Marguerite, page 32
‘Well . . .’ he said, and she frowned.
‘For God’s sake, you’re clearly not a homosexual. Unless you’ve been playing brother and sister with that nurse for the past five days, which I very much doubt. So we can just forget about all of that.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Will you stay?’
He looked down at his hands, waited for the thoughts to still in his mind.
‘You know that girl will lose her job if you don’t?’
He looked up.
‘Oh yes. I’ll make sure of that. The only reason I haven’t got her sacked already is because I’m trying to keep a lid on that rumour, too. For your sake.’
‘Jérôme already knows.’
Her head pulled back a little, like she’d been slapped, but then she shook her head.
‘And his sons? They don’t know yet. The nursing agency doesn’t know. She’ll be sacked in an instant if I make a call. Those boys already want to get rid of her.’ She saw, then, that she’d got through to him; her eyes widened, she nodded quickly. ‘Oh yes. Jean-Christophe called after their recent visit, asking all sorts of questions. He said he didn’t trust her; he said that he was looking into something dodgy about her past, something about getting a medical lawyer involved.’
‘I don’t want to hear your poisonous rumours, Brigitte.’
‘Well, just so you know. She’s not the pretty picture you no doubt think she is. One phone call, Henri, and she’s gone. And I very much doubt she’d be able to get another job in a hurry with this on her record.’
He shifted and Jojo barked, once. Brigitte was watching him.
‘So will you stay?’
‘I’m going to be back at the farm, for now,’ he said, slowly, and he saw the relief pass over her face like a shadow. ‘Whilst we work everything out. I need to go to bed now so I can get in a full day tomorrow. I’ll sleep in the spare room.’
He didn’t wait for her to respond, and as he made his way up the stairs he thought of her tearing Marguerite’s herbs from the ground with her large pink hands, but his anger was tempered now. She was right: his crimes were surely worse. Only there had been no option; none of it had been a choice. It was all he could have done.
Marguerite would sleep well, he thought, without him to keep her awake. She’d sleep, and each of their bodies would lie untouched these few kilometres apart. He settled into the stale spare bed and looked through the darkness at the room he’d slept in as a child, as a virgin. He’d been born in this house, within these walls, just as his father had, just like all the thousands of creatures on the farm that had been birthed and born breech and been stillborn or had lived and reproduced and gone on to die.
Marguerite had told him he wouldn’t be able to move somewhere else with her, and she was right. He’d known it, really, when she’d said it, and now he felt the knowledge like a weight against his chest. Tomorrow he’d wake up at first light and he’d walk out onto his land and work, and he’d keep doing that until he’d seen out his useful time here, just like one of the animals. Then he’d die, where the soil still smelt like home.
21
Come on then,’ Jérôme said when she came into his room with his lunch. ‘Tell me what you bought.’
She placed the food down on the tray over his lap, watched his fingers shake as he grasped the spoon.
‘They’re all just things designed to make you more comfortable,’ she said, and he nodded and rolled his eyes.
‘Yes yes. So bring them in then.’
She went out and with dread she carried in the boxes of things she’d bought in the great hangar-like store outside Pontoux.
‘You’ll be using this for your toilet,’ she said, her hand on the box containing the commode. ‘We won’t—’ She stopped. They wouldn’t have to stagger to the bathroom together each time he needed to shit, she could have said, her neck twisted under his arm, or use the too-small bedpan when he couldn’t make it in time. But he didn’t need to hear that. And he didn’t look up; he had lifted the spoon full of rice to his mouth and as he waited his hands shook and most of the rice fell down his front. He dropped the spoon to the tray, didn’t try to push any more food onto it.
‘And these look scary but they’re not,’ she said, holding up the box of convenes though he still wasn’t looking. ‘They’re convene catheters; they’re much better than what you might have experienced in the past.’
‘Funnily enough, I haven’t experienced a great many catheters in the past,’ he said.
‘We’ll try out the bath seat this evening.’
‘A veritable treat,’ he said, trying now to shovel a new pile of rice from the plate to the spoon. It was slow work. ‘How will I be able to contain my excitement?’
She pulled the chair near to the bed, sat down. ‘Would a bigger spoon be easier?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘and you may as well just feed me while you’re at it. Or no, whizz the whole thing up into a milkshake and give me a straw.’
He caught her eye and she saw fear in his face, for all his deadpan bravado. She knew that look intimately now, the very same as when he looked out of the window each night, into the darkness outside.
‘I’ve got no appetite for this dross.’
‘Can you at least try?’
‘I can’t face it.’
‘It would be good to have just three mouthfuls.’
‘No.’ He folded his lips over each other, and she noticed the burst veins on the tip of his nose, little purple stars like sea anemones. She took the plate from him, stood up.
‘Well, I’ve got just the thing then,’ and she left the room, coming back with the coffee-glazed éclair on a plate, and he smiled in spite of himself.
‘Making me fat,’ he said, and she looked at the hollow scoops under his cheekbones, the rubbery tendons of his neck, the bulbous clavicles beneath, and nodded.
