by Unknown
And then, somehow, it vanished. Audrun would look up at the darkening sky behind her wood and feel her hopes for the future flying away.
She’d try to distract herself with the TV. She loved old American crime movies, with terrifying soundtracks. She loved hospital dramas. But best of all, she loved programmes imported from Japan, where people did the strangest things: they rode horses backwards, they somersaulted through rings of fire, they ate tarantulas, they walked on stilts through snow. Or sometimes they just lay on the ground, not moving, looking up at millions of cherry trees in bloom. And then Audrun would remember Aramon once cutting a branch of white blossom and putting it into her arms and kissing her cheek when she said: ‘I’m a princess now. Am I?’
Days passed and the river fell. No rain came.
Below La Callune, where the river calmed, the campsites began to fill up. Lessons in kayaking were offered. Tourists put on yellow life jackets, yelping as the frail kayaks bounced and swivelled in the eddies. Barbecue smoke tainted the evening air. Loud music came and went on the ever-changing winds.
Sometimes, Audrun wondered whether the surveyor would re-appear, but there was no sign of him, and she didn’t care now, because all of that – the question of boundaries and markers – was irrelevant, or would be soon.
For the time being, she avoided Aramon. Sometimes, she glimpsed him trudging off to work on the wrecked vine terraces, noted how he staggered, how his health was failing, day by day. But she didn’t go up to the house.
She saw a Dutch family arrive with Madame Besson to look round the Mas Lunel, but they didn’t stay long. Their children were terrified of the dogs and kept screaming. The family drove by her bungalow with their faces pointing straight ahead and never turning to look back. And an article in Ruasse Libre informed her that property prices were now beginning to fall. ‘You see?’ she said in her mind to Aramon. ‘Those sums of money were daydreams.’
Then, Aramon arrived at her door one evening – at that time of day when the beneficial effect of her dreams was running out – and he was pale and could hardly speak. She told him he looked as though he’d seen a ghost and he said: ‘I have seen a ghost. Come and look in the barn.’
She followed him there. He went ahead, trying to make little galloping steps that soon got him out of breath. She understood that his heart and lungs wouldn’t let him run any more.
The heavy doors of the barn were open and they went in. It was dark in there, with the daylight going, but Aramon picked up a flashlight from a shelf and shone it onto the chaos which had accumulated in the huge barn over all the years.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘Look there!’
Something stood there. It was a big, bulky shape, draped with sacking, half concealed by a clutter of old farm utensils, crates, boxes, cement bags and broken domestic tools which had been piled on top of it.
‘What’s that?’ said Aramon. ‘How did that get here?’
Audrun stared blankly.
‘There!’ Aramon yelled. ‘There! Are you blind?’
He walked forwards and lifted some of the sacking so that Audrun could see what was underneath. It was a car.
She moved silently towards it. Aramon watched her reach out, as if about to touch the metal of the bonnet, but then she withdrew her hand. She turned her face towards Aramon and said: ‘Whose car is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know . . .’ but then he began to snivel. ‘I don’t know how it got there, Audrun. I swear. And I swear on my life that I never hurt anybody . . .’
‘What d’you mean?’ said Audrun. ‘What are you talking about?’
He broke down into tears of anguish. He came to her and it was as if he was asking her to put her arms round him and console him, but she held herself apart and said: ‘Tell me what you’ve done.’
‘I don’t know!’ he cried. ‘I get these blackouts. I wake up in different places. I swear this is the first I’ve seen of this car, but it could be his, couldn’t it? How do I know? I’ve never laid eyes on his fucking car! I thought they came in the agent’s car, didn’t they? Didn’t they?’
‘The first time,’ said Audrun. ‘The agent brought them the first time, but then, the second time, who knows . . .’
‘How did a car get into my barn? Jesus Christ! I’m going mad. You have to help me, Audrun. You have to help me!’
Out of her overall pocket, Audrun took a handkerchief (one that had belonged to Bernadette) and gave it to Aramon. He buried his face in it.
