by Unknown
‘Anthony just cut that bit out of his mind,’ Veronica went on. ‘He literally forgot about it. If you ever reminded him, he always told you you were wrong. He succeeded in convincing himself that Ma’s fall was on a different day – somewhere else. Because he couldn’t bear to think that he was in any way responsible.’
Lloyd and Veronica drove back to London in Lloyd’s silver Audi. Rain slicked the grey motorway.
Suddenly tired, Veronica rested her head against the soft black leather upholstery and dozed as the darkness came on.
Half asleep and half awake, she remembered the strict, unvarying routine she’d followed when she was a girl and cared for Susan. It was like a High Mass, she thought, with each stage followed in exactly the same way, morning after morning, with nothing missed or bungled, nothing out of time or out of place:
Wake up at six.
Look out of the window to check the weather. Long for sun in summer, rain in spring, snow or hard frost in winter: everything in its right season.
Pull on old clothes: Aertex shirt, jeans, sweater, boots, riding hat.
Go down the stairs, quiet as the tooth fairy. Unlock the back door.
Inhale the first scent of the morning air. Feel like running, running all the way to the stables.
Open the stable door and hug Susan and breathe in the smell of her and talk to her and give her a handful of oats.
Rope halter. Lead Susan out. Tie her to post.
Get the shovel and start mucking out. Twenty minutes average time.
Hose down the stall. Lay out clean straw. Lay it thick and soft.
Fill the water trough.
Saddle up. Girths properly tightened and correct. Lead Susan to the paddock. Sun up now, or nearly up in deep winter. Or rain.
Trot twice round the paddock, then just dig gently into Susan’s broad flanks to start the rocking canter. The most comfortable canter any horse ever perfected: rock-and-rock, rock-and-rock, easy and lovely. The trees and the fencing waltzing by.
And as they waltz by, see the two plumes of breath, mine and Susan’s, telling me that we’re alive, alive, alive, alive . . .
Veronica shifted in her luxurious car seat.
She realised she must have slept for a few moments because she’d been having a dream, not about Susan, but about Kitty.
In the dream, Kitty had sent her an invitation to a forthcoming show: Recent Work by Kitty Meadows. On the invitation card was a reproduction of Kitty’s watercolour of the mimosa blossom. Reduced to a surface no wider than a few inches, this painting looked deft and accomplished, and Veronica now wished, for Kitty’s sake, that these things could have been true: that there could have been a one-woman exhibition, that the mimosa watercolour could have been perfectly achieved. But she knew that neither was the case.
What had arrived instead at Les Glaniques, before Veronica had left for England, was a postcard from Kitty, postmarked Adelaide. On the front was a picture of Kitty, smiling, wearing a white T-shirt and blue dungarees, and holding in her arms a koala bear. Underneath this, Kitty had inscribed the caption: At least somebody loves me!
Veronica had looked at the photograph for a long time, and at Kitty’s backward-sloping writing and imagined Kitty, alone in an Adelaide hotel room, smiling as she wrote it, proud for a moment of her sorrowful little joke.
Then Veronica had torn up the card and thrown it away.
Veronica reached for her handbag and took out a peppermint and put it into her mouth.
‘All right?’ said Lloyd.
‘Yes,’ said Veronica. ‘You’re a very good driver, Lloyd. Do you want a Tic-tac?’
Lloyd refused the mint. Veronica was silent for a moment, then she said suddenly: ‘You know, I’ve been thinking: gardening in southern France is really, really arduous. I can’t grow any of my favourite things, it’s far too arid.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘More and more often, I have dreams about English flowers; sweet peas, peonies, forget-me-nots . . .’
Lloyd turned off the Mozart concerto that had played softly, in a repeating loop, since they’d left Hampshire.
‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Sell up in France and buy a house here. Benita can help you decorate it, if you want her to. Make a divine garden, Veronica. Think of primroses and cowslips and daffodils and trellises of blowsy roses . . .’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I think that’s what I’d like. Just that: an English garden and a paddock for a horse. Or is that terribly selfish?’
