Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  On their last night together they slept outside, as they had often done since the time they had no roof, under a blanket, with the sound of his horses munching close to their ears as they cropped the grass around their bodies. They’d always huddled up close, as people do when there is no bed. When there is no bed you feel more of an urge to touch the other person. But that last night he slept in the meadow and she slept in front of the house, under the lime tree. At first the dog sat with her, licking her face. But whenever Catherine fell asleep the dog would slope off and lie down beside him. When she heard her mistress stirring she would get up and go over to her again, as though a bell had rung. Eventually Catherine pushed her away, sending her back to Luc. “Va avec lui. Je pars. Tu restes là”—I’m leaving. You stay there.

  The men in this family are so obsessed with their past, she said, that suffering in the present leaves them unmoved. They suffer, but do not react. They accept endings without even wincing. When she drove away, Luc stood in the drive, watching her go; but before she had driven out of the gate he had already started talking to his dog, ruffling her ears as they walked back together toward the house.

  A week later he heard someone talking on France Culture about a man who’d left someone called Catherine for a woman called Anne and he thought, It’s me! C’est mon histoire! but when he told his friend Henri, the cardiologist, he said no, he’d heard the same program, and actually they’d been talking about Henry VIII. Now Catherine lives with a carpenter, who has the biggest hands I’ve ever seen on any man. He learned to read and write in prison before he met her, but Catherine does the books. Luc gave her Mas Breillat, where she grows aromatic flowers and St. John’s wort, which is effective for depression. She and Bertrand live off maybe 700 francs a week. She could get a job, teach, give riding lessons, run an art gallery, manage a restaurant, but she would rather be poor. She lives with the love of her life. They have no children; she is her husband’s child, and she has accepted that. When the village was alight with celebrations after the bullfight one year, I saw them stroll through the crowd together, he with his huge arm, the size of Luc’s thigh, around her shoulders, and she with her dark head against him, both looking as if they were walking on water. Later on they danced as a Spaniard in silk slacks sang “O mio babbino caro” through speakers as big as the Roman gate. Bertrand’s eyes were full of tears. As we leaned against the café wall, Luc followed my eyes and said, “You see, I did her a favor, leaving her. Thanks to me she’s discovered the love of her life.”

  FAMILY AFFAIRS

  The first morning I spent at the mas was a Sunday, and I slept through the cockerel crowing and woke to a low keening bellow, emitted by a dying cow. Georges’s herd grazed just yards away from the bedroom, on the other side of a bank edged with hawthorn. Luc’s first thought on hearing the cow’s bellow was that Georges would think he had poisoned it, or stabbed it in the gullet with a paintbrush.

  He pulled on his outdoor clothes like a child, in two movements, slid his feet into his riding boots and went out onto the terrace and down into the field. The cow was groaning, trying to deliver its dead fetus, which was already poisoning its blood. I got up and looked for the kettle. It’s the best thing you can do in a strange house, find the kettle. It always feels like an ally of sorts, as though you’d met before.

  In the meadow, Georges was talking with his hands, placing things in the air. Brigitte, his wife, was standing with her arms crossed, staring at the cow. Luc was calmly walking back toward the house with his dog at his heels. I never saw him run. His life was an andante, but understrung with a tight, restraining web of wires; you always felt there was a quicker man straining to be unleashed, if only he’d allow it. He came into the kitchen, picked his hat off the peg by the door and opened the fridge. “Alors, coquine?” He smelled of leather and paint. There was coffee in a tin pot on the stove. From out of the bottom compartment of the fridge he took a small glass jar. In the drawer under the hat peg he found a syringe, tilted it to the light, then drew some liquid out of the glass jar, took the coffee cup from me, drank it down, and went out again carrying the syringe, which he kept for emergencies with the horses, in case he ever had to put one down, if it was hurt or ill. From the terrace, by the winter wisteria, laid out like a ruined fishing net on the wall, I watched as he knelt down by the cow and sank the needle into its side. The dog stepped back and looked away into the distance, where the horses had gathered to drink from a stone trough under a lime tree, mulching leaves into the damp earth and slurping noisily. The aching moan of the cow ceased. Luc removed his hand from her flank and stood up slowly. Then Brigitte fetched the tractor from the barn and they tied the carcass to its rear end and dragged it slowly away.