‘I suppose you killed him, did you?’ said Audrun. ‘You got in one of your rages and you killed the foreigner because he wouldn’t buy the mas, like you killed that whore in Alès long ago?’
‘No!’ sobbed Aramon. ‘Why would I do that? I only saw him that one solitary time . . .’
‘You know that’s not the truth,’ said Audrun.
‘It is the truth! I called Besson. She confirmed it. She said he only came here once.’
‘Once with her. And then the second time . . . on his own. I saw you with him.’
‘No! He never came back. I would have remembered. Mary Mother of God, I would have remembered!’
She let him cry. She went boldly to the car and uncovered more of it and they both saw that the bodywork of the car was black.
‘God forgive you, Aramon,’ she said. ‘You killed that poor man. You shot him and tried to hide the car in all this clutter.’
‘No!’ he sobbed. ‘No!’
Aramon let himself fall down. He just collapsed and lay in the dust of the barn floor with his face in his hands. His legs swivelled, like the legs of a baby, trying to crawl.
Audrun stood over him and said: ‘Is the body inside?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ he keened. ‘Take this away from me! Tell me this isn’t happening! Take this away!’
She pulled the sacking off the car windows, dislodging a wooden sieve and a pyramid of discoloured Tupperware containers. She peered inside the car, but it was too dark to see much.
‘We’d better call the police,’ she said.
He seemed to convulse then, and sat up in the dust and begged her, begged her on their mother’s soul not to do that.
‘We have to,’ she said. ‘What else can we do?’
‘I’ll get rid of it,’ he sobbed. ‘I know places in the hills. I’ll push it off a crag. I’ll do it at night. Please, Audrun. Please . . .’
She ignored all this and went back to peering in the car window, shielding her vision from the reflected flashlight.
‘Turn the torch off, Aramon,’ she snapped.
He grovelled for the flashlight, picked it up and dropped it and it went out and the true darkness of the barn surrounded them. Wrapping her hand in a piece of sacking, Audrun tried the handle of the car door, tugging hard at it, but it wouldn’t yield and in the next second an ear-splitting sound came from the car – the burglar alarm – and its indicator lights began a frantic blinking on and off.
Aramon’s crying turned to screaming. He put his hands to his ears. He looked like a madman, thrashing about there in the dust.
The gyrations of his body dislodged a clutch of ancient rakes and pitchforks leaning against the wall, and they fell on him, one by one, like the bars of a cage pinning him to the earth.
She lifted the rakes away from him and found the torch and got its beam to come on and she helped Aramon to his feet. Her hand on his arm felt how thin his body had become. She led him out of the barn into the falling night. The burglar alarm on the car went suddenly silent. Audrun closed the barn doors.
Aramon stopped crying as they made their way up to the mas. The dogs began keening as they approached. Audrun led him into the kitchen and turned on the bar of fluorescent light above the table. She sat him down on a hard chair and poured him a shot of pastis and filled the glass to its brim with cool water from the kitchen tap.
He drank gratefully. His face was muddy with tear-stained dust. Audrun sat beside him and talked to him, quietly, like
Bernadette used to talk to them when she scolded them as children, with no need to raise her voice.
‘Aramon,’ she said. ‘Anything like this, it’s only a question of time. You can hide things, like you tried to hide the car, but in the end, they come to light. So you’ve got to try to remember what happened. That’s your best hope – to try to recollect. You’ve never liked doing this, going back over things you wanted to forget, but now you have to, so that you can defend yourself better. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He was still clutching Bernadette’s handkerchief, worn thin by time. He wiped his mouth with this. He nodded.
‘The car’s locked,’ said Audrun. ‘So first you have to remember what you did with the keys. Then we can see whether there’s anything inside it . . .’
‘It’s gone,’ he said.
‘What’s gone? The place where you put the keys? You’ve forgotten where you hid them?’
‘All of it’s gone. Did I do something terrible? Perhaps I did, Audrun, perhaps I did, because . . .’
