Marguerite Page 2

  ‘“I want nothing now I have you,” said the old man.’

  ‘Tired,’ Jérôme said loudly, with a croak as if he had not spoken for days. ‘Enough.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Marguerite let the pages fall back, with her finger as a marker. He closed his eyes tight instead of answering. She had been enjoying reading; she hadn’t used her voice so much for almost a month. ‘Can I get you anything? Are you feeling comfortable?’ His response, as so often, was simply to screw his eyes tighter shut.

  She rose and took the book he’d chosen from her selection to the table: a 1970s edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, its faded jacket showing a large full moon, shivering on the dark surface of water. She folded the corner of their page to mark it and felt a twinge of guilt for doing so; she thought of the librarian and his long list of rules, from which the prohibition of dog-earing a page had surely only been omitted on account of its sheer obviousness. ‘Flagrant disregard for the item’s longevity . . .’ she imagined him saying, and smiled to herself.

  Turning to leave the room, she saw that the old man was watching her. He was lying flat on his back, a rigid straight line down the bed, his eyes swivelled to stare at her.

  ‘Don’t you laugh at me,’ he barked.

  ‘Sir, I—’

  ‘I will not tolerate it.’

  ‘But I didn’t—’

  ‘Just get out, now!’ He shut his eyes. ‘I can send you away the minute I don’t want you. Just one phone call and you’re out of here, scuttling back to whichever deplorable little hole you came from.’

  She felt her cheeks colour; she took a deep breath.

  Gradually, she became aware of a whirring in the room: a moth, throwing its body again and again at the ceiling lamp.

  The old man was lying stiff and straight in the bed, his fists and eyes and everything clenched.

  She watched him for a moment but he didn’t speak again and she left the room, walked straight out of the kitchen into the garden, into the blanket darkness. She breathed in deeply, felt the thud of her heartbeat gradually slow. There was a lightness in the air in spite of the cold; she could believe for the first time that spring was here.

  She had never had a garden. Her childhood had been spent in an apartment on the fourth floor in the 16th arrondissement – large, with high ceilings and rich, heavy curtains. There was a balcony that they had been allowed to step out onto only under supervision from her mother or the au pair; it looked down over a wide, dappled avenue lined with trees. There was always someone walking a dog – she and her sister would think up names for the dogs they came to recognise.

  She didn’t like to think of that. The garden here was hers and she wanted to make it grow. She would grow herbs, plant flowers. She would sit in the shade in the narrow olive groves and look over at her herb garden and pluck rosemary to put in little pots around the house. It would be her project.

  And then when it was dark – this heavy, enveloping blackness – it would comfort her to think of her plants outside. They could line the house like ramparts.

  * * *

  • • •

  The vegetables here were huge and beautiful. She had discovered the village market that morning, by chance, and bought red, yellow, brown and green tomatoes, their skins plump. The stall owner had said the green were the tastiest. She ate one as soon as she got home, bent over the sink. Its skin burst under her teeth.

  There was a head of curly-leafed lettuce. It was so large, and had splayed open so generously, that she could have worn it on her own head like a bonnet. She washed it slowly, watched with pleasure the water turn black with mud. On a hook she hung a straw plait of garlic, its heads indecently bulbous. They shed veined paper over the kitchen surface.

  She would make poule au pot for Jérôme’s dinner. Infirmity had made his appetite weak, but his eating habits carried the shadow of a once-greedy man: in spite of himself, his eyes widened when she brought in a plate of something he liked. He would gobble fast, with relish. She thought of him as she stood there surrounded by her vegetables, carefully unsheathing spring onions and slicing celery and scattering peppercorns. The chicken still held many of its feathers, which she plucked one by one, with care, thinking of Jérôme’s delicate white flesh.

  She had started to doze, sitting in her chair in the kitchen as the stock bubbled, when the sound of a car in the driveway startled her. A door slammed, footsteps ground on gravel. No one visited the house; without thinking, she rushed to lock the door.

  But it was Suki’s face that appeared at the window. She was dressed in a deep, violent magenta, out of place against the silver-greys and greens outside.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ she said, smiling as Marguerite let her in. ‘I’ve caught you off guard.’ She studied Marguerite’s face for a moment. ‘You’ve been asleep.’

  ‘No, just – thinking,’ she said, rubbing her face.

  ‘Something smells nice.’ Suki walked past her into the kitchen, approached the cooker and peered into the casserole. ‘Poule au Pot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lovely.’ She turned and leant back against the kitchen worktop, smiling, as if she had been there hundreds of times. Marguerite didn’t know what to say. She wanted her quiet kitchen back.

  ‘Can I get you something – a glass of water?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t trouble yourself. Actually, I can’t stay long.’ She took a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, and turned to light one on the gas hob. ‘I was just passing, and thought I’d come to say hello and see how you’re getting on.’

  No one passed by the house.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She thought of the cigarette smoke floating through into Jérôme’s room.

  Suki cocked her head to one side. Her expression wasn’t quite friendly, as if it held a challenge.

  ‘Yes? Well, anyway, I thought I’d say hello. And I thought, you’re an outsider, I’m an outsider.’ She gesticulated vaguely.

