by Unknown
Oh God, why was everything so tainted and marred, so pickled in misery and compromise? Anthony cleared a space around his table mat, which was not a table mat but a huge papier-mâché gilded plate, and he laid his head down on the plate, rather like an outcast angel, he thought, tumbling down onto its own uncomfortable halo.
He closed his eyes. The house felt silent, as though Lloyd might have gone, not to the lavatory, as Anthony had supposed, but to bed, having tired of him, tired of trying to get to the heart of things, knowing that the heart of things – the true heart – lay far behind you somewhere and could never be altered.
But that was OK. Lloyd wouldn’t have understood this anyway, but there were certain things you didn’t want to alter. Indeed, you had to keep rerunning them in your head, to make sure they stayed exactly the same, stayed faithful to how they had felt. Not faithful to how they had been, necessarily – because that was unverifiable, anyway – but faithful to how they had appeared to you. You had, precisely, to protect them from the alteration of time.
He’d had everything prepared. Everything. White linen tablecloth with a heavy border of Brussels lace. White linen napkins. Lal’s favourite blue-and-white-and-gold china teacups and saucers and tea plates and sugar bowl and slop bowl and her favourite little bone-handled knives. Blue velvet cushions for the hard chairs. Primroses in a cut-glass vase. He was nine years old.
He kept watch, so that he could help Lal climb the ladder to the hideaway. And here she came, now, through the spinney far below him, wearing a lavender dress, with a matching lavender cardigan and white canvas shoes.
‘Here I am, darling!’ she called out. And he went to the edge of the platform of the tree-house and made his answering call: ‘Here I am, Ma!’
He helped her up the ladder, though she barely needed his help, she was so agile and light. She came in and the sunshine at the doorway behind her made her fair hair shimmer white. When she saw the preparations on the tea table, she clapped her hands with delight.
‘Oh this is so dear!’ she said. ‘I love it!’
He led her to the small window, and showed her how the green of the beech tree, in which the house had been built, came clustering in and how the sky seemed so near and brilliant, it was as though it were his own private sky. Then, he sat her down in one of the chairs and the house swayed gently as the tree moved, and they listened to the wind in the leaves and the afternoon chirruping of the birds and Lal said: ‘Magic. It’s magic.’
Mrs Brigstock brought the tea and the malted bread and the brandy snaps on a silver tray and Anthony climbed down and took the tray from her and – this was the moment he knew he would be proudest of – carried it aloft, without needing to hold on to the ladder with his hands. As he set the tray down in front of Lal, his heart was beating like a lover’s.
Afterwards, he could never remember what they talked about. All he remembered was the feeling: the feeling that this was perfectly achieved, that it was a work of art, his work of art, and that no moment of it was flawed. And that they’d both understood this. He’d contrived an hour of aesthetic perfection.
Lloyd came back into the dining room, still clutching his napkin, and found Anthony asleep with his head on a gold plate.
He gave him a prod. ‘Wake up, old man,’ he said. ‘Come on . . .’
But Anthony didn’t stir, couldn’t stir.
Shit. Lloyd Palmer cursed. Now, he’d have all the ding-dong of getting Anthony into a bed, fretting about him throwing up onto one of Benita’s impossibly expensive carpets, arranging breakfast for him, making sure he didn’t miss his plane or his train or whatever damn thing he was meant to be catching. And all for what? Some half-baked crap about happiness.
‘Shit,’ he said again. ‘Bloody happiness.’
While Veronica shopped and cooked for Anthony’s arrival, Kitty escaped to her studio, in a stone shed behind the house, that had once sheltered animals in its dark recesses. This darkness had been punctured out of it by slabs of skylight and a heavy glass door in its west side. A wood-burning stove heated it in winter.