‘Because what? Because what?’
‘Jesus Christ, I found two spent cartridges in my gun! I don’t know how they got there. Why would I leave them there? I’d never leave used cartridges in the gun. And what did I use the gun for? I don’t know!’
He began crying again. Audrun told him to have another pull at the glass of pastis and he gulped this down.
‘I think it’ll all come back to you,’ she said calmly. ‘Often, we think that certain things have gone clean from our minds, but then we get some clue – it might be a photograph or the smell of something – and we can put it all back together. I can help you. I think you should sleep now, but when you’re feeling better, tomorrow, I can help you fill in some blanks, because, as I keep telling you, I saw you that day, with Verey. I saw you from my window . . .’
He turned his pleading face to hers. ‘Don’t go to the police,’ he said. ‘You’re my sister. Don’t betray me.’
She took his hand in hers and held it tenderly against her bony chest.
‘It was the money, wasn’t it?’ said Audrun. ‘Verey wouldn’t pay your price and you were disappointed. Money makes people insane.’
Veronica felt that she was falling into a trance. A trance of sorrow.
In the middle of doing the simplest things, this trance came on. When she sat down to put on her shoes, she sometimes stayed like that, staring at her feet, for minutes on end.
It was June now and very hot. The journalists and photographers who’d clustered near the house after the police announcement had first been made had gone away. Ruasse Libre’s references to the case were now in very small print. The Inspecteur in charge of the search remarked to Veronica that when someone disappears, the chance of their being found alive diminishes severely after the third day has passed.
‘That doesn’t mean you can just give up!’ Veronica screamed at him.
‘Non, Madame,’ said the Inspecteur patiently. ‘Of course we’re not giving up. We’ll find your brother – alive or dead.’
Alive or dead.
What made Veronica’s sorrow so hard to bear was the knowledge that she’d loved and protected Anthony all his life – against their father’s neglect, against Lal’s bad temper, against his own anguished nature – but she hadn’t been able to protect him from whatever had happened to him now. In her dreams, he was buried alive and slowly suffocating and she woke up screaming. Kitty tried to stroke and comfort her, but she resisted this, afraid that tenderness would become passion.
She talked to Anthony in her mind. She told him she’d been to the Swiss house. The police had done a cursory search of the place, found nothing unusual and left. But Veronica had seen something which convinced her that Anthony had been there on that day. The Swiss couple owned some fine antique French furniture. And here and there, on the dusty surfaces of tables or cabinets there were lines, unmistakably traces left by fingers, and Veronica knew – she knew with absolute certainty! – that these were Anthony’s finger marks. ‘It wasn’t that you were checking for dust, darling,’ she said to him, ‘were you? It was that you recognised objects of value and you wanted to touch them. You wanted to love them for a moment. You wanted to imagine them taking their place among the beloveds. I’m not wrong, Anthony, am I? I know I’m not wrong.’
A forensics team was sent to the Swiss house. Yes, indeed, Veronica was informed, there were clearly delineated marks on the furniture. But now, before undergoing further searches at the Swiss house, the team had to see whether they could match these fingerprints with those belonging to Anthony Verey.
The forensics people arrived at Les Glaniques and dusted the surfaces of Anthony’s bedroom and bathroom for prints and then they took away Anthony’s possessions – took away almost everything that belonged to him – while Veronica stood looking on, seeing the small bit of his life that he’d brought to France being delicately inserted into plastic bags. They even ferreted out his pyjamas, from where Veronica had placed them under his pillow on the day he disappeared, and started to put them into a bag.
‘Don’t take those,’ she said. ‘Why do you need those?’
‘DNA, Madame,’ they said. ‘Everything is vital.’
Veronica lay down on Anthony’s bed. The smell of him – all the balms and unguents he used – was still on the pillow even though the pillowcase had been taken away.
