Ignorance (3 page)

We climbed two flights and slid into the chilly dormitory. Here we fetched chairs, set them side by side, stood on them to peer out of the window on the left-hand side.

From this height, we could see over the high stone wall that separated the school grounds from the Hermit’s garden. We surveyed a completely enclosed space. Between patches of melted ice the grass gleamed green. Inside his encircling walls he had allowed sycamores to seed wildly in little copses. These untidy saplings he had trimmed and pollarded in extreme fashion, stripping off all the lower branches and shaping the top ones into balls. The sycamores stood in groups: tall, slender ladies with round heads turbaned in brown twigs. Maidens who hovered, uncertain whether or not to walk inside the ogre’s castle.

Bluebeard’s fiancées, I whispered to Marie-Angèle, and felt her flinch against me.

A narrow gravelled path twisted in and out between the young trees, like a white ribbon tying them together. The school playground was all sharp angles; the nuns’ oblong garden marched in straight lines, spotless paths bisecting rows of fruit trees and flowerbeds; but the Hermit’s parterre undulated, all curves. Dark greenery glistening with wet. Clumps of laurels and bay, the narrow trees crowding between the high stone walls, ivy sprawling along the ground. Tumbledown brick sheds leaned together on one side, a few hens scratching about. A flight of steps led up to a terrace. At the far side of this: the back door to his house. No one visible. His shutters on the ground floor were open. Dark panes of glass.

From our high perch we watched the black and white feather twist down out of the grey sky.

Come on, I said: I’ll race you to catch it.

Marie-Angèle hesitated. Supposing someone sees us?

I blew out my cheeks at her. Cowardy-custard. I dare you.

Hands skimming the slippery banister, we sped back down the coils of stairs, we fell down through the great, silent house like two pellets rattling out of a canister. We didn’t stop to change our felt indoor slippers for boots. We unbolted the side door by the kitchen and ran out through the playground into the garden between the leafless rose bushes.

The feather had vanished. We searched for a while along the gravel walks bordering the espaliered apple trees. We hadn’t bothered with gloves or capes. Our noses ran with cold. The chilblains on my hands began to twitch. I distracted myself by noticing other things: the withered rosehips dangling from black twigs, thorny rosaries; the crusts of frost edging the dark earth of the flowerbeds. A few snowdrops stabbing up.

A ladder lay on the ground by a tall beech hedge, bronze barrier severely squared-off along its length. One of the lay sisters had obviously been trimming it. She would catch it if anyone found she hadn’t cleared up her mess. Heaps of withered tawny leaves, like cut hair, dotted the ground at intervals. Sawn pieces of plait.

Rapunzel, I said, pointing.

Pick up the ladder, Marie-Angèle said: I’ll help you.

Between us we carried it to the wall. I went first and Marie-Angèle followed. One rung at a time. Don’t look round.

Marie-Angèle swung her leg over, edged close to me. We sat astride the narrow wall, clinging on with both hands, looking down. On the Mad Hermit’s side a few stones stuck out near enough the top to offer footholds.

From there we can jump, Marie-Angèle said: go on.

I didn’t want to move. I felt giddy.

No, I said: this is enough. I want to go back in.

The dare’s not over yet, she said.

Halfway down, when the footholds stopped, we launched ourselves out into the air, thudded on to the ground, bumping sideways almost on top of each other. Ice-tipped grass against my cheek, the tang of earth, my arms around Marie-Angèle, the sour smell of her hair.

We clambered upright. A changed world. We had crossed over. Now we stood on the other side, the convent and school inaccessible, vanished. Nothing to be done but go forward. Hansel and Gretel, abandoned by their parents, bravely approaching the dark forest.

We entered the copse of sycamores immediately in front of us. The trees pulled us into their company and surrounded us. Captives. Captivated. The sycamore fiancées marched with us along the narrow twisting path. Their heads drooped over us and nodded. Yes, you should go in.

We crept towards the house. We reached the bottom of the flight of steps up to the terrace. We paused, glancing at each other. A creak, a scrape. Our eyes shot up.

