Consolation (41 page)

‘Wisteria . . . Clematis . . . Honeysuckle . . . Bignonia . . . Akebia . . . Jasmine . . . But it’s in August that it’s the most beautiful. When you sit here in August, at the end of the day, and you’re pleasantly tired and suddenly all the perfumes are there, on the breeze: it’s . . . wonderful.’

On the tablecloth they set down their piles of plates, the basket full of charcuterie, four long loaves, a bottle of wine, napkins, jars of pickles, pitchers of water, a dozen mustard glasses, two wine glasses, and the big salad bowl.

‘Right. I think it’s time to ring the bell.’

‘You’ve got something on your mind,’ she said, once they were back in the house.

‘May I use your telephone?’

Their eyes met.

Kate lowered her head.

She’d just seen some headlights in the distance.

‘Of . . . of course,’ she stammered, waving her hands around her in search of an invisible apron, ‘the . . . down there, at the end of the hallway.’

But Charles didn’t move. He waited for her to come back to his senses.

Which she did, with a little nibbled smile.

‘I have to notify the agency. About the car, you see . . .’

She nodded nervously. In a way that said, No, I don’t want to know. And while he headed for Paris, she went out and crouched down by the pump.

You knew it was a bad idea, she thought, cursing herself as she drowned herself beneath an ever colder stream of water.

What were you thinking, you silly old fool – that he had come to take pictures of the bridges of Madison County?

It was an old telephone, with a rotary dial. And it takes forever to dial a number on a rotary phone. So he began with Mathilde, to give himself courage.

Voicemail.

He sent her a kiss and assured her she could count on him on Monday morning.

Then the agency.

Answerphone.

He said hello, explained the situation, said that he would understand if they charged him extra.

And finally Laurence.

He counted five rings, wondering what he would –

Voicemail.

What else?

‘Please be so kind as to leave me a message,’ she begged everyone, in a very haute couture voice.

Kind? That, Charles was. He went into a muddled explanation, used the word ‘hitch’ and scarcely had the time to send his . . . before he was cut off by the beep.

He put the receiver down.

He noticed the traces of saltpetre and the cracks along the wall. He touched the leprous surface and stood for a long time flaking away into space.

He joined Kate in the yard.

She was sitting on the third step of a stone stairway, and had put her ballet flats back on, along with a thick jumper.

‘Come and watch the show!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ll do the voiceover.’

He was hesitant to sit at her feet. She’d see his bald spot.

Right . . . never mind.

‘Yacine will go first. Because he’s the greediest and because he’s never in the middle of
doing
anything . . . Yacine never takes part in any of the games. He’s fearful and clumsy . . . The others say it’s because his head is too heavy. He will be accompanied by Hideous and Ugly, our ravishing Thomson and Thompson of the canine order . . . Look . . . here they come . . . And then Nelson, accompanied by his mistress, followed by Nedra, who worships Alice to a similar degree . . .’

The door to the studio opened a crack.

‘What did I say . . . Then it’s the teenagers . . . Ambulating stomachs who never hear a thing except the bell when it’s time for a meal. Three full shopping trolleys every fortnight, Charles . . .
Three
trolleys filled to overflowing! Not counting, of course, Ramon, Captain Haddock, and the goat, who always brings up the rear of the procession . . . All our little friends for the evening carrot. Yes, indeed, the carrot . . .’ she sighed, ‘we’re in a house full of silly
rituals
like that. It took me a while but I finally understood that silly rituals help you live . . .

‘And to conclude, a few odd dogs who are still roaming around here and there: the puppy I mentioned earlier and who is now a magnificent, uh, sort of basset hound, given the astonishing length of his ears . . . last but not least, our dear Freaky, who must have been Frankenstein’s muff in a former life – you see the one I mean?’

‘No,’ said Charles from his loge, with his hand to his forehead and his smile firmly in place, ‘I don’t think so . . .’

‘You’ll see, he’s the fat little dog covered in scars with one badly stitched ear and protruding eyes . . .’

Silence.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why what?’

‘So many animals?’

‘They help me.’