She remembered how he’d always adored perfume. As a teenager, he’d once been caught sitting at Lal’s dressing table, going through all her bottles, one by one, and sniffing the contents. In his hand, when Lal surprised him, was a porcelain pot of vaginal lubricant. Lal took the pot from him and threw it across the room and then hit the side of his head with the back of her hand. She told him he was a grubby and disgusting boy.
This had been during the summer holidays when Lal had brought her Canadian lover, Charles Le Fell, to Bartle House. Although Veronica had long ago guessed that her mother had lovers, it had apparently never entered Anthony’s mind, and he told Veronica that, when he thought about what his mother was doing with Charles Le Fell, he wanted to kill him.
‘Don’t do that,’ Veronica said. ‘Canadians are quite nice.’
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I’d like to kill them both.’
He crept around the house in the night, listening at Lal’s door. Charles Le Fell was a very big man, six foot three with wide shoulders and enormous hands, like a bear’s paws, whereas Lal was small and delicate, like a springbok. Human behaviour was so stupid, so completely wrong, Anthony told Veronica, if his mother could choose that, that hugeness, if she could willingly submit herself to that. And yet, secretly, he wanted to see it. He wanted to open Lal’s door and see her naked body being crushed by Charles Le Fell. And then scream. He wanted to stand in his mother’s bedroom screaming until he was sick.
He wouldn’t talk to Charles Le Fell. At mealtimes, the amiable Canadian tried to make conversation about school, or about the things that were happening in the news, like the launch of the first Russian spaceship, Sputnik, but Anthony only mumbled one-word answers and excused himself from the table as soon as his food was eaten.
Lal punished him by refusing to kiss him goodnight any more. She said to him: ‘All of that is over. You have to grow up, Anthony. In every way. Or you’ll never have a proper life. And you’d better start being civil to Charles or you can spend the Christmas holidays at school.’
‘I hate women,’ he said to Veronica one night. ‘I hate every single woman in the world, except you.’
‘I’m not a woman,’ said Veronica. ‘I’m a horse.’
He hated women, and yet . . .
Memories of Anthony’s wedding began to chase round Veronica’s tired mind.
‘Just let that old stuff go,’ said Kitty. ‘Just get it out of your head, if it upsets you.’
But Veronica felt that it might be there for a purpose. She felt that there was a chance that if she allowed herself to examine it – as
one would examine evidence to present to a court of law – then it might give her some new insight into what had happened.
She could see that wedding day very clearly . . .
Lal wearing a gauzy blue dress, but looking tired, suddenly looking older, and in the church turning round and searching the faces of the assembled guests, as though in the hope that handsome Charles Le Fell might reappear and call her his ‘Lally-Pally’, his ‘sweetie-pie’ . . .
Anthony, waiting in the front pew for the arrival of his bride, Caroline . . .
Anthony immaculate in a morning suit from Savile Row, his hair still dark then, his face tanned. Beside him Lloyd Palmer (yes, of course it was Lloyd, the best man!), the buoyant, dependable friend. And then suddenly, as the organ music struck up the bridal march and the congregation rustled to their well-shod feet, Anthony bent over, bent almost double, as though he was going to be sick on the flagstones, and Lloyd put a comforting arm round him. Veronica, in the pew behind, wanted to climb over the seat to be beside her brother, but all she could do – hampered as she was by her tight silk suit and her satin high-heeled shoes – was reach out her gloved hand . . .
He wasn’t sick. He managed to straighten up as Caroline made her elegant progress down the aisle. But he never looked round to see his bride coming towards him. He held himself rigid and Veronica could see his whole body shaking with fear. He was meant to step out of the pew when Caroline drew level with him, but he didn’t move. Caroline and her father waited. The bride’s sharp features under the veil turned towards him, her eyes blinking in panic. Her hand, holding the bouquet of lilies, reached out . . .
Lloyd had to nudge Anthony out of the pew and into the aisle beside Caroline. The vicar stared down at them in dismay. Lal whispered to Veronica: ‘Something’s wrong, V. But what?’
But what?
He got through it. At the reception, he made a speech about love.
