Consolation (45 page)

‘Anyway. We shall see. As I was saying, earlier on: one day at a time. Right, last glass each, just enough to get us as far as the stream . . .

‘In the middle of all those appointments and hundreds of phone calls, life went on.

‘I lost their vaccination booklets, bought shoes for the summer, met the other mums, heard a lot about Ellen, smiled vaguely, opened her mail and sent death announcements or photocopies of death certificates; I started cooking, I learned to convert pounds and ounces, cups and tablespoons, feet, inches, and all the rest, I took part in my first school fête, I began to do a good job with Tigger’s ludicrous voice, I held up, I cracked, I called Matthew in the middle of the night, I disturbed him during some important manoeuvre in the lab, he couldn’t talk, he’d call me back. I cried until dawn and had the number changed for fear he really would call me back and find some more convincing arguments to lure me back there . . .

‘Then it was summer. We went to my parents’ cottage near
Oxford
. Dreadful weeks, terribly sad. My father was devastated with grief and my mother continually mixed up Alice and Hattie. I never knew that the school holidays were so long in France . . . I felt as if I had aged twenty years. I wanted to put my lab coat back on and shut myself away with my germs . . . I didn’t read them as many stories, but I helped Harriet take her first steps and . . . I had trouble keeping up with her . . .

‘It was the backlash, I suppose. As long as we were still in the scaffold – scaffolding?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of our new life . . .’

‘Try scaffolding, it’s less hard on the neck and it’s even used for cathedrals . . .’

‘Oh? As long as we had had that scaffolding, I was active, fighting, but now that was over. There was nothing left to do but hold out for seventeen years and one month. I had five people on my hands, and I cut short the holidays, they were really getting me down. Because I’d lost a lot of weight and left everything back there, I was wearing Ellen’s clothes more and more often and . . . I wasn’t doing well at all.

‘In Paris it was stifling, the children were going round in circles and I gave Samuel his first spanking. Then, on a whim, I decided to rent a self-catering flat just outside a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. The village was called Les Marzeray and we walked every day with the pushchair to get our supplies and have a drink opposite the church.

‘I learned how to play pétanque and I started reading books that were again full of sad stories, but at least they were invented ones. The woman who had the grocery-café told me about a farm where I could find fresh eggs and even a chicken. The man wasn’t the friendly type but I could always try . . .

‘The children had colour in their cheeks, we walked a lot, we picnicked and had siestas in the meadows, Samuel went into raptures over a donkey and her foal, and Alice started a magnificent herbarium. It’s in the blood . . .’

Smile.

‘I was like her, and I discovered, or rediscovered, nature in a different form, other than through the microscope. I bought a disposable camera and asked a tourist to take a picture of me with
the
children. The first one . . . It’s on the mantelpiece in the kitchen and it’s my most precious possession . . . The four of us, in front of the fountain next to the bakery in Les Marzeray, that summer. Recovering, sitting precariously on the edge of the fountain, hardly daring to smile at this stranger but . . . alive.’

Tears.

‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her nose against her sleeve, ‘it’s the whisky . . . What time is it? Almost one . . . I’ve got to get them to bed.’

Charles, who felt buoyed up after all these stories, offered to carry Nedra.

She refused.

Yacine was walking next to him, silent. He felt sick. Harriet and Camille followed, dragging their sleeping bags behind them.

It was too cold under the stars . . .

*

Kate carried her dog back into the kitchen and disappeared upstairs after asking Charles if he would light the fire.

He had a moment of panic, but no, he wasn’t that useless . . . He went to fetch the logs beneath the awning, and rinsed out their glasses, and then he too came to rub up against their cast-iron nanny. He knelt down, caressed the dog, touched the enamel, opened all the oven doors and lifted up the two lids.

Each temperature was totally different to the touch.

All the things he was discovering . . .

He went and found the photo she’d been telling him about, and winced.

They were so little.

‘It’s a lovely picture, isn’t it?’ she said over his shoulder.

No. That’s not what he would have said.

‘I didn’t realize they were so young.’

‘Less than eighty kilos,’ she replied.

