Marguerite, page 6
Marguerite had cooled down a little; she pulled a blanket around her shoulders.
‘Are you warm enough?’ she asked.
Jérôme turned to look at her again. ‘If you ever get married,’ he said, ‘you’ll do well not to listen to any of the crap you pick up in magazines and on television. What men want is a woman with sense and patience. We might think we want the red racing car but we don’t really, not in the long run. We need an engine that will keep us going.’
‘That isn’t a very romantic metaphor.’
‘What do you know about metaphors?’ he snapped. ‘Or romance.’
‘I know plenty about both,’ she said, irritated, but her words sounded foolish as soon as she’d spoken them. A child trying to show her parents that she’s grown up. Jérôme merely grunted.
‘Really. Well, your literature teacher must have been terribly disappointed when you chose to become a carer.’
‘I’m a nurse.’
‘What a difference.’
Marguerite closed her eyes tight, breathed deeply to try to quieten the thudding in her chest. Then she opened them. ‘Was working in a tile shop intellectually demanding?’
Jérôme’s neck bulged as he turned to stare at her. His eyes were wide; an immediate colour had spread across his face. ‘Would you like to repeat that?’
‘No.’
‘I’m asking you to repeat it.’
‘I don’t think you misheard me.’
He blinked. ‘Have you forgotten that you’re working for me?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ She felt the insult of tears forming; she was too exhausted for confrontation. But she couldn’t face backing down. ‘That’s why I don’t think it’s right that you should insult me constantly.’
‘Well! I don’t think it’s right that you should answer back. Don’t forget, just one word from me and you’ll be gone, out of here.’
‘With pleasure,’ she said, very quietly.
‘What did you say?’
She didn’t answer and he watched her, intently, his shoulders up near his ears. She ignored the crawling of an insect on her neck, determined not to look away, and there was total silence between them as they stared. Then a magpie rattled and Jérôme broke his stare, let out a harsh little laugh. ‘You’re funny,’ he said. ‘You know I was just teasing you? You mustn’t let me get under your skin.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I was just having a joke.’
‘Okay.’
He was watching her again, eyes sharp above his smile.
‘And as I’m sure you know, I didn’t “work in a tile shop”. I owned an extremely profitable business.’
Marguerite didn’t reply; she shrugged the blanket from around her shoulders, warm again from the adrenaline. She felt the thud in her chest subside, slowly.
Jérôme laughed again, a laugh that didn’t seem wholly forced.
‘A tile shop,’ he repeated. ‘You’re very funny.’
* * *
• • •
The milking clusters detached from the cows’ udders and withdrew, clanking and swinging. Henri sanitised the cows’ teats, pink and engorged, thin lines of milk still trickling from them like the white sap from figs. He opened the gate for the cows to move slowly out, lowing and nodding as they walked, and then he called Thierry in from the yard to hose the parlour down. When the young man had taken over, Henri pulled off his thick rubber gloves and rinsed them. He would change out of his milky overalls before he saw to Vanille. He didn’t want to taunt her with the smell of her youth.
Back in the house, he changed into a fresh shirt and jeans and sat in the study to get some paperwork done. It wasn’t urgent, but he needed delay. He went through the accounts for perhaps fifteen minutes until he knew he could no longer put it off. Then he stood up, walked straight out of the house, taking his shotgun, glimpsing Brigitte through the kitchen door and ignoring her as she called out. He strode out to the pasture, where the cows had already settled back into grazing.
Thierry sat with the calves now, feeding them formula, and he looked up and then down at the gun. His head bobbed back slightly, like a tic, and he looked at Henri questioningly, with some alarm, opening his mouth to speak. Henri didn’t acknowledge him.
He held the gun behind his back as he approached Vanille, only now slowing his pace. She blinked.
‘Come on, my beautiful lady,’ he said. ‘Beautiful lady.’ He let her smell his hand, and she rubbed it. ‘Come on,’ he said more loudly, even tersely, so that Thierry might hear. Then he led her away, her awkward, rocking gait making him tread more slowly than he could bear. He needed to do it now, could already feel his resolve slipping. Now Thierry had seen him, he had to go through with it. He couldn’t turn around and wait until tomorrow.