  Luc came back, whistling very softly under his hat. The dog walked like a maid of honor, attentive and proud, just inches behind him. I was doing the washing-up, trying to balance a plate against a pan on the stone drainboard.

  “Look. All the water just sits there in a puddle.”

  “You’re right,” he said, considering me. He was pleased I had at least some practical sense. He’d expected none of what he called a city woman. “I’ll make you an égouttoir out of sycamore twigs.” It became a private joke. He’d make me a dish drainer one of these days. Every month he claimed the design was almost finished, that he just had to refine it slightly, or that he’d had a better idea and would have to start from scratch all over again. Likewise with the bathtub, which had no plug. You had to stuff a washcloth in the hole and lay a rock on top of it. Luc claimed it worked on suction, that if you laid the washcloth correctly it would clamp itself into the hole, but I found it was an egg-timer tub, that you could only stay in six minutes before the water all ran out and your time was up.

  * * *

  Georges and Brigitte had moved onto the farm and bought their first cow while Luc and Catherine were still living on the opposite side of the mountain. Georges was supposed to be studying to become a surgeon, but quietly began breeding a surreptitious dairy herd, until the day came when the doctor and his wife could no longer pretend not to have noticed that their elder son had become a farmer and was never going to finish his education. They blamed the spirit of 1968, which had turned the young people’s heads. In the early seventies, disenchanted students from the north had arrived, with their anti-metropolis, anti-technological ideas, and put their political science degrees to use producing goat cheese and honey. Thirty years later they are all leaping onto the Web, so you can get crottin de chèvre online, direct from the producer. People like Luc’s mother, who wouldn’t have dreamed of going for a walk in the countryside without her best boots, an elegant coat and her poodle on a leash, found the cheesecloth and rats’ tails approach to country life quite incomprehensible, and considered subsistence farming a scandalous risk to public health.

  Over the years tension grew, along with the herd. Georges accused his parents of sabotaging the engine of his car—a serious accusation considering the route down to the village involved fifteen hairpin turns. Then he claimed to have discovered that his parents had arranged to have legal custody over him, for which he needed to be declared insane. Until the week I met them all, he hadn’t spoken to his parents for fifteen years. I couldn’t understand this, because they seemed nice, the kind of parents you might wish you could trade your own for after an irritable Christmas.

  Their mother was a beautiful woman, the only other blonde in the village apart from me, people said knowingly—Bluff Your Way in Freud. “I am the happiest mother alive,” she said to me at the supermarket checkout one morning, just after we met, eyeing my two cans of tuna and passing before me with her three kilos of fresh lobster, for which she would produce a perfect sauce à l’armoricaine the following Sunday, Easter Sunday, when she had invited the entire family to lunch. Clearing out the pantry after her death, I found twenty tiny-sized cans of sauce à l’armoricaine. She was, in fact, the perfect fifties housewife. Today the perfect housewife would make her own,
and you have to wonder who is the freer of the two.

  She was happy because that very week Georges had visited her in their house in the Rue St. Florian for the first time in maybe fifteen years, and had sat fidgeting in an armchair for half an hour, telling her that her poodle was badly trained and asking who got the beach house in the will. It was his way of being intimate. I don’t think it can have been much fun for Brigitte being alone with him for twenty years on the farm. It emerged that Georges had decided to make peace with his parents, or at least to drop the accusations for a while, because things had started going wrong with Brigitte, his common-law wife. He needed to drum up some family support.

