The House with Blue Shutters (22 page)

The next time, Oriane thought she would help him. She put her hand in the middle of his trousers, where his thing would be,
and rubbed him, whispering in his ear, ‘It’s all right, Laurent. I love you.’ When he struck at her, missing her face and
knocking himself off balance so he slipped on the stones and slumped on his knees in the grass, she felt as cold with
shock as if the blow had found her. He struggled to his feet, grappling with the crutch, and pulled her shoulder, shaking
her so hard she felt dizzy.

‘Don’t,’ he shouted, ‘don’t ever do that again!’ Then he turned away and she began to walk alone across the plain towards
home, her head up and her eyes smarting. After a while, a little mean voice inside her told her she ought to laugh at him,
a hard, sneering laugh, to see him scrabbling on the ground like that, poor crippled thing.

‘Look at you!’ she wanted to shout, ‘How dare you? Look at yourself.’ Then she knew it was her mother’s voice she heard, and
realized that there could be a terrible pleasure in cruelty, even though you knew it would hurt yourself too. When he came
up behind her, the crutch tapping anxiously, she flinched when he reached out, just to hurt him because she knew he would
be even more ashamed if he believed she thought he might hit her again.

‘I’m not William, you know. I’m not simple,’ he said softly to her back. ‘Oriane, I just think that it’s better we wait for
that sort of thing. Until we’re properly married.’ His voice was tender, as though he might cry even, so she turned around
and rested her face a moment against the warmth of his coat, then let him take her hand as they walked on. She was shocked
at herself, to find that there could be such hate in her, where it was not deserved. So Oriane did not go to the dances, because
she wanted to avoid being alone with him afterwards, coming back in the dark.

Otto must once have been a beautiful man, Claudia thought, though the dark, French type aged better. He looked like a Viking
next to the Marquis, more so because his straight, massive shoulders were encased in a rough, dark-blue Breton shirt with
a pocket in front, which would have looked ridiculous on Malcolm Glover, but seemed stylish and somehow urban on Otto. He
was much heavier than Charles-Louis, but his eyes, still a sharp, sudden blue flash, and the remaining gold streaks in the
grey hair on his collar, made him an attractive man. Claudia wondered if the Marquis noticed that she noticed. They had driven
up to the chateau in Otto’s high, smooth car early in the morning, before it grew too hot, although the windows on the lower
floor were already shuttered against the banking sun.

Charles-Louis had said he would be delighted to show Otto over the house, though he doubted whether there would be anything
to learn. He had fetched some books from his study, biographies of Hitler and de Gaulle, and Otto looked over
them politely as he explained his story in simple but well-accented French.

‘There are some rooms closed up,’ Charles-Louis explained, leading them up the stairs and along a landing, ‘but you can have
a look if you care to.’ They turned into a small, pretty room with a bow window giving on to what Claudia guessed would be
the garden at the back, with a rather lovely day bed in pale green silk, figured with an old-rose pattern, and a cream tiled
fireplace. A modern desk featured a wedding photograph of Delphine in a sort of Renoir confection with an outsized cartwheel
hat. ‘Delphine has this room,’ explained Charles-Louis, though Claudia had already ascertained with relief that she and the
little boys had gone to the riding stables near Landi. Charles-Louis unlocked a little door, let into the panelling next to
the fireplace, which gave on to a narrow passage with bare buff-coloured walls and a tight, twisting staircase. Claudia loved
the sense of secrecy of these servants’ alleyways, she had seen them at Versailles and Fontainebleau. Otto hunching over,
they came up into a larger space, a gallery that ran the length of the building. It was quite empty, except for an ugly green
futon thing, and the air was thick and close, as though the windows had not been opened for years.

‘I haven’t been up here since I was a child,’ remarked Charles-Louis.

The telephone rang below them, deep in the passages.

‘I’ll leave you,’ said Charles-Louis, his feet disappearing down the stairs, ‘come to find me when you’re ready.’

‘Shall we carry on, Otto?’ asked Claudia. ‘There’s nothing here.’

They progressed along the gallery, leaving marks in the dust.
Now that Claudia’s eyes were accustomed to the dimness, she could make out vague shapes along the walls, a palimpsest of figures
beneath what looked like a hasty coat of whitewash. As Otto fiddled with the bunch of keys the Marquis had handed him, Claudia
noticed a patch of wall in one of the window bays that had not been covered.

