by Unknown
Veronica’s arms were folded under her breasts. Now, she appeared to tighten her grip on herself, hugging the white robe to her, clutching her forearms with her big, workaday hands. She hung her head.
Kitty waited, but Veronica said nothing.
‘I’ve been wondering where,’ said Kitty. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter much. The world’s huge and I haven’t seen much of it. Only Norfolk and London. So it’s probably time I did . . .’
‘It can’t be other than it is,’ said Veronica, cutting Kitty off. ‘Of course it’s not fair on you, the way I am. But I can’t be any different. Each of us has the past we have.’
Kitty wanted to say, Yes, sure, we each have our own history. But we can choose to leave it behind – as I did. We can choose to go forwards and be free.
But Veronica went on talking, not looking at Kitty, but looking at the ground and the fallen cherry leaves. ‘In the school holidays sometimes,’ she said, ‘we went to stay with our cousins in Sussex and they had a huge garden and they knew lots of other children and they’d all get invited over, and we’d make up teams for games, like cricket and rounders. And you’d have to stand in line, waiting to be picked, and what you prayed was that you were going to hear your name early on and then you could feel all proud about belonging to your new team.
‘I was OK because everyone knew I was sporty and all that, but Anthony was never picked. He was always the last one. He was always left there on his own. I can still see it. His bandy little legs. This kid left there by himself because no one wanted him in their team. And I understood it somehow way back then, that I was the only person standing between Anthony and some colossal . . . tragedy. And I swore. I swore I’d never let go. And I never have. So that’s just what is and I’ve got nothing more to add.’
Veronica didn’t wait for Kitty to speak, sensing no doubt that Kitty was unmoved by the story she’d just told. She turned round and walked away.
Kitty held on to her tea mug. Watched Veronica until she disappeared inside the French windows of the salon. Then she began spinning a globe clockwise in her mind: Morocco . . . Egypt . . . Sri Lanka . . . Thailand . . . Australia . . .
She thought about the vibrant life in these places and how she would go there and become part of it and try to paint the things she saw. She wished, though, that she could just arrive somewhere – at some still lakeside jetty, at some clean, inexhaustible expanse of desert – without the lonely torment of the journey.
Aramon bought the newspaper every day now.
Some days, there were photographs of police searching the scrub. Some days, there was nothing about the Verey case – as though it had already been forgotten. Then, the headlines would come creeping back: VEREY: still no clues. MISSING ENGLISHMAN: police appeal for witnesses.
All the time, Aramon listened out for a siren, for the arrival of the police.
In the hot nights, sometimes, he believed he could hear the police car coming slowly up the pitted driveway and then stopping at a little distance from the house. He’d hurl himself out of bed and flatten his face to the window, and squint through the half-open shutters. He knew the shape of every shadow the moonlight cast on the terraces. His eye tried to identify each one, with his heart beating like an approaching train, while he held his breath, waiting for the dogs to begin barking. But the dogs stayed silent.
In his dreams, Serge beat him for his neglect of the dogs. His back and his arse were skinned alive.
He went out early one morning, before the heat came, and opened the gate of the pound and let the dogs out to forage among the holm oaks. Then he began raking up the stinking earth inside the pound. He tied a handkerchief round his face. He trawled all the mess towards him and shovelled it, load by load, into a wheelbarrow and tipped it out into the scrub, scattering it over the dry earth, for the flies and dung-beetles to find.
Then he went down to the lean-to behind the barn where bales of straw were piled up. He knifed open a new bale and began tearing at the straw to load it into the barrow. He felt exhausted. The handkerchief on his face was soaking wet and he tore it off and threw it down. The sun was climbing the hills on the other side of the valley. Get it done, Aramon told himself. Spread the straw, fill the water trough, whistle for the dogs, pen them in. Take a drink of pastis to calm your heart. Then sleep . . .
He piled up the straw and pushed the barrow back to the pound. He wheeled it in and tipped the straw out and took up his pitchfork, to begin spreading it around over the newly raked earth. Then he felt the sun’s heat strike him and he paused in his work. As he straightened up, his eye fell on something glinting in the soil in the far corner of the pound.
He stood the fork against the barrow and walked over to where the object lay. He bent down. He reached out and picked up a set of car keys.
The things that had to be done then . . . they made Aramon faint with terror.
He knelt in the pound, clutching the keys, smelling the clean straw, wishing he had the life of a dog, blameless and uncomplicated. From his afflicted lungs came an agonised keening sound, barely human.
He left everything the way it was, his task unfinished, the water trough unfilled, the gate of the pound open, the dogs loose among the oaks, sniffing for the scent of wild boar.
He looked in the direction of Audrun’s bungalow. He could see his own washing on her drying line, everything still in shadow down there, and motionless, with no wind to move it. He dreaded seeing Audrun standing there, watching him. And he thought, If I postpone the things I’ve got to do, she’ll arrive and find me and she’ll see whatever is in the car and then everything will be lost.
He made his way to the barn. His walk was limping and crabbed, as though he were trying to dodge his own shadow. He held the keys bunched in his hand, so tightly they dug into his palm.