The door in the back wall of the house had opened. There he stood. Smiling. He leaned against the doorpost and lifted a hand. Between finger and thumb he twirled a black and white feather.

Welcome, my dears.

Afterwards, I didn’t know what to say. A story they wanted me to tell, only I didn’t feel clear which one. I improvised and put two stories together. Marie-Angèle made me do it. She wanted to. He made us do it. He wanted to.

What happened? they asked me repeatedly: tell us what happened.

I couldn’t tell them everything I saw when the Hermit showed us around his house. Too much of it. Some bits and pieces I carried away with me behind my eyes and remembered afterwards, in silence, once I was back inside the school, with the nuns questioning me. Brightly coloured memories blurred past like flicked-over pages in a picture book. The book opened and the pages stood up and time stopped and the pictures jumped out and came alive. Bluebeard-the-Jew’s big blue eyes, his wild black hair, his indigo workman’s shirt, red and white spotted neckerchief, emerald corduroy trousers. The bright bottles of
sirop
, green and pink and yellow, he brought out of the rose-painted cupboard and lined up on the blue and white checked tablecloth. We could choose:
menthe
or
framboise
or
ananas
. Black slabs of chocolate he fitted between pale lengths of bread before handing them to us with a courteous bow.
Mesdemoiselles
. The honey-tiled corridor, a dark yellow tunnel, silted with dust rolling light and silvery as fur, which ran through the ground floor of the house, connecting back to front. Cream-painted panelled doors, glistening like sheets of mother-of-pearl, opened off it on both sides. The bare, unfurnished
salon
, painted scarlet, stencilled with gold garlands. Oh, Marie-Angèle exclaimed: like a ballroom. She spread out her arms and spun, a grey-clad Cinderella.

The Hermit told us he preferred to sit in the kitchen. This pale green apartment, lined with old wooden
armoires
and
buffets
painted pale pink, pale green, pale blue, its rafters hung with wheels of dried apple threaded on strings, had a tiled floor patterned in small turquoise and cream squares. Above the fireplace he had pinned up three rows of small rodent-like animals, flattened, the grey fur and skin split open and peeled back, the tiny claws splayed out. Marie-Angèle shuddered: mice? Ugh! He said: these are voles. I walked over and stroked them. Soft. He said: don’t be scared. They’re dead. They can’t hurt you. I like drawing them.

Scattered between the
sirop
bottles on the blue and white cloth lay photographs of fat, loose-haired women, in rucked-up pale chemises, lolling in armchairs. Big grins. Black bows in their dark ringlets. Black triangles of hair between their plump legs. Outside, at the foot of the stairs, three nailed-up moles grimaced in a sort of dance, paw to paw. I’ve got lots more things like this. Come upstairs, if you like, and I’ll show you.

The staircase was neater and smaller than the one in the school. It twisted up in a tight oval. Like going inside a snail’s shell. Fragile and brown. You wanted to step delicately in case something smashed. Shallow treads tucking in around the corners, a curved wooden baluster. Men weren’t supposed to have dolls’ houses but he did because he was like a child. Smiling at us, hopping back and forth. The sort of child I’d have liked to make friends with, someone with a cupboard full of treasures who’d show me them and let me pick something out and take it home. He gave Marie-Angèle the black and white feather and that wasn’t fair, I wanted it just as much as she did.

He opened the door to his study on the first floor, full of books and piles of magazines. Next to it, a smaller room containing a shiny black and gold cabinet in which he had arranged the bones of small animals in circles and rows. He let us pull out each shallow drawer in turn, examine the contents, touch them. With our forefingers we caressed the skulls of rats and squirrels, the dry wings of staked-out butterflies and moths, the clean white skeletons of mice, the transparent brown and white tubes of shed snakeskins. Wizened dark pellets he said were owl droppings. Iridescent blue feathers of tits, arranged in fans. Green-gold carapaces of beetles with black claws.

