Instructions for Visitors

by Helen Stevenson

  Luc moved around, doing the things that had to be done every night on the farm. Next door the lights were still on, though Georges, Luc’s brother, usually went to bed before nine. He had signed up with a dating agency a year after Brigitte left, and after a few distant misses had been introduced to Emilie, who was in her early forties, pretty, with rosy cheeks and a gentle, scolding voice, and a very small child called Léo. Luc said if Georges ever got the private investigator onto her we could call it Emilie and the Detectives. Emilie was a trained seamstress, and had put her sewing machine where Brigitte’s piano had been. She had also brought a seamstress’s dummy, which she stood in the window, draped in sleeveless coats and half-finished jackets, a ghostly rural equivalent of Gigi’s shop window. Georges adored Léo, and carried him everywhere. Luc would watch them crossing the field together and wonder if he could do that, too. Somehow Georges had stepped out ahead of him and stolen his plan. The one thing he might really have wanted, his brother had done first, and now he didn’t want it as much as he had before.

  The sun had gone behind the mountain, but it was still light, as though the horizon kept slipping an inch and it would never quite grow dark. When the horses drank from the trough in the stable, the water chugged in the pipes, and it sounded the way it does when children noisily suck up the last of their juice through a straw. Luc was telling a story. That morning he had been fixing a crown on a patient’s tooth. The patient had kept on asking for more anesthetic. Luc had a reputation for pain-free treatment. Some people, the old mayor included, had such faith in him, they insisted on being treated without anesthetic, even for extractions. My father had always insisted that his dentist do his fillings without anesthetic, because he said it was worth it in order to be able to taste his lunch afterward. It would have been simpler to have his dental appointments after lunch, but I think he enjoyed it that way. That morning’s patient had been anesthetized to the very limit one mouth could take when he started to cough. “Cigarettes,” he said, with rubberized consonants, and opened his mouth once again. The crown had gone. “Quick,” Luc said. “Open wide.” He stuck his fingers in, probed around and found nothing. He tipped the patient’s head forward. Still nothing. Nothing rattled, or fell. Merde, he thought, and stuck his fingers down the patient’s throat. Nothing. He asked if he’d felt anything. Nothing at all, the patient assured him. He was fine. Luc rang Laurent at the clinic. “I’m sending you someone,” he said. “A patient’s swallowed a crown.” An X-ray confirmed that the patient, a forester, had a crown in his stomach. Eat lots of bread, they told him, and watch out for unusually difficult stools. That morning the patient had rung, triumphant as a child who’s found a coin in a Christmas pudding. Would Luc like to have it back?

  “Good guy, Laurent,” Luc said, looking at me. “N’est-ce pas?”

  * * *

  The next morning Morgan and Charles were up first, claiming not to have gone to bed. Morgan had panda eyes, wild with mascara. Luc shut himself up in his atelier. He was designing the dish drainer, he said. I took him a beer at midday. The drainer was huge, more like something Robert the Bruce and his chieftains might have stacked their shields in. All that day and all the next, a Sunday, Morgan and Charles sat on a bench under a lime tree in the garden, Charles sketching, Morgan looking riveted, as though with his next breath he might be about to divulge the secret of where the treasure was hidden, which you didn’t have to know Charles very well to realize was unlikely. Luc got frustrated with his carpentry and tossed it into the stable for the horses to scratch themselves on, and spent the rest of the day stalking around the farm in his ripped jeans and riding boots, looking for a lost chisel in the grass. His slender chest was black brown from the sun, his eyes like dark acacia honey. “What’s up?” I asked. He said he was sick of people who came to spend time on the farm “par exotisme.” “They lie around, they make love, they admire the view through the window, then they go again. They use it as a backdrop. They bring their own stupid concerns with them and pump away at them under my roof.” He hated adolescent flirtation in adults, coy looks and innuendo under the lime tree. At least Charles had made the manicurist scream with pleasure.