He inched the old barn doors open and went in and it was cold in the barn and the sweat on him seemed to turn to ice. He stared at the car, draped in its sacking, piled up with crates and boxes. He felt unable to move.
Suppose it really was there, the body of Anthony Verey, rotting in the hired car?
Aramon wanted to cling to something. Almost wished he could die right there, just fall onto the floor of the barn and cease to be. Because this thing had come into his life and blighted it. It had no name. There was no name he could give it because he didn’t know what it was that he’d done.
To make himself move towards the car, he had to imagine that Serge was behind him, Serge with his belt, whipping him on.
Go on, boy. Go on and open the door . . .
He pressed the lock release button on the key fob. Lights flashed on the car.
Now you’ll see what’s waiting for you, waiting in the darkness . . .
He did it in one movement, reaching out and grabbing the handle and pulling the door, dislodging an empty apple crate, which crashed down beside him.
Immediately, it leapt at him, a foul stench in the car, and he cried out and slammed the door shut again.
He stood there, with his eyes closed, his breathing so fast and laboured that his chest burned with pain. To his dead father, he whispered, ‘Take it away. Take it away from me . . .’
Then he heard a movement at the barn door: a scuffling and whimpering.
And he knew that some of the dogs had followed his scent and found him. And so an idea came to him: let the dogs find it. Let the starving dogs feast their eyes on it, let them tear it apart and eat it up . . . and then it will be gone and I’ll never have to see it . . .
With his back turned to it, Aramon opened the car door again, opened it wide and then began calling to the dogs and they whimpered in response.
He shuffled to the door as fast as he could and opened it and they came bounding into the barn, three dogs, and clawed at him and he pushed them towards the car, knowing that smell was the sense that powered all their actions and that they would go straight to it, to that stench, and begin whatever it was their animal brains commanded them to do.
He went back to the open door, taking gulps of the fresh air. He heard the dogs’ claws clattering and sliding on the bodywork on the car. One of them began barking. Then they were quiet and he knew they were in the car now, following the smell, and he waited for the frenzy to start.
Time seemed to stretch and tease Aramon. Outside, cicadas and bees were stirred from sleep as the sun warmed them. A buzzard turned in the blue sky. That’s the world, the real world, thought Aramon longingly, and the black car is not part of it, but only part of some dark nightmare that I can’t understand.
He sat at his kitchen table, gulping pastis.
There had been no dead body in the car.
The stench that had momentarily filled the air had come from a half-eaten and now putrid Camembert and tomato sandwich, which even the dogs had left alone.
Aramon had made himself open the car boot, but there had been nothing in the boot except a pair of binoculars and a floppy hat and an insulated bag containing a bottle of water. He closed and locked the car, with the sandwich still inside, because he couldn’t bear to touch it. He called to the three dogs and walked out with them into the sunshine, with the car keys in his pocket.
Now, what occupied his mind as he gulped his pastis was how to make the car disappear.
He’d seen plenty of old films on TV where people succeeded in pushing cars off cliff tops, in setting fire to them, or drowning them in a lake. But, they were always found in the end. There was always some charred or broken version of the car which came to light. Those movie scenes were exciting precisely because you knew that, no matter what the murderers did, the cars would be found.
Murderers.
Was he one of them?
Aramon knew that trying to get rid of the car was beyond him. He was too weak, too ill, to contemplate any kind of action in regard to it. He knew that it’d just sit there in the barn. It wouldn’t move from there. He’d pile straw over it, to mask it from sight. He’d put a strong padlock on the barn doors. That was the best he could do.
He climbed his stairs, unsteady after the pastis. He went into the room which had once been Audrun’s room, and which neither he nor she ever visited. The shutters were closed and the room felt cold. Aramon took the car keys out of his pocket and stuffed them away under Audrun’s mattress.
Audrun began measuring the river levels.
She went out at first light, when the valley was still deep in shadow.
She didn’t need a notched stick or a knotted rope; she measured with her eye. She remembered Raoul Molezon once telling her: ‘The wind sucks up the water. The mistral especially. It’s thirsty for the river.’ Audrun’s heart galloped to see how fast the river was going down.
She watched the TV weather forecasts. She saw the temperatures indicated in red: 38°, 39°, 41° . . . The kind of heat in which people died. They suffocated in airless apartments, or contracted sunstroke, or expired from dehydration, or were burned alive in forest fires, trying to rescue their animals or their possessions. No end in sight to the heatwave, said the forecasters. No respite from water shortage, despite the wet spring. All leave for the region’s fire-fighters cancelled, the canadair planes put on twenty-four-hour alert. Infernos feared in the Cévennes.
Infernos feared.
For fifteen years – until it ended, until Serge ended it by dying – there had been an inferno inside Audrun. Fifteen years. Her youth burned away inside her, in agony, with no one to tell, no one to come to the rescue. Not even Raoul Molezon. Because how could she tell him – tell any man – about that shame, that branding? She couldn’t. Not even when Raoul came to meet her outside the rayon factory that day, came courting her in fact, buying that glass of sirop de pêche while he drank his beer and told her she was beautiful. She felt that she loved him, but she was too disgraced and shamed by what she’d done to risk showing him what was in her heart.
