Marguerite, page 34
He turned to look out at the garden. The stubborn, unstoppable beauty of a summer’s dawn turning into morning.
‘You have to remember that I’m a farmer,’ he said finally, spying the way that he might open up a path to break through her silence. ‘To me, life and death aren’t what they are to most people. I’ve never been very good at sickness; I don’t have an instinct for how to care for people or animals.’
He thought of his mother when she’d been close to the end, and how for all the pain and sadness of her vulnerability he had felt something remarkably close to impatience as he watched her struggle to hold on. He’d vowed that, like his father, he would simply close his eyes and wait for the end, once it was time, that he’d not fight against it.
‘On the farm, if something is healthy – a crop, or an animal – it works, it thrives. If it’s not healthy, it no longer thrives and it no longer has its place amongst the rest of the farm. Of course, I know that’s not the same for human life, I’m not saying that it is. Humans don’t have to fulfil a purpose in the same way, or do a job, they don’t have to be healthy to thrive, they don’t have to thrive to justify their existence. But—’ and he cast around, unsure for a moment what he did mean, unsure of how to make her understand that to him, very simply, forcing life beyond its natural extension didn’t make any sense.
‘But just because we’re human doesn’t mean we should live at any cost. We shouldn’t live at the expense of life. Once we’ve got past the point where life is being lived, we shouldn’t have to cling on to it as if it has absolute value, in and of itself. When someone has come to their end, their real end, then it’s no longer life we’re giving them by keeping it going. It’s not life, it’s not death.’ He thought for a moment of Vanille, her sagging jowls in his hand, the dull desperation in her eyes. ‘It’s punishment.’
He turned, and she was sitting upright now, staring at the cup of coffee in her hands.
‘I’m not being articulate,’ he said, and he hated that he wasn’t. ‘I’m not making sense.’
‘You are.’
She picked up the coffee, blew into the cup, put it back down.
‘I have no knowledge, no idea about the medical world, about your job and the intricacies of disease and injury. But what I’m trying to say is that I trust your instincts for understanding the point at which life ends. I trust that you would have known, would have acted only out of love and kindness. As a nurse, and as her family. Even,’ he said, and he came to sit down next to her, ‘as a human.’
He watched her profile, the straight nose and mouth that he thought painfully lovely, and he was going to try again, to cast around again for the right words, force some meaning into them that might unlock her, when she spoke.
‘I’ve thought so much about what it means to be human. Sometimes I’ve thought that it is having autonomy, just the ability to make choices and decisions. Sometimes I’ve thought that it’s communication. And maybe that’s right, maybe without communication – not words, I mean, but anything; the ability to show your pain, or fear, or hunger, in some way, even just with your eyes, or hands, or whatever it might be – maybe without that you find yourself cut off from living among humans. But Cassandre could communicate, still, even long past when she stopped speaking, and yet even when she was communicating, so loudly it seemed to tear her lungs and no one could bear to be in the same room as her, even then I could see that humanity had been snatched away from her. It had been stolen. By the end, the place she was occupying was a place you or I have never been, even in our worst nightmares.’ She met his eyes then, and she looked furious. ‘Whatever we think we’ve suffered, it’s been nothing, nothing compared to that.’ She looked down, her expression calming, and he saw that that fury was her confession. She tugged her hands so that two knuckles cracked. ‘It was no longer a human place. It was a place of the very purest suffering. Worse than Christ.’
Henri watched her face, her straight lips closed gently now into silence, and he wanted to say, how beautifully you speak, wanted to tell her that she could be so much more than she was, this creature of silence, if only she’d give herself permission. Instead he stroked the side of her face with his hand, pulled her head forwards so that he could kiss her forehead. It was very cool. He rested his lips on it and closed his eyes, trying to cast the feel of her skin into his memory.
‘You’re remarkable,’ he said, and he felt her shake her head. He forced her chin up with his hand so that she looked at him. ‘You are. You have to promise me that when you go away from here you’ll make a life for yourself. I think you’ve been serving out a sentence you set yourself when you were fifteen. I think everything you do is in some way penance. I can’t tell you how important it is that you stop doing that.’ She looked at him, unspeaking. ‘You don’t have to cut out joy from your life because of what your sister suffered. I would say, even, that you owe it to her to go and live properly, a proper life.’
‘I don’t deserve it,’ she said, shaking her head again.
‘But you do. You never did anything wrong. You’ve been paying the price for a random, cruel illness that had nothing to do with you.’ He wanted to shake her into understanding that, but he could see how obstinately she’d made herself believe that it was her fault. Perhaps that was an easier way of understanding what had happened than the knowledge that it was a simple, meaningless tragedy, the kind that happens everywhere, all the time, to anyone. She couldn’t accept that even her sister was not special enough to evade it; no one was. He thought that perhaps if he had years to spend with her he might start to break down her obstinacy, the devotion with which she’d betrothed herself to this belief. But they didn’t have that time.