Up another flight to the second floor. He took us into his two bedrooms. One faced north, out into the
place
, and the other looked south, over the garden. One big and one small. One painted black and one white. One served for sleeping in during summer, he explained, and the other he used in winter. The small white room held a wardrobe taking up nearly all the space. Beside the black-draped bed in the big bedroom stood an ebony cot. That’s where children sleep, when they come to stay. I love children. They love playing with me. Sometimes we play hide and seek. Do you two like playing games?

He escorted us back out on to the landing. His eyes burned blue. You can go anywhere you like, hide anywhere you like, but not to the top of the house. That’s my studio, where I work, it’s not a place for children. Understood?

He covered his eyes with his narrow, long-fingered hands. I’ll count up to a hundred. Then I’ll come and find you! Off you go!

Marie-Angèle jerked her head at me. I nodded. Our felt indoor slippers made no noise. So he couldn’t hear us slide past him on the landing, holding our breath, and tiptoe upstairs.

Just a game. We wanted him to find us and we wanted him to play. He found us. In he stormed. Then he played with us.

Afterwards, when I tried to remember, the games came back to me in bits. The last one first. Marie-Angèle saying: my turn. My turn.

She arranged herself on the pink divan under the skylight. Hands clasped behind her head, knees up and apart, face turned, unsmiling, towards him. Her grey pinafore made her look young but her face looked old. A dip in the material between her legs. The feather rested in it. She brought down one hand and twitched her hem higher up, just above the edge of her bloomers. She picked up the feather and flicked it over the strip of white flesh showing between her black stocking-top and her creased-up overall.

Who am I being now? Guess.

Bluebeard’s wife, of course. He frowned, looking at her, and stood still. He was stupid not to know, when Marie-Angèle was such a good actress.

I was wandering about, glancing at them from time to time, leaving them to get on with their new game. I preferred looking at the canvases propped against the walls. Shapes of colour that might be women or might not, which grabbed your insides and whirled them about as though you were cartwheeling. What seemed the same dark-eyed woman in a red frock over and over again. In the bottom right-hand corner of each painting he’d put a thick black squiggle: Jacquotet.

He’d found us easily. Crouching next to Marie-Angèle behind a big propped canvas, in the tent of dark air between its wooden stretcher and the wall, I’d willed him to make haste. End it. Too childish. I wanted to explore his room, see what he’d got. He’d stomped up the stairs, growling an ogre song fee fi fo fum. We heard him through the door. He drummed with his hands on the door and it flew open. We waited patiently. My thighs ached from crouching. Come on, hurry up. As he got closer we jumped up and ran out, squealing. Exaggerating a bit. A show we put on. Bad girls! I forbade you to come in here. What shall I do with you, bad girls? He swayed back and forth in front of the door so that we couldn’t pass him and get out.

A forfeit, he announced. Now, what shall it be?

Was he pretending or wasn’t he? We hovered. Marie-Angèle cocked an eyebrow, sizing him up. She wore a look I recognised: shifty, caught out, wanting to wriggle away from punishment, not sure how, putting on a pout. Not a look that worked with Mother Lucie, who knew her too well, you and your tricks, miss, tell me the truth now. It worked better with the curé, bored with testing us on our catechism, those Sunday afternoon sessions in the cold classroom, the three of us huddled against the lukewarm stove, desperate for a bit of warmth. He’d pat our heads, then his black soutane, thrust his hand through the slit in the side, searching for the bump that meant a bag of sweets, his pocket full of caramels: never mind, you’ll learn the answer for next week, won’t you? Have a caramel, my dears.

Marie-Angèle curtsied to the Hermit. You’ve won. We are your prisoners.

The Hermit beamed, bowed, handed her the feather. Your prize,
mademoiselle
.

The Hermit’s wives, a red chorus, stood around the edges of the studio. They guarded us, making sure we’d not do anything we shouldn’t. Women tried to keep children from getting into trouble. Marie-Angèle’s mother droned don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch you might break something you might get dirty you might make a mess don’t touch. This lot weren’t strong as mothers though. You could punch a hole right through them with your fist. If they came too close you could ward them off with a good clout. They wouldn’t dare touch you after that.