Trespass (6 page)

But it was clear that they were forgiven. And it was after that night that Veronica announced that she was going to begin her book and she had the perfect title for it:
Gardening without Rain
.

‘The English think that gardening’s going to be the same everywhere,’ she said. ‘In India, in Spain, in France, in South Africa, everywhere – but it isn’t. So I want to explore how best to make it work here. I’ll do it properly, experiment with different varieties of things. See what survives and what dies unless you pamper it with rivers of commune water. It’ll be a long project, but who cares? I like it when things are long.’

This early spring was warm at Sainte-Agnès. Five or six degrees warmer than at La Callune, in the hills, where Aramon Lunel came cadging wood from his sister, nine or ten degrees warmer than in London, where a light rain was now falling on Chelsea. Kitty took her easel outside and worked at a delicate watercolour of mimosa blossom. She sat in a worn canvas chair she’d owned for most of her life. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of the seabirds she tried to paint long ago in Cromer, sitting in that same comfortable, sagging chair.

‘Always sketching away at something!’ her father used to complain. ‘As though your life depended upon it.’ It
had
depended upon it. That was what Kitty Meadows had felt as the years of her childhood and youth went slowly by and she took part-time jobs in a post office, in a chemist and finally in a library. The only moments when she’d been happy – or this was how it appeared to her now – were when she was out under the big, lonely skies, with her sketchbook and her colours, with the salt winds and the shifting dunes and the magnificence of the light. Painting had saved her. It had let her escape into a life she enjoyed. And it had eventually brought her, after years and years of waiting, into the arms of a woman she could love.

Now, she saw Veronica coming towards her across the terrace. On Veronica’s face was an expression Kitty recognised immediately: chin lifted and set, brow furrowed, eyes blinking anxiously. It made her, in Kitty’s mind ‘pure Verey’, with all the cherished ‘Veronica’ part of her suddenly missing.

Kitty rinsed her brush, kept staring at the sunlight on the fabulous mimosa tree. She knew that to Veronica’s family she was no one, just ‘that friend of V’s, that little watercolour woman’. She had to fight not to fade back into invisibility. She looked up at Veronica and said, as gently as she could: ‘What’s wrong, darling?’

Veronica snatched a cigarette out of the pocket of her gardening apron and lit it. She only smoked in times of anxiety or sadness. She walked up and down, puffing inexpertly on her Gitane.

‘It’s Anthony,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t sleep for worrying, after my phone call yesterday, he sounded so terrible. And he just rang me, Kitty. I was right to worry. He told me he feels . . . defeated. He sits in his shop all day and no one comes in. Imagine it! Alone like that and waiting and no one buys anything. He says the whole thing’s finished.’

It crowded Kitty’s memory, then, making her head ache, that glimpse she’d once had of Anthony Verey’s treasure house – all the wood and marble and gilt and glass, the turned-this and frieze-moulded-that – a princely stash of priceless stuff in the Pimlico Road he designated his
loved ones
, or some such sentimental epithet. How could such a mountain of expensive objects be ‘finished’?

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I know it’s difficult to believe,’ said Veronica. ‘He’s always made tons of money. But it’s gone wrong now. I suppose even the rich are reining back on Chippendale.’ Veronica stamped on her cigarette and came and laid her heavy arm on Kitty’s shoulder. ‘I know he’s spoilt,’ she said. ‘I know he’s not the easiest guest. But he’s my brother and he’s in trouble and he wants to come and stay with us. Just for a while. So I said yes. You’ll be nice to him, won’t you?’

What could Kitty answer to that? She rinsed her watercolour brush, reached up for Veronica’s hand. She wanted to ask: How long is ‘a while’? But even that seemed selfish. And there was no limit – almost no limit – to the things she would do for Veronica’s sake.

‘Of course I will,’ she said sweetly.

Their guest bedroom faced east, over their small orchard and, beyond this, towards fields of apricot trees and vines. It had a white tiled floor and a sleigh bed and a rickety wrought-iron side table. The beams were painted magenta.

For Anthony, Veronica emptied the walnut armoire of the winter clutter she and Kitty kept there, put white cotton sheets on the bed, vacuumed away the cobwebs, oiled the shutters, shined up the bathroom. Then she stood staring critically at her efforts. She saw the rooms as Anthony would see them: too plain and unadorned, too shabby, with a stupid colour ruining the beams. But there was nothing to be done about it. And at least the view from the window was good.

Anthony hated flying. He thought budget airliners should be shot out of the sky. He said he would take the train to Avignon and collect a hire car.

He insisted he would bring them Earl Grey tea and Marmite, even though Veronica told him they didn’t need these things. He said he was ‘unbelievably grateful’. He said he was sure the air of the south would make everything clear to him.

Clear to him in what way? Kitty wondered, but didn’t ask. Because Anthony Verey had always struck her as a man for whom everything was already clear, already decided, judged, categorised and appropriately filed and labelled. What more, in a life as apparently selfish as his, was there left to understand?

Audrun made her way slowly and carefully up to the old house, vigilant every step, alert to all that was there, to all that might be there . . .

You could never predict what Aramon was going to do. One day, he’d chucked out his old television and bought a new one, wide as a wardrobe. Last winter, he’d taken delivery of a pile of sand but never said – never even seemed to know – what the sand was for. Already, weeds had sown themselves in its shifting and collapsing mass; the sand pile and the ruined old television sat side by side on the grass and the snow fell on them in January and the warm breezes blew on them in this new springtime, and Aramon just walked on by them. Sometimes, Audrun noticed, the dogs did their business in the sand pile, cocked their legs against the television. So the screen was yellowish now, a stripy yellow that occasionally took light from the sunshine, as though some old broadcaster were trying to get his faltering signal through.

