Marguerite, page 28
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing, not a single thing. I’m sorry that I brought it up. I didn’t have the right to.’
‘You did,’ he said. ‘You have the right to know everything about me.’ Relief washed over her, and a little thrill at all those words might signify if she let herself think about them but it was cut short. She was still hiding everything from him. She didn’t know how she could ever start to let him see.
* * *
• • •
Jérôme barely slept that night. He called her to him so often that, after the third time, she could no longer bear to wake Henri when she opened and closed the door to their room, or sank back into the bed beside him. She spent the rest of the night sitting in Jérôme’s chair, dozing when he slept.
His temperature was raised, his voice hoarse.
‘Does your throat hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Do you feel hot or cold?’
‘Neither.’
He moaned occasionally, as he slept. She didn’t know if he was dreaming or in pain.
* * *
• • •
She woke in a room filled with early daylight, and she saw that he was awake, watching her. She sat forward, stretched her neck. It felt rigid.
‘You’re like that blasted dog,’ he said in his new husky voice. ‘Grenouille.’
‘Why?’
‘He used to follow me around the place. If I’d let Céline have her way, that dog would have slept in our room with us and I would have woken up just like this, to find the bloody thing at the end of my bed. Waiting.’
She smiled. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘Grenouille? No. I couldn’t stand him.’
She stood, stiffly. She was cold, felt as if she were made of wood. She took his temperature. ‘You’re back down to normal,’ she said.
‘Good.’
She poured him a glass of water, and as she did she thought of Henri. He would be awake already; perhaps she’d find coffee waiting for her in the kitchen.
‘He never liked me,’ said Jérôme. ‘It drove me mad.’
‘Who?’
‘Grenouille.’ He cleared his throat, a deep scratchy noise. ‘He was suspicious.’
‘But you said he followed you everywhere?’
‘Yes. To check up on me.’
‘It sounds like you’re the suspicious one.’
He grunted. ‘I’m tired.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘All this time you spend thinking . . .’ He looked at her, twisted his mouth. ‘Lying in bed, just thinking and thinking. You remember the oddest things.’
She sat down, waited.
‘Before you woke up, I was just thinking about a set of handkerchiefs Céline made for me one year. For my birthday or Christmas. Beautiful things. Expertly sewn.’
‘That’s a nice present.’
‘I don’t think I ever told her how much I liked them.’ He closed his eyes, opened them, nodded. He smiled a grim smile. ‘Age is turning me soft.’
She watched his hands as they clenched and unclenched, slowly.
‘Still. Always make sure you tell someone how you feel about them. Always make sure you’ve said everything you wanted to say. In case they die.’
‘I know,’ she said, and he eyed her, sharply.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose you do.’
* * *
• • •
She leant back in her seat, on the passenger side. She turned her head to face him and he looked at her and smiled, moved his right hand from the wheel to her thigh. She was almost dazzlingly happy. She wanted to say something but instead she reached out and ran her fingers into his hair, and he turned to her again.
‘I’ve never met anyone like you,’ he said. He looked back at the road, and they drove in silence again. But then five minutes later, he continued as if there had been no pause. ‘You’re the quietest person I’ve ever met.’ She laughed, getting ready to deprecate herself, but then he said, ‘But you still communicate. I feel like you have your own language.’
How could she respond to that? She couldn’t, but she needed to tell him something, anything.
‘I feel—’ She looked down at her feet, flexed her toes in her trainers, tried again. ‘I feel comfortable with you.’
Boring, she thought, what a boring thing to say, but then he slowed the car and pulled up at the side of the road, stopped the engine. He turned to her and pulled her towards him, kissed her, and she climbed over the gearstick and handbrake and sat astride him. He held her body as close to his as he could. Then he pushed her away so that he could look at her face.
‘Tell me more about how I make you feel,’ he said, and she leant forward and rested her face against his. She spoke into the space beneath his ear, into the warmth of his neck.
‘You make me feel—’ His head pushed heavily against hers, as if he were drunk. ‘Like nothing else matters. Like it doesn’t even exist.’
‘That’s how I feel with you.’
Cramped, quiet so they could listen out for other vehicles, constricted by the car’s tiny dimensions and low ceiling and the wheel behind her back, they came together, quickly. Afterwards, she leant onto him, her face in the crook of his neck and shoulder, and kissed him as he held the back of her head in his hands.
‘I love you,’ he whispered, as she realised she’d known he would.
‘I do too,’ she said.
18
There was something in the silence that felt wrong. She went straight through to Jérôme’s room and there she found him, on his front on the floor, one hip hitched up as if he were crawling. His eyes were half open. There was blood, a lot of it, spooling around his face and neck.
She realised she’d screamed and that she couldn’t move, couldn’t bear to check the extent of the damage. Henri had rushed in and he was picking Jérôme up from the floor, and she saw him standing with difficulty and carrying the old man in his arms like a sleeping child. She looked down at her right hand, gripping the table. She wanted to move it but she couldn’t. She was saying please, please, please, please.
