by Unknown
‘Continuity,’ Serge had said, with his grey-flecked head in its attitude of sorrow and his hands twisting in his lap. ‘That’s what a man needs. It’s what he aches for in this shit-hole of a life. And I ache as badly as the next bastard.’
Anthony sat alone at the marble-topped table on Veronica’s terrace, staring at details of properties for sale in the Cévennes, given to him by the agents in Ruasse. Above him, in the Spanish mulberry tree, a gathering of sparrows came and went with twigs and pieces of straw for their nests.
The photographs printed on the agents’ details were maddeningly unsharp. They also had a greenish-blue tinge to them, as though they’d already begun to fade – from languishing in a filing cabinet or from being shoved into a too-bright display window. In most of the pictures, the sky behind the houses wasn’t blue, but grey. It looked almost as if a silent, invisible English rain were falling.
Anthony took off his glasses, polished them with his handkerchief, put them on again and returned to the pictures. He thought about the care he always lavished on photographs of his beloveds for advertisements in the high-end glossy magazines, making sure that the light was such that patina and texture, detail and colour were all exquisitely, irresistibly captured. In contrast to this, these pictures – aimed at buyers willing to part with more than half a million euros – had been hastily, clumsily taken. And not one of the properties bore any resemblance to the house Anthony saw in his mind. In fact, they frightened him. Although he reminded himself that the gap between an idea and its realisation was sometimes so large that the only human response could be a low cry of despair, he felt this cry rise up in him so strongly, so almost audibly, that he choked and became short of breath.
He was about to walk into the house and dump all the brochures in Veronica’s paper-recycling box when Kitty Meadows came out onto the terrace and sat down, uninvited, opposite him.
She smiled at him. This smile, Anthony thought, made her look more than ever like a Peke. But he suspected that she intended something by it, that it was probably standing in for words she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) utter. An apology, he decided, or rather hoped for. Because, after her sulky behaviour at Les Méjanels, this was what she surely owed him? An apology for having underestimated the power of the family bonds that tied him to Veronica.
The smile vanished as Kitty reached out and picked up one of the house brochures.
‘May I have a look?’ she said.
‘Help yourself,’ said Anthony.
He watched her examine a photograph of what appeared to be some kind of stone factory, possibly once producing perfume from lavender or oil from local olives, with a line of narrow windows under its roof and a tall, industrial chimney – a place purpose-built, it seemed to him, for the inevitable suicide of its occupants.
He kept watching as Kitty took in the colossal price of this monstrosity and started reading through measurements and descriptions. Above them, Anthony heard the sparrows suddenly burst into fidgety, ardent chatter and he thought how sublime it had once been, to be part of a garrulous admiring group and how this group had truly carried him on its wings, to all the places where he wanted to be seen and where people said his name with awe.
Again, he looked at Kitty. Pathetic woman, he thought. She would never be able to imagine – never get near to imagining – what it had been like to walk into a vernissage at a Mayfair gallery, and hear, as he sauntered among the clusters of guests, little admiring silences falling softly like snow all around him. ‘That’s Anthony Verey. The Anthony Verey . . .’
And people turning from the pictures on the walls to make ostentatious greetings. ‘Anthony darling!’ ‘Anthony, what a heavenly surprise!’ And, best of all, knowing that his presence there was important to the artist himself, an endorsement without price, and that he could use his power or withhold it, according to his taste or his mood that night. He could whisper in the ears of the rich, in the ears of dealers, in the ears of friends like Lloyd and Benita Palmer: ‘This painter is really good. Take my word. He’s going to be huge a year from now.’ Then later, mildly delirious on champagne, see some leggy young woman clacking round on four-inch heels, peeling red stickers from a card and putting them on the pictures. And then at last taking the artist aside and saying, with a curve of his lip: ‘I’ve been telling people to buy. Do a tour of the room. See if it’s worked.’