Kitty stood with her back to her porcelain sink and contemplated her watercolour of the mimosa blossoms, still on the easel. The thing didn’t shrivel under her scrutiny, as many of her paintings did; on the contrary, she thought it was probably the best bit of work she’d done for about a year. The colours were delicate, held back from gaudiness, and she’d captured the paradox of the blooms – their individuality and their mass – without betraying the terrible effort involved. Kitty fantasised that even her most revered heroine, the watercolorist Elizabeth Blackadder, might have given this picture some curt but thrilling nod. And she felt confident that it would find its way into Gardening without Rain: ‘Acacia decurrens, dealbata’. Watercolour by Kitty Meadows.
Buoyed up by this, Kitty felt in the mood to begin something else.
In painting – perhaps in all the arts? – success drove success, failure whipped you towards failure. She should capitalise on the achievement of the mimosa and she wondered whether she wouldn’t risk having another try at the olive grove. She longed to be able to capture the movement and shimmer of this restlessly beautiful corner of the garden, but all her previous attempts had foundered. She’d made the olives look spiky, when they weren’t; the surprising whiteness in the leaf colour had eluded her; in her inexpert hands, the gnarled trunks of the trees had resembled turds.
A flush of shame at her own inadequacy overcame Kitty, obliterating her moment of optimism. Why were these trees so difficult? Perhaps because, at the heart of each tree (expertly pruned every second spring by Veronica), was an unexpected revelation of air and sky, and it was this brightness, this necessary element, which had been entirely missing from every one of Kitty’s pictures. She’d reverently tried to depict the gaps in the grey-green foliage, but then the sky had somehow pushed itself through the gaps, stupid patches of solid blue which appeared stuck on from outside, making the overall result shockingly bad.
‘Crap,’ Kitty said aloud. ‘Out-and-out crap.’
She decided with a sigh that now was definitely not the moment to attempt the olives again. In a few hours’ time, Anthony would be here, and the thought of trying to paint something so elusive within the range of his appraising eye made Kitty Meadows feel sick.
She resorted, in an aimless, slow-moving kind of way, to tidying her studio. She sharpened all her pencils. She rewashed and regrouped her brushes in their stained and familiar jars. She scrubbed her sink, swept cobwebs off the stone walls. Her thoughts drifted and stumbled from present to past. She soon enough became, in her mind, the lowly, untalented manual worker she somewhere knew herself to be.
She gathered up all her failed paintings of the olive grove, tore them to shreds and threw the scraps into the blue recycling bin. She felt hot and fearful, full of her menopause and her mortal failings. She became again the timid library assistant, trundling her book cart from steel stack to steel stack, as the afternoon darkness came down over Cromer.
Dark was nearing as Anthony stepped out of the train at Avignon TGV Station and trundled his suitcases, like two obedient black dogs, towards the car rental offices.
He’d slept in the train, slept off most of his hangover, while the woods and valleys and industrial zones of France hurtled by, unseen. A shame, he thought now, to have missed France – the whole country, almost, from north to south. But that was what drink did to you: it made you miss things. You aimed at this or that grand notion in your delirium and then you missed it.
But now, leaving the station behind, Anthony lifted his face to smell the sweetness of the air. Pines and starlight, things dark and bright and pure: the air smelled of these. Among the lines of rental cars, Anthony set the suitcases down. He stood very still.
I’d forgotten this, he thought: the feeling of arrival; the heart-lift.
He watched dark dragon clouds stretch themselves across the pearly horizon. He felt the last traces of his hangover evaporate.
> ‘Old age,’ an actor friend of his had once said, ‘arrives in short flurries. Between the flurries, there’s a kind of respite.’ And this was what Anthony felt he’d been given now: respite. He could even have termed it remission. So he instructed himself not to waste the remission time or tarnish it with unkindness. He’d be a good guest in his sister’s house. He’d rhapsodise about her garden, drink pastis with her French friends, conform to her chosen routines. And – just as long as she didn’t insult him – he’d be nice to Kitty Meadows.
