Trespass. Part 5

Audrun shook her head side to side, kept on shaking it like this, like a puppet. She felt herself made weak and limp by all this bad, rotten thinking.

Later, she lay in the dark.

'Safe in your bed,' Bernadette used to say, 'now, you're safe in your bed.' But Bernadette had been wrong.

She was trying to remember: had part of her house been built on Aramon's land?

All she could recall was that it had been done roughly, hastily, in a haphazard way, with just a scribbled permission from the mayor's office and no proper plans, only sketches made by the builder: put this here, put that there. Raoul should have been the one to build it, but he didn't want the job; he only liked working with stone.

So another company was brought in from Rua.s.se and it was all decided day to day, moment to moment, in those times when the men sat in the sun, eating bread and Camembert and drinking beer and sometimes peering at this drawing or that, and once wrapping up what remained of their cheese in one of the drawings they said was no longer needed.

No surveyor had ever come back to check on the finished house had he? No one had ever come back because no one cared a fig about it. All this land belonged to the Lunel family had belonged to it for three generations. Boundary lines were for the brother and sister to draw...

But now a surveyor would come. Even a wall of stone could keep no one out, no one who believed he had a right to be there. She, Audrun, would sit helplessly by and wait for the surveyor to lay a line on the ground with a steel measure. And suppose this line led up to her house and out again the other side, what then? Would she hear someone explaining to her as they had explained to her all her life that she'd made an error?

You don't do things right, Audrun.

You don't see the world the way it is.

Audrun lay on her back and stared up at the darkness. Then, she folded her arms by her sides and closed her eyes and tried to slow the beating of her heart. She pretended she was Aramon, lying in his tomb. She waited for the vault that surrounded her to grow colder.

The restaurant terrace at Les Mejanels, a few kilometres outside Rua.s.se, was perched above a stone bridge over the River Gardon. The water was now as high as it had been in springtime for years. Everybody was talking about this, the beautiful jade-green swell of the Gardon after the snow melt of a cold winter and the recent rain.

Veronica, Kitty and Anthony sat at a table near the terrace edge.

The April sun was warm and flashed cutla.s.s-bright on the swiftly moving river. On the menu were fresh trout, frogs' legs and omelette aux cepes. omelette aux cepes. Veronica ordered a carafe of a local rose wine. Anthony put on an old cricketing hat. There were no clouds in the sky. Veronica ordered a carafe of a local rose wine. Anthony put on an old cricketing hat. There were no clouds in the sky.

Anthony ordered the omelette, followed by the trout. He ate everything slowly, taking small forkfuls, each one aesthetically perfected by the addition of a few beautifully dressed salad leaves. The wine was very cold and dry and light, and this, too, he drank slowly, not wanting any gourmandise gourmandise on his part to disturb the perfect equilibrium of these delectable moments. on his part to disturb the perfect equilibrium of these delectable moments.

He knew that he was as near to being happy as he had felt for a very long time. Happy. He dared to conjure this Peter Pan word. He felt as pleased with life as he used to feel after a successful auction bid. And these hills, this long, majestic valley with its ancient river... these at least, he told himself, had permanence. If he could remake his life in a house here, they'd be his marvellous companions. The beauty he'd create with and for his beloveds beloveds inside this house would find an echo day by day and season by season in the beauty outside its windows. inside this house would find an echo day by day and season by season in the beauty outside its windows.

He turned to Veronica and said: 'This is the place, V. This is where I want to be. I'm going to make a bid for the Cevennes.'

Veronica smiled. Her nose was turning red in the sun. 'Well,' she said, trying to include Kitty in her smile, 'that's OK. That's brilliant, in fact. We just have to start looking for a house.'

Anthony realised another thing. He'd been thinking of a small house, with some modest little curtilage, just enough s.p.a.ce for V to design him a neat garden. But this image was altering now. What he'd begun to imagine was something more stately, where the ceilings would be high, where the kitchen would be big, where he could contrive some audacious lighting effects to show off the cream of the beloveds beloveds collection as many of them as he could afford to hang on to. And, in the grounds, enough s.p.a.ce for a swimming pool. A pool would help to prolong his life. Oh, and plenty of land. He wanted land now. Not so much to protect him from the envious world, but to give that envious world something new to envy. collection as many of them as he could afford to hang on to. And, in the grounds, enough s.p.a.ce for a swimming pool. A pool would help to prolong his life. Oh, and plenty of land. He wanted land now. Not so much to protect him from the envious world, but to give that envious world something new to envy.