Put the girdle on, Audrun.
So sweet it is, that bit of your pussy I can see underneath it.
See what it does to me? See?
Your brother’s the same. Big as a snake, he gets. Eh?
We can’t help it. It’s your fault for being who you are.
She thought Raoul loved her. On that day, he seemed to caress her with his tender brown eyes. She longed to reach out and touch his hair, his mouth. But she knew it was impossible. Everything was impossible and so she had to say it: ‘Don’t come to meet me again, Raoul. It’s better if you don’t.’
And he’d looked so sad, it was unbearable.
It’s your fault for being who you are.
A car stopped outside her gate. She stood at the window of her kitchen, peeling white onions for her supper, watching.
Two middle-aged strangers got out and looked all around them. Then the man began walking towards her door, while the woman hung back, as though embarrassed or afraid.
Audrun rinsed her hands and took off her flowered overall and smoothed her skirt and went to the door very calmly, and the man stared at her; an agitated kind of look.
‘Can I help you, Monsieur?’ she said.
He was a foreigner. He spoke French, but with some ugly accent or other. He said he’d been told by agents in Ruasse that there was a mas for sale beyond La Callune – the Mas Lunel – but the agents wouldn’t bring him here, because apparently the vendor had changed his mind, so he . . . he and his wife . . . had decided to drive up and take a look for themselves . . . just in case . . .
Audrun stared at the foreigners. There was something about the man, a kind of worn and lean look, which reminded her of Verey.
She smiled at him. ‘The Mas Lunel belongs to me,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘We were told there was a Monsieur—’
‘My brother,’ said Audrun. ‘He works the land. It suits me to let him live up there. I prefer my small modern house, you see.’
‘Yes, I see. But is the mas still for sale? We love the proportions of it, the outlook . . . Our name is Wilson. This is my wife . . .’
The anxious woman stepped forward and held out her hand and Audrun took it. Then she said sweetly: ‘My situation has changed. This happens unexpectedly in life, n’est-ce pas? So I’ve decided not to sell. The house has been in my family for three generations. So now I’m going to restore it. Perhaps I’ll end my days there? Who can say?’
They looked crestfallen. They asked if she could be persuaded to change her mind.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Other things have changed, but my mind will not change.’
They both turned and stared longingly at the mas and Audrun could see it in their eyes, a will to possess it. They said they’d been looking at houses in this part of France for a long time and tomorrow they were leaving for England . . .
Audrun contemplated their ordinariness. She wondered how these colourless, mute people had made so much money that they could waltz down to the Cévennes and buy themselves a second home. And she thought, I don’t know how money is made. I’ve never known. All Bernadette had was what we grew on the terraces or what we could exchange for the things we grew; all I had was what I earned in the underwear factory, and all I have now is my little state pension – that, and what I can grow in the potager.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Nothing here is for sale.’
The Wilsons drove away. The moment they’d gone, Audrun saw Aramon limping down the drive towards her. He looked like a scarecrow, with his trousers held up at the waist by a piece of string and his hair dirty and wild.
‘Who were those people?’ he asked. ‘What did they want?’
Audrun looked away from him. She knew she could make him sweat by saying they were friends of Verey’s, but at that moment Marianne Viala appeared at Audrun’s gate.
Marianne kissed Audrun. Then she turned to Aramon and said: ‘You don’t look well, mon ami.’
‘I’m not well,’ he said. ‘Something’s poisoning me. I may have to go to the hospital.’
‘You should go,’ said Mari
anne. ‘And you shouldn’t drink, Aramon, if your stomach’s not right . . .’
‘Who were those people?’ shouted Aramon again. ‘Tell me who they were.’
‘Foreigners,’ Audrun said. ‘They just stopped to ask the way.’
‘The way to where?’
‘To Ruasse.’
‘Ruasse? Their car was facing in the wrong direction.’
‘Yes,’ said Audrun. ‘I set them on the right road.’
He stood there, twisted up with fear. At the corner of his mouth was a fleck of white foam. Marianne Viala looked at Audrun questioningly, then reached out and laid a hand on Aramon’s arm.
‘You should take better care of yourself, Aramon,’ she said. ‘But listen, I’ve got a favour to ask you.’
Aramon’s eyes darted left and right, left and right, and Audrun knew what thought those darting eyes hid: Don’t ask me favours. I’m too ill, too tired, too frightened, to grant them.
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Well?’
‘Jeanne wants to bring her class up here tomorrow, after they’ve visited the Museum of Cévenol Silk Production at Ruasse. She’s bringing packed lunches for the kids and she wants a nice shady spot for their picnic, so I thought about your lower terraces – if you didn’t mind them on your land. It’s only a small class and—’
‘On my land?’ he said. ‘Where, on my land?’
‘I said: on your lowest terrace, the grassy plateau below the vines . . .’
‘I can’t have kids poking about on my property. I told you, I’m not well. I can’t have the worry of it.’
‘They won’t “poke about”. They’re just going to eat a picnic.’
‘Kids. I can’t endure that . . .’
‘You can have the picnic on the other side of the road,’ said Audrun quietly. ‘On my land. Near the wood.’