by Hilton, Lisa
‘I’m going to sell my flat,’ said Claudia. ‘I think I’m going to find somewhere in Paris.’ As she spoke she realized she meant it.
‘I thought you might,’ answered Alex, and Claudia realized she was a very great fool. But all he said then was that he would give her a number of someone who would be able to get her a good deal.
At Murblanc, Aisling was having a crisis on the terrace. She was clutching what was obviously not her first glass of wine, and as they helped themselves from the jug of rosé, to Claudia’s astonishment, Aisling took one of her cigarettes. She smoked it like the men in the photo, held between thumb and finger, her hand curled over the smouldering end. Jonathan was clearly at a loss. Aisling explained she had been to see Delphine, for a coffee. Delphine had shown her over the house, she had opened up a wonderful long gallery in the old part of the chateau. Even though Aisling was furious, she wasn’t totally able to curb the admiration in her voice. The gallery was full of frescoes, painted over, but you could see through in the light, it looked almost like Fontainebleau.
‘Never mind, Aisling, darling,’ said Alex, ‘what happened? Did Delphine leave you off the WI cake list?’
Aisling glared at him. ‘Delphine wants to make the chateau into a hotel. She asked if we might think of selling one of our fields. They want to make a golf course and a gym and a new driveway.’
‘How awful,’ Claudia murmured.
‘She’s going to Paris tomorrow. There are some Americans interested in investing, she said.’
‘Americans!’ said Alex, and Claudia gave him a look before she remembered they were now split up.
‘She thought I’d be pleased. She even asked if I wanted to help as a sort of consultant. She offered me a job, to work for her! As if she thinks I’m Madame Lesprats!’
‘Steady on.’
‘Oh, shut up, Jonathan. As if you care how hard I’ve worked to make this place what it is! You’d probably be happy to spend the rest of your life playing Scrabble with the likes of Malcolm Glover.’
‘You know, it mightn’t be a bad idea, darling. The golf course. This place could do with a bit of investment. Everything’s dying around here. ‘
Aisling stood up and threw her rosé in Jonathan’s hapless face. ‘You’re disgusting!’ she screamed, and ran into the house. They heard her feet on the stairs and the slam of her sitting room door.
Claudia assembled some bread and ham and tomatoes and set it out on trays by the pool, then took a cup of tea up to Aisling. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked softly.
‘I’m sorry. So embarrassing, in front of you two. And after what you’ve been through. It’s just, he doesn’t see it, any of it, how hard I work, how hard I try. It might not be much, it’s not everyone’s idea of a good life, but it’s mine and I try so hard.’
Claudia winced a bit at that.
‘I hate him sometimes,’ Aisling went on, ‘ I really do. Sometimes I catch myself wishing he would just drop dead, it would be so much easier than having to leave him. He has no idea how much work he makes for me, pretending to think he’s doing anything in that study all day but look at pornography, that’s work! And the fact that he can’t amuse himself, I’m always having to get things up for him, he’s worse than the boys.’
Claudia was embarrassed for her now, she wanted these surprising confidences to stop before Aisling said something she would mind later. ‘But you and Jonathan seem happy, on the whole,’ she managed, trying to keep the phrase ‘rub along’ out of the conversation.
‘Oh, we rub along. Maybe he doesn’t really look at porn sites all day. It’s just, when he said that, I realized I’ve lived with him all this time and he has no idea of who I am. And then you realize that’s marriage. You give your life to a stranger,’ she added dramatically, swigging the tea, ‘and now that hateful woman wants to spoil it all.’
Claudia hugged her, and Aisling wept loud and snottily in her arms. After a while she fished about for a hanky, producing a scrap of embroidered pansies Claudia recognized from Cahors market. She thought that if Aisling had been born in a different age, she would have made a good colonial wife, keeping up standards to the bitter end until she was hacked to bits by rebel swords.
‘Well,’ Aisling said, wiping her face, ‘it’ll be over my dead body, that’s all, no matter what that bastard thinks about bloody investments.’
‘Aisling, I know it might sound funny, but tell me again about those frescoes.’
