by Unknown
‘History . . .’ says Verey. ‘This region is very full of history.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘You’re right, Monsieur. We have difficulty forgetting.’
For a few moments, there’s darkness now, a void.
Then, as if seen down a long, silent tunnel, Verey’s face stares mutely at Audrun, his blue eyes, his sunburnt lips. He shows no surprise. His mouth doesn’t open in a cry. It’s almost as though he’s already accepted what’s going to happen, as though he were just murmuring to himself: So this is it after all. This is the way it ends . . .
Verey falls backwards. Blood bursts around him and the crimson droplets hang there in the sunlit air. It’s almost beautiful.
Then he lies in the water, with only his legs sticking out onto the little beach of shingle. This sight fills Audrun’s field of vision. It enthrals her. It is, she thinks, a thing almost perfected.
She lays the gun aside and moves slowly towards the body. She bends down and extracts Verey’s car keys from the pocket of his trousers and places them carefully on a flat stone. The air all around her is suddenly silent.
Blood flows into the water; skeins of blood floating free and away in the bubbling torrent.
A thing perfected.
She takes off her overall and her skirt and blouse and her shoes. Then she modestly removes her nice white cotton underwear (not any hideous pink garment made of carbon disulphide from the old factory at Ruasse!) and walks naked into the river. All she wears are the green gloves. She pulls Verey’s body towards her. She swims on her back, holding him under his arms, as though saving his life.
Now, she’s swimming in the deep pool, where she played as a girl while Bernadette pounded her washing on the stones. The cold of it is sweet and pure. And she knows that in the depths of the pool – if you dare to dive down to where there’s almost no light, to where weeds like flat eels spring up from the river-bed – is a rock cavity, where, on very hot days, she would wedge a heavy ceramic jar, a jar made in the poteries of Anduze, a jar that was almost round but not quite.
Audrun takes a breath, submerges herself. She takes the body down with her, held in her arms. She reaches out to find the hollow in the rock.
As she jams Verey’s head into the cavity, hearing the skull crack as the rock scrapes it, as she binds the neck round and round with long fronds of weed and knots them and re-knots them, she remembers that, usually, there was lemonade in this jar, or sometimes sirop de menthe, but now and again, perhaps once or twice a year, for no reason that Audrun could determine, the jar was filled with cider. And when they drank it, all the world seemed sweet to them.
The child, Mélodie, lay in her room.
This isn’t my room, she thought. Not my real room. My room was in Paris. From my window, I could just see the tip of the Eiffel Tower. At midnight sometimes, I’d get out of bed to watch it prickling with light.
Her mother sat on the bed and held Mélodie’s hand. She told her that tomorrow she was going to be taken to see a counsellor and the counsellor would help her come to terms with what had happened to her at the river.
‘I don’t know what “come to terms” means,’ said Mélodie.
‘It means,’ said her mother, ‘that in time you’ll be able to forget it.’
‘No, I won’t,’ she said. ‘I’ll never be able to forget it.’
The counsellor was a calm, forty-year-old woman whose name was Lise.
Lise occupied a small room above a doctor’s surgery in Ruasse. She sat very still, with her hands held in her lap. In Lise’s presence, away from her mother and father, Mélodie felt that it was all right to be angry. She told Lise how she’d been taken away from what she called her ‘lovely life’ and stuck in this other life, which was disgusting, where you had to keep your eyes closed for most of the time because there were so many things in it that you didn’t want to see.
‘What things don’t you want to see?’ asked Lise.
‘Insects,’ said Mélodie.
‘Yes. What else?’
‘Everything,’ said the child. ‘Everything. I want to not see everything!’
Lise allowed a long silence to come into the room. At the window was a venetian blind and the sun, Mélodie noticed, fell in peculiar, jerky stripes onto the floor and she thought, This is all wrong, too. Nothing is how it’s meant to be in this place.
‘Mélodie,’ said Lise, when this silence was over, ‘do you sometimes see the man’s body in the river?’
‘It wasn’t a man,’ said Mélodie, ‘it was nothing.’