His plans grew and flowered and multiplied in his head: guest suites, a pool house, a sauna, a knot garden, a wild flower meadow... He caught Kitty Meadows staring at him, as though she could read his extravagant thoughts and already had some strategy to crush them. He sat back in his chair and said: 'What d'you think, Kitty?'

She looked away from him, looked far away at the high tops of the hills. She had a snub nose that had probably once been called cute, but which now gave her face the squashed look of a Pekinese.

'Why don't you rent for a while?' she said. 'See if you get used to being this far away from everything.'

Rent? What kind of a wasteful, unambitious idea was that? And what was this 'everything' she was talking about? Kitty Meadows hadn't the remotest idea what was or had been important to Anthony Verey, wouldn't even come close to imagining it. And he certainly wasn't going to reveal to her the truth about his 'everything': that it had been straying, apparently irretrievably, along the pathway towards 'nothing'. Because anyway, he was going to grab it back now, he was going to get it all back, and he wouldn't let anybody stand in his way, certainly not Kitty Meadows...

'I don't want to rent,' he said. 'I want to find something and commit to it. I want to do it before it's too late.'

'Too late?' said Kitty. 'What d'you mean?'

'V knows what I mean,' he said, 'don't you, darling?'

He was talking about time, as Kitty knew perfectly well. He wanted to make some grand new statement about his life before the years ate any more of him away, before he had to lay vanity aside. And this was going to be it, apparently: some expensively restored, immaculately furnished house in the Cevennes. Famous friends would be invited down to wors.h.i.+p. He'd spend his days getting everything just so and then showing it off. He'd speak bad French in a loud voice. In the neighbourhood, he'd be disliked by everyone, but never ever be aware of it.

Kitty was already so weary of Anthony's company that she had begun to experience it as a deep unhappiness. He'd been with them at Les Glaniques for ten days, disturbing the rhythm of their life, making work impossible for her, and now he was going to start his house-hunt and this could go on and on for weeks or months to come. It was intolerable.

Intolerable.

As Veronica ordered creme caramels and coffees, Kitty thought how she'd like to march Anthony Verey down to the bridge below them and shackle his feet to stones and tip him into the raging water. He was the last of the Verey men, with all their old sn.o.bberies and unjustified feelings of ent.i.tlement. It would surely be better for her, for Veronica, for the world if he was simply disposed of, if that life he appeared to regard as so precious was brought to an abrupt end.

'What are you thinking, Kitty?' asked Veronica suddenly.

Kitty felt startled, fidgety as a bird. She laid down her napkin, said she'd changed her mind about the creme caramel; she wanted to go for a walk along the river.

'Oh don't,' said Veronica. 'Wait till we've finished lunch and we'll all go.'

But Kitty got up. As she shook her head, she remembered, with some pain, the thing Veronica had said about her hair being 'difficult to stroke'.

She walked away from the table towards the steps that led down to the road. As she went, she heard Anthony say in a loud voice: 'Oh G.o.d, did I say something terrible? Am I a monster?'

Kitty kept on, without looking back. She thought: Every step I take away from him is a consolation. But the fact that she was walking away from Veronica as well put a little twist of agony into her heart. The last time the two of them had been here at Les Mejanels, at the end of the previous summer, they'd wandered down to the Gardon after lunch and sat in the hot sun, playing noughts-and-crosses in the sand, and Veronica had said: 'I'll do the crosses. There you are. That's the first kiss for you.'

As Kitty walked towards the water, she wondered: Doesn't every love need to create for itself its own protected s.p.a.ce? And if so, why don't lovers understand better the damage trespa.s.s can do? It made her furious to think how easily Veronica was colluding with the unspoken open-endedness of Anthony's visit as though he was the one who mattered most to her, who had the right to come first and always would, and it was up to her, Kitty, to accept this hierarchy with grown-up grace and not make a fuss.