‘Otto!’ she called. ‘Sorry, could you just give me a hand?’

The window latch had been painted into immobility, and after struggling breathily for a few minutes Otto simply struck it
hard from underneath with the heel of his palm. Flakes of paint scattered on to the floor as they wrestled the window wide
enough for Otto to reach through and beat open the shutters. The gallery was suddenly alive with dust motes, dancing like
plankton in the dark air. Claudia squatted in the dusty corner, fumbling around in her handbag for the clear plastic wallet
that held her make-up. She found her fat bronzer brush and cleaned it against her grey cotton smock before carefully dabbing
at the patch. In the new light, she could see a head, a vicious, etiolated little face with curling hair and twisted horns,
cocked cheekily to one side against what appeared to be a woman’s flank. Claudia looked for a long time. Pretty, but probably
negligible.

‘Sorry, Otto. Let’s go on.’

They passed through the door at the end of the space into an anteroom with a large bricked-up doorway. Claudia guessed that
once this had been the formal entrance to the gallery. Another concealed passage ran for a few metres, then turned around
a few steps, ran and turned again. Claudia had no sense now of where they were, and was surprised when, after more attempts
with the keys, they came out into a low, wide space
with cheap wooden partitions and a stack of iron bedsteads like deckchairs in a corner. Claudia peered down the boxy staircase.

‘We’re above the stable. Or what used to be.’

Otto was poking in a heap of odds and ends near the piled beds. He had pulled off a canvas sheet, creating more dust clouds.
Effortfully, he dragged out a cumbrous wooden mangle, two large wooden tubs, bleached white on the inside, and a cardboard
box. The box collapsed as he touched it, spilling a muddle of rusting iron oddments. It was chilly and Claudia was growing
rather bored.

‘Look here!’

‘It’s just blankets, Otto.’ As he unwrapped the grey wool, Claudia shuddered and thought of rats.

‘Look!’

Otto was turning out a drawstring bag. Three round, gold-coloured cases patted on to the blanket. Claudia picked one up, and
laughed.

‘What a funny thing to find. Look, Otto, make-up!’

The lid of the compact had a design of a classical nymph, holding a vase above her head, with a relief of garlands. Inside,
there was a matching gold tube of lipstick, fresh and greasy, and a bed of beige powder. Claudia turned it over. There was
a name she recognized, ‘Bourjois’, and then ‘Histoire d’Amour’. It was obviously not valuable, machine-made gilt, but it was
charming, vintage, the sort of thing one would find in Spitalfields market.

‘What about this?’ proffered Otto excitedly.

Claudia held two small rectangles of fabric, black, with white designs. One had two flashes, Deco lightning, the other
a plain oblong. There were threads hanging off the back, as though they had been torn.

‘This is SS,’ said Otto, ‘a collar badge. I can look it up when we get back. They must have been here, Claudia, this is evidence!’

Claudia failed to see why he was so excited, after all, he had known his father’s battalion had been quartered at the chateau,
but she was glad that he had found something to please him. There ought to have been something sinister about touching it,
SS was an idea that still conjured horror, but it was so light and tiny in her hand. They shoved the things back and re-covered
them, then went down into the sudden welcome heat and found the Marquis on the lawn.

‘Histoire d’Amour?’ he said to Claudia when she showed him the compact. ‘Well, you must keep one of those.’

Delphine could feel herself growing more provincial by the second. She had never understood why the English considered it
smart to be attached to the countryside. Charles-Edouard had loved that, as he loved everything English. During their courtship
she had been obliged to spend many hideous weekends in freezing houses in the chillier parts of Burgundy, while he galloped
about in a black coat looking for deer to kill. Occasionally the dogs chased one on to the road where it was handily run over,
but Charles-Edouard would insist that it was the best meat he had ever tasted. Delphine could hardly bring herself to touch
something that had been scraped off the underside of a lorry, but she told herself she put up with the weekends because they
gave her fiancé so much pleasure. Naturally, she put a stop to them after they were married.
Now she had a reason to get back to Paris, she could hardly wait. The country made one brood.

