by Unknown
In my mind, I have, Kitty wanted to say. In my mind, I was there. I killed him. I sent his car flying off the corniche. I saw it break apart hundreds of feet below. I saw his blood on the stones.
‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘I was miles away.’
When the police left, Veronica lit a cigarette and said: ‘Well, I guess all we do is wait, now.’
The heat was rising on the terrace. The geraniums were beginning to look parched.
Kitty thought, I’m waiting too. I’m waiting for you to remember what happened to me in Béziers. I’m waiting for your eyes to fall on me.
She got up and took the cigarette out of Veronica’s hand and stubbed it out, and without saying anything led her to the bedroom. She could feel her beginning to resist, to protest, but she, Kitty was determined; she wanted love. No words would do. In fact, she no longer hoped for any words; she needed only speechless desire. And she felt that all the future – hers and Veronica’s together – would be determined by what followed in the next few moments.
He told himself that perhaps it was the heat, or the exhausting task of the vine clearance, or both of these, but Aramon’s gut was now so devoured by pain that sometimes he had to get down on his knees and then lie curled up on the ground – in the position of a damned foetus – to help the spasm pass. No day went by free of this agony.
His appetite had gone. Sweet things he could bear to suck on – a spoonful of jam, a square of chocolate – and then sit still and wait for the fix of sugar to get into his blood, but even bread, turning to mush in his mouth, made him gag. And the thought of eating meat was now horrifying to him, as if the flesh laid out at the boucherie might have been human . . .
‘What can I get you, Aramon?’ Marcel, the butcher at La Callune, would ask him. ‘A bit of veal? Some nice merguez?’
Even the smell in Marcel’s shop Aramon found disgusting.
‘Nothing for me, my friend . . .’ Aramon mumbled. ‘Just some bones – for the dogs.’
And then, as he left the shop, he’d hear Marcel talking to other customers about him: ‘Lunel’s not himself, pardi. Is he?’
He sat at his table, sipping sirop de menthe and smoking. He wondered whether a cancer was developing in his stomach. He even wondered whether he’d been poisoned. Because this could happen in the modern world. Toxic microbes could enter the food chain or the water supply. You could die slowly, a bit more each day, and never know why.
Other symptoms began to torment him. Sudden dizziness. Everything clawing itself towards darkness. One minute he’d be standing there out in the heat with birds and insects alive all round him, and the next second he was somewhere else – lying by a stone wall, or face down in the earth, with the world gone dumb and the shadows cast by trees falling where they never normally fell.
These strange gaps in the sequence of time . . . he allowed them to remind him of that long-ago era when the things his body did made him black out and Serge would come and slap him alive again, and help him or even carry him to his own bed. He knew there was no connection between the one and the other. Those moments had been willed. He’d opened a door and gone in and the going in had overwhelmed him like nothing else in his life. But none of what was happening to him now was willed. Aramon could see clearly that the episodes that blighted his sister’s life since that time were now advancing on him.
He considered going down to see the doctor. But the idea of the doctor – eyes staring into his mouth, hands palpating his stomach – made him feel weak. And he knew that if the doctor had bad news for him he wouldn’t know how to conduct himself.
He woke up very early one morning to hear the dogs crying like wolves.
He tugged on his old work clothes and his boots and took his twelve-bore shotgun out of the rack by the door and picked up his cartridge bag and went out. And when the hounds saw him they began clawing in a frenzy at the mesh of the pound.
Aramon reached for two cartridges from the bag and broke the gun to put the cartridges in and saw that there were two spent cartridges in the barrels. Though he kept walking towards the dog pound, his brain jammed itself here, where these cartridges were. He knew that never in his life had he put his shotgun away with two spent cartridges in the barrels.
He opened the gate of the pound and went in, and the stink inside it was so bad it made him retch, and he spat yellow phlegm into the dust. His first thought was that his own condition, his own sickness, had made him less tolerant of the stench of the dog enclosure, but then he looked around him and saw that at the back of the pound was a hound lying dead there in the morning shade, with some of its flesh torn away and flies beginning to settle on two or three blood-stained wounds.
