Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  I said, “You’re a professional. What do you think? People always say it’s a mistake to go back.”

  He thought about it and said, “What do you think? Do you think it’s a mistake to go back?” Psychoanalysts always do that. It’s like getting paid for doing Latin exercises, turning direct statements into questions.

  * * *

  By this time the dental practice had settled into a routine. Luc had bought a computer from a salesman called Didier who lived in the Auvergne. Every time Luc had a problem with his files Didier got in his car and drove 300 kilometers to sort it out. He said Luc was the sort of person who made his profession—his métier—worthwhile. A lot of his patients seemed to think Luc made having a toothache worthwhile. One woman, an elderly friend of his mother, thought of his office so much as home, she kept having slips of the tongue and calling the salle d’attente—the waiting room—la salle de bain. At each appointment, she said, before she lay down in the dentist’s chair, she felt an impulse to undress.

  While I was away and Luc was setting up the office on his own, he decided never to paint again, and burned every picture he had left. He said he started off just clearing some space out in the barn. Because he painted on plain brown wrapping paper, his pictures were highly combustible. There were two or three he didn’t like, so he carried them in a roll down to the far end of the field and set them alight. They went up with a shoosh into the leaves of the trees, which shot in an instant from green to flame to carbon. It was spring. He was spring cleaning.

  The fire was going well. He said it looked rather beautiful in the dark, that there was something in the paint that made the flames glow blue, so he went back to the barn to see if there was anything else he could add. There were more rolls in the barn, some of the paintings left over from the show in Burgundy, so he decided to burn those, too. By morning, he said, everything was gone. Everything he had ever painted in fifteen years, apart from what he had sold or what was on show in galleries and museums. He said it was like going to the hairdresser for a trim and ending up with your head shaved.

  He had been depressed all winter. Shortly after burning his paintings he’d been sitting around in Gigi’s shop, moping, when he abruptly lifted himself up off the sofa and said he was going to get a haircut. She thought this was odd at the time, because he usually cut his hair himself. He came back half an hour later with it cut almost to his skull, looking specterlike and ready for some sacrificial ceremony. “C’est fini,” he said, meaning the haircut. Later that evening she became convinced he was going to kill himself and rang Marcel in a panic. Marcel said Luc wasn’t the suicidal type and she should stop being such a maman to him; he’d only just lost one mother, he didn’t need a new one quite yet.

  His mother had dropped dead while cooking fish one Saturday lunchtime after the market. “Plouf!” he said, in cartoon language, “Morte!” It was the day I’d left to go back to England. Luc, who always read the horoscopes in the local paper, told me his mother’s had said, “Beware Le Poisson”—French for Pisces.

  “Which is odd,” he said when he told me about it, “because that’s your sign.”

  The last time she had knocked on his door, bringing him some jars of apricot jam, he hadn’t answered because I was packing and it wasn’t the moment. We found the jars of jam on the step later, but he never rang to thank her and never spoke to her again.

  When she died he went to Spain and bought a horse.

  She was half Arab, half back-street, and Luc fell in love with her at first sight. He loved anything that was physically irregular. In the office he loved treating old people who had lost all but a few of their teeth, and he was the dentist of choice for all the people with Down’s syndrome who lived in a home at the end of the valley. They delightedly exchanged drawings and paintings, and Luc loved the way his were indistinguishable from theirs. “It’s a parrot,” his favorite patient, Nicole, would say in a challenging tone, handing him a nonchalant scribble that looked remarkably like one of his own drawings. “So it is,” he would say, biting his lip, and the two of them would burst out laughing so hard they’d have to slide down the walls and sit on the floor.

