by Unknown
Consider everything suggested or offered, and then wait before answering.
Getting no reply, Kitty knocked on the door. ‘I’ve got a cup of tea for you.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Veronica. ‘I don’t want anything.’
She heard Kitty pause, hesitate. Then walk away.
Veronica felt relieved. And it was at this moment and not before that she concentrated once again on what had happened to Kitty yesterday in Béziers. Veronica asked herself what she felt about it, this rejection by the gallery.
And she knew that it didn’t surprise her. It seemed terrible to admit this – almost a betrayal – but Kitty’s talent was so small, so almost not there, that it might have been better if it hadn’t existed at all.
If it hadn’t existed at all, Kitty would have had no unrealistic hopes for it and that part of her which yearned and yearned and never gave up would have given up and been still – thus relieving her, Veronica, of the exhausting obligation to collude with her hopes. Because this was all it amounted to, all the praise she had to heap on Kitty’s watercolours – it was no more than dishonest collusion with a lie.
And it wearied her. She saw this clearly now. Kitty’s unrealisable dreams were exhausting. They took up too much precious time.
Kitty insisted on making breakfast for her: croissant, coffee and melon.
The food made her feel less tired, but when Kitty came to her and put her arms round her, she gently pushed her away. And when Kitty said that she was coming with her to Ruasse, Veronica stood up and said: ‘No.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Kitty. ‘I’m not letting you go alone.’
‘Well that’s OK,’ said Veronica coldly, ‘because I’m not asking for permission.’
Then she gathered her things and began moving towards the car and Kitty followed her, but Veronica didn’t turn round or say goodbye, just got into the car and drove away. As she went, she found herself photographed by two press men, who’d been waiting in the lane, but she set her gaze resolutely beyond them.
As Veronica drove, it affected her as it always did, the beauty of the road to Ruasse: the shimmering of the plane trees, their shadows bisecting the tarmac, the sunflowers, like yellow dolls animated by the wind. She remembered how much she’d been looking forward to finishing her work on ‘Decorative Gravels’ in Gardening without Rain and beginning the chapter entitled ‘The Importance of Shade’.
And then she found herself remembering how Lal, brought up in a land of sunshine, had always scorned the idea that anybody needed shade as protection from the sun in England. ‘If you’ve spent your childhood in the Cape,’ Lal used to say, ‘the words English summer are an oxymoron.’
But there had been hot days. Lal exclaimed over them as over a hoard of gold. All her normal tasks were sacrificed to them. In the garden of Bartle House, she’d lie on a cane lounger, wearing a bathing costume or a strapless sundress and white-rimmed sunglasses, pointing herself at the sky. And her skin soon enough turned an obediently sweet honey brown.
The boy, Anthony, would bring out an old tartan rug and put it down on the grass and play with his toy soldiers, positioning them in open formation, moving steadily towards Lal’s lounger. When they reached it, he’d make them form a column, then scale the base of the lounger, one by one, to arrive near Lal’s feet and as she felt their little bayonets touch her skin, she’d laugh and say, ‘Oh no! Not another bridgehead!’
Sometimes, he’d press the soldiers’ bodies in between Lal’s toes, pretending they were dead and lined up in a mortuary, and hold Lal’s feet still as she giggled and squirmed. He told her that her scarlet toenails were the blood of his valiant men.
One time, Anthony stayed too long in the sun, too long on the tartan rug. His face went very red, then pale, then he was sick on the lawn and the doctor was called and he was ill with sunstroke for days and days. But Lal was a careless nurse. She left Veronica to carry up trays of broth, put clean sheets on Anthony’s bed. And as soon as Anthony showed signs of recovery, she abandoned them altogether and went to London, to stay at the Berkeley Hotel. ‘You’ll be fine, darlings,’ she said. ‘Mrs Brigstock will keep an eye. She’ll ring if there’s any kind of crisis.’
After a few days of this abandonment had passed, Veronica went out into the garden with Anthony, still dressed in pyjamas, clinging to her arm. And she could remember, now, that he kept saying: ‘Let’s not go into the sun, V. Let’s not go into the sun.’ So they walked very slowly to the spinney and sat together under the trees.
