Marguerite, page 35
‘I don’t want to die,’ he hissed, his pupils large in his eyes. ‘I don’t want to die, I’m not ready, I’m not ready,’ he moaned and then his head sank back into the pillow and his face creased like a child and tears slid from his eyes as he wailed. It was a quiet, high-pitched sound, like the creaking of a door, and it continued until the pain rose again, silencing his voice into nothing more than panting breath. She watched him, holding his hand, its grip at times so vice-like that she winced as the knuckles of her fingers were squeezed together – until finally, so precariously and gradually that she felt she had to hold her breath, he had fallen asleep.
She tucked her body back into the folds of Henri’s and lay there, his breath warm and rhythmic on her neck. She dreamt of nothing.
IV
23
They called him when it was time; he’d asked that they did. He had promised Marguerite, in the still cool of dawn when they’d lain awake together, facing each other on that bed for the last time, that he would be there when Jérôme died. She’d looked grey and drawn in the morning half-light, her expression very solemn, as it had been the first few times he’d met her.
‘You promise you will.’
‘I promise.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘I don’t mind.’ Even though he hated sickness, had no desire to see another old man die.
And he didn’t mind, he found, as he washed himself in a cool bath at noon, his duties for the day cut off early and left for Paul to take over. He dressed in a crisp blue shirt, one of his smartest. Brigitte eyed him as he came into the kitchen, wet hair cool against his temples.
‘So you’re going to go and watch him die?’ she asked, her voice low.
‘I promised I would.’
‘Don’t worry about the farm, of course,’ she said. ‘Just leave me and Paul to pick up where you left off, we’re used to that. God forbid we get in the way of your sacred duty.’ He didn’t answer, drank a glass of water down. ‘Perhaps you should just get a job as a nurse yourself,’ she said, and he put the glass down. ‘They do have male nurses, you know,’ she continued. ‘Especially your lot. You’d fit right in.’
‘Goodbye, Brigitte,’ he said, and he bent down to take Jojo’s silky face in his hands, kissed her between the eyes.
* * *
• • •
Jérôme seemed scarcely to have spoken, ever since Marguerite had left. Henri had visited him twice, but the old man had barely registered his presence. He was concentrating on dying, Henri thought. It was his time. He had nothing left to keep him going.
He could smell how imminent it was as soon as he entered the room. The nurse left him and he pulled up a chair, quietly, and sat a little way from the bed. She had opened the windows wide, and as he sat there he watched the branches of olive trees moving lightly against the sky.
Occasionally he looked down at Jérôme, lying like a small creature in the bed. His breathing had taken control of him. It was separate from him. He spoke occasionally, grunting formless words and gurning, his jaw pulled down so that it showed how long his bottom teeth were. A scum mark of dried blood marked his teeth halfway down, like the line of seaweed left on a beach by the tide. The smell of his breath was strange: it was something oaty and old, something that no longer had anything to do with food. His irises were faded and misty, his eyeballs mustard-coloured. There were large purple bruises on his hands and wrists, just under the skin, like clusters of grapes that had been trodden underfoot.
‘I promised her I’d be here,’ Henri said loudly, leaning forward as if his words might better penetrate the gulf that seemed to stretch out between the old man and him. ‘She wanted me to be here. She cared very much.’
The old man mumbled, bottom lip pulled right down. His eyes slid over Henri’s face. Henri leant back in the chair and he looked back out of the window, at the trees he used to climb, the odd cloud passing by, very high overhead. He thought of the pride with which Jérôme had spoken of Marguerite, when Henri had asked to see him, to make arrangements for what she should do about Jean-Christophe’s letter.
‘A queer little thing,’ he’d said, ‘but she’s got backbone. I’d have liked a child like that.’ He’d spoken of his own children, the sons who’d disappointed him. ‘I don’t care what people achieve at work, how much they earn. I don’t even care what they do in their private lives.’ He’d eyed Henri then, and for a moment Henri had wondered what he knew about him. ‘What I care about is: are they reaching their moral potential? Do they have mettle? That’s why that boy drove me so mad,’ he’d said, and Henri had known he was speaking of Thibault. ‘His potential was sky high, but he never met it.’
Henri had thought then of how badly Jérôme had gone wrong, because mettle wasn’t the only way to measure people. By that metric, Jérôme would be a great man, but there were other things, surely. Kindness, humanity, things he associated with Marguerite far more than just backbone.
But he was right that she was a far greater person than the sons he had poisoned with his skewed metrics, his impossible standards. And then he’d been vile to her, made her hate him, and Henri had never told her the good things he’d said.
Jérôme grunted, mumbling again, an urgency to the jumbled words he squeezed out between the long, scum-marked teeth. His head rolled from left to right on the pillow every few minutes, eyes searching the ceiling. His hands kept rising up to grasp something; they’d settle on the rails of the bed, he’d grip those. Or he’d pluck restlessly at the sheets. It was all as if there were something he must try to remember, something he’d lost or forgotten, something that was just there, just there – if he could only catch it before it slipped away.
