I suppose it was inevitable that I should find myself here, at the gates of the subsidiary of Rennstadt which, as the big man suggested, has no name-plate, no billboard. I don’t really know what I intend to do – confront them with their hideous crimes, list their abuses, shame them, tear down their walls, or just present myself, their victim, a passive symbol of their worthless practice.
I step into a small, relatively dismal reception area. I approach the desk and ask to speak to someone in authority. The receptionist asks me what my business is in connection with. I reply that it is in connection with a life. She shrugs, pouts her lips into a beautiful whorl and turns away. She whispers into her telephone and then suggests I take a seat. There is a single chair against the opposite wall. I sit and wait. Five minutes later a door alongside the reception desk opens and Bill appears. He looks directly at me, a moment of recognition crossing his face, and then he says something to the receptionist and approaches me.
He stands over me, looking down, something of the nature of a smile on his lips. He speaks airily, charging his voice with deliberate friendship: “Mrs Tennant, always a pleasure. And how is your husband, Mrs Tennant?”
I can’t work out whether he knows anything about John or not, or whether he is fishing, warning me off with the threat of exposure. “My husband is very well,” I say.
“That is good. He is too busy to travel with you, I suspect.”
“He has a lot on his plate at the moment.”
Bill smiles. “I assumed that to be the case. I wonder if he approves of your being here.”
“Of course.”
“Approves of everything you do, I suppose.”
“No, unfortunately, not everything.”
“That is disappointing. I wonder if he approves of your making wild, groundless accusations against this company.”
“He supports me in every step.”
“Is that so, because I wouldn’t want him to get into trouble on your account.”
“Trouble?”
“Oh yes, Mrs Tennant, trouble, legal trouble. You see I have been instructed to inform you that if you make any more malicious statements about this company you will be sued.”
“I will expose your crime.”
“Dear me, my crime. I think we were in that together. You were a little bit pious for my liking, though with quite a tongue I seem to recall.”
“You’re nothing but a bastard.”
He comes close and utters in my ear: “We are tired of your antics, bothering our staff, turning up on our doorstep. You are the mother of a drop-out drug-addict, now get used to it.” He stands back to his full height. He smiles: “I don’t think there is anything to add, is there. No, well, goodbye Mrs Tennant, it was all very, what’s the word, bland.”
I can feel an irresistible, shapeless pain. It is satisfying in some way. I still feel. I have not been emptied of all humanity. I feel my soul resurgent, resisting, defying this act of destruction. It refuses to accept that this is the stuff of human beings. We have not degenerated to this extreme. My pain is exquisite. It is composed of good things. I smile at him. I say: “Thank you. Thank you, you have given me something back.” He looks sceptical, his monstrous uncertainty bubbling to the surface. “At least I know that you are really quite worried by me, why else indulge yourself like this. I won’t stop, not now, not ever.”
He frowns at me. “You shouldn’t say such things. It isn’t helpful.”
He turns away and begins to walk off. Against my better judgement I call to him: “And is your wife all right?”
He turns back, smiling: “It’s a shame actually, but you just missed her, though I don’t think you would have got on, scarcely anything in common.”
“Perhaps we will meet though.”
He scratches his neck with his index and middle fingers, smiles and says: “No, you won’t, you really won’t.”
I regret asking. It serves me nothing. I need to escape such things. My strength is in freeing myself. Somehow I am surviving. It must have purpose. I have to give it purpose. I am guilty of bringing up my son to need to stand for what is right. I can’t betray him ever again. There is a tune inside my head. I am reminded of its beauty. I exit wanting to do justice to its notes.