As he drove the hired black Renault Scenic north-west towards Alès, Anthony felt a radical new idea beginning to form in his mind. He congratulated himself that it wasn’t only radical, but also logical: if his life in London was over, then to regain his happiness all he needed to do was to admit that it was over and to dare to move on. He’d never imagined himself living anywhere else but Chelsea, but now he had to imagine it. He had to imagine it, or die.
So, in its essence, the idea was simple and straightforward. He’d sell the flat and wind up the business. From the great emporium of beloveds, he’d keep only those pieces for which he felt extreme ardour (the Aubusson tapestry, for instance) and put the rest into the appropriate sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. One or two pieces he might sell direct to American clients over the phone for reasonably stratospheric prices, and then ship them to New York or San Francisco. And at the end of all this, he would easily have enough money to buy a beautiful house down here in southern France, near V, in this kinder and simpler world, and here he would start his life again – a different life.
Anthony drove fast, loving the sight of the dark road blossoming up to embrace the rented car. The orange-lit dash cast enough light on his features for him to be aware of a stubborn smile engraved there. His evening with Lloyd Palmer, with all its complicated feelings of material envy, seemed a world away. Anthony was fully in the present now, beautifully alive. His plans chattered away in his mind like Happy Hour drinkers. Hadn’t he subconsciously thought for a long time that it would be good to live near V, near the one person for whom he still felt genuine affection? Because, with V, he could become the younger brother again, yield up some of that oppressive responsibility for his own well-being that he was finding harder and harder to sustain.
At Les Glaniques, Veronica and Kitty waited in silence. From the hall, they could hear the familiar tick of the grandfather clock. It was as though, Kitty thought, they were waiting for something momentous, something dangerous and potentially catastrophic, like a NASA launch.
She looked at her friend, sitting in her favourite chair by the brightly burning fire, and she had the sudden and terrible thought that their lives together might never be the same from this moment on. And the awfulness of this – even if it were just a possibility and not a certainty – impelled Kitty to get up and kneel down by Veronica and lay her head on Veronica’s knees covered by her newly washed denim skirt.
‘What?’ said Veronica. ‘What, Kitty?’
She couldn’t blurt out her worry. It was too irrational and emotional. But she needed comfort. What she wanted was for Veronica to stroke her hair, to say something affectionate and normal. But she could feel the tension in Veronica’s body: a tremble in her right leg, an absence of stillness all through her.
‘Tell me what the matter is,’ Veronica said again.
‘Nothing,’ said Kitty. ‘Stroke my hair, darling, will you?’
Kitty’s short hair, dusted with grey, was curly in a thick and tangled way. Veronica laid a hand gently on Kitty’s head and picked up this strand and that and held these strands between her fingers. Then she said: ‘Actually, your hair is quite difficult to stroke.’
The buzzer at the automated gate sounded at that moment and Veronica had to lift Kitty away from her so that she could get up and go to the gate release. ‘He’s here,’ she said unnecessarily.
Kitty saw the car headlights well up out of the night. Then she heard Veronica’s voice at the door, bright and emphatic, as it might have sounded for the long-looked-for plumber or stonemason. And his voice: the Chelsea drawl, the way posh people spoke long ago when Kitty was a skinny girl, helping to make beds and prepare breakfasts in the Cromer guest house . . .
Veronica led him into the sitting room, led him by the hand, the adored younger brother still, the charmed and charming boy, Anthony. He was pale from his indoor life, his skin flaky. He approached Kitty with a smile that narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks in these days of his seventh decade, but which, Kitty guessed, could still seduce when he wanted it to.
He kissed her lightly, with only a trace of fastidious disdain. He smelled of the train, of things marooned in stale air, and Kitty had the peculiar thought that he needed hosing down with salt water, needed abrasion, ice, grains of sand, to bring the blood back to his skin, to make the world real to him again.
He stood by the fire and admired the new rugs and cushions they’d bought in Uzès. Veronica poured champagne, handed round her home-made tapenade. He said he was glad to be there. He said: ‘What I love hearing is the silence.’
Four hundred and fifty thousand euros.