* * *
• • •
Henri left the house, let the nurse do what she needed to do with Jérôme’s body. He took a cup of coffee down to the stump of the oak tree he’d felled with Thierry and Rémy, the stump he’d pretended to examine for signs of disease as an excuse to stay a little longer with Marguerite, before they’d put a voice to what was happening between them. In that quiet, funny time – just days, he thought, before they’d had the courage to acknowledge the pulsing cord stretching out from one of them to the other, binding them together, invisible.
He thought of Jérôme’s hands as he plucked at the sheets, and then for a moment he thought of the young girl Marguerite had nursed, imagined her small hands, smooth and perhaps a little square, like her sister’s. Her life had become a prison at the end, Marguerite had said, unnatural. He thought of Marguerite’s face, the cool skin of her forehead under his lips, tried to imagine her expression as she reached forwards to release her sister.
He would not live imprisoned, not any more. And he would not live like Jérôme, dogged by anger and regret. He wouldn’t spend his final moments like that, searching wildly for all the things he hadn’t said and hadn’t done. He wouldn’t die still grasping.
He sat down on the stump of the tree, placed his coffee down beside him. He watched as the cup fell dumbly onto its side and the liquid spread, slowly, into the prickly grass, into the dark soil, and he didn’t try to stop it. He watched it and then he closed his eyes and inhaled, heard a great rush of air gathering in the forest behind him, smelt the pine and earth and whatever else it was that laced the air here, ripe and dark and beautiful. He felt it cool his face, wash the stale smell of death right away. He wouldn’t live like Jérôme. He had a choice, of course.
* * *
• • •
He could hear the water as soon as he cut the engine, that distant hum. It got louder as he strode upwards through the forest, his legs light and quick, and by the time he reached the clearing it was all he could hear, a constant roar.
He climbed up to the diving spot and he undressed, let his clothes fall to the ground beside him. He ran his hands over his body. His chest, alive with breath. His taut stomach, the hair that started at its base. For most of his life, he’d barely allowed his body what it had needed. He’d fed it, kept it clean and exercised and strong, but he’d only very sporadically let it take what it wanted. All those years upon countless years of privation, of shame and guilt. At least recently he’d put an end to that.
He crouched carefully, squatted, breathed in the air rising from the rocks and water beneath him, air charged with moisture. Wet and electric as the earth, the soil of his farm, the roots of plants and herbs, the warm breath that shoots from the nostrils of an animal.
This had always been his favourite time of day, the light falling, earth cooling. Time for a beer, for a bath. In that sliver of life he’d allowed himself at Rossignol with Marguerite, it was the time when she’d come into the kitchen with Jérôme’s tray, clear away his dinner things and pour them each a glass of wine. The beginning of their time. He hoped that right now she wasn’t alone, that she was happy with the English woman. Every day for the last few weeks he’d followed her in his mind, imagined going to meet her somewhere in England, seeing whether they couldn’t just make something work. And always he knew that the thought wasn’t a real thought; that it was relegated to the most purely hypothetical, a half-worn fantasy. It was too late for him to make a new kind of life. But not for her, he thought. She didn’t have her own soil; she could plant herself wherever she wanted to. She just needed to learn how to live properly, as he had never done.
The spray beneath him cooled the still-warm evening air so that he felt goose-bumps ripple across the skin of his forearms, up his back. He stood and looked around him and up at the sky, lifting his hands up, high, letting a stretch tear through from the base of his spine up to his fingertips. He pushed his hips out a little, brought his arms back, opened his chest out until his shoulder blades slotted into one another. Then he stepped forward, wrapped his toes tightly over the rock ledge, reached down for the shotgun Brigitte had left as an offering in the darkened driveway, lying in silent vigil under Jérôme and Céline’s old marital bed ever since. He straightened, carefully, taking care not to fall before it was time. His hands were shaking, he noticed, and it was as if he were looking at someone else’s hands, not connected to him. Slowly, he brought the cold nostrils of the thing to the soft flesh under his jaw, one finger curled around the metal of the trigger. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, felt the moisture-laden air uncurling in his lungs. This was his place. This was his time, now.
24
She had grown accustomed already to the smell of the place: a cold smell, somehow, even on days like this, when there was barely a cloud, the sun high in the sky. The walk from the village to the house was hot, so that she could feel her T-shirt grow damp under her backpack. Summer would be coming to an end soon, she’d heard someone say in the village: there were storms forecast for the weekend. But for now it was every bit as warm as it had been.
As she turned onto the final stretch leading up to the house, the sea emerged, flat and dull green-blue. There was the thundering of footsteps behind her and she hugged the wall to let a little squad of children run past, rubber sandals and trainers smacking the pavement, their cheeks puce or sunburnt, hairlines wild with sweat. They found the narrow opening in the wall that divided the pavement from the beach, like water will find an opening, and then they jumped onto the sand, momentum skidding momentarily to a stop in this new medium. Then they were off again, running more awkwardly now down to the sea, their feet sinking as they went.