‘I can’t see why,’ said Lloyd. ‘When life is so bloody short.’
Audrun woke up in a dark room.
She was lying in a bed, but she knew this wasn’t her own bedroom in the bungalow. So where was it? She could smell something acrid, as though the walls might be damp. Was she in a prison cell?
She tried to sit up. But there was a pain in her chest which grew stronger, deeper as she moved. It pushed her back down again, pushed her violently, like an old enemy, standing at her bedside.
Her hand groped to her breast-bone and kneaded the scant flesh there. She thought that all she could do was wait: wait for someone to come into the room, or for a light to be switched on. Then, she would know . . .
If this was prison, it was very quiet. No sound of doors closing or opening. No screams. No footfalls. Or were there noises all around her that she couldn’t hear? Was the silence inside herself? She tried whispering her own name aloud: Audrun Lunel. She thought she heard it, but it sounded timid and far away, like a shy schoolkid reluctantly reciting her name at morning roll-call.
So much of her life had been like this: waiting in darkness, without moving. She was practised in this submission.
But waiting for what, this time? Except for the strangely scented air she was being forced to breathe, there didn’t seem to be any clues about what was going to happen.
She began searching her memory.
Had the handsome detective come back and arrested her? Had the poor traumatised child, Mélodie Hartmann, or even Jeanne Viala, remembered something and whispered it in his ear – something nobody else knew?
Or had he himself, Inspecteur Travier, seen what remained hidden to everybody else – in the way that his movie counterparts so often glimpsed with their sky-blue eyes the obscure pathway to the truth?
Audrun had no recollection of any arrest. The last thing she could remember was standing near the road with Marianne and seeing fires in the hills and being told the canadairs were coming to put them out. But what had happened next? Had the planes arrived? Did the water come cascading down onto the trees? Did she walk back to her bungalow and close her door and sit down in her chair? And then?
I’m sorry, Mademoiselle Lunel. I’m sorry to disturb you again, after all the anxiety about the fire, but I wonder if I can ask you a few more questions . . . ?
Did he say these words? They sounded familiar. Did he arrive with the same constable, the note-taker?
Just a few more questions.
This won’t take very long. I only want to clarify a couple of things . . .
He’d been so nice, so polite. But it was the violent, angry things you remembered in your heart and in your body, not the conversation of gentle people.
To be confined in a prison: Audrun thought that there would be nothing more terrible. She wanted to remind the charming detective, in case he didn’t know: ‘I already lived through that, when I was young. From the age of fifteen to the age of thirty – through all the “best” years of my life – I understood what it was to be in prison. Two prisons, in fact. The underwear factory, breathing carbon disulphide; my room, stinking of my brother and my father. All I wanted was to die.’
I’m sorry, Mademoiselle Lunel, I do sympathise, but what you’ve told me alters nothing. I’m arresting you for the murder of the Englishman, Anthony Verey. You have the right to remain silent . . .
She’d be driven away in a police van and thrown into a cell. And there she’d remain, for ever, with the
stink of strangers all around her, just like at the factory – as though, after all, she’d never escaped from that.
She began to cry. She had difficulty catching her breath. Her tears were hot on her skin and made runnels into her hair. Then a voice in the darkness said: ‘Hey, shut up, will you? People need their sleep in here.’
‘Where am I?’ said Audrun. But no one answered.
Light came.
Light above her, not from any window, but from harsh fluorescent rods, suspended from a high ceiling. And she felt some movement at her side. She turned her head and saw a young nurse standing by her, holding her wrist to check her pulse. Behind the nurse, a green curtain hung lifeless, shrouding whatever lay beyond it.
A hospital.
The nurse was Armenian. Or Algerian. Her hand was warm.
‘What happened?’ Audrun said to the pretty Algerian nurse, but she just smiled and laid Audrun’s wrist down and went away, drawing the green curtain behind her.
