House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  When they had passed, everything looked just the same. Two of the hens scuttled across the yard, chuckling, and began to scratch in the long grass by the barn wall. Slowly, Oriane sat up, stretching her cramped arms, and released the catch of the window, cautiously stretched her head outside to look down the road. ‘Listen, William, listen. Have they gone?’ He shuffled up on his knees, breathing softly, and shook his head. So they lay there in the shadow and listened to the church clock strike the quarter hours in the valley. Oriane was very thirsty, the dust was clogged in her throat and her eyes stung, but it seemed stupid to move until something happened. Her body felt heavy, she had a perverse desire to sleep. An hour passed, the bells chimed once for a quarter past nine. It seemed as though nothing was moving, even the wind in the poplars was muffled with anticipation. Craning out of the little window, Oriane could see the road until it dropped down, then the meadows of Murblanc and the étable, the chateau hill rising behind, the tower just visible above the trees, which were still lacy, not dense with summer leaves. William was distracted, playing a jumping game in the squares of sunlight opened by the missing tiles of the roof, hopping from one to another with his arms stretched out like a dancer. When she turned back to the valley, there was a flag flying from the chateau, a red flag with a white circle and a hooked black cross, limp but fluttering a little, determined. They had not been passing through.

  As the bells chimed towards the afternoon it felt foolish, eventually, to stay in the loft. Oriane heated the soup for William and left him to drink it while she stood in the doorway with a glass of that morning’s cold coffee and stared down the road. She was sure that Laurent would come and tell her what to do, but until then she was reluctant even to leave the yard. She went upstairs for a jersey of William’s and fitted the wool through the darning needle, then sat back on her stool. William had retrieved his violin and was playing again, there seemed no point in stopping him, in trying to explain that they would not be going to the village tonight after all, and that there would be no dancing. It was extraordinary that just hours ago she had been here, pinning flowers on her dress, and that the music that was now so thin and sad had seemed gay. But it was cruel to prevent him after she had struck at him this morning, so he played on. Beneath the sound, the valley was still so quiet that she was sure it could be heard in Castroux. It was dreadful, surely, just to sit here?

  Oriane hated the look on William’s face when he saw her in the kitchen doorway. He started, his shoulders rising as he ducked his chin to his chest, ready to shield himself.

  ‘Have you eaten your soup?’ He nodded. ‘Good boy. Shall you go a walk for me?’ She felt shabby to make him go alone, but to leave the house empty did not feel safe. When he came back, she explained, it would be nearly time to walk to the village. He set off up to the plain with a slice of bread on which she had dolloped a big spoon of strawberry compote. It was too easy to please William, to hurt him and then take away his fear with sweets or games. He was more quickly mollified than a screaming child, but she preferred to treat him as though he were reasonable, as though he understood things. If she practised the delusion hard enough it might allow him a small and unharmed place in the world. She watched his progress up the white road, his head twisting this way and that with his comical ears sticking out like cabbage leaves, and was full of a painful love for him, for that loneliness that she thought he ought to feel and which was hers alone. When his figure was gone, she put away the dishes and wiped the crumbs from the table, then swept the floor as she had done that morning. There was the noise of an engine outside, so she crossed quickly to the yard, expecting Laurent and an explanation.

  Four of them were getting down from a square, open-topped car. For a second she thought of grabbing the poker, a knife, or simply running, but her limbs had the heavy quality of a dream and she remained still, though her body was as vividly alive as a hare before the dogs. One of them came towards her. He was tall, taller than any of the men in the village, in a black tunic open at the neck to show a grey shirt and black tie. There were knots of silver in his lapels and an emblem above the bib of the black peaked cap, which he removed. His hair was the colour of new corn, short and bristling. He waited a few steps away, as though expecting her to speak. So they had come already.