Then Henri was in front of her with his hands on her shoulders, shaking them. ‘Marguerite.’ His voice was hard and harsh. His green eyes in front of her face. ‘Pull yourself together. He needs you, right now.’
He needed her. That woke her up. So he was alive, if he needed her he was alive. She approached the bed. ‘Jérôme.’
‘Where were you?’
The blood was all over his face.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ she heard Henri say and then everything clicked into place.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’ She held Jérôme’s face, very gently, and he winced. ‘Tell me what hurts.’
‘I tried to find you,’ he said.
‘Get me a bowl of warm water and a load of towels,’ she shouted out to Henri.
‘I was trying to find you,’ he said again, dragging his voice like a tired child.
‘Jérôme? Listen to me. I’m here. You’re fine. You’re safe. I’m right here. You’ve had a fall but you’re fine. You’re safe and you’re fine.’ She was running her hands up and down his body now, watching his face as she did so. Legs and feet fine, hips fine, thank God, thank God, his hips were fine. Gently, she took each hand and moved it around, watched his face. By a miracle, his wrists were too. Then, gently, very gently, she held his face and rolled it a little to each side. He groaned.
Then Henri was there with water and towels and she fastened one to his chin, the source of the bleeding. ‘Hold this here,’ she said, and she dipped another towel in water and started to wipe his cheeks. She rubbed the blood away, let the rosy water drop down into the pillow. He closed his eyes.
‘My head hurts so much,’ he said, and then tears ran down from beneath his closed lids.
‘Lift him a little,’ she said to Henri. ‘He needs to sit up to swallow pills. Gently. Support his neck.’
‘No, no, no,’ Jérôme whined, and the tears came again, more now.
‘Put him back.’
She prepared an injection instead. She saw that Henri turned away when she gave it.
The cut was small and deep, not the gash she’d thought it might be. He’d fallen onto his chin and nothing was broken, not one of his brittle little bones. When she’d dressed the cut she gave it two small stitches and then Henri helped to hold him as she changed the sheets around his body. Clean, dry sheets and pillow. Clean, dry pyjamas. They’d only been gone half an hour, she kept thinking as she worked. Forty-five minutes, perhaps. They’d not been gone so long. She took his blood pressure, fine. She hadn’t abandoned him. Forty-five minutes, maximum, they’d been gone. But she’d been in the throes of another orgasm, she thought, while Jérôme cracked to the floor on his own. The fear he must have felt, as he lay there and realised he couldn’t move. All of that fear while she nuzzled her stupid face into Henri’s neck.
The diazepam had kicked in and he was mostly asleep, eyes flickering open now and again, the odd word coming from him, a little separate from him. She turned and saw Henri standing in the doorway, and the look on his face made something unbearable happen in her throat. The pain of it was startling. She turned back to Jérôme, watched him lying there clean and peaceful now, a bandage covering his chin, and she felt her shoulders moving independently of her. A sound came out through her throat: a clean, deep sound she didn’t recognise. Henri’s arms were around her then; she turned as he pulled her into them. She wept, and she was surprised by the sound her throat gave to the pain. She’d almost forgotten that pain could have a voice.
He carried her through to the kitchen, laid her down on the sofa with her head on his lap. He ran one hand over her hair, slowly and heavily, over and over. Like she was a small child, or an animal.
‘I thought,’ she said.
‘Shh,’ he said. ‘I know.’
But he didn’t know.
‘I thought I’d done it again.’
‘Done what?’
‘Killed someone,’ she said, and his hand stopped stroking her head. She felt her shoulders shake again. The tears stung as they slid out of the side of her eyes, collecting hot in her ear. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t pushed her away from him. His stroking had started again. One of his beautiful, rough hands, heavy as a paw on her head.
When she’d stopped crying she kept her eyes closed and told him about Cassandre.
* * *
• • •
She rose quietly from the bed and dressed. She opened and closed the door very carefully. Then she walked down the stairs in the full dark, letting it close in around her. She thought about her lack of fear now that Henri was here. All those nights she’d spent alone, terrified of everything outside.
Jérôme was asleep, his reedy fragile snore creaking in the room. She settled into his armchair, her legs tucked underneath her. Sitting was a little sore, as if she were bruised from Henri’s attention. It was a pleasant kind of pain.
‘You weren’t responsible, surely you see that,’ Henri had said.
‘But I was. Everyone said so.’
‘Who said so?’
‘My mother, for one.’ In the weeks after Cassandre had first been rushed into hospital, phone calls had battered the eerie stillness of their apartment. The first time her mother had confirmed what Marguerite had already known was just a few days in. She hadn’t known who was on the other end of the phone – she’d been trying to work it out when her mother had said, very plainly, in that new low voice she’d had since Cassandre had gone in, ‘The dreadful thing is that Margo knew she was ill. If she’d only woken us up, we could have got her to the hospital in time. These things are all about timing, stopping the swelling before it’s had time to damage too much. If we’d known even just a few hours sooner – if Margo had had the sense to wake us up – the situation would all be very different.’