A male orderly with a kind old face brought her breakfast – a cup of coffee and a stale croissant and a tiny blob of jam. The orderly helped her to sit up in the hospital bed so that she could eat it.
‘What happened to me?’ said Audrun.
‘You’re all right,’ said the orderly. ‘You’re going to be all right. Want some sugar in your coffee?’
She tried to eat and drink. She found swallowing difficult. She thought that if she got a bit stronger, she might remember what had happened.
She slept and woke, slept and woke. Pissed in a bed-pan, holding on to the nurse. Slept again, her chest tight and aching. The light above her never changed.
Then she saw Marianne at her bedside. Marianne looked pale and tired and wore a cross expression on her face.
‘How are you?’ Marianne asked in a flat voice.
‘I don’t know,’ said Audrun. ‘My chest hurts. I don’t know what happened. Did the canadairs arrive?’
Marianne half turned away, seeming to draw in a long breath. Then she looked at Audrun and said: ‘It’s gone. I had to come and tell you. Someone had to tell you straight to your face. It’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Marianne.’
‘The Mas Lunel. The fire took it. Parts of the walls are still standing, but they’re black, absolutely blackened. It seemed to split open in the middle. I’ve never witnessed anything like that in my life! The heat made the stones just . . . explode.’
Audrun said nothing. She closed her eyes. In her mind, now, she saw something new: Raoul Molezon running, running towards the dog pound, calling out that he was going to save the dogs. And she was following him, she was trying to run, too. But she didn’t follow Raoul to the pound; she opened the damaged front door of the mas and went inside and stood in the kitchen, which was dark, with all the shutters bolted against the heat.
She laid her arms across Bernadette’s oak table, which she’d been trying so hard to return to bare wood, to scour to perfect whiteness. Then, she began tugging and pushing at the heavy table. Her arms and back ached.
She knew she was too light to lift up this ancient piece of furniture, too weakened by time. But she wasn’t going to give up. She was Audrun Lunel. She was going to save what remained of her mother – all the things Aramon had tried to despoil, but which now belonged to her; she was going to bring everything out before the fire came. She remembered that she could hear shouting in the hills above and the barking and wailing of the dogs, but she took no notice of these sounds . . .
‘You were very lucky,’ said Marianne curtly. ‘Raoul Molezon risked his life to get you out.’
‘Risked his life?’
‘Yes, he did. You’d wedged the front door shut somehow. Raoul slammed at it with his shoulder, but it wouldn’t move. The fire was terribly near and jumping from tree to tree. The firemen told him to come away, but he wouldn’t. He helped one of the fire-fighters tear the door off its hinges. He carried you out.’
Audrun looked at Marianne, whose expression was still stern, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. She couldn’t prevent a smile from spreading across her face at the thought that Raoul Molezon had risked death to save her.
‘He was always a good man,’ she said. ‘Always.’
Aramon Lunel was incarcerated in a prison above Ruasse while he waited for his case to come to trial. He knew that the trial was far away in time and that its outcome could be foretold, so he seldom thought about it.
He attempted to live his life one day at a time.
The prison buildings had once housed a regiment of the French Foreign Legion. They were cold in winter, but strongly built of stone. Aramon had been allocated his own cell. It was prison policy to keep murderers and sex-offenders separated from petty felons. It had been stated by the governor that men who had taken lives, or blighted lives for ever, should be made to endure a certain degree of loneliness. But Aramon was impervious to this. He knew that he’d been lonely for thirty years.
The walls of his cell were painted white. The room had a small window, protected by an ironwork grille. Through the criss-cross of the grille bars, Aramon could see down the steep valley to the roofs of the town: the tilting, red-grey tiled roofs and boxy chimney flues of old Ruasse, the blank corrugations of the retail sheds, the water towers and TV masts of the high-rise blocks in the cheaply constructed 1970s suburbs they still called ‘new’.
In one of these blocks, the girl Fatima had lived and died, and Aramon sometimes found himself thinking about her: the way she’d draped scarves over her lampshades, the better to conceal the shabbiness of her room; the way she tried to turn him on by rotating her belly. From time to time, he wondered whether – after all – he had killed her. Killed her for her fat, gyrating stomach. Killed her for not being the person he loved.
