by Unknown
‘Oh,’ said Marianne. ‘But I thought . . . if Aramon didn’t mind . . . they could combine the picnic with looking at the dry-stone walling of the terraces. They might do some drawing, and—’
‘No!’ said Aramon, and he threw Marianne a look of anguish. ‘I don’t want anybody near anything. I’m tired of strangers. I want to be left alone!’
Aramon turned away from them abruptly and began his slow walk, hobbledehoy, hobbledehoy, back towards the mas, and in silence the two women watched him go.
When he was out of hearing, Marianne said: ‘Is he dying?’
‘Well,’ said Audrun. ‘Let’s say that time’s caught up with him.’
Time.
A flickering out of each and every moment before it had been properly lived – as though time were a whirlwind, a mistral, blowing everything to kingdom come – this was what Anthony Verey had had to contend with for years – ever since his business had begun to fail. Then, sitting in his back office, that morning in spring, he’d caught sight of the black silk thread hanging from the Aubusson tapestry, that black thread escaping from the head of the malevolent witch, and he’d held it between finger and thumb and understood at last what waited for him: death unfurnished.
And so a certain day had arrived.
On this inevitable day, Anthony found himself sitting on a mahogany-framed armchair (‘Probably French, c.1770. With padded cartouche back. Arms and seat on cabriole legs’) and he was looking around at a handsome room in an unfamiliar, lonely house, with a view of empty sky at every window.
His gaze settled and moved on, settled and moved on. The room was aesthetically pleasing – there was nothing ugly in it. But it was here in this place, in this almost-beautiful room, sitting on this expensive chair, upholstered in charcoal-grey-and-white damask, that Anthony Verey felt it pinching and pulling at his frame: final defeat.
He sat very still. So still, he could hear the thud of his own heart. The room had a high beamed ceiling, painted a soft shade of blue-green. Near him, was a tall stone cheminée (‘Modern. Sandstone. In the English Georgian style. Simplified lines and moulding’) and in the fireplace a half-burned piece of wood, resting on a pile of ash.
With his dispassionate, collector’s eye, with some distant part of himself still alive in this present, Anthony admired the room, its proportions, its flicker of grandeur, its place in a house that stood so alone. For a little while, he was able to distract himself from his feelings of collapse by imagining the Swiss couple who’d put this room together: lawyers or professors, educated people, a couple with a full address book which connected them, perhaps, to many different worlds. People on whom life had smiled. And yet they’d hung on to their souls. They weren’t vulgar. They weren’t afraid of silence.
But then, when a certain amount of time had passed, they’d understood what Anthony understood: that this house exposed them in too terrible a way. It sat too high on a pitiless plateau, unguarded, unprotected – with a precipice at its feet. The wind bent the pines planted to give it shade and shelter, bent them and bowed them.
The trees were still just alive. They clung to the stony soil, still, clawed into it with their obstinate roots, but they couldn’t shield the house or its occupants. The dome of sky held everything here in its grip. Here, at night, you’d find no retreat from the icy stars. The universe would reach down to you. And everything that you’d been, tried to become, hoped fondly yet to be: all this, in its folly and delusion, would be revealed to you – as though there were no decency or honour in any of it.
Perhaps you could light a fire in the grate, huddle near it, grasping at small comforts: wine and memory. But always, round and round you, would expand the void. You’d see yourself as though from a vast height: the way you crawled from one purpose to the next, endlessly starting and giving up, endlessly hoping and repenting, endlessly lost . . .
Anthony gripped the arms of the chair. He looked down at the charred log on the mound of ash. He could no longer hold on to his musings about the Swiss couple. What came instead to his desolate mind was an image of Lal, tripping into this spacious room, always so light on her feet, wearing perhaps that lavender dress she’d worn the day she climbed the ladder to his tree-house and eaten brandy snaps filled with whipped cream . . .
He looked up. Yes, there she came, his beloved Lal, insubstantial as candyfloss, and then something caught her eye: the sight of the half-burned piece of wood on the dead ashes and she skipped over to it and knelt down in front of it and said: ‘Oh, do look, darling! Doesn’t that silly old stick remind you of someone? What a scream, hey? A stick! Doesn’t that remind you of you?’