‘If you won’t believe it wasn’t your fault,’ he said, and he pulled away from her a little so that he could really focus on her face when he said it, ‘you must at least believe me when I say I think you did the bravest thing for your sister that any human being could do.’
Because it was, he thought. It was a truly horrifying thing to have done, a horrifying act of love and courage, something he didn’t think he would have had the strength to do himself.
‘But Jérôme is right,’ he said. ‘You have to go away.’
‘I’m scared,’ she said, and her eyes filled slowly with tears, until she had to close them and they ran down the sloping plains of her face. He held her head in his hands, her forehead once more against his lips, and he said that she mustn’t be, that she was very strong and that she of all people could do it, and he wondered whether they were talking about the running away or the thing he imagined she found most terrifying of all: trying to live a proper life, for herself.
* * *
• • •
After she had taken Jérôme his breakfast, Henri asked to go in and see the old man and she left them in the room together. She didn’t know where to start preparing for going away, still couldn’t understand that this could be real, so instead she left the house and turned out of the driveway and broke into a slow jog, building up her speed gradually as the track darkened with forest. A few minutes in, she heard a rustling among the trees to her right and she thought she saw movement and was overcome with terror, turning and sprinting back to the gates of the house.
Back inside she took sprays and unguents out from under the sink and she went about cleaning the kitchen, sorting the cupboards, throwing out the spongy stubs of vegetables from the fridge, scrubbing the spaces of the hob, the sticky grease of the extractor fan. Next she cleaned upstairs, ending with the old room of Thibault’s she’d occupied at the beginning. When she’d finished, she sat on the edge of the small bed in that room and she looked at the broken chair and the detached wardrobe door resting against the wall and thought of the version of herself that had sat there so many times before Henri had started visiting the house, and she saw clearly that something had changed in her between now and that time. Looking back at the interminable days and weeks she’d lived in this room before him, she had the feeling of looking at something murky, something half in shadow.
She stood and went down to him then. He wanted to speak to her about Jérôme, about logistics, but she didn’t let him just yet. They had sex, the air still pinched with the smell of bleach, and as they did she thought that one day she would look back at this, this ability she once had to take him inside her without a word, and she would see the self that she was at this moment as something out of shadow; that for all the terror she felt in the woods and the pain with which she thought of the old man down the corridor, she became fleetingly, as Henri’s body was locked into hers, a thing in the light, at last.
* * *
• • •
They had worked out a plan, between them. Jérôme had given orders and Henri had made phone calls and from tomorrow morning there would begin a rotation of visiting nurses, no one person to live there all the time but a revolving team of them, overseen by the village doctor, who would come to Rossignol to assess Jérôme the following afternoon and twice weekly from then on. She was to call her agency, hand in her notice, pretend to see out the notice period in the hope that the agency didn’t hear anything from Jean-Christophe or anyone else before it expired. Jérôme’s lawyer would be visiting, too, in the coming days, and Jérôme would tell him he’d given away the cash he’d held in the house – to diffuse, unnamed beneficiaries – and he would have Monsieur Richoux type up a reference for her, dictated by Jérôme, which would be sent to her so that she could practise again in future if the worst didn’t come to the worst. That was a kindness she couldn’t have anticipated, she thought, something she would never have imagined from Jérôme. And it continued: she must keep the car, she must take the cash, enough to keep her going for a good while, said Henri, and she couldn’t bear to hear how much. Then he looked down and said that she must do her handover and leave immediately the following morning, and stay away until all talk of investigations was over.
‘And Jérôme?’ she asked.
‘What of Jérôme? Jérôme will be fine. He’ll have all the medical attention he needs.’
‘He wanted to die under my care,’ she said, and Henri took her hand in his.
‘He does,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t want you to be taken away from here. He wants you to leave while you can. He thinks, we both think, that all of JC’s fear-mongering is baseless, that there’s nothing that can touch you. But it’s best to be safe. He wanted you to have that money anyway, and the car. This is just you taking it earlier than you were going to, and going away for a while just to make sure that you don’t get stuck in something pernicious and unpleasant, something dangerous.’
And you? she wanted to ask but couldn’t, and so instead she asked him if he would stay until she left in the morning and he smiled, the hushing sound of the start of a laugh in the back of his throat, and he blinked slowly and said of course he was going to do that, but only if she promised to feed him because he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her cooking since he’d left the house. She smiled and nodded, and she was glad that they were pretending everything was going to be all right when they both knew that it wasn’t, for either of them – even in the best possible scenario, in which she was never held accountable for what she’d done to Cassandre.
* * *
• • •
Sitting at her place at the table in his room, watching again as he tried to negotiate a spoon between shuddering fingers, she said, even though she felt sure he would not let her continue, ‘I’m very grateful, and very sorry.’
He dropped the spoon. He was tired, she thought. Weary to his bones.