‘Peaceful,’ said Alex by the pool as the distant howls subsided.
‘As far as I can see,’ said Jonathan, ‘the problem with this place is there’s always some bloody woman crying.’
‘Maybe it’s cursed, Dad,’ offered Richard, spearing a salty tomato. ‘Maybe there’s ghosts here.’
‘Does that mean we’re moving back to London?’ asked Olly.
‘I doubt it. Imagine how potty your mother would go there.’
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
That night, Aisling sat alone in the kitchen when the others had gone to bed. She had made a pot of coffee and filched another cigarette from Claudia’s handbag. Everyone seemed to be doing that, she thought ruefully. Spread open before her were the blue and orange notebooks. She had Alex to thank, really, with his stupid impersonations. She began to circle recipes with her pencil. Tagliata of Charolais beef with morel sauce, salad of pigeon breast with pear and hazelnut, mint sorbet with iced cherry compote. She could do this, she realized. Bugger Comtesse fucking Delphine and bugger Jonathan too. Though he was right in a way, it was about time she pulled her weight. Her book would be called La Maison Bleue: Recipes from a French Kitchen. The cover would be a photograph, one of the ones she had taken for Mrs Highland that first season, the shutters the exact colour of a summer sky. With a delicious sense of wickedness, she allowed the fag end to buzz out in her coffee cup. It was handy, in the end, that she wasn’t pretty, the way Claudia was. The viewers would feel reassured by that, like Delia.
Alex left the next morning. He felt there was no point sitting out the last few days for the sake of it, and it was easy to say he had been called back to the office. Claudia was still wearing her ring, Alex said he preferred not to make any awkwardness and that he could phone up Jonathan after she had caught her train. She was submissive, solicitous in her comfort of his bereavement.
‘It’s just as well we didn’t tell too many people,’ he said.
‘Alex, I can’t just keep telling you how sorry I am. It won’t make it any less awful, I know that. But I do believe you deserve better.’
He looked at her in disappointment for the first time, and she told herself she had no right to mind it.
‘Claudia, do you think I’m blind? Of course I deserve better. I always knew that you didn’t love me as much, as much as someone else. You spend all your time making people think you’re perfect, and so long as they do you’re satisfied, and you don’t care how unreal you make yourself. I felt sorry for you, I thought that if you knew you could rely on me loving you that you might just relax a bit. I didn’t want better, Claudia, I wanted you.’
‘Shall we meet in London?’ Craven. Alex was right.
‘I don’t think there’s much point, do you? But you can always call me if you need anything.’
They made a decent job of concealing from the Harveys their relief to be away from each other. After he had driven away, Claudia took the bicycle to the chateau. The leaves in the avenue were tea coloured, beginning to drift down and coat the grass. It seemed for ever away, Giles Froggett and his ankle. It was a beautiful place, Claudia could see how the avenue would look in a brochure, shot at dusk with the shadows thick and the house opening up at the top like a lost castle. Claudia wondered if Delphine was planning to put the SS slaughter in her brochure. She was still amazed by how relieved she felt, by how lightly she had got off. Everything was suddenly, wonderfully simple, she could even feel sorry for herself if she wanted to – Aisling certainly did.
The Marquis came out to meet her, holding a
dog by its collar in each hand. He was very pleased to see her, though, correctly, he said nothing about what he had intimated at the fëte. They sat on the lawn with glasses of stickily un-iced lemonade, and he asked politely about the Sternbachs.
‘I wonder if they’ll be glad in the end?’ he said, when she explained. ‘It’s terrible, the things that were done here. Not so well known as Oradour, of course, but dreadful, dreadful.’ There was a sort of pride in his voice. Claudia didn’t want to get started on the war, so she asked him quite directly about the hotel, what he thought?
‘Delphine seems very confident. There are the boys to think of, naturally. In a way it’s no longer my business.’