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s what we weighed at the time. All four of us, on the scales at the bus terminal. Well, anyway . . . Jumping on the thing with all our books and our parkas, and we managed to get told off by the bloke at the ticket office. Madame! Mind your children, please! You’ll bugger up the mechanism with your nonsense!

‘Good.

‘That was precisely my intention.’

She’d pulled over a cane armchair that was missing an armrest. Charles was sitting lower down, his arms round his knees, on a tiny footrest tapestried with rosebuds and moth holes.

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘The awkward old man, that was René, right?’

‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Oh, there’s something I’d like to do, just for fun. I’ll take my time. But I’m worried that you’re not sitting comfortably?’

He turned around so that he could lean against the mantel-piece.

For the first time, she sat directly opposite him.

He looked at her face, lit only by the fire he had built and would maintain, and he sketched her in his mind.

Beginning with her eyebrows, that were very straight, and then . . .

So many shadows.

‘Take your time,’ he murmured.

‘It was on the 12th of August. Harriet’s birthday . . . Her first candle. A sad day, or a happy one, it was up to us. We decided to make her a cake and we went looking for those famous fresh eggs. But that was a pretext. I’d already noticed the farm beyond the village during our earlier walks, and I wanted to see it closer up.

‘It was very warm, I remember, and already, beneath the long avenue of oak trees, we felt better . . . Some of the trees were diseased and I thought about all those mushroom genomes that others in my place were probably in the middle of sequencing . . .

‘Samuel, on his little bicycle, was riding ahead of us, counting the trees. Alice was looking for acorns “with holes in them”, and Hattie was asleep in her pushchair.

‘Even with the prospect of that birthday candle, I felt rather down. I couldn’t really see where we were headed. I felt as if I too were afflicted with a sort of scabies or some other parasite . . .
Solitudina vulgaris
perhaps? The kids were intoxicated with our long walks and the fresh air, and fell asleep very early, and that left me with long evenings to ruminate on my fate. I’d started smoking again, I lied to you earlier on . . . I didn’t read all those
novels
I’d taken with me . . . But I did read haikus. A little book I’d stolen from Ellen’s night table . . .

‘I turned down the corner on pages that read:

Covered with butterflies

the dead tree

is in bloom!

Or:

Without a care

on my pillow of herbs

I am absent
.

‘But the only one that really obsessed me at the time is something I’d read on the door of the toilets, on campus:

Life’s a bitch

and then

you die
.

‘Yes, that one had a good ring to it.’

‘And yet you still remember them, the Japanese ones, I mean,’ countered Charles.

‘No particular merit in that. The anthology is in the loo, now,’ she answered with a smile.

‘To continue . . . We crossed the bridge and the children were in a trance. Frogs! Water boatmen! Fireflies! They didn’t know where to begin to look.

‘Samuel dropped his bike on the spot and Alice handed me her sandals. I let them play for a moment while I gathered some rushes and water crowfoot . . .
ranunculus aquatilis
. . . for her . . . And then Harriet, whom I’d left in her pushchair up on the road, called for us and we went back up with our treasures. And then . . . I don’t know what you thought, yesterday evening when you arrived here with Lucas, but for me, these little walls, and the courtyard, and the little house hidden under the vines and all the buildings round here . . . they’re worn but still so valiant – well, it was love at first sight. We knocked on the door: no one, and because it was so hot we went to have our picnic in one of the barns. Samuel immediately ran to look at the tractors and was fascinated by the old carts. “Are there horses, do you reckon?” The girls made a mess with
their
biscuits, laughing among all the hens, and I was absolutely desperate that I’d forgotten my camera. This was the first time I’d ever seen them like that . . . Neither older nor younger than their real age . . .

‘A dog came up to us. Some sort of little fox terrier who also liked BN Choco biscuits and who could jump as high as Samuel’s shoulder. His master soon followed. I waited until he’d put his buckets down and rinsed off at the pump before I dared bother him.

‘Because he was looking for his dog he soon saw the four of us and came slowly over to greet us. I scarcely had time to say hello before the kids were bombarding him with questions.

‘“Oh my!” he went, raising his hands, “I can tell you lot are from the city then, ain’t ya!”

‘He told them the dog’s name, Filou, and made him perform all sorts of funny little tricks.

‘A regular little drill sergeant . . .