Frances had looked up from the newspaper she was reading; Marguerite could still remember the wild look on her face. She’d stretched both hands out to clasp Marguerite’s.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Henri had said again, so firmly that he sounded angry. ‘How could you have known? You don’t even know if they could have stopped it at that stage.’ He’d shaken her shoulders. ‘Marguerite?’ He’d made her look him in the eye. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
But it was. Everyone knew it, though most didn’t tell her directly. She’d lost track of how many times she’d overheard people: friends at school, teachers, family friends. ‘Poor Margo, I don’t know how she’ll ever get over that.’ ‘Did you hear she knew Cass was ill? If only children knew these things, if she’d known they could have caught it in time.’ ‘I’ve told mine that they’re always to come to me, right away, if they ever know that one of the others is unwell . . .’
She would have preferred them to tell her directly – to punish her as she felt she deserved. But there was no punishment, no recrimination, in anything but her parents’ increased coldness and silence. They divorced four months after Cassandre was hospitalised, as they’d been trying to do for so long. Finally they felt they had an excuse. Frances, who had come back from England to stay with them as soon as Cassandre was admitted, was let go again. She had her own life now anyway, in her own country. Marguerite was too old for an au pair. Once Frances had left, there was no one who didn’t avoid Marguerite, slide around her, shrink back to make way. She had become an ill omen. But Henri hadn’t pushed her away. After she’d told him, he hadn’t let her go, and they’d gone to bed and drifted into sleep together, with her still there in the space he’d made between his arms.
* * *
• • •
‘Where were you?’
His voice sounded rubbery, untested. She opened her eyes; she hadn’t realised he was awake.
‘When?’
‘When I fell.’
She stood up and went over to him, poured water into his glass. ‘I had gone to the shop. I was only gone about half an hour.’
They looked at each other and then his eyes slid past her and she handed him the glass, helped him take it to his lips. He drank, staring ahead of him.
‘Does your chin hurt?’
‘Yes. Everything hurts.’
‘It’s almost breakfast time. I’ll get you some food.’
‘I hadn’t called for you, actually,’ he said. She looked at him lying there, blinking at her. With the bandage on his chin, his face looked crowded: its big nose, the watery eyes and full lips.
‘What do you mean?’
He tutted, sighed. ‘Yesterday. I didn’t need anything. I hadn’t called you to me.’
‘So why did you get up? Where were you trying—’
‘I—’ He stopped, looked away, looked back at her. His mouth opened, he made the shape of a word, but he didn’t speak. He closed his eyes and she waited, but still he didn’t speak.
‘I’ll go and get some food.’
He opened his eyes then, but he couldn’t quite look at her and she realised that he was embarrassed. ‘I wanted to see if I could,’ he said, and she waited. ‘Walk on my own. For some reason I got it into my head that I could.’
How could he have thought that? she wondered. She hadn’t thought he could even sit up on his own any more. She couldn’t imagine how he had mustered the strength to get himself to standing.
‘No, I got my answer,’ he said. ‘I’ll never be able to walk on my own again, that’s the end of it,’ and she thought that she couldn’t bear the look on his face, that she would do anything to be able to distract him from those thoughts.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there.’
‘Well, me too,’ he snapped, looking up at her, and she remembered that he’d told her something about woodlice, once, and a dream in which he’d fallen and she’d been right there to pick him up. She wanted to hide her face from him. She turned, walked to the door, opened it, and then he said, ‘Lucky that Henri happened to visit at that moment.’
She nodded, tried to hold his gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘He must have got quite a fright.’
‘I’m sure—’
‘It’s good of him to make these visits.’ He blinked, eyes wide, and she nodded again. ‘I do hope he’ll come again.’
* * *
• • •
He came into the kitchen from outside, flinching briefly in a shaft of sunlight, and it occurred to her that she must look terrible. He stepped forwards and took her to him, and his body was warm, smelt of something particular she thought she was coming to learn. She was seized, then, by the fact that she would lose him too.
‘I wish I could make you happy,’ he said.
She detached herself from him, went to wash her hands at the sink. ‘Do you think anyone’s really happy?’ she asked.
He thought for a moment, looked out of the window into the garden. The sound of birds and insects, the pretty fluttering of light and shadow on the grass under the olive trees, all seemed to her to belong to a different world.
‘No, I suppose not.’
She realised her question hadn’t been kind. She reached for his hand, hooked two fingers onto his. He looked at her, smiled faintly, looked back out of the window.
‘But I’ve been a lot happier over the last few days than I can remember being,’ he said, and she wished she could feel the giddiness she knew that should make her feel, but instead all she could feel was dread. It wouldn’t last. It never did. She mustn’t think that it would. He was looking at her, and she realised she must say something, but she couldn’t.
‘You’ve gone away somewhere,’ he said. He held her waist, kissed her forehead. ‘I’m going to go back to the garden. There’s coffee.’