Aramon stood still and stared at this. Then he began to take in the state of the pound and he saw that it was filthy, with excrement everywhere, and that the water troughs were dry and he asked himself when he’d last come here with a bag of bones or even watered the animals. But he couldn’t remember.
The dogs were jumping up and clawing at his legs, his groin. He saw in their mouths the foam of thirst. He pushed them away and went to the corpse and grabbed the stiff hind legs and began to drag it through the dust, still carrying his shotgun. Then he looked up and saw Audrun standing there, watching everything, and she held her flowered pinafore up to her face and said: ‘Mon dieu, Aramon, what a stink! What have you done?’
Done? What did she mean? He hadn’t done anything. It was only that caring for the dogs had . . . well . . . it had slipped his mind . . .
‘I’ve been out on the vine terraces,’ he said, ‘working like a savage. And now I’ve got some illness. I’ve been poisoned.’
‘Poisoned?’
‘I could have been. The way my gut hurts.’
‘Poisoned by what?’
‘Anything. These days, you don’t know what’s going to finish you off.’
‘Nonsense. You talk pure nonsense. Did you shoot the dog?’
‘No. Why would I kill a dog?’
‘Then it just died, did it? They’re all dying of starvation. Look at them!’
Pity for the creatures moved Aramon now. They were blameless. He’d fill their trough with water, drive down to Marcel’s for another heap of bones . . .
‘It’s not my fault,’ he said, ‘if something’s poisoning me. I need help. I told you weeks ago. I can’t manage things any more. One man alone . . . what can he do?’
He closed the gate of the pound and the dogs went crazy, clawing at the wire and braying, and Aramon thought: If Serge were alive, he’d flay me for mistreating the dogs. Then he remembered the cartridges in the gun and he was about to say something about this to Audrun, who was following him down towards the house, when she reached into the pocket of her overall and brought out a copy of Ruasse Libre and said: ‘Did you see this? I came to show you this.’
Aramon let the corpse of the dog fall. Dead things weighed so much; you couldn’t lug them far. And the earth was so dry, digging a grave for the animal would take all the strength he had. He turned to face his sister, breathing hard. She held out the newspaper.
‘What is it?’ said Aramon.
‘Look at this picture,’ she said.
He didn’t have his spectacles with him. He’d just flung on his clothes and picked up the gun. ‘I can’t see it,’ he said.
She’d folded the paper in half and she waved the page in front of his eyes. ‘Look!’ she said.
He stared at the blurred image. ‘Who is it?’ he said. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
She snatched it away and read: ‘ENGLISH TOURIST STILL MISSING. Police today renewed their search for Englishman, Anthony Verey, reported missing on Tuesday. Verey, 64, a British Art Dealer, was thought to have been driving his rented car—’
‘Verey?’ said Aramon. ‘Verey?’
‘Yes. Isn’t that the man—’
‘How could he be “missing”?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s the same man, isn’t it? The one who came here?’
Aramon hefted the gun over his shoulder, reached out for the newspaper. He held the picture very close to his face and slowly, very slowly, his eye focused on an eye. And there was something familiar about the eye, something which sent a shiver through him and he felt this shiver travel the length of his body and go down into his shoes.
‘Could be him,’ he said. ‘If you don’t know these hills, you can get lost in them . . .’
‘Strange though,’ said Audrun, ‘that he went missing the day he came back here. Don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s odd?’
The day he came back here.
Aramon lowered the picture and looked around him, not knowing what he was looking for, but knew that he had to keep looking and looking . . . as if there might be something there – in the devastated dog pound, or in the way the holm oaks moved in the hot wind – which would jog his faulty memory. ‘Came back here?’
‘Yes. On that day . . .’
‘What day?’ said Aramon.
‘Tuesday. The day he went missing.’
‘He never came back here.’
He saw his sister shake her head. Shake and shake, as though scolding a child.
