On my last day I went around to the house at noon. Irene was out on the terrace. She was reading a book. She waved it at me. “My doctor says I shouldn’t sit in the sun, but if I can’t sit in the sun, what’s left? Have you read this? Take it. Write to me. Tell me what you think.”
I’ve always felt happy around old people, and not just because they make me feel young. The children from the garden next door came home from school at lunchtime. The little girl began her piano practice. The two boys ran out with a ball into the garden. They had a new game, where one of them sat in the crook of the peach tree and threw the ball at the other one’s head. The woman next door with no teeth was baking fish with herbs. Irene said, “It’s too good to move,” so I went and bought two huge plates of Greek salad from Angélique’s bar. Luc was there with Serge Collier. The social services had taken Serge’s two small foster twins away that morning and returned them to their natural mother. “I always knew I’d have to let them go,” he said. “But it’s so harsh and sudden. We have no visiting rights.”
“Quelle époque,” Luc said. “Can I get you a coffee, coquine?”
I said I was visiting the woman in the house.
“Again?”
“This is the first time,” I said. “The other time I was only picking her up. After all, I came all this way to see her.”
“Ah bon. I thought you came to see me.”
Gigi came up and slid onto a stool next to Luc. “Hello, stranger,” she said, looking at me, “you’ve lost some weight.”
“You always say that,” Luc said, for which I was grateful. “Can’t you think of anything else to say?” It was the first time I’d seen him irritable with Gigi.
“Two salads,” Angélique said.
Two salads nearer the Dominican Republic. She leaned back against the espresso machine. “How’s London?”
Gigi said, “You look très chic. No more ripped jeans, then? Isn’t that Agnès B.?”
“Where?” said Luc, looking up and down the street. He was always interested in new women arriving in town.
“On her back.”
“Where?”
I went back to the house. Irene had moved into the shade. I found plates and cutlery and little glasses. We had a glass of wine each. She said, “My doctor also says no wine, but what’s life if there’s no wine?”
She spoke about her son, who might have been a painter but had stopped painting. “He has a nice wife. He went into teaching when he married, but they’ve never had children. Now they’re building a house. When it’s finished, he says, he’ll start to paint again, but they won’t because the house he’s building’s not that sort of house. Time goes by. He says he’s writing a book.”
A couple of hours later I stood at the top of the stairs and noticed that the smell of the sixteen cats had gone. She said, “I won’t see you again, but I will write. Write to me. Tell me what you decide to do.” She handed me some postcards. “Mail these for me.”
I ran down the stairs and out into the street. I felt sad but elated. She opened the kitchen window and called down to me from the second floor. I squinted up at her, dizzy out in the light. “Read the top one,” she said. It was addressed to her son. It said, “She is kind and clever. She does not seem to know how happy she could be.” When I looked back up at the window she’d gone, as though I’d imagined her in the first place. I expect she had gone to lie down in my white room with the blue shutters. What did an old woman look like lying between the sheets with the shutters drawn in the early afternoon? I mailed the cards and drove to the beach, where I met a friend and swam in the sea.
* * *
I left and he said, “Come back when you’ve finished. Nothing’s decided yet. I’m not going anywhere.”
One afternoon I was in the library and I suddenly thought, I have to tell him now, though I didn’t usually call him in the afternoon. I went out to the shop and bought an eraser with the British Library stamp on it to get some small change, and I called him from the phones at the exit to the old Reading Room in the British Museum, where there are always students calling about apartments or trying to track down someone in Earl’s Court whom they met years before on a bus in Jerusalem.
“Luc?”
“Yes.”
“Luc . . .”
He said, “I can’t talk. The dog’s just died.”
He never wept when his mother died, but he wept for a week over his dog. He said, “Are you coming back now?”
I closed my eyes and said, “I can’t.”
“You tell me this now, when the dog’s died?”
“Well, yes,” I said.
I wanted to say that worse things had happened to people, that the first time he’d dumped me it had been three weeks before my divorce came through. When you realize someone needs you to assuage their unhappiness, an unhappiness you didn’t create, and you would gladly do it, but you know they shouldn’t build a new life on the hope of you, you have to go. I wanted to say that his dog dying was beside the point. He had no pity for other people, but suddenly his dog had died and he thought there should be some kind of state funeral.
“Why are you telling me now?”
“I couldn’t not tell you and have you think it would be all right, the dog dying, because I’d come back.”
“You never liked her,” he said. “She told me.”
