French Kiss (12 page)

            “You can do a hundred more,” he said. “Then call it a day.” He retrieved his shirt and headed towards the house via his postbox, at which point he added: “Save some for me. By the look of this letter, I may need to split some wood myself.”

            At times, Charlotte had tried meditation, but had always been too anxious and too fidgety to make it work. Chopping wood, however, had the effect of focusing her mind while giving her something useful to do. Soon she was surrounded by split logs and she was grunting like a tennis player every time she halved one. Relaxed. Confident. Capable. For the first time in her life, she was being all of those things all at once.

            Her shoulders became sore fairly quickly, because she was using muscles that she was unaccustomed to exercising, and as the sun rose in its arc across the sky the heat slowed her progress. She thought that maybe now would be a good time to take Patrick for his daily walk.

            She ran up the steps, energised by the lightness of her mood, knocked on the door and breezed in.

            “Hey Giles,” she said, deciding that that would be a good English nickname for him. “I've chopped enough wood to last you until -”

            “What are you doing in here?” he snapped. He was sitting at the table, hunched over one of the letters he had received in the post this morning. The envelope was torn into a few pieces, which were scattered over the floor, but the letter was intact in his hands. His fingers were trembling.

            “I came in for a glass of water and -”

            “Get out,” he said.

            “What?”

            “Leave me,” he said.

            “Whatever. I'm taking Patrick for a walk, so -”

            “Patrick has had enough walks. I want you to get out. Now. Out.”

            “Why are you being so mean?” she asked.

            “I'm not your friend,” he said. “I'm your boss.”

            She left, slamming the door behind her and marching down the steps. Before she was off the property, he was at the top of the steps calling her back.

            “Good,” she thought. “The occasional apology might certainly take the sting out of working here.”

            “You need to clean up this mess you made,” he said, indicating the split logs strewn about the ground like the scraps of envelope he had torn up. “Use the wheelbarrow and put them beside the house. Then I expect you to finish the rest of your duties. If you don't, then you can find yourself another job.”

            She bit her tongue.

            When he went inside, she waited a few moments to calm down, a fury of emotions contending for precedence.

            Several times, she considered marching in to the house to give him a piece of her mind, but each time she dissuaded herself and for a different reason. He wasn't worth it. That was what he wanted. He was under a lot of stress. He was right; they were employer and employee. Nothing more. Last night had meant nothing.

            She threw herself into her chores rather than throw herself at him. She built the stack of split logs beside the house so quickly and so neatly that her conscientiousness itself was an act of defiance.

            “Your cruelty can't touch me anymore,” she said. “If you won't let me in, then I won't let you touch me either.”

            When her work beside the house was done, she was pleased to get further away by mucking out the horses and the chickens. Even now, the dirty work usually made her feel squeamish, but now she lost herself in it, wiping her sweating brow with the back of her sleeve.

            She thought that she was being calm and efficient, but the chickens ran away from her and didn't indulge their curiosity as to what she was doing. Even Sarko kept his distance.

            Gitane and Gilou the second ate their hay warily.

            “I'm not going to poison you,” Charlotte said. “Not you anyway.” Gilou the second raised his ears.

            She stopped in the shed to dump the empty buckets, return the shovel to its corner and hang the axe back on its hook.

            She'd lost some weight and could feel the difference in her body. She felt strong and powerful and alive. She laughed, imagining what Mark would think if he could see her now.

            Before leaving, she caught sight of her reflection in a shard of glass serving as a mirror on the wall. She had excrement of one kind or another smeared across her forehead. Her hair was a tangled mess, littered with straw and sawdust. A fly buzzed nearby and she swatted it away. She looked gaunt. Her eyes were hollow, waiting to be filled.