  He suffered from advanced marital paranoia, and his reason was severely affected by his conviction. He firmly believed that whenever friends came over to chat in their kitchen about Rudolf Steiner, organic farming and esoteric texts, Brigitte would leave the room not to turn the cheese in the dairy, but to make love to one of those not present, who had prearranged the whole thing with the others behind his back.

  At first she laughed at his accusations. Physically she was a strong woman, with tight, curly gray hair, the body of an eighteen-year-old boy and eyes that were the strange milky blue of the veins in a mother’s breast. Later she protested her innocence. She had never looked at another man. For twenty years she had only ever looked at the earth, and occasionally at the sky to see if it would rain. He lost his fear of her, fearlessness being one of the side effects of anger and despair. She started to panic. She had no rights; she had no possessions apart from her piano; she had no children. I thought that if she’d ever been able to love him in the first place, then she must still. But by the time of the Easter Sunday lunch she was in despair.

  EASTER SUNDAY

  That meal, the first of many, was unlike any event I had ever attended. We arrived from the four corners of the estate, converging on the doorstep of the summer house. Architecturally, it was like going to Argentina for the day. The night before, it had snowed. Marcel, Luc’s psychoanalyst friend from Paris, had arrived with his newborn baby grandson. It was March 21, the first day of spring, the sky was as clean and sharp as a newly beaten sheet of metal. Luc had written “Coucou!” in the snow, to greet the baby. As we crossed over to the summer house the next morning, we found crocuses beaded with melted snow in the patchy grass where he’d written hello.

  It was a desiccated house. Everything in it, including the lives lived, seemed to belong to an entirely different age. Some skulls and the family teeth were kept in a closet in one of the bedrooms, along with the robes of the late bishop. In the cellar hung row upon row of decaying wooden tennis racquets. I liked to picture the bishop frolicking on the tennis lawn in his gold and purple robes and hat, swatting butterflies and buffeting about for his lost ball among the rhododendrons.

  In the long drawing room there was a fire burning in the grate. Luc’s father clasped me to him tenderly and rasped some inaudible words in my ear while his poodle danced up my skirt, stamping peanuts into the floorboards. Then the doctor went around with the champagne, slender-stemmed glasses trembling on a silver tray. His wife took me by the hand and led me upstairs, past posters for bullfights from the last century, and a photograph of a cousin, an operatic tenor who had moved to Argentina, where he had died on stage during the second act of Turandot. We went and inspected the linen closet. I had never seen so much pristine cotton, so stiff it would be like sleeping between boards. By the time we came back downstairs again, Georges and Brigitte had arrived. Brigitte grabbed my hand and pulled me out onto the terrace. I was a wild card being passed around the family, with a different value according to what each of them already held in their hand. It was a beautiful day, and the Canigou was still dredged in last night’s snow. Her face was almost corrugated with grief. “She showed you the linen?” she said, gripping my hand. Yes, I said, she had. I hoped she wasn’t thinking of work for these apparently idle hands to do. Brigitte let go of my hand. She stepped to the edge of the terrace and rolled a tiny cigarette, striking a match on the wall. She breathed in through the tube of her cigarette, checked the burning end, and squinted at the mountain through the smoke. She had a gold tooth, which showed when she laughed, shaking her head and saying, “Putain! Putain de merde!”

  We went back inside the room, where the table was magnificently laid. During the meal Luc’s mother floated between the table and the kitchen on a cloud of maternal joy. Luc was looking so beautiful I could hardly eat my lobster. A photograph of the day shows me looking like an overweight schoolgirl, sucking the claw of a lobster in an underconfident way. At one point I dropped my napkin; I was glad to duck out of the conversation for a while. Everyone over fifty kept saying, “What’s she saying?” every time I opened my mouth. Brigitte and Georges were not speaking, not to each other nor to anybody else, but were both bent over their plates like they’d lost something in the salad. As I got down to table-leg level and scrambled for my napkin, I saw their hands, tightly gripped together, like those of people desperate in prayer, two white vegetable tubers, entwined.