That smell, like gulls and fish and netting and seawater and damp, salty towels, all at once. It was strongest when she pushed open the light glass door that led into the hallway, mixed with the whiff of damp masonry, and then when she opened the second front door it receded a little, competing now with whatever was cooking in the kitchen, or sun cream if the kids were getting ready to go outside.
She went through to the kitchen. The radio had been left on and was murmuring a gentle torrent of foreign words she couldn’t bother to decipher. She pulled the backpack with relief off her back and onto the table, pulled the damp cotton of her top away from her skin. She poured a glass of water from the tap – she still didn’t like that it came out a little red with rust, though they assured her it did no harm – and drank it down in four breathless gulps, and as it went down, that new, low-level nausea curdled again in her stomach. She wiped sweat from her temples, held the glass to her cheek. She heard stomping upstairs, liked the way it felt as if the house was rattling when people moved.
The youngest came into the room with his busy steps, fish-white torso bare, speaking to her in English until he looked up and saw that she wasn’t his mother. He retreated again, still speaking, nonplussed, and she heard him plod back down the corridor and shout up the stairs.
The kids would need their lunch soon. She put water on to boil, took a box from the fridge. Frances was teaching her new recipes, fuelled by the vegetables she and Mark grew in their garden: big pots of stew and curry, largely, full of chickpeas and lentils and spices, things that might have tasted crude and simple without Frances’s touch. It was a meat-free household, the eldest child had explained proudly, but they all ate fish, and often Marguerite would find the sink full and stinking with cockles or winkles or death-grey prawns.
She still thought of Jérôme most times she prepared a meal, imagining what he’d say if she brought him what she was making: slick houmous or yellow, turmeric-rich curry with paneer. He might be dead already, and it was strange to know that she wouldn’t know if he was. It might be happening at this very moment, as she dug a brush’s bristles into the black pockmarks of a potato. At some point he would cross over into that other place, into nothingness, and she would be busy with something here, loading the dishwasher or tying a kid’s shoelaces.
Frances came in then, the youngest marching in front of her, and she pulled the top of Marguerite’s backpack open with one hand, peered inside.
‘Milk, wonderful,’ she said in French and the middle child, trailing into the room with a bundle of swimming towels in her arms, parroted her with an elaborate accent, rolling her eyes into her head as if she were someone very grand. Frances smiled at Marguerite, rueful. ‘Stop washing those,’ she said. ‘I can do it. Go and cool down outside, take a break. You’re going to have to start taking things a lot easier now,’ she added. ‘Trust me, I’ve been there. Three times.’
The nausea was rising up again, oily, slippery, an animal presence at the bottom of her gullet.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Very.’
‘Thank you.’
She put down the brush and potato, turned off the tap, stepped carefully around the little girl and into the cool damp of the pantry, then out onto the patio. She sat on the step, felt its pebbly stone under her palms, closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Then she lifted her face so that the sun was on it, beating like blood.
She took off her trainers and socks and stood, stepping onto the grass, feeling its cool wetness under her feet as she walked forwards into the garden. There was a clinking sound from the other side of the fence, a neighbour doing something, and she ducked a little as she walked so that she wouldn’t have to say hello. She walked the length of the garden and then she lay down at the far end under the apple tree, took another deep breath in. That smell: salt, and water, and wet holidays. A cold smell, not unpleasant.
And something else, too, as she lay there, the very faint breeze tinged with it. Rosemary, she thought. Lemon thyme. She opened her eyes and she looked over at all the herbs, bushy and splendid and messily efficient like the rest of the garden, banked in rows against the back wall. She closed her eyes again, rested her hands on her stomach to calm it, the curve where her belly had already started to swell. If she lay still enough she could imagine that he was lying next to her, head to head, his limbs straight as railway sleepers, warm body solid under the soap-clean cotton of a shirt.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are owed:
To early readers Albi and Will Kemp, Karen Raney and Miriam Robinson.
To Blake Morrison, Francis Spufford and Erica Wagner for their valuable guidance and encouragement.
To Johnny Goring for patient, amusingly worded instruction on all things agricultural, and Katie James at the National Sheep Association; to David Mitchell and Dr Nicky Thomas for advice on medicine and nursing; and to Dr Richard Perry and Dr Fergus Rugg-Gunn for their generous counsel on neurological issues. All errors are entirely my own, and in spite of their expert advice.
To Clare Alexander, who didn’t just trust in the book but whose astute understanding helped to shape it as I wrote. To Anna Kelly for her sensitivity, support and insight, and to Helen Garnon-Williams, Luke Brown, Katy Archer and all at 4th Estate. To Kathryn Court, Victoria Savanh and all at Penguin US.
To Mum and Claudia, for your indispensible wisdom and patience with the book.
To Petra, for keeping me silent company during the final months of writing.
And most of all to James: for making it possible – in so many different ways, big and small–to write at all.
About the Author
Marina Kemp was born in London, where she lives now with her husband and daughter. She studied Classics at Oxford University, and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Marguerite is her first novel.