  He called the horse Chiquita. She was frisky but ugly, a disconcerting combination. She had lost her mother as a foal and had been raised by a human, and she believed she was human, too, not a horse. Sometimes she would come clopping into the house and mooch around the sitting room, nosing among Luc’s tax papers. When that happened Luc would say quietly, “Quick, get the phone off the hook.” The first time this happened I thought it was an odd priority, but he explained later that the phone, an old seventies model, which pealed so loud you could hear it at the far end of the field, would have terrified the horse and made her buck and charge into the walls or through the plate-glass window. It wasn’t difficult to imagine her sailing through the glass, legs splayed, sprouting wings at the very last moment, soaring away over the mountain. Gigi came to look at her the weekend Luc brought her back. She took one look at her over the green gate and said perhaps he should have called her Clothilde. It’s true, she had something of the none-too-bright but willing peasant about her. The first thing he did when I got back was introduce us.

  HOUSE BUYING

  I was first shown the house by Monsieur Barthieu, a small, carefully coiffed Trotskyist. He worked for a realtor called Monsieur Dada, for whom he staged performances, by appointment. I was looking for someplace small, inexpensive, but with what French realtors call “cachet.” He understood—completely, he assured me with an off-center grin—my requirements. A writer! His mind’s eye focused, twitching with pleasure. He wanted me up in that south-facing room at a little table, with a view out onto perfectly tended gardens, with fruit trees and trailing vines and stone balustrades and a nightingale in the early evening. Do you write in the morning or the evening? The morning. Ah. He touched my shoulder with the tip of his pipe. And in the evening? In the evening, I said, I read and eat. Ah. I see. You like the sun when you write. Yes, I said, I like the sun when I write. So he trailed me on that first, blistering-hot house-hunting morning around a number of glum properties that were all completely wrong. “I know—I can see!—exactly what you are looking for,” he said. “We will find it. But I must warn you. It could take a year, maybe more.” As the bells tolled five to twelve and we were thinking about breaking for lunch, he stopped dead in the street. He looked up at the house with the bulge. “And yet,” he said, “and yet . . .”

  The woman who answered the door looked like someone who’d retired from the Summer Special Show in 1976, tan, wiry and blond. She was fiftyish, very thin, and wore leggings and a turquoise T-shirt. Madame does not own the house. We would, therefore, it turned out later, have to consider Madame’s interests very carefully. Madame had said the only time prospective buyers could visit the house was at midday on Wednesdays—nice timing!—and that she had to be found somewhere to live not only for herself, but for her sixteen cats as well. The house stank of ammonia, like a 1950s hairdressing salon.

  Tenants’ rights are well protected in France. There was no question of turfing Madame out. After all, said Monsieur Barthieu, you can always live with your boyfriend. But I wouldn’t be buying the house if I wanted to live with my boyfriend. Then why is he your boyfriend if you don’t want to live with him? Don’t you want to have his babies?

  He had a way of always asking the awkward questions. Nor was his Trotskyism an empty affair. He was a protector of the interests of the non-property-owning poor. As both Madame and I, at this point, fell into that category, he was a realtor made in heaven. He sold me the house at a fraction of what it should have cost, and rehoused Madame in an elegant squat on the square.

  Madame had been a good tenant for the previous owner, a Belgian psychoanalyst from Bruges. He had met a Japanese widow, living in Paris, at the spa the previous summer. They had married, and decided to sell up in Bruges, Paris and the village so they could buy a bigger house here for their retirement, with a lar
ge garden. It’s always good to meet people who are planning on a large garden for their retirement. At the time of the negotiations for the house the man had a broken leg, having fallen off a ladder while picking cherries. When I went to see them he was lying on a chaise longue, sipping green tea from thimble cups, looking out at his garden. He told stories about his practice in Bruges, while his new wife reminisced about Regent Street, where she’d bought a Burberry raincoat in the sixties. If they hear you write books, people tell you stories. You’re the one they catch at the gate to the wedding feast, whose coat edge they pull at, who always, as they know, has a moment and one to spare. They told me Madame, their tenant, had a boyfriend who kept her. He sold spices and African clothing in the Sunday morning market on the coast.