Chapter Nineteen
Back in the cottage I take a shower, cleansing and reviving myself. Encounters with people leave me soiled and weary. I don’t know my place with them. When I took the train here I was struck forcibly by that separation. I kept seeing my reflection in the glass and wondered about myself as if I were another person. What does she share with all the other people on the train, I thought, with all of the people on the other side of the glass, on platforms, in the fields, in the streets. What does she share with all the people whose time she shares: they intersect, but what does that mean? Is there a purpose to this accidental gathering and sharing that she can’t see? I have to be more concrete, more alert. It isn’t she, but me. The reflection was absent more than it was there, and there was only me then, sitting, wondering, unable to turn my mind to anything useful like reading. Maybe I’m just not looking. Looking, the critical interest on top of the experiential interest, will bring something into existence, but will it be real, or will it be a sequence of notes seen in interconnecting mirrors. I don’t know anything anymore. Everything is a mystery.
There is a spotlight directly above me. When I look down I can see the shadow of the cascading water along the floor of the bathtub – the shower is above the taps. The shadow is slow and heavy, as if the water were falling in slow motion. The reality and its capture don’t agree. The shadow is beautiful and compelling. I feel like weeping it is so exquisite. Once I would have accepted without question that moments of beauty can result in tears, but now it seems unfortunate in the extreme. When I turn off the water the silence and stillness are surprising. My response is somewhat predictable. I intend to drink until the exquisiteness of all things is not in doubt, though its truth may be painful in the extreme. At least I make the effort to dress, lying to myself that I intend to go out and eat.
I don’t know how much later it is when the sound of a car rouses me. Two thirds of a bottle is gone. I’m sure I haven’t slept but I seem to have been dawdling through story dreams, crazy dreams of hide and seek in which I didn’t really know whether I was looking or escaping. I presume it’s the woman who lives across the way. The cottage isn’t attached but is like a small outbuilding. I go to the window and look out. I can’t see anything but I hear a car door close. It isn’t slammed but firmly pushed to. A few seconds later another door opens and is pushed to in the same deliberate, discreet manner. I pull the curtain behind my head to stop the light from the room in order to better see through the dark. Along the track, just at the point where it divides, turning into the courtyard of the house or straight on to the cottage, I can make out the front part of a car. Its sidelights are still on. As I look the full lights are switched on illuminating the whole area in front of the cottage. It is like an assault, disturbing the peace. There is usually a lone horse in the field on the other side of the hedge and I wonder what it would make of such sudden, artificial light. I suppose it is stabled in the evening. The night is cold, though the day had a moment of spring. There are snowdrops on the path to the canal, a great swathe of white, tenacious and wonderful. Somehow I have drifted from the present to flowers. I worry about my mind. I am so scattered and leaking.
The headlights are switched off. The dark plunges back, solid and physical. It shocks me into the present. I press my face against the glass straining to see who is there. Against the hedgerow, on the fringe between track and verge, there is a figure, the outline just discernible against the background. Scale and shape suggest a man. His head is tilted slightly back, suggestive of the fact that he doesn’t wish to be seen, though the idea is absurd. His right arm is raised from his side, the open palm facing backwards keeping something or someone back. He moves forward slowly, step by step, keeping to the fringe. I
jump back from the window. What on earth is going on?
I stand in the middle of the room, my hands clasped together in a stupid parody of prayer, paralysed. My first thought is to hide, but hide where? The cottage has no hidden corners, certainly none I know of. I’m not aware that there is a cellar or a loft. And even if there were wouldn’t that just mean that I’d be trapped? But trapped by whom? Why do I think they are intruders? Am I not being ridiculous, interpreting headlights and slow steps in some maddening melodramatic way of my own? Why not go to the door and ask them what they want? Of course there must be more than two, the two doors, the driver still sitting at the wheel, lighting a pathway, controlling the dark. Surely this can’t be happening. Terrible cries of torment and panic well up inside me, but I just stand and shiver. I feel that I might vomit. I fight against myself, shouting inside my head that I am being ridiculous, more than stupid. I am in rural France for God’s sake, grounded in a predictable reality, not an actor in a hidden narrative. A much louder voice says my son died here. That statement demands no embellishment.
