by Unknown
Aramon contented himself with shouting at Madame Besson, asking her why no more purchasers had been to see the house, telling her that a sale was imperative – imperative now, this month – before some idiot mayor began interfering with his rights . . . Madame Besson stayed calm and asked him about the status of his sister’s house. Was she leaving? Would the bungalow be included in the sale? If the bungalow could be included, she said, then the whole proposition would be very much easier to market . . .
Aramon rubbed his eyes.
‘Madame,’ he said, forcing himself to become polite, ‘I’m almost a hundred per cent sure that my sister will be persuaded to leave. Almost a hundred per cent certain. Unfortunately, the surveyor I employed wasn’t able to complete his report because my sister was taken ill while he was there. But I’m going to explain the situation again to her and I think when she understands it properly – particularly when I show her the article in Ruasse Libre which could jeopardise my future – she’ll definitely agree to leave.’
‘Well,’ said Madame Besson, ‘that would, of course, change the prospects for a fast sale.’
‘But what about the price?’ said Aramon. ‘What could we ask if the bungalow was sold with the mas?’
There was a pause, and Aramon heard the snicker of Madame Besson’s cigarette lighter close to the phone. Then, she said: ‘I’d need to look round the bungalow – and the land that goes with it. But you’d probably be talking about something close to 600,000 euro.’
600,000 euro!
The wonder in this sum. The salvation in it. For a moment or two, it left Aramon speechless.
‘But the other thing I’ve been thinking about,’ said Madame Besson, ‘are the vine terraces. I noticed the last time I was there that you hadn’t made much progress on these.’
‘I have made progress!’ protested Aramon. ‘I’m taking all that in hand . . .’
‘The thing is that people find it difficult to imagine what they can’t properly see.’
‘Yes,’ said Aramon. ‘I understand. I’m going to work night and day on the terraces. Night and day!’
It was almost eleven o’clock by the time Anthony picked up the keys and directions to the house from Madame Besson’s office. On Madame Besson’s desk, a white fan moved the tepid air in a feeble rotation. When she handed Anthony the badly printed photograph and the house description, she said: ‘This one, it is very isolated . . . vous voyez?’
It was a big stone building that looked dark and lightless in the landscape. On one side of it was a small plantation of umbrella pines, but elsewhere there appeared to be only scrub and stones. The heavy slate roof was lumpy and bowed between the gable ends.
‘It looks almost derelict . . .’ Anthony said.
‘Ah, non!’ snapped Madame Besson. ‘The owners are Swiss.’
‘So why are they selling?’
Madame Besson shrugged impatiently as her phone began ringing and she reached to answer it. ‘They told my daughter they don’t use it any more,’ she said. ‘That’s all I know.’
Anthony went out to his car, which had become burning hot in the space of ten or fifteen minutes. He sat with the door open, studying the map, and worked out that he had at least twenty miles to drive on a perilous corniche of a road. And he thought that this might be why the owners were giving up the house – because no one came to visit them any more; they didn’t want to risk their lives getting there.
Perhaps the Swiss couple had loved the place at first precisely for its mountainous isolation, and then . . . a few summers passed and they sat under the umbrella pines and looked out at the valley below and realised that they’d put themselves out of reach of all their friends. And, Anthony asked himself, was this what he really wanted to do? Because here, according to his reading of the road map, even the distance between him and Veronica at Les Glaniques would seem significant. And what would the night feel like in such a place? Or the winter?
He started the car and drove. He felt he had to see the house – just in case the feeling returned, that beautiful feeling of wanting to possess something. But now, suddenly, the route that lay ahead up the mountain made him feel afraid. What if he got lost up there, or the car broke down, or he misjudged a corner and crashed over the edge into the void?
Veronica had packed water for him in a cold-bag. She’d told him the barometer was rising and rising and the heat might suddenly be pitiless up where he was going and if he set off on a walk – which he’d told her he planned to do – he couldn’t be sure of finding a river or a spring.