  Eventually, on Sunday evening, Luc invited some friends over, so Morgan had to go back to the village. They said goodbye at the gate, and Charles walked slowly back down the drive, looking sad and important. Luc put on Jimi Hendrix very loud and began drilling a hole in the wall to attach a new coat peg for the hat he’d bought in Figueras market.

  Our friends arrived for dinner, people from Paris, the parents of Chlöe of the sesame rolls. They had a farm on the other side of the valley, where they spent several weeks a year. They arrived at seven, because they never liked to stay late. They were urbane, professional people in their late fifties, with high-ranking jobs in the art world, the only “intellectuals” Luc tolerated. He adored them, but still thought their life was berserk—all that culture, all that walking the streets of Paris, les pauvres.

  The light always seemed different in that room on summer Sunday evenings, more golden. We ate chicken and rice and salad at the oval table. The potager was at its height, with five different types of lettuce. We probably ate too much salad that summer—maybe that was the problem with my digestion. Charles was thrilled to meet Luc’s Parisian friends, and was shy and charming. At one point Eugène asked him how the painting was going, and Charles replied that he had just had a show in the Rue de Seine.

  “I know,” Eugène said, “I saw it.” Charles had already complained to Luc earlier that these smart Parisian people with influence never went to any contemporary shows; they never really knew what was going on.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course, I’m sure you did.”

  “You were on the left, in the second room,” Eugène said, which was true, and shut Charles up until, when Stéphanie asked Luc how his practice was going, he decided to make up for his fault by telling the story of the swallowed crown.

  It was a difficult story to tell badly. It wasn’t till I started clearing the plates that I noticed Luc hadn’t spoken for half an hour. When Eugène and Stéphanie left, we saw them off and walked back to the house together. Luc went to close the gates and Charles and I began washing up. It was still quite early. Luc came in and poured himself a drink.

  He saluted Charles ironically. “Bravo,” he said. “Merci, cher ami.”

  Charles smiled anxiously. “What? What for?”

  There was a silence, then Luc burst open like a spraying firework, everything shooting outward in fury, with crackers popping around his feet. Charles had let him down in front of his friends. Here Luc was, trying to earn a decent living, entertaining his friends, his girlfriend cooking for everyone, providing them with a location for their smutty teen affairs. They, and most particularly Charles—and he hated artists—were posers and fakes, and he never wanted to see Charles again. He could just get lost, get out of his sight. “And you,” he said to me. “You didn’t stop him. You’re supposed to defend me. I don’t know whose side you’re on. Why didn’t you interrupt him? You can just get back to your own world, too. I’m not a tourist attraction. Won’t be turned into one.”

  He went to bed.

  Charles debated whether he should go and spend the night in my house with Morgan, and decided against it. Men, once they pass thirty, are surprisingly prudent in their arrangements: He left in the morning and Luc predicted that the manicurist would be getting a nice surprise around midday. We were sitting reading that evening when Luc began to giggle. It started somewhere at the top of his head and worked its way down his body. I sat there thinking, I am sitting here opposing his laughter. Nothing’s funny. What’s going on?

  He said, “Charles’s face! Marcel will piss himself when I tell him.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “He’ll think, There’s Luc again, getting away with it because he won’t condemn himself.” It was like listening to the gospel story of the adulterous woman, if you made the exchange between her a
nd Christ into a comic monologue. Jesus says, “Where are all thine accusers?” and she says, “Gone Lord,” and he says, “Then neither do I accuse you.” Luc would look around and say, “Who accuses me?” and they’d all have gone running because they loved him and wouldn’t fight with him, and so he’d shrug and say, “They obviously thought I was all right all along.”

  I’d try to get him to see how much harm he did: “You can’t believe it’s OK to say the things you do.” One night he’d called up a woman in her eighties, the one who called his waiting room a bathroom, and told her over the phone she was a fat-assed, gossiping tart. Only one out of the three terms was strictly untrue. Afterward he’d said, “She didn’t really mind. Look, she still comes running.” And indeed she had at once come running, with pots of jam and truffles to soothe his nerves, to make up to him because his maman had died. Because no one ever berated him to his face, he believed he had done nothing wrong. He would never blame himself, and the myth of his blamelessness grew like scales over everyone’s eyes.