And of course Anthony knew all this. He no doubt enjoyed the knowledge. Enjoyed seeing 'V's little friend' relegated to second place. It was possible that he'd let his stay drag on into summer or beyond, just to persecute her, to do his best to destroy Veronica's love.

Reaching the river, Kitty turned right and walked along the narrow path above the churning, dazzling water. She saw that the grey beach where she'd sat with Veronica was flooded and would only reveal itself again when the heat of July came back and the river shrank to a slow-moving channel. Boulders that had been stranded mid-stream last year were submerged now, and Kitty could imagine all the newly hatched brown trout beginning their lives in this sheltering darkness, nibbling at the green protein-rich weed that billowed up from the s.h.i.+ngle bed.

Thinking about the innocent lives of fish, Kitty found that she was crying.

She stumbled on. She wanted to sit down and cry properly. But there was nowhere to sit. There was only the narrow path, just wide enough for one person, and nothing to do but to follow that, until she felt able to turn round and go back.

Anthony believed she'd done it on purpose, to spoil his moment of happiness, and this made him all the more determined not to let her ruin the whole day or distract him from his plan, which was now to visit as many estate agents as he could find in Rua.s.se.

They were on their way there at last, after waiting half an hour for Kitty to show up. Veronica drove and Anthony sat in the front and n.o.body said a word. Kitty rested her head against the window and closed her eyes.

No doubt, thought Anthony, she wants to go straight home, to stare at her hopeless watercolours and drum up some way of getting rid of me. But I'm not going to let her get rid of me. I'm Anthony Verey and I'm myself again: I'm the the Anthony Verey... Anthony Verey...

In Rua.s.se, Veronica parked the car in the market square, under white plane trees just coming into leaf, as the sun began its decline and a suggestion of cold was felt again in the air. On the opposite side of the square were two agents and Veronica directed Anthony towards these, saying she'd catch him up.

'All right,' he said. But he said it wearily, to let his sister know that he disapproved of her pandering to the moods and whims of Kitty Meadows. Kitty, he thought, should have been left to stew in the back of the car while he and V went and looked at photographs of houses. Indeed, this would have been ideal, to strand her in the car, lock her in like a child, while they, the Vereys, got their first glimpse of his future...

He strode off across the square, still wearing his cricketing hat, hearing the click and knock of a boules boules game in the sandy gravel, the chime of an ancient clock. Rua.s.se, he'd been told, had two souls and this was one of them, its old soul, defined by the white plane trees and narrow, tilting buildings with clay roofs and a clutch of expensive shops. But its other soul was elsewhere, on the margins of the town, where high-rise flats balanced on flimsy foundations. If you could keep from coming face to face with this other soul, so much the better, or so V had said. game in the sandy gravel, the chime of an ancient clock. Rua.s.se, he'd been told, had two souls and this was one of them, its old soul, defined by the white plane trees and narrow, tilting buildings with clay roofs and a clutch of expensive shops. But its other soul was elsewhere, on the margins of the town, where high-rise flats balanced on flimsy foundations. If you could keep from coming face to face with this other soul, so much the better, or so V had said.

Now, Anthony stood at an estate agent's window. His heart was racing. He began to stare at photographs and prices. Through the gla.s.s door of the premises, he could glimpse two women at work on their computers under cold strips of industrial light. He saw them glance up and stare at his comical hat.

Veronica sat in her kitchen and smoked and listened to the stillness of the night.

In front of her on the kitchen table were half-finished sketches of a garden she was designing for clients at Saint-Bertrand. She wasn't working on the drawings exactly, just moving her pencil around, shading in stands of box and a line of yew b.u.t.tresses over which the clients had rhapsodised. Veronica knew that these b.u.t.tresses would take three years to look solid enough to form the architectural shape that had so thrilled Monsieur and Madame, but she hadn't dared to mention this. She got tired of repeating that gardens took time, that they weren't like interiors, that you had to have patience. She knew she didn't live in a patient world. Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to them the fugitive wonders that flickered into their minds.