Anthony now felt grateful for the water, for V’s unwavering motherliness. But it seemed to him that water wasn’t enough: he needed food too, to sustain him in case of an emergency, and he remembered the stall called La Bonne Baguette where they had stopped on their way to the Mas Lunel and bought sandwiches. He knew that he’d pass this before he crossed the river, near the village of La Callune, and decided he’d buy at least two sandwiches. With sandwiches and water, he’d be all right. These would be a kind of insurance against the unforeseen.
Here it came now, La Bonne Baguette, but Anthony quickly saw that the lay-by where Madame Besson had parked her car on the previous trip was entirely occupied by a tanker-truck. He swore. He was being tailgated by an impatient BMW driver and there was nowhere else to stop. In the ordinary way, he knew he would have resigned himself to being hungry later in the day and driven on, but, suddenly, he saw this getting of a sandwich as a vitally important thing. And there would be no other stall or small café on the road. These hills, as far as he could tell, were empty of every petty amenity. So he had to get back to La Bonne Baguette.
He slowed down. The BMW kept pulling out, trying to pass. Then Anthony came to a point where the road widened into a bend and provided a narrow hard shoulder of gravel for about a hundred yards, and he dinked the black Renault onto this and came to a noisy stop.
The BMW driver screamed at him as he sped away. Anthony returned the hand insult and climbed out of the car. He inched round it and began the trek back to the sandwich stall.
The sun glinted on rock and road. The narrow space in which he had to walk, between the granite face of the cutting and the oncoming cars, felt so perilously small that he could imagine his feet being run over. His heart was fluttering with panic, and sweat began to slide down the back of his neck, but the idea of going on without his sandwich had now become unthinkable. The sandwich had become the thing that would get him through this day, through whatever lay in wait for him. So he pressed himself close to the rock wall and trudged on. Motorists stared at him – an ageing tourist on foot in a place where nobody was intended to walk. But he didn’t care what people thought; he just wanted to get his hands on the sandwich.
And he was here at last. He recognised the stall-holder, a corpulent, tough-seeming man with a stubbled chin. He was chatting to the driver of the tanker-truck. The two men were old friends, it seemed. A joke made them suddenly crease up with laughter and the stall-holder wiped his mouth with a scarlet handkerchief as he turned to give his reluctant attention to Anthony.
‘Alors, Monsieur?’
Camembert and tomato, he’d chosen last time. He hadn’t wanted to risk ham or saucisson, in case these made him ill. (He knew he was fastidious to the point of neurosis, but who cared? He knew a woman who’d died from eating sushi, so why not from salami, improperly chilled?) He surveyed the selection of sandwiches, then pointed again at the Camembert.
‘Deux comme ça, s’il vous plaît, Monsieur.’
He saw the wide brown hand reach for the sandwiches, each in its cellophane wrapper inscribed La Bonne Baguette: que c’est bonne! And he saw his own hands shaking as he fumbled to pay for them.
Back in the car, Anthony turned the air-conditioning down to 16° and waited there for a moment or two, letting the Renault cool, letting his heart rate slow.
Then he set off again and quickly came across the sign to the narrow road that crossed one arm of the River Gard
on and branched away to the west, heading for high ground. The road soon enough began the zigzag indicated on the map and Anthony forced himself to stay calm as he steered the Renault into a slow waltz round the impossible turns. On either side of the road were dense firs, now, planted so closely together that nothing grew in the darkness underneath them and Anthony distracted himself from the perils of the road with a memory of these trees from his childhood.
Raymond and Lal and Anthony and Veronica had been driving in Raymond’s Rover to a lunch party near Newbury when Lal had caught sight of a Forestry Commission fir plantation and burst out: ‘Look at that! Raymond. Children. Just look what they’re doing: they’re farming trees now. Frightful! I think it’s absolutely frightful.’
‘It’s for building materials, darling,’ said Raymond. ‘For planks and stuff.’
‘I don’t care what it’s for. They shouldn’t farm trees like that. They never did in South Africa and we had plenty of planks.’
