by Unknown
God knows what kind of life.
And now, it could go wrong again, that thing she called her life. If she did what she wanted to do, what she knew she had to do, wasn’t she afterwards guaranteed a miserable end? Because prison would feel like dying, just as working in the underwear factory at Ruasse had felt like dying. She’d spend her days trudging between a freezing cell and some noisy, echoing room, where women laughed and screamed like demons as they went about their ugly work. In this place, her eyesight would surely fail. Her episodes would increase, until they joined one to another in a skein of unpronounceable suffering and confusion. And in the nights, she’d be haunted by dreams about her wood, knowing that she’d never see it again, never hear its sighing, never see the glad spring, but only imagine the seasons passing and flying on . . .
Audrun sat on in her chair and the evening darkness slowly visited the room. She realised now that she didn’t have it yet, the plan that would accomplish its end and leave no trace. She pulled her cardigan round her. Then she thought: I don’t have it yet, but it will come. It will arrive in me, unbidden, like a stranger with a swagger arriving at the door. And I will rise up and follow it.
She got up early and drank her bowl of coffee and put on her flowery overall and began to tidy her house for the surveyor’s visit. She dragged a mop over the tiled floors, watching the pathways of shine its dampness made and wishing that this glimmer wouldn’t fade, the way it always did.
She knew the bungalow was a dump, botched together under its tin roof, but now that she was probably going to lose it she felt her sentimental attachment to it increase. It contained all there was of her: her bed, her armoire, her plants, her television, her stove, her rugs, her favourite chair. The walls had sheltered her, kept her pain in one place.
The morning was bright and still. Audrun watered the geraniums on her terrace, pulled up two white onions for her supper, chased a green frog away. As the frog disappeared into the grass, Audrun saw Marianne Viala walking up the road towards her.
‘The surveyor’s coming this morning,’ she told Marianne.
Marianne had brought her a piece of her famous tarte au chocolat on a blue plate. She set this down on the plastic table. She shook her head that appeared small, with its tightly permed curls, coloured pale brown. ‘Aramon should be ashamed of himself,’ she said.
They sat down in the plastic chairs, with the tarte between them, uneaten. Whenever a car came by on the road, they turned and stared, wondering if it was going to be the surveyor arriving. After a while, Marianne said: ‘If your brother knocks your house down, you can come and live with me.’
Audrun was silent. She knew this was very kind of Marianne, exceptionally kind – if she really meant it – but it wasn’t a thing she could contemplate. She’d lived her whole life here, on land that had belonged to the Lunel family for three generations. To find herself in some little shadowy back-room, surrounded by Marianne’s possessions, would be terrible. She lifted her head and said: ‘I think I’ll go and live at the mas.’
‘What,’ said Marianne, ‘with him?’
Audrun looked down at her hands, clenched together on the table top.
‘The way he’s drinking,’ she said, ‘he can’t have long to live.’
After an hour had passed, Audrun made more coffee and the two women ate the chocolate tarte and they felt the sweetness of it bring their blood alive. And they started on some reminiscences of their schooldays and among these was a memory of how their teacher, Monsieur Verdier, used to bring his mongrel dog, Toto, to Thursday classes because his wife worked in the village shop on that day of the week and Toto was a creature who couldn’t bear to be alone.
At break time, Toto would be let out into the school yard with the children and they hugged him and petted him and pulled his ears and fed him sweets and chased him round and round, and some of the older boys threw sticks at him but he kept scampering on.
Then, one Thursday, Toto wasn’t there in his basket in the classroom, and Monsieur Verdier set the children a reading assignment and sat at his desk without moving, staring out of the window at the sky.
‘Please, sir,’ one of the children asked. ‘Where’s Toto?’
‘Toto’s disappeared,’ said Monsieur Verdier. ‘We don’t know where. We just hope he’s not alone.’
‘Did he ever come back?’ asked Marianne. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘No,’ said Audrun. ‘He never came back. The things you love never do.’