‘I’m on my way!’ she said aloud now, her voice strong and purposeful above the throbbing of the car’s air-conditioning. ‘It’s V. I’m coming to find you.’
It was like a poison in her blood, Kitty decided, the ‘V’ part of Veronica.
It was at the root of every selfish act, every unkindness. Veronica was loving, compassionate and clever; V was none of these things. V was a snob and a tyrant. She was a relic of a vanished time.
Kitty lay down and slept for a while. It had always been her way of trying to overcome misery. But the late morning heat in the room was suffocating and after sweating through a nightmare in which she found herself abandoned by Veronica for ever, she got up and showered and sat in the shade of the terrace, sipping water and eating fruit, and tried to order her thoughts about what was happening.
It wearied her to realise that Anthony’s disappearance would be the only subject talked about at Les Glaniques from now on. In fact, this was such an exhausting thought that Kitty began almost to wish that the wretched man would suddenly reappear. Scarred a little, of course. Someone who had had to confront terror and pain – for once in his pampered life. But alive. And, with any luck, traumatised sufficiently by whatever had happened to him in the Cévennes, to abandon his idea of coming to live in France.
Then, V would revert to being Veronica. Things would be as they once were . . .
Kitty yawned. Getting Anthony back meant finding him. Kitty judged that the French police might be fairly slow in their search for an ageing English tourist and thought that, after all, Veronica might be right to do some searching on her own.
But it now occurred to her that Veronica was heading to the wrong place. Perhaps only she, Kitty Meadows, had understood that Anthony had already found a house he loved: the Mas Lunel. Until she’d pointed out the ugly bungalow to him, he’d been in a possessive rapture about it. She’d seen it, felt it in him as he stood there surveying the view, at the upper window. He’d been imagining himself installed in that house, lord of the land. And then she’d deliberately spoiled it for him. Had enjoyed seeing his features cloud over with dismay.
But he wasn’t a stupid man. He would surely have considered what might be done about concealing the bungalow from view. Even discovered advantages in its being there: told himself that the woman who lived in it might be able to work for him and look after the house when he was away. And then he would have gone back to look at the mas again . . .
It was the scalding middle of the day. The cicada orchestra had reached a discordant pitch. Bees harassed the lavender. Kitty thought that it was really time to go to sleep again, to wait out the heat, wait to think clearly in the relative cool of the evening. But the idea of waiting passively for Veronica to deign to return to her made her cross and sad. Better, she decided, not to be here when Veronica came back. Better to climb back into her car and set out on her mission: Kitty Meadows, Private Detective.
Kitty’s attachment to her small Citröen – a car she felt to be right for her short body, her modest aspirations – was at its least affectionate in very hot weather. The car had no air-con. Kitty tried to combat the stifling atmosphere with the breeze from the open windows and with the soaring voice of k.d. lang, given blissful escape by the Citröen’s dusty cassette player.
Kitty sang along with k.d. This music, this hard, sexy voice kept her buoyant as far as Ruasse. Then she turned the music off. She knew that from here, she wasn’t certain of the road to La Callun
e, and needed quiet in which to try to remember it. As the road out of Ruasse began to climb and the landscape of the Cévennes encircled her, she felt again the thrill of the idea of Anthony Verey’s death. Here, among rock and precipice, among impenetrable forest, his body could lie undiscovered for months – or years. She imagined him hanging, face downwards, his slim ankles in their silk-cashmere socks snagged forever by a tangle of roots, his hair slicked down by rain, hooded by snow. She imagined all the creatures that would come and peck at his flesh, digest it and evacuate it: Anthony Verey turned to dung.
She knew she was on the right road when she passed the sandwich stall, La Bonne Baguette. So here she slowed, waiting for the turning to the village of La Callune to come into view.
