by Unknown
But later, when Veronica bumped into him coming out of the hotel cloakrooms, he took her arm and led her away from the party into the garden, where a fountain in the form of a curly-headed cupid pissed water into a lily pond.
‘I don’t love Caroline,’ he said. ‘I like her, but that’s not the same thing, as we all know very well.’
‘It may not matter,’ said Veronica. ‘It may all be all right in time. Think about arranged marriages. Sometimes, love happens later on . . .’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So I’ve heard. What a wise old thing you are.’
He seemed to be about to return to the wedding reception, but then he caught Veronica’s arm and held it in a painful grip as he said: ‘This morning, V, I woke up at five and I walked to Chelsea Bridge and I had a set of butchers’ weights in a Harrods bag and I began to put them into my pockets . . .’
‘What stopped you?’ Veronica asked. ‘The thought of wasting a bag from Harrods?’
‘I’m serious, V. I’m serious.’
‘So am I, Anthony. If you wanted to kill yourself, then what stopped you?’
‘Not what’, said Anthony, ‘but who. A boy. Sixteen or seventeen years old. On the way home from some all-nighter, reeking of everything. And he wasn’t even a beauty, but I didn’t care. We went to Battersea Park. There are still a few places there where you can’t be seen.’
‘And if the boy hadn’t come by?’
‘I don’t know. Because why go on? I couldn’t answer it and I still can’t. Why?’
In the night, Veronica woke Kitty and said: ‘I’ve been resisting this. But now I’m trying to face it. I think it’s just possible that Anthony committed suicide.’
‘Yes?’ said Kitty.
‘He considered it once before. Maybe more than once. Coming to France was his last throw at his life. I believe it was. And I think he may have understood – up at that lonely house – that it wasn’t going to work . . . that everything was over.’
Kitty stroked Veronica’s hair. Then she got out of bed and went to the chest of drawers where she kept her mannish underwear. She came back to the bed and held out a crumpled piece of cellophane.
‘I found this when I went back to the Mas Lunel,’ she said.
Veronica put her glasses on and squinted at the cellophane. ‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Sandwich wrapper,’ said Kitty. ‘Cheese and tomato. From La Bonne Baguette.’
‘So?’
‘I could be wrong,’ said Kitty, ‘but it’s the same flavour of sandwich that Anthony chose the first time we went there with Madame Besson. And I keep wondering . . . suppose he went back . . . to have another look at the mas . . .’
Veronica stared at the cellophane, turning it over and over in her hands. At last she said: ‘We could give this to forensics. But I don’t think Anthony went back there. In fact I know he wouldn’t have. He’d made up his mind about that place. He knew the bungalow ruined it. Perhaps he thought he’d found it for a moment – his paradise – but then he saw it for what it was: not paradise at all.’
Aramon began praying to his dead mother, Bernadette.
‘Help me!’ he cried out to her. ‘Help me, Maman . . .’
He knew she couldn’t hear him. Or, if she did hear him, if she did know what was in his heart and in his mind, then she wouldn’t give him any comfort, because she’d also know that he’d long ago put himself beyond her love.
But still he kept imagining her sweet face, calm and tender beside him. She was mending the holes in his own worn-out socks. She handled the darning needle as deftly as a high-class tailor. On her feet, she wore rubber boots, flecked with farmyard mud, to which little bits of damp grass still clung.
He began ransacking the house, looking for the keys to the hidden car.
The pain in his gut made him growl when he had to reach upwards to high shelves or the tops of armoires. He found ancient blankets, bitten to threads by moths. He found Serge’s fustian wartime coat with an S.T.O. badge still pinned to the lapel. He found a rolled map of the world, on which Europe looked large and Africa small. He found a selection of shoes and coat hangers and broken lampshades and torches. He knew these things were worthless, but something prevented him from lighting a bonfire and hurling them onto it. So he left them where they were, lying around on the floor in different rooms.
In the nights, he sweated. What he dreaded most was finding the keys.
He told Bernadette that yes, yes he knew he was capable of killing a man. Human life – his own included – hadn’t been that precious to him, not after Serge died and everything had had to change, not after what had been precious to him was denied him for ever.
