Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  UFO

  “Tu m’aimes?”

  “No. Only amoureuse,” I tell him, though I don’t know if it’s true.

  When Luc touches my face his fingers are bone dry and professional. It’s reassuring. He is not a reassuring person, but his fingers are, accustomed to the intricate scale of the tooth.

  It was always a surprise to wake up there. It felt like somewhere you woke up and had to guess where you were, as though you’d been transported in a sack, like a cat, or washed up on a shore while you slept.

  Luc said it was normal. He was always saying “C’est normal,” though hardly anything was. “You’ve come from another planet. Bienvenue.”

  “Your time here,” he explained in a pleasant, easy-listening voice, as though I were a visitor being shown around a factory in a hard hat, “is probably only equivalent to a single day in your own world. You’ll get back to the place you can’t remember for now, and find nothing has changed. There’ll still be a half-drunk cup of coffee on the kitchen table and a sheet of paper in your typewriter.

  “You’ve forgotten, for now, because you’re new here and amoureuse. But as the years go by, and your children grow, and you watch me every day, doing the same things, growing a bit older, a little bit will come back every day, just a tiny bit of the picture. One day,” he said, lying down beside me again, his eyes closed, touching my cheek, his voice so close to my ear that his lips brushed against it, “I’ll be down in the barn, painting, I’ll hear a crash of plates and a cry and I’ll think Oh merde, ça y est. C’est fini. Elle va partir. When I get upstairs I’ll just find the broken crockery and a few gray hairs in your hairbrush. There’ll be a humming noise, and I’ll go down and find the grass all singed down at the end of the field and a dark round shape disappearing over the mountain.” He liked the idea of UFOs.

  “It’ll just be there, waiting?”

  “It’s always there.”

  He pointed to where the field dipped away and the dark seam of the wood blurred in the emptying light of dusk. “Look, it’s there now. Are you telling me you can’t see it?”

  I closed my eyes. “I can’t.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  He got off the bed and whistled to the dog. I got used to his changes of speed after a bit. Very reasonably, sur un ton raisonnable, as though to the dog, who didn’t care anyway, he added, “I hope it stays that way.”

  * * *

  We rarely left the village. Once we met a man who lived a kilometer from the town center. I asked Luc if he lived far away. “Oh yes,” he said. “After the Pont du Diable.”

  I kept myself happy writing for six hours a day, then cooking, riding and gardening, or watching him paint. Occasionally I’d think, This is not my life. It’s wonderful, but it’s not my life. But then I tried to think what I’d be doing otherwise. I imagined being back in England, the place I’d left, sitting in wine bars, or sailing up escalators, reading the ads for holidays and books, or looking for parking places, or temping somewhere and buying salad leaves ready washed from Marks & Spencer, or doing a teacher-training course, and none of that seemed very possible, either. All those things were as prefabricated and prepackaged as the salad leaves. I wanted to feel I was making up my own story. I was making up a story, mon histoire, but it wasn’t actually mine.

  Most people said he was crazy, a dreamer whose mother had cuddled him too long and who had turned out a weird mix of gentle idealist and vigorous monk—the kind who lugged stones or felled trees. He was also a fantastic gossip, which I loved, and when I wonder now how we spent all those winter nights, it must have been mostly swapping stories by the fire, trying to tell each other our lives, to see if it made any difference to anything. We were completely antisocial, though Luc knew everyone. I was introduced to all the locals, the newspaper editor, the people he’d been to school with, the man who owned all the cork forests, the painters and poets and cowboys, and Gigi and her friends, and his parents and all their friends, and the people who ran the restaurants and their girlfriends, and the famous poet from Paris, so famous that Paul Auster did his university thesis on him and Luc had gone out with his daughter.

  We sometimes had dinner with the elderly poet and his wife when they came down from Paris for July and August. She was fair and spoke as though she were auditioning for the part of Cordelia in King Lear, constantly true and somehow pure and tender, in a way that got on my nerves. She also insisted on referring to her daughter in every other sentence, which I wouldn’t have minded, except she had the same name as me, so it had the curious effect of neutralizing my presence, as though she had reinvented the foursome, and in fact her daughter was really in my place and I was an extra they’d called in to take over the part at the last minute.

  Women, generally speaking, were tricky. There was Marie-Lou, and there was Gigi, and Angélique with her sandwich bar, and Barbara with the museum, but apart from them none of the women actually seemed to have any public life at all, apart from in the shops. They were far too busy with their children’s lives, and they were suspicious of a woman who had no children and wrote books that weren’t on sale in their bookshop. I soon learned to dress appropriately—no more shorts or ripped jeans—but I still looked slightly hippie-ish to them because I occasionally dressed in the casual way English people do. The men were all nice to me in the cafés, and people like Henri showed me their pornographic texts, displaying their vulnerable spots with a candor and trust I found appealing, though Luc insisted on reading them all through first. Luc was worried that there wasn’t enough for me to do. He found it surprising that I preferred talking to my girlfriends in England on the telephone to making new friends in the village. He decided we should buy a piano.

