by Unknown
The young mortuary assistant, a student in his twenties, had stayed with Veronica. He knelt beside her, holding her hand. Over his green overalls, he wore a green plastic apron, scrubbed violently clean.
‘I know,’ said Veronica to this young man, ‘that there are things I should be doing. Lots and lots of things. But I just can’t imagine what they are.’
He shook his head, encased in a soft gauzy cap. ‘You will remember these things later, Madame,’ he said gently.
‘I don’t know if I will,’ said Veronica. ‘I feel my mind has . . . just . . . more or less melted away.’
‘This is normal,’ said the mortuary assistant. ‘Absolutely normal. It’s the shock. Now, can you get to your feet? I’ll take you to the police car and they will drive you home.’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Veronica in a tender, motherly voice.
‘Paul,’ said the boy.
‘Paul,’ repeated Veronica. ‘That’s a very nice name. Easy to remember. I like it when that is the case.’
So many things to do . . .
But she did nothing. She knew this was lamentable.
She sat on the terrace, watching leaves fall. She sat so still that she lost almost all the feeling in her feet. Then she got up and limped to her room and lay down, unable to hold herself upright any more. She covered herself with the sheet and the blue-and-white bed cover and closed her eyes.
She knew that crying was one of the things she should be doing, but this felt like an impossible demand, the kind of stupid, insensitive demand Lal might have made – Lal, or some stranger who didn’t know her properly and who would never know her, would never ever know how it felt to be Veronica Verey, alive in the world . . .
She wondered whether, in fact, she’d never do anything again, except lie there in her room at Les Glaniques. Just lie there unable to move, like someone in a ghastly play by Samuel Beckett, in which nothing ever happened. It seemed very likely.
She tried to think of all the things she might do, but none of them attracted her. She remembered that when the vet had had to be summoned to put Susan down, she’d run into the spinney behind Bartle House and taken a stick and charged round and round and round, whacking the trees. She’d kept on running until the stick broke, then she’d found another stick and kept hitting and hitting until she had no more breath in her lungs and had to fall over and let her face come to rest on a pillow of moss.
Now, she admired from a distance the girl who had done all this charging about. She could imagine the high colour it had brought to her cheeks.
She thought it all admirable and right, for that adorable little pony. But as she lay on her bed, the idea of any bodily movement made Veronica feel so tired that she seemed to sink right down into the mattress, as if it were as deep and soft as a quicksand. Breathing felt exhausting.
Perhaps she slept. She wasn’t sure.
She could see now that the room was dark and she could hear something going on, a sound she was meant to recognise, but she couldn’t recognise it.
It belonged in a different life.
After some time, she decided the sound might have been the telephone ringing, but she couldn’t think of anybody she wanted to talk to. She was glad of one thing: that she was alone. She thought that in this loneliness there was a kind of dignity and peace.
Her memories came tumbling towards her, like sprites, like characters escaping from a story, holding hands and running fast. ‘Look at us! Look at us! We’re alive!’
An evening when . . .
. . . she and Anthony sat alone in the kitchen at Bartle House, eating cereal. Lal had gone out to dinner. She, Veronica, would have been fifteen and Anthony twelve or thirteen. All they had to eat for supper was the cereal. Anthony went to the fridge and opened it and saw that it was filled with bottles of champagne and with dishes of dressed game and fish, waiting to be cooked for a party Lal was giving for her smart Hampshire friends the following night.
‘Nothing’s ever for us,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Yes you do,’ said Veronica.
‘You mean she doesn’t care about us?’
‘She doesn’t love us.’
He sat down and stared at the cereal, half eaten in a blue bowl. Then he overturned the bowl and let the milk and cornflake mush seep into the tablecloth. He pushed it about with his hands. Veronica got up and came to him and put her arms around him. She kissed the top of his head.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘And I always will. I promise I always will.’
‘I know, V,’ he said.
Had she kept her promise?