In his dreams, he killed Verey. He didn’t know why this kept happening, but it did. He shot Verey in the gut. He saw his grey colon come bursting through the flesh of his stomach. Then he rolled the body in a blanket, or in Serge’s old coat with the S.T.O. badge still pinned to it, and chucked it in the car. The body was light, almost like the body of a boy.
But when Aramon woke up from these dreams, he still didn’t know the truth about what he’d done or not done. The first words on his lips in the mornings were to his dead mother: ‘Help me, Maman, help me . . .’
Then Madame Besson phoned.
‘Monsieur Lunel,’ she said brightly, ‘j’ai des très bonnes nouvelles: I have another English family who would like to come and visit the mas.’
Aramon was standing in the kitchen. Five empty pastis bottles adorned the table. On the floor were piles of old farming manuals, mousetraps, broken fishing rods, blackened roasting pans and stained crockery: all the detritus he’d tugged out of cupboards in his terrified search for the keys to the car in the barn. He stared at these objects, bent down and picked up a broken rod with an unsteady hand. Outside, he could hear the mistral tormenting the trees.
‘Yes?’ he forced himself to say.
‘Would today be convenient?’ said Madame Besson. ‘The clients are in my office with me now. A Monsieur and Madame Wilson. I could bring them up to the mas at about three o’clock this afternoon.’
Now, sweat began to pour down Aramon’s forehead and down the back of his neck. It was as though he’d forgotten all about trying to sell the mas, forgotten that more strangers could arrive to poke and pry into the house – and into the barn. And now he saw that he couldn’t possibly let anyone come here until he’d got rid of the car . . .
‘Monsieur Lunel,’ repeated Madame Besson, ‘tell me if today would be convenient? I have the Wilsons right here . . .’
‘No,’ said Aramon. ‘Not today. No, I can’t . . .’
He heard Madame Besson sniff with irritation. To stop her from suggesting a different day and to stop himself from agreeing to this different day, he pressed the rod across his shoulder – like you press a stick across the shoulders of a dog when you’re training it to stay or sit – and he blurted out: ‘I’ve been meaning to call you, Madame Besson. To tell you . . . I’m not well. I’m afraid that I can’t have anybody visiting me at the moment.’
‘Oh,’ said Madame Besson. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that . . .’
‘I’m confined to my bedroom. The doctor’s ordered me to stay there.’
‘Oh,’ said Madame Besson again, ‘well that is . . . very bad luck and I send you my sympathy. Nothing too serious, I hope?’
‘Well,’ said Aramon. ‘Nobody knows. Nobody seems to know . . .’
‘I see,’ said Madame Besson, then, without a pause, she went on, ‘But I must tell you, Monsieur Lunel, that if you want a sale, then I think you should let the Wilsons come today – or tomorrow, when you may be feeling better. They have to return to England on Friday but they are really very interested to see the house. From the pictures and details, they say it sounds exactly what they’ve been looking for and they’ve been looking for more than a year now, and also, I don’t think the price will be a problem for them, so if there is any way . . . I mean, I myself could conduct them on the tour of
the property. N’est-ce pas? I could explain about your illness. We would arrange to leave you in peace in your room . . .’
‘No,’ said Aramon. ‘No. Things have happened to me . . . You have to understand. We must set this all aside.’
‘Set it aside? What d’you mean by that?’
Aramon looked out of the window and saw yellow leaves flying in the wind, as though autumn were already arriving. He thought of them falling on his parents’ stone mausoleum and settling there.
‘Cancel the sale,’ he said. ‘I can’t go on with it at the moment.’
When Audrun came up to the house the next day, she told him he’d done right.
‘Your only hope,’ she said, ‘is to keep everybody away from here, Aramon. Barricade yourself in. Lie low. Wait till it’s all forgotten. All you need to do is get rid of the car.’
He told her he’d been searching for the car keys night and day. He said, ‘I swear, I go walking around the house, searching for them in my sleep . . . but I can’t find them.’
‘Did you look in the chest,’ asked Audrun, ‘where the old family papers are?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Aramon. ‘I don’t know where I looked and where I didn’t look.’