  PIANO 1

  We found one in Paris, in a huge music shop in the Rue de Rennes. They sold sheet music on the ground floor, woodwind on the second, strings on the third, uprights on the fourth and grand pianos on the fifth. They obviously liked to make things difficult for themselves. We’d been to buy Luc some riding boots. He was standing in the middle of the pavement in the Rue de Rennes in his faded blue denim shirt and jeans and a worn-out brown suede jacket, clutching his posh shoebox, trying to persuade me to go inside and buy a piano.

  I said, “It won’t fit in my apartment.”

  He said, “We’ll have it at the farm.”

  It was odd, with all the traffic zooming past and the sun glinting off the Tour Montparnasse and him standing there with his riding boots, to think of a grand piano belonging to me in his house. It felt like a marriage proposal. I’d always thought a piano was for life. In the big house I’d shared with my ex-husband there had been two big black ones, placed nose to nose, like well-cared-for Labradors who think they’re better than the servants. Long after we’d finished speaking we’d continued to play together, glancing at each other’s reflections in the raised lids, nodding and catching each other’s eye. I didn’t mind that I’d never see them again, but they now seemed like symbols of bad luck.

  What I really wanted, my dream piano, was something beaten up and sore, but with a beautiful tone. Just a simple upright, donated by a kind old person who had recognized, sadly, that her daughter’s visits had petered out, that it was a long way for her to come from the Auvergne, that she scarcely touched it these days, the grandchildren had an electronic keyboard.

  But by the end of that excruciating day, Luc and I were co-owners of a large, black lacquered Korean monster. I was intimidated by the saleswoman, who followed me around and, every time I moved on to a new piano, slid onto the stool of the one I’d just left and played the minute waltz by Chopin in forty-three seconds flat. I just wanted to get out of there fast. It seemed OK, and Luc put down the deposit. He always paid cash when we went out of town, as though he didn’t believe his checks could work if the person he was making it out to didn’t know him, but here they had said they preferred a check. He didn’t have a credit card. Whenever I paid for anything for us both
, like dinner, with mine, he’d say, “No, don’t, I’ve got cash,” and if I insisted he would look away as I signed, as though he was unhappy about being party to anything dubious and was only turning a blind eye to keep me happy.

  They would deliver the piano the following week, free of charge. We explained he lived after fifteen steep bends up a mountain, but they said they’d seen it, done it, all before. After we’d signed the papers we went and had a drink in a bar by the Hôtel de Ville on our way to have dinner with Luc’s gallery owners, and we left all the piano documents on the counter. I always felt jumpy when we went to grand dinners, because Luc was capable of getting out his peasant’s knife to hack at some bread or spear a chunk of cheese. The first time I saw him do it, it had reminded me of Emma Bovary’s wedding night, when the servant brings in the food and Charles gets out his knife and Emma thinks, I’ve married a peasant. Halfway through dinner I realized I’d left the papers in the bar and ran back to fetch them. It took me so long to find the bar again that by the time I got back to the restaurant Luc and his two friends were walking their black poodle around the Place des Vosges for the fourth time. We went off and celebrated the recovery of the papers with a cognac in a café on the Rue Saint-Antoine, during which the black poodle had an epileptic fit.

  The next morning I said, “Luc, I don’t really want this piano. Let’s just put an ad in the local newspaper, and get an old scruffy one. Let’s go back to the shop now and tell them.”

  Luc was trying on his new riding boots. We were staying in Marcel’s apartment. In the room next door, on the other side of a supposedly soundproof wall, we could hear the voice of a woman filling her analytic hour with flat words of woe. Luc said, “It’s too late. I gave them my word of honor.”

  “No you didn’t,” I said. “You gave them a check.”

  “Same thing,” he said. He really did believe that. I never saw him cheat anyone, never heard him tell even a white lie. He could use his brown-gold eyes to get whatever he wanted; he was stubborn and proud, but never deceitful. It’s good to be with a man who will never do anything that makes you feel ashamed for him, and who looks nice in a pair of boots. “If you ever start seeing another man,” he once said, “just tell me. Don’t cheat, just let me know.” A child had been frightened one day in the dental chair, and while Luc’s back was turned had leaped up and made for the door. Luc saw him and gently kicked the door shut. “Sit down again,” he said, and the child did. “Now. Do you want to leave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK then. Go ahead.”

  * * *

  The day before the piano arrived I caught my finger in the car door and had to show the moving men where to put it with my hand in a sling. Luc X-rayed it at his office, wrapped the image in a Kleenex and put it in his shoebox with his phone bills and income-tax bills, marked “petit doigt.”

  He was at work when the piano arrived. The moving men slid it through the front door, which was a stable door, in two parts, so you could keep the bottom half closed and gaze moonily over the top half out into the field. They positioned it near the window and went out to smoke cigarettes under the lime tree. I signed for it and then they left. I sat and looked at it for a while. It looked more like the accessory of a dead person than a live one. It cried out for a bouquet of plastic chrysanthemums on the black lacquer lid to set off the crimson trimmings. The paint on the inside was exactly the shade of dull gold my brother had kept in a special little jar on his window ledge for touching up the details on his Airfix galleons.