  ‘Are you new to the village?’

  ‘Not any more, though I often think I may as well be. I’ve been here – oh, a long time now. But I’m not from around here originally. Guess where I’m from?’

  Marguerite sat down. She didn’t want conversation, didn’t want Jérôme to be woken by the noise; she wanted to go up to her room and crawl into bed and go back to sleep. And she hated guessing games, the ennui she felt when she contemplated their boundlessness.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Guess!’

  ‘Pakistan?’

  ‘Well, no – Iran. But the right continent, at least. You must be the only person who hasn’t guessed Algerian or Tunisian. Everyone just presumes I’m maghrébine. Maghrébine! Shit . . .’ She rolled her eyes, exhaling a long plume of smoke. ‘Oh, can I smoke in here?’

  But she was stubbing it out already, in the sink.

  ‘I have to go, I was just dropping by. But you must visit me. I live right next to the doctor’s surgery.’

  ‘I can’t really leave Jérôme.’

  ‘What, you never go into the village? Not even to the library?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Next time, drop by for a coffee. Not before noon, I never wake up before noon.’ She walked to the door. ‘Goodbye . . . ?’

  ‘Marguerite.’

  ‘That’s right. Goodbye, Marguerite.’

  * * *

  • • •

  She expected to find him asleep when she went into his room to get the book. It was the hour after his lunch; after eating, he almost always fell asleep immediately, as suddenly as a child pretending, his mouth mordantly slack. But today he was lying with the sheets right up to his chin and his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. She thought that his look was one of deep fear.

  ‘Don’t you know how to knock?’ he snapped.

  ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I—’
br />   ‘You what?’

  ‘I thought you’d be asleep.’

  ‘I see. And so you just wanted to skulk in here and watch me sleeping?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What did you want then?’

  ‘I wanted to take the book for a few hours.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Read it.’

  ‘Without me?’

  ‘We’d still go back to where we left off.’

  ‘But then you’d be reading those passages twice?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Do you think you’re humouring me? Is that what you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She braced herself for his next question but he looked suddenly weary.

  ‘I’m having some pain.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘I can’t give you more Tramadol.’

  ‘Dolophine.’

  ‘I can’t give you that either.’ He groaned. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He opened one eye, looked at her warily and closed it again. There was silence, and then: ‘All right.’

  She approached the bed, pulled the sheet down gently from his chin to his stomach and rubbed her hands together to warm them. Then she pressed his shoulders down, firmly. She didn’t rub his skin, she pressed it: his shoulders, his slipped pectorals, the large crown of his thorax. She hummed quietly as she worked.

  ‘Your hands are cold,’ he mumbled, his eyes still closed. And then, ‘You’re always humming.’

  ‘Does it annoy you?’

  He didn’t answer for a while. She moved her hands to his head, pushed and pressed each side slowly and heavily.

  And then, so quietly she could barely hear it, he said: ‘No. Not really.’

  She lifted his thin left arm, wrapped it in the blood-pressure cuff.

  ‘And?’ he asked when it released.

  ‘Fine today. In fact, a little lower than usual. Perhaps you’re relaxed from the massage.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said. And then, meticulously casual, he said: ‘You’re Parisian, of course.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you leave Paris?’

  She sighed as she removed the cuff, the tear of the Velcro the only other sound in the room. ‘Why not? It’s very beautiful here.’

  ‘But boring. Very boring. Why would you leave Paris to come here? At your age? On your own?’

  ‘Because I wanted to.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why not? This is my job. I came here to work. The position came up, so I applied.’

  ‘But you didn’t have to work here.’

  ‘No. I can work where I like.’ ‘So why did you choose here?’

  ‘Why not here?’

  ‘Why not Paris?’

  ‘Because I did,’ she snapped. The words came out too loud and too fast. His eyes widened, his shoulders gathered. He watched her intently and she pretended not to notice his gaze, busying herself by going through the drug chart she’d left at the end of the bed. She made a few notes, put the pen in her pocket, made to leave the room.

  ‘I won’t ask again,’ he said, as she reached the doorway.

  She turned around. ‘You can ask me whatever you want.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure about that.’ He closed his eyes, smiling just a little as she turned back around to leave. ‘Not sure at all about that.’

  2

  Henri liked this time of the day the most, when his manual work was largely done and he could afford to slow down a little, to sit on the ground with his back against a fence or wall, feel the scratch of dried grass through his trousers. He could close his eyes and enjoy the thinning of the day’s warmth. His hairline was encrusted with sweat; he could rub it, and bits of dirt, and desiccated grass, and what he imagined to be his own refined body salt would fly as if startled into the still twilight air.

  The dirt, all of the dirt, was a source of pleasure to him. Meticulous and clean by instinct, he nonetheless enjoyed the day’s long accumulation of filth before he headed back to the house on weary legs to take his bath. He dragged the pre-bath moment out as long as possible to build up its eventual release; he would stop at the basin in the kitchen and drink almost an entire beer, usually his only beer of the day, in virtually one go.