The overgrown driveway to the Mas Lunel lay higher up, beyond the village, and Kitty found it without difficulty. On her left, exactly as she remembered it, was the bungalow. She let the car slow down, wondering if she might risk stopping and talking to Lunel’s sister. But the bungalow appeared closed and shuttered, so she drove on.
The handsome, yellow-painted mas now came into view. Kitty drew the Citröen into some shade and stopped. She sat absolutely still in the car, looking and listening. The shutters of the house were closed, but there was someone at home – Monsieur Lunel, himself? – because Kitty could hear the dogs barking in their pound and an old brown Renault 4 was parked near the front door.
On her right, below the scrubby lawn, was a tall stone barn, also handsome in its dilapidated way. She didn’t remember this in the way that she remembered everything else, but now she thought that Anthony would surely have had plans for it – as a garage or a pool house. There was nothing here, he would have realised, that couldn’t be altered in its use, nothing that couldn’t be made to serve his needs. Only the bungalow. He’d seen the bungalow and walked away. But surely she wasn’t wrong; the place was beautiful and the problems of the bungalow could be overcome. Anthony would have come back.
Kitty wiped the sweat off her face, ran her hands through her short hair and got out of the car. Something surprised her right away: a foul stench in the air. This, she thought, hadn’t been there last time. The air had smelled of the perfumed maquis. Now, it had been vitiated. She wondered, did pockets of industrial pollution from factories at Ruasse reach even as far as here, when the wind was right? Or was the smell carried by something else? For the first time since setting out, Kitty felt mildly afraid.
She nevertheless walked boldly towards the house and knocked on the closed front door. As the dogs caught her scent, they began tearing at the sides of their cage. Her fear of them was tempered by pity for their plight. She wondered what Lunel would do with them when the house was sold.
Nobody came to the door. Kitty stood still, looking round her. The stench was strong here and seemed to come from the dog pound. She moved to the right, towards a window whose shutters were not quite closed and, shielding herself from her own reflection, looked in. She could see only fragments of the dark space inside: a kitchen table, a tin basin piled up with dirty washing . . .
Then she heard a movement behind her, turned and gaped as she saw Lunel, a few metres from her, pointing a shotgun at her.
She raised her arms, thinking as she did so: Now I’m going to die because of Anthony Verey. There’s no end to the things he asks of the world. No end.
‘Monsieur Lunel . . .’ she began.
‘Qui êtes vous? Que faites-vous ici?’
He kept the gun held high, but Kitty saw that his hands which held it were trembling. And he was out of breath, his thin chest rising and falling behind the stock of the gun. He could kill her by accident in the next few seconds.
She summoned a voice to ask him calmly in French to put the gun away, but he didn’t move it. He told her he was defending his property, defending it night and day. It was only when she said the word ‘Verey’ that she saw his expression change. Slowly, he lowered the gun.
‘Verey?’ he said. ‘The Englishman?’
‘Yes,’ said Kitty. ‘I came with him to visit your house.’
‘His sister. That it? You’re his sister?’
‘No. I’m only – a friend. But I just came to ask you—’
‘Missing, they say he is. Have they found him?’
‘No.’
‘Why are you here? He never came back here. He came the one time, when you were all there. Ask the agents. The agents can verify it: he came here just that once.’
Kitty nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘That’s all we were wondering; whether anyone else had seen him on Tuesday. We knew he was very interested in your house, so we thought—’
‘Come inside. Use my telephone. You can call Madame Besson. I’m not lying. I never saw Verey again. I would have been willing to sell him this place on very good terms. I wouldn’t have been greedy. Look at me. You can tell I’m not a greedy man. And I was talking to my sister about what was to be done with the bungalow . . .’
‘Yes. Did you get anywhere with this? Has your sister agreed to sell the bungalow?’
‘Not yet. But she will agree. I wanted to tell Verey that – that it could all get sorted out. I expected him to come back, but he never did.’
‘You’re absolutely sure about that? He didn’t come here on Tuesday afternoon?’
Lunel shook his head. ‘He never came back,’ he said. ‘I swear it on my life.’
Kitty now realised that the sweat on her was making her cold. She walked away from the shadow of the house, into the sunshine.