Fatima, the belly-dancing whore. He had no recollection of slitting open her body from sternum to pelvis. None. But then, he had no recollection of shooting Anthony Verey in the gut, either. He’d thought at first that it would all come back to him, that moment by the river. It would come streaming into his mind like a motion picture and then he would feel it, feel in his being that he’d taken a life. But time went on and this didn’t happen. There was no motion picture, no feeling: only fog and darkness.
It had been suggested to him by his lawyer, Maître de Bladis, that his mind had ‘blanked out’ the terrible things that he’d done. Some killers, de Bladis had opined, found their feelings of horror and guilt ‘too terrible to be borne’. They managed to achieve ‘absolute mental suppression of their crime’ – and he was almost certainly one of them. He was subsequently informed that he had the right to psychiatric help, if he should request it.
His cell was four metres long by two and a half metres wide. It contained a wooden bed, narrow and low to the ground. The single pillow was surprisingly soft. Under the window, stood a wooden table and chair.
In the corner of the cell nearest the door were a lavatory and a washbasin, both cracked and stained, but serviceable. And in the night, when he needed to empty his bladder, Aramon often thought how convenient – how almost enjoyable – it was to have this WC just a few paces from his bed.
Sometimes, he didn’t even bother to stand up, but just crawled to the toilet bowl (which was also set low to the ground) on his knees. Then he’d go back to his bunk and listen for the dawn outside the window and often sink into dreams of being a boy again, toiling along the onion rows before the sun came up behind the hills of La Callune.
When he’d first arrived at the prison, they’d put him into the hospital, because he couldn’t keep his food down. He told the prison doctors that he thought he had stomach cancer. They showed towards him a surprising degree of sympathy and kindness. His body was scanned. He was informed that there was no cancer, only two bleeding ulcers.
‘That figures,’ Aramon said. ‘I could feel that, pardi: that bleeding inside. I think that’s been going on a
long time.’
He was put on a special alkaline diet. His cigarettes were taken away for a while. And when he came out of the prison hospital, he felt almost well again, well enough to stand up straight, well enough to crack a few jokes at mealtimes or in the exercise yard or in the wood shop where he worked making pallets.
He made friends with another murderer, an old Somali man called Yusuf, who had an infectious, high-pitched laugh. Yusuf claimed he couldn’t remember his crime, either. The police had told him there was more than one, but he’d long forgotten what they were or why he might have committed them. He said to Aramon: ‘It doesn’t matter what they were. I may have been wicked a long time ago, I may even have slit a man’s throat, or the throats of more than one man, but God has forgiven me. He has given me rest from toil. He has given me shelter in my old age. And now He’s giving it to you, too.’
Shelter in my old age.
This thought made Aramon smile. It also made him take a certain pride in his cell. He cleaned it with care. At the Mas Lunel, he’d allowed everything to go to hell, not caring – not really noticing – if the place stank, until it all got too disgusting and too complicated to be endured and he’d had to send for Audrun to sort it out.
Here in prison, he disinfected his lavatory bowl three times a week. He stretched the bed-sheets tight. He wished he had pictures or photographs to tape to the walls: views of places where he’d never been and never would go and which would therefore ask nothing of him. Niagara Falls. Mount Etna. The Great Wall of China. Venice. A lake in Somalia, where, Yusuf told him, men fished for eels under a crimson sunset. These pictures, he thought, would give his mind a resting place: somewhere to dwell.
Many of the inmates of the prison were young men – Caucasian French, Somalis and North Africans, staying mainly in their own ethnic groups.
At mealtimes and in the yard, all the groups strutted and bragged and cursed. Sometimes, there were bloody fights and these amused Aramon. He could remember what it was like to be twenty years old and full of fury. But he admitted to Yusuf: ‘I wouldn’t want to be young again. It’s too exhausting.’