Marguerite, page 10
* * *
• • •
Jérôme awoke within an hour, calling her to him by knocking loudly on the headboard. She welcomed the sound.
‘Where have you been?’ he said.
‘Waiting for you. You were asleep.’
‘Was I?’ He frowned. ‘Where’s my lunch?’
‘I took it away. You fell asleep before you finished it.’
‘Then you should have woken me.’
‘Are you hungry? I can bring you a snack.’
He nodded, rolling his eyes, and Marguerite returned to the kitchen, coming back with a plate of crackers and Comté.
He plucked at a cracker. ‘It’s stale,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t drop your standards.’
He ate a piece of the cheese, chewing noisily.
‘You have your energy back,’ she said softly.
‘I know.’
He took the glass of water in both hands, shaking, and stared into the bottom of the glass as he drank, like a child. He kept drinking until it was almost finished, then pushed it towards her and leant back in the bed.
‘I’ll get dinner ready early, since you didn’t have much lunch.’
‘That seems reasonable.’ His face and voice had softened a little.
She smiled. ‘I came across the disused swimming pool,’ she said. ‘In the garden.’
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. ‘Yes. And?’
‘I hadn’t realised it was there. It must have been a huge pool.’
‘Yes. It was. And?’
‘I just—’ She wondered now why she had mentioned it. ‘I hadn’t realised it was there.’
‘As you just said. But what’s your point?’
‘I was just interested. I just – I have no point.’
‘Yes, that’s right. No point. But thank you for reminding me of the pool and its “disuse”. Most tactful.’
She shook her head slowly, irritated now, and turned again to leave the room.
‘Bring me those flowers,’ he said. He pointed to the jug on the table with his shaking right hand. ‘I would like to smell them.’
Marguerite brought the jug over: a pretty jumble of the wild, unearthly-looking flowers she’d picked, flowers she associated with the Alps more than these parts. They wouldn’t smell of anything, but she brought them to his nose for him to try. In a swift, precise movement, he swiped the jug from her hands and it dropped, smashing into blue pieces and water and tangled stems on the floor by her feet.
* * *
• • •
When she cooked dinner that evening, she did something she’d always considered apocryphal: she spat into his spaghetti. She stirred it in, part appalled, part amused.
As he ate, she knelt by the bed to sweep up the wet mess of the broken jug and flowers. When he’d finished eating and she took away his tray, he said, ‘It was my jug.’
She didn’t bother to respond.
* * *
• • •
She dreamt she was underwater. The walls of the pool were glass, though she couldn’t see through them; they were very grimy, the water greasy. As she swam, trying to reach the end of the tank, she felt something ice cold on her foot and knew that it was dead. She didn’t look back, didn’t want to see it; she tried to shake her foot free.
She kicked so hard that she woke up, pulling her legs up in the bed and scrambling to sit up, still feeling that something was trying to hold on to her. She switched on the lamp and, squinting, looked around the room. Her left foot throbbed; she must have kicked the cold radiator. Her mouth was furry, and she remembered that she’d been a little drunk when she’d gone to bed. A headache was spread like someone’s palm across her forehead.
She rubbed her feet to warm them, and as she held them it was Cassandre’s icy feet she imagined. Cassandre had come in at around midnight that night, burning with a fever, flushed and blotchy. She ached all over, she said; her head was agony. Marguerite let her crawl into her bed and lie head to toe as she so often did when she was ill, like tonight, or their parents were fighting, or she was scared of something and couldn’t sleep. But tonight Cassandre wriggled and squirmed, turning from one side to another, restlessly. Her teeth chattered and she tugged the blankets constantly around her. At first Marguerite sang to her and stroked her burning face, but eventually she became tired and impatient. ‘I have vocab tests tomorrow, Cass, I’ve got to sleep. Just try to stay still.’
But still she squirmed and shuddered, and every time Marguerite started to slip away into sleep she was awoken by Cassandre’s feet; it was like someone pressing large blocks of ice to her arm or back or shoulder. Finally, she ordered her back to her own room. ‘For God’s sake,’ she snapped, irritated in spite of how ill her sister was. ‘Get your feet out of my face. They keep waking me.’
‘I’ll stop moving,’ Cassandre said, and Marguerite had said the words she could never forget.
‘Just go away.’
And Cassandre had gone away. Too scared to wake their parents, she’d gone back to her own bed. Marguerite could never know what loneliness and pain and fear she’d suffered from then until the next day, by which time she’d slipped into a coma. Marguerite watched from the door of their building as Cass’s body was rushed away in an ambulance, their mother in the back instead of Marguerite, even though Cass was her little baby more than their mother’s. She watched the ambulance disappear and knew that this was, in entirety, her own fault.