‘You have me sussed,’ she said.
He ate almost the whole thing, slowly, and then she lifted him with difficulty into a sitting position so that he could piss into the pan. Then he slumped back down into the bed and looked up at her, face yellow-grey against the white of the pillow.
‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Brown as a nut.’
‘I should get out of the sun.’
‘It suits you,’ he said. ‘You’ve never looked so well.’
She felt the faint beginnings of a blush, and looked away. ‘There’s some post for you here,’ she said, and put a few letters down on his bedside table, including one with a handwritten address – surely the only handwritten letter, she thought, he’d received for some time.
He nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I’ll sleep now. You go and do whatever it is you do now he’s gone.’
He opened one eye then, studying her face, and she turned, the weight of it all like a stone in her stomach, and left the room.
* * *
• • •
When she came in to check on him in the afternoon, she found him wide awake, staring ahead, a torn envelope in his hand. He didn’t look at her until she’d crossed his line of vision, standing at the sink at the foot of his bed, and then he studied her face, eyes wide, and it was as if he’d never seen her before.
* * *
• • •
He was silent and watchful as she took him to the bath using his new stick for support. He kept his silence as she put him into the new bath seat; he didn’t complain as she lowered him down clunkily, knock-kneed and naked, nor when, back in his bedroom, she fixed the condom of the convene over his penis. His docility was unsettling.
When she had got him back into bed she lay a towel out under his lower legs and massaged oil into them, his short straight calves, almost hairless, and the bulb-like ankle bones and knuckles of his toes, swollen and distorted with arthritis. As she massaged him she found him watching her again, mournfully, eyes large and watery in his head, so that she was moved to ask him if he was all right. He didn’t respond, looking away and staring down towards the end of the bed, his mouth drawn down into a crescent like a sad puppet.
She read a few pages and then finally he spoke: he asked her to stop, said he wasn’t in the mood, and she put the book aside, prepared his room for bedtime.
‘The post you gave me,’ he said when she was at the sink. ‘Some of it was five days old.’
She turned her back to him, rinsed out his glass. ‘That’s often the case. I only collect it once a week or so.’
‘Well, I wish you’d got it to me sooner.’
She rolled her eyes, she didn’t have the energy for one of his tirades, but he didn’t follow up on it and took his pills in silence, the mournful look in his eyes again as he watched her, and she started to feel uncomfortable in his silence.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked him, wary that he would snap as he always did when she asked questions like that, particularly for a second time, but he simply shrugged and looked away. She switched off his bedside light, left him to sleep. When she’d eaten she went upstairs and ran a bath of her own, Jérôme’s watchful silence still beating like a physical presence around her. She looked down the length of her body in the water, the body Henri had made his, and she closed her eyes and felt tears slide from the corners of her eyes, into her hair and her ears.
* * *
• • •
She hadn’t yet got to sleep when Jérôme knocked for her.
‘I thought you were asleep,’ she said when she came into his room, his bedside lamp already on.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Do you want to take something?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’
She sat at the chair by his table, and he looked at her, took a deep breath. ‘You’re going to have to leave,’ he said, and she felt her chest kick.
‘What?’
‘I don’t want you to,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, it’s the very last thing I want.’ He lifted his shaking hands, rubbed them over his face, the short white hairs covering his cheeks and chin and jaw where he needed a shave. ‘If I could have my way,’ he said after a while, hands dropping to his sides, ‘I’d say nothing and try to have you stay here until I die. Don’t think I haven’t considered that. As I’m sure you know by now, I’m no saint. But I’ve thought about it, and I’ve realised I just can’t let that happen.’
‘Let what happen?’ she asked. ‘What’s happening?’
‘You’ll have to read the letter I opened this afternoon,’ he said. ‘It’s from Jean-Christophe, the little worm.’
She watched him, feeling sick, and then she stood up and opened the drawer of the table where he’d let her put away the post he’d read and didn’t want thrown away.
‘Wait,’ he said, before she took the handwritten letter, and she held it in her hand and watched him, felt her hand shake like his. ‘Before you read it . . .’ He waited, looked away, folded his lips inwards as he thought. ‘No, don’t worry, best to read the thing first.’
She sat back down and looked at the page, felt him watching her as she read. Dear Father, it started, You’ll forgive the formal nature of this letter but what I’m writing about is, as you’ll see, of a particularly sensitive nature. After our last visit to see you at Rossignol, I left with a deeply uncomfortable feeling about your current nurse, Mlle Demers, whom I am of course aware I hired in the first place – something that now gives me cause for great regret, and again I do ask your forgiveness . . . She felt the heat rise to her face and something else rising up from deep within, up from her stomach through her chest, into her gullet and onto her tongue so that it felt heavy in her mouth, metallic, as if she couldn’t have spoken. She was calm, and horrified, and the words she read – even ‘her sister, a patient there who was, by all accounts, most severely damaged’ – felt like something she’d read before or known she would read in her future, so that they weren’t a surprise at all but the intimate words of a document read and examined and re-examined.