  I said to Luc, “I’m leaving. I’ve found a room in London. I’m going to go and live there for a while.”

  “What’s so special about it then? Why this room, now?”

  “There’s a piano. I don’t think I can spend another winter here.”

  “C’est bien,” he said. “I always knew you’d leave.”

  “That’s why I’m leaving,” I said. “Because you keep saying I will. Now it’s come true.”

  “Then I was right,” he said.

  * * *

  I wrapped up my bike in brown paper and took it to the train station. I had a huge backpack, too. I thought, I’m too old to be at a train station with a backpack and a bicycle, crying, again. I thought I could still turn back, and go and sleep on the farm and wake up to the sound of the horses drinking from the trough below the terrace. The station master said, “I don’t know who you spoke to on the phone, but you certainly can’t bring that bike on here.”

  Luc came awake for the first time that day. He put his arms around me and said, “Don’t cry, coquine, you can always come back,” and put my bike on the train anyway, where the staff treated it like a pet and patted it each time they went up and down the corridor.

  LONDON

  What happened then? Princess Diana was killed in a country that seemed to have nothing to do with the country I’d been living in, as though it had happened in an underworld that bore no relation to the everyday world above. That was the day I arrived back in London, in the big house with the children. They were the kind of children I’d dreamed about meeting when I was small. They lived in a rambling house, wore jeans and hand-knitted blue sweaters, kept insects in matchboxes and spent summers playing in and out of rock pools and waves on a Cornish beach. Everyone played music. I sat on my bed with my backpack on the floor. I wondered if it was possible to change like this, just to wrench yourself out of one place and, by physically going to another, consider yourself to have moved. It was the most beautiful day of the summer, just at the end. It reminded me of early autumn Sunday evenings, when my father used to take me and my brother back to university with our trunks. They were flying Diana’s coffin back to London. They were playing English music and people were walking stiffly and sadly on the television. I began unpacking my backpack, and the little boy came in and said there was a postcard for me from America, and would I mind if he steamed off the stamp.

  It was a time when nothing had quite ended, because nothing new had begun. At night, in London, I lay awake wondering if I should be there. I was living in a half-world, where everything was more unfamiliar to me than anything in France had ever been. London had become so fancy. It had so many chic Italian and French restaurants, patisseries and delis, it almost felt like America. I wrote to Luc from my desk in the Round Reading Room, letters in green ink that I never posted. I read a book called Why Women Write More Love Letters Than They Mail.

  He never wrote. Once I’d said to him, “You never write to me. I don’t even know your handwriting.”

  He said, “Which hand do I write with?”

  “Left.”

  “No,” he said. “Right. What hand do I draw with?”

  “Right.”

  “No, left.”

  “What color are my eyes?” I asked.

  “Green. And I know that,” he said, “because Gigi said to me the other day, ‘She had beautiful blue eyes, your English girl,’ and I realized there was something wrong with the sentence.”

  It’s true. If you have green eyes, only the people who really like you notice they’re green and not blue.

  “You’ve still never written me a letter.”

  I went out to the garden to pick salad leaves, and when I came back in there was a Kit-Kat wrapper with its white inside facing up, trapped under a stone on the kitchen table. He’d written, “Coucou, coquine. Luc.” I’ve kept it, and I tell myself it’s a love letter, but I expect in five years’ time I’ll change my mind and throw it away.

  Irene Bishop wrote from North Carolina to finalize her plans. She would be in Paris for a week, then she would travel down by train to the house. Luc and I spoke twice a week on the phone. We still half believed this was just an interlude, like the ones we’d known before. He said, “You have to get this book you’ve written out of the way. You have to stop wanting things so much.” I said to him on the phone, “The woman who wrote is coming from America. She’s seventy-seven. She’s staying for three weeks. Can you meet her at the train station? She’ll need someone to carry her luggage. It’s difficult, traveling when you’re old.”