If Cass’s feet hadn’t been so cold, if her shaking hadn’t kept waking Marguerite, surely she would have been less cruel, surely she would have let her spend the whole night there. She would have woken up when things got worse, when Cassandre had a seizure or whatever it was that had happened; she would have prevented her descent. Cass would be a healthy young adult now, able to walk and talk with precision. She and Marguerite would be living together; as soon as Marguerite had finished school, she would have found a job – not as a nurse, perhaps far away from death and sickness – so that she could take Cassandre out of their parents’ noxious apartment and rent somewhere small of their own. She would work while her little sister attended university, studying science or philosophy or literature: intelligent, a brilliant student.
Or was this fantasy, as ever? Who could vouch for the fact that Marguerite would have taken Cassandre away from their parents when she was old enough – she who had sent her back to her own bed the night of her illness, who had told her, rough and impatient, to go away? Unspeakably, brutally stupid, she’d failed to see how gravely ill Cassandre was, how she shook and shivered, how her blotchy face wasn’t right. She hadn’t paid attention. She had been more interested, in those years – on the surface at least – by the attention of boys and the approval of her female classmates than the blind devotion of that elfin little girl.
After that night, Cassandre’s feet were never the same again. Before the illness they were pretty, soft from the family’s carpeted lifestyle, surprisingly long for such a little girl. ‘It means you’ll be tall,’ Marguerite had told her once or twice.
Her arches were not as pronounced as Marguerite’s, but that changed after meningitis. At first, her feet were limp and lifeless. And then, slowly but unstoppably, her left foot started to curl until it was pointed constantly, even when she slept. Within a year the right foot had followed suit, and finally they became a gross parody of a ballerina on pointes.
When daylight began to creep in between the shutters, she dressed and left the house. She moved like a sleepwalker down the track, looking down, watching her trainers step one after the other and again and again and again, of their own accord. She felt at a remove from her body, as if she were still drunk.
She thought of the word sleepwalker as she moved, let it plod out its heavy, muffled consonants in her head: somnambule, somnambule. It was a tired word. For a moment she thought: I am so tired. What she wouldn’t give for someone to come along now and put her in a car and drive her somewhere, let her sleep. She didn’t want to be in the house with that tyrant of an old man; she didn’t want to be in the village, among its dully vicious women; she didn’t want to be back in Paris, nor a new nursing home in some forgotten corner of this country. She was out of options.
* * *
• • •
Jérôme was quiet when she brought him his lunch, patient as she helped him up to piss and then settled him into his chair. As he ate, she tidied his bedside table and emptied the pan by his bed into the loo. They would have to come up with a new approach soon: he could no longer sit up unaided. For now, he could call her each time he needed to piss – but it wouldn’t be long, she knew, until he couldn’t hold it for as long as it took her to come.
When she came back with the empty pan, he looked up.
‘This stew is very good.’
She didn’t answer; she had barely spoken to him since he’d smashed the jug of flowers. He watched her, chewing slowly.
‘I had a dream this morning,’ he said. ‘I tried to get out of bed to walk through to the garden, but I fell. I had forgotten how to walk.’
She sat at the table, looking over his charts.
‘I was like a beetle.’ He took a shaky spoonful of the stew, spending time to fish out a coin-shaped chunk of carrot. Then he looked up, waiting for a response, and she pushed the charts away and cleared her throat.
‘It doesn’t sound like a pleasant dream.’
‘Well, obviously,’ he said, frowning, and she waited for the customary outburst. But instead he gazed into the distance, his frown fading. ‘It’s funny, what reminds you of things you might have forgotten. I woke up remembering the way woodlice try to get onto their front when they’ve fallen the wrong way.’ He glanced at her. ‘I used to flick them off the wall sometimes, to watch them struggle on their backs until they worked out how to get up. That’s what young boys do, you understand.’ He rested the spoon on the edge of the bowl, was quiet for a moment. ‘Anyway, they can’t simply turn over onto their front, woodlice; what they have to do is curl up into a little ball, and only then they can sort of roll onto their legs again. Every time, it takes them a while to work it out afresh.’ He took another spoonful, chewed the meat carefully before swallowing. ‘Why was I talking about woodlice?’
‘Your dream.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Anyway, the fact is—’ He paused, and she could see that he was picking his words with care. ‘I thought, if you’d been here when I’d fallen – in the dream, that is – you would have helped.’ He sniffed then and frowned. ‘In other words, I might get rather angry but I’m afraid that’s just the way I am.’ Marguerite waited, and he continued to stare ahead of him, his expression imperious. ‘After all, what I’m saying is that I am grateful for your care.’
Then he exhaled loudly and started to eat again, scooping up his stew more quickly and steadily. She stood there, aware that she must speak now.
‘Thank you,’ she said. He batted her words away with an impatient gesture.
‘Oh shhh shhh,’ he said, and she turned and left the room.
7
The light was falling, soft as felt, when she heard a car pull into the driveway. She had been lying on her bed, eyes open but reading nothing, and she got up and walked to the large bedroom at the front of the house. Through the window she watched Suki emerge from her car, slam the door, straighten her clothing, turn towards the house. Marguerite stepped back, but not quickly enough. She thought Suki had seen her watching.
She walked heavily downstairs, pulling her cardigan around her.
‘Hello,’ she said when she opened the door.