  Just before I made the offer on the house, Luc came around to have a look at it. Even though it had been built in 1500, or thereabouts, to him it seemed like a tract home that had just sprung up out of nowhere, since it didn’t feature on his personal map of the village, on which only the lines that he had traced himself existed at all. It’s only visitors who explore a place. In the place where you were born and brought up you never go looking for things, or trying to get the general picture. He was astonished that he could have lived in the village all his life and have no idea that this perspective existed, this way of looking at the mountain. It was as though he’d had an envelope sitting around for years and I’d one day slit it open and said, “Look. Go on, take a look at what’s inside.”

  He said, “Of course you have to have it. It’s perfect for you.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was beautiful. You can walk through any pretty village and think how lovely it would be to have a little place there, but it’s really rare, in fact, to find someplace where you feel happy, and where there is enough light.

  The day I got the keys and paid the check it was pouring rain. I said to Luc at breakfast, “You will help me paint and plaster won’t you?”

  He poured himself some more coffee and licked the edge of his cigarette paper thoughtfully. After a while he said, “No. No, I don’t think I will. I’ve more than enough to do here on the farm really, without helping you with your place.”

  I didn’t enjoy taking possession. If you go to get a divorce in France, the lawyer will beam across the table at you, surrounded by hugely blown-up photographs of his smiling wife and happy children. If you go to buy a house, you can be sure the photographs of his elegant domain will sour your pleasure at your own meager acquisition. “So, Mademoiselle,” he said, “you were born in nineteen seventy-three.”

  “Sixty-three,” I said.

  “Sixty-three? No!” He clutched at imaginary beads at his chest, like a duchess in a pantomime. “Surely not!” He opened his palms to the sellers, he in plaster and she in her serviceable Burberry for special occasions. “I appeal to you, Messieursdames, is it possible? Surely not. But never mind. Your little house will give you plenty of gray hairs, I am sure. Cracks do not always appear first on the surface. When you come to sell it we will say, so, you were born in nineteen forty-three, Mademoiselle.”

  I signed the check, which was enormous. It was the size of a magazine or a certificate for doing well at ballet class. I had to sign it and have it countersigned by the lawyer, who then presented it to the owners. I found it difficult to take as much pleasure in this little ritual as the lawyer himself seemed to do. I thought ritual was meant to be a way of cushioning an act, of providing a cathartic release of tension. But this was just a lawyer handing over a huge check with my name on it to someone who would later go and pay it into their own account.

  It was pouring rain. I walked up into the old village with the two keys, one tiny and one barely portable, in my backpack. It was December. I couldn’t remember why I’d bought the house. It took all the money I had in the world. I had no regular income. This was the place I was supposed to be forgetting. I loved Luc, but I felt he was bad for me, that he appealed to my rather base instinct toward the cleverest, best-looking, funniest boy in the class, who would boost my confidence then let me down. I had a subconscious system for recognizing these men. Every time I started going out with one I would dream about a boy at school who was clever and handsome and good at sports, and who had never noticed me at all, though I was glued to him in my head and we were scheduled to marry. It took me ages to realize that the subconscious meant the dream as a warning, not a prompt. England was only a few hours away. I had been searching for something to decide for me whether I wanted to go home or stay. I had found it. I had just paid £30,000 I didn’t have for it. It was an expensive way to flip a coin.

  It was almost lunchtime. Henri, the cardiologist, stopped and offered me a lift.

  “I’ve got another story for you,” he said cheerily. “It’s on the back seat in the plastic folder. Usual drill. Don’t feel you have to be kind.” Henri dropped me in the corner of the parking lot and said he’d come around after work and fix the window in the top bedroom. It breaks whenever a wind from the north slams the bedroom door. It just crumbles and falls to the floor.

  I let myself into the house and dropped the big key into a bucket in the kitchen. I looked at all the places that were dripping. I noted all the long cracks in the outside supporting walls. I hadn’t had a surveyor in to check. It would be arrogant, Monsieur Barthieu had seemed to suggest, to suppose that after withstanding centuries of pestilence, sun and rain, it was going to develop a fatal fissure just for me. You couldn’t even see out of the foggy window at the view that had made me fall in love with the house the previous August. My head spun and sang from the cat smell of diluted ammonia, which was acting like a eucalyptus chest rub and emptying my sinuses. I sat down on the floor in the kitchen, in the middle, where it seemed least likely I’d see a rat, and read Henri’s story about a girl in a red bikini on the beach in July.

