Trespass (9 page)

She looked at her friend, sitting in her favourite chair by the brightly burning fire, and she had the sudden and terrible thought that their lives together might never be the same from this moment on. And the awfulness of this – even if it were just a possibility and not a certainty – impelled Kitty to get up and kneel down by Veronica and lay her head on Veronica’s knees covered by her newly washed denim skirt.

‘What?’ said Veronica. ‘What, Kitty?’

She couldn’t blurt out her worry. It was too irrational and emotional. But she needed comfort. What she wanted was for Veronica to stroke her hair, to say something affectionate and normal. But she could feel the tension in Veronica’s body: a tremble in her right leg, an absence of stillness all through her.

‘Tell me what the matter is,’ Veronica said again.

‘Nothing,’ said Kitty. ‘Stroke my hair, darling, will you?’

Kitty’s short hair, dusted with grey, was curly in a thick and tangled way. Veronica laid a hand gently on Kitty’s head and picked up this strand and that and held these strands between her fingers. Then she said: ‘Actually, your hair is quite difficult to stroke.’

The buzzer at the automated gate sounded at that moment and Veronica had to lift Kitty away from her so that she could get up and go to the gate release. ‘He’s here,’ she said unnecessarily.

Kitty saw the car headlights well up out of the night. Then she heard Veronica’s voice at the door, bright and emphatic, as it might have sounded for the long-looked-for plumber or stonemason. And
his
voice: the Chelsea drawl, the way posh people spoke long ago when Kitty was a skinny girl, helping to make beds and prepare breakfasts in the Cromer guest house . . .

Veronica led him into the sitting room, led him by the hand, the adored younger brother still, the charmed and charming boy, Anthony. He was pale from his indoor life, his skin flaky. He approached Kitty with a smile that narrowed his eyes, creased his cheeks in these days of his seventh decade, but which, Kitty guessed, could still seduce when he wanted it to.

He kissed her lightly, with only a trace of fastidious disdain. He smelled of the train, of things marooned in stale air, and Kitty had the peculiar thought that he needed hosing down with salt water, needed abrasion, ice, grains of sand, to bring the blood back to his skin, to make the world real to him again.

He stood by the fire and admired the new rugs and cushions they’d bought in Uzès. Veronica poured champagne, handed round her home-made tapenade. He said he was glad to be there. He said: ‘What I love hearing is the silence.’

This sum of money preyed on Audrun’s mind. Had she really seen such a shockingly large figure written on Aramon’s palm? Or was it just floating there, a thread of numbers unconnected to anything, in the confused grey mass that was her brain?

She asked him again: ‘How much did they say you could get for the house?’

But he wouldn’t tell her this time. He gobbed up some shreds of tobacco and spat them out as he said: ‘The mas is mine. That’s all I know. Every euro of this is mine.’

From her window, moving the net curtains by half a centimetre, Audrun watched people arriving to look at the house. She saw them stand and stare up at the crack in the wall. They picked their way past the pile of sand and the rusty, urine-stained TV. They turned to look back at the view on the south side, which included her bungalow and her vegetable plot, criss-crossed with baling twine hung with rags to scare away the birds, and her washing line, draped with Aramon’s tattered laundry. The hounds in their pen barked themselves crazy at the scent of them. They drove away.

Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, arrived.

Audrun rushed out with coffee for Raoul and asked: ‘Is it true, about the four hundred and fifty thousand?’

‘I’ve no idea, Andrun,’ said Raoul. ‘I’m just here to fix the crack.’

She told him the crack would travel right through the house and split it from top to bottom, because where the two arms of the Mas Lunel had been, now there was only air. She said: ‘The earth calls to the stone walls, Raoul. You’re a mason, I know you understand this. Unless they’re buttressed, like they used to be, the earth will call to them. I’m sure my mother knew it.’

Raoul nodded. He was always gentle with Audrun. Had been gentle with her all his life. ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But what can I do?’

Raoul swallowed the last dregs of the coffee and returned the bowl. He wiped his mouth with an old scarlet handkerchief and began setting up his ladders and wedging them with shovelfuls of sand. In his pickup were bags of cement. So Audrun now saw what Aramon was doing: employing Raoul to patch up the crack with mortar and then to plaster a coat of grey render over the new mortar veins, so that when the purchasers came, they’d never imagine a fissure in the wall – never dream of any such thing. She held the empty coffee bowl close to her and said: ‘I’m telling you, Raoul, you’ve got to tie that wall with an iron bolt . . .’

He was halfway up his ladder, nimble and neat and unafraid of falling, even at the age of sixty-six. Long ago, Audrun could have fallen in love with Raoul Molezon, if Bernadette had lived, if her whole life had been different. She stared at his brown legs, in dusty shorts. She used to think, watching Raoul, you might love a man just for his legs, for the joy of stroking them, as you might stroke the sweet neck of a goat. But that was before love for any man had become impossible . . . forever impossible . . .

She watched Raoul put on his spectacles, which hung from a chain round his neck, and peer at the fissure in the wall. He put his hand into the fissure. Now he would know how deep it went.

‘See?’ she called up to him. ‘It goes right through, eh Raoul?’

He said nothing. His face was close to the wall now, half swivelled round, as though listening to the heartbeat of the house. Then, the door banged open and Aramon came charging out like a terrier, his face flushed with anger and wine.

‘You let him be, Audrun!’ he yelled. ‘You leave Raoul alone!’

He tried to swat her away with the flat of his hand, as he would swat a fly.

She recoiled from him, as she always did. He knew he could frighten her the moment he touched her. She turned and walked away. Almost ran.