She took hold of his thin wrist and led him into the salon. She opened the shutters, closed against the midday heat, to let light into the room and she and Aramon knelt down by the chest, side by side.
Very quickly, they came across photographs of Bernadette, and Aramon’s agitation seemed to be stilled by looking at these. One black-and-white picture was of Bernadette leading on a rope the donkey who had eventually died in the byre. Both she and the donkey, Audrun noticed, looked skinny, almost starved, and she said to herself that that was the condition you had to bear in the hills of the Cévennes in the middle of the twentieth century: you had to endure hunger. And then she remembered that she herself had endured it as a child and that this had been all right, just part of each day, each week, each month, and it was only the things that had come later that had been unendurable.
After a few moments of lifting out bundles of letters and newspapers, Audrun said: ‘You know, we should really go through all these family papers properly. There could be important things in here.’
‘Important once maybe,’ said Aramon. ‘But everybody’s dead now. All the news is dead news . . .’
‘And the letters?’
Aramon rubbed his eyes. ‘Words,’ he said. ‘Just words.’
Audrun picked up a letter in Serge’s handwriting and read aloud: ‘My dearest wife, terrible bitter cold these nights and praying it may be kinder at La Callune for yourself and our beloved son, Aramon, and the little girl . . .’
‘Beloved son?’ said Aramon. ‘Did he say that?’
Audrun passed him the letter. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Look.’
He fumbled with his spectacles and began reading. He held himself very still. Audrun saw tears begin to slide down the furrows in his cheeks.
‘Aramon,’ she said gently. ‘When you die, who inherits the mas?’
‘You do,’ he said. ‘It’s the law. You’re my only next of kin left alive. So you get it all – if it’s not sold, and if you’re still breathing.’
He looked at her kneeling by his side, seeming not to mind that she could see his face all drenched with his sorrow. ‘Clean it up, you could,’ he said with a hint of a smile. ‘Eh, Audrun? Even get your old flame Molezon over to have a proper look at that crack. N’est-ce pas? If he can still haul his arse up a ladder.’
She nodded slowly.
Aramon put the letter from Serge aside, and began sifting through the papers remaining in the chest. Then he straightened up.
‘The keys aren’t in here,’ he said. ‘I would have remembered putting them in with all this family junk.’
Kitty lay in a hammock under a sickle moon. She stared up at this blade of moon and at the shrapnel of the stars scattered far and wide.
‘Heartless!’ her mother used to say, glancing up at the darkness above Cromer. ‘Never expect consolation from the night sky.’
Kitty made the hammock sway gently. Her head rested on a striped cushion and she’d covered her body with a thin blanket. The garden all around her was almost silent. Now and then, there was a scratch of sound from the cicadas and the scoop-owl let out its anxious exclamation: ‘Oh-ooo, oh-ooo!’ But the mistral had died down. The branches of the two cherry trees, where the hammock was suspended, didn’t move. No sound came from the house.
Kitty preferred to spend her nights out here now. It was all right to be alone, alone in the darkness, alone in her own little mind. Because she had to hang on to that. She had to hang on to being Kitty Meadows, fifty-eight years old, watercolorist, photographer, lover of women. She had to remind herself that she was, she existed, she would go forward into some kind of future, nobody had taken her life.
But she wanted to leave Les Glaniques. She now wanted to leave the place where she’d been happier than anywhere in her life. Leave before her life was taken. Because to be cast out as she was from Veronica’s love was killing her. Every day, Kitty felt smaller, more ugly, more useless. And she could envisage no end to this. Unless, by some miracle, Anthony Verey was returned to Les Glaniques, returned to his sister . . .
Kitty didn’t mind much where she went. She decided she would buy a plane ticket to some destination she’d never imagined visiting: Fiji, Mumbai, Cape Town, Havana, Nashville Tennessee . . . She lulled herself to sleep picturing these places, seeing Fijian war dances, hearing country songs.
But her sleep was strange, as though it didn’t quite happen except in short, vivid dreams, and when the sky grew light Kitty just felt surprised that a piece of time had passed without her noticing it.