            If Mark could see her now, he'd make her a cup of tea and send her to bed for a week. She sank to her knees and sat heavily against the shed wall. She sank her face into her knees and allowed her body to be racked by sobs. A breeze blew the door into her and she turned away from it, crying for all the times she hadn't allowed herself tears over the last two years.

~~~

“And how are things going in your backwater and with your backwater employer?” Charlotte's mother enquired.

            “He's not backwater,” Charlotte said. She didn't know why she was defending him. Perhaps because her mother was only trying to get at her. Or perhaps because she knew that it wasn't true. “He's a jerk, but he's not backwater.”

            “Is he still making you clean up chicken poo?”

            “Yes, mother,” she said, knowing that she hated it when she called her 'mother'.

            “He'll be making you kill them next, for the pot. You'll be chopping their heads off with an axe.”

            “You know what he made me do today?” Charlotte said. “He made me chop logs into little tiny bits. And then he made me stack them all neatly next to his house. And then he told me that he hasn't had the chimney swept, so its unusable, and he's going away for the winter too, so he totally wasted my time.”

            “He's paying you,” her mother said. “You should be thankful.”

            It was just like her to take his side. She could change side several times during one conversation, just to be against her daughter. Charlotte imagined her mother polishing her demolition ball, then giving it a little kiss to set it in motion.

            “You make it sound like he can do no wrong,” Charlotte said. “Maybe you love him a little bit.”

            “You know,” said her mother, “I was about to say the same of you.”

            Charlotte hurried to get off the phone. When it was safely down on the cradle she tore it from the wall and threw it across the room. The phone gave the vase of flowers a slight knock. It wobbled, then toppled, then rolled off the shelf and smashed on the floor.

            Charlotte gasped. It didn't look valuable, but that wasn't the point. She had a sense that Jean would have made an inventory of every item in the house and would not look favourably on the vase's destruction.

            She swore and set about sweeping up the pieces, but it had broken in such a way that there was no sense in trying to fix it. It would never be the same. Regretfully, she tossed the shards into the bin and then set the phone back on its table.

~~~

Unable to sleep that night, she tormented herself with what she was going to say to Gilou next time she saw him. She decided to be magnanimous. If he apologised for his behaviour, she would accept graciously, but accept also that he had drawn a line in the sand. Attempting to close the gap between them always ended with him slapping her hand. No more. If he decided to be cold, then she could be cold too. She'd let him see what that felt like.

            Though settled on a course of action, she still could not sleep.

            Their meal and their lovemaking. The horse ride beneath the stars. The way he had held her when demonstrating how to wield an axe. Had none of that really meant anything to him?

            She began to wonder what it was that had changed his mood so dramatically from one hour to the next, but she was also loathe to excuse his behaviour. She wasn't that person any longer. That particular Charlotte had sloughed away down a plug hole. Nobody had the right to treat her like dirt. Nobody.

            In the morning, she went out to drink her coffee on the swing chair and kicked an envelope that had been placed on the step. She opened it and found that it was thick with Euros, significantly more than Gilou owed her for the week.

            It looked as if he had become one of those black-suited, tie-less men after all, attempting to buy her forgiveness or her body. He had said that everyone has their price and this, she supposed, tucking the bulging envelope into her dressing gown, was what he estimated to be hers. Though she felt insulted, she at least appreciated that he'd aimed high.

            She enjoyed her coffee and admired the view as she chose the words she would use when she thrust the envelope back into his hands. Many things could be bought, but her affection wasn't one of them.

            She arrived at La Gaillarde at nine thirty on the dot. Patrick ran to greet her.

            “Not right now, Patrick,” she said, knocked on the door and waited.

            “Entrez!” came Gilou's voice.

            He looked up from his table as though shocked to see her.

            “Nice acting,” she thought. She marched across the room and threw the envelope so that it skidded to a stop amid his papers and pens.

            “I don't want it,” she said.

            “You're entitled to it,” he said.

            “I don't want it.”

            He shrugged and looked through the contents.

            “I took what you owed me for the week,” she said. “That was all.”

            He riffled through the notes, as if he didn't trust her. She bristled, but then he pulled out a piece of white notepaper.

            “You didn't read this?” he said.

            Damn. She hadn't seen that.

            “I didn't need to,” she said. “I don't want your money, just some respect. Thank you.”

            “Okay,” he said. He put the note back into the envelope and put the envelope into the drawer.

            It turned out that they had nothing more to say to each other, so she headed for the door.

            “Leave your boots by the step,” he said.

            “What now?” she said.

            “Your boots. In fact, they are my boots. Leave them by the step.”

            It took a few more steps towards the door to realise what all that money in the envelope had been about.

            “You're firing me?” she said.

            “Yes,” he said. “I thought that was clear.”

            “Why are you firing me?”

            “I don't need you to be here anymore.”

            “But. The vegetable garden? The animals?”

            “As you said, these are things I could do myself. I appreciate your help, but I don't need your services anymore.”

            “None of this was real, was it?” she said. “There really wasn't any man working here before me.  You made all this up to give me something to do. And now, I've done something, but you won't even tell me what it is.”

            “You've done what I asked. Now it's over..”

            “Why did you give me this job? Why go through all that effort? Making up a job posting and putting it in the mairie.”

            “I felt sorry for you,” he admitted. “I could see that you needed help. So I helped you. Like someone takes in a puppy and then finds that it is eating them out of their house and their home. Now you don't need my help anymore. You can say more than ten words of French. You can walk from here to there without being lost. You can lift a wheelbarrow without falling over. You can go, live in the real world now.”