Marianne sniffed, as if to say that, really, Audrun’s pessimism was wearisome sometimes, and she changed the subject to her daughter, Jeanne, who was a teacher, now, at a school in Ruasse. ‘The children there,’ said Marianne, ‘are far less disciplined than we were. Far less – in the city schools. Jeanne has terrible difficulty. And she told me in her class this term she’s got a child from Paris, who’s getting bullied.’
‘Well,’ said Audrun. ‘That’s not new. Bullying.’
‘No. But it’s hard for Jeanne. She has to try to be fair to everyone. She hates it when any of them are unhappy, but she says this little girl has been very spoilt. Her father’s a doctor, or something like that.’
‘What’s her name?’ asked Audrun. ‘In Paris, they give children the names of movie stars, American names.’
‘Yes,’ said Marianne. ‘Her name’s Mélodie. Mélodie. Imagine calling a child that! And of course it makes another difficulty for Jeanne.’
The morning went by and Marianne returned to her house, and there was no sign of the surveyor.
‘If you’re a woman,’ Bernadette once said to Audrun, ‘you spend a lot of your life waiting. You wait for the men to come back from the war, or from the fields, or from hunting in the hills. You wait for them to decide to mend all the things that need mending. You wait for their words of love.’
Audrun went indoors. She ate some bread and cheese and then locked her front door and lay down on her bed. She discovered that the waiting had tired her. She slept for two hours and was woken by a knocking on her door and she thought from its frenzy that it was probably Aramon, come back to shout at her about something or other, so she took her time answering.
A man stood there, wearing a crumpled grey suit and a tie tugged loose from the collar of his shirt and hanging down all anyhow. Under his arm was a sheaf of papers.
‘I’m the surveyor,’ said the man. ‘From Ruasse.’
Soon after Bernadette died, Serge Lunel had said to his son: ‘It’s us against the world now, Aramon. You and me against the world. We have to take control. And I’m going to tell you how.’
Aramon stood now near the Lunel tomb in the cemetery at La Callune.
He found that he was holding in his hands a small wreath of plastic flowers, but he wasn’t certain how his hands had come by this. Had they taken it from another family’s mausoleum? Had they found it lying in the grass?
He told himself that it didn’t really matter, that a plastic wreath was the kind of thing nobody cared a fig about, and he set it down distractedly at the foot of the granite tomb that contained his parents and his Lunel grandparents, Guillaume and Marthe, all on top of one another, with his mother and father jammed in last, up against the roof. And it seemed fantastical to Aramon that he was now older than Serge had been when he’d died.
Time, he thought, was so unstable, it was surprising anybody had been able to carve out any rational existence within it at all.
Deep in Aramon’s heart lay the knowledge that both their lives – his and Serge’s – had been warped and damaged by what they’d chosen to do after Bernadette was gone. But he didn’t want to feel that either of them were to blame for it. Time was to blame. Time had given them Bernadette and then taken her away, just as it had taken Renée away, long before. Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live. Time changed the way your body felt and the things it had to do.
It wasn’t a thing you could ever talk about, or had ever been able to talk about. Even while he and
his father had hoed the onions (in the long-ago days when onions had still earned the family good money) in the hot earth, moving together up and down the rows, while Audrun worked in the underwear factory in Ruasse, they’d been silent on the subject. Only once, right at the beginning, had Serge whispered to him, ‘It’s perfectly logical, son. There was Renée, but she died, she was punished for what she did, then there was your mother, but she’s gone too, she left us. So now . . . there’s the other one. It’s logical to keep all of this in the family. Quite logical.’
It used to make Aramon black out. The sheer and terrible thrill of going into Audrun’s room in the night and doing that. He thought of it as love, the most delirious perfect love he could imagine. It was too much for his body and his mind. Sometimes, afterwards, Serge had to come and pick him off the floor of her room where she’d tipped him, and carry him back to his own bed, slap his cheeks to bring him round, make him drink cognac. ‘Allez,’ Serge would whisper tenderly, ‘it’s all right. You’re not dying. You’ve just done what young men have to do. Go to sleep now.’