She pointed towards the hill: ‘There they are, my God, there are even more of them than I thought there’d be . . . And all the way over there, by the fir trees, I don’t know if you can see them . . . Our fine horsewomen, Harriet and her friend Camille on their little ponies, riding flat out for once. Will there be any carrots left?’

The major procession which ensued showed that she had been right in every respect. The courtyard was soon filled with cries, dust, and cackling.

Kate followed her guest’s reactions out of the corner of her eye: ‘I’ve been trying to put myself in your shoes since you arrived,’ she eventually confessed, ‘and I say to myself, “What on earth will he be thinking about all this?” You must imagine you’ve landed in a houseful of nutters, no?’

No. He was thinking about the contrast between the excitement in this house and his laborious rotary-dial goose chase down at the end of the corridor.

Lately, he’d been getting the feeling that he spent his life talking to machines . . .

‘You haven’t answered.’

‘Don’t try to put yourself in my shoes,’ he jested, bittersweet, ‘it is much more . . .’

‘More what?’

With the tip of his shoe he was tracing semi-circles in the gravel.

‘Less alive.’

Suddenly he felt like talking to her about Anouk.

‘Time to eat!’ she cried, getting up.

He took advantage of her departure to ask Yacine, ‘Tell me, what do you call a baby owl?’

‘A now-let’s-hoot.’ Alice smiled.

Yacine looked troubled.

‘Hey! It doesn’t matter, if you don’t know,’ he said reassuringly.

But it did.

It mattered a lot.

‘I know you say “fledglings” for birds that aren’t adults yet, but as for owls, um . . .’

‘And baby camels?’ added Charles at random, to get him out of his sticky moment.

Big smile.

‘Chameleons.’

Sigh of relief.

Well, sigh of relief, after a fashion . . . The boy went on about it for a good part of the dinner. Hatchling, gosling, yearling, duckling, fingerling, nestling, darling, spiderling, and crockling.

No. Sorry. Crocklet.

Sitting across from them, she watched as he nodded conscientiously, and she was having a grand time.

There were twelve of them under the arbour. Everybody was talking at once. The bread and the pickles went back and forth a great deal, and stories about country fairs were told.

Who had won what, how the teacher’s son had cheated, and how many drinks it took for old man Jalet to slide from the counter at the drink stand.

The big kids wanted to sleep out under the stars, and the little kids asserted that they too were big kids. With one hand Charles refilled Kate’s glass; with the other he pushed away the snout of something that was drooling on his shoulder, and she scolded, ‘For Christ’s sake! Stop feeding the dogs!’ while no one listened because she was speaking Chinese. Finally she sighed and fed slices smeared with rillettes to her Big Dog on the sly.

For dessert they lit torches and candles. Samuel and his gang
cleared
the table and went to fetch all the unsold cakes. There was a bit of a fight; no one wanted to eat Madame Whosiwhatsit’s apple pie because Madame Whosiwhatsit smelled bad. The teenagers, polishing the screens of their mobiles with their sleeve all the while, talked about where the best fishing holes were, about calving problems, and about the Gagnoux’s new forage harvester. There was a lovely specimen wearing a white tank top, with a black dot printed right on her left nipple, next to an arrow which warned: ‘slap distributor’; the machine seemed to work rather well.

Yacine wondered out loud if for a beaver you said a kitten or a pup, Nedra stared into the candle flame, and Charles stared at Nedra.

A portrait Georges de la Tour might have painted . . .

The hitchhikers had set off in search of a spot where they could get reception, and Alice was manufacturing ladybirds with candle wax and pepper grains from the salami.

Between two bursts of conversation you could hear the wind in the trees, and the cries of the young people in the distance.

Charles, attentive, was concentrating hard, for later.

Their goofiness, their laughter, their faces.

This harbour in the night.

He didn’t want to forget a thing.

She stopped him, placing her hand on his sleeve, ‘No, don’t get up. Let the children work for once. Would you like a coffee?’

Alice said she would go and make it for him, Nedra brought the sugar, and the others unearthed a torch so that they could lead the animals back to the meadow.

The mayflies were in attendance: it was a joyous, ephemeral dinner.

8

THEY WERE ALONE
.

Kate had picked up her glass and turned her chair to face the darkness. Charles came to sit in Alice’s place.