Despite the insult (or was it only a joke? With Lal you never really knew), Anthony longed for his mother to stay with him. In his reverie, he got up from the chair and took her hands and then put his arms round her and held her close to him and buried his face in her golden hair and said, ‘Stay with me, Ma. Please. Don’t leave me in this place.’
‘Oh, all right, darling,’ she said. ‘All right. I’ll stay. If I must. I’ll hold on to you.’
But she escaped from his arms and went back to the fireplace and knelt by it, and then she did something awful: she crawled onto the mound of ash, and lay down, lay down in the ash, holding the half-burnt log close against her breast.
‘Don’t, Ma . . .’ said Anthony.
There was ash in her hair, in the folds of her dress, on her slender legs, on her naked feet. He reached down, to try to pull her up, but she wouldn’t be moved.
‘Ma . . .’ he pleaded. But she lay there, laughing, clutching the stick. She just lay there laughing her silvery laugh and said: ‘I’ve got you now, Anthony. See? That’s what you always wanted, wasn’t it? I’ve got you close to me!’
He begged and begged her: ‘Ma, get up. You’re covered in ash. Please . . .’
But she’d never heard a single thing he’d said in his whole life. And she couldn’t hear him now.
Anthony walked slowly round the room, trailing his fingers over the surfaces of furniture that he admired, but found this admiration tempered, as though even these – these beloved kind of things – held no importance for him any more.
He went outside. He was awed by the vast bowl of hills that spread round him, from horizon to horizon. The wind was so strong that the car was rocking where it stood on the gravel driveway. And he thought, If I walked to the edge, the northern edge of the plateau, where the mistral pulls hardest against gravity, I’d only have to wait a few moments before I’d be hurled away. I’d be pitched into the darkness where, soundless, voiceless, Lal lies waiting.
And then it would be over.
It would be over.
There would be no more dallying and flirting with the future, in any of its ever-changing, ever-mutating versions. I would simply be lifted up by the wind and thrown down on a bed of ash.
And I would accept.
Jeanne Viala settled herself and the children in Audrun’s little field, close to the oaks that grew at the edge of the wood.
The class had been attentive and well behaved in the Museum of Cévenol Silk Production. Even Jo-Jo, with his short attention span, had seemed to be interested in the exhibits and all the children had completed quite good drawings of the different stages of silkworm-rearing: the incubating of the eggs in pouches secreted against the human body; the spreading of the worms in the magnaneries; the devices used to keep rats and ants at bay; the gathering of mulberry leaves; the montada of the grown worms, five centimetres long, into the sprigs of heather; the spinning of the cocoons; the boiling alive of the emerging moths inside the cocoons as the threads were unwound . . .
Only the Parisian girl, Mélodie, had seemed unhappy. Her drawing, reluctantly undertaken, had consisted of dark lines up and down and across the page. When Jeanne Viala asked her what this was meant to be, Mélodie had replied in a strangled voice: ‘Les flats. All the dead worms.’
And then, in the middle of the picnic, which was so pleasan
t under the great dark trees – such a happy moment, in fact that Jeanne would have liked to share it with her new boyfriend, Luc, who worked for the Fire Service – Mélodie had got up and run off, without permission, without even looking back when Jeanne called her.
Jeanne had decided to let her go. She knew these terraces. The child couldn’t come to any harm. The land lay well below the road. The way to the river was impassable because, for years now, Aramon Lunel had ignored the directives of the commune on river-bank maintenance. And Jeanne didn’t want to leave the whole group, to go running after one child. She hoped Mélodie would soon reappear. Jeanne had packed bottles of cherry Yop for dessert and she would tempt her with one of these to sit down again.
The other children stared at Mélodie as she ran off. Stared and stared.
‘She didn’t like the silkworms,’ said Magali. ‘All she likes is dancing class and violin!’ And the others laughed at this, and Jo-Jo burst out: ‘She thinks she’s better than us, just because she used to live in Paris, silly cow.’