When Audrun was a child, the Mas Lunel had been a U-shaped house. Now, all that was left of it was the back section of the U. The roofs of the two wings, where once the cattle had been housed and grain stored and silkworms reared, had been damaged in the storms of 1950 and the father, Serge, had said: ‘Good. Now we can get to work on them.’

Bernadette had told Audrun that she’d thought that ‘getting to work’ on them meant rebuilding them, filling the cracks in the walls, attending to the damp, relaying the brick floors, replacing doors and windows. But no, Serge had begun to dismantle both edifices. He tore off the clay tiles and stacked them up in his cart and drove the cart down the old, pitted road to Ruasse and sold them to a builder’s merchant by the river. Then he hacked his way through the grey mortar that covered the walls of the two wings of the Mas Lunel and began gouging out the stones. He proudly told his neighbours, the Vialas and the Molezons, that stones were his ‘inheritance’ and now – in this post-war time when nobody had anything left to sell – he was going to make his fortune out of this, out of selling stones.

Bernadette had pleaded with Serge: ‘Don’t destroy the house,
pardi
! Don’t leave us with nothing.’

‘I’m not leaving us with nothing,’ he said. ‘You women don’t understand how the world works. I’m making us rich.’

But they never became rich. Not that anybody could tell. Unless Serge kept the money somewhere else: in an old fertiliser sack? In a hole in the ground?

On the ground, still, were the ghostly outlines of the former east and west wings of the Mas Lunel. It had been grand, a true Cévenol mas, with space for everything and everyone, with all the machinery kept out of the rain and all the animals sheltered in winter and, above this the
magnaneries,
the attics where, season by season, the silkworms were hatched and where they ate their vast quantities of mulberry leaves and spun their cocoons and were sent down to the last
filature
at Ruasse to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins.

Audrun could just remember the old
magnaneries
at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof.

‘It was terrible work,’ Bernadette had told her. ‘Terrible, terrible work. You had to collect bunches and bunches of mulberry leaves every single day. And if it had been raining and the leaves were wet, you knew a lot of the worms were going to die, because the damp gave them some intestinal infection. But there was nothing you could do. Every morning, you just had to pick out the dead ones and carry on. And the stink up there, of the dead worms and all the horrible excretions, was vile. I used to gag, sometimes. I hated every minute of that work.’

Yet, she’d done it without complaining. Still hanging on the wall of Audrun’s small sitting room was a photograph of Bernadette with, on her lap, a basket full of silk cocoons and on her face not a trace of anguish or disgust, but only the smile of a tired and beautiful harvester, her labour complete. The picture was faded and brown, but the white of the silk cocoons still had about it an obstinate kind of light.

All the silk in France came from the Far East now. What once had been a flourishing trade, and had kept thousands of Cévenol families alive, had died in the 1950s. When Serge sold the stones of the Mas Lunel, he’d already known that it was finished. The wooden hatching trays were chopped up and thrown on the fire. The last
filature
at Ruasse was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she’d sighed with relief once the
magnaneries
were burned and gone. She told Audrun: ‘When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.’

Aramon slept in the bed where Bernadette had died. On the very mattress. In sheets that had once belonged to her.

Audrun hated going into this room that stank of his encroachment on their mother’s memory. Because her brother had never loved Bernadette, not as Audrun had loved her. All her life, his wild behaviour had plagued and punished Bernadette and when she died he just looked blankly at her corpse, chewing on something that might have been tobacco or gum or even a mulberry leaf, because this was the way he was, like a silkworm, with his jaw grinding on something day and night, and in his eyes a vacancy.

Reluctantly, Audrun had agreed to help him tidy the house and try to find the things he’d lost.

While he killed the bantams he’d promised her, she began searching among all the clutter and garbage for his spectacles and his identity papers. She put his dirty laundry into two pillowcases, to take down to her bungalow, to wash in her machine and dry on the line in the sun and wind. She could find nothing clean to put on the bed, so she left it as it was, with just the old blankets and the eiderdown airing under the open window. Let him scratch all night. She didn’t care.

She doused a rag with vinegar and cleaned the windows. She swept and washed the wooden floor and took the rug into the garden and hurled it over and over against an old mulberry tree. As she slammed the rug against the tree trunk she heard the dogs begin howling in their pound, so she decided to go up there, to see if Aramon was taking care of them or letting them starve to death.

It was then, as she looked up at the house on her way to the dog pound, that Audrun noticed the crack in the wall. It was an immense, dark fissure in the stone. It ran down from under the eaves, like a fork of lightning, skirting a window frame and narrowing as it sped on towards the door.

Audrun stopped and stared. How long had the crack been there?

She felt time begin its peculiar pull between past things and present awareness. Had she looked a hundred times at this lightning strike in the front wall of the Mas Lunel and never seen it – until now? The howling of the dogs grew in urgency. The still-dusty rug in Audrun’s arms felt as heavy as a corpse. She walked slowly on.

She remembered sitting with the men who built her bungalow, sitting on the stony earth among the recently delivered slabs of plasterboard while the Camembert the builders were eating for lunch ripened in the sun, and hearing them say that, all over the Cévennes, cracks were appearing in the walls of old stone houses. The taller the house, the deeper ran the cracks.