House with Blue Shutters, The
Page 32
Cook said they had an electrical washing machine now, up at the chateau. Oriane’s hair reached the tips of her ears and curled out under her handkerchief. The scars around her mouth were fading, tight, pink and smooth. She didn’t miss the weight of her hair, in the heat. Cook had asked if she would like to go to the chateau again, now the family was back, but she couldn’t leave Jacky. Clara had not returned, and she had never written either, but Cook said that was because she was Jewish, though you never would have guessed.
At first Cathérine had turned her head away ostentatiously when they met in the village, but now she looked through her, as though she wasn’t there. Oriane missed her, and Amélie, and Andrée. Amélie was married now, to one of her innumerable Lesprats cousins, she was already expecting. Oriane hoped she didn’t get another poor William. Betty was gone, up to Paris with her parents to find a bar to run. For sure she would see plenty of dancing there. The bakery was empty, waiting for someone to buy it, so a van came around the village twice a week with bread that was already old and stale. Andrée’s father had gone to work in a factory in Toulouse. Cécile Chauvignat had one baby now, a girl, and another on the way, she wore her medal all the time, pinned to the front of her bulging jumper. She was the one who had distracted the soldiers long enough to allow Laurent to get away to Monguèriac, at least everyone believed that, but they said William was a hero too, when all he had done was play his violin.
There was to be a monument, with William’s name on it too. Oriane had asked that William not be put with their parents, there was no sense in Sophie Aucordier frightening him for all eternity, so William and his shattered violin lay over by the wall of the witch’s house, in the highest part of the churchyard, where Oriane hoped the wind would reach him in the night and remind him of home. She put lavender on William’s grave and a bunch of rosemary from the nuns’ garden for Laurent. Jacky tugged at her skirt. It was so hot, she had him just in his little smock with his tanned legs sticking out in their sturdy wood and leather galoches. His hair was dark, but he had his father’s pale northern eyes.
They went to Karl’s grave last. Oriane suspected Père Guillaume knew that Karl was Jacky’s father, though she had never said a word to anyone. Père Guillaume had buried the body himself, there was a bare wooden cross because no one had known the soldier’s name, or why they had shot him. Oriane could not think badly of Karl. He had made her no promises, told her no lies. In her anger she had forgotten to ask him for the key, simply forgotten, and that was what he had used to try to save William’s life. She had thought the Marquis might come to ask her about it, but since the door was broken in she assumed he had collected his box of old papers and been too relieved to think about what had happened.
Oriane had to believe that he must have loved her then, in a way, because of what he had done, but she couldn’t feel glad about that. When she tried to unravel things, she saw that they would have killed William anyway if Karl had not acted, and that the person who had chosen his death was herself. Time twisted up and things got remembered wrongly, because what happened was always more simple than the reasons why. If the Marquis had not wanted to hide his stupid box, if she had gone to live at Murblanc when Jacky was born. Even a place as small as Castroux was impossibly dense with connections and chances, of tiny plenteous moments that became lives or deaths.
There was no one in the square as they walked down through the village, everyone was eating their lunch or sleeping. Jacky held her hand on the scorched white road as they walked up home. You couldn’t try to be happy, you couldn’t make yourself believe it. Sometimes, the between times, you were, and that had to be enough.
Years later, seated with a rug across his knees in the garden of the convent in Rome where he had come to die, Père Guillaume remembered a woman weeping. On his lap was a picture postcard, sent by a Jesuit friend from Venice, showing a painting of a woman, a woman with lustrously waving gold hair and a wonderful luminosity in her skin, the Magdalene, his friend wrote, and Père Guillaume held it a long time between hands now delicately blush-veined, and sought in himself to recognize the origin of the sensation the painting made in him, a sensation he was sure he had felt once before, quite differently, long ago.
Père Guillaume had never once, from the time he declared his vocation, been troubled by the flesh. He was happily able to admire a pretty girl in the safe knowledge that her hair or mouth would not return to pester his dreams. He had easily resisted a streetwalker who had once flicked up her skirt over her boots, calling to him softly in the cathedral walk in Toulouse. He was inured to the whispered obscenity of the propositions that came to him occasionally through the grille of the confessional. If he had sinned at all, it was in pride at his own inviolability. Yet the picture stirred something in him, too soft, he thought slowly, to be wicked now, a desire to smooth that glowing face with his hand, to know just a little, through his own skin and nerves, what was meant by beauty. He sat on there in the garden with the yellow-white jasmine on the walls until a thousand church bells sang the angelus and he remembered that he had felt this before, for a woman whose hair was straight and wet-black, who was nothing at all like the holy image before him, whose flesh shone over hard cheekbones with the mercury of tears in a room that smelt of ashes. Her eyes were wet flowers. He was too tired to trouble himself for her name.
Claudia’s mobile began to chirrup as soon as the train drew in range of a signal. She began to check her messages as it rang.
‘Claudia, I’m very impressed. Jean-Jacques was so excited he’s cut short his holiday. He had some idea about Fiorentino. The man himself – not that he could have done the work, but there’s some cartoons in the Louvre that he thinks look like the photos you mailed me. Will you still know me when you’re famous?’
‘Are they sending someone then?’
‘I gave Jean-Jacques all the details. No hotel for Madame la Comtesse.’
‘What if I told you I was motivated entirely by spite?’
‘She deserves it. Apparently she gave old Charles-Edouard such a time I think he dropped dead just to be rid of her.’
‘Do tell.’
‘Come to Paris then.’
‘I’m in the train.’
‘Where shall we have dinner?’
‘Sébastien, I don’t know.’
‘Old Faithful?’
‘Actually, I’m not getting married to Alex.’
‘Oh dear. Or are you pleased?’
‘I just couldn’t. I didn’t love him.’
‘I thought that was rather the point.’ ‘It was, but then it wasn’t. Well, I just didn’t like it, or myself, much.’
‘Claudia, darling girl, don’t tell me. You’re still persisting with true love?’
Claudia took the phone away from her ear and looked at it. The train was running parallel with a motorway, clogged on one side with returning holiday-makers. Beyond the road were the huge hangar sheds of a commercial centre, Leclerc, Décathlon, Buffalo Grill, Ikea. The air looked sluggish and dirty.
‘Of course not. What about L’Ami Louis? You owe me.’
‘Ten o’clock?’
‘Perfect. I’ll have time to change.’
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Erica Lewis, Linda Hilton, Patrizia Moro, Michael Alcock, Anna Power, Georgina Capel, Laura Palmer. In the Tarn-et-Garonne, my thanks especially to Mme Andree Pouchet, M. Claude Desprats, the staffs of the Public Records office at Montauban and the Museum of the Resistance in Cahors, and to all my neighbours in Trejouls and Cazes Mondenard who contributed their memories to this story. Thanks most of all to Andrew Roberts, who made me take it out of the drawer.
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