‘Stop it, Jo-Jo!’ said Jeanne. ‘I won’t tolerate that kind of talk.’
‘She’s a Jew, anyway,’ mumbled Stéphanie. ‘Hartmann’s a Jewish name.’
‘What did you say, Stéphanie?’ said Jeanne.
‘Nothing . . .’
Jeanne Viala set down her bottle of Evian water. She held up her hands in an embracing gesture. ‘Listen, everybody,’ she said. ‘Please everybody stop talking and listen to me. Jo-Jo, that includes you. Now I want to remind you that in this country we are a tolerant people. You know what tolerant means? It means that we accept people into our community and into our hearts, no matter what their background is, or their religion, or what city they’ve come from. And this means – please listen very carefully – this means that we don’t bully anybody or call them names. Is this understood? I would really like to know that you’ve all understood this.’
The children were silent, every one. Jeanne shook her head in a sorrowful way. ‘The way Mélodie Hartmann has been treated in this class is . . . disappointing. Her home was in Paris. There’s nothing wrong with that. She’s trying to adapt to her new surroundings. But you’re not giving her the chance—’
‘She doesn’t “adapt”, said Magali. “She just keeps telling everybody how brilliant her school in Paris was.’
‘She’s homesick, that’s all,’ said Jeanne. ‘If you’d all make an effort to be more friendly to her, her homesickness would disappear. So, as from today, I want you all to make a resolution. Are you listening? Stéphanie? As from today, I want to see kindness shown to Mélodie. All right? Real kindness. Let her into your games. When she gets lost, help her. OK? I really hope everybody is understanding this?’
Some of the girls nodded. Mostly, the boys turned away and looked blank.
‘Can we have the Yops now?’ said the youngest girl in the class, Suzanne.
Jeanne waited. She wanted something more from the children than this. She had bad dreams about the way the Parisian girl was being treated. She thought of poor Audrun Lunel and Marianne saying, ‘When lives are blighted young, Jeannette, sometimes you just don’t quite recover, and that’s a true tragedy.’
Jeanne began to take out the cherry Yops from the cold-bag. ‘Before I give these to you,’ she said, ‘I want to hear from each one of you that you’ve heard what I’ve said. Say it please. “There will be no more bullying of Mélodie Hartmann.”’
It was on its way to the hand of the first child, the little bottle of Yop . . . it was on its way but didn’t reach the hand, didn’t elicit from the child any words . . . because it was then that Jeanne and the children heard the screams.
Jeanne dropped the bottle and sprang to her feet. All the children’s faces turned and looked down towards the edge of the field. Jo-Jo and his friend André jumped up in hectic excitement. ‘What’s that, Miss? What’s that?’
‘Wait here,’ Jeanne said firmly to the group. ‘Wait here and don’t move. Jo-Jo and André, sit down on the rug please. Nobody go from here, right? Stay exactly where you are. Promise me? Magali, give out the Yops.’
The screams kept on. Jeanne Viala began to run towards them. She ran faster and faster, but soon she could feel her heart cramping, like the heart of an old woman, as she forced her legs to carry her across the sloping field. She cursed herself. What kind of teacher sat back and allowed a child to wander off on her own from a country picnic?
And . . . oh God . . . which way had the child gone? The screams had suddenly stopped as Jeanne reached the edge of the field. Should she go straight on, into the pasture that led to the river, or turn left? She looked at the ground, to see if any tracks were visible, but nothing showed up in the dry grass, only the red-backed crickets jumping and the dry heads of hemlock burning up in the sun.
She began calling: ‘Mélodie! Mélodie!’ But now everything around Jeanne seemed infected with a colossal silence. The loudest thing was the beating of Jeanne’s own heart. She kneaded her chest, felt her white blouse sticking to her body. Luc, she wanted to cry, help me . . .’
Then she made herself think rationally: try one direction, then another. Keep calling. Everything’s up to you now.
She stumbled on, shouting out the child’s name, telling her she was on her way, she was coming, it was all right . . . She pushed through a rusted iron gate into the pasture. She thought that in the damp pasture, there might be footprints she could follow, but when she got into the meadow she saw that the grass here was brown and parched too, and it was lumpy and her feet in her white canvas shoes were twisted this way and that and she almost fell, but recovered herself and ran on, going towards a spindly clump of ash, beyond which was the river bank.