  ‘Good morning, Mademoiselle. Might I ask if your father is at home?’ His voice was almost French, clear and polite. Oriane twisted her hands in her dress until the moment grew too long and she stammered out that she was alone, that she lived alone, except for her brother.

  ‘He’s at work,’ she added stupidly.

  The other three wore helmets, rounded with short brims. They stood by the car and watched.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude, Mademoiselle,’ went on the man with the cap, ‘but we need to look over the buildings here.’

  ‘The buildings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He said it with such calm and perfect authority that it did not occur to Oriane to question him, to find out why, let alone to refuse or ask for justification. Her first feeling was simple relief. The man said something to one of the others. It was the first time Oriane heard German. The rhythm of it was strange, tripled like the jigs William played. It didn’t sound terrifying, it was almost funny. The helmet stepped forward with a notebook and pencil.

  ‘Your name?

  ‘Oriane Aucordier.’

  ‘Your papers?’

  ‘I have to fetch them. They’re inside.’ He nodded his head slowly, as though she could take her time. She brought out the identification cards and the ration books that had lain untouched in the drawer of the buffet for three years. The man looked at them so slowly that she felt guilty, certain there was something wrong and that they would take her away.

  ‘How old is your brother, William Aucordier?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Has he a paper of exemption?’

  It would be wrong, she was certain, to tell the truth, which was that she did not understand. But was the truth about William any better? They would take him to prison.

  ‘The paper that excuses him from serving in the Army, if he’s here?’ When they had gone to the Mairie for the cards no one had mentioned any such thing, but William was old enough now, she had to speak, to decide just this instant which was worse to admit to.

  ‘No, sir. He’s feeble minded. Simple. But he’s very good, he doesn’t do any harm, he’s never been in trouble.’

  ‘But you said he was at work.’

  ‘Yes, he scares birds you know, to help. Up in the fields.’ Oriane made to gesture with her arm towards the plain, but it hung like a broken wing at her side. Already she had been forced to lie, and the helmeted man was scribbling down the translation as the other spoke it. William would go to a horrible prison, he would be beaten and starved and it would be her fault for telling the truth. A hot wash of thin vomit rose in her throat, she gulped, shuddering, stretching her eyes wide to keep tears from coming.

  ‘May we look inside?’

  ‘Inside?’ He must think she was some country throwback, not quite finished.

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ patiently, with no sign in his voice that she seemed a cretin to him, ‘that’s why we’re here. Just to see the buildings.’

  ‘Of course.’ She held the door for him as formally as if he were the priest, and the others followed, removing their helmets as they stepped over the threshold. They walked through the rooms, the kitchen and scullery downstairs, the four bedrooms, lifting the hatch to the low, dusty attic where the rats scuttled at night. Then Oriane was to show them the barn, the ladder to the loft, the chicken house, the vegetable garden, and all the time the man asked questions in his formal, correct French. How many goats had she? What work did she do? When had her mother died? Oriane blushed as they opened the door to the privy, though it was whitewashed and the seat scrubbed smooth. One of them picked a sprig of rosemary at the door and rubbed it against his fingers until the man with the cap frowned at him and he drop
ped it. She still did not know the purpose of the inspection, yet her fear receded and she answered confidently, hoping that the man would see from her tone that she was respectable and had nothing to hide. Later she learned that they were doing the same all over Castroux, poking sticks up chimneys and peering into larders, rattling at windows that had been painted shut for generations.

  ‘You two live alone, you say, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you are not, that is you have never?’ He paused and said something in German, the helmeted men sniggered and one of them shook his head. ‘Never mind. You will report to the Mairie tomorrow morning please, at eight o’clock? With your brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He saluted her and clicked his heels together smartly. ‘Thank you, Mademoiselle.’

  They were starting up the car when there was a raucous whooping from the road. William was hurtling into the yard, his face tight and terrified, blood streaming from his nose. Two soldiers chased him, so fast that when they saw the car and stopped short, the second of them crashed into his companion and stumbled to the ground. William threw himself at Oriane, clutching at her clothes and gasping, butting his head against her shoulder as though he was trying to hide. The hands of the men in the car reached swift and simultaneous to their hips, and Oriane realized with a sick dread that they were, truly, reaching for guns.