And then leaving early – always ostentatiously early – just to sniff for a second the dark scent of disappointment he left hanging in his wake. Leaving early, because very often he had another party to go to and when he arrived there, it would happen all over again. ‘It’s Anthony Verey. Gosh.’ And his host or hostess would break away from whomever they were talking to and greet him and lead him forward into the throng, on wings of expectation.
Gone, those wings. And his name gone . . .
Kitty put down the details of the olive oil factory and picked up another clutch of brochures. Irritated that he was going to have to sit and wait while she waded through the whole batch, Anthony took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and said: They’re no good. None of them.’ He wanted to say: They’re no good, just as your watercolours are no good. These things I can tell right away. I really don’t need to waste time deliberating about them.
But he restrained himself and Kitty turned the picture she was looking at towards him. It showed the tall, oblong house, painted yellow, that he had, in fact, examined with slightly more enthusiasm than the others.
‘This one,’ she said. ‘Veronica said she liked this one.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I wondered about it, for a bit. But I think the shape’s too blocky and forbidding.’
‘The description says the ceilings are high and beautiful,’ said Kitty. ‘And it’s got acres of vine terraces. Think of the garden we could help you make.’
He took the picture from her and looked at it again, then up at Kitty, and he saw that her smile had come back, her Peke smile, and he mistrusted it now. It had an intention he couldn’t fathom.
At this moment, Veronica appeared beside them, carrying a jug of home-made lemonade. She, too was smiling. ‘I’ve decided to be bossy, Anthony,’ she said brightly, setting down the lemonade. ‘I’ve rung the agents and made us an appointment to see that house on Friday.’
Anthony’s hands clutched the two arms of his spectacles. He wished he had hold of something more substantial.
No, he wanted to say. No, V . . .’
Because he couldn’t lie to himself: he was afraid. Afraid of seeing any of these places face to face. Mortally terrified that, standing out under the sky and contemplating someone else’s imperfect arrangement of stone and brick and slate, his fragile vision of his future would be broken so badly it would be like the breaking of a Lalique vase: impossible to repair.
‘V . . .’ he began, ‘I don’t honestly think—’
‘It probably won’t be right at all. It doesn’t matter. But you’ve got to start looking, Anthony. I said I was being bossy and I am. If you’re serious about moving to the Cévennes, you’ve got to get out there and look at places, so that you have something against which to measure.’
He was silent as Veronica poured out the lemonade. His mouth was a thin line of anguish. He felt helpless, as though Lal were standing there very close to them all, in the cool shade of the mulberry tree, and had turned on him. Unexpectedly turned on him and told him he was a cry-baby.
Kitty Meadows saw it, enjoyed it, almost felt thrilled by it: Anthony’s terror. If you’d lived thoughtlessly, hedonistically, as he’d done for more than sixty years, then what could you expect but mortal fear, when the last act of your life approached? But it was fascinating how visible his terror was, like an extreme form of stage fright, or like the panic of a condemned man. It was so fascinating, in fact, that Kitty quite wanted to see it prolonged. She thought she might be able to fall asleep at night, consoled by the thought of it, and that when Anthony next turned his demeaning stare on her work, she would be able to say
to herself, or even say aloud to him: All right, as a painter I’m mediocre, but as a human being, I’m in possession of a grand passion that could last my lifetime – and this you’ve never experienced and never will. And already, before you’ve looked at a single house, your plans for a life in France are turning to dust . . .
But Kitty was also doing and redoing the arithmetic of Anthony’s stay at Les Glaniques. And this, she saw, could mass to a vast number of days, unless or until he found a place he wanted to buy. At that point, she supposed, a line would be drawn. Because then, or soon after, he’d have to go back to London, to wind up his business, raise a sum of money and put in hand the sale of his flat. And from that time on, they’d be rid of him for a long while. Perhaps for ever? Because if he suggested staying with them while he organised all the tedious, expensive refurbishments to his new abode, she, Kitty, would put her foot down and Veronica would just have to accept this foot.