She asked if he would take her inside. She had brought her camera and a notebook, a torch from the Harveys’ barn, and the puffy bronzer brush she had washed carefully in shampoo and dried with her hairdryer. They were indoors for nearly an hour, and, when they came out squinting on to the steps, the Marquis shook her hand and said that in any case, they would have to meet now, in Paris. He mentioned La Perouse, which was as good a hint as any. Claudia pretended she didn’t know the anecdote about ‘Bel Ami’, and the courtesans scratching their diamonds on the mirrors to see if they were real. Rather obvious, but the old chap had style. Claudia grinned all the way down the hill, thinking perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t.
The Sternbachs were gone too, with a basket of biscuits and preserves that suggested Aisling felt guilty about her neglect of the barbecue. Aisling was down at La Maison Bleue supervizing Madame Lesprats and no doubt getting every last bit of information about the plans at the chateau. Claudia did a bit of peering from the balcony and ascertained that Ginette’s bicycle was also there. She used the house phone to call Sébastien and thought while she was waiting for the connection that he would surely answer, as surely as he would not have done before Malcolm Glover, unlikely messenger of the gods, knocked her down. He picked up on the third ring.
‘Claudia! You’re in France.’
‘Bravo, Sherlock.’ It seemed strange after all she had felt and struggled with that her voice sounded just as usual.
‘Are you being bucolic?’
‘Dangerously. Listen, I have to ask you something. You know someone at the Patrimoine, right?’
She told him about the frescoes. ‘Obviously not Primatice, but definitely school of. Real Mannerist. The Marquis was pretty certain they were originals. The dates are all right.’
‘He’s such an old fraud with his Bonnards. Had it never occurred to him before?’
‘He says not. That part of the house is usually shut up, anyway, it hadn’t been used since before the war. Apparently Delphine went rooting about because she thought it would be marvellous for the spa.’
‘I’ll give Jean-Jacques a ring and call you back.’
‘Perfect.’
When they hung up, Claudia said out loud to Delphine, ‘That’s the end of you, then.’ She couldn’t tell anyone about her idea just yet, in case she was wrong, but after seeing the paintings twice she knew she wasn’t. These things did happen, Rembrandts turning up under coffee tables. The d’Esceyracs had had the house since the early seventeenth century, but the gallery and the tower were at least fifty years earlier, the Marquis said, built by the Vicomtes who had held the land since early mediaeval times. It was amazing how little he seemed to know about it. In England, it would all be written up in a guidebook and you would be able to pay to go around and buy fudge. Aisling would mind much less about a museum, she was tremendously fond of frescoes after all. Claudia looked out again for the bicycle, then set off up the road to find Oriane.
She knocked cautiously at the door of the farmhouse, then pushed it open when there was no response. The kitchen room was dim and stuffy, shutters closed against the sun. She found Oriane on a whitish plastic chair around the side of the house, positioned in the shade of a dilapidated tenement of dirty old rabbit hutches.
‘Hello,’ she called cheerfully as she approached, not wanting to startle the old lady.
‘Claudia. How are you? Ginette told me all about the accident.’
Claudia looked for somewhere to sit and perched on the concrete base of the hutches, holding her knees under her chin.
‘I lost the baby.’
‘Are you sorry?’
‘No. I mean, I probably should be, but I’m glad. I’m glad it wasn’t my fault though, if you understand what I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘It hurt more than I expected. It hurt a lot.’
‘Not as much as it would have done, all the same.’
‘I wanted to ask before, how did you know, that I was pregnant, I mean?’
‘Did you think I was a witch?’
Claudia smiled, ‘Maybe.’
‘It was your face, that was all. I had the same thing. The skin goes darker, around the cheeks and the forehead, they call it the mask of pregnancy. English people normally have such pale skin.’
Claudia realized she was right. So simple. She had noticed a crop of freckles on her cheekbones, but thought it was just a tan and had been irritated because she had spent forty pounds on a La Prairie sunblock.
‘So you had it too?’
‘My baby was conceived in the summer.’
‘Yes, in the war.’
‘Are you still going to marry him then, Monsieur Harvey’s brother?’
‘No. No I’m not going to marry him. I suppose it isn’t necessary now, to be honest. That sounds awful, doesn’t it?’
‘I didn’t think you young people bothered about all that any more.’