‘You accuse me of being crazy,’ she said. ‘Now you’re losing your mind. I saw you, Aramon. I was ashamed of what a peasant you looked, in your dirty work clothes, next to that smartly dressed person.’
‘Saw me . . . ?’
Audrun began to walk away. ‘By the river,’ she said. ‘With Verey.’
‘When?’ he called, helplessly.
‘On Tuesday afternoon. That body stinks, by the way. You’d better bury it pretty fast.’
Aramon looked down at the dead hound. The wounds were in its neck and in its stomach. There were bite marks around them. The flies had returned and were crawling over them. And at his back, the other dogs were still crying and he knew he had to get water to them and he had to clean the pound and bring them food, because to have let animals suffer like this was a terrible thing . . .
‘Audrun,’ he said, ‘help me . . .’
But she just kept walking away.
He went in and telephoned Madame Besson. He told himself he wasn’t so stupid or made so dumb by pain that he couldn’t find a way to sort out at least some of the things that confused him. The phone was answered by Madame Besson’s daughter, who told him that her mother was out with a client.
‘Verey,’ said Aramon. ‘That Englishman they say has gone missing. He made one visit to my house, uhn? Not two. He made one visit.’
The daughter was silent. After a moment, she said: ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. You’ll have to check with my mother. And I think she has someone else who’s interested to see the mas.’
‘Yes?’
Aramon immediately felt his spirits lift. The huge sums of money promised by the sale entered his brain like music, like the old sweet jazz his father used to play when Bernadette was still living: 475,000 euro . . . 600,000 euro . . . The numbers jived and shimmered. 650,000 euro! Because, Jesus Christ, the house and its land was making him ill now. He was too weary to keep on shouldering such a burden. If it wasn’t lifted from him soon, he was going to die.
‘I’ll ask my mother to call you,’ said the daughter.
‘When?’ said Aramon.
‘When she gets in, this afternoon.’
Aramon rolled a cigarette and sat smoking it until the pain in his gut diminished a little. Then he went outside and began digging a grave for the dog. As he raised the pick and brought it crashing down into the earth, he felt the weight and the pain of it, all along his arms and through his shoulder blades.
Veronica lay in the dark.
She thought how strange it was that, when her brother was missing and might be dead, the night could be so quiet. She wanted the world to be out there in a blaze of official light, searching for him. She almost thought she heard him calling to her: Please help me, darling. I’m trapped. I’m dying . . .
This was so unbearable that Veronica got up and pulled on her robe and fastened it tightly round her, to cover the scent of sex she could smell on her own body. She went into the kitchen, and drank cold water from the tap, splashed it over her face, and stood there staring at nothing, dismayed by her own behaviour. For what had she done – in the face of the tragedy that seemed to be occurring – other than to call in the police and give them the facts and answer a few questions, and then just let herself go wild with Kitty in bed – the wildest she’d ever been. Jesus Christ! Why was human conduct often so shockingly inappropriate? Veronica thought of herself as ‘civilised’ – a civilised woman, known for her stoicism and her kindness. Now she saw that she was also no better than an animal.
It wasn’t that she needed to apologise to Kitty. Not at all. Kitty had played her erotic games with her every step of the way. What Veronica longed to be able to do was erase those hours altogether. They embarrassed and mortified her. She promised herself that she wouldn’t let Kitty touch her or even kiss her again until Anthony was found. She owed him this, at least. He was Lal’s flesh, Raymond Verey’s flesh, just as she was. She owed him – or his memory – a period of sexual abstinence.
Made calm by this decision, Veronica sat down at the kitchen table, pulled a pad and pen towards her and began to make notes.
What to do now? she wrote at the top of the page. Knowing that, really, there was nothing to be done except to wait for news, she also knew that she had to do something. She couldn’t just stay quietly as Les Glaniques with Kitty. The voice that cried to her Help me, help me, darling had to be heard.
Follow the trail, she wrote.
This felt right. She’d drive to Ruasse, see Madame Besson and get directions to the isolated house Anthony was supposed to be visiting.