He wanted to look at her little ladybirds . . .

Then he lifted one hip, dug around for his cigarettes, and offered her one: ‘Shock horror,’ she moaned, ‘I’d love to join you but I had
such
trouble giving it up . . .’

‘Look, I only have two left. Let’s smoke these last two together and that will be it.’

Kate looked worriedly all around her: ‘Are any of the kids around?’

‘I don’t see any.’

‘Okay . . . great.’

She took a puff and closed her eyes.

‘I’d forgotten . . .’

They smiled at each other and poisoned themselves religiously.

‘It’s because of Alice,’ she declared.

She looked down and continued, lowering her voice, ‘I was in the kitchen. The kids had been asleep for a long time. I was chain-smoking and I . . . was
drinking alone
– to use Alexis’s mum’s expression . . .

‘Alice came into the room, crying. She had a stomach ache. It was at a time when we all had a stomach ache of sorts, I think . . . She wanted someone to hold her, some affection, words of comfort, all those things that I wasn’t able to give them any more . . . And she managed somehow to climb up on my lap.

‘She put her thumb in her mouth and no matter how I tried I couldn’t think of what to say to calm her down or help her to get back to sleep. I . . . never mind.

‘So instead, we watched the fire.

‘After a very long while, she asked, “What does ‘prematurely’ mean?”

‘“Earlier than expected,” I replied. She was silent for a moment and then she added, “Who’s going to look after us if you die prematurely?”

‘I leaned over her and saw that I’d left my Craven As on her lap.

‘And that she had just learned how to read . . .

‘How was I supposed to answer such a question?

‘“Toss it in the fire.”

‘I watched as the packet twisted and disappeared, and then I began to cry.

‘It really felt as if I’d just lost my last crutch . . . Much later, I carried her through to her bed and came back at a run. Why the rush? To rake through the ashes, what else!

‘I was already feeling very down, and going cold turkey like that made it even worse . . . At that point in time, I loathed this cold, sad house that had already taken everything from me, but I had to admit it did have one redeeming feature: the nearest tobacconist was six kilometres away and he closed at six in the evening . . .’

She crushed the butt in the earth, then placed it on the table and poured herself a glass of water.

Charles was silent.

They had the night ahead of them.

‘They’re my sister’s ch—’ Her voice broke. ‘Sorry. My sister’s children and . . . oh,’ she said, cursing herself, ‘that’s why I didn’t want to invite you to dinner.’

He was startled.

‘Because when you got here with Lucas last night I could see, even behind your injuries, or perhaps because of your injuries, I could see the way you were looking around you –’

‘And?’ he urged, somewhat anxiously.

‘And I knew what would happen. I knew that we’d have dinner around this table, that the children would run off, that I’d be here alone with you and that I’d tell you what I’ve never told a soul . . . I feel a bit sheepish to admit it, Mr Charles the Stranger, but I
knew
that you’d be the lucky one . . . That’s what I told you earlier on in the saddle room . . . There have been plenty of expeditions passing through here, but you are the first civilized man who’s
ventured
as far as the henhouse and, to be honest . . . I was no longer expecting you.’

A rather botched attempt at a smile.

Always the same old problem with words, damn it. Charles never had them available when he needed them. If at least the tablecloth had been made of paper, he could have sketched something for her. A vanishing line or a horizon, the idea of a perspective or even a question mark – but to speak, dear lord, what . . . What could you say with words?

‘You still have time to get up, you know!’ she added.

This time the smile was a success.

‘Your sister,’ he murmured.

‘My sister was . . . Well, listen,’ she continued more cheerfully, ‘I may as well start crying straight away, that way it’s done.’

She pulled on the sleeve of her jumper as if unfolding a hand-kerchief:

‘My sister, my only sister, was called Ellen. She was five years older than me and she was a . . . wonderful girl. Lovely, funny, radiant . . . I’m not just saying that because she was my sister; I’m saying it because of who she was. She was my friend, my only friend I think, and much more than that . . . She looked after me a lot when we were children. She wrote to me when I was at boarding school and even after she got married we’d ring each other nearly every day. Rarely for more than twenty seconds, because there was always an ocean or two continents between us, but twenty seconds, that we could manage.