Claudia had hunched herself down on the packed dirt, she looked between her knees and said nothing. ‘All that’ she had to admit in the end, was minding that she wouldn’t have had enough money.
‘What about the other one?’ Oriane asked.
‘I don’t know. He’s not in love with me.’
‘So what will you do, then?’
Claudia thought. The right thing, the empowered emancipated independent adult thing, would be to tell Sébastien, fondly, to get stuffed. She knew that would not happen. For so long it seemed, she had been lost to herself, casting herself as a tormented heroine, unable to see her own smallness. She needed Sébastien, and she thought there was little use in feeling ashamed of that, of pretending she was otherwise. But there was something else, something that had been growing in her since the night of the accident. After what had happened with Alex, she knew that even marriage with Sébastien was not actually what she wanted. What she wanted was to make her own thing of that need, to choose other lovers, be hurt, but bearably, at least as long as she was pretty enough for it not to matter. And she would have a child, but she would choose when and with whom. Sébastien would suit this new self very well, for a time, and then, and she was excited at the knowledge as it came to her, he would not. She thought of Aisling. It wasn’t much, but she could try, she thought, to be a little less parochial in her feelings, to live up to the person she had tried to pretend for so long that she really was. Alex was wrong. She did not dislike herself so much that she wanted to convince the world she was perfect, quite the contrary. She had merely been afraid of not conforming to his vision of what she needed, because at heart she had been too much of a coward to believe she could be happy any other way.
‘I’ll be fine.’
They sat in silence, looking down the valley. There had been no wind at Murblanc, but up here it puffed around the house, blowing withered straw from the rabbit hovels.
‘Jacky’s father, he tried to make it up to me, in a strange way, but my boy said he hated me, when he went. That I had spoiled his life and Ginette’s. He spat at me, my Jacky.’
Claudia thought she would sit here a while longer and then ride her bicycle along the lanes and take the train to Paris. It was a kind of selfishness, trying to manufacture a happy ending because she herself could not stand the pity and the waste, the sad boys in the photographs and the loneliness of this place.
> ‘I wanted to say thank you,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Why?’
‘I had a very difficult time here, I was really unhappy. I know I don’t know you, but being able to speak to you so honestly has been a help, the things you’ve told me, I don’t really understand why, but I’m glad. So thank you.’
This was the moment for Oriane to say something wise, then Claudia would be released, absolved.
‘Uat aihvair,’ said Oriane.
‘I’m sorry, what was that? Is it Occitan?’
The old woman was chuckling. ‘No, it’s English. From that programme, the American one where all the friends live in the same apartment. Ginette loves it. Uat aihvair!’
‘Right,’ said Claudia, ‘yes, right. Whatever.’
AUGUST 1947 /AUGUST 2000
Behind the church at Castroux, as in most country churchyards, was the plot reserved for suicides. Mostly, the names on the plain stones were men’s. Girls got themselves into trouble, but on the whole, Oriane thought, men gave up more easily than women, and then they were found hanging in the barns, or with their heads blown off with a hunting rifle. Laurent had been buried in the Nadl family plot though, next to Papie. Jean-Claude Larivière had seen to that, because he was a hero of the Resistance. Jean-Claude was an important man now, in Cahors, for all that his own poor father had killed himself for shame. Jacky was playing on the steps of the witch’s house, jumping down with his fat little legs together so his head wobbled at every bounce. That’s what the children called it, they frightened themselves, daring one another to go in there, though it was really nothing more than a tiny old cottage used as a toolshed. There had been a sorcerer in Castroux once, Charlotte said, but he had lived out in the woods and people went to him so he could read the cards. He had cursed the bellringer for not bringing him a gift of meat, and the next Sunday when he went to ring the bells one of them fell on his head and killed him stone dead. Charlotte was writing a book on the old customs of the village, she said they would all die out now the war was over. It kept her busy in the evenings after school. Oriane found she had lots of stories to tell her when she went down to the schoolhouse sometimes, of men who changed into wolves at night, and how she always tied Jacky’s hat with a green ribbon, because that was what you did to ward off the grass snakes who slithered into babies’ cribs as their mothers worked in the vines, to suck the milk from their throats.
