas, but where Aramon hardly ever lingered, as though he recognised that the space was too grand for him – for the person he was in his core.
Bernadette had always kept the family Bible in this chest. Over all the years, this Bible had exerted its holy magnetism upon everything that seemed to plead its own bureaucratic importance or sentimental preciousness, such as the letters Serge had written from the Ardennes during the war, then from Alsace, where he was repatriated after France’s surrender, and then during his time spent working for the Service de Travail Obligatoire at Ruasse.
There were large heaps of these letters in Serge’s untidy writing, unread for years. There were also ancient identity cards, bills of sale to the wine co-operative, invitations to marriages, christenings and first communions, mourning-cards, family photographs, newspaper cuttings, letters of condolence, edicts from the mayor, a faded menu from a cheap Paris restaurant in Les Halles . . . All of these things had flung themselves in to be with the Gospels.
Audrun opened the chest and took out the Bible. She held it to her face for a moment, picking up – even now – the scent of her mother embedded in its cloth covers, then laid it aside. She stared at the heap of papers, sprinkled with woodworm dust, finer than fine-grained sand. This dust suggested to her that the papers hadn’t been disturbed for a long while. Aramon never looked at the past, then, and no wonder. He was afraid to catch sight of himself in it.
Audrun lifted out an armful of letters, cards and photographs. One photograph, of Bernadette, fell out of the pile and Audrun stared down at her mother’s face – that sweetest of sweet countenances – as it had once been, when she was young and smiling at the old box camera in the sunshine. How beautiful Bernadette had been! Her hair was parted at the side and swept up into a tortoiseshell clip. Her eyes were wide and sleepy. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. She wore a striped blouse that Audrun couldn’t recall.
Audrun put the photograph into the pocket of the old red cardigan she was wearing that day. She returned to the chest. Again, the arrangement of the remaining papers indicated neglect. But it was still possible that Aramon had made his will and layered it silently in, deep down in the complicated mille-feuille of what passed for a family archive.
She sifted and sorted, looking for a document that would probably be whiter than the rest, with dark printing. But she found nothing. Reaching the bottom of the chest, Audrun picked up a picture postcard of the river at Ruasse, with the water almost overflowing the banks and washing against the old market stalls that had once stood there and all the patient cart horses waiting in a line. The message, written by her father and dated 1944 read:
My dear Wife,
I pray you’re safe and all in La Callune also safe, and the boy and the baby. My work here is not difficult. I am part of our S.T.O. group guarding the locomotives at night against sabotage by Maquisard elements. I am getting fond of these engines.
Did you ask old Molezon to repair the chimney stack? Is the boy cured of his cough? We work in the dark and sleep in daytime. I kiss your breast. Serge.
Audrun laid the card back in. Arranged everything as she’d found it.
I kiss your breast.
She put the Bible away and closed the chest. She didn’t want to think about her father.
My dear Wife, I kiss your breast . . .
She stood up and looked around. Where else was she going to search?
She made her way up to Aramon’s bedroom. The window was wide open, freshening the foetid air. Audrun knelt by the bed and ran her hands under the mattress. She tugged out a clutch of magazines of the kind she was expecting to find and as she looked at them she thought that his death should be the right death, the one he’d deserved, and it should not be quick and it should not be painless.
Audrun shoved the pornography back under the heavy mattress. Circling round to examine the other side of the bed, she remembered that there were always bottles and blister-packs of pills on Aramon’s night table, and she returned to these. She fumbled for her spectacles and put them on. She stared at the neat pharmaceutical labels, none of which she recognised, but she supposed they were sleeping tablets or anti-depressant tablets or some other oblivion-inducing drugs.
And so she wondered . . . might it be as easy as that, to get him more drunk than he knew and cram pills into his mouth or mash them up and let him swig them down himself with his wine and whisky, and be taken for a suicide?
Or better still, lie him face down on the bed and get out his enema paraphernalia and pump the poison into him that way. For hadn’t she read in some magazine that Marilyn Monroe had died like this, from having a river of barbiturates squirted into her colon? And yet, at the time, everyone had believed she’d died by swallowing pills, that she wanted to die, that her life had become unbearable . . . and what nobody had revealed until years and years later was that there was no residue of an overdose in her stomach. None. But still the verdict of suicide had been returned.
Audrun imagined the two scenes, Marilyn’s death, past and gone, and Aramon’s death, yet to come. She could envisage the softness and beauty of Marilyn’s arse, her languid sleeping defenceless body, and the rough panicky gestures of the assassins, shoving and pumping. They made a mess of it, so the magazine article said. The sheets had to be washed in the middle of the night. Imagine that. As the pale, famous woman lay dying, as the dawn crept nearer and nearer, the drum of some old American washing machine kept turning . . .
If she, Audrun, was going to kill Aramon this way, she couldn’t afford to mess it up like that. Despite the disgust she’d feel, having to touch and smell his arse, to guide the enema tube inside him, she’d have to do it carefully, like a surgeon, wearing protective gloves, and leave no trace of herself behind. No trace.
And she thought that once she’d got the tube inside him, then it might be extraordinary, it might be almost beautiful to begin squeezing the bag of fluid, to feel the venom’s ejaculation from the tube, feel its infusion into his body.
When she’d filled him up with it, when the fluid bag was empty and he lay unconscious there, she’d take the tube out very carefully and replace it with a cork, an ordinary wine cork, dampened and made soft. Then, she’d bind his arse with rags, to stop the cork from popping out and letting the poison escape. How hilarious, how wonderfully right, to bind him up like that, to stop anything coming out of him! And then there would be nothing more to do; she’d simply wait. And it would certainly be beautiful – that silent waiting, that solitary waiting until he died.
She was back in her bed now. Safe in her bed. With the sighing of the wind in her wood to comfort her. She’d found no will.
By the yellowish light of an old parchment-shaded lamp, she stared at the photograph of Bernadette. She whispered to Bernadette that she wasn’t afraid of the surveyor now – now that she’d decided to kill Aramon. They could come and knock her house down and she wouldn’t care, because soon Aramon was going to be in the gro
und and she would install herself at the Mas Lunel, in Bernadette’s bed, made clean and sane once more with a new mattress and crisp new cotton sheets . . .
She turned the photograph over, to see whether there was a date on it.
And she found these words: Renée. Mas Lunel. 1941.
Renée. They never talked about her. Never. Not even Serge talked about her. Except just one time. One time. When he made her his excuse for everything that was going to happen next . . .
Renée.
Audrun put the photograph face down on her night table.
Less than a year after this photograph had been taken, Renée was dead. Killed by German soldiers in reprisals against the first feats of the maquisards at Pont Perdu.
And so Audrun had dared to ask her father, ‘What was Renée doing at Pont Perdu?’
He’d sighed and shifted on his chair. ‘She was just there that day, ma fille.’
‘Why? We don’t know anybody at Pont Perdu?’
He looked as sad as a mule, with his greying head hanging down, and Audrun had felt sorrowful for him and gone to stand close to him, and then regretted that she had.
He’d rubbed his eyes. ‘Women,’ he said. ‘You have to control them – day and night, day and night. Or they get the better of you. But I wasn’t there. I was in Alsace. I couldn’t control anything. I was trapped by the war.’
Renée was in her grave by the time he got home. She’d been his fiancée, the most beautiful girl in La Callune, but she was slaughtered before he could begin his life with her. Perhaps she’d betrayed him with a lover at Pont Perdu, but nobody ever talked about it, one way or another. Serge Lunel let a few months pass and then he married her identical twin sister, Bernadette.