  The painter uncle was there in his candy-blue sweater, a tiny, virile celibate who always grinned as he talked. I don’t know what Luc had done, or failed to do, to his teeth. He had a little receding chin and his skin was nut brown, like Luc’s. In temperament he had none of Luc’s sweetness, though Luc had some of his tortuous sourness. He, too, had been imprisoned in the POW camp with his brother and Monsieur Desarthes. At one time, in the fifties, he had been quite a well-known painter. He lived in the same huge house as Luc’s parents, the former postmistress’s house. It was vast, on three floors, and the way from the second up to the third was via a spiral staircase that was six meters in diameter. Light came in through a glass dome in the roof, and on the upper landing many of the uncle’s paintings were hung. I’d seen him groping his way around the spiral staircase under the huge dome, tittering to himself like a vain but lonely parrot nobody has taught any new words to for years. At lunch he told a story about a cousin on Luc’s mother’s side who was under the delusion that he was a spy on an important and highly secret assignment during the war. He would wake up in the night and go around knocking on strangers’ doors, apologizing for having failed to accomplish his mission and for having given all the secrets away to the Germans. Luc’s mother blushed softly for her cousin.

  “There’s always one in every family,” she said, and there was a silence during which each member of the family pinned the tail on one of the others.

  While we were eating slices of a baguette-shaped piece of filo pastry, from which custard leaked at one end, which Luc’s mother told me was called the curate’s prick—“The bishop’s prick,” sniggered the uncle when he saw the size of it—two emaciated kittens arrived at the French windows, scratching at the glass. Luc’s mother leaped up and rushed into the kitchen, holding the oven glove to her face.

  Luc said angrily to his brother, “Why have you got all these cats? Why didn’t you drown them? They’re starving. It’s worse for them if you’re sentimental.”

  “They keep the rats down.”

  “Rubbish.”

  Later that day we saw Georges stalking over to his barn with a shotgun. Over the following hour we heard one shot, then two, then a silence, the banging of a barn door, a scuffle and more shots. No one dared come out till it was over. “Happy now?” Georges asked that evening when we passed him on the road.

  That spring Georges took the train up to Paris for the first time in fifteen years to go and see Marcel.

  “I need help,” he said. “My wife is a whore. It is driving me mad.”

  Marcel replied, “But I can only help those with delusions. Suppose we reconstruct the sentence.”

  “How?’

  “We invert it,” Marcel said. “I am mad—pause—and my wife is a whore.”

  Georges referred to Marcel from then on as l’alcoolique, as though even if he had been one he was the only one in the world.

 
One night—maybe he was high on the new crop of marijuana—Georges trashed Brigitte’s dairy. I was writing in the room above, and my heart bolted and crashed into my rib cage as the first milk churn hit the stone floor. It was a waste, because they’d paid good money, earned leek by leek, carrot by carrot, equipping the dairy to conform to European standards the previous winter.

  Three months later he threw Brigitte out on a charge of multiple adultery. He didn’t wait for the private detective’s report, which said she really had been visiting her mother in Marseilles at Pentecost. So she left. An intelligent woman, a qualified rheumatologist who had spent twenty years, childless, on that mountain, planting and harvesting leeks and carrots, and playing the third Schubert impromptu on her childhood piano, which was as flat as a punctured tire, but we didn’t notice because we had nothing to compare it to until, one day, my own piano arrived.

  She took nothing with her except a few personal possessions and the little Renault 4 they’d used to transport the milk churns. Watching her drive away, Georges picked up the phone, rang the insurance broker and canceled her car insurance from that minute of that hour. She later moved in with the butcher who worked behind the counter at the supermarket, a big hairy man who kept goats for a hobby. Whenever she met me in the street she would ask casually after the family, squeeze my hand and tell me to look out for myself.

  4. LOCAL LIFE