With the thought of Joseph two things occur simultaneously: my panic subsides, allowing a wave of fatalistic resolve to pass through me, and the door at the rear of the cottage opens. There are a number of rooms to the rear of the cottage: a small kitchen, a shower-room, a toilet and a tiny lumber-room. The door is between the shower-room and toilet. Of course I never gave a thought to it being locked or open. It has possibly never been locked since I arrived. I make no attempt to move. I suppose I have a martyr’s pomposity. A few seconds later and the enormous man who placed his hand on my shoulder along the track where the lorries were, who appeared at the scene where Joseph was found, stands in the doorway. He looks at me with a quietly puzzled expression, almost as if I disappoint him. I urge myself to scream at him, wanting to muster all of the defiance of which my wretched little body and soul is capable. I want to say I am capable of fighting, but with that thought it all eludes me. I am capable of fighting for what? I have no such mission.
“You must come with me,” he says, his tone low and commanding, its guttural musical quality as strong as on the night with the lorries. I make no reply, but gaze at him unflinchingly. “Quickly,” he insists, his voice suddenly rising, but then continuing more evenly. “Trust me. You must trust me.”
I virtually laugh in his face. That’s what Bill said, trust me, on the first night we ate out, trust me. I don’t suppose his name is really Bill. Of course I don’t trust this man. I don’t suppose I will trust anyone ever again, even though I need to. The thought releases all of my pent up fear. The paralysis, the stupidity, the denial have all gone. Yes, this is happening. I am caught up in something, brought to it through the criminal death of my beautiful, gifted son. I will fight and resist all the while. I fix him with a withering look of triumph. He steps up to me, quickly seizes my arm and drags me away. At the rear door he lifts my coat off its hook and throws it over his arm, eases the door open slowly, peeks through the gap then pulls it wide and steps out bringing me behind. I know this is my opportunity. If I scream I should arouse the lady in the house, if she is there. As I’m thinking it through he drapes the coat over my shoulders and leaves his arm there, covering me, containing me, urging me to keep close. He bustles me away from the cottage towards the house, looking all around as he goes. The house and cottage are separated by a small wooden fence, the two connected by a gate. There are lights on in the upper rooms. If I scream and shout now she will surely hear me, but there is the evidence of the coat. He thought of my comfort. It was a spontaneous gesture. He just knew I needed a coat. Or is it to make everything look natural? A woman found without a coat would be suspicious, even one stricken with grief at the loss of her son. That will be the story. A mother visits the scene of the death of her son and overcome with grief takes her own life. I will be another fictional character in this story of mirrors.
He leads me through the gate then bends to my ear and utters: “Please, quickly, it is the good chance.” His breath is warm on my face and visible in the semi-light, a small plume of whiteness, quickly displaced. “We must, quick.” There is much concern and puzzlement in his voice. Of course I don’t trust him, but I have to; I have no choice.
We quickly skirt around to the rear of the house, the house and cottage standing at right angles to each other, the rear of the cottage facing the side of the house. We follow a path through the garden and then at the bottom scale a small wall and then turn right to the house and run, following a hedgerow edging a field. When this hedgerow is intersected by another we turn and make towards the canal. Only when we reach the canal do we stop running.
A thin sliver of moon appears between broken clouds. The water of the canal is visible, a steady blackness, intimating depth and quiet. It is the quietness that is reassuring. Things may fall out in a pattern that is recognizable. I am beginning to learn that if you look you can bring something into existence. It is perhaps better that I avoid the canal. I want nothing from it but commonplace stillness. I look into the face of the man. He is no longer holding me. His release ushered in cold, a feeling of aloneness. I hate the momentary comfort I felt crossing the fields, running together. It was impossible not to trust him when we were running, we were so obviously conjoined, but the separation set that aside. Besides I have no need to trust a man. I hate myself for falling for that. Only John ever earned that right. The man is smiling, the tenor of it pleased, perhaps pleased at me. He says: “I am the Big Farmer, Le Grand Fermier.”