This sum of money preyed on Audrun’s mind. Had she really seen such a shockingly large figure written on Aramon’s palm? Or was it just floating there, a thread of numbers unconnected to anything, in the confused grey mass that was her brain?
She asked him again: ‘How much did they say you could get for the house?’
But he wouldn’t tell her this time. He gobbed up some shreds of tobacco and spat them out as he said: ‘The mas is mine. That’s all I know. Every euro of this is mine.’
From her window, moving the net curtains by half a centimetre, Audrun watched people arriving to look at the house. She saw them stand and stare up at the crack in the wall. They picked their way past the pile of sand and the rusty, urine-stained TV. They turned to look back at the view on the south side, which included her bungalow and her vegetable plot, criss-crossed with baling twine hung with rags to scare away the birds, and her washing line, draped with Aramon’s tattered laundry. The hounds in their pen barked themselves crazy at the scent of them. They drove away.
Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, arrived.
Audrun rushed out with coffee for Raoul and asked: ‘Is it true, about the four hundred and fifty thousand?’
‘I’ve no idea, Andrun,’ said Raoul. ‘I’m just here to fix the crack.’
She told him the crack would travel right through the house and split it from top to bottom, because where the two arms of the Mas Lunel had been, now there was only air. She said: ‘The earth calls to the stone walls, Raoul. You’re a mason, I know you understand this. Unless they’re buttressed, like they used to be, the earth will call to them. I’m sure my mother knew it.’
Raoul nodded. He was always gentle with Audrun. Had been gentle with her all his life. ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But what can I do?’
Raoul swallowed the last dregs of the coffee and returned the bowl. He wiped his mouth with an old scarlet handkerchief and began setting up his ladders and wedging them with shovelfuls of sand. In his pickup were bags of cement. So Audrun now saw what Aramon was doing: employing Raoul to patch up the crack with mortar and then to plaster a coat of grey render over the new mortar veins, so that when the purchasers came, they’d never imagine a fissure in the wall – never dream of any such thing. She held the empty coffee bowl close to her and said: ‘I’m telling you, Raoul, you’ve got to tie that wall with an iron bolt . . .’
He was halfway up his ladder, nimble and neat and unafraid of falling, even at the age of sixty-six. Long ago, Audrun could have fallen in love with Raoul Molezon, if Bernadette had lived, if her whole life had been different. She stared at his brown legs, in dusty shorts. She used to think, watching Raoul, you might love a man just for his legs, for the joy of stroking them, as you might stroke the sweet neck of a goat. But that was before love for any man had become impossible . . . forever impossible . . .
>
She watched Raoul put on his spectacles, which hung from a chain round his neck, and peer at the fissure in the wall. He put his hand into the fissure. Now he would know how deep it went.
‘See?’ she called up to him. ‘It goes right through, eh Raoul?’
He said nothing. His face was close to the wall now, half swivelled round, as though listening to the heartbeat of the house. Then, the door banged open and Aramon came charging out like a terrier, his face flushed with anger and wine.
‘You let him be, Audrun!’ he yelled. ‘You leave Raoul alone!’
He tried to swat her away with the flat of his hand, as he would swat a fly.
She recoiled from him, as she always did. He knew he could frighten her the moment he touched her. She turned and walked away. Almost ran.
She held tight onto the coffee bowl in case she needed a weapon, in case Aramon followed her. She imagined how she would jab the bowl into his face, like covering a spider with a cup.
But he didn’t follow and Audrun reached her door – that flimsy thing that had no weight and solidity in it, her pathetic front door. She went inside and closed and locked it, but knowing that the lock, too, was insubstantial, a little nub of weak metal. These things were never meant to be like this. Doors were supposed to have solidity and strength. They were supposed to keep out everything and everyone who could do you harm. And yet they never had.
She sat in her chair. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the voices of Aramon and Raoul Molezon, carried to her on the wind that was blowing from the north, the wind that sometimes blew into the skull of Bernadette and laid her out cold under pegged washing or on the feathery floor of the chicken coop.