‘I think it was a man. A drowned man.’
‘No!’ screamed the child, ‘it was nothing! It was just a thing like a dead snake. It was all white and slimy. It was a gigantic silkworm!’
Mélodie began crying. She put her face in her hands.
Lise sat very still on her chair. She said gently: ‘That man you saw had been killed. Another man had shot him. People die in the world. It’s terrible but it’s what is and so we have to accept it. Sometimes they die violently, like that person died. But then, after that, they’re at peace, at rest. And he’s at rest now, the man you saw in the river. He’s absolutely at peace. And I’d like you to try to imagine that peace, Mélodie. How d’you think it might feel?’
She couldn’t answer. She thought words like ‘peace’ were meaningless.
Her own head was crammed with horror. It was so full of it, her skull was going to burst and then stuff would come out of it and slide down her neck or down her face and then the children in the school would stick their fingers into the stuff and run away and pretend to be sick.
Yuk! You’re disgusting, Mélodie!
Look at your head, Mélodie! You’ve got ca-ca coming out of your brain.
Lise leaned forward and gave Mélodie a tissue.
The little girl crumpled the tissue in her hand and threw it on the floor. She smeared her hands with her own tears and snot and held them up for Lise to see.
‘This is what everything looks like now,’ she said. ‘Like this merde.’
She refused to go to school.
She heard her parents whispering about this in the early evening.
‘It doesn’t really matter, at her age.’
‘It’s nearly the end of term anyway.’
‘By September, let’s pray she’s all right.’
She went to where they were standing, drinking wine in the kitchen whose walls were made of stone – drinking their wine as though nothing had happened. She ran at them and began beating at her father with her fists. The long-stemmed glass was jolted out of his hand and shattered on the tiled floor. Her mother tried to grab her, but she fought her off, fought them both with her fists and with her will, that could be as hard and black as the body of a scorpion.
‘Take me home!’ she screamed. ‘Take me home!’
‘Ma chérie,’ said her mother, ‘this is your home now . . .’
It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. It would never be her home. It would never protect her.
‘I want to go home, to my home!’ she cried louder, still trying to hit out at them with her fists and kick them and butt them with her head.
‘Mon dieu, Mélodie, that’s enough . . .’
It wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough. Not until she got it back: her room with its soft white carpet and its blue-and-white wallpaper, patterned with shepherdesses and fluffy blue sheep. And her walk to school, past the florist’s shop and the pâtisserie and the optometrist’s on the corner, to the school gates where her friends – her real friends – waited for her. Until then, until she got it all back, no matter what she did to punish her parents, it would never be enough.
Jeanne Viala arrived one afternoon.
Mélodie was lying on the sofa watching daytime TV, holding her Barbie doll to her top lip, letting the feel of Barbie’s silky hair against her skin soothe her into a kind of exhausted half-sleep. But when her mother showed Jeanne Viala into the room, the sight of her – of the o
ne person who cared about her in that school, the person who had carried her away from the river in her arms – she flung her doll away and got up and ran to her and pressed her head against Jeanne’s breast.
Jeanne’s arms went round her and held her close. The child’s mother slipped out of the room. Mélodie began crying, but it wasn’t the kind of crying which made her more and more angry; it was the kind that felt beneficial, like gulping some medicine you couldn’t describe. And then the child understood that Jeanne was crying too and that this was how they needed to remain, holding tight to each other and crying until they were unable to cry any more.
Eventually, Jeanne wiped Mélodie’s tears and her own, and they sat down on the sofa and Jeanne picked up the doll and smoothed its golden hair.
‘I came to ask,’ she said after a moment or two, ‘would you like to go with me to Avignon one day? It’s a big city. A beautiful city, with lots and lots of people, like Paris, and it isn’t very far away.’
Mélodie nodded. She hadn’t known any proper cities were nearby. She’d thought that what surrounded them for miles and miles beyond Ruasse were rocks and trees and rivers and flies.