Then, he would hear Serge walking back down the corridor and going into her room, too, and closing the door and, later, crying out, like a dog. And Aramon didn’t care about this, that his love had to be shared. What he minded about, what made him mad, was that she never cried out. All she ever gave him in return for what he did – the love he gave her – was her silence.
The years kept passing, like that – Serge and Aramon crying out in the dark for more than fifteen years – until Serge fell ill. Then, on his death-bed, Serge had said to his son: ‘I’m going down to Hell, Aramon. I feel it. And it’s because of that. So you . . . you’d better find a different path now. The mas is yours, and most of the land. Marry some girl. Let Audrun build her own little place. Or your life will go wrong. Do it before it’s too late.’
Do it before it’s too late.
Aramon went down to Ruasse (to the other Ruasse that tourists seldom liked to think about) and picked up an olive-skinned whore called Fatima, and fucked her twice a week in her secretive attic room where chiffon scarves were draped over the lampshades and the air was perfumed with body oils and incense.
But what Aramon Lunel did with Fatima never made him black out.
It was never the same as it had been. And then Fatima died. Someone killed her with a knife, there in her hot little scented room, they split her open from her breast bone to her pelvis, and she was taken away, wrapped in plastic sheeting, to the morgue.
Aramon was led into the police station and questioned. (They called it questioning but there didn’t seem to be any audible question marks on the ends of sentences.)
You killed this girl.
You stabbed this whore. Fatima. You cut her open.
He told them he wouldn’t have bothered to kill her. She didn’t mean that much to him. With her, he’d never blacked out.
Blacked out.
This could explain it, then: your loss of memory.
You killed the whore. Then, you blacked out.
The ‘questioners’ were just stupid, ordinary policemen. How could the intensity of what he’d once felt be explained to people like them? All he kept saying was: ‘She’s of no account to me. Fatima. I probably never even called her by her name.’ And after a long and weary while, after days in police custody, they found another man and accused him of the murder and left Aramon alone. They told him he was ‘walking free’. But he knew what they did not know, that after what had happened for fifteen years, he would never be free.
There were a lot of family tombs in the cemetery at La Callune. The little graveyard was almost full up. Some of the dead were labelled Heroes of the Resistance, carved in stone. Not Serge, of course. He’d guarded trains and stretches of railway line against Résistance saboteurs. But quite a few of the others. Yet, whenever Aramon went to the graveyard, he found himself alone and it was as though Serge had somehow arranged this, so that the two of them could talk (well, he thought of it as a conversation, even though he knew it was a monologue) and not be overheard by other people visiting their departed relations. ‘These villages are full of spies,’ Serge had once said to him. ‘You can’t trust a single soul. Only the family.’
Now, Aramon told Serge that he was confused. He was going to get a pile of money in return for the mas and the land. Four hundred and seventy-five thousand euros! Nearly three million francs! More money than had ever existed in generations of Lunels. But he didn’t know where – when he had all this cash in his hands – he was going to go.
‘Where should I go?’ he asked. ‘Where?’
He longed for Serge to answer. Serge Lunel had been a survivor. Always, this survival had been a close-run thing. He’d narrowly escaped slaughter by the German army in the Ardennes. He’d survived Renée’s death by marrying Bernadette. He’d managed to avoid being sent to work in Germany with the S.T.O. by agreeing to a night-time job in Ruasse, guarding trains. And the things that came later: he’d survived his own guilt by making his son his accomplice.
Aramon stared out at the heavy-shouldered tombs. Everything, he thought, weighs so much in this place. The earth. The houses (for the living and for the dead). The canisters of this or that poison you have to carry on your back. The boulders in the path of the river. The thunderclouds filled with rain . . .
He drank because of the weight of things. More and more, the alcohol was making him ill, he knew this, but he couldn’t find any substitute, any other way of sliding out from underneath the slab of memories that tried to crush him, crush him with guilt and with love that he could never express.