‘I’m very sorry, Monsieur Lunel,’ she said, ‘for disturbing you. I had no right to walk onto your property, but I expect you can understand that we’re very very worried . . .’
‘He crashed his car, Madame,’ said Lunel. ‘That’s what I think. You English drive on the wrong side of the road. So how do you know which way to steer?’
Kitty smiled. But even in the sun, she was shivering. She longed, now, for the heat of her car, longed to be miles from here. She knew that Private Detective Kitty Meadows would have found a way to look round the house – to see if any clues were buried inside it. But she didn’t feel capable of going with Lunel into that darkness. She only wanted to be gone.
She held out her hand and Lunel hefted the gun over his shoulder and took it. She said goodbye and Lunel opened his mouth, as though to say something else, but closed it again, and walked away from Kitty, in the direction from which he’d appeared. Kitty watched him go, then went fast towards the car. She wished she had a bottle of vodka in it. She was in shock and knew she shouldn’t be driving until she recovered.
As she opened the car door, she reassured herself that she could stop in La Callune. There would be a café there. She would sit quietly and sip a vodka and tonic until she felt ready for the long drive home. She tumbled gratefully into the driver’s seat. She was about to close the car door when she saw something glinting in the grass underneath it. She looked down at this and saw that what she’d thought was a shard of glass was in fact a piece of cellophane. She stared at it. Then, realising what it was, she picked it up. It was a sandwich wrapper from the roadside stall, La Bonne Baguette. Kitty closed the car door, glad of the warmth which spread round her, and slowly examined the wrapper. Just visible on its label were the words fromage/tomate.
Kitty put the sandwich wrapper into her glove box and started the car.
It took her three turns to manoeuvre it round. The sweat on her hands made the hot steering wheel sticky. She’d drawn level with the bungalow before she realised that she was driving on the wrong side of the road.
She swerved and corrected. Her eye was caught by the sight of a solitary flowered overall, pegged to the bungalow’s washing line and moving gently in the rising breeze. Mistral, she thought. It’ll come soon, the wind that dries the rivers and yellows the leaves before their time, and lingers . . .
Audrun didn’t know why, but all her dreams during this time were happy.
Was it because the t
hing she’d been waiting for was over? She didn’t think so, because it wasn’t over – not yet, not quite. It was now inevitable, but there was still one more act to be played out. And then, it would be over: it would be at an end.
Here they were, anyway, these dreams of past happiness: of going on a bus to the seaside with Bernadette, singing songs all the way, eating oysters from a tin plate on the quayside, seeing the immensity of the ocean.
And the best dream of all: her dream about the day – just the one in all those years – when Raoul Molezon had been waiting for her when she came out of the underwear factory. She’d almost walked right by him because she never expected him to be there, but he called her name and she stopped. He took her to a café and bought sirop de pêche for her and beer for himself. He said to her: ‘I’ve been noticing something, Audrun: you’re becoming a beauty. Your mother must have looked just like you look now when she was young.’
A beauty.
Her, a beauty?
She’d felt like crying. Perhaps she had cried. Cried over her sirop de pêche in the cheap café because Raoul Molezon had said a wonderful thing.
Then, she told him that the factory was poisoning people. The underwear was made of rayon. As you stitched, you had to pull and stretch the rayon, like skin, and in this skin was a chemical called carbon disulphide which had a bad smell and which could give you eczema and boils or even make you go blind.
And Raoul Molezon had said it was a tragedy that she should be working in such a place, but Audrun could never remember what she’d replied; it seemed to her that there was nothing she could have said, then or ever.
But now she was dreaming, not about the factory or the spots that broke out on her hands and round her nose from the carbon disulphide in the rayon, but only about that moment when Raoul called her a beauty.
Dreams like that refreshed you. You woke in the mornings, not aware of the weight of everything that was wrong, but on the contrary, feeling hospitable towards the day, curious to see what it would bring. And this feeling of optimism could last well into the afternoon; last, sometimes, until the daylight began to fade.