There had been times of dereliction, months when she didn’t call him or even think much about him, particularly after she’d met Kitty Meadows. For she saw it clearly now: Kitty had always wanted to separate her from Anthony, always wanted to destroy the feelings she had for him – as though they’d been sexual feelings and posed a threat. So, in a sense, Kitty was responsible for his death . . .
This felt like a coherent thought: Kitty is responsible.
And Veronica decided that it might always feel like that to her, that Kitty Meadows had sent Anthony to his death. Someone else, some crazed, unhappy stranger had shot him – for being an English tourist? For a reason which would always feel unreal to her. But Kitty was the one who’d wanted him dead. She was the one who’d been too obtuse to see the truth of what Anthony and his sister felt for each other and so, out of inappropriate jealous feelings, she’d willed his end.
The telephone rang again but Veronica didn’t move.
In the night, she woke up and thought she heard rain.
But she knew that sometimes, you couldn’t tell: was it rain or was it just the wind changing direction, breathing differently through the trees?
It went on, this sighing sound. On and on. She half wanted to get up, just to see if the rain had come, if all the weeks of drought were ending. But then she realised that she didn’t care about this either. Let the garden die.
Because what is a garden? A piece of ground changed temporarily by artifice, requiring inordinate attention. An attempt at creating some baby ‘paradise’ to console you for all the other things that will never be yours.
And then a new thought came: There should have been a child. Mine or Anthony’s, it wouldn’t have mattered which. There should have been someone to whom all of what we’ve tried to do could now be given.
Someone beloved at last.
Fire came to the hills behind La Callune.
A thoughtless rambler discards a cigarette.
A dry leaf begins to burn . . .
The mistral chivvied the flames across the skyline. The wind blew from the north and the fire, gorged by pine resin on the high tops, paused for a moment, then changed direction and began an assault on the valley.
The air was filled with smoke and with the wailing of the fire trucks. Marianne Viala came panting up the road to Audrun’s bungalow and the two elderly women stood by the gate, watching. They’d watched it before, year upon year: Cévenol fire in all its heartless grandeur. They’d seen the sky turn black. They’d seen the vinefields greyed and choked with ash. They’d seen power lines explode. But never before had they seen it come straight towards them like this, straight towards the Mas Lunel on the veering wind.
Marianne clutched Audrun’s hand. The fire-fighters struggled up the steep terraces with their heavy hoses.
‘The canadairs are on their way,’ said Marianne. ‘Luc called Jeanne and she rang me. The canadairs will put it out, Audrun. They’re at the coast now, refuelling with water.’
Audrun stared up. What fascinated her about fire was the way it appeared so alive. In its crackling and spitting, she could almost hear its boast: The earth is mine, the tinder-dry earth has always been mine.
In contrast to the tireless, boastful fire, Audrun felt like a shadow. She knew she was faltering on the edge of one of her episodes. She knew she ought to go and lie down, now, before it began. But
she was trying to fight it off this time. She clung to Marianne, with her head lowered, her vision concentrated on the ground at her feet. Sometimes, it could be fought like this, with her concentration on the earth, with her will alone.
When she next looked up, Raoul Molezon was there, his pickup on the driveway. She heard Marianne say to him: ‘She’s not well, Raoul. She’s going to go . . .’
But there was no time to think about this. Audrun herself knew that there was no time. She felt the touch of Raoul’s hand on her arm. ‘The dogs,’ he almost shouted at her. ‘I’m going to set the dogs free.’
‘The dogs?’
‘You can’t let the dogs be burned alive!’
He began to run towards the mas and Audrun thought how sweet a thing it was that Raoul Molezon could still run fast, like a boy. She broke away from Marianne and tried to run after him, not because he was still beautiful to her, but because he was right, the dogs had to be saved – those poor animals she’d kept alive with offal and bones since Aramon had been driven away in the locked and guarded van.
But she also understood, as she ran, that if the dogs needed saving, then there were other things at the Mas Lunel that had to be saved too.