I recall Dominique Dufour’s words that they were going to consult the Big Pharma, Joseph and Joanne. “It was you they meant. They were going to consult you.”
The smile broadens, the large, bone dense contours sculpting into warmth. “She calls me the Big Farmer, the correct big farmer. That is what she says. I like it.” He throws up his hands and shrugs: “I am a farmer and yes, I am big.” He laughs, guttural notes like bubbles.
“What did they consult you about? Do you know where the girl went?”
“Later, later, not now. Now we still go quickly.” He takes hold of my hand, his touch this time more hesitant, self-conscious. I realize that his touch was always gentle. I remove my hand from his, put my coat on properly and then take it again. We head-off along the towpath.
After a few minutes I stop him, like a child pulling at an adult’s hand. “What would they have done?”
He looks down at me, purses his lips and then says: “Whatever they needed.”
“Are they French?”
He shrugs: “Not in doing what they do. Maybe, maybe not. It is not of significance.”
“So what does it mean to them?”
“Money. Everything means money. It is a clinically simple, elegant decision. Please, to come.”
“Yes, of course, of course I’ll come.”
Chapter Twenty
I lie in bed suspended in some mid-point between sleep and waking. My mind is a canvas. There are numerous small tears penetrating its surface, sequences of dashes, lines cut with zigzag serrated scissors, closely huddled smudges. Shapes come and go, constructing and deconstructing, turning fluid, losing substance. There is birdsong, lots of birdsong. I have forgotten the volume birdsong can produce. I have been turning the sounds into shapes, each shape a separate species. I open my eyes. Spindles of grey light illuminate the room. I am in the house of the Big Farmer, whose name is Pierre-Yves Moreau. I know nothing more about the people at the cottage. He told me his name, offered me cheese, bread and wine, which I accepted, and was told not to ask any questions. We spoke of other things, village life, London, John and his work in America – I had no reluctance disclosing my run-away husband. Pierre-Yves Moreau is a widower with three children. We shared a great deal, but nothing of the things that brought us together. There is pleasure, sadness and puzzlement in his face all at the same time. His features are bold, primordial and beautiful. I trust him completely. If I am mistaken – which, of course, I might be – then human kin
d is twisted and duplicitous– which, of course it is. I want to trust Pierre-Yves Moreau, it stems loneliness.
The bedroom is very comfortable, though scant. There is a huge piece of dark furniture covering the wall to the left of the bed, with carved decorative lines and enormous drawers. The wood is so dark it is almost black. There is a chair in the corner with two towels. There are three paintings on the walls, all seascapes, originals in oil, impressionistic in style, verging on the abstract. I like them, like them in an easy, uncritical, joyful way. The sheets on the bed are pure cotton, cool to touch, perfectly smooth, smelling of cleanness. I haven’t felt so comfortable for a long time.
I get up, push my hand through my hair, and dress in the gown that Pierre-Yves Moreau has also provided. To the right of the bedroom is a bathroom. It is obviously a man’s bathroom, devoid of any clutter. I rinse my face and straighten my hair. I gaze at myself for a short while, debating whether this remains the person that so recently left London. Maybe more time has passed than I recall. It was winter when I left but this morning the birds seemed to be signifying spring. It has yet to snow, though it threatened so often in Paris. Perhaps that is how it eventually will die out, by failing steps. Perhaps that is how everything eventually dies out, one thing at a time, by fits and starts, with false dawns and sad endings. Yes, Louise Tennant remains tied to all that is Louise Tennant, all the moments of taboo and shame, a single narrative cemented by memory. I am an artist of motherhood, displaying imitation and allegory. I also aspire to the second theory of beauty and the third of idealised nature. I leave the mirror with foreboding and excitement. Just before retiring Pierre-Yves Moreau said that I would meet Joanne.
The Extinction of Snow Page 18