So then, there had been yet another thing for Anthony to worry about: Lal’s eyes alighting on farmed trees and her mood suddenly changing to crossness and snappiness and dislike for her adopted country, his only home.
He’d wanted to say something amusing, something that would diffuse her irritation, but he hadn’t been able to think up anything amusing and they’d driven on in silence until Veronica – unwisely as it turned out – ventured: ‘Ma, you can’t really use the word “farming” in relation to trees. They’re Douglas firs, Pseudotsuga menziesii, and they’re grown in plantations all over Europe.’ And Lal had lit a Peter Stuyvesant cigarette with the car lighter and, without turning round, had said quietly: ‘Veronica, why are you such an annoying, fat little know-all?’
A dreadful shriek of laughter had broken free from Anthony. He hadn’t meant to laugh, because it was terrible, what Lal had just said. Terrible. He’d put a hand to his mouth, as though trying to press the inappropriate laugh back into his throat. He hated himself for making such an awful sound and knew that V would be justified in hating him, too. He looked at Veronica, expecting to see her in tears. But she wasn’t in tears. She was just looking calmly out of her window at the passing countryside.
Now, as the road unravelled in the high Cévennes, narrowing, twisting, changing direction, its verges here and there littered with evidence of rock falls, Anthony found himself wishing – despite the cruel way his mother had crushed V, despite his inappropriate shriek of laughter – that he was thirteen years old again, driving along a softly undulating B-road in Berkshire, with all his life to come.
Veronica was enjoying her solitary day.
She’d bought calves’ liver and lardons at the boucherie and fresh bread from the boulangerie and potatoes, vegetables and fruit from her favourite roadside stall, and now all this was safely stowed in the kitchen and she was working on a section of Gardening without Rain entitled ‘Decorative Gravels’.
It was cool in her study, with the shutters half-closed against the morning sun, but Veronica could just hear and appreciate the sounds of the garden: the sparrows on the wall near the stone bird-bath, the cicadas in the Spanish mulberry outside her window, a tiny breeze rattling the palm fronds.
. . . the type of gravel most favoured for drives and walkways in southern France [she wrote] is a composite of sand and very small, rounded stones. Its colour is pleasing: it can appear almost white in very dry weather and darkens to a straw shade after rainfall. It is not much used in England, but in France it can be found in the Tuilerie Gardens in Paris and on boules pitches up and down the land.
She looked glumly at this last sentence and knew she had to get rid of ‘up and down the land’, a phrase so embarrassingly weak, it made her blush. Veronica was well aware that she wasn’t a very good writer, but she also knew that the kind of people who’d buy Gardening without Rain probably wouldn’t notice this. All they wanted was knowledge and tips and hard information. Yet she always struggled to make her prose as readable as possible, partly to please the publisher’s editor, a beauty called Melissa, with whom she was very mildly infatuated. Perhaps, also, she heard Lal’s voice somewhere in her head, telling her that her school essays were ‘miserably illiterate’ and that she’d never get on in the world if she couldn’t string proper sentences together.
But she had got on in the world. See me now, Mother. I am happy and I am quite successful . . . The stringing together of words – any incompetence she might have had in this area of endeavour – had turned out not to matter very much at all. Horticulture and colour and form – her understanding of these – had been what mattered.
She decided to ignore ‘up and down the land’ for the time being and wrote on:
Gravels, in general, play an important part in the creation of the drought-resistant garden. Where you might be tempted to sow a lawn – that thirsty entity! – think again, and create a gravel space. Consider, even, exotic gravels, such as the black volcanic gravel brought back from Tahiti by Bougainville in 1767. This is an expensive variety, but highly suited to the ‘modern’ look currently in favour in garden design, where surprising colours (blacks, greys and startling royal blues) can create the unforgettable.
Veronica paused. She felt, suddenly, that her work was going less than brilliantly this morning. ‘The unforgettable’, for instance, was pathetically wrong; it was just an abstraction hanging there on the end of the paragraph, like an over-ripe fig about to drop off onto Bougainville’s wretched Tahitian gravel! She knew that Melissa wouldn’t let ‘the unforgettable’ pass, but again, Veronica couldn’t immediately see how she could replace it with something more elegantly formed and firmly attached to the rest of the sentence.