  “She should stay at home then,” he said.

  So the night before the Saturday she was due, only two months after I’d left, I flew to Gerona; Luc picked me up and we drove back to the village. He looked me up and down and said, “Your clothes are different.”

  I said, “Well, I’ve been temping all week to get the plane fare.”

  “What’s temping?”

  We were sitting in the crêperie, late at night. Luc had stopped drinking, he said, so it was a bit gloomy, sitting there with our water, trying to find things to talk about. “How’s your father?”

  “Very well.”

  “The horses?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m writing an article about love letters for a magazine.”

  “Ha.”

  Laurent came in to buy cigarettes. “Ça va?”

  * * *

  It was hot the next day when I took Luc’s car and drove from the farm to Perpignan railway station. The floor of the Land Rover was littered with my old tapes. Luc had kept everything of mine as it had been. It felt weird, like someone who doesn’t accept that a person has died, and keeps their room just as it has always been and won’t give their clothes away. The car smelled of hay that’s been dried behind glass over a hot summer. It smelled of old dog, too, and of the leather of the horses’ saddles, and there were odd bits of free samples from pharmaceutical companies, and gallery invitations on the dashboard, and the odd single riding glove, and my leather riding jacket hanging over the bar in the back. I switched on the tape recorder. It was halfway through Blur singing about people going home through the suburbs after a night out in London. Luc had been listening to it without understanding the words. Or maybe he did. It turned out he spoke really good English, so other people told me, though he never spoke it to me. Once he said in English to a friend of mine from London whom he’d met in the market, “I am told that you are a metalwork restorer in the area of fine art. But do you only restore existing pieces or do you create sculpture of your own?” which was an unusual first sentence, I thought.

  The highway slides alongside the sea. I was held up at the péage, and the train, which must have dropped Irene Bishop at the station, passed me between the road and the sea. The vine fields were lime-gold, the leaves dark red-wine stained here and there, though in fact that was just the color they turned in autumn and nothing to do with the color of the wine.
The sky was an uncomplicated blue. There was no snow yet on the mountain. At the station Irene was standing a head above the crowd in narrow tartan trousers. She had steel-gray short hair. She was holding a piece of paper with my name on it. It seemed to correspond with the little I knew of her, that the piece of paper should bear my name and not hers.

  I drove her back to the village. I tried to drive slowly, because the train would have been so fast. She told me she had stayed in a hotel in Paris where she’d last stayed in the fifties, with her husband. They had taken a trip down this way one summer in a car whose engine had overheated. She talked about “writing programs” and the fall. I took her to the house, then went and did some shopping for her, and some for me, too, and we met up at the Café Central for a sandwich. She said she needed to rest for two days. I said I had to go back to London on Thursday. “Then come and see me,” she said, “on Wednesday at midday.”

  Luc said, “She looks deranged.” I didn’t think she looked at all deranged. She looked beautiful and clever, and she was as tall as a stork. “I don’t think you understand,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he replied. “I don’t. Are you going to come back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t like London much. I love it here.”

  “When your book’s over, come back. We’ll have a family.”

  I’d heard it all before, but I let it drift. Bits of his talk, his dreams, settled on me like dust I didn’t want to wash away. We rode down the familiar paths in the forest. I had become again a person who rode on escalators and watched the ads skim by. My horse, Hector, was quiet, stepping carefully through the first fallen leaves, though the forest was still dark green within, only the edges singed with autumn. Early autumn leaves are the ones the sun has sizzled, and they crack more sharply underfoot. I could have ridden through the forest with my eyes shut and known after a few seconds what season it was, just from the noise the horse’s hooves made on the ground. In winter they made a “clock-clock” sound, as though the earth were hollow inside. Maybe Luc had had a word with Hector and said, “Don’t play up. Do this for me.” The dog was also subdued. Not particularly pleased to see me, either. In the village everyone said, “Tiens, you’re back.” They never said, “How’s London?” they just said, “Isn’t it marvelous! How you must have missed it!”