‘You’re not to bother with all that,’ he said. ‘I’m not helping you out to be kind or because I think you’re special.’ He frowned down towards his feet at the end of the bed and, with his chin bowed to his chest and neck slumped forwards like a turtle, his broad mouth stretched wide, sulky, he looked immensely ugly. ‘I just don’t want the money going to my sons, they’ve got enough what with this place and shares and savings and what they already got when Céline died. Yes, the Napoleonic law has me in a bind, otherwise I’d be divesting them of some assets too.’ He stared at his food, looked at her, looked back down the bed. ‘No, you’re not special. I’m not helping you for any other reason than that you probably don’t deserve to go to prison, which is frankly where you’ve got yourself headed without my intervention. God knows you don’t deserve my help – you’re a bloody fool, and reckless to boot – but no, you don’t quite deserve prison.’ He took up the spoon again. ‘So do what I say, take the car and the cash, get going as soon as you can tomorrow morning and let some more competent professionals take over my care.’
She swallowed, felt the blood burn underneath the skin of her cheeks. He could still hurt her.
‘I won’t take it, then,’ she said, and a flash of fury crossed over his face.
‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t be noble,’ he said. ‘It’s too late to pretend you’ve got morals. Take the bloody cash. You’re doing me a favour: I don’t want it, I’ve got no use for it. I’m telling you to take it, that’s my command and God knows you at least owe it to me to do me that last great service. Since you’ve been having an affair under my roof, and since you’re leaving me just as I make my final, shabby crawl into the ground.’ He licked his lips with a pale tongue. ‘You either take it or you burn it. Now get out of here, take this foul food with you, and go and spread your legs for Henri like you’re so fond of doing. You may as well make yourself useful to someone.’
She wanted to spit in his face as she took the tray from his lap. She walked from the room and slammed the door behind her, something she’d never done before, the whole time she’d been here, however hard she’d been pushed. Her hands were shaking just like Jérôme’s as she tried to clear the lunch things away, and when Henri tried to hold her she pulled away.
‘He’s a monster,’ she said.
‘Yes, he can be. Don’t let him get to you.’
‘The things he can say,’ she said.
‘He wants your anger,’ he said. ‘He wants this response. It’s his way of coping with you leaving.’
‘He’s desperate for me to leave. After all of this, after everything I’ve put up with—’
And he had got her into the situation with Jean-Christophe, with the care home. If it hadn’t been for his vile games, for the way he’d used her to goad his sons, there would have been no investigations, no medical lawyers, no one going to the care home to pick around among the bones she’d left behind. That was surely the only reason he was doing anything to help her now: he knew that all of this was his fault.
‘I’m not going to take his money,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’
‘You must. You need it.’
‘I have money of my own.’
‘Enough to keep you going for a while?’
‘No.’
She looked out at the sunshine outside and she wanted to shake the house away from her, shake the old man’s sour air from around her shoulders.
‘I’m going to take some now and buy us champagne,’ she said, looking at Henri. ‘Champagne and lobsters for dinner.’
He smiled, and she loved the way his flesh crinkled at the sides of his eyes, this stranger whom she suddenly knew and would just as suddenly not.
* * *
• • •
She hadn’t been able to find lobster. They drank champagne in the garden, sitting on the grass among lanterns filled with candles, as the darkness fell, until Henri confessed that he didn’t like champagne very much, and she took his and drank it for him. She thought that the delicate flutes that she’d found and dusted off looked odd in his large cracked hands, and she felt sad that he looked embarrassed when he admitted that he preferred wine. They ate monkfish and it was good but not perfect, just a touch overcooked, though he said he didn’t think it was, and then they set their plates aside and lay back on the grass and lay there together, head to head, for a very long time, insects creeping in the grass by their ears and under their necks. He talked a little about his childhood, about the boredom of his teenage years on the farm, and she wanted to ask about how he had discovered his feelings for other boys and whether he had had them for girls, too, and whether he’d been in love with Thibault and whether anything had ever happened between them, but she didn’t. Instead, she listened, and avoided her own childhood, and let the lovely, glossed-over memories he had of this house and this garden float around between them.
When they were tired they cleared away their food and went upstairs. They made love for the last time in the big bed they’d shared and she felt shy under the pressure of momentousness, as if it must be different from how it had been before, a summation of everything that had come before. Of course it couldn’t be and for the first time she felt glad when it was over, when she could lie with the back of her body fitted into the front of his and wait for sleep. She didn’t think she’d sleep, and for a while she lay while his breathing changed, listening to the rich, rustling night outside the windows that she’d spent so many evenings dreading, but then she too became overwhelmed with tiredness, the tiredness of a child.
It was the thickest, blackest part of the night when she awoke to Jérôme’s knocks and went downstairs. He was pallid, his temperature raised, his forehead dankly damp, and he was in very great pain, so much pain that his face was contorted with it. He was sick, heaving drily over the plastic bowl she pulled under his chin, vomiting water and the foam of undigested painkillers. He writhed, turning his head from side to side on the pillow, and in one of the moments in which the convulsions had abated just a little he grabbed her arm, the strength of his grip surprising, and looked up into her face with very wide eyes, his breath acrid as eggs, and stared, breathing sharply, as if he were looking for something in her that he’d lost.