This morning, she had actually found herself gossiping with Madame Lesprats about that Claudia girl. Apparently she was pregnant.
She told herself she felt sorry for Claudia if she was indeed involved with Sébastien Marichalar. Was he the father? Sébastien
had slept with practically every woman in Paris, though not actually with Delphine herself. She had a knack for turning pique
to propriety when it suited her, and now believed she had firmly resisted his advances. The girl had a certain something,
despite those dreadful droopy clothes; certainly she didn’t seem to fit with the Harvey brother. Delphine wondered what Aisling
thought of her, of whether she was aware of the affair with Sébastien. Not that it was anybody’s business, but that was the
problem with the country, everything became one’s business.

Delphine was aware that Aisling had a bit of a crush and was prepared to make use of it. Her boys seemed well brought up,
and in a few years they would be able to speak English with Charles-Henri and Jules. Delphine was hardly in a position to
dislike her for being such an obvious climber, the other English people around here all seemed rather dreadful, drunk the
whole time and terribly patronizing. Delphine wondered idly – she seemed to spend all day doing that, she really had to get
back to Paris – whether Aisling’s marriage was happy. It could hardly be an amusing life she led. Jonathan seemed entirely
featureless to Delphine, just another overweight expat with too much time and too little to say, though there must be money.
Madame Lesprats said that Monsieur Harvey had made a lot of ‘
grain
’ in computers.

How mortified Aisling had looked, squashed in at the
fête
with the help! Though Madame Lesprats was probably better company than that pompous Chauvignat and his revolting old mother,
who had dipped her bread in her wine and mumbled it in her toothless mouth. Still, she would have to get Chauvignat on her
side if the hotel were to go ahead, it was amazing how much power these mayors had. How he had droned on about his father
being a prisoner of war and his mother speeding heroically about on her bicycle, smuggling contraband sausages to the partisans.
She had managed to keep a smile on her face by thinking of how she could work it up into an anecdote to amuse Armand. How
people did seem to obsess over the war, like that Dutch chap who had come up to ask her father-in-law about it. Altogether
it would be a good thing to have Aisling Harvey as a friend, she was the energetic type, and she truly had good taste. There
had been some clever features in the converted barn, that cow byre, the wooden cradle used as a log basket, the lime-washed
beams in the bedrooms. She would never do for Paris, naturally, but if she were to be spending time down here to get the hotel
going, it would be nice to have someone to talk to. Her thoughts returned to Armand. She would mind not being Madame la Comtesse,
though of course it was much better these days to pretend that one hardly noticed such things.

Alex, too, was restive. He had spent his morning wandering about on the steep road up to the plain, finding and then infuriatingly
losing a signal on his mobile to call the office. He couldn’t see why Claudia had made such a thing of it, they’d barely had
any time alone since they had arrived. Each
day was the same. He’d fancied a yacht in Croatia. It was beyond him why Jonathan had allowed Aisling to talk him into upping
sticks and moving down here. He’d been into the study to catch up with the FT online and seen the ‘work’ Jonathan claimed
to be so busy with. He’d expected lesbian schoolgirls and that sort of thing, tame enough, but he was quite shocked when he
saw what his brother was involved in. It was one of those ‘second life’ programmes where the user takes on a character and
manipulates it through a realistic alternative world. Guiltily, Alex discovered that Jonathan was Mikhail, an eastern European
architect living alone in a loft space overlooking a sort of San Francisco Bay. Mikhail ran his own studio, and collected
contemporary art. He went to the gym and drove a Maserati. Alex was tempted to make a joke of it to Claudia, it was the sort
of thing she would say was ‘delicious’, but that seemed really low.

Obviously the poor chap didn’t have enough to do. He thought about getting Jonathan to come in with him on something, maybe
a property if he and Claudia were selling, but he had the impression that things might be a bit tight, not that Jonathan could
ever bear to admit that to his little brother. He supposed he ought to start thinking about putting something aside for school
fees himself once the wedding was sorted. Still, Claudia seemed happy here. She had seemed oddly nervous the last few weeks
in London, but then it was a big step getting engaged. If the American markets carried on like this, he’d be looking at a
fantastic bonus, maybe they could get a big place right away. Queen’s Park was really coming up, you could still get whole
houses there. Claudia might need a bit of persuading, it wasn’t exactly the sort of place her
trendy friends hung out, but in a few years, he could tell her, they’d need the room. Thinking of it, he went out to the pool
to find her, and buried his face in the warm honey of her hair.