The House with Blue Shutters (6 page)

The baby would be born in March, the doctor had said. Claudia had made an appointment at a private clinic, wanting to deal
efficiently with a stranger, and the doctor, sensing her recalcitrance, or perhaps being polite at the bare evidence of Claudia’s
left hand, had not congratulated her or shown any enthusiasm.

‘You intend to have the baby?’ she had asked, although if Claudia had not intended thus she would have approached the appointment
differently, making it apparent from the start that she needed an abortion. The doctor had given her some leaflets, suggested
a book she might buy, asked her if she smoked (Claudia lied), warned her about drinking alcohol and over-exerting herself
at the gym. Claudia wondered what the doctor thought of her, this quiet young woman in her expensive suit, if she wondered
at all about her patients.

‘Good luck, then,’ she had said, as Claudia had thanked her and gathered her handbag.

The idea of a baby Claudia was sure she wanted very much. She had no sense of herself ‘giving birth’, no excitement at
the thought of breast feeding or tiny clothes. Shopping on a Saturday morning, or taking a ski lift, she and Alex, like everyone
else, would point out sweet little children to one another, determined muffled bundles, showing their own sweetness to one
another. None of Claudia’s friends had babies. Alex knew a couple in Surrey with two, but Claudia had so far avoided going
to lunch with them. She had briefly, stupidly, imagined Sébastien shepherding her proudly through a market in Paris, lying
in bed with him with their child sleeping on his chest, scenes from a film or an advertisement. Sébastien was impossible,
and Claudia believed that she was acting practically. She supposed that if she had the baby with Sébastien’s knowledge, he
would agree to give her money, to visit and take an interest, but deceiving Alex relied on Sébastien’s ignorance, and she
could not risk making him part of it.

The newspapers were always talking about the expense of childcare. If Claudia had the child on her own, she reasoned, even
if Sébastien were dutiful about it, she would have to give up her job, at least for a time. This would necessitate her selling
the flat in Lexington Street, which she had bought outright with all the money left by her father, and moving somewhere cheaper,
so that she would have money to spare when she did not work. There was something about the thought of herself pushing a pram
around Stoke Newington or Queen’s Park that she couldn’t bear. Fat, she supposed in the Queen’s Park version, and covered
in milky sick. And it would be years and years before it could go to school, you were always reading about how mothers couldn’t
afford to work because nursery was so expensive. As Claudia saw it, she was making an
exchange, herself for her child. She would be Alex’s wife, they would live in town, she would be able to work or not as she
chose, there would be money for school fees and holidays. She did not pretend to herself that there was anything admirable
in this, it was just that she could imagine no other possibility that would be tolerable. She had not seriously considered
selling her flat and taking off to Mexico or Andalucia, there was nothing she found enticing about setting herself bravely
against the world, there was not the strength in her for that.

Nor did she tell herself that she loved Alex. There was nothing at all in her feeling for him that even resembled the pride
and longing she had for Sébastien. Claudia and Alex had met at a large party given by one of Claudia’s former students, an
Italian girl who had been dating someone at Alex’s bank. She had given him her number and had not been remotely surprised
when he called the next day. They had dinner somewhere obvious. Alex was not good-looking, but he was tall, and his face was
kind. Claudia’s relationship with Sébestien was long past the point of even nominal fidelity, and Alex was a good lover. His
cock was long and thick, and, perhaps because Claudia was unconcerned as to his opinion of her, she came easily with him,
felt quiet when she slept in his arms. That Alex was not Claudia’s ‘type’ caused less comment than she expected amongst her
girlfriends, who themselves as they moved into their thirties, were considering men at whom they would not have looked two
years before. If she had put off calling Annabelle and Sally, she told herself when she accepted Alex, it was because she
needed to have everything straight first.

