Trespass (23 page)

Jeanne exchanged a glance with Marianne. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

‘It’d be sad to sell it to foreigners, anyway,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it? They say foreigners are taking over all the nice old stone places. I read about it in
Ruasse Libre.
But the mayor has said it has to end.’

‘That’s right,’ said Audrun. ‘The mayor’s right. Because people from outside don’t understand how to care for the land. Everybody thinks these days that it’s just houses that matter, but it’s not: it’s the land.’

There was silence in the room for a moment.

Audrun turned and turned the parsley leaf in her hand and she thought of the drum of her washing machine, still turning.

‘If Aramon sells the mas,’ said Jeanne Viala, ‘where’s he going to go?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Audrun. ‘You tell me. Where on earth?’

Kitty Meadows lay in a hotel room and watched the green neon light of an all-night
pharmacie
winking on and off on the opposite side of the drab street.

She hadn’t wanted to spend much money on a hotel and this one, called Le Mistral, was the cheapest she could find, a two-star establishment where the walls were thin and Kitty’s bed was narrow and hard. The keening of the hotel elevator kept jolting her awake the moment she closed her eyes. Up and down, up and down it went, carrying people yearning for love or for rest – for the sweet rest that love can give.

At least I’m alone, thought Kitty. Although she was fond of her friends, André and Gilles, she hadn’t been able to bear the idea of their pity, their sad smiles concealing smug judgements: ‘Sorry, Kitty chérie, but I’m afraid we just
knew
that a gallery like that, with that kind of reputation, was never going to take your work . . .’

Better to be here, in an impersonal hotel room with an annihilating quantity of drink inside her, than to be with them on this night of humiliation. And although Kitty might have liked to be comforted by Veronica, the idea of returning to Les Glaniques and Anthony Verey’s undisguised delight in her disappointment was impossible.

In fact, one thing which Kitty couldn’t even bear to think about was how that eventual return was to be faced. Since Anthony’s arrival, it was as if she’d been prevented from taking any comfort at all from the home she shared with her lover. She’d found refuge in her studio – away from both Veronica and her brother. She was happiest there, alone with her work and her dreams. But now she had to face the agony, not only of returning to live under Anthony’s disdainful gaze, but also with something more terrible: coming face to face with the fact that the work she loved doing so much and tried so hard to do well was, when judged by the highest standards, no good.

All right, she’d managed to sell in small galleries and shops, but now a serious establishment had looked at the watercolours and pounced, like a heartless tiger:
I’m sorry, Madame Meadows . . . the Internet photographs of your work did look quite interesting to us, but now that we see the actual pictures . . . your sense of colour is very nice, but there are some shortcomings of technique. So
voilà,
I just don’t think we’d be able to make a sale here
 . . .

Kitty lay and shielded her eyes against the maddening
pharmacie
light and told herself that, at least, she’d be able to continue her work for
Gardening Without Rain –
both the watercolours and the photographs. And perhaps, when the book was published, somebody somewhere would think that her illustrations had some merit.

But how ardently – how desperately – she’d longed to be taken on by a reputable gallery! How often had she imagined the brochure that gallery would produce:
R
ECENT
W
ATERCOLOURS
by Kitty Meadows.
And then the fabulous night of the
vernissage
 . . . the red ‘sold’ stickers accumulating . . . the smile of pride on Veronica’s face . . . the beautiful money in the bank . . .

Kitty’s mobile rang: Veronica’s name on the display. Kitty looked at her watch and saw that the time was almost one o’clock.

‘Veronica?’ said Kitty quietly.

‘Sorry it’s so late. Were you asleep?’

‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘No chance.’

‘OK then, well, listen, darling, something’s very wrong.’

Kitty sat up, glad to be distracted, glad to be reminded that there was a world outside her own misery.

‘Tell me . . .’ she said.

She heard Veronica dragging on a cigarette.

‘It’s Anthony,’ she said, coughing as she exhaled. ‘He said he’d be back for dinner. I even asked him this morning what he wanted to eat and he said calves’ liver and I went to the
boucherie
and got it. He said he’d definitely be back. But he hasn’t come home, Kitty, and it’s one in the morning.’

Kitty held the phone close. For a moment, she couldn’t speak, so thrilling did she find these words. Cinematic light flooded her brain.

She saw a winding road high up above La Callune and she saw Anthony’s hired car sliding too fast into a hairpin bend and then spinning round and flying out into the void and falling and breaking on the rocks below . . .

‘Right,’ she forced herself to say gravely. ‘Have you tried his mobile?’

‘Yes. Nothing. Absolutely no sound from it.’

‘No voicemail?’

‘No sound at all. And the agency woman phoned and said Anthony never returned the keys to the house.’

‘Right . . . well, we’ve got to think what might—’

‘I’ve got a terrible feeling about it, Kitty. There are accidents up in the Cévennes all the time. People drive far too fast and Anthony doesn’t know how to manage that kind of corniche. I’ve just been sitting here waiting and waiting and I keep thinking I see headlights, but it’s only cars on the Uzès road. What am I going to do?’

Kitty took a gulp of water and swung her legs off the bed. The
pharmacie
light kept up its relentless welcoming green flash:
here to help you, here to help you, here to help you . . .