‘I thought we could go to hear an afternoon concert,’ said Jeanne. ‘I know you used to play the violin – and you will again, because I’m going to find you a teacher. Do you think you’d like to go to a concert?’
‘Yes,’ said Mélodie.
‘Good. I’ll get some tickets. Then, after the concert, I thought . . . if you wanted to . . . we could find a nice café and go and have cakes and chocolate milkshakes. Just the two of us. You and me. If it’s OK with your parents. What d’you think?’
Mélodie reached over and took her doll out of Jeanne Viala’s hands and once again pressed Barbie’s golden hair against her top lip.
‘When can we go?’ she said. ‘Can we go tomorrow?’
On an October afternoon, Veronica stood in the graveyard of the Church of St Anne’s at Netherholt, Hampshire, holding Anthony’s ashes in a plastic urn.
It was one of those rare, sunlit days when the countryside of southern England seems to be the most beautiful place on earth. The graveyard was bordered by a dark yew hedge. Beyond this, to the east, was an old, majestic beech tree Veronica had known since childhood. Its leaves glinted amber in the brilliant light. Behind the church was a green meadow, where two bay horses were grazing.
Veronica was standing now beside two men she hardly knew: the vicar of Netherholt and Anthony’s friend and executor, Lloyd Palmer. The three of them were staring silently down at Lal Verey’s headstone, commissioned by Anthony.
Lavender Jane (Lal) Verey
Beloved mother
Born Johannesburg 1913 ∼ Died Hampshire 1977
At the foot of the slab which covered Lal’s grave was a small, freshly dug hole. Here, the remains of Anthony would be placed – deep down in the earth, not beside his mother, but resting at her feet.
This had been his wish, his will. But for a while, it had looked as though his will couldn’t be accommodated. The graveyard at Netherholt was full, Veronica had been informed. Her brother would have to go into the ‘overspill’ cemetery behind the village hall.
Overspill.
Veronica knew that Anthony wouldn’t care for this word, any more than he’d care to lie in the vicinity of the Netherholt village hall, a low, brick building which was host to drunken weddings, children’s tea parties, Bingo nights, amateur dramatics and (it had been known to happen) illegal raves. Anthony wanted to be near Lal – as near as it was possible to be – and that was that.
Lloyd had saved the day. ‘I’ll sort it,’ he’d told Veronica blithely. ‘The Church of England loves to make a ding-dong about everything, but the only thing to remember when they do is that all their little parishes are practically bankrupt. Leave it to me, Veronica.’
How much had Lloyd Palmer paid to get permission to bury Anthony’s ashes here? Veronica didn’t ask. But the vicar of Netherholt had quickly said that yes, after all, if it was . . . erm . . . just a question of . . . erm . . . a small receptacle, not a coffin, then space could perhaps be found ‘between the rows’.
And so here they were, with Anthony clutched against Veronica’s bosom, and Lloyd wearing a black cashmere overcoat and a red cashmere scarf, and the vicar shivering just a little in his cotton surplice, holding a prayer book.
‘Shall I start?’ the vicar asked anxiously. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ said Veronica. ‘Please do start.’
The familiar words fell into the cool but sunlit air. ‘. . . Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live . . . He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow . . . Earth to earth, ashes to ashes . . .’
The voice of the vicar was soft, not unpleasing. On the breeze, Veronica could smell ash: leaves and twigs being broken down to dust and smoke on a garden bonfire. And she thought, All of this feels right. It’s where Anthony and I began. It’s home.
But then, when the moment came to put the urn into the muddy hole, she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t let go. Lloyd and the vicar waited silently, with their heads bowed. She hugged the plastic jar. She kept thinking, I loved him too. He belongs to me, too, not just to Lal . . .
She held the urn out in front of her and the sun fell onto the lid, painted with copper-coloured lacquer, and gave it a burnished sheen, like an antique saucepan. She saw Lloyd raise his head and look at the urn and then up at her face.
‘Anthony,’ she said aloud, in as strong a voice as she could manage, ‘this is what you would have called a “ghastly moment”. Letting go. But I’m going to do it. When I think about it, I probably should have let you go years and years ago, but I never did. I loved you far too much.’