She was docile, infinitely trusting; he got her with ease into the old stable nestled at the corner of the next field. Standing there beside her, he had to wipe tears from his eyes and cheeks.
‘You bloody fool. Get a grip.’
He kissed her head and took it in his hands, turning it so that she was facing out of the doorway, out to the fields. She stared out obediently, not turning even when he loaded the gun. Her cheeks sagged like old elastic; she nodded a little, reflexively. He cocked the gun, took the barrels to her head and pulled the trigger. She dropped in an instant, heavy as concrete. He didn’t look at the ground. A fine mist of warm blood settled over his face.
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, pressed until it hurt. Then he wiped his face with his sleeves and strode from the pen, passing Thierry as he made for the house.
‘Call the knackerman to come and get rid of that,’ he said, gesturing behind him. He didn’t look at him, or the cows, or down at the blood he imagined must cover his body. He sensed a silent terror around him, suffusing the pre-twilight air. Everything was silent. Even the cicadas stopped suddenly, for just one second.
* * *
• • •
Brigitte set his dinner in front of him: lamb and potatoes, and a tall glass of water.
‘Busy day?’ she asked, but he didn’t respond. ‘I’ve finished the feed orders for the pigs and chickens. I found a new merchant, we’ll be saving a couple of hundred euros a year.’
‘That’s great,’ Henri said, getting up from the table to get another beer from the fridge. She watched him, glanced down at the bottle in his hand as he opened it. ‘Three beers isn’t very much, Brigitte.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Good.’ He sat down and took a long draught straight from the bottle. She didn’t like that but he knew she wouldn’t say anything. Ordinarily, she might tease him – ‘farmer by name, farmer by manners’ – but he knew that she knew not to do that tonight. He almost wanted her to try.
They sat in silence for a while as she started to eat. When Brigitte felt uncomfortable, she affected a daintiness as she ate that annoyed him. As if the bald eagerness of her darting fork could be mitigated by the small volume of food she picked up each time; or this rare show of delicacy, the repeated wipes of her napkin to each corner of her lips, make her appear less greedy.
‘How’s Paul’s shoulder?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know, he was in Montpellier today.’
‘Well I do hope he’s seen a physio.’ He could hear the moistness of her chewing. ‘I wonder how Thierry’s mother is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s been ill.’
‘What, with a cold or something.’
‘Not a cold, Henri. She’s had scarlet fever.’
‘Scarlet fever?’ He leant back and let his chair tip backwards, which he knew she hated. ‘What is this, the nineteenth century?’
She frowned; she became embarrassed when he brought up any period of history she couldn’t remember from school. As far as he could tell, that left them with only the most superficial smattering of the Revolution to discuss with any ease.
‘Well that’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Laure says she’s been awfully ill. I did mean to go round there with some things but you know how busy it’s been these last few days.’
‘Why any busier than usual?’
Brigitte put down her fork and let out a little sigh. ‘I’ve been going through all the re-orders, Henri! It’s taken a long time. I’ve done them all, we’re up to date.’
Henri shrugged, took a mouthful of potato and washed it down with beer. He didn’t often drink more than one beer and he felt a little drunk already. He let his chair tip back again.
Brigitte took refuge in her food. ‘I’ll take her something tomorrow if I get a chance.’
‘I’m sure she’s fine. Maybe it’s a good thing; she might have lost a bit of weight at last.’
‘Henri!’ cried Brigitte immediately, and she looked hurt. Now he had a rise, he regretted his callousness. It was too easy.
‘That wasn’t kind,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘I take it back.’
‘I should jolly well think so,’ she said, and he was freshly irritated.
‘But it’s true. She’s grossly overweight.’ He stood up, pushing his plate away.
She stared, eyes wider than usual. ‘Won’t you eat?’ she asked.
‘I’m not hungry.’ Half-drunk bottle in his hand, he crossed the room.