Audrun could hear Marianne trying to call her back, but she hurried on.
She knew she looked awkward, attempting to run. One of her feet seemed to kick out in the wrong direction and she kept stumbling. But she had to reach the house before the firemen swarmed in and prevented her. Because all that remained of Bernadette was in the house. The sink where she’d peeled potatoes. The bed where she’d slept. The table where her elbows had rested . . .
Raoul was at the pound. Audrun saw him slide open the bar of the gate and the dogs clawed and pressed on each other to come out into freedom and then ran round in frenzied circles and pissed and defecated with joy and confusion. Only one dog remained in the pound, lying in the dry mud, its eyes open in a terrified stare, but its voice mute. Raoul went into the cage and took this dog in his arms, to bring it out, and Audrun thought, Raoul Molezon is a good man and always was a good man . . .
But she went on by him and up to the house. She pushed open the door of the Mas Lunel, the heavy door splintered by the police, that would no longer close. She stood in the kitchen which, when Aramon had left, when the gendarmes had finished their searches, she had scrubbed to the bone, throwing out everything he’d owned: all his half-broken gadgets and contrivances, every domestic item he’d ever laid his hands on. The kitchen no longer smelled of him. It smelled of caustic soda and beeswax polish. The old brass taps on the sink shone in the sunlight. The blackened oak table was slowly returning itself to a sweet whiteness.
And Audrun thought that if fire was going to come now to destroy it all . . . now, when everything was scoured and renewed, beginning its journey back to what it had once been . . . she thought that this didn’t seem right. She said it aloud: This isn’t right.
She began to push the heavy table towards the broken door, to try to get it outside to save it from the fire, but then she saw that the table was too wide to go through the door, even if she could have lifted it. So, with the table jammed against the door, she just stood behind it, like a shopkeeper, as though waiting for customers to arrive. She knew this was stupid, this standing still behind the table: it achieved nothing. But she couldn’t think what else she was supposed to be doing. She could smell the fire, coming closer, but had no idea how it could be fought off. When she fell, she fell with her head on the table and her arms outstretched.
Sometimes, when an episode came, there was darkness, walled in and complete, and no memory of anything afterwards. Other times, there were visions in that darkness, visions that took on sound and substance like an old-fashioned slide-show beginning, or even a film . . . and bits of these visions would be remembered . . .
The sky is huge and filled with light: a wide screen of sky.
Audrun is standing under that sky, stringing up her runner beans, when she sees the black car go driving past her and stop outside the mas.
The Englishman – Verey – gets out and knocks at the door, but there’s no one there. Aramon is out on the vine terraces, with his secateurs and his canisters of weed-killer and his bread and beer for lunch.
Audrun stops her work. She likes the thrill of it, suddenly, that she’s here alone with the English tourist and can do what she wants with him. The land is hers – should all have been hers, every centimetre of it – and he’s trespassing on it and she can taunt Verey with whatever comes into her mind.
She removes her green rubber gloves and puts them in the pocket of her overall. She walks quietly up the driveway, taking Verey by surprise. He’s a nervous man, she can tell. He reminds her of a puppet, long and limp.
She introduces herself as Aramon’s sister, owner of the bungalow. He gives her a disdainful look (‘the bungalow owner . . . the one I’d like to obliterate . . .’) then he remembers he has to be polite, so he shakes her hand. He tells her he’s come back to look at the mas again. He gestures at the land around them. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says. ‘And I love the silence here.’
She opens the door of the mas and leads him in. He walks slowly round the house. His glance is directed most of the time towards the rafters of the high ceilings. She’s silent, following him from room to room, watching every move his body makes. She knows that he’s imagining himself as the owner of the Mas Lunel, and she thinks how, if Bernadette were here, she’d smile her sweet smile and say quietly to him, ‘No, I’m sorry, Monsieur, but I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. This is my house.’