  In my life I’ve met three medical doctors who’ve shown me their pornographic stories. It must be almost time for an anthology. I didn’t mind reading Henri’s stories because they were rather good, and because, I’m afraid, he was so attractive. Henri had such astonishing eyes that if he’d ever run amok and you’d stopped someone in the street and said, “Did you see a man carrying a chainsaw dripping blood run past here twenty seconds ago?” they’d say, “Oh, the one with the blue eyes? He went that way.” Later on, Henri came around and fixed the window very slowly, using putty and a square-ended knife, and it continued to rain.

  But after a few weeks of cloud and mist and more rain, I walked into the house one morning when the sun shone and thought, This is where I meant to come after all. Now I realized that the sun hit the terrace before I even woke, so that when I stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen, made my coffee and took it outside to drink, the seats of the chairs and the stones and the terra-cotta tiles were already warm.

  The house had hidden itself from me successfully for the first few weeks, pretending not to be what it was. It was the lover glimpsed at an airport or on a passing ship, who returns disguised as a fat merchant or a beggar to test the strength of your love. It had come to me with all its charm cast off, wanting me to love it for the disposition of its rooms, the things that still work when the sun doesn’t shine, its smell of old wood, its secret closets and staircase laid with terra-cotta tiles. Once I’d proved, grudgingly, my affection, it came to me undisguised and turned out to be even better than I’d thought.

  MILD XENOPHOBIA

  A man called Serge Collier, who had once been a typesetter for the Presses Universitaires de France, fixed all the leaks and cracks. He would work for a day and a half, then stop for a week. He and his second wife were foster parents to two small children—twins—who had come from a home neither of them remembered. Serge sat out on my terrace for hours, smoking calmly, talking about women, children, politics and his frustrated love affair with his wife.

  The walls were pitted and crevassed, and bulged in places. I covered them in white lime—chaux—bought from the paint shop in the village by the sa
ckload, and the effect was as flattering as snow. It scuffed so easily that it soon looked as though a herd of elephants had had an all-night romp in the Arctic, but it didn’t matter because the lime was cheap and easy to reapply.

  I painted the woodwork gray-blue, the color of all woodwork in old houses in the south, since the color is said to repel flies. The wooden floors soaked up beeswax from a rectangular yellow can, a product whose packaging hadn’t been redesigned since the turn of the century. I found that if you waxed the floors just before lunch, they caught the sun just as you finished, and to polish them you could skate around with cloths tied to your feet with twine, and execute double salchows with lighting effects that didn’t rely on having sequins sewn on your socks. Luc would arrive at midday and say, “You’re making a good job of it. It’s important to do it yourself. Otherwise, before you know where you are, everyone will start to call it ‘Luc’s house.’ ”

  It was the most pathetic reason I’d ever heard for not picking up a paintbrush. “Why on earth should they do that? It’s my house. Yours is up there.”

  “Because the village is like that.”

  “No, it’s not. Only you are. Stop saying the village when you mean you.”

  “Le village, c’est moi.”

  “You’d better be kidding,” I said.

  I needed to rent the house out over the summer to pay the mortgage, hence the ad in the London Review of Books, which has a perfect classified ads section. I always turned to the back page before plowing through the essays on William Empson or politics in early seventeenth-century Rome. Their classifieds so exactly reflect the readership that you could feel kinship with the people who wrote on William Empson and the rest, simply by desiring what they desired: a two-bedroom house in Highgate, a room for writing in Brooklyn, an out-of-print edition of poems. Now that they have a personal ads column it has become a bit more difficult to dream along with them. I found it easier to get excited about “House on Missolonghi Peninsula, view of temple, vegetable garden, £70 a week” than about “Shy, ugly man, fond of extended periods of self-pity, middle-aged, flatulent and overweight, seeks the impossible.” I’d love to know if he found it, though.