‘We’ve got to think clearly,’ said Kitty, but she was all the while conscious of the alcohol in her blood and the movie of the falling car spooling round in her head.

Kitty wondered whether Veronica could detect in her voice or in her breathing the hectic excitement she was feeling.

Kitty breakfasted early and drove home with a headache darkening her vision, like some peculiar clouding of the windscreen glass. She longed for tea and a deep sleep.

She found a police car parked in the driveway at Les Glaniques. Veronica, looking pale and with her hair in a strange tangle, was in the salon, talking to two
agents,
a man and a woman. When they all turned and saw Kitty at the door, Veronica got up and came to her and Kitty put her arms round her and tried to smooth down the tangle of her hair and she heard the
agents
murmuring something to each other in low voices.

‘Any news?’ whispered Kitty.

‘Nothing,’ said Veronica. ‘No report of a car accident. I suppose that’s something.’

‘Any theories?’

‘Well, one. It’s just possible he left the car and went for a walk and got lost or hurt himself and his phone was dropped and broken. They’re going to search with a helicopter,’ said Veronica. ‘It’s on its way now.’

‘Good,’ said Kitty. ‘Good. Easy to get lost up there. But they’ll find him.’

Kitty slipped away to make her tea. Her tiredness was now compounded by the wearisome idea that Anthony had escaped death – just like he’d escaped punishment for his vanity and selfishness across sixty-four years. Probably, he’d be back at Les Glaniques by the end of the day. And Veronica would cling to his scrawny neck and tell him how important he was in her life and how she longed for him to be settled in France, and then the days would go on as before, just as before, only without the salvation of her dream of a gallery.

Kitty had imagined the police would leave her alone. She was just ‘a friend’. Anthony Verey was nothing to her, and what could she – who had been undergoing her mauling by disappointment at Béziers – know about any accident in the Cévennes? But when she looked up from spooning out her tea, the woman
agent
was standing in the kitchen.

‘Just a few questions,’ she said. ‘You speak French?’

‘Yes,’ said Kitty. ‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Tea?
Ah non, merci
.’

It was routine, absolutely routine, said the
agent
, but she just had to verify Kitty’s movements in the last twenty-four hours. Had she been anywhere near the hills above Ruasse?

In my mind, I have, Kitty wanted to say. In my mind, I was there. I killed him. I sent his car flying off the corniche. I saw it break apart hundreds of feet below. I saw his blood on the stones.

‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘I was miles away.’

When the police left, Veronica lit a cigarette and said: ‘Well, I guess all we do is wait, now.’

The heat was rising on the terrace. The geraniums were beginning to look parched.

Kitty thought, I’m waiting too. I’m waiting for you to remember what happened to me in Béziers. I’m waiting for your eyes to fall on me.

She got up and took the cigarette out of Veronica’s hand and stubbed it out, and without saying anything led her to the bedroom. She could feel her beginning to resist, to protest, but she, Kitty was determined; she wanted love. No words would do. In fact, she no longer hoped for any words; she needed only speechless desire. And she felt that all the future – hers and Veronica’s together – would be determined by what followed in the next few moments.

He told himself that perhaps it was the heat, or the exhausting task of the vine clearance, or both of these, but Aramon’s gut was now so devoured by pain that sometimes he had to get down on his knees and then lie curled up on the ground – in the position of a damned foetus – to help the spasm pass. No day went by free of this agony.

His appetite had gone. Sweet things he could bear to suck on – a spoonful of jam, a square of chocolate – and then sit still and wait for the fix of sugar to get into his blood, but even bread, turning to mush in his mouth, made him gag. And the thought of eating meat was now horrifying to him, as if the flesh laid out at the
boucherie
might have been human . . .

‘What can I get you, Aramon?’ Marcel, the butcher at La Callune, would ask him. ‘A bit of veal? Some nice
merguez
?’

Even the smell in Marcel’s shop Aramon found disgusting.

‘Nothing for me, my friend . . .’ Aramon mumbled. ‘Just some bones – for the dogs.’

And then, as he left the shop, he’d hear Marcel talking to other customers about him: ‘Lunel’s not himself,
pardi
. Is he?’

He sat at his table, sipping
sirop de menthe
and smoking. He wondered whether a cancer was developing in his stomach. He even wondered whether he’d been poisoned. Because this could happen in the modern world. Toxic microbes could enter the food chain or the water supply. You could die slowly, a bit more each day, and never know why.

Other symptoms began to torment him. Sudden dizziness. Everything clawing itself towards darkness. One minute he’d be standing there out in the heat with birds and insects alive all round him, and the next second he was somewhere else – lying by a stone wall, or face down in the earth, with the world gone dumb and the shadows cast by trees falling where they never normally fell.

These strange gaps in the sequence of time . . . he allowed them to remind him of that long-ago era when the things his body did made him black out and Serge would come and slap him alive again, and help him or even carry him to his own bed. He knew there was no connection between the one and the other. Those moments had been willed. He’d opened a door and gone in and the going in had overwhelmed him like nothing else in his life. But none of what was happening to him now was willed. Aramon could see clearly that the
episodes
that blighted his sister’s life since that time were now advancing on him.