They go into Audrun’s old room. Audrun hangs back, standing at the door. Verey opens wide the shutters and the room is flooded with sunlight and the sunlight falls on Audrun’s bed and on the chest of drawers where she used to keep the disgusting girdles, hidden under her own sad clothes.
Verey opens the window and leans out. He raises his arms, as though to embrace the view down the valley. Then he turns to Audrun and says in his faltering French, ‘If I bought the house . . . which I think I am going to do . . . would you work for me? I’m going to need somebody to keep everything clean . . .’
She stares at him, at this stranger in her room. She pictures herself getting down on her hands and knees, scrubbing floors for him, working till she’s too old to work any more, lying exhausted in her bungalow, trapped behind the wall this man has built to keep her out of sight. And then she sees it come towards her – exactly as she knew it would one day – the idea that will set her free.
Audrun and Verey are walking towards the river now. Their progress is slow because Verey seems to need to walk very carefully over the tussocky ground. Grasshoppers jump round their feet and he tries vainly to flit them away with a broken stick.
Audrun has Aramon’s shotgun slung over her shoulder.
As they left the house, she took the rubber gloves from her overall pocket and put them on and then she snatched the gun from the rack. Delicately, she inserted two cartridges into the firing chamber, admiring their perfect fit.
‘Herons,’ she said, as she hefted the gun.
‘Herons?’ said Verey.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Devil birds, we call them.’
She didn’t know whether this Englishman understood all of what she was saying, but she thought that this didn’t really matter.
‘There are still fish in the river,’ she went on. ‘Trout and grayling. When I was a child, we used to eat a lot of river fish. But the summers are too dry now. The fish die in shallow water because they don’t get enough oxygen and then the herons come. They’re like vultures. The herons just stand and wait and pounce. They’re taking what’s left of the fish in the Gardon. So they have to be culled.’
‘Culled?’ said Verey.
‘Killed,’ she said.
‘Ah, yes. I see.’
‘Whenever we go as far as the river,’ she said, ‘we always take a gun.’
As she and Verey came out of the mas
into the sunlight, she glanced away to the left, to the path leading to the vine terraces – just in case Aramon had decided to stop work and come back to the house. But there was no sign of him. Recently, toiling over his vines, he’d reminded her of a character in an old fairy tale, trying to spin straw into gold. But now she’d understood the terrible covenant he was trying to make: if Verey bought the mas, her brother wouldn’t need to struggle with the vines, or indeed with anything at all ever again; into his hands would be placed all the gold he could ever wish for: more than his diseased frame would be capable of carrying.
Audrun and Verey go down through the ash grove where the leaves are yellowing and flying in the wind. Verey asks Audrun whether she would mind if – once the mas belonged to him – he planted a fast-growing cypress hedge in front of her bungalow.
A fast-growing cypress hedge.
The kind of thing a man contrives to block out what he can’t bear to look on . . .
Audrun’s hand tightens around the stock of the gun. She says sweetly, ‘I understand about privacy, Monsieur Verey. There’s nothing more precious. I, of all people, understand this.’
The Englishman nods and smiles. Audrun’s noticed in Ruasse that many of the Britanniques seem vulgar and rude, but Verey’s a courteous man. And he wants to make a beautiful garden, he tries to tell her. His sister is going to help him, his adored sister, who’s a professional garden designer. ‘It will be my last project,’ he says, ‘ma dernière . . . chose . . .’
‘Yes?’ she says with interest. ‘Well, it’s good to have something to hope for in the future.’
Down they go, side by side, through the lower pasture, then along the impenetrable, overgrown bank of the river to where, about a hundred yards further east, there’s a narrow pathway made of stones. This pathway to the river, emerging opposite a deep pool, is a secret, Audrun tells Verey. It was laid down long ago by her father, Serge. He made it for his use alone, but sometimes he brought her here . . . He carried the heavy stones, one by one, with his own bare hands and pressed them into the earth.