Tonight, Veronica's own heart was agitated. The day had begun well, ended badly. She'd had to be severe with Kitty in the car in Rua.s.se, had to say to her that nothing, no, nothing nothing would stop her from caring for Anthony, because he was her brother, and if she, Kitty, expected her to stop loving him, then they were all in grave trouble. would stop her from caring for Anthony, because he was her brother, and if she, Kitty, expected her to stop loving him, then they were all in grave trouble.

She knew Kitty had been crying and this upset her. Whenever she remembered where Kitty had come from, and allowed her mind to form some torturing image of Kitty laying breakfast tables in the Cromer guest house, waiting on a shabby clientele who left stingy tips, then toiling off to her lowly job in the library, her heart felt like breaking. She wished she could have changed Kitty's past, retrospectively. But the past was the past. You couldn't change it. And this was what she'd had to remind her in the car: 'You have your past and I have mine and Anthony was a part of mine and I'm never going to push him away. Not for you. Not for anybody. Never.'

Never.

She saw the word have its effect on Kitty. And knew that Kitty still hadn't understood how strong was Veronica's need to protect Anthony from the world and from himself. So she began to explain it again: how, when they were children, Raymond Verey, the handsome father who was so often missing from home, bullied his son, called him weak, puny, babyish, kept asking him when he was going to 'become a real boy'. Lal, still enslaved by Raymond Verey, had mainly stood silently by when he did this, but she, Veronica, had formed the habit of speaking out for her brother.

'I hated my father for tormenting Anthony,' said Veronica. 'It wasn't Anthony's fault that he wasn't sporty or strong. I was those things, but he wasn't. He was thin and dreamy. He liked doing little domestic pastimes with Ma.'

Veronica remembered very vividly Anthony's obsessive love for Lal. She'd had to protect him from that as well, she explained to Kitty. On days when she saw him almost dying of hurt, she'd had to try to protect him from his own feelings.

'What about you?' asked Kitty. 'Who protected you from anything or anyone?'

'I told you: I was OK,' said Veronica. 'I was impervious to a lot of things. And I had my pony, Susan. I talked to her. Susan and I would go and tear round the jumps and I'd forget everything. I was fine. But when Ma turned away from Anthony, he died.'

She evoked one such day. It had been Anthony's eleventh or twelfth birthday and Lal had driven them to Swanage beach for a birthday picnic. It had been just three of them. Raymond was in London, as usual, living his own distant life. And it was high summer, with a hot sun s.h.i.+ning and the sea calm and blue. And they ate the delicious picnic Lal had prepared, everything except the birthday cake, which they were saving for later, and then they went swimming.

Lal, elegant as ever, was zippered into a skin-tight, lime-green bathing costume. But when the swim was over and she tried to get out of the wet costume, the zip jammed, and there she was with a wind whipping up now and the sky clouding over getting cold and cross. She tugged and tugged at the zip, then she tried to get herself out of the costume without undoing it, but it was too tight.

Anthony danced about on the sand, his face white with terror. He gave his own towel to Lal, but she tossed it away, saying, 'Don't be stupid, Anthony. That thing's soaking wet.' She threw him the car keys and sent him off over the dunes, wearing his sagging bathing trunks, to get pliers from the tool-kit of the Hillman Minx. He came panting back with the whole toolbox and Lal lifted her shapely brown arm impatiently while he searched for the pliers among the jumble of wrenches and spanners and then found them and clenched the zip head with them and attempted to drag the zip down.

But the zip wouldn't move. Lal was going blue-white with cold, her whole body in a spasm of s.h.i.+vering. 'Come on!' she kept shouting at him. 'Come on, Anthony! For G.o.d's sake fix it! Can't you see I'm freezing to death?'

He was freezing too and his hands were shaking. And then he accidentally let the pliers bite into the soft white flesh underneath Lal's arm and she gave a scream and pushed Anthony away from her and he fell backwards into the sand and began sobbing.

He spent his days trying to please her and now, when she was in trouble, when she needed him, he'd only managed to wound her.

'He couldn't bear what he'd done,' said Veronica. 'It traumatised him. To have hurt Lal! To have drawn blood! It was the worst thing he could imagine.'