She was out of breath now, in the colossal heat, struggling with the tussocks of dead grass. She stopped for a moment. What could she hear?
Nothing. A bird of prey calling, a buzzard or a kitty-hawk. And then . . . yes . . . something else . . . the sound of the river. She went on in that direction, through the ash grove, and was grateful for the dappled shade of the spindly trees, shielding her from the sun, just for a moment. The river was louder now. But between the ash trees and the river bank were briars and nettles. Surely, the child couldn’t have pushed her way through those?
Jeanne stopped again. She was about to turn round and make her way back up the pasture when she saw that what she’d taken for nettles weren’t in fact nettles, but those plumed dark weeds that hugged the shingle banks of the Gardon in a few shady corners, where snakes sometimes made their nests, in places the fishermen avoided.
And then she saw that, at one spot, a clump of these weeds had been flattened. Perhaps she’d chosen the right path after all? She followed where the tracks led, imagining the child’s little feet treading all this down, careless of snakes in her misery, just rushing on, away from the bullying Jo-Jo and the sneering girls, fighting her way through the rank weeds . . .
Jeanne arrived on a shingle bank and saw the river trying to rush steadfastly on, but slowing, slowing almost as she watched it, the way it did every summer when no rain fell after the month of April. But her gaze didn’t linger on the water. She began searching for footprints in the shingle. The stones were coarse and slippery, but nearer the water’s edge there was a grey beach and she walked down to this and thought she saw tracks going left, towards the river bend.
‘Mélodie . . . Mélodie . . .’ she began calling again, knowing her voice wasn’t loud any more. She felt exhausted, as though she’d walked from Ruasse to La Callune, uphill all the way, with cars rushing by her and the road edge scarred with fallen rocks. ‘Oh please, please let me find her,’ she said. ‘Please let her be alive . . .’
Jeanne rounded the bend. Immediately, she saw the child, naked except for a little pair of red-and-white briefs, lying on a boulder in the middle of the river. She lay on her back, with her legs overhanging the boulder, gravity threatening to pull her body down at any moment into the water. Strewn about on the shin
gle beach were the clothes she’d been wearing for the outing.
Cold now. Jeanne was suddenly cold. And the thought of wading into the icy water was unbearable. Oh God . . . if only Luc were here to gather the child into his arms, to frighten away the stranger who might be hiding anywhere along the river line . . . But sometimes, Jeanne knew, there is no one, no Luc, no Marianne, no one. You’re alone and what you have to do is to go on. And whatever is going to happen, is going to happen . . .
Jeanne kicked off her canvas shoes, remembered her mobile phone in the pocket of her jeans and stuck it inside one of the shoes. She walked into the river and felt the chill eddy round her calves. She clung to rocks to steady her progress on the slimy, stony river-bed. ‘I’m here now,’ she kept repeating out loud. ‘I’m here now. I’m here now . . .’
And she was almost there. She reached out. She said the child’s name again: Mélodie. She touched one of the little smooth legs, the toe dangling almost into the water. She held it tight. Then she pressed herself against the boulder and gathered the child to her. Mélodie still lay across the stone, but she was held now, held in Jeanne Viala’s arms. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth open. But Jeanne could feel her heartbeat and her breathing.
She shook her and cried out to her, told her she was safe now. And to her ecstatic relief Mélodie opened her eyes. And Jeanne felt the child’s thin arms go round her neck and cling to her.
Jeanne cradled her and rocked her, letting the boulder still take the weight but holding her as close as she could while she readied herself to carry the child back across the water.
‘What happened?’ she said softly. ‘Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you?’
But the little girl couldn’t speak. She opened her mouth, but the sounds that came out weren’t words, only a low melodic moaning.
Make her warm, Jeanne instructed herself. Carry her to the bank. Get her clothes on. Get help. Call Luc. Tell him to send an ambulance. Call Maman to come and be with the children.