‘I told him we’d come to buy some eggs. “Ah, I reckon I must have a few in the kitchen now, but the little lad and lass will be wanting to fetch ’em theirsels, won’t they?” and he led us to his henhouse. For a bloke who wasn’t the friendly type I found him very amiable . . .

‘Then we followed him into his kitchen to look for a box for the eggs and I realized he must have been living there on his own for a very long time . . . It was absolutely filthy . . . Not to mention the smell . . . He offered us something to drink and we all sat down round his table with the oilcloth that stuck to our elbows. It was a very weird syrup drink and there were dead flies in the sugar bowl but the children behaved perfectly. I didn’t dare take Hattie out of her pushchair. The floor was as sticky as the rest . . . At one point I couldn’t take it any more and I got up and went to open the window. He watched me without saying a thing, and I think that was the beginning of our friendship, when I turned round and said, “Aah, that’s better now, isn’t it?”

‘He was an old bachelor, all awkward and embarrassed, and he’d never seen children that close up, and I was a future old maid with seventeen years to go, and who wasn’t about to be daunted by a stiff window handle, so he and I smiled at each other in the warm breeze . . .

‘Sam explained that the eggs were so that we could make a
birthday
cake for his little sister. He looked at Hattie now on my lap: “Is it her birthday today?” I nodded, and he added, “Seems to me I must have a cuddly toy for the little lass round here somewhere.” Oh Lord, I wondered what sort of repulsive sticky thing he was going to put in her hands . . . A pink rabbit he’d won at the shooting range at a county fair in 1912?

‘“Follow me,” he declared, helping Alice down from her chair. He led us into another building and began grumbling in the gloom: “And where the divil have they got to now?”

‘It was the children who found them, and this time there really was no way I could have kept hold of Hattie . . .’

Charles was becoming an expert on Kate’s particular smiles, but this one was even more contagious than the others.

‘What was it?’

‘Kittens. Four tiny kittens hidden under an old banger of a car . . . The children went wild. They asked him if they could hold them and we all went to play in the grass behind the house.

‘While they were playing with the kittens as if they were marshmallow paste, he and I went to sit down on a bench. He had his dog on his lap, was rolling a cigarette, smiled as he watched the kids and congratulated me: I’d had a lovely litter, myself. I burst into tears. I had had nowhere near enough sleep, and I hadn’t spoken to a kindly adult since . . . Ellen, so I came out with the whole story.

‘He sat there silent for a long time with his lighter under his thumb and then he said, “You’ll see, they’ll be a happy lot, all the same. Well then, which one has she chosen, the little kid?”

‘Her brother and sister decided for her and I promised we’d come to fetch the kitten on the day we left. He walked us back as far as the oak trees. The rack under the pushchair was filled with vegetables from his garden and the children turned round to wave to him for a long time.

‘Once we were back in our little rental kitchen, I realized I had no oven . . . So I planted a candle in a bought sponge cake, and they went to bed exhausted. Sigh of relief, the bloody day was behind us . . . I’d decided it would be a cheerful time, but I’d never have managed it without that house and its beautiful vesperal name . . .

‘I was smoking on the terrace when Sam joined me, dragging
his
teddy bear behind him. It was the first time he’d come to find me like that. The first time he put his arms around me . . . And this time it wasn’t my cigarette but the stars that served as our smokescreen . . .

‘“You know, we mustn’t take him, the little kitty,” he finally announced, very gravely. “Are you afraid he’ll be sad in Paris?” “No, but I don’t want him to be taken away from his mummy and his brothers and sisters . . .”

‘Oh, Charles, I was an absolute sponge myself, full of tears . . . Everything made me cry, absolutely everything.

‘“But we can go and see it again tomorrow,” he added.

‘Of course we could. And we went back the next day, and the day after that, and finally we spent the rest of our holiday at the farm. The children amused themselves in the barns while I emptied the kitchen out into the courtyard and cleaned it with big buckets of water. Our Monsieur René, with his hens and his cows and the old horse that he boarded, and his little dog and his gigantic mess, had become our new family. For the first time I felt good. Protected. It was as if nothing bad could ever reach us behind those walls, and the rest of the world was out there, beyond the moat . . .