She told herself that she, V, would know – somehow, she would know – whether Anthony had been there, or not. There would be some sign of his presence – or of his absence.
Verify, she wrote.
But, after visiting the house, where should she go?
Veronica found a map of the Cévennes and spread it out on the table and stared at the brown contour lines and the snaking yellow of the roads and the black dotted lines of the ramblers’ tracks. And she knew what these things represented: a wilderness – one of the last protected wildernesses in Europe. Anthony wasn’t the first person to go missing there. The Cévennes hid the bones of countless lost people. Some of these – or so Veronica had been told by Guy Sardi – were German infantrymen, shot by the Résistance in 1944 and buried in the scrub and never named.
The telephone rang at 8.15 and woke Veronica, who had gone to sleep with her head on the kitchen table, thinly cushioned by the map.
‘Veronica,’ said a loud English voice, ‘it’s Lloyd Palmer, calling from London. I just switched on the news and I’m in total shock.’
For a moment, Veronica couldn’t remember who Lloyd Palmer was. Then she recalled a few visits made long ago with Anthony to a house in Holland Park, dinner served by a butler, Palmer’s wife wearing the kind of huge diamonds that sent out little daggers of light from her throat. One time, on the way home with Veronica in a taxi, Anthony had told her that, in event of his death, Lloyd Palmer would be the sole executor of his estate.
‘I want to help,’ boomed Lloyd. ‘What a total nightmare. Tell me what I can do. Shall I fly over?’
Veronica waited before answering. This, she told herself, was what she would do in the coming days: consider everything suggested or offered, and then wait before answering.
‘Veronica, are you there?’ said Lloyd.
‘Yes,’ she said calmly, at last. ‘It’s good of you to call, Lloyd.’
‘He’s alive, isn’t he? The radio said he could be “lost” or stranded. They’ll find him, won’t they?’
Veronica looked up and saw Kitty at the kitchen door. She was naked. Veronica looked away. She turned her back on Kitty.
‘I don’t know if they’re going to find him,’ Veronica sa
id to Lloyd. ‘I just don’t know . . .’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Lloyd. ‘It’s unreal. I spoke to him just a few days ago. D’you think he crashed the car?’
Kitty didn’t leave. She stood there, puffy-eyed, barely awake, idly scratching her pubic hair. Veronica took the telephone and went out onto the terrace, where a hot sun was already falling. She closed the door behind her. A voice in her said: This is no one else’s business. Only mine. I’m the one responsible for everything and I’ll be the one to find my brother.
‘Lloyd,’ she said, ‘it’s no use asking me questions, really. I’m absolutely in the dark. Anthony left here in the car, on his way to see a house on Tuesday morning. I packed some water for him in a cold-bag. That’s all I can tell you for sure.’
‘He wasn’t a good driver, was he?’ said Lloyd. ‘He was always turning round to speak to you, if you were the passenger.’
Passenger.
This lit up a new thought in Veronica’s tired mind. Was it possible that Anthony had stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker, or to help someone apparently stranded on a lonely road, and had then been mugged for his wallet and his phone, and for the car itself? Because despite all his sophistication – the veneer he’d cultivated over the years – there was a vulnerability about Anthony which seeped through and which would instantly have been apparent to a stranger.
‘He wasn’t a good driver, no,’ said Veronica to Lloyd. ‘Or rather, no he isn’t a good driver. We can’t start talking about him in the past tense.’
‘Oh God, sorry, absolutely not!’ said Lloyd. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
Veronica ran a bath and lay in it, watching a spider perfecting its web in one corner of the bathroom ceiling.
Verification and abstinence. In these words appeared to lie some kind of appropriate resolve. Already, Veronica was preparing herself for the journey to Ruasse and beyond. She was only waiting for Madame Besson’s office to open at 9.00.
She heard Kitty come to the bathroom door, but Veronica had locked it. Kitty called softly: ‘I’ve brought you tea, darling.’