  Then he climbed slowly into the bathtub that was really too small for his long limbs and he crouched there, only then turning on the taps. He watched the water reach the top of his foot, water that was already swirling brown with dried mud. It reached his ankles, it lifted his large, slack penis. When it reached the base of his back, he started to get to work; he scratched out the dirt embedded behind his nails, scrubbed his long back and torso until they were pink. Then he emptied the bath, rinsed it out, and started again – as many times as it took for the water to be quite clear, long past when it ran hot.

  This evening’s bath was particularly welcome; today had been hot work. Spring was well underway, the sun swiftly gathering intensity. Henri imagined vaguely the great star’s rotation, its heat slowly spreading over Earth, from the Sahara to the Maghreb, over the sea, soaking through the Mediterranean mile by fish-filled mile, reaching the French coast and moving, an inverted shadow, towards the resilient, winter-bitten land around his farm. He had always envisaged it this way, as long as he could remember.

  But the bath held a further charm today: the metallic gurgling of the tap, the clunks and creaks the running water set going through the walls of the house, the lightly hissing hum of the rising water level all worked together to drown out the women’s voices downstairs. This was one of each week’s two or three unannounced visits from Laure, the village boulangère and Brigitte’s confidante. Returning from the fields this evening, he had caught the small woman’s nasal voice just in time to avoid entering the house through the kitchen. That meant no long draught of water, no beer, but it was worth it.

  ‘Henri’s bath routine,’ he imagined Brigitte saying to Laure in the kitchen below, as she so often did among their friends; ‘Henri’s e-lab-o-rate bath routine.’ She tended to give special emphasis to words over three syllables long. ‘There are families without water in India and Africa and here is our Henri, using enough water each day to fill an aquarium!’

  But she also took pride, he knew, in his appearance. When they married, both straight out of school, no one could believe that Handsome Henri – the village’s nomenclature, of course, not his own – had chosen Brigitte Arnoult. Plain Brigitte, big Brigitte, dumb Brigitte. Because that was the other thing: Henri was first in the class, always had been. ‘A way with words and a head for numbers,’ his mother had always said, a regular refrain in the Brochon household as he grew up.

  Their courtship and engagement had unfolded quickly. As he leant back in the bath he closed his eyes, imagined his younger self, tall and handsome with his hair combed tidily back, knocking on the Arnoults’ door every evening. Every day was the same: he would bow to enter the house through its diminutive doorframe and greet Brigitte’s parents, sit down and find his bride-to-be sitting nervously in the gloom. He couldn’t imagine now what it was they had found to talk about, sitting each evening in her parents’ warm salon, drinking milk from her father’s cows. Her parents were mistrustful; it was as if he were playing some sly trick.

  His own mother had been the first to voice in his presence the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Henri, for God’s sake, why Brigitte?’ He hadn’t felt cross, or slighted; he had understood her consternation. It’s not as if he somehow saw beauty in Brigitte’s scant charms – how could he? When he spoke to the girl her face and neck came out in livid purplish patches, she could not meet his eye. He had not failed to notice the great width of her feet, nor the fair but not insubstantial whis
kers around the corners of her lips. But there were things about Brigitte that appealed to him that he couldn’t explain to his mother, who was so tidily and precisely her opposite.

  At eighteen, he chose Brigitte because he liked the silence and reverence she reserved for him, she who was otherwise the loudest and most domineering of girls. He liked her simple way of speaking, her literal reading of everything, her lack of coquetry.

  With Brigitte he had sensed refuge, a life left unscrutinised and undisclosed. And hearing her flat, loud voice now rise and fall below the din of the pipes and the water, he had to acknowledge that he had that. In spite of the small-minded prurience with which she had grown to view the rest of the world, despite her endlessly repetitive chiding, he still lived in a home devoid of judgment or enquiry.

  He heard one of Laure’s whinnying laughs and turned the tap on more fully to drown it out. He leant back against the tub, his legs bent at their extreme right angle in the bath that was too small. He closed his eyes again and rubbed his hands over them, down his cheeks to his mouth; he could taste his salt. Letting his mind drift away from Brigitte, away from Laure, he ran his hands slowly down his body.

  * * *

  • • •

  Brigitte cracked an egg into a bowl and tilted it to show Laure. ‘Do you see the colour of that yolk?’

  ‘There’s nothing like your eggs, I always say that.’

  ‘That is the yellowest yolk you can find.’

  ‘You’ve considered selling your eggs properly, haven’t you? You’d put the Bernards right out of pocket.’

  ‘We’ve got enough on our plate with the dairy and the sheep, we just don’t have the scale. Not that you’re wrong, of course. You know I’m not one to brag, Laure, but they really do make the very best omelettes. You can tell from an omelette alone how fresh your eggs are.’ She continued to crack a further three. ‘The secret to a really excellent quiche lorraine is whisking the eggs as long as you can. Whisk them to hell and gone.’

  Laure nodded and Brigitte started to whisk with a force she liked to think was almost alarming. ‘So Jérôme’s latest girl was in the shop again today,’ Laure said, ‘buying Lanvier’s usuals. A baguette and a loaf aux céréales to help things get going downstairs . . .’ She poked her stomach.