Trespass (15 page)

Anthony nodded. The woman annoyed him. She smelled of nicotine. She drove dangerously. She talked so fast it was just about impossible to understand her.

‘Paysage,’ he said. ‘How is that?’

‘
Paysage?
What d’you mean?’

‘Paysage. The land near the house . . .’

‘Ah, I see. Well, it’s overgrown. Nobody has worked the land for years now. Some of the terrace walls have collapsed. But that’s nothing. You can repair those. You English have a mania for gardens, I know. And you’ve got plenty of space here. So.’

The road unspooled on and on, rising, falling, rising, turning, falling. Anthony began to be tormented by thirst and when he saw a roadside stall advertising Orangina, he asked Madame Besson to stop. They pulled over and Anthony, Veronica and Kitty got out. They stood on the verge, breathing the sweet air. The sun today had a new heat to it. Bees hummed above the yellow gorse. A green meadow below them was shiny with buttercups.

‘Summer,’ said Veronica. ‘It comes early here. You suddenly feel it.’

They walked over to the stall, which called itself
La Bonne Baguette.
When Veronica saw that there was a chiller full of crusty sandwiches on its counter, she said: ‘Let’s get a sandwich each. It’s almost lunchtime.’

Madame Besson got out of the car and lit a cigarette. Anthony offered to buy her something, but she refused, staring pointedly at Veronica’s bulky form. ‘You English,’ said this look. ‘You eat junk. And you don’t seem to have noticed that it’s killing you.’

She paced up and down while the drinks and baguettes were bought.

‘Eat them here,’ she instructed peremptorily. ‘Then I won’t get crumbs in the car.’

So they walked down to the buttercup meadow and sat on the springy grass, eating and drinking, with the eyes of Madame Besson on them.

‘I guess,’ said Anthony, ‘she’s tired of foreigners. We make money for her, but really she wishes we’d all go home.’

He laughed as he said this and looked over to Kitty, as if he expected some chiming reaction from her, but she just turned her head away.

In fact, what was preoccupying Kitty was the sandwich filling that Anthony had chosen: Camembert and tomato. It thrilled her to remember that a friend of Veronica’s, living not far from here, had died from eating unpasteurised cheese.

Now, there it was at last: the Mas Lunel. Golden in the midday sun; the holm oaks behind it just coming into leaf and, above these, the dark shoulders of firs. Daisies gave the unkempt lawn a dusting of white.

What Anthony liked straight away was the feeling the mas had of being completely on its own, on a sheltered plateau, as though the land had sculpted itself around the building. To the south of it were the vine and olive terraces, descending towards the road. Anthony got out of the car and stood very still, trying to catch the mood of the place, to seize this – its marvellous isolation, its wild beauty – before anything came along to compromise it.

An elderly man came out of the house. He walked with a slight limp. He was skinny, in shabby clothes, and with the hectic, high colour of a drinker. A dark red kerchief was tied around his scrawny neck. He shielded his eyes against the sun.

Madame Besson went to him and shook his hand. Anthony heard her reminding him quickly that these were English buyers she’d brought this time, and he saw the man look over to where he stood, with Veronica and Kitty, and gawp at them, wiping a thread of saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand.

Madame Besson made the introductions. ‘Monsieur Lunel. Monsieur Verey. His sister. A friend . . .’ And they all moved to cluster together, to undergo the obligatory handshakes, the good-mannered greetings long ago abandoned in Britain. The dogs, in their wire pound, had begun barking, visibly unsettling Kitty, and Monsieur Lunel hurried to apologise for this. ‘Take no notice of the hounds,’ he said. ‘They’re my hunting dogs. We hunt wild boar up in the hills here. But they’ll be going away with me. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to sell them with the house!’

Lunel laughed at his own little joke and was quickly punished for this as the laughter turned into a loose cough that boiled up from his chest, so that he had to turn away and spit into a rag. Anthony thought: He’s selling because he’s dying. He wants to cash in before the darkness comes.

When he recovered from the cough, Lunel said he’d go and make coffee. Or tea. Would the
Britanniques
like tea? He had some tea. Lipton’s Tea. He said it was probably better if he made the tea and Madame Besson showed them round the house, because he wouldn’t know how to describe things. He’d lived here all his life. When you’ve lived in a place all your life, he said, you don’t know how it appears to strangers. You don’t know what might worry them or what might please them . . .