It amused Kitty to remember that Veronica had a weakness for her lover’s soft feet, that she liked to caress them with her palms perfumed with rose oil, even let them gently chafe her there, where she used to feel the chafe of Susan’s saddle and the pony’s warmth under her thighs and cling passionately to the horse’s neck as she rubbed herself to her gorgeous teenage climaxes. So yes, this is what Kitty would say: ‘I put my foot down, darling.’ And Veronica would be seduced into accepting it. That would be the word: seduced.
In Kitty’s dreams, though, the immediate future didn’t go according to her plan. In fact, they weren’t dreams; they were nightmares. They could happen when she was wide awake. In these nightmares, Anthony found no house to buy. He just stayed on and on at Les Glaniques, as spring became summer and summer became autumn. He took over the kitchen. The smell of his after-shave corroded the air. And all his conversation – on and on and on – was about the past he shared with Veronica, about the way they’d suffered from their father’s absence, and the way, after Lal died, they’d become ‘all in all’ to each other, because they’d had no one else. And the evocation of this ‘all in all’, spiced with its private jokes and innuendoes, tormented Kitty to the point where she had to take herself away somewhere, out under the sky, down the long path to the river or up into Sainte-Agnès, where she sat by the communal fountain and bathed her face in the cool water and let the chatter of the village women – about the mayor’s new girlfriend, about the list of names for the fête committee, about the loss of the postmistress to a man from Limoges – soothe her back to normality and equilibrium.
Another thing gave her pain: she believed that Anthony listened to their love-making through their bedroom wall. Not only in her nightmares, but in reality: he stood there in his room or in the passageway, listening in the dark. She couldn’t see or hear him, but she felt sure he was there. And she knew the same anxiety was gradually taking hold of Veronica. Because, now, it was as if Veronica had become frightened of being caught out in the act of loving Kitty. In bed, where she’d always been so voluble, even unashamedly loud, she began to talk in a tiny little mouse-like voice, as though she and Kitty were children, condemned to silence after lights-out in a boarding-school dormitory. When Kitty tried to kiss her, she often pushed her gently away.
Upsetting as this was, Kitty decided not to make a fuss. She was determined not to let herself fall into the kind of detestable sulky behaviour Lal had clearly been guilty of. So she lay wide awake while Veronica slept and tried to dream up some clever way of getting Anthony to leave Les Glaniques. But she knew there was no clever way. He’d announce that he was leaving as and when it suited him and not a moment before. All Kitty could pray for was that he abandoned his implausible idea of living in the Cévennes (whose remoteness he had not fully grasped and of whose history and customs he knew nothing whatsoever), or else that soon some house turned up that would fire his precious imagination.
While Veronica snored softly, Kitty tried to soothe her mind with the remembrance of Anthony’s agitation over the agents’ brochures. She tried to picture the condition of his heart, of the actual organ, and she envisaged it as being brownish in colour and dry and pithy and yet with a small pulse inside it, beating with the frenzied little ticking movements of a stopwatch. And she thought that a heart in such a condition couldn’t possibly keep a person alive for very long – even somebody as languid and inactive as Anthony Verey. So it was likely that he would die soon. He would die of his petrified heart.
After a while, these imaginings had some consoling effect on Kitty and she began to feel sleepy. She turned over and laid her palm tenderly against Veronica’s back. Before she closed her eyes, it occurred to her that it would be enjoyable to go with Veronica and Anthony to see the yellow house on Friday, and to observe – up there among the wild gorse and the dying chestnuts, and the ever-present idea of snakes sleeping in the sun – how far his terror deepened.
Anthony, Veronica and Kitty were driven from Ruasse to La Callune in the agent’s car. The agent’s name was Madame Besson. She’d left her daughter, Christine, at her desk in the office, closed now at midday, chain-smoking her eight-centimetre cigarettes and talking on her mobile.
Madame Besson knew this corniche of a road very well and she drove it worryingly fast, waltzing into blind bends, nudging up too closely to the traffic in front. Anthony, sitting beside her, bound himself in tightly with his seat belt, but he couldn’t stop his right foot from shooting forwards all the time onto an imaginary brake pedal, couldn’t put down a silent screaming inside himself.