There was this too, Claudia thought, in her relationship with him. A sense of imminent compromise, unspoken of between her
and her friends, who had dissected and analysed every incident of one another’s lives over years’ worth of wine bottles and
coffee cups. This new reticence, a mutual, gentle refusal to insist or to question where once they would have dismissed, even
laughed at one another’s lovers. It came from a decade of London loves and London disappointments, infatuations that collapsed
into disillusion, men unremembered and unmourned after ten years of bed-hopping. There was a gravity to this restraint, a
required discretion, which was not entirely derived from the fact that it was no longer quite form to mock masculine inadequacy,
sexual inadequacy, for the amusement of the girls. If Claudia and Sally and Annabelle no longer laughed at their boyfriends,
it was because they needed one another to believe that these men were possibilities, loves rather than affairs, and this magic
cloak of love was necessary to maintain the invisibility of doubt. They participated, they knew, in a narrative where desperation
to find a man was funny and also rather risible, the stuff of novels read by secretaries on the Tube, but there was to be
no admittance, even in unspoken desperation, of the possibility of something other than True Love. Mr Collins had still to
be Mr Right, thought Claudia, pleased because that was rather clever. Claudia knew that her engagement, once announced, would
carry with it a similarly unmentioned taint of spinsterish anxiety. It was a loyalty they needed now, she and her friends,
this mutual pretence that they were the same careless creatures who had come to London together after university, and that
if they chose such or such a man, it was because they loved
him as they had once believed they loved other, less suitable incarnations, more beautiful, or cleverer though they had been,
but that there was nothing in the quality of their love that had changed. That was the essential thing, this new silence.

There was a woman standing on the terrace below her, holding the handlebars of a bicycle. Her appearance had come so silently
that it took a moment to realize, so Claudia’s gasp of shock sounded stagy. She was breathless, Claudia could hear her urgent
panting, she looked around, confusedly, then saw Claudia’s white pyjamas in the moonlight, and called out in French, ‘Quick,
please, I need to telephone! For the doctor.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Oh, Ginette. From Aucordier’s. I need the phone for Mademoiselle Oriane.’

Fear resolved into the simpler timbre of domestic emergency. Claudia jumped off the parapet and ran through the drawing room,
up the stairs to Aisling’s bedroom, knocked peremptorily and poked her head into the darkness. ‘Aisling, Aisling,’ she hissed
in a half-whisper, ‘Aisling wake up! There’s some woman downstairs who says she needs the phone. It sounds urgent.’

The woman waited at the back door. Claudia dithered, London discretion fighting with drama, then turned the key, stepping
back quickly along the passage. ‘What do you want?’

Jonathan, down the stairs, ‘What’s going on?’ Aisling in the doorway in a long nightdress. Claudia thought it was typical
that she would keep up the rustic charm even when she slept.

‘Oh, it’s you, Ginette,’ sighed Aisling, as though she were disappointed. ‘It’s only Ginette!’ she shouted over her shoulder.

‘The phone?’

Aisling proffered the portable and Ginette fished in the pocket of her nylon overall for a scrap of paper. She dialled carefully,
pressing her fingers precisely on the digits, hunched over.

Jonathan appeared in a maroon towelling dressing-gown. The sweat of his sleep came thickly to Claudia’s nose in the cooler
air from the passage. ‘What’s up?’ he asked in English.

‘They haven’t got a phone, you see,’ said Aisling, as though that explained everything.

‘Who hasn’t got a phone, for God’s sake?’

‘Ginette and Mademoiselle Oriane, from Aucordier’s up the hill. There must have been an accident. Claudia found her.’

Ginette turned back to them. She was thin, feet snub in green felt slippers. Claudia saw that Aisling had on a patient encouraging
smile, as for a child. ‘Mademoiselle Oriane had one of her nightmares. I heard her scream, then she fell out of bed on to
the floor. I think she’s broken her arm. I best go back up.’ Her speech was rapid, in the thick nasal accent of the region.
There was a moment of hesitancy on Aisling’s face.

‘The other lady is hurt,’ Claudia offered.

‘My God!’ said Aisling dramatically, then quickly in English, ‘I’ll go up in the car. Jonathan, will you put the lights on
and watch out for the doctor, he mayn’t know the way up? Just a moment,’ she added imperiously to Ginette.

Claudia followed Aisling up the stairs. ‘Shall I come, too?’ she asked, feeling that Aisling minded about something.

‘You might as well, since you were up anyway.’