  The man in the cap was kind, though. He bellowed at the two soldiers as they stood shiftily to attention, and apologized formally, in French, no less, to William. His attention gave her a kind of pride, as though it made her and William distinguished, that they had been singled out to be defended so. He must be an officer, she thought. The man’s eyes were a sharp greenish blue, like roof slates after the rain.

  SUMMER HOLIDAYS

  Claudia’s misery had descended to the point where she felt mechanical, divided between one self, which functioned, spoke to Aisling and Alex, swam, ate, performed efficiently, and another, which floated somewhere outside, the same questions running through its mind, wretchedly irresolute, permanently on the edge of tears. There was a sort of perverse pride in the discipline it took to keep the two selves apart, like holding a pair of magnets without permitting them to touch. What had seemed so simple and obviously apparent in London was now clouded, opaque, a treacherous quicksand that would swallow her whether she moved forward or back. The link between the d’Esceyracs and Sébastien had recalled her, horribly, to the fact that he, unlike her, was not suspended in limbo, that his life continued in the world with no sense of hesitation as to how she, Claudia, would act.

  If she could not choose to love Alex, the sensible thing would be to get rid of the baby, get over Sébastien, engineer some quarrel with Alex and return to her life as though nothing had happened, but she was afraid. If she pursued that, it would be unpleasant for a time, but she knew rationally that she would recover, that no one would die of it, except the baby. There was a sort of arrogance, she thought, in people’s belief in their capacity to cause others pain. Alex would not be irrevocably damaged, he would not collapse of a broken heart. He would be disappointed, angry perhaps, and uncomprehending, but not destroyed. Or she could do as she had originally intended, but then why was that now so difficult? There were worse things, surely, than to marry a man who she found embarrassing, and what did it tell her about herself that Alex’s slight buffoonishness outweighed his other qualities? She could justify not marrying him on the grounds that it was insulting, such a deceit, and cruel to pretend to love him when she did not, but this argument was implausibly abstract. She did not believe it because she did not believe that Alex would ever know the difference. He would not necessarily prefer the kind of woman who would love him as he deserved.

  What Alex deserved was one of the Emmas or Lucys, someone unimaginative and undemanding, who would admire him, but what he wanted, what he thought he was worth, was difficult, clever, beautiful Claudia, so was it not generous, truly, to encourage him in the delusion that she would have had him even if he weren’t second prize? Maybe that was a disgusting thing to think, but it was nonetheless true. It was why she could not blame Sébastien. The only deceit had been her own towards herself, and she acknowledged that she was craven enough to have been grateful if he were to have deceived her, to have pretended to love her. Though surely in that case she would not have known and so would have been happy, as Alex was happy now. All through the settled routine of the days at Murblanc, Claudia dismantled her reasons and rebuilt them thus, and the only idea that did not occur to her was that this torturous logic grew from a need to rationalize where it had previously been valid only to feel. She had never before had to reconcile desire and possibility, to accept, simply, that she would not have what she wanted.

  The peacefulness with which she was surrounded was beginning to feel oppressive. She felt banked in, as surely as the house and the village were held in their bowl of hills, moving in a slower time. Aisling seemed so contented, so preoccupied with her tiny universe, as unbearably smug and self-satisfied as Alex’s London friends, and yet Claudia envied her in a way, envied her assurance of agency, however limited its scope. There was no need for gin and hot baths, Claudia had autonomy too, she could elect for that life she had before, her flat, her job, her friends, yet things were too far gone for that. She had been offered a sort of grandeur, a chance to alter herself radically, to become someone else, and mysteriously she felt superstitious about negating it. Not to move forward would be a denial she might regret. So why was she so afraid to take what a few weeks ago had seemed a simple and necessary step?