She mused that it would have been very useful to have had Melissa there with her, lying on the cushion-strewn day-bed perhaps, so that she could read everything out to her, sentence by sentence and get from her immediately what she often referred to as ‘a titchy bit of editorial input, Veronica’. That way, the chapter on ‘Decorative Gravels’ would certainly have progressed quite far by the time Kitty returned the following day.
Veronica now looked up. Her gaze fell on the brass carriage clock (an expensive gift from Anthony) on her mantelpiece, and she saw that time had moved on in what felt like a sudden scamper and that it was just before one o’clock. Kitty had promised to call around eleven, to announce her safe arrival in Béziers, but no call had come.
Veronica picked up the phone and dialled Kitty’s mobile. The phone clicked straight to Kitty’s abrupt and slightly cross-sounding voicemail: ‘Kitty Meadows here. Leave a message please. Thank you. Veuillez laisser un message, s’il vous plaît. Merci.’
‘Kitty,’ said Veronica. ‘It’s me. Hope you’re all right, darling. Thinking of you and have my fingers crossed about the gallery. I’ve absolutely got a feeling that they’re going to say yes. Almost bought some champagne in the village, but thought this might be tempting fate. Anyway, all’s fine here. It’s very peaceful on my own and I’m working away on the “Gravels” chapter. Call me when you have a moment. Lots of love.’
She tried to get back to her writing. She began a sentence about the inadvisability of laying polythene membranes under gravelled spaces to control weeds. Before making a decision about this, she wrote, consider closely the attendant risk of water-logging or flooding during the crue season and the— Then she broke off, suddenly anguished by her failure to reach Kitty.
Kitty’s car was old and small. Yet even in this little car she had to drive almost crushed against the steering wheel so that her short legs could reach the pedals. She was a courageous driver, but this image of tiny Kitty buzzing and bumping along the autoroutes, in the jet stream of disdainful Audis and Mercedes, in the annihilating shadows of container trucks, always made Veronica’s heart lurch with terror.
She got up from her desk and went out onto the stone terrace. The sun was burning hot on her face and as she began a slow walk round the garden, still green from the wet winter and early spring, she kne
w that now it was coming back again, the time when much of what was growing here would be at risk once more from drought, that risk only lessened by her vigilance, hers and Kitty’s. She walked to the old stone well and peered down into it, holding tightly to the rim. She could see that the water level had already fallen.
Veronica ate a slice of tarte aux oignons and a salad for her lunch and attempted to return to her writing. She left two more messages for Kitty during the afternoon, but no call came in. She kept telling herself that if Kitty’s mobile was still putting out her voicemail, then it – and therefore Kitty – couldn’t have been mangled in a car crash.
She wanted the afternoon to pass – so that Anthony would come back and then at least her anxiety about Kitty could be shared with someone – but she also wanted it not to pass, wanted it not to get late, because then her reasons to be anxious would only multiply, hour upon hour.
She began to feel so paralysed by this conflict with time that she eventually found herself standing completely still in the middle of her kitchen, with no seeming inclination to move in any direction or assign herself any task. Without thinking about it, she started to cry. She knew this was a stupid thing to begin doing and yet, once indulged in, it felt oddly appropriate to the moment. She tore off a strip of kitchen paper and buried her face in this and noted that her tears were warm, almost hot, like blood is hot.
Now the telephone rang.
Veronica blew her nose and ran to it. She felt certain that it was going to be Kitty and already she saw how ridiculous she was, standing there with scalding tears blotching her cheeks for no real reason, and when she said ‘Hello’, she tried very hard to disguise the choke that was in her voice. But it wasn’t Kitty. It was Madame Besson.
‘Excuse me for disturbing you,’ said Madame Besson in English. ‘May I talk with Monsieur Verey?’
‘Monsieur Verey isn’t here,’ said Veronica.