Alex was still sleeping. Claudia pulled his light sweater over her pyjamas and shoved at her espadrilles with her feet. On
the way back down, she picked up a bottle of cognac from
the table in the drawing room, Aisling reappeared in jeans. ‘Right then, Ginette.’ Jonathan was making tea. The three women
loaded the bicycle into the boot of the car and Aisling manoeuvred carefully up the narrow Murblanc lane to the road, only
slightly wider, steel coloured in the moonlight. The road climbed to the left until they stopped at the large square house
that Claudia had seen over the brim of the hill. The door was open, a harsh neon strip frosted the yard from indoors. ‘It’s
only me,’ called Ginette loudly, ‘and Madame Harvey.’

Mademoiselle Oriane was propped on the floor against a high wooden bed. Ginette had clearly been too afraid or too weak to
move her. Aisling stepped forward purposefully, her voice matronly. ‘Now, Mademoiselle, what’s going on? You remember me don’t
you, Madame Harvey? From Murblanc? I bought your lovely table for my kitchen.’

The old woman’s eyes were so pale that it was hard to discern where her floury, crinkled face began. Her hair was absolutely
white, tucked into a blue web of hairnet. As Aisling approached, she spat at her, viciously. She called her, in a high, strong
voice, the son of a whore.

Ginette rushed forward. ‘I’m so sorry, Madame Harvey, she’s confused, she gets like this. It’s one of her spells, oh dear,
when she fell, she was screaming so.’ Ginette stopped short and began to cry, her sobs mounting into wails, she hiccuped breathlessly,
uncontained, and began to gulp like a frog, her shoulders convulsing, saliva running down her chin.

‘Oh Christ!’ said Aisling.

Claudia cautiously put an arm around Ginette’s shoulders, but the gasping continued, the frail muscles bouncing beneath
her housecoat. Claudia shook her a little, then raised her arm and cut a short slap across her face.

‘Now,’ Claudia said firmly, feigning confidence, ‘come and sit down, Ginette. I’m going to give you a little drink, and we’re
going to put Mademoiselle right. Come on.’ She led Ginette to a dingy brown sofa, looked to the cupboard next to the huge
old fireplace, occupied by an oil stove, and retrieved a glass. She was still holding the bottle of cognac. ‘Now you drink
that,’ pouring a measure, ‘and we’ll get on. The doctor will be here soon.’

‘She’s not right, you know,’ said Aisling in English, meaningful on the word ‘right’.

‘Should we lift her back?’

Mademoiselle Oriane had closed her eyes. With an arm each beneath her shoulders, they pulled her up until she half sat on
the bed. She winced, her left arm dangling, Aisling slung her legs around, covered the horrible lumpen feet with sheet and
blanket. Their swiftness was tender. Claudia fetched a glass of water and propped it to the slit of mouth. ‘Is that better,
Mademoiselle?’

Aisling unbent. ‘We’d better wait for the doctor. It’s a good half-hour drive from Landi. I’ll make some tea.’ Ginette was
silent on the sofa, clutching her half-empty glass tightly, her eyes far away.

‘What about her?’ asked Claudia.

‘Just shock, I suppose. I don’t think it’s serious. She comes to help Madame Lesprats sometimes, at our place. Madame Lesprats
always calls her “pauvre Ginette”.’ Aisling was setting a pot of water to boil, pushing aside a saucepan from which a bone
and a lump of carrot protruded.

The large room, hard in the neon, was floored in turquoise lino. Aside from the bed and the sofa, there was a fridge under
the angular wooden staircase, a formica table covered in a wipe-clean plastic cloth printed with sunflowers, and four wooden
chairs, a calendar from the church in Castroux on the wall next to the fireplace, a television half covered in a crocheted
pink doily on a huge dark
buffet
, and a small folding table with a vase of plastic lilies and a framed photograph of a black and white young man with a Proustian
moustache. There was too much space, like a set in a theatre before the actors come on, and a strong thick smell of soup.
Around the fireplace, saucepans and casseroles were piled, neat but homeless, and the table was set with two striped coffee
bowls, an orange plastic dish of white sugar cubes, and two teaspoons, ready, Claudia supposed, for breakfast. She had never
seen such a poor room, a room whose sparseness had nothing artful in it, whose shabbiness was merely shabby, not deliberate
or bohemian or charming. She had never been so stupid as to believe that there was anything picturesque about poverty, but
the room grated at her nonetheless, in a way it would not have done if it had been squalid. It was ugly, and the ugliness
was painful, the calendar with its photograph of a nun at Lourdes was painful, the orange bowl was painful.