He felt that dying in a car accident would be a pointless way for his life to end. And the idea that he could perish here and now in an old, badly driven Peugeot, not only made him angry, it made him suddenly, passionately impatient to see the yellow house. He now longed – yes longed – to walk in through its front door, to understand how it sat in the landscape, how it coped with the weather. His terror at coming face to face with it – with one actual version of his future – had miraculously vanished, replaced by his fear of dying on the road before he got to it.
To distract himself, to try to diminish his fear, Anthony asked Madame Besson, in his stumbling, imprecise French, to tell him more about the Mas Lunel. The silence that met this request suggested that it took her a moment or two to remember which house it was they were driving to. Besson Immobilier, said this panicky little pause, is the smartest agent in Ruasse; you have to understand that we handle hundreds of properties, so we can’t always recall . . .
‘This is a beautiful house,’ she announced at last, letting the car bound up to a slow-moving cement truck and stay clamped there in its sulphurous slipstream. ‘Don’t be put off by the state of the rooms. They’re full of an old man’s clutter. But you have to imagine how it will be once all that has gone. With old houses like these, that have been in the same family for years and years and never updated, you’ve got to use your imagination.’
Anthony nodded. The woman annoyed him. She smelled of nicotine. She drove dangerously. She talked so fast it was just about impossible to understand her.
‘Paysage,’ he said. ‘How is that?’
‘Paysage? What d’you mean?’
‘Paysage. The land near the house . . .’
‘Ah, I see. Well, it’s overgrown. Nobody has worked the land for years now. Some of the terrace walls have collapsed. But that’s nothing. You can repair those. You English have a mania for gardens, I know. And you’ve got plenty of space here. So.’
The road unspooled on and on, rising, falling, rising, turning, falling. Anthony began to be tormented by thirst and when he saw a roadside stall advertising Orangina, he asked Madame Besson to stop. They pulled over and Anthony, Veronica and Kitty got out. They stood on the verge, breathing the sweet air. The sun today had a new heat to it. Bees hummed above the yellow gorse. A green meadow below them was shiny with buttercups.
‘Summer,’ said Veronica. ‘It comes early here. You suddenly feel it.’
They walked over to the stall, which called
itself La Bonne Baguette. When Veronica saw that there was a chiller full of crusty sandwiches on its counter, she said: ‘Let’s get a sandwich each. It’s almost lunchtime.’
Madame Besson got out of the car and lit a cigarette. Anthony offered to buy her something, but she refused, staring pointedly at Veronica’s bulky form. ‘You English,’ said this look. ‘You eat junk. And you don’t seem to have noticed that it’s killing you.’
She paced up and down while the drinks and baguettes were bought.
‘Eat them here,’ she instructed peremptorily. ‘Then I won’t get crumbs in the car.’
So they walked down to the buttercup meadow and sat on the springy grass, eating and drinking, with the eyes of Madame Besson on them.
‘I guess,’ said Anthony, ‘she’s tired of foreigners. We make money for her, but really she wishes we’d all go home.’
He laughed as he said this and looked over to Kitty, as if he expected some chiming reaction from her, but she just turned her head away.
In fact, what was preoccupying Kitty was the sandwich filling that Anthony had chosen: Camembert and tomato. It thrilled her to remember that a friend of Veronica’s, living not far from here, had died from eating unpasteurised cheese.
Now, there it was at last: the Mas Lunel. Golden in the midday sun; the holm oaks behind it just coming into leaf and, above these, the dark shoulders of firs. Daisies gave the unkempt lawn a dusting of white.
What Anthony liked straight away was the feeling the mas had of being completely on its own, on a sheltered plateau, as though the land had sculpted itself around the building. To the south of it were the vine and olive terraces, descending towards the road. Anthony got out of the car and stood very still, trying to catch the mood of the place, to seize this – its marvellous isolation, its wild beauty – before anything came along to compromise it.
An elderly man came out of the house. He walked with a slight limp. He was skinny, in shabby clothes, and with the hectic, high colour of a drinker. A dark red kerchief was tied around his scrawny neck. He shielded his eyes against the sun.