She held tight onto the coffee bowl in case she needed a weapon, in case Aramon followed her. She imagined how she would jab the bowl into his face, like covering a spider with a cup.

But he didn’t follow and Audrun reached her door – that flimsy thing that had no weight and solidity in it, her pathetic front door. She went inside and closed and locked it, but knowing that the lock, too, was insubstantial, a little nub of weak metal. These things were never meant to be like this. Doors were supposed to have solidity and strength. They were supposed to keep out everything and everyone who could do you harm. And yet they never had.

She sat in her chair. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the voices of Aramon and Raoul Molezon, carried to her on the wind that was blowing from the north, the wind that sometimes blew into the skull of Bernadette and laid her out cold under pegged washing or on the feathery floor of the chicken coop.

Audrun tried to sweeten her thoughts by remembering the wonderful cures for ailments old Madame Molezon, Raoul’s mother, used to brew up in her dark kitchen: young blackberry shoots, dried and stewed and mixed with honey, for sore throats; sage tea for nausea; borage tea for shock. But then Audrun couldn’t help remembering, too, that certain ailments had no cure. Nothing from the kitchen of Madame Molezon, nothing on the earth had been able to save Bernadette. In her last days, she’d told Audrun that her cancer was like a
magnanerie
of silkworms and her body was a mulberry tree. Nothing on the earth could deter the worms from ingesting the leaves, right down to their last little bit of green.

And that was when everything changed – when that last little bit of green was gone.

At the age of fifteen, Audrun was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory making underwear in Ruasse. Her father and her brother stayed home, worked on the vines, the onion beds, the fruit tree terraces and the vegetables. They cared for the animals and then slaughtered them. But Audrun was told she was no good on the land and would never be any good; her duty was to earn money. So she caught a bus at seven every morning, six days a week, and the bus dumped her outside the underwear factory on the outskirts of Ruasse and she spent all day hunched over a sewing machine, making girdles and suspender belts and brassieres. In her memory, all of these oddly shaped garments were pale pink, the approximate colour of her own flesh, the bits of it the sun had never found.

Her father ordered her to bring samples of her work home. Serge and Aramon fondled these pink samples and sniffed them and stretched the elasticised girdles this way and that and pulled on the elasticised suspenders like you’d pull on a cow’s teat, and laughed and sighed and shifted in their chairs. Then, Audrun was told to put the samples on, to show them off, to pretend she was a fashion model in a magazine. When she refused, Serge tugged her towards him. He touched her breasts, which, at fifteen, were already large. He whispered that she needed a brassiere for these beautiful breasts, didn’t she, and he would buy her one if she would just show off the girdle . . .

She pulled away from him. She saw Aramon, doubled up in the corner, scarlet-faced with embarrassment and thrill, laughing his hyena’s laugh.

She ran out of the house and walked to the cemetery where Bernadette’s body lay in its stone catafalque, piled in on top of her parents-in-law, and that was when Audrun began to feel it for the first time in her life, the stretching of everything round her into skeins of un-meaning . . . the breeze like beating wings, the sunlight slippery on the gravestones, like melted butter, the cypress trees like buildings about to fall. She cried out, but there was nobody to hear her. She clutched at the earth and felt it crumbling in her hands, like bread.

Audrun rocked in her chair, remembering: that was the first time.

Raoul Molezon arrived every morning for four successive days. He brought his apprentice, Xavier, to help him. They filled the crack with cement, covered it with new render, repointed the brickwork round the windows. Then they did something extraordinary: they painted the render bright ochre yellow.

In the cool shadow of early morning, it looked primrose-pale; in the evening sunlight, it blazed out like a waterfall of marigolds. It no longer resembled the Mas Lunel.

Audrun spent hours standing in her
potager
, leaning on a fork or a hoe, staring in amazement at this yellow apparition. She watched Xavier loading the abandoned TV into Raoul’s pickup and shovelling away the sand. She watched Aramon plant a forsythia bush near the front door. She noticed that the dogs were quiet, as though drugged by the fumes from the paint.

She saw the estate agents come back – the mother, and the daughter in her brown high-heeled shoes. She saw Aramon, dressed in clean clothes for once, standing with them in the new warmth of midday, the three of them gazing up at the startling new face of the Mas Lunel. The agents began taking photographs, one after another, from near and from far away. And Audrun knew what they were considering – that this transformation might put up the price of the mas still further.

She clutched the area of her heart. Her own little house had been built in four weeks for a few thousand. And it was the only shelter she would ever own.

She stopped the agents on the road, waving her thin arms to flag down the car. She stuck her face in through the car window.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘But I’m Monsieur Lunel’s sister and that house was once my home. And I saw what was done. He called the stonemason, and now the crack’s covered over, but it’s still there.’

The agents had round faces, almost identically formed, with pursed little lipsticked mouths. The daughter was smoking, drawing deeply on some expensive mentholated brand and puffing the smoke out of the car window. They both stared wordlessly at Audrun.

‘A bit of cement won’t stop it widening,’ Audrun went on, clutching at the burning metal of the car, ‘the earth calls to the stones on either side. It never stops calling.’

‘Listen, Madame,’ said the mother, after a moment or two. ‘I think we have to make something clear to you. We’ve been asked by your brother to handle the sale of the mas. And that’s all. We honestly can’t have anything to do with a family feud.’

‘Ah,’ said Audrun. ‘So he told you, did he? He told you how I was treated?’

‘How you were treated? No, no. Nothing in the past has anything to do with us. We’re just acting as agents for the sale.’

‘I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you. He pretends none of it ever happened.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but we have to be on our way now. We’ve got another appointment, a very urgent appointment in Anduze.’