‘Where are you going?’
‘For a drive,’ he said.
‘At this time? Whatever for?’
‘I feel like it.’
‘Henri!’ she cried again, and looked down, her lips pursed tight. ‘All right. Of course. Well, I’ll leave your food out, okay? I’ll wrap it up so Jojo doesn’t eat it. You can have it in a little bit. You must need it.’
‘Maybe.’
He walked to the truck, pushing aside Jojo as she tried to come with him. He could feel great walls of inevitability closing in on every side, almost tangible. He tried to resist for a moment, considered turning back towards the house. But then he imagined the night ahead of him, sitting downstairs until he knew Brigitte was asleep, crawling into their bed next to her slack snores. That was too dismal, and his hunger too deep.
It took twenty minutes to drive to Edgar’s – usually enough time for Henri to question his decision at least three times, but not tonight. As he drove, his third beer and the cool air rushing through the windows made his head light and calm. No more indecision, and no more rage.
He pulled up a little way down the track from Edgar’s cottage. The cottage itself was small, tucked away in woodland, and he was able to leave his truck away from the road. There were no cars in the driveway, no guests. Classical music blasted through the kitchen windows: opera, a man’s thick baritone, infinitely sad. Henri stood for a moment looking up at the sky, a few stars showing through gaps in the clouds. Then he shook his head and walked to the door and knocked.
Edgar smiled when he opened the door, his eyes only half open, lazy, seductive.
‘I’ve been wondering when you’d come,’ he said. He reached out for Henri’s waist; Henri tensed his abdominals under Edgar’s touch. They kissed. ‘Are you going to sit and keep me company for a while, or is this one of your hit and runs?’ he said into Henri’s ear. Henri groaned, pushing Edgar into the house. He felt sick, and aroused, and relieved.
* * *
• • •
He lay on the sofa while Edgar sat next to his head, running a hand through Henri’s hair. He remembered washing Vanille’s blood from it just a few hours earlier, how sticky it had been.
‘How’s farm life?’ Edgar asked.
‘Fine,’ said Henri. He didn’t want to talk. ‘How’s writing life?’
‘Wonderful. I’m eighty pages in and it’s flying along. But now you’ve shown up I’m naturally bound to get lovesick and stop being able to write anything but sonnets. And the world has enough of those.’
Henri turned his head sharply to remove Edgar’s hand. ‘Can you get me a drink?’
‘All the vices are coming out tonight,’ he said in the smiling voice Henri couldn’t stand. Edgar walked to the kitchen and Henri sat up, flattening his hair down, stroking it firmly into its usual parting. He stared at the coffee table in front of him, covered in books and used cups and glasses. He picked up the book at the top of the pile: Literary Impressionism in Conrad and Ford. He flicked through the pages, but could no longer make much sense of the bald, un-accented striations of English on each page. Nor could he remember what Conrad had written, whether he was English or American. His knowledge had receded like Edgar’s hairline, eroded under the great seasonal tide of the farming year.
But it was books that had first got them talking, ten or eleven or twelve years ago now, at drinks after a christening ceremony in the village. It was shortly after Edgar had moved there, and for the first hour or so Henri avoided this stranger everyone referred to as an ‘eccentric’. ‘Pretentious ass,’ he whispered to Brigitte when they were first introduced. But then over drinks they began talking, Edgar telling him offhand, as if Henri wouldn’t know the first thing about it, that he was attempting a biography of Molière. He had been visibly surprised when Henri reeled off lines of Le Malade imaginaire. They went on to discuss Racine, who’d been Henri’s favourite at school, and it was enlivening to summon his past knowledge, talk to someone who shared it, let their talk meander down unpractised routes. With everyone else, each conversation was simply a replay of the last.
As the afternoon went on – a violently hot afternoon in mid-August, just before a mistral came and swept summer’s intensity away – he felt Edgar’s eyes on him, interested and appraising, and felt himself stand taller, hold his jaw more firmly. He left the party reluctantly, to Brigitte’s bemusement, since he was usually the one to drag them away from social events. And he drove home drunk, tingling throughout his body, excited and fearful and alive.
