Consolation (46 page)

‘The day we were due to leave, we were all rather upset and we promised we’d come back to see him during the holidays at All Saint’s. “Well, you’ll have to see me in town then, ’cause I won’t be here on the farm no more.” No? And why not? He was too old, he didn’t want to go through another winter there on his own. He’d been very sick the year before, and he’d decided to go and live at his sister’s place, now that she’d just been widowed. He was going to rent the house out to some young people and he’d only keep the vegetable garden.

‘“And the animals?” asked the kids, anxious. Bah . . . he’d take the hens and Filou, but as for the others, well . . .

‘In that little “well” there was an echo of the abattoir.

‘Right. Well, we’d go to see him in town, then. We took one last long tour before leaving, and I wasn’t able to take all the crates he’d so kindly filled for me: the car was too small.’

She got up, lifted the left-hand lid, and filled up a kettle.

‘After that the flat seemed really tiny . . . And the pavements . . . And the square . . . And the traffic wardens . . . And the sky . . . And the trees on the Boulevard Raspail . . . And even the Jardin du
Luxembourg
– I didn’t want to go there any more, the lightning swift donkey rides had become far too much of a luxury . . .

‘Every evening I thought to myself that I’d fill up some boxes and rearrange the flat, and every morning I’d put off the ordeal until the following day. Through a former colleague, the American Chestnut Foundation offered me the job of translating a huge dissertation on chestnut tree diseases. I signed Hattie up at the daycare centre – there, too, I’ll spare you all the administrative hassles, so wretchedly humiliating . . . And while the older children were at school, I struggled with the
Phytophthora cambivora
and other
Endothia parasitica
.

‘I hated the work, spent my time staring at the grey sky through the window, and wondered if there were a stove with holes in it for grilling chestnuts in René’s kitchen . . .

‘And then a day came that was darker than all the others . . . Hattie was ill all the time, blowing her nose and coughing and choking at night in her phlegm. It was hell to get an appointment at the doctor’s and the waiting time for a physio to sort her chest was driving me mad. Sam was on the verge of reading on his own already and was bored to death in his first year in primary school, and Alice’s teacher, the same one she’d had the year before, was still requiring the signature of both parents on the little notes she would send home. I couldn’t really reproach her for it but if I were the one who’d chosen such a profession, I’d’ve been a bit more attentive towards this little girl who was already so much better at drawing than all the others . . .

‘What else happened that day? The concierge had got on my case about the pushchair, that it was cluttering up the entrance; I had just got a letter from the building manager with an estimate for all the work to be done on the lift – it was exorbitant and totally unexpected; the boiler was not working; my computer had just crashed and fourteen pages of chestnut trees had disappeared into thin air . . . and, the icing on the cake, when I did finally manage to get an appointment at the physio’s, I found the car had been towed away . . . Anyone else, with a bit more sense, would have simply called a cab, but I burst into tears.

‘I was crying so noisily that the children didn’t even dare tell me that they were hungry.

‘Finally Samuel fixed a bowl of cereal for everyone and . . . the milk was off, it had turned.

‘“Don’t cry over it,” he said, distressed, “we can eat it with yoghurt, you know.”

‘How sweet they were, when I think of it . . .

‘We lay down in our bivouac. I didn’t have the heart to read any stories and we made one up in the dark instead. As was often the case, our daydreams took us back to Les Vesperies . . . How big would the kittens be now? Had René taken them with him? And the little donkey? Were other children bringing him apples after school?

‘“Wait here,” I said.

‘It must have been nine o’clock in the evening, I went to make a phone call and when I came back I stepped on Sammy’s tummy to make him shout. I got back under my duvet with the three of them and said these words very slowly: “If you’d like to, we’ll go and live there forever . . .”

‘Long silence and then he whispered, “But . . . can we take our toys?”

‘We talked a while longer and when they had finally fallen asleep I got back up and started to fill up the cardboard boxes.’

The kettle was whistling.

Kate put a tray down by the fire. The scent of lime flowers.