  Later that afternoon, Luc’s father and mother walked over from the summer house to pay their respects to the piano. Their poodle came dancing in, skated over the wooden floor and sniffed its legs. Luc’s mother sashayed over and struck a note with a scarlet fingernail, and leaped back laughing when it sounded, as though it were something ridiculous and new-fangled. His father said it was good to have music again, that he hadn’t heard any up here since Madame Desarthes played the “Moonlight Sonata” in her black dress, with a glass of whiskey on the edge of the piano. He had obviously forgotten Brigitte already—or she’d been airbrushed out—and didn’t count Luc’s habit of turning up the speakers full blast at sunset till the sound of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock ricocheted off the southern flank of the Canigou. I didn’t play because my hand was in the sling.

  Luc and the dog got back in the early evening. The dog shuffled across as though they’d had a tiff, and threw herself down with a thud in the opposite corner on top of her pungent blanket. If she’d smoked it would have been the moment to light up. Luc looked startled to see how much space the piano took up in the room that had previously been so empty. It was a huge room, with a kitchen at one end, a fireplace, a shabby leather sofa, two odd chairs and a table from a convent, with little drawers at each place setting, where a nun might keep her wooden plate and her napkin, a missal and maybe something secret, too. Even Stefan loved the room. He said it had something you couldn’t contrive, a real rustic quality, with everything slightly lopsided or the wrong shape.

  Luc was brilliant at introducing false notes and then allowing them time to assimilate, for dust to settle on a plastic pen holder given to him by one of his patients, so that it didn’t look out of place beside a tiny stone Buddha sitting comically in a niche, or the seat of a pair of jeans smeared with paint and pinned to the whitewashed wall, a token from a painter who had come for the weekend. But the piano could never have the air of having arrived by accident. It came in waving its embossed invitation, tricked out and ready to seduce. The far wall, from waist height to ceiling, was all glass. The mountain was set at the perfect distance, neither so close that it loomed heavily, nor so far that you didn’t feel you could walk there in a day. Between the mas and the mountain the land rippled and dipped, and just outside the window the horses came and munched the new green walnuts off the tree. When the sun set, it poured over the floor like molten wax, and Luc would paint in his atelier below by the same light while I cooked or read upstairs. Now the sun hit the piano, and we had to cover it in its blanket, which made it look even more like a royal race horse than it did already. It was high summer—July—and there were flies everywhere because of the horses. Luc set out little dishes of vile yellow crystals to poison them, but they were out of date and you probably could have sprinkled them on your muesli with no ill effect. Somehow, though, the piano became a hospice for flies: it was where they went to die.

  We tried to assimilate the beast. Friends and neighbors came to look at it, as they might have done if the bishop had brought a giraffe back with him from Africa. Two weeks later my finger was well enough for the splint to be removed. Alone in the house one day, I sat down at the piano. I had the music for the Schubert impromptus that Brigitte had previously played. She’d taken her piano when she’d left. She and a girlfriend had hoisted it onto a trailer and towed it down the mountain. I started to play. There is something quite strange and solipsistic about making a noise in an empty house by playing a musical instrument. You find yourself clearing your throat awkwardly between movements, and shifting in your seat as though you were at the Festival Hall. I played all afternoon, with the flies dropping like flies into the heart of the piano, caught on the strings, flattened by the hammers, till the instrument seemed to be almost earning its keep as a flycatcher. The door opened, but it was always opening and shutting in the breeze, or as the dog slipped in and out, so I didn’t take much notice. When I got up to get a glass of water, I realized Luc’s uncle, whom I hadn’t seen since the Easter Sunday meal, was sitting in an armchair listening. Every year in early summer he went off up to his mas, a two-room stone house with table, a bed and a chair, where he drew all summer, returning at the end of September. He appeared to be dead. The glass in my hand slipped between my fingers and shattered on the stone floor by the sink. Even
when you pass a dead rat, or a squirrel with its paws in the air, it seems to take a split second before you start inwardly, as the brain retorts to the eyes that this is not normal, that this thing should not be there.

  He wasn’t dead, though. He was watching me through half-closed eyes.

  “Carry on,” he said, as though it were an audition, or one of those occasions when you had to play at a Sunday School concert for people who didn’t care what you played, just as long as you weren’t as advanced as their Ellie, who’d just gotten her grade five with honors. Afterward he said I played quite well, but not as well as another girl he mentioned. When I asked Luc that evening who Eléonore was, he said she was the daughter of Uncle Jérôme’s ex-mistress and that she didn’t play the piano. But what surprised Luc was that Jérôme had been to the house at all that afternoon. Apparently he hadn’t set foot in Luc’s part of the farm for fifteen years. “He heard about the piano,” Luc said. “He came to see it while I wasn’t here.” It worried him. It seemed like another dark sign.

  PIANO 2

  Shortly afterward we went up to Burgundy for an exhibition of Luc’s paintings. For the first time he was sharing a show with his uncle, though Jérôme wasn’t planning to attend. Luc’s pictures were full of color, and very simple and abstract. There was a family resemblance there—in the days when they had been close, Jérôme had taught him about modern art.