Trespass (30 page)

Then he heard a movement at the barn door: a scuffling and whimpering.

And he knew that some of the dogs had followed his scent and found him. And so an idea came to him: let the dogs find it. Let the starving dogs feast their eyes on it, let them tear it apart and eat it up . . . and then it will be gone and I’ll never have to see it . . .

With his back turned to it, Aramon opened the car door again, opened it wide and then began calling to the dogs and they whimpered in response.

He shuffled to the door as fast as he could and opened it and they came bounding into the barn, three dogs, and clawed at him and he pushed them towards the car, knowing that smell was the sense that powered all their actions and that they would go straight to it, to that stench, and begin whatever it was their animal brains commanded them to do.

He went back to the open door, taking gulps of the fresh air. He heard the dogs’ claws clattering and sliding on the bodywork on the car. One of them began barking. Then they were quiet and he knew they were in the car now, following the smell, and he waited for the frenzy to start.

Time seemed to stretch and tease Aramon. Outside, cicadas and bees were stirred from sleep as the sun warmed them. A buzzard turned in the blue sky. That’s the world, the real world, thought Aramon longingly, and the black car is not part of it, but only part of some dark nightmare that I can’t understand.

He sat at his kitchen table, gulping pastis.

There had been no dead body in the car.

The stench that had momentarily filled the air had come from a half-eaten and now putrid Camembert and tomato sandwich, which even the dogs had left alone.

Aramon had made himself open the car boot, but there had been nothing in the boot except a pair of binoculars and a floppy hat and an insulated bag containing a bottle of water. He closed and locked the car, with the sandwich still inside, because he couldn’t bear to touch it. He called to the three dogs and walked out with them into the sunshine, with the car keys in his pocket.

Now, what occupied his mind as he gulped his pastis was how to make the car disappear.

He’d seen plenty of old films on TV where people succeeded in pushing cars off cliff tops, in setting fire to them, or drowning them in a lake. But, they were always found in the end. There was always some charred or broken version of the car which came to light. Those movie scenes were exciting precisely because you knew that, no matter what the murderers did, the cars would be found.

Aramon knew that trying to get rid of the car was beyond him. He was too weak, too ill, to contemplate any kind of action in regard to it. He knew that it’d just sit there in the barn. It wouldn’t move from there. He’d pile straw over it, to mask it from sight. He’d put a strong padlock on the barn doors. That was the best he could do.

He climbed his stairs, unsteady after the pastis. He went into the room which had once been Audrun’s room, and which neither he nor she ever visited. The shutters were closed and the room felt cold. Aramon took the car keys out of his pocket and stuffed them away under Audrun’s mattress.

Audrun began measuring the river levels.

She went out at first light, when the valley was still deep in shadow.

She didn’t need a notched stick or a knotted rope; she measured with her eye. She remembered Raoul Molezon once telling her: ‘The wind sucks up the water. The mistral especially. It’s thirsty for the river.’ Audrun’s heart galloped to see how fast the river was going down.

She watched the TV weather forecasts. She saw the temperatures indicated in red: 38°, 39°, 41° . . . The kind of heat in which people died. They suffocated in airless apartments, or contracted sunstroke, or expired from dehydration, or were burned alive in forest fires, trying to rescue their animals or their possessions. No end in sight to the heatwave, said the forecasters. No respite from water shortage, despite the wet spring. All leave for the region’s fire-fighters cancelled, the
canadair
planes put on twenty-four-hour alert. Infernos feared in the Cévennes.

For fifteen years – until it ended, until Serge ended it by dying – there had been an inferno inside Audrun. Fifteen years. Her youth burned away inside her, in agony, with no one to tell, no one to come to the rescue. Not even Raoul Molezon. Because how could she tell him – tell any man – about that shame, that
branding
? She couldn’t. Not even when Raoul came to meet her outside the rayon factory that day, came courting her in fact, buying that glass of
sirop de pêche
while he drank his beer and told her she was beautiful. She felt that she loved him, but she was too disgraced and shamed by what she’d done to risk showing him what was in her heart.

She thought Raoul loved her. On that day, he seemed to caress her with his tender brown eyes. She longed to reach out and touch his hair, his mouth. But she knew it was impossible. Everything was impossible and so she had to say it: ‘Don’t come to meet me again, Raoul. It’s better if you don’t.’

And he’d looked so sad, it was unbearable.

A car stopped outside her gate. She stood at the window of her kitchen, peeling white onions for her supper, watching.

Two middle-aged strangers got out and looked all around them. Then the man began walking towards her door, while the woman hung back, as though embarrassed or afraid.

Audrun rinsed her hands and took off her flowered overall and smoothed her skirt and went to the door very calmly, and the man stared at her; an agitated kind of look.

‘Can I help you, Monsieur?’ she said.

He was a foreigner. He spoke French, but with some ugly accent or other. He said he’d been told by agents in Ruasse that there was a mas for sale beyond La Callune – the Mas Lunel – but the agents wouldn’t bring him here, because apparently the vendor had changed his mind, so he . . . he and his wife . . . had decided to drive up and take a look for themselves . . . just in case . . .