She lay still in her hammock and looked out at the parched condition of the garden. Birds came down from their night roosts to peck for worms in the grass, but the grass was full of dust and on it was a carpeting of brown cherry leaves, already falling. The lavender flowers, where a few bees still came to search for nectar, had lost all their colour. Leaf-moth was attacking the bays and the laurels, making the leaves blister and curl. Oleander blooms withered and fell.
The well was almost dry. The mayors of all the surrounding villages had agreed together on a hose ban. Vegetables could be watered; nothing else. Not even the dying fruit trees.
‘The saddest thing,’ Kitty had said to Veronica, ‘would be to lose the apricots, wouldn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Veronica. ‘There’s only one sad thing. Nothing else feels important to me. Not even the garden.’
Kitty, for once, had pressed on. She’d evoked for Veronica their first summer at Les Glaniques, when they were still discovering what flourished and what died in the garden. And when the apricot trees fruited, they’d found they had the sweetest, most abundant crop they could ever have imagined. They gorged on the juicy, pink-blushed apricots. They made jam and pies and glazed tartlets. Feeding apricots to Kitty in bed, Veronica had said: ‘I can hardly remember a pre-apricot world, can you?’
But Veronica halted this retelling of past things. She put her hands up, as though trying to stop a moving train. She said she didn’t want to think about all that ‘normality’. She said she found any evocation of normality offensive. That was the word she used: offensive.
Then, she’d put her face in her hands. Staring at her bent head, Kitty had seen that her hair – the thick head of hair she usually kept clean and shiny – needed washing and she thought that washing Veronica’s hair for her might be a consoling thing and so she gently suggested it. But Veronica didn’t move.
‘My hair’s fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Kitty walked away. Gardening without Rain, she thought, hadn’t been a bad title for a book. But Kitty knew now that it was a book that would never be finished.
Kitty felt the hammock sway slightly. She looked out at the stand of oleanders, blemished by yellowing leaves, and saw them move and she thought, The ne
w misery in my life is like the mistral: it dies down at night and lets me encounter silk-weavers in Mumbai and wind-surfers on the Indian Ocean, and then back it comes with the morning. And there’s nothing to be done. The wind sucks away the last drops of moisture from the poor, parched garden . . .
It was still early. Not yet seven. But she heard the telephone ring in the house and held the hammock still, listening and waiting. Lately, the ringing of the telephone had felt to Kitty like the rampaging of a wildcat, something broken free of a cage, intent on damage.
Kitty wondered, should she leave today? Packing wouldn’t take long. She could just go her studio and parcel up some of the watercolours rejected by the gallery in Béziers, be careful to choose the best of these, to try to sell them somewhere when she ran short of money in her new destination. Then fill a small suitcase with clothes and shoes. Put in two photographs: one of Veronica and one of the house. So simple. And by tonight she could be in London or Paris, deciding on her future travel plans, imagining Veronica left to separateness and solitude, to the altered ‘normality’ she’d apparently chosen . . .
Now she saw Veronica, wearing her white cotton dressing gown, crossing the lawn, coming towards her, carrying a mug of tea, shading her eyes against the strengthening light in the sky. Kitty pushed back the blanket and swung her legs out of the hammock and jumped down from it. A sparrow was startled out of one of the cherry trees and flew away. Kitty stood waiting.
Veronica handed Kitty the tea.
‘He was at the Swiss house,’ she said. ‘They’ve got matching prints. So we know he was still alive at around lunchtime on that Tuesday.’
‘Yes?’ said Kitty, looking down at her tea.
‘But that’s all. It doesn’t get us any further.’
Kitty began to sip her tea. ‘What about the Mas Lunel?’ she asked. ‘Did you have the police check the sandwich wrapper I found?’
‘No,’ said Veronica. ‘I don’t know what I did with that bit of cellophane. I may have thrown it away.’
Kitty looked at her beloved friend. She thought, I’m no use to her any more. She’s tired of the things I say. They stood in silence as the sun crept to the roofline of the house and gleamed on a blue-black starling pecking at the chimney stack, and then Kitty said: ‘What I think is best is . . . if I go away.’