‘The only thing René had said on the telephone was that the house hadn’t been rented yet. The young people who were supposed to move in thought it was too isolated. Perhaps that should have started me thinking – the fact that locals with young children had decided against living there . . . But I was too excited when I heard what he had to say . . . That winter, much later, I would often think back on that moment. There were some nights when it was so cold . . . But anyway, by then we’d got used to camping and we all settled in the living room around the fireplace. Physically, our first years here were the most exhausting in my life but I felt . . . invulnerable . . .

‘Then came Big Dog, and then the donkey to thank this little lad who had helped me carry logs every night, and then the cats had more cats, and by then it had become the merry shambles you see today . . . Would you like some honey?’

‘No, thanks. But . . . you’ve lived here alone all these years?’

‘Ah!’ smiled Kate, hiding behind her mug. ‘My love life. I wasn’t sure whether I ought to go into that chapter, to be honest . . .’

‘Of course you’re going to talk about it,’ answered Charles, stirring the embers.

‘Oh really? And why is that?’

‘I need it in order to finish my inventory.’

‘I don’t know if it’s worth it . . .’

‘Well, try.’

‘And what about yours?’

Silence.

‘Right. I see that
yet again
I’m the one who has to pack the cardboard boxes! Here goes but it’s nothing to be proud of, you know . . .’

She moved closer to the fire, and Charles turned an invisible page.

Her profile, now . . .

‘Hard as they were, those first months flew by. I had so much to do . . . I learned how to fill cracks, and coat surfaces, paint, chop wood, put a drop of bleach in the hens’ water so that they wouldn’t get sick, sand the shutters, kill rats, wage war against draughts, buy the cuts of meat that were reduced and divide them up before freezing them, and do a ton of things I would never have thought myself capable of and, all the time, there’d be a very curious little girl under my feet . . .

‘In those days I went to bed at the same time as the children. After eight in the evening I could have had a sign saying “out of order”. It was the best thing that could have happened to me, actually . . . I never regretted my decision. Nowadays it’s more complicated because of school and in future it will be even worse, but nine years ago, believe me, this Robinson Crusoe lifestyle saved us all. And then the good weather returned . . . The house was almost comfortable and I began to look in the mirror again to brush my hair. It’s daft but it was something I hadn’t done in almost a year . . .

‘One morning I put on a dress again, and the next day I fell in love.’

She was laughing.

‘Obviously at the time the whole business seemed like the most romantic thing imaginable. The unexpected arrow of some Cupid who had got lost in the fields and all that foolishness, but nowadays, with hindsight, and given the way things turned out . . . Well anyway, I’ve sacked the cherub now.

‘It was springtime and
I wanted
to fall in love. I wanted a man to take me in his arms. I was fed up with being this Superwoman who took forever to take off her boots and had had three children in less than nine months. I wanted someone to kiss me and tell me my skin was soft. Even if it wasn’t true for a second . . .

‘So I put on this dress to go with Samuel’s class to visit I can’t remember what with the other teacher’s pupils and . . . I sat next to that teacher during the return trip.’

Charles gave up on his sketches. Her face was too changeable. Ten minutes ago she was ageless but when she smiled like that, she was in the back of the bus again, and not quite fifteen years old.

‘The next day I found an excuse to make him come here, and I raped him.’

She turned towards Charles: ‘Um . . . he was consenting, actually! Consenting, kind, a bit younger than me, single, a local man, very good at handiwork, very good with kids, very good on birds, trees, stars, and hikes . . . In short, the ideal man. Wrap him up quick so I can take him home and freeze him!

‘No . . . I shouldn’t be so cynical. I was in love. I was dying of love and I loved him
well
. Life had become so much simpler. He moved in. René, who’d known him as a wee lad, gave me his blessing, and Big Dog didn’t eat him, and he took everything on without making a fuss. It was a gorgeous summer and for her second birthday Hattie had a real cake. And it was a fine autumn as well . . . He taught us how to love Nature, how to look at it and understand it, he got us a subscription to
La Hulotte
– it’s a brillant nature magazine – introduced me to loads of adorable people whom I’d never have known without him . . . He reminded me that I wasn’t yet thirty and that I loved to have fun, and that I liked to have my lie-in . . .

‘I’d gone completely daft. Over and over I said, “I’ve found my master! I’ve found my master!”