Audrun stared at the foreigners. There was something about the man, a kind of worn and lean look, which reminded her of Verey.

She smiled at him. ‘The Mas Lunel belongs to me,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘We were told there was a Monsieur—’

‘My brother,’ said Audrun. ‘He works the land. It suits me to let him live up there. I prefer my small modern house, you see.’

‘Yes, I see. But is the mas still for sale? We love the proportions of it, the outlook . . . Our name is Wilson. This is my wife . . .’

The anxious woman stepped forward and held out her hand and Audrun took it. Then she said sweetly: ‘My situation has changed. This happens unexpectedly in life,
n’est-ce pas
? So I’ve decided not to sell. The house has been in my family for three generations. So now I’m going to restore it. Perhaps I’ll end my days there? Who can say?’

They looked crestfallen. They asked if she could be persuaded to change her mind.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Other things have changed, but my mind will not change.’

They both turned and stared longingly at the mas and Audrun could see it in their eyes, a will to possess it. They said they’d been looking at houses in this part of France for a long time and tomorrow they were leaving for England . . .

Audrun contemplated their ordinariness. She wondered how these colourless, mute people had made so much money that they could waltz down to the Cévennes and buy themselves a second home. And she thought, I don’t know how money is made. I’ve never known. All Bernadette had was what we grew on the terraces or what we could exchange for the things we grew; all I had was what I earned in the underwear factory, and all I have now is my little state pension – that, and what I can grow in the
potager.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Nothing here is for sale.’

The Wilsons drove away. The moment they’d gone, Audrun saw Aramon limping down the drive towards her. He looked like a scarecrow, with his trousers held up at the waist by a piece of string and his hair dirty and wild.

‘Who were those people?’ he asked. ‘What did they want?’

Audrun looked away from him. She knew she could make him sweat by saying they were friends of Verey’s, but at that moment Marianne Viala appeared at Audrun’s gate.

Marianne kissed Audrun. Then she turned to Aramon and said: ‘You don’t look well,
mon ami
.’

‘I’m not well,’ he said. ‘Something’s poisoning me. I may have to go to the hospital.’

‘You
should
go,’ said Marianne. ‘And you shouldn’t drink, Aramon, if your stomach’s not right . . .’

‘Who were those people?’ shouted Aramon again. ‘Tell me who they were.’

‘Foreigners,’ Audrun said. ‘They just stopped to ask the way.’

‘The way to where?’

‘To Ruasse.’

‘Ruasse? Their car was facing in the wrong direction.’

‘Yes,’ said Audrun. ‘I set them on the right road.’

He stood there, twisted up with fear. At the corner of his mouth was a fleck of white foam. Marianne Viala looked at Audrun questioningly, then reached out and laid a hand on Aramon’s arm.

‘You should take better care of yourself, Aramon,’ she said. ‘But listen, I’ve got a favour to ask you.’

Aramon’s eyes darted left and right, left and right, and Audrun knew what thought those darting eyes hid:
Don’t ask me favours. I’m too ill, too tired, too frightened, to grant them.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Well?’

‘Jeanne wants to bring her class up here tomorrow, after they’ve visited the Museum of Cévenol Silk Production at Ruasse. She’s bringing packed lunches for the kids and she wants a nice shady spot for their picnic, so I thought about your lower terraces – if you didn’t mind them on your land. It’s only a small class and—’

‘On my land?’ he said. ‘Where, on my land?’

‘I said: on your lowest terrace, the grassy plateau below the vines . . .’

‘I can’t have kids poking about on my property. I told you, I’m not well. I can’t have the worry of it.’

‘They won’t “poke about”. They’re just going to eat a picnic.’

‘Kids. I can’t endure that . . .’

‘You can have the picnic on the other side of the road,’ said Audrun quietly. ‘On my land. Near the wood.’

‘Oh,’ said Marianne. ‘But I thought . . . if Aramon didn’t mind . . . they could combine the picnic with looking at the dry-stone walling of the terraces. They might do some drawing, and—’

‘No!’ said Aramon, and he threw Marianne a look of anguish. ‘I don’t want anybody near anything. I’m tired of strangers. I want to be left alone!’

Aramon turned away from them abruptly and began his slow walk,
hobbledehoy, hobbledehoy,
back towards the mas, and in silence the two women watched him go.

When he was out of hearing, Marianne said: ‘Is he dying?’

‘Well,’ said Audrun. ‘Let’s say that time’s caught up with him.’

Time.

A flickering out of each and every moment before it had been properly lived – as though time were a whirlwind, a mistral, blowing everything to kingdom come – this was what Anthony Verey had had to contend with for years – ever since his business had begun to fail. Then, sitting in his back office, that morning in spring, he’d caught sight of the black silk thread hanging from the Aubusson tapestry, that black thread escaping from the head of the malevolent witch, and he’d held it between finger and thumb and understood at last what waited for him:
death unfurnished
.

And so a certain day had arrived.