  She said she felt like a walk, Alex offered dutifully to accompany her, but she could see he would be glad to continue with the phone calls that spun him across the sea to London.

  Claudia climbed the hill to Aucordier’s and went to find old Oriane. She had the excuse of the Sternbachs, and tried to begin by explaining their story, that she had wondered if Oriane could remember anything. Did she know another lady, Amélie Lesprats? Oriane was sitting as usual in the kitchen, the television making its perpetual murmur in the corner. Claudia brought the story around to the visit to the chateau, then petered out. Was this too indelicate, too hurtful? But the memory of the old woman’s calm acceptance of her earlier outburst made her feel that she might say anything, so she simply asked.

  ‘Was it the old Marquis, your baby’s father?’

  ‘Is that what you thought?’

  ‘Well, I sort of guessed.’

  ‘You were wrong.’ They used the formal ‘vous’ with one another. Claudia was mortified.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I haven’t said anything to anyone else. I just, you know, when you said about the baby—’

  Oriane patted the sofa beside her. ‘Come and sit here.’

  Claudia got up from the hard kitchen chair where she had been sitting, fiddling uselessly with the hem of her skirt, and took the proffered place. The old lady smelt clean today, like talcum powder.

  ‘Down the hill, behind Murblanc there, there was a good place for gathering ceps. We used to go there. We’d find them quickly, maybe half a kilo, a kilo after the rain. Cook used to put them up in butter and serve them with little potatoes and black pepper. They were delicious that way.’

  Claudia tried to look interested, but her stomach was contracting like a snail pulled out of its shell and left in the sun. What was she going on about mushrooms for?

  ‘One time, I went with my brother. He was called William, my brother. People thought he was simple, but he could be clever in his way. When they came, the Marquis asked William to move some things for him. Just boxes, but they had important papers in them, I think, and he wanted someone he could trust, someone who wouldn’t talk. Poor William couldn’t exactly talk. So when we’d got the ceps, we took them up the hill. I was going to share them with the girls who worked in the kitchen, although Cook had gone by then. Well, we came to the house, and William got excited, he was pulling at me, want
ing to show me something, so I followed him into the stables. I wasn’t supposed to go in there, it was where they slept, see?’

  Claudia nodded, although she didn’t see.

  ‘And he showed me a little cupboard, and in the cupboard was a key.’

  ‘A key. Good.’

  ‘I couldn’t see why he wanted to show me that. But then he took me down into the woods and he showed me the place the key fitted, a sort of cellar, where the Marquis had put his boxes.’

  ‘Did you look inside?’

  ‘There were just papers, like I say. Some of them in English, I think. I think he thought they would be important if he got killed. But I kept the key. And that was where I met him. Jacky’s father, he was one of them, see?’

  Claudia took a moment to concentrate, still confused by the mushrooms. She had not expected this sort of chattiness, really. She began to babble about her visit to the chateau, describing what she and Otto had found. ‘Look,’ she said brightly, trying to distract Oriane, ‘there were three of these.’ She tumbled the compacts on to the dingy cushion between them.

  Oriane picked one up, opened it, examined the design, turned it over and read out the name on the underside. She surveyed her face in the mirror.

  ‘Regarde toi,’ she said softly.

  Claudia was chattering, ‘I wonder where they came from? How they got there? It’s a funny thing to find, no?’

  ‘I know how they got there,’ answered Oriane, and her voice was curt again.

  She reached for her stick and pulled herself up, slowly, manoeuvring with her unbandaged arm. For a while Claudia was left alone with the half-light from the shutters and Gérard Depardieu. There seemed to be only about eight actors in France, she thought. She could hear Oriane moving about upstairs, and then the shuffle and tap as she returned.

  ‘Are you all right? Should I fetch you some water?’ Oriane’s face was flushed, bruised-looking.