'So what did you you do?' asked Kitty quietly. do?' asked Kitty quietly.

'Well, I think I put my hanky on Ma's wound and told her to hold it there, or something like that, and then I tried to get them both warm. I got the rug from the car and made them sit down close together and I wrapped them in it. Anthony just clung to Ma and cried and I said, "That's good, Anthony. Hold on to her very tight and keep her warm." Then I went looking for some scissors. It took ages, but eventually I found a nice woman with a knitting bag and she had scissors in that and she helped me cut Ma out of the bathing costume. We got Ma dressed, and she drove us home but she wouldn't talk to us. She thought the world should be punished because she'd been stuck in a lime-green bathing costume.'

'Ridiculous...' breathed Kitty.

'I know,' said Veronica. 'But that's just how she was, sometimes. And we never touched Anthony's birthday cake. Ma conveniently forgot all about it. And when he realised she wasn't going to put candles on it or cut it or sing or anything, he sat down and ate almost the whole thing, on his own in the kitchen, then threw up in the garden.'

Kitty was silent when Veronica reached the end of this story. No doubt she was thinking how spoiled and difficult their mother had been, how half a lifetime spent in white South Africa had blinded her to her own selfish behaviour. But Veronica hoped the anecdote about the day at Swanage had driven home to Kitty the realisation that protecting Anthony was a lifelong habit which she would never be able to break.

After a moment, Kitty said: 'I understand it. I do. It's part of why I love you; because you're kind. But you've got to tell me how long Anthony's going to stay with us. Just tell me that.'

'I can't tell you. Because I don't know. He wants to look for a house, now. He's putting all his hopes into that. So I have to help him, don't I?'

'Sure. But he doesn't have to be with us day and night. Why can't he move to a hotel?'

Veronica turned away from Kitty angrily and punched her fist against the steering wheel of the car. 'If you can say that,' she said, 'you haven't understood one word of what I've been talking about!'

On the table, underneath Veronica's garden sketches, was a pile of brochures from the estate agents in Rua.s.se. Veronica moved her own drawings aside and began to leaf through these. She stared at washed-out photographs of big, crumbling, stone houses attached to scant descriptions and large prices. It seemed that Cevenol property owners were bent on getting rich now, along with everybody else in the Western world.

Veronica's eye fell onto a photograph of a tall, square mas, standing with its back to a low hill planted with holm oaks. Unlike all the others, the cement facade of this one had been painted a creamy yellow and this gave the place a kind of unexpected grandeur. The price being asked was 475,000. Veronica rubbed her eyes and began to read the details: six bedrooms, large attic s.p.a.ce, exceptional beams, high ceilings...

A noise in the kitchen made her look up. Kitty was standing there, wearing the bulky, washed-out cardigan she used as a dressing gown.

She came over to where Veronica sat and bent down and put her arms round her shoulders and laid her head on hers.

'I'm sorry,' Kitty said. 'I'm sorry.'

Veronica pushed aside the house details. She reached up to Kitty and they stayed like that, in an awkward hug, for a long moment.

'I'm sorry, too,' Veronica said at last.

'Come to bed,' Kitty whispered. 'I hate being there without you.'

Whenever a car stopped on the road, now, Audrun thought it would belong to the surveyor. 'He's coming any day,' Aramon had told her. 'Then we'll see how much of my land you've taken! Then, we'll know, ha!'

She stood at her window, waiting.

She saw Aramon walk out early one morning, going towards the neglected vine terraces, bent low by the weight of the metal weed-killer canister strapped to his back. He'd told her that the estate agents had advised him to clean up the terraces, that the kind of purchasers interested in the Mas Lunel would also be seduced by the idea of growing grapes. 'I can't see it myself,' he'd scoffed. 'Bossy c.u.n.ts of agents know nothing about vines! But I I know. I know how they break your back. No lazy town-dwelling Belgian or Englishman would put in the work. But who cares? I'll do as I'm told. For 475,000 euro, I'll be as obedient as a wh.o.r.e.' know. I know how they break your back. No lazy town-dwelling Belgian or Englishman would put in the work. But who cares? I'll do as I'm told. For 475,000 euro, I'll be as obedient as a wh.o.r.e.'