Now he was sitting before a stack of books on modernist theory, the Molière project abandoned many years since. Edgar placed a bottle of Chablis and two empty glasses on the table.
‘Actually, I should go,’ he said, standing quickly to stop Edgar trying to hold him back.
‘Would it have been different if I’d brought a Sauvignon?’ Edgar asked with a smile, and Henri ignored him. In a drier tone he said, ‘And with that, Hurricane Henri sweeps off to other shores, oblivious to the wreckage he leaves in his wake.’
‘I left the dog in the car,’ he lied, and let Edgar kiss him. Then he left, walking as quickly as possible to the truck.
When he got back to the farm, the house was unlit except for the kitchen. He walked in and saw his uneaten dinner on the side, covered neatly in cling film, with a little note beside it in Brigitte’s young-looking hand: ‘Enjoy yourself!’ He closed his eyes, bowed his head as he leant against the counter. He imagined her writing it, cleaning everything away, thinking before choosing those words. Then walking heavily up to their bed, folding her clothes, moving her large, soft body around their room. Falling asleep alone while her husband ejaculated in someone’s mouth. A man’s mouth.
He couldn’t eat, but he scraped the food into a plastic bag and tucked it towards the bottom of the bin, underneath the rest of the rubbish. Then he walked upstairs slowly, wearily, and crept into the room and lay down beside Brigitte. She wasn’t snoring, had clearly not been asleep.
‘Is everything all right? What time is it?’
‘It’s midnight,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fine, my darling. You can go to sleep.’
‘Did you eat your lamb?’
‘It was delicious,’ he said, as quietly and gently as if talking to a tired child.
She didn’t reach out for him; she never did. After their first abortive attempts at love-making, when they first married – he twisted his face at the memory of her great pink thighs straddling his hips, the fumbling of her hand around his retracted penis – she had barely grumbled or complained about the largely sexless partnership they maintained. There was the odd time, still, perhaps two or three times a year: in the total dark of night, thankfully free from foreplay or words, when he was driven by privation to indiscriminate urgency. But physical intimacy beyond the most purely anatomical was something she had had to learn to do without.
He wanted to turn to her now, stroke her hair or say something kind, but he felt too deadened, too heavy even to reach out his hand. He lay on his back, apart from her, staring into the darkness.
* * *
• • •
Marguerite turned her bedside lamp on and sat up in bed, blinking. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened. There was a toad’s high rattle like a burglar alarm outside her window; it reminded her of summer childhoods by lakes, where she and Cassandre had been wimps in the face of all the insects and creatures, however hard they’d pretended to be intrepid.
She rested her left cheek on her knees, studying her little room. The broken chair, the empty suitcase under the wardrobe. The tired rug stretched out on the floor.
She had switched the light on to try to escape a constant showreel of memories and images playing in her mind’s eye as she lay trying to sleep – as if the light might force them to scatter, like launching a floodlight on a pack of thieves. But the position she was sitting in now – knees to chest, face on knees, ears pricked, bedside lamp on – was too familiar for forgetting. She had sat exactly like this so many times that it almost felt as familiar to her as sleep.
She closed her eyes, the light glowing pink through her eyelids, and let herself slide back into one of the nights before everything changed. She pictured herself from the outside: a fourteen-year-old sitting up in the pristinely elegant cream bedroom her mother had designed for her. The wallpaper was feathered with very slightly raised, pale green swirls. She wasn’t allowed to pin or tack things onto the wall so she tried to rebel by covering the bedside table with neon-framed photographs of her and her friends on school trips or at birthday parties. Hiding cigarettes behind their backs, so that the innocuous photos held a secret challenge. She used to hang dream-catchers and strings of gaudy beads from the polished bedposts; aged ten, Cassandre had already started to imitate this but she couldn’t quite get it right. With plastic pony charms and hearts, her arrangements looked too young. If only Marguerite had just given her some of her own.