Often, in his reveries, he was a boy again and Audrun was a little girl, jumping in the dusty courtyard with her skipping rope, with the sun shining on her brown hair. Together, they fed the chickens and the family pig. After heavy rain, they were sent out together, hand in hand, with identical tin buckets, to collect snails.
Sometimes, when they were picking snails near the river and their rubber boots were larded with moist earth and the wet weeds and rushes brushed against their legs, he asked to see her scar, where the surgeons had chopped off her pig’s tail, and she lifted her pinafore-dress and showed him her little round tummy, and he stroked it and said he was sorry about teasing her and pretending she’d been the daughter of an SS man. And she said it was all right, she couldn’t remember anything about that. And he’d give her some of his snails, so that Bernadette would be proud of her and say: ‘Well done, ma chérie. You found more than your brother.’
And, at other times, after warm days in April and early May, they stood together in the fields of cherry blossom at dusk, listening out for nightingales, and the white blossom became luminous in the fading light and one evening, when Audrun was still a child, but growing in beauty, beginning to resemble her mother and her dead aunt Renée, Aramon broke off a little branch of it and tucked it behind her ear, and she looked up at him and said: ‘Now I’m a princess. Am I?’
Take me there.
That’s what Aramon wanted to say to Serge. ‘That’s the place I want to go. Please, oh please take me there: to the field of white blossom.’
But the dead never responded to any living plea. They could, it seemed, arrange a confidential hour, but then when you whispered your longings to them and asked them to help you, they fell back to being inert and useless: just brittle branches, bare twigs, dust.
Aramon walked slowly, painfully back to the Mas Lunel. His feet hurt all the time. There was an ache in his hip. His gut churned with some kind of distress that wasn’t quite hunger and wasn’t quite sickness, but a mortal unease he couldn’t identify. And he wondered whether, when he’d got his great wad of money in exchange for the mas, he wouldn’t go in search of some hospital or rest-home and pay them to take him in and take care of him. Were there such places, where you could just walk in the door and be led by the hand to some small but clean room? People said that, in this modern world, everything you could think of existed, provided yo
u could pay for it, so perhaps these existed too? Sanctuaries.
It was the time of year for olive-pruning – before the summer truly arrived.
Veronica and Kitty had been to a seminar in Ruasse on how this was supposed to be done. You cut back the growth only every second year and, when you did, you had to let the foliage have air; you had to keep in your mind an imaginary bird flying into the tree and out again the other side without pausing in its flight.
The olive grove at Les Glaniques had more than twenty trees, so Anthony had agreed to help with the pruning. He enjoyed repetitive tasks. They calmed his mind. And the feel of the secateurs in his hand reminded him of pruning roses with Lal: the bright sound of the cut, the consoling idea that you were making the plant strong, the unexpected warmth of spring sunshine on your face . . . So he felt happy as he worked. Kitty was satisfactorily far away, Veronica within easy call. There were no clouds above them.
The vivid birdsong reminded Anthony of Lal’s garden, too: of a time when the mistle thrush was a common sight, when scarlet-breasted bullfinches snickered in the hedges, when you could hear woodpeckers – those determined amateurs of DIY – tapping at tree trunks in the orchard and pheasants squawking in the spinney.
And he thought that here was another reason to leave England: even as people and property crowded in there, so nature was withdrawing her riches. It was as though the land had tired of the way its variety and complexity kept being ignored by man, and had decided to brand itself with just the few, dull species everybody would recognise. Fifty years from now, there would be only blackbirds and gulls and stinging-nettles and grass.
The beautiful olive branches massed around Anthony’s feet. Loving France, he thought as he looked down at them, was going to be easy for him.
His mobile rang and it was Madame Besson telling him she had another house for him to see near Ruasse. It had just come onto the market.
Anthony heard himself let out an audible sigh. He knew that he couldn’t bear another disappointment so soon after the visit to the Mas Lunel. To have been so near to something beautiful and yet so far from it had enraged him.