Suki leant her head to the side, smiled ruefully. ‘Am I interrupting?’
‘No. Come in.’
She took the kettle from its perch to the tap, watched the little flakes of limescale swirling as it filled with water.
‘How are you, Marguerite?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Good. I’m here to say a bit of a sorry.’
Marguerite looked at her as she replaced the kettle. Again, the rueful smile. ‘Why?’
‘I felt a bit bad after the fête. I felt like I should have stuck up for you when Laure was doing the Spanish Inquisition on you.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Really?’
Marguerite paused. ‘I felt a bit confused by the whole thing. It was – unclear. There seemed to be something going on that I didn’t know about.’
‘Yes, there was. Thank you for being honest. I thought you were just going to say it was fine and bat me away.’ She leant her head to one side again and looked at Marguerite intently. As so often, there was something staged in the gesture. ‘Laure hates me. Laure and Brigitte hate me. They claim I made passes at Henri Brochon, Brigitte’s husband, and they claim that’s the reason they hate me. But they always did, ever since I arrived in Saint-Sulpice. You might think I blame too much on prejudice, but I don’t. I arrived five years before l’affaire du voile islamique kicked off. You remember, the schoolgirls in Creil? Shit, you probably weren’t even born.’
‘I was. I was a child, but I know about it.’
‘Of course you do – I forget you’re actually educated, unlike these peasants. Anyway, when that came to a head they stopped even trying to pretend they liked me. Most people around here behaved badly, but them more than most. So it was way before the thing with Henri started.’
‘And what was the thing with Henri?’
Suki frowned. ‘Nothing happened. Okay, to be completely honest with you, I developed a crush on him. I was bored in a way I had never even imagined could be possible. Even more bored than when we moved to Hilversum.’ She got up to light a cigarette by the door. ‘We went from a huge, magnificent house in Tehran to a hideous high-rise in North Holland. Hilversum, Europe’s most depressing city. All of our assets stripped, my childhood home taken. We went from living like kings in the country we knew to living like trash, seen by everyone as outsiders. But that’s a whole other story.’
She took a deep drag of her cigarette. The kettle hit its climax and clicked off, but neither of them moved.
‘I was talking about Henri. Yes, and boredom.’ She rolled her eyes with exaggeration. ‘I was so bored. Philippe was never around – still never is, actually. I had no friends. And Henri and I got chatting once and I realised he wasn’t just a brainless farmer; he was actually very sensitive, very smart. Educated. And of course it helped that he was devastatingly handsome.’
She smiled, a little wickedly.
‘I’m here to apologise to you, so fuck it, I’m just going to be completely honest. I fell head over heels. I went over to their farm all the time, tried to talk to him about anything and everything. And I think he liked it, I think he liked the attention and the flattery and, God, just having someone more interesting to talk to than his tedious wench of a wife.’
Marguerite laughed. ‘You have a point.’
‘Anyway, this is an incredibly long-winded way of telling you: Laure and Brigitte hate me, and it goes back a very long way, and it’s rooted in this huge perceived slight to Brigitte as well as in their racist ignorance. They’re threatened by me, by the fact I’m attractive and confident and educated.’ She dropped her unfinished cigarette, grinding it with her foot, and came back to sit at the table. ‘But for some stupid, stupid reason, I did the fête again this year to try to show them I’m not beaten down by it, and that they haven’t won. And—’ She looked at Marguerite, now, with real awkwardness. ‘And actually, when Laure was having a go at you, I didn’t really want to be swept up in it.’
‘You didn’t want to be tarred with my brush,’ Marguerite said, smiling.
‘Don’t put it like that,’ Suki said. ‘Do you think I’m terrible?’
‘No. I really don’t care. You shouldn’t be worried about it.’
‘Well, I have been. Because I really value getting to know you, and I want us to be friends.’
Marguerite felt herself recoil. She went to the sink and filled a glass with water, her back to Suki. ‘Really, don’t worry about it any more,’ she said.
There was silence between them for a while as she drank the water; she was conscious of the glugging in her throat. When she put the empty glass down and turned around to face the table, Suki was pulling a bottle of wine from her bag. ‘Now let’s have a drink,’ she said – and Marguerite must have looked confused, because she grinned. ‘Yes, I drink. How could I survive here otherwise? I smoke, I drink, I flirt with married men.’ She held both hands up, in mock defence. ‘Don’t judge me.’
‘Okay,’ said Marguerite, and smiled. ‘I’ll try not to.’
She went to get glasses and a corkscrew. ‘What happened, by the way, with Henri?’
Suki looked up.
‘You don’t have to answer that.’
‘Nothing happened. My theory,’ she said as she pulled the cork out with a quiet pop, ‘is that he’s asexual. Or just incredibly, boringly moral. He obviously fancied me, but he just wouldn’t take it any further. I think, deep down, he lacks imagination. I was projecting too much onto him out of sheer boredom. That’s my theory.’
She poured two glasses, right to the top.
‘Santé.’
* * *
• • •
‘There’s nothing out there, you know.’