They agreed to the tea, then set off, following Madame Besson, and Anthony saw Lunel go down to the dogs and throw them some scraps out of his pocket, to calm them.

‘Cévenol houses are dark,’ Madame Besson said, as they walked into the large space that contained the kitchen range and a warped and beaten refectory table, ‘because the window space is kept to a minimum. This way, the houses stay cool in summer and retain the heat from the fires in winter. You notice how thick the walls are?’

The room smelled of the fire and of cooking grease and onions.

The stone floor was worn down in places by the repetitive traffic of feet in heavy shoes. A vast oak dresser, (‘French, circa 1835 . . .’) Anthony guessed, (‘. . . overscroll pilasters showing wear and chipping’), was crammed with meat platters, plates, jugs, bowls and blackened brass lamps. In the far corner of the room was a day-bed, covered with a tartan rug and piled up with faded farm machinery catalogues. By this, on the floor, was an old bakelite telephone. A tap dripped in the stone sink. Empty whisky bottles decorated the draining board. On the table were some mouldy apples, a bottle of pastis and a clouded glass.

‘I warned you,’ said Madame Besson. ‘Everything’s a mess. But this room is a very good size. And now look up. You see the fine ceilings?’

Anthony saw wide, smoke-blackened wooden beams holding up a dense cross-hatching of narrower rafters. Between these, the plasterwork was patched and flaking, but Madame Besson was right, the ceiling was exceptional. It reminded Anthony of the roof in the plain little parish church of Netherholt, where Lal was buried. And he thought: This would be the place to start work on this house, this ceiling like a church roof, with its echo of the past. Restore the wood to its original colour. Re-plaster. Then tear the rendering off the walls and return them to stone. Dismantle the present. Get back to how everything had once been, and flood it with bright light.

They were present in every room on the ground floor, these astonishing ceilings, even in the pantry, with its concrete floor and its ancient freezer, looped up to a trailing electric cable. ‘Don’t they,’ Anthony whispered to Veronica, ‘remind you of Netherholt Church?’

Veronica smiled and Anthony saw that it was the kind of indulgent smile she might give to a child, but he didn’t care, because he was feeling excitement now, real excitement. It was almost catching at his breath as he followed Madame Besson up the steep staircase to the first floor.

Here, the ceilings were lower and the rooms felt cramped and surprisingly small, but, reading Anthony’s disappointment with impressive precision, Madame Besson immediately began tapping at one of the walls and quickly said: ‘Partitions. You could take them out. And what I would do is, I would also take out these ceilings, get rid of the attics. You’ve got plenty of rooms without them, including space for new bathrooms. So I’d let the bedroom walls go right up into the roof. You can insulate, of course. Then you would have exquisite spaces with, almost, a Gothic shape.’

Anthony loved Madame Besson now. He forgave her her bad driving, her disdain for Veronica’s fat stomach, her smoking habit. She’d done her job as an agent with intelligence. She’d replaced for him something ordinary with something marvellous. She had, in fact, made the house
one
: a beautiful gem, with its most audacious wonders still waiting to be revealed behind flimsy slabs of plasterboard. He wanted to slap a kiss on her sun-wrinkled face.

He walked to one of the bedroom windows and stared out at the big parcel of land which would belong to him. There was even a sizeable stone barn below the lawn, which could be put to some magnificent use (Pool house? Separate guest suite?), and to the left of this he could glimpse the terraces falling away towards the south. They were overgrown with weeds, but they were planted with vines and olives and what looked like gnarled old fruit trees, sweetly fuzzed with grey lichen. The window was open and Anthony leaned on the sill, hearing nothing now but birdsong. He adored the feeling of being high up. And he thought how, with V’s help, this view might in time become so seductive he’d never ever want to leave it . . .

He was on the very precipice of calling Veronica over to him and whispering to her that he wanted to buy the house, that he’d made up his mind already, that he had a sublime vision of what it could be, when Kitty arrived beside him. She’d said nothing so far, but he’d noticed her ferret eyes go peering into corners, seen how, straight away, the dogs in their pen upset her, sentimentalist that she was. Now she stood by Anthony, peering out.