She paused. She knew that her voice sounded strangely loud in the still air.
‘You’re at Netherholt,’ she went on. ‘OK, darling? I know you can’t see it or feel it. I know you’re nowhere, really. But this was the place you wanted to be. The beech tree’s still here. And the sun’s shining. And I’m putting you by Ma’s feet. It’s the best we can organise. I don’t think you’ll mind. I expect you’ll remember better than I do that she always wore absolutely brilliant shoes . . .’
Veronica half wanted to go on, to say something more portentous, but she found that she just stopped there and then she knelt down and put the jar in the ground. At her side, she discovered that Lloyd Palmer was crying. He blew his nose loudly, then gathered up a fistful of damp earth and threw it onto Anthony’s urn.
‘Bye, old sod,’ he said. ‘Happy times.’
Veronica and Lloyd walked beyond the churchyard to the meadow where the horses grazed. Above the distant combes, rain clouds were shading the sky. Lloyd and Veronica stood leaning on a wooden fence. Then, in a gesture that was second nature to Veronica, she held out her hand to the horses and immediately saw their heads go up.
They stood still, ears pricked, regarding her. She loved that moment, when she spoke silently to a horse and it seemed to listen. And now they came to her, ambling slowly across the shining field, and as they got near to her, the scent of them – the scent of living horses, which, to Veronica Verey, was more consoling than any other scent – reached her and held her in its spell.
‘Good girls,’ she said. ‘Lovely girls . . .’
She took off her black gloves and touched the hard, warm heads of the bay horses, rubbing and caressing their noses, each in turn. At first, they trembled imperceptibly, still wary of the stranger. Then Veronica felt all their anxiety vanish and they came nearer to her still, and one of them rested its head on her shoulder and her arm went round its neck.
‘Good lord,’ said Lloyd. ‘Love at first sight!’
Veronica smiled. ‘They were always my thing, horses,’ she said. ‘I used to love my pony Susan far more than I loved my mother.’
‘It figures,’ said Lloyd.
Then he blew his nose again and stuffed the handkerchief away
in his pocket and said, ‘What are you going to do, Veronica?’
‘Do? You mean, with the rest of my life?’
‘Yes. I know it’s none of my business, but you will come into quite a bit of money, once we get probate . . .’
Veronica stood still, caressing the horses, loving the warmth of them, their breath on her neck. She wondered whether, after so much time, she could be taught to ride again.
‘I don’t know . . .’ she said. ‘I’ve never loved anything very passionately. Only gardens. And horses.’
She looked up at the sky. The sun was still shining on Netherholt, but rain was falling on the combes and she thought how beautiful these things were in their proximity, the sunlight and the drift of rain.
‘I thought I was happy in France,’ she said. ‘But now, after everything that’s happened . . . I don’t know whether I really was. I think I just made myself believe I was.’
‘Happiness,’ said Lloyd, with a sigh. ‘It’s what Anthony and I talked about the last time I saw him. The near impossibility of ever hanging on to it for more than five minutes. He told me he thought he’d only been happy once in his life.’
‘What? Drinking from Ma’s tits when he was a baby?’
‘Almost. He said he made a tree-house . . .’
‘Ah, the tree-house! And he invited Ma for tea?’
‘Yes. He said it was the most perfect afternoon of his life.’
Veronica began to stroke the ear of the horse whose head rested on her shoulder.
‘Did he say that?’ she said.
‘Yes. He said everything was completely beautiful.’
‘Yup? Well you know, Lloyd, it wasn’t, in fact. It wasn’t beautiful. The tea may have been perfect – made by Mrs Brigstock, no doubt. And Anthony and Ma may have had a nice conversation up there in the tree. But on the way down, climbing down the ladder, Ma slipped and fell. She hurt her back very badly. And after that day, she was always in pain. Till the day she died. The pain was always there. It might even have been the thing that brought on her cancer.’
Lloyd re-knotted his expensive scarf, as if he suddenly felt cold.