. . . I simply had to have a few questions asked, via a contact I have through work who specialises in clinical cases of this kind – the kind that actually wind up in official proceedings, that is – and deeply concerning accounts arose. It appears the manager of the care home passed the official line that Mlle Demers had had no involvement and so all was put to rest and indeed buried, on paper, but as with all these things there was still a number of individuals whose suspicion and discomfort had persisted long past the inquest . . .
She pictured those individuals – she knew them exactly, and she felt hatred rise like a pulse in her neck. I have contacted the manager, and do think that with some legal pressure and on the insistence of the nursing agency with whom Mlle Demers is currently filed, there’s a strong chance they’ll be persuaded to re-open the investigation. Of course, I (and, I am sure, you too) hope to find that absolutely nothing untoward went on, but I think you’ll agree that the circumstances do seem simply too convenient for words, and that in a country in which euthanasia is rightly – given the grave ramifications it would have for the security of all the nation’s most needy and vulnerable – categorically illegal, a serious criminal offence, one can almost imagine how a desperate and unhinged young woman might take it upon herself . . .
She couldn’t look at him. She let the paper rest on her lap, and she gazed at the floor just past her feet in her scuffed slippers, looked at the little chips in the stone from years of use. She imagined those three men as young boys, running past her feet and back out of the room, and it was not difficult to picture Jean-Christophe’s chubby face as a little boy, his rosy cheeks and fair hair, a child with the power within him to reach into the future and lay a snake into the pit of her past.
It is not, needless to say, my usual wont to get involved in something of this nature, and you’ll appreciate that if the matter didn’t have the most severe implications regarding your own safety and wellbeing . . .
She heard the paper start to crunch in her hand, and loosened her grip, lifted the letter and let it rest on the table beside her. She wouldn’t speak to Jérôme, she thought. She couldn’t bring herself to say a word. She would simply pack up and leave. She stood and felt the room spin and adjust, not unpleasantly.
‘Marguerite,’ he said, as she made to leave the room, and she stopped in the doorway, one hand resting on its frame, her head bowed. ‘I would have left that poisonous letter to rot in the desk,’ he said, and she let herself meet his eyes then. ‘I hope you know that.’ His eyes were wide, more serious than she’d ever seen them. ‘But I can’t let it rest because I’m afraid you might be in serious trouble, and for all I’d like to let you risk it and stay with me until the end, I’m afraid I’ve had to reckon with myself and I simply wouldn’t be able to countenance it. You deserve more than that. Please sit down.’
She sat again, held her face in her hands.
‘In any case, if we’re going to be honest, I’m not at all sure your agency won’t be following up pretty soon with a letter of their own. If there’s an investigation, they’ll suspend you until it’s carried out. They’ll be watching their own backs.’
They sat in silence for what felt like many minutes. She couldn’t get her thoughts straight yet but she knew she would, she just needed to wait for the adrenaline to recede. Right now it was like waves at high tide, lapping relentlessly at her chest and distracting her from the letter’s shiny reality so that she felt alert and muddled and calm all at once.
‘I’m not going to ask you about what he’s referring to, because I don’t want to confuse things in case anything gets asked of me, but all I will say is that—’ He paused, waited. ‘I in fact, contrary to what Jean-Christophe says . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want to pass judgment on what you may or may not have done. I trust you.’
She leant back in her chair, stared up at the ceiling, exhaled so deeply that she felt physically lighter.
‘So we’re at a deadlock,’ he said. ‘Except actually we aren’t, because the one thing we do know is that you’re going to need to go away from here.’
‘I can’t escape an investigation,’ she said.
‘You certainly can. And if you don’t, you’re the idiot I suspected you were for a long time.’ For the first time that evening, she recognised the expression on his face. ‘Yes, you’re an idiot if you don’t get the hell out. Go on a very long holiday. Out of the country, I’m talking about. You think they’ll let you go anywhere once an investigation’s open?’ She felt the horror stir within, and she wished he’d stop talking just for a moment. She wasn’t ready to formulate thoughts, a plan. She wasn’t ready to accept that this in any way resembled an externally quantifiable reality, that she might wake up in the morning to find that the letter still existed when the sun was shining and the day well underway.
‘You’ve presumably got plenty of money set aside after working here all these months, living like a monk. And in any case . . .’ He looked down at his hands and up again, his mouth twitching with something smug, proud. ‘I was going to wait but I’ll let you know now that I’ve had a decent amount of cash set aside in the house for a long time now. I don’t believe in keeping everything tied up in the bank, never have. I’ve already mentioned to my lawyer that I was intending to leave most of it for you, was going to confirm it with him next time we spoke.’
‘You can’t—’ she began, and he shook his head.
‘Don’t try to persuade me, or thank me.’ He sniffed. ‘I’d already decided on it. I don’t want those vultures getting hold of it. They’re getting more than enough already through shares and assets, including this place, of course. No, I’ll speak to Monsieur Richoux and I’ll tell him I’ve given it away in various anonymous charitable donations, otherwise they’ll think you’ve stolen it of course. You could do without that extra trouble.’