‘It’s interesting,’ she said. ‘From inside, and even from here, you feel as if the house is on its own.’

‘What d’you mean?’ said Anthony. ‘It
is
on its own.’

‘Well, not quite. There’s the bungalow.’

‘What bungalow?’

Kitty leaned further out. Anthony couldn’t stand the way she cut her hair so short at the back, like a man’s hair, as if enticing you to keep noticing the tough sinews of her neck.

‘Over there,’ she said. ‘You can just see it. There. On the bend in the driveway.’

He looked to where she was pointing. Saw a low, corrugated iron roof, the edge of a façade, painted pink, geraniums in what looked like plastic pots.

‘Didn’t you notice it as we drove in?’ asked Kitty.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

And he hadn’t noticed it. He’d been staring straight ahead, fixated on his first sight of the Mas Lunel. But there it was. Another habitation, another person’s life, with all its mess and clutter, squatting on land he’d been imagining was his.

He cursed silently. He’d believed he’d been looking at a slice of paradise and he’d chosen to forget that there were no paradises left in the world. All the still-beautiful places were blighted by their nearness to some other thing you didn’t wish to see or hear or have to think about. And here was that blight again, like the face of the old crone in the Aubusson tapestry, mocking the blithe aristocrats at the very moment when delicious food and wine were being brought to them.

He felt choked, furious with himself. Why hadn’t he, who was normally so vigilant about the details of his surroundings, taken in the damn bungalow? He kept staring at it now, as though willing it not to be there. Of course, he thought wearily, it had to be Kitty, it
had
to be her who drew his attention to it, who came and took away his excitement, his incipient joy.

The only question that remained was, did the fact of the bungalow ruin the whole place for him, or might some compromise with it be reached? He knew he’d have to go outside and look at it face to face to be able to answer this question, but he shrank from doing this. He was afraid that its ugliness would send him plunging back into depression.

Anthony called Madame Besson over to him.

‘Ah yes,’ she said, ‘that little house belongs to Monsieur Lunel’s sister. But most of her land is on the other side of the road. She just has a bit of grass and a small vegetable garden there. You could easily screen her off. Plant some fast-growing cypresses. Then you wouldn’t know anything was there.’

Oh yes, thought Anthony, this was agent-talk of the kind they loved to perfect, but he was Anthony Verey, and he
would
know. Even if he couldn’t see it, he would feel it: the hag in the forest, another human existence, with all its distress and noise, all its grinding ordinariness, when what he yearned for was perfect, unpolluted solitude – a kingdom of his own, where he could grow old in style.

Anthony turned to Madame Besson. He was too agitated to try to speak French. ‘I love the house,’ he said in English. ‘The high ceilings, the space. The position, even. But I think the bungalow ruins it. I think, for me, the bungalow makes it impossible.’

Out of politeness, they had to drink the tea Monsieur Lunel had prepared.

He sat them down at the kitchen table, cleared of the apples and the pastis. He passed round a plate of stale biscuits.

‘So,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you down to the vines when you’ve drunk your tea. They’ve got a bit overgrown. I’m on my own here. I’ve got no son to help me or take over from me, which is why I’m selling up. But it’s good land, worked for generations . . .’

Anthony, sipping disdainfully at the tepid brew, said to Madame Besson: ‘Please can you ask him how much of the land belongs to his sister.’

‘I already informed you,’ said Madame Besson. ‘Most of the sister’s land is on the other side of the road.’

‘Nevertheless, ask him please,’ snapped Anthony.

When Madame Besson put the question to Lunel, Anthony saw sudden anxiety darken the man’s face. He didn’t reply immediately, but then leaned over and whispered to the agent: ‘Tell them my sister’s of no account. She’ll be gone. That house will be gone. It never should have been built where it is.’

Madame Besson pursed her lips. She shifted in her chair and began patting her hair as she turned to Anthony and said: ‘There is . . . a . . .
suggestion
that Monsieur Lunel’s sister may also be leaving. In which case, I suppose that plot with the small house would become available to buy. But I am not certain about this.’