‘The following spring, I decided I wanted a child. It was probably a bit early, but it meant a lot to me. I must have reckoned that it would be a way to strengthen all the ties – to him, to Ellen, to the house . . . I wanted a child of my own to be sure I would never abandon the other three . . . I don’t know if you see what I mean?’

No. Charles was too jealous to try to unravel all that.

I loved him
well
.

The ‘well’ had bitten him just beneath the crocodile.

He did not even know what it meant . . .

And, besides, it went without saying that a country bumpkin teacher would be good with kids and be able to find the Great Bear.

‘Sure, I understand,’ he murmured gravely.

‘It wasn’t working. Perhaps another woman would have had more patience than I did, but at the end of a year, I went into the big city to undergo a whole series of tests. I’d taken on three kids at once without batting an eyelid – so I ought to be entitled to my own child, no?

‘I was so obsessed with my belly that I kind of fucked up on the rest . . .

‘He wasn’t sleeping at home every night? He needed peace and quiet to mark his dictations. He no longer wandered around the back roads with us on Sundays looking for boot sales? Well, he must have been fed up with all our junk. He no longer made love quite so tenderly? But that was my fault, too! All that calculating is a real turn-off . . . He found that the children were always in the way? Well, there were three of them . . . And badly behaved? Indeed . . . I thought that Life owed them that much . . . that in their childhood at least they ought to be able to tell the rest of the world where to get off . . . I spoke to them in English too often? Well, yes . . . when I’m tired, I speak the language that comes to me most easily . . .

‘For this reason and that one and this one and that one . . . and he had asked for a new posting for the next school year.

‘Ah. There was nothing I could say.

‘I really hadn’t seen it coming. I thought he was just like me, that the words he’d said and the commitments he’d made even without the judge and his clerk, meant something. Despite the forecast of rough winters, and a rather cumbersome dowry . . .

‘They gave him a new posting and I turned into what I was when I told you about my last cigarette . . .

‘An abandoned guardian . . .

‘I was really miserable, when I think back on it,’ she smiled, sheepishly. ‘But what the hell was I doing here, anyway? Why on
earth
had I come to balls up my life in a shithole of a house like this, anyway? Acting like I was Karen Blixen among the dunghills . . . Bringing in the wood every night and going to do my shopping farther and farther away so that no one would comment on the number of bottles I placed discreetly between the packets of biscuits and the tins of cat food . . .

‘And to add to the entire world collapsing around me there was something even more pernicious: loss of self-esteem. Right, our affair had come to an abrupt end but . . . that happens to a lot of people. The trouble was the three years’ difference in our ages. I didn’t say to myself, he left me because he no longer loves me; I said, he left me because I’m too old.

‘Too old to be loved. Too ugly, too much baggage. Too kind, too blind, too far behind.

‘Hardly very glamorous, either, with my chainsaw and my chapped lips and red hands and my cooker that weighs six hundred kilos . . .

‘No. Hardly very glamorous.

‘I didn’t hold it against him for leaving; I understood.

‘I would have done exactly the same thing in his shoes.’

She poured another cup and blew on the lukewarm water for a long time.

‘The only good thing to come out of the whole business,’ she scoffed, ‘is that we still have our subscription to
La Hulotte
! Do you know him, the bloke who puts it together? Pierre Déom?’

Charles shook his head.

‘He’s brilliant. An absolute genius. I doubt whether he’d want to go there, but he deserves his plot of earth at the Panthéon one day, that man . . . But anyway. I was no longer really in the mood to try to tell a hazelnut nibbled by a squirrel from a hazelnut nibbled by a vole . . . Although . . . I must have been interested in all of that or we wouldn’t be here this evening . . .

‘The squirrel breaks the nut open into two halves, whereas the vole makes a neat little hole. For further details, see the mantelpiece . . .

‘I was more of a vole’s nut in all this business. I was still in one piece, but completely emptied out inside. Uterus, heart, future, confidence, courage, cupboards . . . Everything was empty. I was smoking and drinking deeper and deeper into the night and, since
Alice
had learned how to read, I could no longer die prematurely, so I suffered from some sort of depression instead . . .