A week later he rang me and said, “People are very interested in the village. You’re quite a celebrity here. I’ve told them you’ve left, of course. Everyone said, ‘She looked like such a sweet girl.’ Gigi wasn’t surprised, though. She said she’d known you all along. She says you’re like her, that it’s something she could have done when she was your age. She never trusted you. She always said you’d leave once I told you I needed you here.”
“I thought it was you who said that. You said it every day. That’s why I left. You know that.”
“Gigi told me you would. She knows women. She can read you like a book.”
“She needs glasses,” I said.
“She wears them for reading now,” he said. “In bed.”
I said, “Irene died.” I’d gotten back from a weekend in Cornwall with the children and the rock pools and I’d found an e-mail from her son.
“Who?”
“The woman who came to my house.”
“She was old.”
“Not old enough, though.”
“None of us is ever that,” he said.
* * *
I returned to the village once more the following March. Luc and I met in the street one night. He looked alone, as though something was missing. I realized it was the dog. It was a dark night, no moon, only the ghastly orange light of the street lamps. The mountain was hidden by cloud, the cafés were closed, but even if they’d been open we wouldn’t have gone and sat at the bar and drunk a beer. It was one of the rights I’d forfeited by leaving, one of many. We walked, talked stiffly. We no longer knew how long each other’s sentences were going to last. We were both terribly unhappy. We knew, too, that in a few minutes we’d part. Outside my house, he stopped. “I’m going to sell it,” I said. I couldn’t keep it and not be with him. I’d bought it so I’d never have to leave the village, but I’d left anyway, so as not to be with him.
“Why do that?” he asked. “It’s a pretty house. You like it. Don’t sell it because of me.”
I said, “It’s too big.”
I meant too big for me. I felt so small and far away, it seemed vast and unmanageable. It would change and decay in the weather, while I sat in the library in London, under the sheltering dome.
Luc squinted at me. “Too small, you mean.”
“What?”
“Too small. You want a family. Children and cats and books and visitors. Now you say the house is too big. Get it straight in your head, coquine.” He pushed himself off from against the wall, where he’d been leaning back with the flat of one foot against the stone, and walked off down the street. I rang Monsieur Barthie
u the next morning, and within two weeks the house was sold to some Swedes who were as flat and flavorless as a smorgasbord. I left them a sack of white lime paint for the walls.
6. LEAVING
There’s so much less to say about leaving than arriving. Everything’s familiar by now. Trash goes in the big plastic bins in the parking lot. Marianne comes and cleans on Saturday at midday. Make sure the shutters are hooked back and the windows bolted fast. Leave the towels and the sheets in the bedrooms, where they are. Lock the inside door at the top of stairs, and leave the keys in the hole in the wall by the mailbox to the right of the door.
* * *
I leave by car, on a day that is neither autumn nor winter. The village is already behind me, in the nape of the hills that ripple down to its outer walls, a pile of warm yellow and pink stone. It sits like a newborn child, wrapped in the folds of these protecting slopes, a pleat in the landscape, aging, changing imperceptibly to human eyes. But it is never not here. It is we who leave, forget, return, change, we the visitors. The Pont du Diable is gray in the afternoon light. On the disused railway bridge is a flat silhouette of a bull, made of tin. The green municipal bins are being emptied, and a truck is spraying fluorescent dotted markings on the road. When I stop at the traffic circle and take one last look, I remind myself this was once, and may always be, my place. I know I’ll always misremember something, move a line of trees, forget a twist in the river, cancel a bank of trees or a vital cloud. My mind’s eye grows tired. Each time it blinks the landscape shifts a season, passing from mimosa into pale peach pink, to early summer lime and late summer yellows and then orange and red, as though gradually less water were being added to the wine as the year wears on. On my left, as I drive up the access road, is the mountain Virgil loved, rigid against the banking equinox clouds. I wind down the window, throw my two francs into the wire basket and the barrier lifts. A train passes, going the other way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN STEVENSON grew up in South Yorkshire and studied modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford. She is a translator and the author of three novels, Pierrot Lunaire, Windfall and Mad Elaine. Since taking up writing full time, she regularly reviews for the Independent. She now lives in London.
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Helen-Stevenson
Also by Helen Stevenson
Pierrot Lunaire
Windfall
Mad Elaine
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Copyright © 2000 by Helen Stevenson
Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers
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ISBN: 0-7434-5689-0
ISBN: 978-0-7434-6338-6 (eBook)
First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing January 2003
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