Audrun followed him, unseen, down to the terraces. She stared at the rows and rows of vines, all unpruned, with the skeins of last year's growth still tangled round them and all the stony earth that nourished them choked with gra.s.s and weeds. Standing in the shadow of some ilex scrub, she watched Aramon working half-heartedly with his secateurs, snipping a few cuttings, then stopping and lighting a cigarette. He stood there smoking, with his nervous, inebriated glance jumping here and there in the bright light and the canister of weed-killer abandoned in the long gra.s.s.

Audrun looked at him with her eyes narrowed and hard. She was trying to decide how best to kill him.

She went up to the Mas Lunel and began searching for his will.

He'd never married or fathered any children, so everything would be hers if he died before her, unless he'd contrived to will part of it away to one of his old hunting friends. And she doubted that he'd got round to this, ever made the necessary burdensome visits to a notary, but she needed to be sure. If he'd made a new testament just to spite her, he would have hidden a copy somewhere.

She went first to an old mahogany chest in the salon, the most comfortable room in the mas, but where Aramon hardly ever lingered, as though he recognised that the s.p.a.ce was too grand for him for the person he was in his core.

Bernadette had always kept the family Bible in this chest. Over all the years, this Bible had exerted its holy magnetism upon everything that seemed to plead its own bureaucratic importance or sentimental preciousness, such as the letters Serge had written from the Ardennes during the war, then from Alsace, where he was repatriated after France's surrender, and then during his time spent working for the Service de Travail Obligatoire Service de Travail Obligatoire at Rua.s.se. at Rua.s.se.

There were large heaps of these letters in Serge's untidy writing, unread for years. There were also ancient ident.i.ty cards, bills of sale to the wine co-operative, invitations to marriages, christenings and first communions, mourning-cards, family photographs, newspaper cuttings, letters of condolence, edicts from the mayor, a faded menu from a cheap Paris restaurant in Les Halles... All of these things had flung themselves in to be with the Gospels.

Audrun opened the chest and took out the Bible. She held it to her face for a moment, picking up even now the scent of her mother embedded in its cloth covers, then laid it aside. She stared at the heap of papers, sprinkled with woodworm dust, finer than fine-grained sand. This dust suggested to her that the papers hadn't been disturbed for a long while. Aramon never looked at the past, then, and no wonder. He was afraid to catch sight of himself in it.

Audrun lifted out an armful of letters, cards and photographs. One photograph, of Bernadette, fell out of the pile and Audrun stared down at her mother's face that sweetest of sweet countenances as it had once been, when she was young and smiling at the old box camera in the suns.h.i.+ne. How beautiful Bernadette had been! Her hair was parted at the side and swept up into a tortoisesh.e.l.l clip. Her eyes were wide and sleepy. Her skin was smooth and unblemished. She wore a striped blouse that Audrun couldn't recall.

Audrun put the photograph into the pocket of the old red cardigan she was wearing that day. She returned to the chest. Again, the arrangement of the remaining papers indicated neglect. But it was still possible that Aramon had made his will and layered it silently in, deep down in the complicated mille-feuille mille-feuille of what pa.s.sed for a family archive. of what pa.s.sed for a family archive.

She sifted and sorted, looking for a doc.u.ment that would probably be whiter than the rest, with dark printing. But she found nothing. Reaching the bottom of the chest, Audrun picked up a picture postcard of the river at Rua.s.se, with the water almost overflowing the banks and was.h.i.+ng against the old market stalls that had once stood there and all the patient cart horses waiting in a line. The message, written by her father and dated 1944 read: My dear Wife,I pray you're safe and all in La Callune also safe, and the boy and the baby. My work here is not difficult. I am part of our S.T.O. group guarding the locomotives at night against sabotage by Maquisard elements. I am getting fond of these engines.Did you ask old Molezon to repair the chimney stack? Is the boy cured of his cough? We work in the dark and sleep in daytime. I kiss your breast. Serge.

Audrun laid the card back in. Arranged everything as she'd found it.